I hope you are well and that your lovely girls and lovely wife are all flourishing.
I’m back with another request for information. I know, anyone would think I was a private investigator! But I seemsomehow to have stumbled upon another wrong ’un. This one lives in Hampstead and appears to have had something to do with a missing person investigation. And now there is another person missing from the same address and that is who I am trying to find.
Anyway, the family name is “Black” and the house address is Thornwood, The Vale of Health, London NW3. Police visited this address during the early weeks of the first lockdown in 2020. Do let me know if you can uncover anything. I can pay you for your time, or, if you’ve still got that lovely retriever, I’d be happy to board her for free with me down in Dorset. Or wine, I can always send wine!
Thank you, Tobias. I am always in your debt and so very grateful to you for all your help over so many years.
Yours, with love
Jane
After the email is sent, Jane spends some time googling local restaurants that might be able to deliver food for her get-together with the stepchildren on Saturday. Then she googles the weather and sees that Saturday is the last day of the current hot spell and that means she can move the lunch party onto the roof terrace, but then wonders if it’s childproof up there and goes upstairs to check it out, establishes that only a very acrobatic child would be able to breach the walls, and then she calculates how many chairs she can get up here and decides it might need to be a sit-down picnic, in which case the food will need to be simple and thinks: Pizza, yes, pizza on the roof, lots of cushions, blankets, champagne; it will be wonderful.
And then, and only then, does she stop and think about Daisy Black.
That poor girl.
Where is she?
It’s been at least a week since she disappeared. A week and no sightings,no developments. Jane thinks again of those slight possessions: the unpretty underwear, the basic toiletries, the old school sweatshirt, her stressed texting as she passed by the front of Bill Newsome’s cottage.
Jane sighs heavily. Her phone buzzes five times in a row and she picks it up to look at the screen. It’s photos of the dogs, sent by Shannon.
They can’t wait to see you!says the accompanying message, and Jane replies with a string of love-themed emojis and dog faces. And then she checks her email and sees that there is something from 192.com: the report on Jessamine Black that she’d ordered.
She opens the attachment and quickly scrolls through it. There are the names of the residents of Thornwood: Jessamine Black, Annie Black, Allen Black, Jasper Black. But there is no mention of Daisy and no mention of Stuart.
Jane returns to the email she’d sent Tobias earlier and replies to it with a copy of the report and of the Land Registry details.
Jane’s phone rings the following morning at 9 a.m. on the dot. It’s Tobias.
“Sorry to call you so early,” he says in that soothing, personable way of his. “I was about to type an email and then I thought it might just be quicker to talk on the phone.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” says Jane. “I’ve been up for an age.” It’s not entirely true. The garbage trucks woke her again at 7 a.m. as they have every morning since she got here, but she had managed somehow to drift back to sleep and has been up for only fifteen minutes.
“I’ve been down a rabbit hole and a half with this one,” Tobias continues. “So much doesn’t add up. This guy, Allen Black, he used to work for John Lewis, department head at the Oxford Street branch, left in 2006 when he was forty-eight. No record of employment anywhere after that and no sign of him since, but also no death registered. There is a record of a police visit to the house in 2004 to inquire after a woman called Destiny Trent, a working girl it seems, reported missing by her mother, but she turned up safe and sound a few days later. And Jessamine Black: there is anarrest on file for her; drunk and disorderly in Hampstead in January 2017. She is registered as being born in the Royal Free Hospital in 1987, but there’s no birth registered for a Daisy Black or, in fact, anyone else at that address. And the police visit that was carried out on the third of May 2020 was, according to my contact at the Met, part of a cold-case investigation into… are you ready for this, Jane?”
“Yes,” says Jane briskly. “Yes, I am.”
Tobias clears his throat and continues. “… the disappearance of a young woman called Claire Connolly in 2005. She was last seen on the Heath on a hot afternoon that June heading to meet her friends at the Spaniards pub on Spaniards Road. She did not turn up, but her friends left it a full five days before trying to find out what had happened to her that day as she had a habit of changing her plans at the last minute and going out of contact. The last CCTV sighting of Claire was just around the corner from our friends the Blacks, on a path that passes from the front of their cottage to the main road leading to the pub. But of course the police didn’t discover that until five days too late. Everyone in the enclave, including the Blacks, was interviewed around the time of her disappearance, but there was nothing to suggest anything untoward. The investigation ran out of gas and was finally closed down in 2010.
“But in April 2020, someone in the cold-case team at the Met got bored and fished it out. A female police detective called Yasmin Brooks took it upon herself to retrace Claire Connolly’s last-known steps on the day she disappeared. She walked from Claire’s apartment in Kentish Town across the Heath, following the exact route that Claire took, and then, as she turned onto the Vale of Health, Detective Brooks noticed a young girl in the front garden of Thornwood. She looked at the reports from the initial investigation and saw that there had been no child registered at that address at that time, just a young woman called Jessamine Black, her brother, Jasper, and her parents, Allen and Annie Black. But what really drew the young detective’s attention was that at first she thought she waslooking at Claire Connolly herself. The girl in the garden looked, according to Detective Brooks, exactly like her.”
Jane’s breath catches.
“Obviously, there was nothing to be done in the moment, but it set Detective Brooks on a mission. She went back through the notes taken during the initial Black family interview back in 2005 but couldn’t find anything out of place. The family said they had been eating lunch in their back garden on the day in question, because it was such a beautiful day. They said they hadn’t seen or heard anything. They had not seen Claire; they had not seen anything suspicious. The original investigation team had asked to look at the garden and noted that there was nothing strange: a beautiful garden, according to their notes, well tended. But…” Tobias clears his throat again. “There was something that caught Detective Brooks’s eye when she was rereading the original interviews. A neighbor, a lady called”—Jane hears Tobias tapping a key on his laptop—“Sara Aalto, is recorded as having said she saw someone behind her house that afternoon, in the scrubby section of the Heath that runs between the houses at the end of the Vale of Health. She said she didn’t catch sight of the person, couldn’t have said if it was a male or a female, just saw a blurred figure beyond her hedge. And then she says she heard a voice. She said it was a woman’s voice. She said it sounded as if she was saying ‘Excuse me’ but she couldn’t be sure and then she’d heard laughter and chatter coming from the Blacks’ garden and realized it was just the family eating their lunch outdoors.
“So our intrepid lockdown detective went back to the Vale of Health and explored the back end of the last few properties and found a loose panel in the back fence of the Blacks’ property… She noticed that the well-kempt garden was now overgrown and neglected. She saw a scruffy woman sitting in the sunshine, a scruffy man hanging up laundry to dry. She thought of the description given by the original investigators of a vibrant, happy family, a well-maintained home, lunch in the garden. She felt something was off. She performed a fine-tooth search of the Heathon the other side of the Blacks’ garden fence and she found, after two hours…”
Jane stops breathing again.
“… a small package, nestled into the fencing just behind the Blacks’ property. It contained a small packet of guitar strings and a purple plectrum. According to the friends that Claire Connolly had been due to meet on the day in question, she had spent the morning in Soho, perusing guitar shops. She was, in fact, a keen amateur guitarist. That was enough for the case to be reopened. And Detective Brooks was given permission to interview the Black family again. Three teams of detectives spent half a day at the property, interviewing the residents, searching the grounds, and found nothing amiss. Detective Brooks was not able to extend her investigation into the Black family, or property, and tragically she passed away just over a year ago of ovarian cancer.”
“Did they not find the outhouse?” Jane asks frantically. “The room, attached to the back of the house, with the metal rings on the wall. Is there anything about that in the report?”
She hears more clicking, then: “Ah. Yes. There was a room attached to the back of the house. When questioned about the purpose of the room, Annie Black told Detective Brooks it was where her husband had stored his ride-on lawn mower, that the rings were there to secure it.”
Jane scoffs. “Who on earth secures a ride-on lawn mower? That’s clearly nonsense.”
