‘But you did know he was constantly coming back late from work. You did know he was giving you increasingly lame excuses for those absences. And you accused him, for months, and with monotonous regularity, of having an affair. Can you deny that?’
Sharon opens her mouth, then closes it again. Her cheeks have gone very red.
‘So let’s run through it once again, shall we?’ says Agnew. ‘Just so we’re all clear about this new story of yours. According to you, you are at home preparing for the party when your son and daughter get home from school. Daisy at 4.15, and Leo at 4.30. Daisy puts her music on in her room. You gather from Leo that the children had had some sort of argument but you don’t go upstairs to check on Daisy. At just after 4.30 you go out for mayonnaise, leaving the children in the house on their own. At 5.15 you return, without mayonnaise. Again, you do not go up to check on Daisy. Or on Leo, for that matter. Your husband returns at 5.30 and likewise does not go up to see the children. Guests start to arrive for the party at seven, and all through the evening you see a neighbour’s little girl running about in a daisy costume and have no idea – to use your own phrase – that she is not your daughter.’
Someone shouts abuse from the public gallery and the judge looks up sharply. ‘Silence, or I will clear the court!’
Agnew takes a deep breath. ‘When precisely, in all this, Mrs Mason, are you telling us your daughter disappeared?’
Sharon shrugs, avoiding his eye. ‘It must have been when I was out.’
‘So we’re back to the famous forty minutes? You would have us believe some unknown paedophile – some random intruder – just happened to choose that very moment to break into the house?’
‘She might have known them. She might have met them before and let them in. You didn’t know her. She liked keeping secrets. She liked doing things behind my back.’
There’s another ripple from the gallery at that, and anxious looks between the defence team.
‘Indeed,’ says Agnew, turning to look at the jury. ‘Members of the jury might well wonder at a mother who says such things about her own child – her own dead child – ’
Miss Kirby begins to rise again, but Agnew quickly forestalls her. ‘I withdraw that last remark, my Lady. But I will, if I may, ask the defendant if she can cite an example – any example – of any actual duplicity on her daughter’s part?’
‘Well,’ she flashes, ‘she was seeing that nasty little half-brother of hers for a start. I didn’t know anything about that.’
‘And you are asking the jury to believe that?’
‘Are you calling me a liar? We didn’t know. I didn’t know. I’d have put a bloody stop to it if I had.’
It was a trap, and she’s walked right into it.
‘I see,’ says Agnew after a heavy pause. ‘Are you in the habit, Mrs Mason, of putting a bloody stop to things you don’t like?’
It’s the judge who intervenes this time. ‘The jury will ignore that last remark. Move on, please, Mr Agnew.’
Agnew consults his notes. ‘Regardless of whether you knew Daisy was seeing her half-brother, it wasn’t Jamie Northam who came to the house that day, was it, Mrs Mason? Because we know for a fact that he was twenty miles away at a wedding rehearsal in Goring. Are you saying Daisy was meeting someone else as well – that she had a second secret assignation going on? Is that really likely – a child of eight with neither a mobile phone nor access to a computer? And even if such a person did exist, wouldn’t Leo have known if they had come to the door that afternoon or broken in?’
Sharon glares at him; her anger is perilously close to the surface now. ‘He had his headphones on.’
But Agnew isn’t letting up – he’s done his homework. ‘But even so – surely he would have noticed – surely he would have told you as soon as you got back? After all,’ he says, holding her gaze, drilling each word, ‘you’re his mother, he’s your son – ’
It’s the last straw.
‘That bloody kid is not my son!’ The words are out before she can think them. ‘And as for him hearing anything or doing anything, you’ve got to be bloody joking. There’s something wrong with him. There always has been. He burned the sodding house down, for Christ’s sake. If anyone’s to blame it’s his stupid mother. Not me.’
Kirby is again on her feet objecting, and people in the public gallery are shouting and pointing. It’s nearly five minutes before order is restored. And all that while, Sharon sits there, her shoulders heaving.
‘So you stand by your story,’ says Agnew. ‘That you never saw Daisy after she got home. You never spoke to her and you never saw her.’
She flushes, but she does not speak.
‘In that case, how do you explain this?’ He lifts another plastic bag from the desk in front of him. ‘Exhibit nine, my Lady. A small cotton cardigan found under the heap of wheelbarrows in the car park. A cardigan which, as we know, has been identified as that worn by Daisy Mason on the day of her disappearance.’ He presses his remote control again and the CCTV from outside the school appears on the screen. There are more gasps around the court: the police haven’t released this before. No one has seen this footage. Agnew lets them watch. Let’s them see Daisy alive, Daisy laughing, Daisy in the sun. And then he freezes the frame.
‘This is the last sighting of Daisy Mason. The cardigan is tied round her shoulders and, as you can see, it is completely clean. Both sleeves are visible and there are no marks.’
He lifts the evidence bag again. ‘I accept that the jury will find it hard to discern, in among the mud and filth, but analysis has proved that there are bloodstains on the left sleeve of this cardigan. This blood is not Daisy’s. It’s from someone else entirely. That person, Mrs Mason, is you.’
He pauses, waiting for it to sink in. ‘So perhaps you could tell us, Mrs Mason, how your blood came to be on this cardigan, when it was not present at 3.49, when your daughter left school. Do you still claim you never saw Daisy after she got home that day?’
She must have known this was coming, and yet she has nothing to offer. No story that will stand the slightest scrutiny.
‘I cut myself,’ she says eventually. ‘There was glass on the kitchen floor.’
‘Ah, the famous broken jar of mayonnaise. But that still does not explain how your blood got on to this cardigan. Can you enlighten us, Mrs Mason?’
‘I found the cardigan on the stairs after I heard her come in. When I went to call up to her. So I picked it up and put it on the hook in the hall. I was tidying up. For the party. I didn’t realize my hand was still bleeding or I’d have put it in the wash.’
‘So when did you notice the cardigan was gone?’
She looks at him now and her chin lifts. ‘When Leo got home. I just assumed she’d come downstairs and got it.’
‘And you never mentioned this to the police? Not once – in all those hours of interviews before they arrested you?’
‘I didn’t think it was important.’
The courtroom is silent. No one believes her. But it’s all she has.
There is a long, long pause.
*
19 July 2016, 4.09 p.m.
The day of the disappearance
5 Barge Close, kitchen
She knew he was lying. There was something about his voice, the noises on the line. The echoes were all wrong. He wasn’t out in the open, at a site, he was in a room. A room with other people in it. She’s got a long nose for them now. The backing tracks to his lies.
She puts the phone down carefully and stares at the kitchen floor. The mayonnaise is solidifying into a sticky glutinous mass, buzzing with flies. There’s glass everywhere, tiny splinters crunching underfoot. When the front door opens five minutes later Sharon is on her hands and knees, collecting the pieces in a piece of kitchen roll.
‘Daisy? Is that you?’
Sharon gets to her feet and reaches for a tea towel. There’s blood on her hands.
‘Daisy! Did you hear me? Come in here at once!’
Daisy eventually appears, dragging her school bag along the floor behind her. Sharon’s mouth hardens; there are two spots of livid colour on her cheeks.