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.