The Girl Who Came Back (36 page)

After glancing at Andee he changed course with a question Jules really hadn’t been expecting. ‘Did Amelia Quentin come here last Tuesday evening?’ he asked.

Tensing to her core as all eyes came to her, Jules had no choice but to admit it.

Stephie turned to her open-mouthed.

Cutting her off with a raised hand, Jules waited for Leo to continue.

‘Did you speak to her?’ he wanted to know.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘So you let her in?’

‘Eventually.’ Sensing the others’ incredulity, she added, ‘She wouldn’t go away and I … I can’t really say why I ended up opening the door.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t invite her here?’

‘Perfectly sure. I kept trying to make her go away, but she wouldn’t.’

‘I’m sure you know the conditions of her release, so didn’t it occur to you to call the police, or her probation officer?’

‘Yes, but … I guess I didn’t feel threatened.’

He seemed puzzled by that. ‘So what did you feel?’

‘All sorts of things. Angry. Outraged. The kind of things you’d expect someone to feel when their daughter’s killer turns up at the door.’

Passing over the sarcasm, he said, ‘So after you let her in, what did you talk about?’

‘Her mother and father. How she felt when Daisy told her they needed a break from each other …’

Leo waited for her to continue.

Suspecting Amelia had told her boyfriend, or another friend, everything that had been said while she was here, Jules said, ‘I’m not sure what she hoped to gain from coming to see me, but I can tell you this, she as good as admitted to killing Daisy. I realise it’s my word against hers, but there’s never been any doubt in my mind, and this time she didn’t deny it.’

The youngsters were staring at her again.

‘Is that when you threatened her with a knife?’ Johnson asked quietly.

Into a shocked silence, Jules said, ‘No, that happened after she tried to blame me for what she did to Daisy.’

‘She blamed
you
?’ Stephie cried in disgust.

Jules continued to look at Leo. ‘I ended up plunging the knife into the table,’ she told him. ‘You can see the mark it left.’

Leo was about to speak again when Jemma Payne called him into the hall.

As the door closed behind him Jules looked at Andee, while feeling the strain of the others’ confusion as they watched her. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ she told Andee earnestly.

Appearing to believe her, Andee said, ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell someone she’d been here?’

Jules shook her head. ‘I guess I didn’t want the fuss, or anyone to find out I’d been stalking her.’

‘You weren’t stalking,’ Stephie protested.

‘I think that’s the way the law would see it,’ Jules corrected her.

‘I reckon she’s gone into hiding to try and cause trouble for you,’ Joe declared decisively. ‘She’s obviously told her friends what happened when she came here, so now they’re …’ He broke off as the door opened and Leo and Jemma came back into the room.

Seeing how worried they looked, Jules immediately thought of Kian, and felt her insides turning to liquid.

Remaining standing, Leo looked directly at her as he said, ‘We know that your husband was on a flight out of Dublin into Bristol on Saturday morning.’

Jules managed to return his gaze.

‘Do you know where he is now?’ he asked solemnly.

Trying to swallow, she said, ‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘How about his cousin, Danny Bright? We’re told Danny collected your husband from the airport and it seems no one’s seen either of them since.’

‘I’ve tried calling them,’ Jules admitted, ‘but they haven’t rung back.’

Leo glanced at Andee. ‘The call Jemma just took,’ he said gruffly, returning his eyes to Jules, ‘was to inform us that a body’s been found on the rocks down by Porlock weir.’

As the words hit Jules like a blow the room started to spin. She was barely aware of what everyone was saying; it was as though they were all talking at once, while Andee only looked at her.

‘Mrs Bright,’ Leo said, stepping forward, ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of …’

‘For heaven’s sake, Leo,’ Andee cut in angrily, ‘you know better than that. Unless someone’s already identified the body?’ Her eyes flashed the challenge.

Leo was forced to admit that no one had.

‘Then I suggest you get a few more facts together before you start making arrests.’ She was on her feet, leaving the young detectives in no doubt that she was showing them the door.

As they left Jules made herself look at the others. It was clear no one knew what to say. She felt so wretched, so afraid, that she wanted to run and run as though she might end up in another land, another life that had nothing to do with it all.

Instead, she went to her phone and rang Kian.

‘You have to call me,’ she told his voicemail, angrily, brokenly. ‘The police have just tried to arrest me. They’ve found a body, Kian … For God’s sake, what the hell is going on?’

Within an hour of the detectives leaving, news came through that the body found at Porlock weir was a young male, still unidentified, but believed to belong to a Devonshire lad who’d left a goodbye note for his parents.

Though it seemed wrong to feel relief at someone else’s tragedy, Jules couldn’t help the way she almost collapsed with it when Andee received the call.

‘I think me being here wasn’t helpful for Leo,’ Andee admitted. ‘He doesn’t normally make mistakes.’

‘I knew it couldn’t be her,’ Stephie declared, sounding sorry that it wasn’t.

Since it still didn’t provide any answers to where Kian and Danny might be, or Amelia, Jules was soon pacing again, leaving Joe and Ethan to man the landline as calls started flooding in from curious friends and the press, while Stephie drove over to see her parents and put their minds at rest.

‘They must surely know when she left the house,’ Jules commented to Andee. ‘The CCTV would show it.’

‘Only if she left via an exit where there are cameras,’ Andee pointed out.

‘So she could still be on the property?’ This was too much like when Daisy was missing for Jules not to feel edgy and afraid.

‘I doubt it. They’ll have carried out a thorough search before coming here, particularly in light of what happened before.’

It was during the late afternoon when Anton Quentin, looking as smoothly arrogant as ever, appeared on a news bulletin declaring himself fully convinced that members of the Bright family were holding his daughter hostage and very probably meant her harm. ‘I’m afraid I can’t go into any more detail at this time,’ he continued in his insufferably superior way, ‘but I can tell you that we have incontrovertible evidence to back up our claims.’

‘What sort of evidence?’ Jules cried.

‘He’s probably talking about the CCTV,’ Andee reminded her.

‘And the fact that I threatened her with a knife,’ Jules added. ‘And stalked her and lied to the police when they asked if I’d seen her.’

‘He probably won’t know about that,’ Andee assured her.

By early evening, having heard the news, virtually every member of Kesterly’s Bright family was crowded into Jules’s small kitchen-cum-sitting room. Half of them had already been questioned by the police, while the other half were expecting to be at any time. It didn’t take Jules long to believe that not one of them knew where Kian and Danny might be, not that they’d have been likely to give them up to the police if they did, but she could tell that they were as worried about the way things were looking as she was.

‘I can’t see them hurting her,’ Ruthie declared for the umpteenth time. ‘Even if she does deserve it.’

‘They’ll be making her see that she’s got to move away from here,’ Finn told them. ‘She should never have been allowed to come back, not after what she did.’

‘I can’t believe she had the nerve to anyway,’ Bridget stated hotly to Jules. ‘I’ve always said she’s not right in the head, and it seems she just wants to go on proving it.’

‘What if they don’t have her?’ Liam piped up.

Everyone gawped at him in amazement.

‘If they don’t,’ Ruthie said, ‘maybe you’d like to tell us where else they might be.’

Since neither Liam, nor anyone else, had an answer for that they fell silent, until Stephie said to Jules, ‘Is Andee coming back here tonight?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Jules replied. ‘Unless we hear something, I suppose.’

‘What’s getting me,’ Bridget mused, ‘is how long does it take to persuade the girl that she’s not wanted around here? No one’s seen her since Friday night …’

‘And Kian didn’t fly in until Saturday morning,’ Joe put in keenly, ‘so he couldn’t have been involved in anything before that, unless Danny somehow got to her on his own on Friday, hid her away somewhere, then went to the airport for Kian.’

‘No one’s actually said that she disappeared on Friday night,’ Stephie reminded them, ‘they only said it was the last time she was seen. If she slept alone and got up early on Saturday morning … What time did Kian’s plane get in?’

Quickly going online to check, Ethan said, ‘Eleven a.m.’

Stephie grimaced. ‘By the time they got back here from the airport it would have been at least half past twelve. Someone would have been bound to see her before that, if she was still at Crofton Park, so I’m not sure my little theory is helping us.’

Round and round, back and forth, only questions, no answers and several phone calls from Aileen, who was as mad as a trapped bee and threatening to sort out Amelia Quentin herself if the boys hadn’t already managed it. ‘She’s been nothing but trouble for this family,’ she ranted furiously, ‘and I for one have had enough of it.’

‘You’re making it sound as though she’s to blame for going missing,’ Bridget pointed out.

‘And so she is,’ Aileen snapped at her sister on the speakerphone. ‘If she hadn’t done what she did to our Daisy we wouldn’t any of us be in the positions we’re in now, including her, so yes, she’s to blame for whatever’s happening to her. I just hope it’s good and final and she doesn’t come bothering any of us again.’

Checking her mobile as it rang, Jules’s heart lurched to see it was Andee. ‘What news?’ she asked, clicking on.

Andee’s answer was so unexpected that it turned her horribly light-headed.

‘Are you sure?’ she murmured, as everyone looked at her.

‘I’m sure.’

Jules’s mind was buzzing. She wasn’t dreaming this, she was awake, it was real. Still not fully breathing, she managed to say, ‘Tell me, is she …?’ She couldn’t finish the question.

Andee understood. ‘She’s unharmed, and on her way back to Crofton Park.’

Jules relayed the information to the others, and said, ‘So where was she?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Andee replied, ‘but I can tell you that Kian, Danny and another man have been taken into custody.’

‘Oh God,’ Jules muttered, pressing a hand to her head.
Where was this going to end? What the hell had he been thinking?
‘What other man?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘I don’t have a name, but as soon as I do I’ll get back to you.’

As she rang off Jules looked at the others, feeling the strain of their concern and needing them to leave as she tried to think what to do. She didn’t want this to be happening. She wanted her life to be normal and calm, unafflicted by tragedy, undarkened by fear.

No matter what happened to Kian, nothing was ever going to be as bad as what had happened to Daisy.

And so began the second longest night of her life as they watched the news, waited for calls and tried to work out who the other man could be.

‘It has to be someone Danny hired to lure her out of the house,’ Finn decided. ‘You know, like a private detective, or someone down at his club who needed a few bob.’

‘I wonder where they were holding her,’ Stephie ventured. ‘In a dungeon, I hope.’

Unable to stop herself damning Kian for being so reckless and stupid, Jules eventually went upstairs to lie down. She felt exhausted, drained, ready to give up on everything, as if there was anything left to give up on. How could she have believed that Kian was ready to restart their lives and try to put the past behind them, when she knew that good fortune had turned its face from them three years ago? They’d had all the happiness that was going to be theirs with their lottery win, the Mermaid, and most of all Daisy. Now all they had to look forward to was the time Kian would spend in prison for his part in this madness – and very probably another breakdown, this time hers.

‘Jules? Are you awake?’ Stephie whispered, putting her head round the door. ‘I’ve brought you some tea.’

Surprised to realise she’d been sleeping, Jules rolled on to her back and looked at the bedside clock. Ten past eight. In the morning? It must be, or it would read twenty ten. She’d slept all night? That was something she hardly ever did.

Suddenly swamped by the awful reality of what was happening in her life, she closed her eyes, as though she could shut it all out again.

‘They’re saying on the news,’ Stephie said, coming to sit on the bed, ‘that no one’s been charged with anything yet, but there should be some sort of announcement in the next couple of hours.’

‘Has Andee rung?’ Jules asked, checking her phone.

No calls on her mobile since Aileen had rung last evening. ‘Is everyone still here?’ she said, forcing herself to sit up.

‘Terry and Finn had to leave, but everyone else is. Joe’s taking orders for breakfast if anyone wants it. Marco sent supplies from the pub last night.’

Remembering how Misty and Marco had kept them all fed when they’d waited for news of Daisy, Jules mumbled, ‘That was good of him.’

What the hell was happening to her life? Why was everything so out of control?

After forcing herself up and into the shower, she went downstairs to join the others who were all busy on their phones with texts and emails, or glued to the news. She was greeted lovingly, tenderly, treated almost like an invalid, and she had to admit she felt like one.

‘Anything yet on who the other man might be?’ she asked as Joe put a strong coffee in her hand.

‘Finn’s going to call if he finds anything out at Danny’s club,’ Bridget told her.