It Could Have Been Her(55)
I cock my head, let myself sit down on the arm of the sofa. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing.”
* * *
Daisy finds me on the sofa an hour later. Jessamine has crashed and burned in bed. She perches gently on the other end of the sofa. “Are you OK?”
I nod. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” She points at the scratches on my forearms.
I look down at them and smile. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
“Yes. But you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have to take it. You do everything for her; you do everything for all of us. And then she treats you like that.”
I sigh. “It is what it is. She is what she is. She’s very damaged, your mum. For whatever reasons. And my job is to make sure that you don’t get damaged too.”
“Bit late for that, I’d say.”
“Well, OK, then, any more damaged.”
She smiles. “I’d really like to meet your daughter,” she says.
“Well, you should come with us! Blaise would love that!”
“Mum would lose her actual shit.”
Daisy used to talk like an Enid Blyton schoolgirl; now, five months into secondary school she sounds like all the other London kids. “Well, yes, she would, but she’s going to lose her shit whatever I do, so we may as well go for broke.”
“What’s she like, Blaise?”
“She’s cool. Like you. Except with an Aussie accent.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes, of course she is! I’m her dad after all.” I smile at her and then I think about what Jessamine had said earlier. “Do you think you look like your dad?” I say.
“I guess. I mean, sort of.”
“How well did you know him?”
She shrugs. “Not very. He used to come, like, every other weekend? Take us out for lunch? And then it got less and less and less. Last time I saw him was just before Christmas, two years ago?”
“Why did he stop coming over?”
She shrugs. “It was around the time you came, so I guess he didn’t like you being around very much.”
“Do you ever contact him? Like text him, or speak on the phone?”
“No.” She shakes her head vehemently. “Mum won’t let me. Apparently he hates us both.”
“But you have a number for him?”
“Yes. It’s his office number. Not a mobile number. So I can’t text him on it.”
I nod. “Do you miss him?”
She shrugs again. “Not really. I mean, I like him, but he never really felt like my dad.”
“You know,” I say, “if you wanted, I could try and talk to your dad, find out a bit more about what happened? Between him and your mum.”
She looks at me and nods. “But seriously,” she says, in a tiny whisper that I can barely hear, “be careful. Don’t make things worse than they already are.”
I pat her hand. “I’ll go carefully,” I say, “don’t you worry.”
chapter forty-four
According to Helen Yaxley, Daisy Black had arrived in Little Belmont at the beginning of May. Is it possible, Jane wonders, that she had come to find her uncle at the circus? That the clown pictured in the poster was in fact Jasper Black? Jane pulls her phone from her bag and finds the photo that Helen Yaxley had sent her of the Black family posing on the sofa. She looks from Jasper’s face to the image on the poster, looking for similarities, but the artwork is low-res, overbrightened, and the photo on her phone is old and faded, so it’s impossible to tell. But surely, she thinks, surely it can’t just be a coincidence that Daisy would have been here, in Little Belmont, the very same weekend that the circus was in town?
Jane takes a photo of the poster, and another closer one of the clown’s face. Then she heads into the convenience store, takes out ?300 in cash, and walks back to her car.
* * *
Shannon leaves an hour after Jane gets home, and after the intensity of the joyful reunion with the dogs and Shannon’s nonstop commentary, Jane is suddenly alone. It’s lunchtime. The weather has turned gray and cool, and a heavy drizzle starts to fall, leaving a mist on the windowpanes and making the pert boughs of hawthorn and apple blossom beyond droop and wilt. She’s tempted to turn the heating on, but it will take hours to warm up in here, and she can’t really afford it, so instead she lights a fire and turns on a blow heater and then, ignoring the crumbling ceiling in the room across the corridor, ignoring the sound of something dripping somewhere else in the house, ignoring the empty growl in the pit of her stomach, she flips open the lid of her laptop and googles “Martello’s Circus.”
* * *
It transpires that the Martello Circus has now moved on to a village called Runnydown, only forty or so miles from Little Belmont. It had arrived on Friday and is there for a week according to their website. The clown pictured on their poster is one of three possible clowns, named Raimondo, Patch, and Mikki. There are photos of all three of them on the website, but under so many layers of oily makeup it is impossible to discern their facial features; they all look the same to Jane, no matter how many times she stares at each image with the photo of Jasper Black held next to it. There’s no phone number on the website, just a registered address somewhere in Essex. Jane glances at the time in the corner of her screen. Just gone half one. Shannon has already walked the dogs today. Jane has nothing better to do, not really, so she puts the location into her app, pulls on a raincoat, gets into her car, and sets off for Runnydown.