Chapter Seventy-Five
STUART, NOW
I move around the rooms of Thornwood in a state of numb horror, this house where I have lived now for nearly ten years, this house that has trapped me, suffocated me, hurt me, and now, I know, deceived me.
I am collecting my possessions, folding them neatly into rucksacks and canvas shoppers.
My brother and his family await me in their solid proper house in a safe suburban backwater.
The police have finished questioning me for now, while Jessamine and Daisy are still at the station.
A police officer follows behind me as I gather my things; his name is Asif and I can tell he thinks I’m dodgy, thinks, somehow, that this is my doing, and I cannot blame him, because I have lived here with this horror beneath my feet, I have brought Annie her tea and her coffee and her biscuit just so on the saucer four times a day every day into the room beneath which those girls lay in their terrible contortions.
I have shared a bed with a woman at night whose entire being is formed of the trauma and agony of that to which she bore witness, and every day I allowed her to sink further into addiction and hopelessness.
I let her daughter, a child I claim to love as if she were my own, run away and into the path of a demented man who tried to kill her, and I did not report her disappearance to the police.
I found a photograph of a young woman wearing shackles around her legs and I did not say anything.
I would not trust me either.
I can hear the equipment down below, the haunting sound of jackhammers and drills, men calling to each other, as I tuck five pairs of socks into my bag.
I call for Hugo, and when the dog and I leave a few minutes later, followed by Asif out onto the Vale, as I thread my way through the vans and cars and clusters of onlookers, I swallow back some tears.
I know that I am never coming back to this dark, dark house.