It Could Have Been Her(65)
“And? How did it go?”
“Fine. At first. He kept himself to himself. Caught the bus to school in Winchester. Stayed in his room. Always very polite when our paths crossed. Neat boy. A little bit strange. I did try to talk to him about himself, about his life, because as I say, he was very well-spoken and not necessarily the sort of boy you’d imagine wanting to run away from home to join the circus. I was curious about him. But he wasn’t very forthcoming. Anyway…” Stella picks a cat hair from her trousers and sighs again. “His clowning classes finished, and I thought he’d be on his way, but it took him a long time to find a job, about six months, and during those six months he became…” She sighs again. “He became quite dark and brooding. He didn’t leave his room very much. Some nights he’d wait until John and I had gone to bed and then he’d leave the house in the middle of the night. We never heard him come back, but he’d be here in the morning, and I don’t know, Jane, I just had a bad feeling about him. I can’t put it into words, or explain it, but I just felt that something wasn’t right. I felt uncomfortable being in the same room as him. He had this… aura. You could feel it leaking out of him, like his initial charm was a veneer that was chipping away, peeling off, and under it was this festering child, this desperate man. I felt, quite often, as if he hated me.”
She rests her hand against her breastbone when she says this, and her voice cracks slightly. “I did not feel safe, Jane. That’s the bottom line. I did not feel safe. And there was one night when I was lying in bed and I was looking at the local news on my tablet and there was a story about a young woman, not far from here, who’d been followed at night through a local park, harassed, verbally abused, and intentionally terrified by a man wearing a clown mask. And, also, er… playing with himself.”
Jane gasps, her hand going unthinkingly to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she whispers.
“My husband and I both said the same thing at the same moment; we looked at each other and we both said: ‘You don’t think?’ So, really, whether it was Jasper or not, the fact of the matter was that we couldn’t have someone in our home who made us feel that way. It was unthinkable. We made up a lie about our son splitting up with his girlfriend and coming home and needing his room back.
“Jasper took it very well. He’d just found a job at Martello’s, so he moved out a couple of weeks later, left his room in good order, asked if we could forward any mail on to him, and left. And John and I, as the door closed behind him, both breathed this huge sigh of relief, like we’d just marched the devil out of our own home. I can’t explain it. We had no proof of anything, no way of knowing anything. But on a fundamental level we knew Jasper simply wasn’t right.”
“What was the name of the girl in the news report?” Jane asks. “The one he harassed?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m not sure I can remember. It was such a long time ago and it was such a small story, this was before social media, you know, where things proliferate. But I can remember when I read about it because it was my mother’s seventieth birthday the day after. My mother was born on the twelfth of June 1938. So this must have been the eleventh of June 2008. And it had happened the day before the news report came out. So the tenth of June. And I remember where it happened because it was right next to the school that my son went to, and where I’m still a governor in fact, Cherry Wood Primary. There’s a small park just around the corner where the children used to be taken sometimes to do activities. I still shudder when I walk past it, to this day, just thinking of what happened to that poor girl.” Her gaze goes to the photos on Jane’s phone and she sighs. “I should have said something. My husband and I both should have said something. Because we knew. We just knew.”
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?