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Jean heaves a deep sigh and looks away. Basil gets up from where he’d been slumped on the grass and comes over, nudging his big head into Jean’s hands. She looks down and strokes his shiny coat. There are tears in her eyes.
‘Silly sod. He’s the dopiest dog in the world but his emotional intelligence is off the scale.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Ev gently. ‘I hadn’t realized how hard this would be on you.’
Jean shakes her head, blinking the tears away. ‘It just brings it all back – the way those people treated that poor boy. Like shop-soiled goods. It was criminal, absolutely criminal.’
Ev bites her lip, remembering, now, something Barry Mason said to Fawley all those years ago – about how Sharon had found out she was pregnant with Daisy only a few weeks after Leo’s adoption was finalized, but by then it was ‘too late to give him back’.
‘We’ve done everything we can to undo the damage,’ says Jean. ‘Make him feel secure, loved. And he’s easy to love, he really is.’ She smiles weakly. ‘Even as a stroppy adolescent with a smelly room full of dirty washing he was still easy to love.’
‘I’m sorry, Jean. We really wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t absolutely have to.’
She pulls a hankie out of her pocket and wipes her nose. ‘No, no, I understand. I mean, he’s going to find out sooner orlater, isn’t he? If that woman is released it’ll be all over the bloody papers.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Well, much better he finds out now, then, when we can talk about it calmly and work out what we’re going to do.’
Sargent clears her throat. ‘He’s seventeen now, isn’t he – is he still at school or doing something else?’
‘He’s about to start at Oxford Tech, for a City & Guilds in plumbing. He’s investigating an apprenticeship at one of the local building firms. Phil knows a few people. There’s a lovely guy called Martin Room who might take him on – he’d look after him.’
‘That sounds great,’ says Ev. ‘People will always need plumbers.’
Jean smiles weakly. ‘I know. That’s what we said. But he didn’t need nagging. He’d researched all the courses, had it worked out all on his own. Made me so proud of him.’
‘And he must be getting interested in girls too.’
The smile is slightly stronger now. ‘Well, he’s quite secretive about it, but I don’t blame him. There was a girl, a little while ago, who I think was helping him with online courses and things like that, he didn’t really say any more. But who wants to talk to their parents about stuff like that at that age? I know I never did.’
‘I’ve looked back at the file,’ says Ev, after a pause, ‘and Leo – Gary – never mentioned anything about other people who might have been in Daisy’s life that we didn’t already know about. Has he ever talked to you about that since – a new name you hadn’t heard before? Someone she may have thought she could trust?’
‘That’s your theory, is it?’ says Jean, frowning slightly. ‘She went off with someone?’
Ev spreads her hands. ‘I don’t know, Jean. Like I said, it isn’t even twenty-four hours since we took this on. Right now that seems like a reasonable supposition, given her age. She had no transport, no mobile phone –’
Jean sighs. ‘I suppose you’re right. But I can’t believe she just swanned off like that and left everyone else to pick up the pieces. The wreckage that girl caused –’
‘I doubt it was “swanning off”,’ says Sargent softly. ‘She was almost certainly being groomed. And shewasonly eight –’
‘Yes,’ says Jean, rounding on her. ‘She was only eightthen. Though a pretty damn devious little whatsit for eight, if you ask me. But what about since? She’ssixteennow. Easily old enough to know right from wrong and admit what she did. Try to put things right. But has she? Has she heck as like.’
There’s a slightly awkward pause. Sargent reaches for her glass, her cheeks red. Ev struggles to think what to say, because Jean’s right: there’s a version of Daisy’s life in which she simply walked out and never looked back, leaving everyone thinking her father had abused her and abandoning her mother to rot out a life sentence. But, she reminds herself, that’s only one version. She can’t help fearing it was a whole lot darker than that.
‘The answer to your question is no,’ says Jean, into the hot silence. ‘He’s never said anything to me suggesting there was some mystery person in play.’ She reaches for her glass. ‘Though there was one slightly odd thing – nothing major. I mentioned it to Adam Fawley at the time. When he came round after the trial.’
Ev feels her heart lurch. But if it was significant, surely Fawley would have mentioned it long before now?
‘What was that?’ says Sargent.
Jean turns to her. ‘There was this little silver thing Gary had. Like something you’d put on a charm bracelet. He kept it in a dish in his room, and Adam saw it and asked about it. I told him it had been Daisy’s. She said it was some sort of amulet – I can’t remember the name now.’ She flaps her hand. ‘Anyway, Daisy and her classmates had seen some like it at the Pitt Rivers when they went on a school visit, and their teacher had explained to them that they were supposed to keep bad things away. Thatpeople used to hang them over babies’ cradles at night. You know the sort of thing. Charms against the evil eye.’
Sargent is frowning. ‘I’m not sure how that –’
‘The point was, Daisy gave this thing to Gary. The night before she disappeared. Like I said to Adam at the time, it was almost as if she knew.’
Everett and Sargent exchange a glance.