The Darkest Secret by Alex Marwood

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