It Could Have Been Her(90)

Jessamine groans and flops back heavily into her pillows, her face contorted with rage and pain. “Please, Stuart, don’t muck me about. Just get me a drink. Or Daisy—please. I have to have something to drink.”

“Daisy,” says Stuart, turning to address her, “can you get Grandma’s meds? The ones in the little blue box. And a glass of water.”

Daisy nods and disappears, and Stuart sits next to Jessamine on the bed, and tries to soothe her into calmness. “Daisy’s getting you some medicine, OK? You’ll feel better soon. But listen, you need to know what’s been happening. There’s been an accident, a few days ago, and we didn’t tell you because we didn’t want you to worry, but we’re telling you now, because if we don’t tell you, then Jane here is going to go to the police and everything could get very messy. So please, just listen. There was a struggle, between Daisy and your mother. And during that struggle, Annie fell. OK? She fell and, well, we think she broke her neck.”

Jessamine sits up again. “So she’s… what? She’s dead?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry. But yes. She’s dead. And we haven’t told anyone yet. We didn’t know what to do.”

Jane sees tears spring to Stuart’s eyes, hears his voice crack. And then she watches in amazement as a spark returns to Jessamine’s dull green eyes, and her face regains some semblance of what it must once have been. “Are you sure?” she asks.

“Yes. I’m afraid so. She is most definitely dead.”

“Where is she?”

“Well, she was in her study at first, but we put her in the outhouse yesterday. Just while we decided what to do.”

Jessamine looks with wide eyes from Stuart to Jane and back again.

“Call the police,” she says in a soft but urgent tone.

“What?”

“Call the police, Stuart! Tell them it was me! Tell them I pushed her! And then let me tell them why.”





chapter seventy-three


The police arrive an hour later. Jane sits nervously on the sofa in the living room, unsure about her part here. She feels somehow that Stuart and Daisy appreciate her presence and so she stays, sending messages to all the people she’d told she would be coming here to let them know that she is safe. Jessamine has had a shower and is dressed in a scruffy blue dress, her damp hair combed back into a neat ponytail. She is so thin that Jane can see her veins beneath her flesh, the marble white of her bones pushing at her skin. Her eye sockets are yellow; her lips are dry and cracked. Jane fiddles inside her handbag, her hand passing over the metal of the kitchen knife hidden in there, and she pulls out a small metal canister of Vaseline lip balm. She passes it to Jessamine, who takes it silently and uses it, then hands it back.

A female PC takes a glass of water from Stuart, and a male officer opens a notebook on his lap and clears his throat.

“So,” says the female PC, “you want to report an accidental death?”

Jessamine nods. “Yes. Please.”

“And could you tell us who has died?”

“My mother, Annie Black.”

“And where is the deceased?”

“She’s in the outhouse.”

“Right, thank you. And how long ago did this accident occur?”

“Last week. I… I’m sorry, but I’ve been very unwell, as you can see, and I couldn’t… I didn’t know what to do. It happened and I freaked out, I dumped her in the outhouse. But Stuart just found her and now, well, I need to explain. I need to explain everything.”

Her hands shake and she is so thin, but still, there is something compelling about her delivery of this terrible lie, something believable and real.

Jessamine sighs. “My mother,” she says, “was evil. My mother killed my father. My mother and my father, they killed other people. This house,” she says, her jaundiced eyes trailing around the four walls of the room, “is a house of fucking horrors.”





Naomi de Santo

Jody Pinkerton

Susana Perez

Elena Iannou

Jade Paris-Smith

Charaya Kim

Claire Connolly





chapter seventy-four


Beneath the soles of Annie Black’s soft, pampered feet, under the floorboards of her study, beneath an antique Turkish kilim, threadbare in places, lies a trapdoor, and beneath the trapdoor lies a small rabbit warren of subterranean rooms.

These rooms contain rudimentary furniture: toddler beds, armchairs, a table or two. The team from the murder squad find blankets, underwear, plastic water bottles, two old cardigans eaten half away by moths. The girls’ remains are embedded down here in cavities and holes made with a jackhammer. Some of the bodies have been chopped up to make it easier to tidy them away in awkward corners. And there, stretched out in plain sight, half-on, half-off one of the toddler beds, are the papery remains of Allen Black, still in the bloodstained clothes he’d died in after Annie Black stabbed him in the throat and eyes with a small paring knife, his long, slim body desiccated to a pile of bones and parchment flesh. She’d killed him in a jealous rage, according to Jessamine, when she realized that he was in love with Claire Connolly, and then she had killed Claire Connolly, too, and taken her baby, given it to Jessamine.