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.
“I wasn’t even twenty. I didn’t want a baby.
But what else could I do? We couldn’t let the baby die.
I was in an on-off relationship with a married man at the time and Mum told me to tell him it was his baby, and that way he might leave his wife.
He might, you know, look after me. But it didn’t work out like that. So, it was a total waste of time.”
And thus, Jessamine tells them, her life fell into a steeper and steeper state of decline, of course it did. What other sort of life could it have been? she asks them. With so much trauma? How else could it have gone?
“Stuart tried to save me from myself, but he couldn’t. Nobody could save me, not while I lived with that woman, with those poor girls under the floorboards.”
“So you knew?” asks one of the policewomen. “About the girls?”
A terse nod. “Yes. Of course I did. We both did. Me and my brother. But we were children. Our parents, you have to understand, they were forces of nature—in different ways, but equally as powerful, equally as terrifying. We were scared of them. And after my mother killed my father and Jasper disappeared, I went into a state of going through the motions. My life stopped. Completely stopped. I thought that was going to be it for me. That I would drink myself to death, take the secrets with me, these godawful evil fucking secrets that have been eating away at me for twenty years, for longer, eating away at my sanity, my health, my happiness. I was ready to go. But then Daisy went to find my brother and came back with only half the story and she was screaming at my mother to tell her the truth, screaming and crying, and I saw my mother go to Daisy to slap her, to hurt her, and I so pushed my mother. I pushed her. And down the stairs she went. All the way to the bottom. I heard her neck snap as she fell.”
“And you did not tell Mr. Tucker?”
“I did not tell Mr. Tucker. No.”
“And where did Mr. Tucker think that your mother was?”
“I told him she’d gone to stay with a friend. But then earlier today…” She pauses and looks from one police officer to the other. “Well, he noticed a smell coming from the outhouse.”
It takes the team three weeks to recover all the pieces of the girls.
The identification process takes another few months.
But in those first few hours after the police arrive at Thornwood and Jessamine starts sharing her story, the world feels hollowed out and raw to Jane.
That could have been her, she thinks to herself over and over again… it could have been her.
The “au pairs” who came to Thornwood were all sex workers, befriended by Allen Black in various London locales, never the same place twice.
According to Jessamine, they would arrive at night, and at first they would be housed in a room in the eaves of the house, the door to which, she showed the police, had a lock on the outside.
At first, Jessamine told the police, she and Jasper were allowed to befriend the au pairs, but then Annie put a stop to that and the au pairs had to move around the house doing their chores in silence, the only sounds coming from them those of Allen Black forcing himself onto them night after night, the old house riven with creaks and groans and ever-increasing banging until blessed beautiful silence and the sound of Allen clicking the lock and tiptoeing back to the room he shared with Annie.
“Why?” the PC had asked Jessamine. “Why was this happening?”
“Oh my God,” Jessamine threw back boldly. “How was I meant to know? I was a child. What power did I have to ask questions, change anything? Children don’t. Children just adapt. They survive.”
“Did you ever tell anyone? At school? In the neighborhood?”
“Of course I didn’t. I just kept my head down and made sure my parents still loved me.
That was all I cared about. I just pretended none of it was happening.
I lived a fantasy life, inside my own head.
Things were… happening, but I blocked them out.
Blocked it all out. I focused on my drama.
I focused on boys. On my looks. I just pretended that I lived in a normal house with normal people, and I blanked out the bad stuff. Blanked it all out.”
Jane returns to Rosebery two days later.
The Vale of Health is on every TV screen that she passes, on every phone: images of the banks of police vehicles, plastic ribbon fluttering in the breeze, hatchet-faced people walking in and out of the house, blurry onlookers just visible on the hillocks and slopes around Thornwood.
Her stepchildren call her to check in on her, aware that she just been through a trauma.
Shannon holds her in a bizarre embrace that Jane doesn’t quite feel she was in need of but tries to respond to appreciatively.
Once Shannon has left, Jane acknowledges the silence, the blissful, astringent silence of Rosebery Hall that has kept her sane and driven her mad in equal measure all her life.
She absorbs her state of aloneness and redundancy.
Daisy is safe. Annie is dead; Allen is found.
Jessamine is unburdened. Stuart is free.
The secrets of that strange house have been thrown like pages of a book into the sun and fallen all around as dark ashes of human depravity.
But still Jane is haunted by something: the lights that went on in Jessamine’s eyes when she heard that her mother was dead.
Jane’s own mother was not a good mother; she made Jane’s childhood very dark and very difficult.
Her mother had rages and episodes; there was cruelty in her home—not to the brutal extent that there had been in Jessamine’s home—but cruelty, nonetheless.
Yet when as a young woman of nineteen her brother had called her at the restaurant in the village where she was working part-time to tell her that their mother had died—a heart attack, stone-cold dead in under a minute and a half—there had been no sudden lights in Jane’s eyes, no sense of rebirth and enlightenment, just sadness, shock, and bitter, bitter grief.
The rebirth and enlightenment had come eventually, many years later, when she knew herself to be free of the shackles of her parents’ addictions, but not then, not in that very moment of knowing.
Why? Jane wonders. Why did Jessamine react that way?
And it is a terrible thing to think, she ponders, of a woman who has been through the most unthinkable and dreadful trauma for virtually her entire adult life. But for some reason Jane does not trust Jessamine.
She does not trust her in the least.