“Was she safe?” I repeated, louder. “As in, not in danger?”
He recoiled a little at the sound of my raised voice. “Please don’t shout at me.”
“I’m not shouting. I’m just… Please. Just tell me what you know. Don’t make me drag it all out of you. You were there.You were there!”
He shuffled slightly, rearranged his limbs, looked up to the sky, then back down to the ground.
“You need to ask Mummy.”
“Mummy?”
“Annie. Ask Annie. She knows what happened. I don’t know what happened. Ask her.”
“I’ve asked her. I’ve asked everyone. Nobody will tell me anything. You’re the only one left I can ask.”
His body language was becoming fraught, tense, his limbs twisting themselves together. I felt anxious again. I needed to get him to trust me. I needed him to be calm.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is difficult. I can see that. But my childhood has been difficult too.”
He snapped his head toward me. “In what way?”
I sighed. I didn’t know where to start. “Jessamine is an alcoholic. She has a nice boyfriend who she abuses—she hits him, spits at him, tries to kill him, stops him from seeing his own children, locks him in rooms. Annie treats him like a slave. Jessamine lives in bed now. She makes Stuart bring her alcohol and she sits in bed and drinks it until she’s comatose. Our house is dirty. I left school and nobody taught me; I didn’t do any exams. And then six years ago I saw a photograph of Claire Connolly and I knew that she was my mother, and you are the only person who can tell me what happened to her. So please, I beg you, just tell me.”
I stared at him. I saw his jaw clench and unclench, a muscle in his cheek twitch.
“There was a fight,” he said. “A big fight. And I don’t really know what happened, but at the end of it”—he picked up his hair in his fists and tugged at it slightly as he talked—“something bad happened… That’s why you need to ask Mummy. Because she’s the only one who knows. And I just… I packed a bag, and I left because I was scared. I was so scared. I thought the police would come. I thought there would be prison and newspapers and that everything would suddenly explode into a million pieces and I should have stayed, to protect them, to protect my mother and Jessamine, but I was a coward, and I ran away. I ran away and left them all. To deal with it.”
“Deal with what?”
“With all of it. All of it.” He was becoming fraught again, his voice high-pitched and catching with the sound of desperate tears. “All of it.” He began hitting his temples with the heels of his hands.
“What?” I asked urgently. “All of what?”
“Ask Mummy! Ask Mummy!”
“Ask her what?”
“About all of it!”
And then he was on his feet and trying to run and I could not let him run, I could not, and I chased after him and grabbed his jacket from behind, grabbed it and pulled him back, and he fell, and I fell too, and for a moment we were rolling around in the undergrowth, the dead leaves and twigs of the woodland floor scratching and rubbing at the bare skin on my arms, and suddenly he was on top of me, his hands hard around my throat, and he was trying to throttle the air out of me.
Hugo was frantically running in circles around the pair of us, not knowing what to do, and I saw Jasper throw out his left leg and kick Hugo out of the way. I heard a high-pitched yelp and then the scuttle of his paws across the woodland floor and I tried to call out his name, but no noise came. I looked back at Jasper, and I saw it again, that blade of darkness inhis eyes, and I knew that I had to fight back harder than I’d ever fought in my life. My knee made contact with his groin and I felt what little strength he held in his puny body dissipate; the hold around my throat was suddenly loose enough for me to breathe, and in that moment I managed to throw him off.
I got to my feet and ran.
chapter seventy-one
Jane sits back and appraises Daisy across the kitchen table. “He tried to kill you?”
Daisy nods.
“So then you… what, you came home?”
Daisy nods again. She says, “I tried to find Hugo, I really did, but I couldn’t be in those woods anymore, not with Jasper close by, so I walked and walked and walked, for miles it felt like. And then I called Stuart.”
Stuart throws a small look at Jane. “I came and collected her. We drove around for ages looking for Hugo, but when it started to get dark, we came back to London. It was…” His fingers fiddle with the side of his plate. “It was a tough call. I just hoped, I really hoped, that someone would find him. And bring him home.”
“But why didn’t you tell me that first day? When I brought Hugo back? Why didn’t you say that Daisy was home?”
