“Me neither,” says Steve.
Jane sighs and puts her phone back in her pocket. “So, what happened to his stuff? His caravan?”
“Well, it’s not his, is it? It belongs to Martello’s. So it stays with the circus. Did you want to have a look?”
Jane widens her eyes and nods. “Yes, please,” she says, “that would be amazing.”
Jasper’s caravan is a one-berth unit in a pale lemony yellow. Dave opens it up and then stands back to let her in. It’s small and cozy, with a creamseating area at the back and a tiny, well-maintained kitchenette. “Could I have a snoop around?”
“Go for it. We’ll just be over there. Take your time.”
The unit appears to have been cleared out completely; everything is clean and shiny, no personal effects on display. Jane goes through drawers and cupboards. She finds utensils and cutlery, packets of tissues, of batteries. She finds tins of greasepaints and pots of brushes. She also finds a wad of printed flyers of Jasper in full clown regalia, smiling unnervingly into the camera, with the name “Patch” in curly graphic printed in the corner. She takes a couple and slides them into her bag.
She goes to the built-in wardrobe next to the seating area and finds a denim jacket, two red ties, a pair of rubber boots, a pair of sandals, a couple of folded T-shirts. She pulls one out and sniffs it. It’s from Marks & Spencer and it smells of detergent. She searches the pockets of the denim jacket and finds nothing but a scrunched-up tissue. There’s a drawer at the bottom of the hanging cupboard and she pulls it out. Inside is a parka folded into its own pouch, and a red nylon wig with a small hat stitched onto it. She pulls them out of the way and then recoils slightly at the sight of an old plastic mask; it’s a clown face, similar to the one that Jasper was holding in his lap in the spooky family portrait that Daisy had brought with her to Little Belmont. Jane pulls it out and holds it at arm’s length. It’s horrible, really quite, quite horrible, the clown’s face more of a devil’s rictus than a jolly buffoon, two white light flares painted into the center of each eyeball, a snarl at the corners of its lips.
Jane turns it around to look at the back, and then recoils again at the sight of what looks, without the benefit of her reading glasses, like four bloody fingerprints, but could just as easily be dirt.
“Eww!” she says, dropping the mask back in the drawer. She shudders, then picks it up again and very gingerly pops it into her shoulder bag.
She pulls the cushions off the sofas and lifts up the wooden hinged seat. Inside is bedding: a floral-patterned duvet, two floral pillowcases, and a soft, fleecy blanket. Jane groans. This is pointless. She lets the hinged lidshut heavily, and as she does so, something is dislodged and comes floating toward her feet. She picks it up and sees that it is a torn corner from a piece of paper; it looks as though it might have been left behind by accident when the rest of the letter was ripped away.
It displays a section of a letterhead, a date and the first line of a name and address. The date is this time last year. The name is Jasper Black. The first line of the address is c/o someone called Stella Madden, who lives at number 21 Dresden Close, but the rest of the address is missing.
What remains of the logo shows the letters “Dr. A. J. Tw” and then a partial address of “Dov” and a postcode with aWand twoAs in it.
Jane slides it into her shoulder bag alongside the terrible clown mask. It’s almost nothing, but it will have to do.
She goes back to Steve and Dave’s caravan before she leaves. “Did you have a phone number for him?” she asks. “For Jasper?”
“Er, yeah.” Steve feels the pocket of his joggers and pulls out his smartphone. “Yeah. I mean, we’ve tried calling him, a ton of times. Called and called. Never picks up. But yeah, here it is.” He turns the screen of his phone toward Jane, who types the number into her phone.
“Amazing,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Did you find anything?”
She shakes her head. “He cleaned it out pretty comprehensively.”
“Yeah. He definitely intended to go; it wasn’t some last-minute decision. He’d obviously been planning it. I suppose,” he says, “that’s why none of us have been worried about him. He wanted to go, you know? And in a lot of ways it doesn’t surprise me, because he always seemed like he was running away from something. Always seemed like he was looking over his shoulder. You know what I mean?”
Jane climbs back into her car and opens up her Maps app. According to Street View, Dresden Close, where Stella Madden lives, is a small turning off a mini-roundabout just outside Winchester, and number 21 is a neateighties-style house with a red car in the driveway and a very healthy-looking palm tree outside the front window.
There are no photos of Stella Madden on the internet, but Jane can get a feel for her from the jauntiness of her little red car, the happiness of her palm tree, which must make every day feel like a holiday, and the fact that she is on the board of governors of a primary school about half a mile away. The small car suggests either no children or grown children. The tidy frontage suggests some free time or a green-fingered hubby. Stella Madden, in other words, and on the basis of googleable intel, seems to be a normal, possibly even nice person, probably retired.
So what is her connection to Jasper? And why has his mail been coming to her house? There is only one way to find out, but that line of investigation will have to wait now until tomorrow.
chapter forty-nine
STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
On the day that I am to take my daughter, Blaise, out for dinner, Jessamine becomes suddenly very ill. She thrashes in her sleep the night before and when I awake at 7 a.m. she is silently sobbing in the bed next to me. “I think I might be dying,” she says in a whispered girl’s voice. “I really think I might.”
I put my hand to her forehead, which is cool to the touch. I peer into her eyes, which are as cloudy and dead as they are every morning of her life.
“You seem OK,” I say kindly.
I see a flash of rage pass across her face. “I’m not OK,” she hisses. “I’ve been awake all night. My arms and legs feel like there are needles running all through them. My head…” She puts a hand to her skull. “It pounds, and it pounds, like a sledgehammer going up and down. My eyes are burning hot. And I can’t feel my feet, Stuart. I can’t even feel them.” The rage passes and her eyes fill with tears again. One falls from her tear duct down the side of her nose, and she flicks it away with her finger. “What’s wrong with me?” she asks, her voice a sweet girl’s again.
Nothing’s wrong with you, is what I want to say.You are just trying to stop me taking my daughter out for dinner tonight, but that is not going tohappen. Not even if your eyes fell out of their sockets and your feet exploded into mincemeat. Nothing will keep me from seeing my girl.
