“I’m so sorry to disturb you here at work. My name is Jane Trevally; this is my assistant, Dexter Lombardi. I’m a private investigator.” For the first time, Jane doesn’t pause before referring to herself this way. It feels more natural now. “We’re looking into the disappearance of a young woman called Daisy Black. We suspect that she’s been abducted by a man called Jasper Black, purportedly her uncle, but now we’re not so sure. And this man, it appears, may have been…” Jane pauses, making sure the next words that leave her mouth are exactly right. “… may be the same man who assaulted you in a park eighteen years ago.”
Jane holds her breath, horribly aware of the terrible wasp’s nest of trauma she is currently poking with a stick. She watches the woman’s face for signs of her having crossed a line and is taken aback when Avril tips her head slightly and says, “Ha! That little freak. He’s still going strong, is he?”
Jane sees nothing on Avril’s face. No fear. No pain. No trauma.
“Erm, well. I don’t know. I just… and please feel free to say no—I will totally understand—but I wondered if I could show you a couple of things? That might identify him?”
“Bring it on,” she says. “I always wondered what happened to him. Let’s take a seat.”
She leads Jane and Dexter to a small sofa outside the fitting rooms where they all sit down.
“This is the first thing, and I really hope this isn’t too upsetting for you.” Jane licks her lips and slowly puts her hand into her large shoulder bag. “I found this in an abandoned trailer for a circus act called Patch the Clown. Can you tell me if it’s familiar to you at all?” She pulls the plastic mask out carefully and shows it to Avril, with her breath held.
“Eww,” says Avril, recoiling. “That’s horrible!”
“Yes. I’m sorry. It really is. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Avril holds one hand to her chest and prods the mask with one perfectly manicured fingernail.
“And here,” says Jane, taking the next thing from her bag: the photo of the Black family with Jasper holding the mask on his lap. “This is Jasper when he was a kid, holding a similar mask. And here…” She takes out the headshot of Jasper in costume as Patch the Clown. “This is Jasper now, in work mode. Do any of these things ring a bell? Do you recognize him? Or the mask?”
Avril takes both photographs from Jane and stares at them intently for a moment. “That’s the little creep,” she says. “I can tell. And yeah, as far as I recall, that’s the mask he was wearing.” She shudders. “Gross,” she says.
“Obviously, Avril, you do not need to answer this question, but what did he do, exactly? The police report says sexual harassment. Did he hurt you?”
“Hurt me? No! God no, he didn’t hurt me. He just scared the absolute life out of me. Followed me round the park in that stupid mask,miming.”
“Miming?”
“Yes. Like, bizarre. Totally bizarre. Doing tricks. And then he came right up close to me…thisclose.” She measures an inch between her fingers. “I could hear his breathing through the mask. I could tell he was getting a massive kick out of how scared I was. I thought he was going to grope me, touch me; I thought he was going to rape me. But no, he…” Avril pauses, then blinks slowly and shakes her head. “He put one hand over my mouth, and with the other, he… he pulled a silk scarf out of my ear. Then he put his hand inside his trousers and started… pleasuring himself. It was all over in about ten seconds. And then he ran. Just like that. I was shaking, terrified. It was horrific. Even now I’m scared of clowns. But you know, as time passes, I can look back and laugh. I mean, like, a silk scarf? What the actual fuck,” she says. “It’s turned into my party piece. You know, like, ha-ha, let me tell you about the time I was accosted by a tiny clown wanking in a park.”
“Tiny?”
“Yeah. He’s small. Really small. Like under five six. Maybe closer to five three.”
“Oh, right, I had no idea.”
“Yeah, thought it was a kid at first.” She shudders again.
“And he didn’t hurt you?”
“No, he didn’t hurt me. He was just a pervy, freaky little weirdo.”
chapter sixty-five
STUART, NOW
I stride away from the pub, hard and fast, pulling Hugo in my wake. I’m shaking. I can feel the corners of the world closing in on me, this weird world I’ve found myself in with these strange women in this strange house, here at the very farthest ends of everything.
The woman, Jane: while I’ve been sitting in Thornwood drinking tea, she’s been out there asking every fucker every fucking thing, and any minute now she’ll take it to the police, and then what? What happens next?
I fumble with the front-door key as I try to fit it in the lock. I manage to get it open and then I drop my shopping on the kitchen table and call out, “Anyone here?”
I need another drink, but it’s not time for another drink, not yet. I only finished that pint a few minutes ago and I have to leave at least half an hour between each drink. But God, I want one now, right now. I stare at Jessamine’s wine in the fridge, her two bottles, chilling, ready for the afternoon onslaught to begin. She would murder me with her bare hands if I touched it. But I could take a slug of her rum and top it up with water. I pull it toward me and unscrew the top, pour a double measure into a teacup, add the water to the bottle, screw the lid back on; by the time she gets to the rum she’ll be too drunk to notice anyway. The rum goes downlike medicine and immediately I feel the anxiety start to lift. I want another one, but that’s it. I can’t. It’s probably for the best, because the way I’m feeling right now, I could drink myself into a nightmare that I would never wake up from. I put some fresh water down for Hugo and then I climb the stairs, slowly, so slowly, putting it off, putting it off.
Jessamine is out cold, as always. She looks old, these days, at least ten years older than her thirty-nine years. I shake her awake gently. Sometimes when I come to her in here I think she may be dead; my chest constricts, and my heart races and I can’t breathe until I see the rise and fall of her chest.
She grumbles and groans, turns away from me.
