“Jess,” I whisper urgently in her ear. “Jessamine. Wake up. Something’s happened.”
“What?” she mumbles.
“I spoke to her. You know, the woman who brought Hugo back? She’s been watching us, stalking us. She knows so much about us, Jess. About everything. You have to wake up and talk to me.”
She stirs. “What time is it?”
“It’s quarter to one.”
“God.” She rubs her hands across her face, then slowly pulls herself up to sitting.
“She’s going to go to the police, Jess. She knows about Claire Connolly. She knows about you. She knows about Jasper. She knows everything. We need to do something. We need to fix this. Talk to me. Jess. Tell me what to do.”
As I say these words I hear the creak of the old door. I turn and see a face in the crack, pale fingers curled around the edge.
“Is that you?” I ask.
I see the head nod.
“Come in then,” I say. “Come in.”
chapter sixty-six
As evening comes to Covent Garden, Dexter unscrews the top from a bottle of wine and pours Jane a large glass, then himself a small one. “I’ve got a dance class in the morning,” he says, passing her the glass. “Need to keep myself fresh.”
“Well, I have to go to the police tomorrow morning, so I should probably keep myself fresh too, but fuck it, frankly. Anything that can take the edge off the thought of that tiny masked clown pulling a scarf out of a young woman’s ear in a park with a hard-on. Jesus Christ.” She lifts her glass to Dexter’s. “Cheers,” she says. “And thank you for being there with me today. Thank you for being such a perfect boy and making this all feel so much less dreadful. I love you.”
She feels a surge of emotion pass through her system. Tears fill her eyes; her throat tightens. What is it about all of this that’s bringing her into such a heightened state of emotion? But the moment she asks herself the question, she already has the answer. Every step she takes down the path of the Blacks’ life, she takes another step down her own, heading closer and closer toward the core of it all, and she’s not sure she can bear it. The neglect; the black terror of being a child living in a house with addicts; the blurred lines of uncertainty and fear; the weak, bleeding boundariesbetween the adult and the child; the helplessness and despair. She feels it because she knows it, because shelivedit.
Brave face, red lipstick, big smile, big laugh, big earrings, big bright beautiful Jane Trevally; she feels she’s as much a 2D slapped-on persona as Jasper’s hideous Patch the Clown.
“You OK?” asks Dexter.
She nods and turns on the smile. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just—it’s all a lot, isn’t it? This whole thing. And soon it’ll be out of my hands. I’ll be heading back to the crusty old money pit, you know, until someone has to cart me off in the back of a pickup truck to the morgue.”
“What happened to you being a private eye?”
Jane sighs. “How can I be a private eye? I live in the sticks with four dogs.”
“Well, bring the dogs to London. Sell the money pit. For God’s sake, Jane. It’s not that deep.”
Jane sighs and then emits a strangulated laugh, half filled with unfallen tears. “You think?”
Dexter puts his arms round her and hugs her. “I don’t think,” he breathes into her ear. “I know.”
chapter sixty-seven
The next morning Jane wakes up at six. She drinks the stale water from her bedside table, readjusts her sleep mask, turns on her other side, and tries to get back to sleep, but it doesn’t come. Of course it doesn’t come. Her mind spins with it all, a dark kaleidoscope of worries, secrets, and mysteries, the deep pressure of her promise to Dexter to go to the police today and pass over all she knows. She’s not ready, but she knows she must. And then, below all that, the existential stuff. She thinks of her dogs, curled up right now in her big bed with Shannon. She thinks of all the lives she started but didn’t finish, the endings she ran away from in pursuit of something she can no longer comprehend. She thinks of lost Daisy Black, and lost Claire Connolly, and broken Stuart Tucker. And then, when her head feels so full of everything that she thinks it might explode all over Tony’s expensive pillowcases, she rips off her sleep mask and gets out of bed.
It’s another gray day in London, which doesn’t help lift her mood. Spots of rain on the windowpanes blur the early morning scenes. She makes herself coffee and two thick slices of toast. As it turns from 6:30 to 6:31, shefeels her phone vibrate and picks it up. It’s a text message from a number she doesn’t recognize. She opens it:Jane, it’s Stuart. I’ve spoken to Jessamine. We think it would be really good if you could come and speak to us, before you go to the police. There’s a lot to explain and it will be better face to face. Come whenever you’re ready. I’ll make breakfast.
Jane’s heart races suddenly, quite violently, enough to make her steady herself against the kitchen counter. This is exactly what she wanted. It’s what she’s wanted since the first moment she arrived at Thornwood with Hugo two weeks ago. And now it’s being offered to her and she feels scared. What if it’s a trap? What if Jasper suddenly appears from the wings with his mask and his scarves and his scary greasepainted face? What if she’s drugged and taken to the outhouse and wakes up six hours later with her wrists shackled to the walls?
But no, she thinks. She will tell people where she’s going, including Tobias, and she will tell Stuart that numerous people, including a former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner know where she is, and then she will surely be safe.
She forms her response to Stuart:I’m on my way. Give me an hour or so. I have told everyone where I’m going, and my stepson is under instruction to call the police if he doesn’t hear from me by 9 a.m. So no monkey business.
She doesn’t give herself time to question her actions too deeply. She necks her coffee, throws away the leftover toast, has a short shower, throws on yesterday’s clothes, and heads through the damp early morning to the tube station.
