I watched her from the front window running helter-skelter into the night and I hoped that there would be no more girls.
chapter thirty
After their drinks on the Heath, Jane says goodbye to Dexter and takes the tube into town. She alights at Charing Cross and walks through the buzzy backstreets from the Strand toward Seven Dials. Another glorious evening, another reminder that she has no one to share glorious evenings with, another opportunity to chastise herself for feeling bad about her aloneness.
Her mind tumbles with images and facts and not-quite-facts that flicker and fade through her thoughts with nothing to grab hold of. She pulls out her phone and types Helen Yaxley another message.
I know you said you’d let me know if you heard anything, hate to be annoying. Any word? Any news?
Then she messages Shannon.I’ll be back on Monday, she types.Hope that’s OK.
No reply from Helen, but a reply instantaneously from Shannon:
No probs! Me and the boys are having the best time! Bit of an issue with the tap in the kitchen sink though. No water coming. Using hose water instead for now. But you might want to get a plumber in. Also that bit of the ceiling in the room next to the kitchen that was hangingoff—it’s finally come down. Looks a bit grim up there. Soz to bear bad news. Sure it’s fine! Have a good weekend!
Jane groans under her breath, adds a thumbs-up emoji to Shannon’s message, and puts her phone back in her bag. She can’t think about it all now. That bloody house. The decay and frailty of it. The money she doesn’t have to spend on it. The job she doesn’t have to earn the money to spend on it. The life she has lived that has made her indolent and work-shy. The time trickling through her fingers to change anything, fix anything. She thinks of Chloe Flint, the glamorous estate agent, her talk of Crittall windows and foreign buyers, and she knows that that is the only sensible solution, but she’s still not ready to face it.
Back at Tony’s house, Jane sits up on the roof terrace and watches the clips of Jessamine Black’s B-movie that she’d recorded onto her phone from Natasha’s laptop.
She casts her eyes across the rest of the actors; there’s Natasha’s now-husband, Jacob, playing a surly young neighbor, and a girl with red hair playing Jessamine’s stepsister, staying for the weekend, and a slightly older man with dark blond hair in thick millennium-style curtains playing Jessamine’s on-and-off love interest, Tristan. According to IMDb, his name is Oliver Bloom, and he appeared in a few movies during the nineties and early 2000s, but a quick google earlier showed that he was now an artisan cheesemaker living in the West Country. Natasha told her the cast had lost touch after filming, that only she and Jessamine had stayed friends. But was it possible, she wonders, that Jessamine might have said something on set, or done something that had stayed with anyone else, something they might remember? It was worth a shot. Jane goes to Oliver’s cheese website and sends a message via his contact form.
Hi, I’m investigating a missing girl and trying to find out more information about a woman called Jessamine Black who youshot a movie with in 2005/6. Wondered if you knew anything about her or had contact details for anyone you think might still be in touch with her? I spoke to Natasha de Large this morning and she couldn’t help. Do drop me a line if you remember anything. Thank you.
The film is still paused on Jane’s phone when she switches back from her browser, capturing Jessamine’s face in full detail. Jane stares at it again. It’s a fascinating face somehow. There’s something in her eyes that reminds Jane of herself. She feels an affinity with this woman, something pulling at her from her gut. She sighs and turns off her phone, then googles “how to find out who owns a house.” She fills in the form on the Land Registry website and pays her £24.95 to get the title register emailed to her. Then she spends another £19.19 (inc. VAT) to get a background report from 192.com for Jessamine Black. The temperature starts to drop, and she takes her empty wineglass down the tiny stairs and shuts the door to the roof terrace behind her.
She’s done as much as she can for one day.
When Jane wakes up the next morning, she’s uncomfortably aware that the air-conditioning has been on too high all night in Tony’s bedroom, that the air is too crisp, and her throat is dry and sore. She gets up and turns it off from the panel on the wall, then finds her reading glasses, picks up her phone, and sees that she has a message from Helen Yaxley.
Nothing from the police. But I did find something in the annex that I thought you might be interested in. I was packing away her things for the cleaners, putting everything in her suitcase, and there was a little pouch on the inside of her suitcase, and I found this.
The next message is a photograph of Helen’s fingers clasping a photograph of an older man with a mustache and thinning black-and-gray hair sitting on a faded floral sofa between two teenagers, a boy and girl. He hashis arms around both of them and all three are smiling. In the background is an old-fashioned dresser full of knickknacks and old books.
Jane gasps.
It’s the same man she came home with from the bar that night. It’s also the same sofa she sat on that night back in 2000 and the same dresser on which he’d mixed her martini.
She zooms in closer on the girl. It’s Jessamine, probably about seventeen or eighteen here, her face already set with that dark broken beauty, her eyes already wild and lost.
And then she zooms in on the boy. On his lap is something strange; it looks like a clown’s head, an obscenely bulbous red nose protruding from the front. She notices then that the boy is wearing white gloves with white frilled trim at the wrists.
And there, reflected in the glass of the dresser door, is the photographer: a woman with dark bouffant hair, a slim-fitting outfit, her features indistinguishable in the blur, but Jane knows it is her, the man’s wife, who helped her escape that night; she recognizes her instantly.
There is another photograph in the next message, this one of the flip side of the picture, where in neat ballpoint pen someone has written the words: “The Last One of Us, Thornwood: 30th April 2005.”
The last one of us? ponders Jane. What does that mean? The lastphotoof us, maybe? In which case, did something happen around this time? Maybe this is when the brother ran away. There he is with his scary clown mask and his creepy white gloves, ready and raring to go by the look of him. Jesus. The whole photo gives Jane the heebie-jeebies. Everything about it is slightly wrong, slightly off. The way the father’s hands grip the two children’s shoulders a little too tightly, the children pulling slightly away from him. And what has happened to Jessamine’s father, the man with no name who brought her back to his home all those years ago?
Jane replies to Helen, thanking her for sharing the photo. Then she sighs and puts down her phone. What started as an obsession with findingthe girl who disappeared from Helen’s annex has turned into an obsession with Thornwood and the Blacks. She desperately wants to get into that house. She wants to know who lives there, what’s happened there, what happened to the father, why this was the last photo of them, and where, dear God, is that haunted-looking boy in the clown gloves?
chapter thirty-one
Jane showers and dresses and makes herself a coffee. Looking down through the window of the first-floor living room she sees the tops of people’s heads: early workers, or maybe the previous night’s workers heading home. The sky is an acid blue turning hot white at the edges as the sun begins its ascent over the rooftops. Jane can hear the rumble of garbage removal trucks, the clack and shatter of bottles being tipped into containers, the distant thunder of buses on Charing Cross Road. It’s just turned 7 a.m. She has a full day ahead of her and no plan. Then her phone buzzes and she picks it up and sees that her phone has just received a dump of emails, and in between all the junk from boutiques and pet food companies there is the report from the Land Registry. Her heart races as her thumb clicks the email open, and then the attachment.
Her eyes rush across the forms, looking for the bottom line, and there it is. Thornwood, Vale of Health, London NW3. Currently owned by Allen and Anne Black, but formerly owned by someone called Vivienne Rich. Jane immediately googles her and finds nothing. Then she adds the postcode “+NW3” to her search and the results narrow to one solitary item.
“Our beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, VivienneRich, passed away on February 12th at the age of 70. We will be holding a celebration of her life at the White Swan, Hampstead Square, NW3, at midday on June 30th. All welcome.”
It is a post on a local message board, and the poster is someone called “AnnieB.” Jane immediately clicks on her name, but no other posts appear. The year of the post is 2000.
