It Could Have Been Her(38)
Nothing from the police. But I did find something in the annex that I thought you might be interested in. I was packing away her things for the cleaners, putting everything in her suitcase, and there was a little pouch on the inside of her suitcase, and I found this.
The next message is a photograph of Helen’s fingers clasping a photograph of an older man with a mustache and thinning black-and-gray hair sitting on a faded floral sofa between two teenagers, a boy and girl. He has his arms around both of them and all three are smiling. In the background is an old-fashioned dresser full of knickknacks and old books.
Jane gasps.
It’s the same man she came home with from the bar that night. It’s also the same sofa she sat on that night back in 2000 and the same dresser on which he’d mixed her martini.
She zooms in closer on the girl. It’s Jessamine, probably about seventeen or eighteen here, her face already set with that dark broken beauty, her eyes already wild and lost.
And then she zooms in on the boy. On his lap is something strange; it looks like a clown’s head, an obscenely bulbous red nose protruding from the front. She notices then that the boy is wearing white gloves with white frilled trim at the wrists.
And there, reflected in the glass of the dresser door, is the photographer: a woman with dark bouffant hair, a slim-fitting outfit, her features indistinguishable in the blur, but Jane knows it is her, the man’s wife, who helped her escape that night; she recognizes her instantly.
There is another photograph in the next message, this one of the flip side of the picture, where in neat ballpoint pen someone has written the words: “The Last One of Us, Thornwood: 30th April 2005.”
The last one of us? ponders Jane. What does that mean? The last photo of us, maybe? In which case, did something happen around this time? Maybe this is when the brother ran away. There he is with his scary clown mask and his creepy white gloves, ready and raring to go by the look of him. Jesus. The whole photo gives Jane the heebie-jeebies. Everything about it is slightly wrong, slightly off. The way the father’s hands grip the two children’s shoulders a little too tightly, the children pulling slightly away from him. And what has happened to Jessamine’s father, the man with no name who brought her back to his home all those years ago?
Jane replies to Helen, thanking her for sharing the photo. Then she sighs and puts down her phone. What started as an obsession with finding the girl who disappeared from Helen’s annex has turned into an obsession with Thornwood and the Blacks. She desperately wants to get into that house. She wants to know who lives there, what’s happened there, what happened to the father, why this was the last photo of them, and where, dear God, is that haunted-looking boy in the clown gloves?
chapter thirty-one
Jane showers and dresses and makes herself a coffee. Looking down through the window of the first-floor living room she sees the tops of people’s heads: early workers, or maybe the previous night’s workers heading home. The sky is an acid blue turning hot white at the edges as the sun begins its ascent over the rooftops. Jane can hear the rumble of garbage removal trucks, the clack and shatter of bottles being tipped into containers, the distant thunder of buses on Charing Cross Road. It’s just turned 7 a.m. She has a full day ahead of her and no plan. Then her phone buzzes and she picks it up and sees that her phone has just received a dump of emails, and in between all the junk from boutiques and pet food companies there is the report from the Land Registry. Her heart races as her thumb clicks the email open, and then the attachment.
Her eyes rush across the forms, looking for the bottom line, and there it is. Thornwood, Vale of Health, London NW3. Currently owned by Allen and Anne Black, but formerly owned by someone called Vivienne Rich. Jane immediately googles her and finds nothing. Then she adds the postcode “+NW3” to her search and the results narrow to one solitary item.
“Our beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Vivienne Rich, passed away on February 12th at the age of 70. We will be holding a celebration of her life at the White Swan, Hampstead Square, NW3, at midday on June 30th. All welcome.”
It is a post on a local message board, and the poster is someone called “AnnieB.” Jane immediately clicks on her name, but no other posts appear. The year of the post is 2000.
It is time, Jane realizes, to make a timeline.
* * *
She opens and closes a dozen drawers in Tony’s home before realizing that Tony does not own paper, pens, or in fact anything useful of any description beyond bottle openers and cocktail stirrers. She leaves the house and heads out to find a branch of WHSmith that is open this early in the day, ending up at Charing Cross station, where she buys a notepad, some A3 card stock, a packet of multicolored felt-tip pens, and two blocks of Post-it notes.
Back at the house she sets up a work area at a desk that appears to have been used only as decoration and begins to arrange all the facts and pieces of evidence that she has accumulated over the past few days into some kind of aesthetically pleasing order. When her timeline is complete she clips it to the door of Tony’s fridge with a magnet and stares at it for a while. Where is the boy in all this? Jasper, the weird clown boy? The Other Jane said Daisy had told her he’d “run away with the circus” and Jane had assumed it to be some kind of childish nonsense, but maybe Daisy was being literal.
Jane opens the email from the Land Registry again and goes through the attachments. She gets to the title plan and zooms into the delineated line drawing of Thornwood. She’s amazed to see how far the property extends at the back; the plot looks to be at least three or four times bigger than the plots of any of the nearby properties. It’s shallow at the cottage’s front, but then spreads out from behind in a fan shape, with what looks like connecting footpaths through shrubs onto the back corner of the Heath where it joins Spaniards Road. Is it possible, she wonders, that she could find a way onto this land without alerting Stuart Tucker? That she could get another view of Thornwood? Well, she thinks, she will certainly give it a go.