“No.” She shakes her head vehemently. “Mum won’t let me. Apparently he hates us both.”
“But you have a number for him?”
“Yes. It’s his office number. Not a mobile number. So I can’t text him on it.”
I nod. “Do you miss him?”
She shrugs again. “Not really. I mean, I like him, but he never really felt like my dad.”
“You know,” I say, “if you wanted, I could try and talk to your dad, find out a bit more about what happened? Between him and your mum.”
She looks at me and nods. “But seriously,” she says, in a tiny whisper that I can barely hear, “be careful. Don’t make things worse than they already are.”
I pat her hand. “I’ll go carefully,” I say, “don’t you worry.”
chapter forty-four
According to Helen Yaxley, Daisy Black had arrived in Little Belmont at the beginning of May. Is it possible, Jane wonders, that she had come to find her uncle at the circus? That the clown pictured in the poster was in fact Jasper Black? Jane pulls her phone from her bag and finds the photo that Helen Yaxley had sent her of the Black family posing on the sofa. She looks from Jasper’s face to the image on the poster, looking for similarities, but the artwork is low-res, overbrightened, and the photo on her phone is old and faded, so it’s impossible to tell. But surely, she thinks, surely it can’t just be a coincidence that Daisy would have been here, in Little Belmont, the very same weekend that the circus was in town?
Jane takes a photo of the poster, and another closer one of the clown’s face. Then she heads into the convenience store, takes out £300 in cash, and walks back to her car.
Shannon leaves an hour after Jane gets home, and after the intensity of the joyful reunion with the dogs and Shannon’s nonstop commentary, Jane is suddenly alone. It’s lunchtime. The weather has turned gray andcool, and a heavy drizzle starts to fall, leaving a mist on the windowpanes and making the pert boughs of hawthorn and apple blossom beyond droop and wilt. She’s tempted to turn the heating on, but it will take hours to warm up in here, and she can’t really afford it, so instead she lights a fire and turns on a blow heater and then, ignoring the crumbling ceiling in the room across the corridor, ignoring the sound of something dripping somewhere else in the house, ignoring the empty growl in the pit of her stomach, she flips open the lid of her laptop and googles “Martello’s Circus.”
It transpires that the Martello Circus has now moved on to a village called Runnydown, only forty or so miles from Little Belmont. It had arrived on Friday and is there for a week according to their website. The clown pictured on their poster is one of three possible clowns, named Raimondo, Patch, and Mikki. There are photos of all three of them on the website, but under so many layers of oily makeup it is impossible to discern their facial features; they all look the same to Jane, no matter how many times she stares at each image with the photo of Jasper Black held next to it. There’s no phone number on the website, just a registered address somewhere in Essex. Jane glances at the time in the corner of her screen. Just gone half one. Shannon has already walked the dogs today. Jane has nothing better to do, not really, so she puts the location into her app, pulls on a raincoat, gets into her car, and sets off for Runnydown.
The circus is set up in a field about half a mile from the village center. As Jane pulls up on the lane opposite, she sees people moving around in waterproofs and under umbrellas. She turns off her engine and watches for a moment. Jane doesn’t like the circus. She was taken once as a child and found herself faintly terrified. She liked the horses, sheremembered, the flare of their nostrils, their pretty feathered heads, but the people had unnerved her, the atmosphere, the noise, the theatrics, the makeup.
She takes a breath and leaves the car, pulling up the hood of her coat against the rain. There’s a woman with a young child standing in the shelter of a tree just outside the area where their trailers and caravans are located; she’s looking at her phone and the child is standing with his hand in hers and staring out into the middle distance.
“Excuse me?” Jane says, approaching her slowly.
The woman looks up from her phone. She doesn’t acknowledge Jane in any way, merely maintains neutral eye contact with her.
“Hi,” Jane babbles, “sorry, I don’t want to disturb you, but I’m looking for someone? And I think he might be part of your…” She struggles for the right word for a moment and then says, “I think he’s one of your clowns?”
The woman nods at her.
“His name is Jasper? Jasper Black? In his thirties? Do you know him?”
The woman gestures at the child to head back toward the caravans, then takes a step toward Jane. “Jasper,” she says. Her accent is hard to place. “Yes, we know Jasper.”
Jane feels her heart race with anticipation. “Oh,” she says. “Great.”
“Why do you ask?”
Jane taps into her gut feelings about this woman. Is she pro-Jasper or anti-Jasper? It’s impossible to read her body language or facial expressions.
“I just need to know if he’s here.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m…” Jane pauses, searches for a neutral response. “I’m a friend of his family.”
She narrows her eyes at Jane. “What family?”
“His… sister.”
The woman nods. “Well,” she says, “Jasper is not here.”
