It Could Have Been Her(80)

“I don’t know what I’m suggesting, OK? It’s just… tell me stuff, Jessamine. What happened to your dad? Where is your brother? Who is Daisy’s dad? What happened to those fucking girls, Jessamine? Talk to me. I can’t stay here and help you unless you talk to me. OK? I can’t be here.”

“Oh, there it is,” she snarled. “There it is. That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it? Finding an excuse to leave. Finding an excuse to fuck off back to your sad, pathetic life and your sad, ugly women. Go on then, fuck off. See if I care.”

“But you do care. You need me. You can’t live without me.”

“Try me.”

I breathed in hard through my nostrils and clenched my jaw. The same circles, the same endless, endless loops. I couldn’t do this anymore, I really couldn’t.

“Seriously, Jessamine,” I said. “I could go straight to that policewoman, show her this photo, show her what you did to my ear. I could tell her about the neglect, the abuse. I could tell her everything. Social services would take Daisy and the police would be back digging up the back lawn. All of this could happen, Jessamine. But it doesn’t have to. Just tell me, tell me what happened here. Please.”

“I don’t know! I don’t know, OK? Things happened, but I don’t know what they were! I was just a kid. I was just a kid.” And then she was crying, crying so hard it made me hurt to watch. I passed her tissues; I held her in my arms. I waited for the storm to pass through. And when it did, I left her to sleep.





chapter sixty-three


Jane pulls in her breath hard and lets it out slowly. Leg shackles? Sex slaves?

“Did you ask Annie?” she asks Stuart urgently. “About that girl in the photo?”

“Yeah. Of course I did. Brick wall.” Stuart uses his hands to describe a wall falling rapidly from the sky. “Said she couldn’t remember who the girl was. Maintained she was just an au pair girl. The leg shackles were a little trick of Jasper’s, apparently; he’d been practicing on her. And then whoever the girl was, she packed her little rucksack and disappeared back to wherever she came from.”

“But Jessamine told you that her father had been having sex with her?”

“Annie flat-out denied it. Told me that Jessamine was a fantasist, which isn’t entirely inaccurate. Jessamine is a very difficult woman, a very damaged woman, she’s an addict and a liar. But I knew—when she told me what she told me about her dad—I knew she wasn’t lying. And I knew that Annie was. But how the hell was I going to prove it? The word of a booze-addled alcoholic against the word of a silver-tongued sociopath. It was impossible. So I kept on looking.”

“And what did you find?”

“Well, nothing about the girl in the photo. Or about Claire.”

Jane leans across the table and cuts in, “The outhouse, Stuart. What about the outhouse?”

He flinches. “What?” It comes out as a whisper.

“The outhouse, behind your kitchen…”

He looks at her blindly.

“I was snooping around a bit last week. You need to fix your back fence.”

“Last week?” he repeats.

“Yes.”

He seems to relax when she says this. “Right,” he says, “yeah. It’s where Jessamine’s dad used to keep his ride-on lawn mower.”

“You know that’s bollocks,” says Jane. “I mean—there’s a pair of metal rings in there, Stuart. Screwed to the walls. It’s clearly been used to restrain someone. It’s—”

Stuart is looking anxious now and his hand is looped around Hugo’s lead as if readying himself to leave.

Jane stares at him and she sees it in his eyes. Pure fear.

He takes two large mouthfuls from the pint glass and then sets it back on the table. “I really have to get back now.” His gaze goes from Jane to Dexter and he says, in a voice tinted with desperation, “Please. Please don’t go to the police, I beg of you. At least, not yet. Let me talk to them again, to Annie and Jessamine. Give me some time.”

“And Daisy? What about Daisy? Where is sh—”

“Just let me deal with this,” he cuts in. “OK?”

He downs the last two inches of his lager and bangs the empty glass down on the table. And then he tugs at Hugo’s lead, collects his shopping bag, and leaves.





chapter sixty-four


Dexter and Jane return to Covent Garden an hour later. There is a heaviness around Jane’s heart, for Stuart, for his situation, for the girl in shackles in the photograph, and for poor missing Claire Connolly. A light rain has started to fall outside, and the world seems suddenly oppressive.

“How the hell are we going to find Daisy?” she asks Dexter. “Without going to the police?”

Dexter blows out his cheeks. “We can’t,” he says. “I mean, I’m sorry and everything, he seems like a lovely guy, and yeah, I feel really sorry for him, but frankly, fuck them, fuck Jessamine and Annie. Their child, their grandchild is missing, maybe even dead, and they’re just going to have to suck up the consequences of having her found. I mean, whatever secrets they’re trying to hide, it’s too late now—it’s endgame.” He casts his eye across the evidence that Jane has collected: the coffee cup, the clown mask, the photos of the school hoodie, of the Black family. “You have to pass it all over to the police now, Jane. I’m sorry, but I really think you do.”