Jane reaches across and covers Stella’s hand with hers. “Stella, honestly, you did what anyone would do. Imagine if it turned out it wasn’t him, that you’d sent the police to question an innocent young man. But listen.” She puts her hand into her document case, pulls out the torn piece of paper, and pushes it across the coffee table toward Stella. “This is what I found in his trailer that led me to you. He’d clearly ripped it when he grabbed it and has taken the rest with him. But do you happen to know anything about it?”
Stella picks up the shred and gazes at it. “Well, yes. I did forward something on to him, about a year ago. I’m not sure what it was. It was the first time anything had come for him in years. I’d almost forgotten about him, you know. Almost. And then there it was, on my doormat. Jasper Black. Blast-from-the-past sort of thing.” Stella sighs and passes the piece of paper back to Jane. “So,” she says. “What’s your role in all of this? Are you… official?”
“No. Entirely unofficial. An amateur sleuth. Just got this bit of grit in my head that I can’t shift, and frankly I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“You know,” says Stella, tapping her finger against the abbreviation “Dr.” next to the sender’s initials. “He did use to tell me that he was seeing a therapist. For some reason, I assumed it was a physical therapist, something to do with his clowning. But now I think about it…?”
Jane picks up the torn piece of paper from Jasper’s trailer and looks again at the remaining chunks of text. Could that be the clinic of the therapist Jasper had once visited? Could this in fact be a clue to someone who knew about the darkest inner workings of his freaky mind?
chapter fifty-three
STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
I wake up in a room I don’t recognize.
I’m not even sure I’m in Thornwood.
The first thing I’m aware of is the terrible clotted feeling of dulled pain and a slight deafness in my left ear. I put my hand against it and flinch. It’s bandaged. The bandage goes all the way under my chin and appears to be tied in a knot at the back of my head where I can feel it digging in slightly. My vision on that side is blurred too, as if there is gauze over it. I run a finger across my eyelid and flinch again. It feels as though there is something in there. Something sharp. My body aches all over, the way it does when I have the flu, but mostly it is the left side of my face that feels broken, unhuman. I want to see it. I need a mirror. I look around this room that I don’t recognize and it’s only when I spy the chimney stack of the house on the other side of us through the low dormer window that I know that I am still here, at Thornwood. I must be in the locked room on the attic floor.
I slowly swing my legs out from under the thin duvet and pull myself up to sitting. Blood shifts from place to place in my head, clouding my vision, forcing a sudden rush of dull pain all through my sinuses and the back of my head. I say a quiet “ow” to myself and then look around again. A dresser with a bowl and a jug, a small armchair, some books on built-out skirting, a tiny fireplace with nothing in it, an old wooden mantel over it built into the wall, but no mirror above. I see that someone has placed three plastic bottles of water on the floor next to my bed, and a box of tissues. I recognize them as the brand I buy for the family when I do the big shop. It takes me a minute or two to find the strength to stand, and when I do, I immediately sit down again, my head spinning, my legs weak.
I call out. “Hello?”
My voice is a puny rasp. I open a bottle of water and glug from it and then I try calling again. “Hello!”
The house seems silent, empty. I pull myself up again and this time I stay on my feet. I go to the door and lift the old-fashioned latch, pull the door toward me, pull again. It’s locked from the outside. I bang my fists against it and shout louder now. Louder and louder. My voice has found itself.
A moment later I hear soft, slow footsteps on wooden stairs. Then I hear something clicking, and a thin, fearsome face appears in a crack in the door followed by two small hands clutching a knife.
Then I hear the words: “Stuart, get away from the door and get back into bed, right now, or I’ll cut off your other fucking ear. OK?”
chapter fifty-four
Jane gets back from her visit to Stella Madden two hours later and takes the dogs straight out for a walk. As they run ahead of her through the dark mounds of dead bluebells, she uses her phone to search for the mysterious therapist for whom she has only five letters and six numbers to work with. She also has no idea what kind of therapist she is looking for. But she googles every single possible combination of letters to make words out of them, surnames, street names, anything, and adds the word “therapist” to all of them. She’s pretty sure it’s Dover Street in Mayfair, but it’s the doctor’s surname that is eluding her. Dr. “Tw” something. She’s tried Twining, Twigg, Tweedy, and nothing. The dogs have started running circles around her now as they approach the brook beyond the woods, and she knows they are expecting her to throw sticks for them. She finds a handful and hurls them one by one through the air until all four of their wagging tails disappear below a dip for a moment, which she uses to run another search before they all return. By the time they all make it to the brook she has thrown sticks roughly thirty times and the dogs are panting and ready for a short rest.
There’s a small bench here; her grandfather had put it in place for her grandmother, for whom this was a favorite spot. The bench is green now,a touch slimy, and Jane pulls her waterproof coat down low before she seats herself. How lovely it would be, she thinks, if someone could give the bench a jet spray, give it some love, bring it back to her grandfather’s dreams, and she finds herself for the first time feeling the responsibility for this job falling to Rosebery’s potential next owner, instead of her.
While the dogs tip-tap around on the cool, wet pebbles in the brook, she googles “surnames beginning with Tw.” And there it is.
Twist.
Dr. Anthony Twist, to be precise, of 26 Dover Street, London, W1.
Dr. Anthony Twist, according to Google AI, is a renowned London psychotherapist specializing in the practice of EMDR.
Jane immediately googles EMDR and discovers that it stands for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” and is a therapy designed to help individuals process traumatic memories and reduce their emotional distress.
She goes onto Dr. Twist’s website and sees that he works in a very rarefied environment, absolutely the type of environment that both Tony and the Viscount had allowed Jane to grow very used to during her years married to them. Plants, sofas, a smiling receptionist behind a walnut desk.
What now? she wonders. Dr. Twist will be bound by patient confidentiality; he won’t be able to tell her anything about his sessions with Jasper Black. But maybe she could find another way in? Let’s face it, she thinks, she has enough of her own traumatic memories to deal with; she is damaged and distressed—she could do with some EMDR, she’s sure she could.
She goes to the contact page and finds the phone number for Dr. Twist’s clinic and presses it in. Five minutes later she has an appointment for 10 a.m. on Wednesday. It’s going to cost her £250 for an initial consultation, but she pushes the discomfort to the back of her mind. That’s one Botox appointment, she thinks. She can live without Botox for a few more months. It’s not as if anyone would even notice.
She turns off her screen and puts her phone back in her pocket. “Come on, boys,” she says, “let’s go back and get you all hosed down.”
Jane has lentil soup for dinner and a glass of prosecco that Shannon had left at the bottom of a bottle in the fridge. It’s virtually flat and far too sweet, but it gives her the gentle release she’s looking for before she can face ending the day. The boys follow her up to bed and take their usual places on her bed, Reggie in his own bed at the side, sighing heavily. It’s barely 9 p.m. and still light at this time of the year but she can’t bear to eke the edges of the day out in the gloom of the kitchen or the morning room. She pulls up Dexter’s last message to her on WhatsApp and starts to type:
Hi, beautiful. Guess what? Jasper is a filthy flasher. He’s also run away from the circus and nobody knows where he is. The circus was in—guess where???—when he disappeared—Little Belmont! Latest theory—Daisy came down from London to meet up with him. BUT—Daisy OF COURSE thinks Jasper’s her uncle. Strong possibility, according to other sources, that he might NOT be. Jessamine’s ex, the cheesemaking actor, says she told him she was infertile. In other words, Daisy might have been lured down to meet her uncle Jasper, who might not even be her uncle, but is, it seems certain, a pervert and an incredibly damaged, possibly dangerous individual. Anyway… I’m back in town on Wednesday for the day. Want to meet up?
