“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.”
Jane looks at the objects too, then up at Dexter. She nods. “Yes,” she says. “You’re right. Tomorrow,” she says. “I promise. I will hand this all over tomorrow.”
Dexter narrows his eyes at her. “Do you swear?”
“I really swear. I really, really do.”
Jane’s laptop trills with a notification an hour later. It’s an email from Tobias:
I’ve had some luck on the poor girl in Winchester who was assaulted by the clown guy. Her name is Avril Christmas. Easy name to trace. She’s a sales assistant at a department store in Guildford. Women’s wear section. Photo of her attached. If you do track her down, go in easy. I know I don’t need to tell you that because you’re a naturally empathetic person. But just a reminder anyway. Good luck!
Jane looks up at Dexter and then turns her laptop so that he can read the email on the screen.
He exhales after he’s read it. “So,” he says. “I guess we’re going to Guildford?”
Avril Christmas is easy to spot across the rolling sky-blue carpet of the ladies’ wear department. She has white-blond hair braided into a long plait, a bright slick of letterbox-red lipstick. She’s wearing all black with the sharp white of a shirt collar peeping from beneath the crew neck of her sweater. She’s shuffling party dresses into place on a clothes rail in a slightly officious way that Jane would find off-putting if she were here looking to buy something.
“Avril?”
The woman looks up from the dresses and gives Jane the once up and down that she had been fully expecting. “Yes?”
