And then, at some point, I hear something new: a noise I’ve never heard before, a noise that makes me realize that this has all gone too far, that I have to do something, and then the next day, when the monster is at work and Mummy is at the shops, I take a tiny knife from the very back of a kitchen drawer, one I’m sure nobody will notice is missing, and I tuck it up my sleeve.
Somehow, I think, I will find a way to get it to her.
chapter fifty-two
The following morning Jane puts the journey to Dresden Close into her app. It will take an hour and forty minutes if she leaves her house now, and she should be back home with the dogs in four hours if she doesn’t spend too long there.
She puts on some smart jeans and a pink cashmere sweater; unthreatening is the look she’s going for. No red lipstick today, just a touch of something peachy, and her hair tied back in a bun. She stops at Helen Yaxley’s on the way, to collect the photograph that Daisy had left in her suitcase, and slides it into a plastic folder alongside the shred of letterheaded paper found in Jasper’s trailer, Patch the Clown’s headshot photo, and the photographs of the circus poster that she’d printed off.
She spots the fan palm the moment she turns onto Dresden Close ninety minutes later—it’s quite the feature—and she breathes a sigh of relief when she sees the shiny red car parked on the driveway. She collects her small document case and her handbag, checks her face in the rearview mirror, and then gets out of her car.
A woman, who looks so much like the woman that Jane had pictured in her mind’s eye that it almost makes her gasp, opens the door on a chain.
“Hello?”
“Oh, hi, I’m looking for Stella Madden?”
“Yes.”
“So sorry to disturb you. My name is Jane Trevally and I’m a…” She pauses just a beat. “I’m making inquiries into a missing girl in Dorset and I wonder if I could ask you a few questions. Nothing to worry about, I promise you.”
“I don’t understand. What would I know about a missing girl in Dorset?”
“Good question. It’s possible you won’t know anything. It’s just that I found a piece of paper, part of a letter, when I was looking for evidence yesterday, and for some reason that letter had your name and address on it. It had been sent care of you.”
Jane sees Stella’s eyes open wide. “I mean, gosh,” she says, “no. I can’t think of anyone who would use my address like that, apart from… you don’t mean Jasper, do you? Jasper Black?”
Jane flushes with delight and triumph. “Yes!” she says. “Yes! That’s exactly who I’m looking for!”
“Oh,” Stella says softly. “Right. I see.” There is a long pause and then Jane sees the chain lock being pulled back and the door opens and there is Stella Madden, in red corduroy trousers, a black turtleneck, and black-socked feet. “Come in,” she says. “Come in.”
She leads Jane into the living room and seats her on a gray felt sofa, brings her water, and introduces her to her cat, Mabel.
“So,” says Stella, pulling her hair back into a low ponytail. “What do you need to know? About Jasper?”
“Well, everything,” says Jane with a dry laugh. “All I know is that he used to live with his family in Hampstead and disappeared when he was a young man and now works for the Martello Circus as a clown called Patch.”
Stella nods. “That’s right. Yes. Apart from the bit in between. Which is when I met him.” She pauses and sighs. “He was our lodger. For about a year and a half.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Here. Our son had just moved in with his girlfriend; they’d bought an apartment together and we knew that his bedroom wouldn’t be needed anymore, so we redecorated it, put a little kitchenette in there, built ourselves an en suite so that the other bedroom had its own bathroom, and advertised it on an app. This young man replied, very well-spoken, told us he’d just left home, was about to start at the clowning school in Winchester, needed somewhere to stay for a few months. So we offered him the room.”
“And? How did it go?”
“Fine. At first. He kept himself to himself. Caught the bus to school in Winchester. Stayed in his room. Always very polite when our paths crossed. Neat boy. A little bit strange. I did try to talk to him about himself, about his life, because as I say, he was very well-spoken and not necessarily the sort of boy you’d imagine wanting to run away from home to join the circus. I was curious about him. But he wasn’t very forthcoming. Anyway…” Stella picks a cat hair from her trousers and sighs again. “His clowning classes finished, and I thought he’d be on his way, but it took him a long time to find a job, about six months, and during those six months he became…” She sighs again. “He became quite dark and brooding. He didn’t leave his room very much. Some nights he’d wait until John and I had gone to bed and then he’d leave the house in the middle of the night. We never heard him come back, but he’d be here in the morning, and I don’t know, Jane, I just had a bad feeling about him. I can’t put it into words, or explain it, but I just felt that something wasn’t right. I felt uncomfortable being in the same room as him. He had this… aura. You could feel it leaking out of him, like his initial charm was a veneer that was chipping away, peeling off, and under it was this festering child, this desperate man. I felt, quite often, as if he hated me.”
She rests her hand against her breastbone when she says this, and her voice cracks slightly. “I did not feel safe, Jane. That’s the bottom line. I did not feel safe. And there was one night when I was lying in bed and Iwas looking at the local news on my tablet and there was a story about a young woman, not far from here, who’d been followed at night through a local park, harassed, verbally abused, and intentionally terrified by a man wearing a clown mask. And, also, er… playing with himself.”
Jane gasps, her hand going unthinkingly to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she whispers.
“My husband and I both said the same thing at the same moment; we looked at each other and we both said: ‘You don’t think?’ So, really, whether it was Jasper or not, the fact of the matter was that we couldn’t have someone in our home who made us feel that way. It was unthinkable. We made up a lie about our son splitting up with his girlfriend and coming home and needing his room back.
“Jasper took it very well. He’d just found a job at Martello’s, so he moved out a couple of weeks later, left his room in good order, asked if we could forward any mail on to him, and left. And John and I, as the door closed behind him, both breathed this huge sigh of relief, like we’d just marched the devil out of our own home. I can’t explain it. We had no proof of anything, no way of knowing anything. But on a fundamental level we knew Jasper simply wasn’t right.”
“What was the name of the girl in the news report?” Jane asks. “The one he harassed?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m not sure I can remember. It was such a long time ago and it was such a small story, this was before social media, you know, where things proliferate. But I can remember when I read about it because it was my mother’s seventieth birthday the day after. My mother was born on the twelfth of June 1938. So this must have been the eleventh of June 2008. And it had happened the day before the news report came out. So the tenth of June. And I remember where it happened because it was right next to the school that my son went to, and where I’m still a governor in fact, Cherry Wood Primary. There’s a small park just around the corner where the children used to be taken sometimes to do activities. I still shudder when I walk past it, to this day, just thinking of what happened tothat poor girl.” Her gaze goes to the photos on Jane’s phone and she sighs. “I should have said something. My husband and I both should have said something. Because we knew. We just knew.”
