“No. I don’t. Not really. Give me some examples. Tell me how it started.”
“Well, I mean, there were some scenes, in the film, intimate scenes. We had to play them out together. I had a girlfriend at the time, and this was the first time I’d ever had to kiss someone, do sex scenes on a film set, and I think I, er, misread the situation, thought it meant something that it didn’t, kind of pursued her off camera when I really shouldn’t have and possibly gave her the impression that I was, er, well, you know, crazy about her, when really, in retrospect, I was just crazy about being young and making a movie and getting to kiss a pretty girl on a film set and all of that and she kind of fell in love with me and I kind of didn’t handle the situation very well and tried to get out of it and she kind of went a bit bunny boiler on me.”
“In what way?”
“Turning up places. She literally walked into a restaurant one night when I was having dinner with friends, took a seat at a table across the room, and stared at me. Just stared. She followed my girlfriend all the way down Oxford Street once, from one end to the other, three paces behind, in and out of clothes shops. I tried to be nice to her, tried to make up for leading her on. But she wouldn’t take it. I was close, you know, to getting a police restraining order out on her, and then suddenly, it all stopped. Silence. I never saw her again.”
“How long did your affair go on for, before you ended it?”
“Oh, maybe four, five months tops. She was living in a rented room in a shared house. Not with friends, with strangers. Her room was spartan. Not much in the way of décor. Thin sheets. Nothing on the walls, none of the, you know, clutter that you normally find ina woman’s bedroom. Cushions. That kind of thing. She was filthy. You know. Sexually. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but she wanted it every which way it came, nonstop, to the point, frankly, that I couldn’t keep up.”
“Did you know much about her background? Her family?”
“She didn’t talk about her family. I never met them. She had… scars?”
“Scars?”
“Yes. Strange marks on her body. I asked her about them; she said she was in a car accident when she was fourteen.”
There’s a small, dry silence on the line between them. Jane thinks again of the horrible little jail cell attached to the back of the house. “Do you think she might have been abused?” she asks softly.
“It would not surprise me, and it would explain a lot… of her strangeness.”
“Can you remember where she lived? When she was sharing the house?”
“Somewhere near Ally Pally; you could see it from her bedroom window. That’s all I remember.”
Jane scribbles “Ally Pally” into her notepad.
“And at this time, how old were you both?”
“I was, well, twenty-two? Twenty-three? And Jessamine was about eighteen, nineteen? Young, you know. Both so young, and stupid, and I do feel bad to this day. I don’t make it my business to hurt people but I feel like I really did hurt her. I caused her pain, and at the time all I could see was what she was doing to me. But it was my fault. I can see that now. I hope she’s OK…” He sighs heavily and then says, “Why are you trying to find her?”
“Oh, I’m not trying to find her. I’m trying to find her daughter. She’s gone missing.”
“Daughter?” Oliver sounds surprised.
“Yes. Her name is Daisy.”
“And what makes you thinks she’s Jessamine’s daughter?”
It’s a good question, Jane thinks, but she’s sticking by her instincts. “Well,” she says. “They have the same surname.”
“Hmmm.”
“What?”
“Well, I don’t know… Jessamine was a bizarre girl, and she might have been lying to me, but when we were together, she told me… that she was infertile.”
chapter thirty-five
It’s only as Jane is returning her glass to the bar and getting ready to leave the White Swan that she recognizes the name of the pub she’s in. It’s the same pub that “AnnieB” posted about in the local message board about her mother’s memorial event. The man behind the bar looks about Jane’s age and Jane assumes him to be the manager.
“Excuse me,” she says, “slightly random question, bear with me, but did you work here in 2000?”
“I’ve been in this place since I was virtually a child. For my sins.”
Jane smiles at him encouragingly. “Great!” she says. “So do you by any chance remember a funeral wake here that year, for a lady called Vivienne Rich? Organized by her daughter, I think her name is Annie Black?”
