It is time, Jane realizes, to make a timeline.
She opens and closes a dozen drawers in Tony’s home before realizing that Tony does not own paper, pens, or in fact anything useful of any description beyond bottle openers and cocktail stirrers. She leaves the house and heads out to find a branch of WHSmith that is open this early in the day, ending up at Charing Cross station, where she buys a notepad, some A3 card stock, a packet of multicolored felt-tip pens, and two blocks of Post-it notes.
Back at the house she sets up a work area at a desk that appears to have been used only as decoration and begins to arrange all the facts and pieces of evidence that she has accumulated over the past few days into some kind of aesthetically pleasing order. When her timeline is complete she clips it to the door of Tony’s fridge with a magnet and stares at it for a while. Where is the boy in all this? Jasper, the weird clown boy? The Other Jane said Daisy had told her he’d “run away with the circus” and Jane had assumed it to be some kind of childish nonsense, but maybe Daisy was being literal.
Jane opens the email from the Land Registry again and goes through the attachments. She gets to the title plan and zooms into the delineated line drawing of Thornwood. She’s amazed to see how far the property extends at the back; the plot looks to be at least three or four times bigger than the plots of any of the nearby properties. It’s shallow at the cottage’s front, but then spreads out from behind in a fan shape, with what looks like connecting footpaths through shrubs onto the back corner of theHeath where it joins Spaniards Road. Is it possible, she wonders, that she could find a way onto this land without alerting Stuart Tucker? That she could get another view of Thornwood? Well, she thinks, she will certainly give it a go.
Jane is about to leave the house when her phone buzzes once more. It’s an email notification and she quickly clicks it open when she sees it is from Oliver Bloom, the cheesemaker man from the B-movie that Jessamine made back in the early 2000s.
Hi. V. mysterious! Yeah, I remember Jessamine. Between you and me we had a thing. Brief. Weird. I could tell you things. Here’s my number. Give me a call. But make it later, maybe midday?
Jane puts a reminder into her phone to call Oliver at midday. She does not subscribe to all the brain fog nonsense that is continuously spouted about menopausal women. She is, she is quite sure, sharp as a pin; HRT and lots of fresh air. No fog whatsoever. But she does find it’s usually a good idea to set things down in writing, to pin things into the matrix to make sure they don’t slip away. Chances are she will remember to call Oliver at midday with or without the automated reminder, but it really doesn’t hurt to set one anyway.
She finds her sunglasses, fills a bottle with water, adds a slick of SPF to her nose, and heads out toward the tube station.
chapter thirty-two
STUART, NINE YEARS EARLIER
I ask Jessamine about the clown mask a few days later. “What’s with this?” I ask, holding it up toward her. I see her flinch, very slightly, and then shrug.
“It belonged to my brother.”
“I thought you were an only child.”
“Yes, well. I’m not. I have a brother. His name is Jasper. I haven’t seen him since I was nineteen.”
“Where is he now?”
“I have no idea. I moved away from home for a few months. When I came back, he was gone. Disappeared.”
“Whoa,” I say. “That’s heavy. I mean, he’s your brother. If my brother disappeared, I’d—”
“Well, yes,” she interjects sharply, “I’m sure your brother is a very different kettle of fish to mine. My brother was… well.” She nods toward the old mask in my hands. “He was weird. I didn’t like him very much. And I really, really don’t miss him. Not at all.”
“So, what was the deal with this thing?” I point at the mask.
She sighs. “He had this obsession with the circus. From when he was a child. My parents took us to the circus on the Heath one year and it startedthen. He wouldn’t stop talking about it; he’d go and hang around there during the day, watching them all.” She gives a little shudder. “He had this sort of alter-ego thing going on.”
“Oh my God.” I laugh. “A clown alter ego; sounds like the stuff of nightmares.” I hold the mask up to my face and do a stupid clown impersonation: “Hello, my name’s Stewpot the Clown.” I tip myself giddily from foot to foot, but immediately the mask is snatched away from my face and out of my hands, and I am confronted with Jessamine’s furious face.
“Not. Funny,” she exclaims darkly. “Not even slightly funny.”
I defer to her anger and shrug. “Sorry.”
I see her soften. “It’s fine. It’s just… it’s complicated. All of it.” She forces a smile. “And thank you,” she says, “for everything you’re doing for me. For us. It’s good having you here.”
“What about your dad?” I find myself asking, and I want to kick myself the moment it’s out of my mouth.
She grimaces. “What about him?”
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just, you never talk about him.”
She shakes her head slightly.
“It’s fine,” I say. “We don’t need to talk about him.”
“Thank you,” she says; then she turns and puts the clown mask back into the dresser drawer.
