chapter seventy-three
The police arrive an hour later. Jane sits nervously on the sofa in the living room, unsure about her part here. She feels somehow that Stuart and Daisy appreciate her presence and so she stays, sending messages to all the people she’d told she would be coming here to let them know that she is safe. Jessamine has had a shower and is dressed in a scruy blue dress, her damp hair combed back into a neat ponytail. She is so thin that Jane can see her veins beneath her esh, the marble white of her bones pushing at her skin. Her eye sockets are yellow; her lips are dry and cracked. Jane ddles inside her handbag, her hand passing over the metal of the kitchen knife hidden in there, and she pulls out a small metal canister of Vaseline lip balm. She passes it to Jessamine, who takes it silently and uses it, then hands it back.
A female PC takes a glass of water from Stuart, and a male ocer opens a notebook on his lap and clears his throat.
“So,” says the female PC, “you want to report an accidental death?”
Jessamine nods. “Yes. Please.”
“And could you tell us who has died?”
“My mother, Annie Black.”
“And where is the deceased?”
“She’s in the outhouse.”
“Right, thank you. And how long ago did this accident occur?”
“Last week. I… I’m sorry, but I’ve been very unwell, as you can see, and I couldn’t… I didn’t know what to do. It happened and I freaked out, I dumped her in the outhouse. But Stuart just found her and now, well, I need to explain. I need to explain everything.”
Her hands shake and she is so thin, but still, there is something compelling about her delivery of this terrible lie, something believable and real.
Jessamine sighs. “My mother,” she says, “was evil. My mother killed my father. My mother and my father, they killed other people. This house,” she says, her jaundiced eyes trailing around the four walls of the room, “is a house of fucking horrors.”
Naomi de Santo
Jody Pinkerton
Susana Perez
Elena Iannou
Jade Paris-Smith
Charaya Kim
Claire Connolly
