The man screws up his face, shakes his head slowly. “Doesn’t ring a bell. But we do a lot of wakes and the like. And 2000 was a bloody long time ago. What did they look like? I’m good with faces. Not so good with names.”
“Well, I don’t know what the woman who organized it looked like, but I have a picture of her daughter, when she was young.” Jane takes out her phone and finds the screenshots she’d saved from Jessamine’s B-movie.
She turns the screen toward the man, who puts on his readingglasses and peers at it. “Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s the lemonade lady. I remember her.”
“The lemonade lady?”
“Yes, she used to come in every day without fail, drink vodka and lemonades till she could barely stand straight, then she’d set an alarm for three on the dot. She’d have an espresso at the bar and then wobble out with her dog. Poor woman. We felt really sorry for her.”
“A white dog?”
“Yeah. A little Westie. Felt sorry for it too. Sitting under her table half the day.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
“Only in the way of talking about the weather. That kind of thing. Nothing proper.”
“When did she last come in?”
“Haven’t seen her in here for a few years. She got chatting to a man. Another keen drinker. I think they might have, you know, hooked up, moved away together or something? They seemed to get on very well.”
“Long hair? The guy? Kind of scruffy?”
“Yeah. Spot-on. That was him. Has something happened to them?”
“Not really, no, I’m just trying to find a young woman who’s gone missing from a village near where I live. I think she’s called Daisy Black and I’m pretty sure she’s your lemonade lady’s daughter.”
“Missing?”
“Well, she spent several days in an Airbnb in my village then disappeared into thin air, leaving her Westie running around my back garden—the same Westie you used to see in here with that woman. I really do think that something bad has happened to her.”
The man nods his head thoughtfully. “Wow,” he says, “looks like you’ve got yourself a true crime special going on in the real world. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”
Jane smiles. “You have been,” she says. “It’s good to get more insight into Daisy’s mum. It all helps.”
She’s about to leave when she remembers what the man had said about running the pub since he was virtually a child, and she switches her screen back on and finds the photo of Jessamine and Jasper sitting on either side of their father. “I don’t suppose you remember these two, do you? This is Jasper”—she points at the boy—“and this is his dad.”
She sees a shadow pass across the man’s face as he peers at the image on her phone. “Oh my God,” he says, pointing at the man in the middle of the photo with one bitten-down fingertip. “That’s him!”
“That’s who?”
“That’s the guy.” He taps the screen three times. “Whatsisname? I told you I’m bad at names. But him. I know him. He lived down in the Vale of Health. You know…” he begins cautiously, as if he’s wondering whether to say it or not.
Jane nods encouragingly.
“There was a rumor about him a while back. The police turned up at his place—during lockdown, this was—and someone told my wife they were looking for someone? For a missing person?” He shrugs and holds his hands up, as if to say that none of this is anything to do with him. “But that’s as much as I know. And it might well be total nonsense. But…” He pauses dramatically. “That man was dark; dark as all hell. Hated people, you could tell, just hated them. There’s nothing you could tell me about that man that would surprise me. Nothing.”
chapter thirty-six
JASPER
The au pair girls were not really human beings as far as I was concerned.
When I was young, I saw them as props, actors, people to practice my magic tricks on, my mimes, my persona.
And then, as I got older, I started to find their presence arousing. I knew why they were here, I knew what Daddy was doing with them at night. I would stare at their breasts, touch myself sometimes when I thought about them, sometimes even when I was in the room with them. I was only a child, and I knew it was wrong, obviously, but I wasn’t me when I was doing that. I wasn’t Patch either. I’d switch into another persona and then I could enjoy doing it without feeling guilty. There was one au pair girl, I forget her name, but I remember her crying while I was doing it, staring at me with sad eyes and just crying.
One day, two police came asking about one of our au pair girls. I can’t remember which.
