Page 86 of The Housewarming

‘What?’

‘Ava said you and Matt got back at midnight the night little Abi went missing. You didn’t get back at midnight. Where were you?’

‘I went back out.’ He pulled off his clothes and climbed into bed. ‘I thought I could find her. I told her that.’

‘Why did you do a wash load that morning?’

‘Wash load? What? What are you going on about?’

‘I had to lie for you,’ she said. ‘It was horrible.’

‘I haven’t done anything though. They’re just paranoid. Something about that party set them off. Ava especially. I told you. She’s gone mental, needs some proper help, that’s all. Come here. Come on. What you need is a cuddle.’

‘You always defend her.’

‘Come here.’

He talked her round like he always did. She liked to be persuaded out of a bad mood like that, used to pretend she was angry about something or other – he was pretty sure she did it on purpose – so they could end up like they did last night, one thing leading to another. It was the best sex they’d had in ages – spontaneous instead of thermometers and ovulation kits and all that crap. It was, he thinks, the last sex they’ll ever have. Wonders now if she knew that, if she was saying goodbye.

The police car pulls up outside the station. He waits for the cop to open the door. He believed he could move past it. He thought, with time, it would become no more than a bad feeling. But he knows – has always known – that if it comes out, it will define him. And now that day has come. He is about to become Neil Johnson, the guy who killed his best friend’s child.

Forty

Ava

‘He had a plausible story,’ Farnham is saying, sitting at one end of the sofa while Lorraine Stephens sits pushed up against the opposite arm. ‘It matched what he said at the time, and there was nothing to put him in the frame. When we spoke to Mrs Lovegood, she told us he wasn’t at their home when they left for work and that he texted to say he’d be in later, that he had to go to the builders’ merchants for equipment. Mr Johnson’s wife confirmed that he wasn’t in the house when she left for work but that didn’t put him at the Lovegoods necessarily. His phone data had him at home the whole time.’

Matt’s leg presses against mine, our hands a knot between us.

Farnham leans forward and folds her hands together.

‘But he couldn’t explain the toy,’ she says. ‘I asked Mrs Lovegood whether Jasmine would recognise a sloth and be able to name it as such if she hadn’t seen the toy before, or whether she had a sloth toy herself. She said most definitely not, to both, that the nearest she’d get would be a monkey. There was no record on Mr Johnson’s bank statement of buying equipment earlier that morning, to which he initially replied that they were out of stock. We pushed him on the toy and in the end he admitted that he was at the Lovegoods’ property at 7 a.m. He’d left his mobile at home. He was working in the utility room while the family were getting ready to leave. The Lovegoods didn’t know he was there.’

‘He was in their downstairs loo?’ I cut in.

‘Yes. But he couldn’t give us any explanation why he’d lied about that. Then of course we have a missing large tool bag and a missing… person.’

A small mass, I think. A large bag.

Farnham continues. We listen to the second-by-second, beat-by-beat rhythm of a different melody all together. Except this one will not end in taunting and tantalising but in one terrible closing note.

‘We put it to him that, according to Mrs Lovegood, the only way Jasmine could have known that toy by name is if she’d had it named for her. Ava, you said that Jasmine had called the toy not sloth butMrSloth, the name you and your husband had given it. This name would most likely only have been used by yourselves and your friends the Johnsons. We put this to Mr Johnson.’

‘And he couldn’t explain it,’ I say.

‘No, he couldn’t. The change in timelines was significant. If Abi left your home nearer 8 a.m., and Neil arrived at the Lovegoods’ house a little after seven, it was possible for Abi to have seen him inside the property and for Jasmine to have not only seen Abi’s toy but had it named for her by Neil. It was possible that Jasmine was the only member of the Lovegood family who saw Neil. And later that morning he handed the toy to you, Ava. He found it on the road, which of course means he could have planted it there earlier.’

‘So he confessed?’ Matt interrupts.

Farnham performs her now familiar mannerism of brushing her hand across her chin. ‘Sometimes you get the impression that, no matter how much a suspect is resisting, actually they want to confess. There’s a kind of inevitability to it, as if you and they know that’s where you’re all headed. An innocent person will tend to be very insistent. They can get physical. But throughout, Mr Johnson seemed like he was going through the motions, like he’d lost the will or couldn’t or didn’t want to lie anymore. And once we had him against the wall, as it were, he admitted that, yes, Jasmine had seen him and he’d shown her the toy… and that’s when he broke down.’ She looks up, first at Matt, then at me.

‘So he definitely killed her?’ Matt’s disbelief is palpable. ‘I mean, he said it with his own mouth, not under duress or anything?’

Farnham nods. ‘I’m afraid so. I’m so sorry, I know this must be terribly hard to hear. There are two detective constables with your neighbours just now, explaining the situation. And tomorrow morning we’ll be excavating the site.’

‘The site? I thought she was in the river?’

‘That was the working theory, yes, and I’ll give you a full account of the sequence of events as we understand them in a moment, but tomorrow we’re going to have to excavate your next-door neighbours’ kitchen floor with a view to accessing the trench immediately to the rear of the kitchen entrance.’

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