“Because I didn’t know who the fuck you were. You could have had something to do with Jasper. I don’t know. I just wanted you to go away and leave us to it.”
Jane turns her eyes back to Daisy. “So what happened? Where’s Annie?Did she tell you anything? Where’s Allen? Did you find him? I mean… what is going on? And why are we not calling the police?”
She sees Daisy and Stuart exchange a look. She sees them nod at each other. And then they wordlessly lead her from the kitchen and toward the outhouse.
Jane grips the handle of the knife inside her shoulder bag as she follows the pair out into the garden. She stands well back from the outhouse and watches, her breath held, as Stuart unlocks the padlock. Her heart is pumping blood so hard she can hear it pulsing in her ears. Every muscle in her body is taut, ready for the impact of attack, of violence, and somewhere deep down inside herself, she hears a tiny voice saying,Oh well, you had a good ride. It was fun while it lasted.
But then she thinks about her dogs, her stepchildren, and she shouts down the tiny voice. She stares hard as the door opens, and then she gasps, sharply, audibly, when she sees, slumped on the floor of the terrible room, the tiny, birdlike remains of Annie Black.
chapter seventy-two
Jane’s hands go to her mouth. “Oh my God!”
“And this, Jane,” says Stuart, “is why I didn’t want the police involved. Do you see now?”
“Oh my God,” Jane says again, panic subsuming her whole nervous system. “What… I mean… how?”
“It was me,” says Daisy, talking over Stuart, who was about to say something else. “I did it. Last week. I pushed her down the stairs. She wouldn’t tell me and she wouldn’t tell me, and I was screaming at her that I’d seen Jasper and Jasper told me she knew everything, that Claire was my mother, and I just saw red because she was being such a fucking bitch, such a fucking bitch, and I pushed her and she fell down the stairs and now we don’t know what to do! But please, please, don’t go to the police. I don’t want to go to jail. I really don’t.”
Daisy starts to cry and Jane feels a strong urge to comfort her, to put an arm around her and tell her that everything will be OK, but there’s still a part of her that thinks that Stuart and Daisy might be about to lock her inside the outhouse with Annie’s dead body. Her hand is still clutching the knife inside her bag and so instead she stands helplessly, with no ideawhat to do. “What about Jessamine?” she says. “Does she know what happened to her mother?”
Daisy gives a small shake of her head. Stuart sighs.
“You have to tell her,” says Jane. “I mean, I don’t want to sound harsh, but maybe, if she knows her mother is dead, she’ll feel that she can talk, that she can be honest with you—about Claire, about everything?”
“It’s not that simple,” says Stuart.
“In what way is it not that simple?”
“Jessamine… she’s lost, you know? Lost in her sickness. She’s not there anymore. I think she’s too far gone now, she won’t remember, and even if she does, she won’t be able to frame the memories into anything coherent.”
“Have you tried?” asks Jane.
They both shake their heads.
“Where is she?”
“In bed, of course.”
“Let’s go,” says Jane. “Let’s at least try.”
The smell in Jessamine’s bedroom is rancid: stale alcohol, stale laundry, trapped air. Jane asks if they can open a window and Stuart says he will.
Jane turns back to the bed and tries not to physically recoil at the sight of Jessamine, in a dead sleep, her head lolling back against the pillows, her flesh gray, her teeth unkempt, her hair thin and straggly, riven through with gray. She stares at her numbly for a while, thinking of the pretty girl with the Marianne Faithfull hair and makeup in the low-budget movie she made twenty years ago. She thinks of the photo of the sweet teenage girl with a dastardly twinkle in her eye sitting alongside her father and her brother on the sofa. She thinks of the girl that Oliver Bloom, her cheesemaker ex, had described as sexually voracious, insatiable; the girl that her old friend Natasha de Large had described as crazy and wild. She thinks of Jessamine’s brief time in a spartan studio apartment with a view ofAlexandra Palace and she thinks of the “lemonade lady” described to her by the landlord at the local pub, the timer on her phone set to remind her to collect her daughter from school.
Then she thinks of Stuart, his mutilated ear, his broken spirit, his utter selfless devotion to this house, to these woman, to the guarding of their secrets. All of this passes through her thoughts in the time it takes Stuart to gently rouse Jessamine from her deep, deep slumber. And then, when Jessamine opens her eyes, Jane is unnerved by the tiny glimmer of life still there behind the dull sludge green of her irises.
“What the fuck…” says Jessamine groggily, staring at Jane with narrowed eyes. She turns to Stuart. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t worry, love, it’s fine. This is Jane. She’s been trying to find Daisy. Remember, we lost Daisy for a few days? And while she was looking for Daisy, she found out about a few other things—you know, like the police search? Back during Covid? And like, well, Jasper. And she’s been talking to people and putting things together and there are things you don’t know, Jess…”
But even as Stuart is talking, Jessamine’s hands are searching her bedside table, the floor by her side of the bed, growing more and more frantic, and then she interrupts him by saying, “Stuart, I need a drink. Please.”
Stuart sighs. “We’ll get you your drink in a minute, but what we need from you right now is to really listen, OK? Listen to what I say to you, about what’s been happening.”
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.”
