The Darkest Secret

by Alex Marwood

  Despite his former wife’s soured reputation, Jackson surprised the public when he did not apply for custody of Ruby. Not long before the divorce, Claire dropped off the radar. Increasingly unhappy at the negative press she had received, she left London with Ruby, and seemed to vanish from view like her daughter before her. It was widely believed that she had left the country and was living in an ex-pat community where she was not known. The Mail can now reveal that she is in fact renting a smallholding in rural Sussex, and has been living quietly in the three-bedroom house with her surviving daughter, largely unnoticed by those around them. When our reporters called to seek a reaction to her former husband’s death, she refused to answer the door and Ruby was nowhere to be seen. A statement relayed via Maria Gavila read: ‘I am deeply saddened by the death of my former husband. We had not been in contact for some time, but we shared a devotion to our two daughters that never waned for either of us. My surviving daughter is devastated by the loss of her father, and both she and I would be grateful to be left in peace to digest this sad development.’

  Neighbours were unwilling to discuss her. ‘I don’t know her,’ said Norman Colbeck, whose farm borders on to the two fields in which she keeps a ragged collection of pigs, chickens and goats. ‘She doesn’t mix. I don’t think you’ll find anyone much around here who’ll have anything to say to you.’ In the nearby village of Mills Barton, residents were equally unforthcoming. ‘Yes, they come to the church from time to time,’ said vicar Ruth Miller. ‘Nice people, but quiet. They don’t mix a huge amount, but they are always willing to contribute to church events and fundraising efforts.’ No one at the school would comment. ‘She isn’t a pupil here,’ said head teacher Daniel Bevan. ‘We don’t know them. Though obviously our thoughts are with them both.’

  So the mystery of Claire Jackson’s vanishing act is finally solved, but the mystery of Coco lives on. Many people believed at the time that Claire knew more about her daughter’s disappearance than she was admitting. Cross-questioning would bring about a robotic shutting-down and a repetition of stock phrases and stories, as though she didn’t trust herself to go off-message even for a moment. As the Mail columnist Dawn Hamblett said just before she dropped out of the limelight, ‘It was as though Coco Jackson was an escapee from Stepford rather than a much-loved child.’

  The death of Sean Jackson is far from the only disaster to strike the lives of the Jackson Associates, as the guests at the kidnap house were quickly dubbed in the days after the event. Jackson faced more heartbreak when his third wife, Linda, was found at the bottom of a flight of marble stairs in a house whose interior she was designing in Leyton, Essex, in 2010. She had suffered a fractured skull and died soon afterwards.

  Her former partner, Dr James Orizio, was found guilty of malpractice and struck off in the summer of 2008 after one Miranda Chace, singer with hip-hop band Ton Ton Macoutes, died as a result of painkilling drugs he had prescribed on tour earlier that year without carrying out necessary health checks. The subsequent police investigation revealed a raft of prescriptions for painkillers such as Vicodin and the ‘Hillbilly heroin’, OxyContin, plus a number of other metabolism-enhancing drugs which had been, at the very least, handed out too casually. He was jailed in 2009 and released in 2012.

  Charles Clutterbuck, once a rising Tory star, found himself sidelined to the back benches after the party came to power in 2010. After an early career in which he had been tipped for stardom and a Cabinet position at the very least, it wasn’t hard to infer that his involvement in the ill-fated weekend might have had some influence over this exclusion. Clutterbuck himself blamed it on having attended ‘the wrong school’, a swipe at David Cameron’s preference for surrounding himself with his fellow Etonians. In 2013 he gave up his safe Tory seat and defected to the newly formed Britain Together, an anti-immigration, Eurosceptic party, and failed to win it back at the ensuing by-election. His LinkedIn profile currently lists him as a ‘consultant’, although the Mail was unable to trace any companies using his services. Clutterbuck and his wife, Imogen, currently live on the Dalmatian coast, where the parliamentary pension, as a waggish former colleague put it, ‘goes a lot further if you don’t mind drinking local’.

  As his reappearance on our televisions on the 10th anniversary of his daughter’s disappearance made clear, Sean Jackson never lost hope that one day his daughter might be found. With his death, and with his second wife reluctant to engage with the outside world, the possibility of a solution to the mystery of what happened to Coco recedes that little bit further. Yesterday, gates leading to the Jacksons’ Queen Anne manor house near Bideford remained closed, Robert and Maria Gavila the only visitors given access. No funeral is planned as yet, as the body awaits release by the coroner. But, with another gravestone soon to join the others in a green English graveyard, now perhaps might be the time to consider adding a further memorial to its carved granite surface.

  The piece is illustrated by half a dozen pictures of Dad, three of them with the twins, one from twenty years ago, when India and I were still part of the picture. I look at it long and slow. We’re at a table somewhere shady, a bright sunlit beach outside, red wine on the table, Indy and me hooked, one on each side, into the crooks of his arms, the three of us tanned and smiling broadly at what presumably is Mum taking the photo. He was a good-looking man, I can see that now. I thought he was handsome when I was a kid, but all girls think their fathers are handsome, don’t they? But now that I’m little more than a decade off being the same age I can see that a man of forty could be handsome without me projecting it on to him. Thick sandy hair touched with grey at the sides, his body still hard and shiny, three-day stubble on a jaw that had yet to show signs of slackening.

  I have no memory of this being taken. I don’t know where it is. We did a lot of holidays when I was a kid, and some of them were happy.

  I feel a sudden contraction somewhere deep in my bones. My joints ache, as though I’ve developed a fever. My God, I think, there is something there. I do miss him. I put the laptop aside and roll on to my side. Wrap my arms round my body and squeeze. Daddy. We loved you, when we were little. We thought the sun shone from your eyes.

  I remember what it felt like to be wrapped in those big strong arms, before he stopped touching us. When was that? Sometime around the divorce, I guess. I remember the day he finally left, another day of bright sunshine, watching him walk down the path to his BMW without once looking back. We stood in the window of India’s bedroom and watched him go, and Mum clattered things in the kitchen as if to signal that she wasn’t bothered. He was wearing aviator sunglasses. I’ve never been able to like a man who’s wearing them since.

  And then I’m crying. I’m not sure what for. The fact that he’s gone, or the fact that he went? I don’t even know who I’m crying for. Nine-year-old me, or the mess I am at twenty-seven? But the sadness tears at my chest like a trapped animal trying to get out, and my face seems to have taken on a life of its own. I grit my teeth and feel my lips pull back to expose them, feel the wet flood over the side of my nose and soak the pillow.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, out loud. Then, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’

  I’m alone. I have no one to comfort me. Everyone I know is elsewhere, going on with their lives, and I’ve ensured over the years that there is no one I can call on. I grab a pillow and wrap it in my arms, and somehow find it comforting. Oh, Dad. What a sod you were, and yet here I am mourning you anyway.

  The phone begins to vibrate on the bedside cabinet. I swipe my sleeve over my eyes and sit up. A withheld number. Someone calling from an office, presumably. I consider for a moment not answering. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that someone from the press has got hold of my number. But then I think: it could be anyone. It could be India, or Maria, or Robert, looking to give me information, someone from the morgue or the police or something. I hit Answer and put it to my ear.

  ‘Hello?’

  Silence. For one second, two. I’m beginning to think
that it’s a wrong number, or an Indian call centre taking its time to connect me to the salesman waiting to ask if I’ve ever had PPI, when a voice I’ve not heard in years speaks and the back of my neck prickles.

  ‘Milly? It’s Claire.’

  ‘Claire who?’

  ‘Claire Jackson,’ she says.

  Chapter Nine

  2004 | Thursday | Maria

  Maria Gavila feels a bit weary as they sail past the chain ferry. Time on the Gin O’Clock is precious, because it’s the only time when they don’t have to be on parade. And even though Harbour View has fences and, according to Robert, gates like prison bars, they’ll be back on show again once they get there and she’ll be back to giving people what they need, or at least what they think they need. Robert is at the helm in his comical captain’s hat and he’s as happy as a pig in shit. This weekend will be exhausting. Sean and Charlie’s appetite for partying is almost inexhaustible, and of course they’ll be leaving it up to the women to work through the hangovers and keep the kids out of their hair in the daytime.

  Her vodka, lime and soda is almost finished, and there’s not enough time before they put in at the marina berth they’ve booked to make it worthwhile getting another. Simone is in a swing chair reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Whether she’s reading or rereading is anybody’s guess. It’s such a long book, and Simone is such an idle reader, that it could well have taken her a year to get halfway through. Linda and Jimmy are nursing bottled beers at the aft table, still playing Beggar-my-Neighbour with the kids, though the fun must have worn thin by Southampton. It’s partly to avoid talking to each other, she thinks. I’d have got fed up with Jimmy’s ‘rock’n’roll medic’ act years ago, too. The only thing that keeps them together is the fact that he’s off on tour prescribing pharmaceuticals to overpaid musicians half the time. I would probably have backed off from being friends with them years ago myself, if it weren’t for the stream of gossip that pours out of him after every tour, and God bless the Hippocratic oath.

  She uncurls herself from her chair and makes her way forward to find her husband. The Gin O’Clock is their largest boat yet – four compact berths below deck, white leather upholstery and drop-down walls that turn the canopy into a makeshift saloon in inclement weather – but it still takes her less than thirty seconds to reach him, hanging on to the guard rail as she walks. She comes up behind him and encircles him with her arms, leans her chin on his shoulder. There’s more of him than there was when they met; he’s filled out, become more substantial as his status has grown. She doesn’t mind. Maria has kept her figure despite the almost nightly stream of events she attends, sticking to a single glass of champagne and waving away the canapés in order to compete with her actress-model-singer clients, all twenty years younger than her and thin as whippets and all wanting shots with their Alpha Rep in front of the sponsor boards; but weight feels better on a middle-aged man, as long as it doesn’t wobble. He’s her power husband, the other half of her power couple, and she likes him as he is.

  ‘It’s not too late to say we’ve sprung a leak at the Isle of Wight,’ she says.

  Robert shakes his head. ‘You know we can’t, Maria. They’ll just tell us to come over on the ferry.’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she says. ‘No one’s going to be expecting you to spend the weekend playing house with the laydeez.’

  Robert sighs. ‘It’s just a weekend. And I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

  The boat reaches the pontoon and Robert starts to manoeuvre. Maria lets him go and goes to lean on the railing to look at sunny Poole. It’s hardly a Visit England brochure. But then, old people need a lot of ramps and guard rails in their retirement communities.

  ‘Simone!’ shouts Robert. ‘Stand by to tie up, will you?’

  Simone drops her book on to the deck and uncurls herself slowly from her chair. Like a cat, thinks Maria, or a marmoset. My goodness, where did those legs come from? And the bosom? I could swear she was a child when we set out on this trip, but now look at her.

  Simone is wearing white hotpants and a gingham shirt that she’s knotted beneath her breasts to show a little brown midriff and emphasise her neat little cleavage. Her poker-straight – no need for these ceramic straighteners they’re all carrying in their make-up bags these days – waist-length hair shines chestnut with glints of gold, as though someone’s come in and dipped it in glitter varnish. Maria stares, mesmerised, at her stepdaughter. My God, she’s a woman, she thinks. Then an awful thought rushes through her head – I must watch her around Charlie Clutterbuck – and she squashes it down before it can take root. Charlie has known Simone since she was a toddler. He would no more… he’s no Woody Allen even if he does like to play the lusty monseigneur. Good God, he’s spent enough of his career watching his parliamentary colleagues fall one by one to the News of the World to never want to go anywhere near a teenager as long as he lives.

  Simone sashays along the deck in her pink flowered mules towards the little gate in the guard rail. She’s wearing make-up. All the way around the coast, marina-to-marina from St Katharine Docks, she’s been as bare of face as a ten-year-old, and has stuck to a uniform of smocks and leggings when she’s not been spreadeagled on the prow soaking up the sun in her bikini. Now she’s as brown as nutmeg and her skin, usually freckled and scattered with evidence of her hormonal age, is smooth as marble, her eyes lined black like a cat’s and – good God! Are those false eyelashes? What’s going on? Is there some boy I didn’t know was coming?

  A thunder of footsteps and the smaller kids barrel up behind her in their flotation vests, push her out of the way before she reaches the gate. ‘Me!’ shouts Joaquin, her son with Robert, seven years old and loud as a foghorn. Simone presses herself back against the cabin wall and treats them to a look of teenage contempt. She studies her nails, and Maria sees that they’re painted. A subtle shade of pink, thank God, but painted. ‘Me! Me!’ shout the Orizio kids at Joaquin’s heels, three and four and six and caught up in the web of hero worship. It’s all monkey see, monkey do at that age.

  ‘You look nice,’ she says, experimentally, and Simone silently tells her to back off through her curtain of shiny hair.

  ‘Look,’ says Robert as they walk up the road through Poole, their dependants trailing along behind, the young ones poking things with sticks and the two of them savouring their last few moments before the world kicks in again. ‘I’ll tell you what. You just get through this weekend and I promise we won’t have to do it again. He’s only fifty once, and I can guarantee you that she won’t be around by the time he’s sixty.’

  ‘Really?’ she asks, brightening.

  ‘I doubt she’ll be around by the time he’s fifty-one, actually,’ he says. ‘The bloom is most definitely off the rose.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she says.

  ‘She’ll be toast come Christmas. It’d have happened years ago if it weren’t for the twins. As it goes, I think there’s someone else on the horizon.’

  ‘Oh, really? Who?’ She glances around and notices that Simone is walking a few feet behind them, fiddling with her phone. ‘Attends! Pas devant les enfants,’ she says.

  Simone looks up and says the first words she’s shared all day. ‘I do speak French, you know,’ she says. ‘Actually, I probably speak more than you do. That’s what you get for sending me to private school.’

  The queue for the chain ferry seems to run all the way back off the Sandbanks peninsula and into the suburbs behind. They walk past car after car full of red-faced children staring hopelessly out in search of the sea. Adults stand on the tarmac, lean on roofs, smoking, and she’s painfully aware of how many eyes follow her stepdaughter’s barely covered buttocks as she sways along the road. It’s an endless worry, parenthood, she thinks. No sooner do you stop worrying about them eating bleach than you’re yelling at them to LOOK before they cross the road, and now it’s oh, darling, you don’t know about the nasty men in the world, please take ca
re. I was no better. I used to walk around in a rugby shirt and fishnet stockings and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than dress-up.

  Jimmy jogs up beside them. ‘So tell me about this Charlie Clutterbuck?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘He’s a bit of an arch Toryboy, isn’t he?’

  ‘A slavish free-marketeer,’ says Robert. ‘I can tell you that. Always was, even at university when the rest of us were huffing and puffing and supporting the miners. He’s tipped for Cabinet if they ever get back in again, especially now he’s got such a safe seat. He’d have gone straight into politics with the Thatcherites if he’d had a private income. Had to go into the City for fifteen years first, to save up.’

  ‘Yeah, what I’m wondering,’ says Jimmy, ‘is how much we’re going to have to mind our Ps and Qs. Am I going to get MI5 banging on my door?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ says Robert. ‘Dobbing people into MI5 is far more of a New Labour thing. Besides, our Charlie had the busiest of noses the moment he had the income to support it. He’s never done things by halves, be it entertainment or fascism. I should think he’s gone underground a bit, but you know Tories. I don’t suppose he’ll manage to keep it under wraps for long. As it were. If anything he’ll be beating you to it.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Jimmy. ‘Well, I’ll play it by ear.’

  ‘There’ll be lots of drink,’ says Maria, reassuringly. ‘Gallons and gallons of excellent wines.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Jimmy, ‘good old drink. How old-school.’

  She’s just starting to wonder if they might have missed the house when she sees Sean, standing on the pavement with his hand on his hips, talking to a man in a hard hat. Beside him, on the ground, is a slate nameboard with the legend ‘Seawings’ painted on it in gold cursive lettering, obviously awaiting reattachment to one of the ugly red-brick pillars that have been recently built to take heavy gates.