Fuck off.
“Why did you take only Miss Farrell camping? You have two children. It seems rather strange that you’d only take your daughter.”
Max nodded and swiftly replied, “I would have taken both, but Jasper, my son, didn’t want to come in the end.”
“Don’t say my fucking name,” Jasper growled.
I patted his hand, warning him to keep his cool.
“What do you mean ‘in the end’?”
“To begin with, Oakley didn’t want him to come. She wanted me to herself, the same way she only wanted Sarah, her mother, to take her to gymnastics. Camping became my time with Oakley, and my son’s time was football on a Sunday morning.”
“He’s fucking lying,” Jasper muttered.
Of course, he was. The football part was true; the rest was Max’s fantasy.
“You allowed your five-year-old daughter to dictate who was going on these trips?”
Max smiled his award-winning smile. I itched to put my fistthrough it. “She needed one-on-one time, and so did Jasper. Every child does. We had plenty of times together as a family, too, but they each needed occasions where they had my undivided attention.”
I ground my teeth.
“Mr Farrell, why didn’t you tell your wife that an old friend, Mr Frank Glosser, would join you on your most recent trip?”
Sarah and Jasper had written statements so they would prove that Max was lying about either of them knowing Frank was alone with Oakley.
“It was a last-minute thing. Frank called me to say he’d just arrived in town and was about to check into a hotel. Frank always stayed in a separate tent or caravan.”
“You took a spare tent?”
“He hired one from the campsite. They have a record of the booking.”
Linda smiled briefly. She had known that already. “Of course. And why did Mr Glosser continue to join you on these trips after Oakley had stopped talking? Did it not seem odd to you that she’d stopped soon after you’d been camping?”
“Frank is an old friend, and he’d been joining us for a while. My son and daughter liked him and had no issues with spending time with him. Frank had been around them both long before Oakley had stopped talking, and she’d never expressed any unease in his presence.”
A fresh fire lit inside me, the flames licking at my skin. I curled my hands, my short fingernails cutting into the flesh of my palm.
“So, it never crossed your mind that someone could be forcing her to stay silent? In your statement, you said that you spent many hours researching and visiting doctors.”
“It was a consideration, of course, but we trusted everyone we had around our children.”
“Wanker,” Jasper growled under his breath.
“Still, the one person who saw more of your daughter than your son on a one-on-one basis was Mr Glosser.”
“Frank had spent time with just myself and my son over the years,” Max replied smoothly. He was a picture of calm, as if the questions being asked now were about the weather.
Linda smiled briefly. “How did Oakley’s silence affect you?”
“It was difficult, to say the least. Oakley’s mother and I were desperate to help her, and we put everything in to finding out what was wrong. As a result, we suffered physically, emotionally, and financially. I lost work because I was so preoccupied in finding out what was wrong with my child. My now ex-wife and I fought, both lost as to what to do for the best. We didn’t know how to help. I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since the day she stopped speaking.”
“Probably worrying she’d speak up,” Jasper muttered in disgust under his breath.
“You suffered financially?” Linda asked.
“Yes.”
