“Of course. I would never stop fighting for her.”
“Would you kill another to protect her?”
He’d warned me he’d start sweet and swiftly divert into dark. I’d been waiting for the hard questions but it still made my heart skip. “I think anyone would if it was justified.”
“Did you kill those innocent girls?”
I sat taller, keeping my hands on my thighs. “No, I did not. My uncle, Jeffrey Clark, did.”
“The same Jeffrey Clark you killed?”
I nodded. “I ended his life for killing those girls as well as hurting Olin Moss and kidnapping my daughter.”
My eyes searched out O’s. Her skin had turned white and lips bitten with nervousness.
“So you admit that you are a murderer.”
“Of a man who’d murdered girls, blackmailed me, and threatened rape to the only woman I’ve ever loved, yes. I am. I killed him.”
A buzz of energy came from the jury again.
Brad ignored them. “But you didn’t kill the other girls?”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed. “Then why was the same brand and batch number of your paint found on their skin?”
I braced myself. “Because I painted them.”
The buzz of energy became a tidal wave of tension.
I stayed focused on my lawyer, trusting him to navigate through the next chaos.
“How is it that you painted them and didn’t stop them from being killed? If you painted them for your uncle to murder, you knew what their fate was. That makes you an accessory. You had a moral and civil obligation to report the crime.”
“I didn’t know.”
My lawyer scoffed before the jury could. Such a weak and useless answer. But it was the truth, regardless. “You didn’t know? How did you not know? You painted them to match the undergrowth where they were killed.”
“He did that.”
“You’re saying he staged each murder depending on how the girls were painted?”
“Yes.”
“You do realise how this sounds? That you’re asking the jury to believe in an unbelievable excuse that you didn’t ...know?”
This was where he wanted me to play my trump card.
I’d rehearsed my paragraph. I had my truth. It wouldn’t set me free, but it would grant some resemblance of peace.
Looking again at O, I said, “I’ve done many commissions over the past few years. Some are garish and bright, some are fantastical and mythical, others are natural and pure. Those are the jobs I love the most. The ones where I get to use nature as my palette. The designs where foliage and shadow, flora and fauna consume the model and make her a part of their world.”
Some of the jurors rolled their eyes. Others stared at me with doubt. Only a few kept judgement from showing.
“The girls were painted because of me. I can show you the invoices and emails requesting that sort of camouflage. I can show you where the photo shoot was taken and even present a couple of magazines where the photos were used. What I can’t show you is the location of where Jeffrey Clark put them because if you look very closely, they weren’t designed to go with that body paint.”
“So they were canvases you’d hired?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “If you look at their bank accounts, you’ll see payment for the time we spent together.”
“How did your uncle grab them before they’d showered off their paint?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, cursing once again for being an idiot. “The number of canvases who ask if they can keep the paint on to show loved ones before washing is extremely high. I always offer them a shower before they leave. Some take it, but most don’t. I’m not responsible for them when they walk out the door.”
“No, but you are responsible if they get killed.”
I hung my head. “I’ll always feel guilty for playing even a small part in their demise. I’m guilty for a great many things. But I didn’t kill them. I didn’t know they’d been targeted until it was too late. When the ransom demands came in, I always paid. I paid countless times and he held off killing—or at least, I hope he did. When the girls started showing up, I didn’t know it was my paint they wore. After all, Jeffrey taught me. He was just as capable of the artwork as I was.”
“But you had a suspicion?”
“By the second girl, yes...I worried.”
“And why didn’t you go to the police then? When you knew lives were being taken?”
“I honestly can’t answer that.” I sighed. “I was still afraid of Olive being taken away from me, but she’d already been taken so that wasn’t such a big restriction. I guess, I knew I was in too deep. And if I was arrested, how could I keep working and paying him? How could I prevent him from killing Olive if I was in jail? She would die.”
“So you kept paying him, hoping you could stop him yourself?”
“Yes. I paid until I was bankrupt. I sold my warehouse, my furniture, everything I could. On the nights when the demands came in, I’d trawl the streets until dawn, looking for him, searching for Olive, for a girl he might have taken. I walked up and down the length of England. I explored countless forests and estates. I kept trying, but I always failed.”
“Is that why your footprints were found at the location of the fourth girl?”
“Yes. Jeffrey gave me her location. I hadn’t painted anyone in camouflage that week and hoped...I hoped she’d still be alive to save.” My head hung. “But he hadn’t waited for nature to kill her. He’d done it himself somewhere else, then painted her to match the bluebells where he dumped her body.”
“And you didn’t report this?”
I winced, accepting how it sounded. “No.”
More noise in the court. More hate.
Hearing it out loud was worse. Everything I’d done, I’d done for Olive. I’d sacrificed everything I could—my fortune, my freedom, my very fucking soul. But it wasn’t up to me to play God and let those girls die.
I had killed them. I’d played executioner just by keeping silent.
That was my true crime.
Staying silent when a teacher took advantage of me, staying silent when O came back into my life, staying silent when my daughter was taken.
Fuck.
Silence was my mistake.
For everything.
Brad paced for a moment, working up to his next question. “How many girls did you save by paying his ransoms?” He stopped and looked at me. “Do you know?”
I shook my head. “I can only go by what he told me. But he was a killer before he took Olive. I don’t know how many lives he took while he had her.”
“Just a guess is fine.”
“Seven, eight? Enough to know at least my money saved a few girls, even if I couldn’t save my daughter.”
“And when you found him that night, when he went back on his word to trade the woman you loved for your daughter, you decided enough was enough?”
Temper curled through me. My mind shot back to the night in question. The guilt in my veins. The self-disgust in my heart. “Yes. It was pre-emptive.”
“How so?”
“I bought succinylcholine, also known as sux, on the black market. It’s a drug they use in anaesthesia.”