chapter thirty-one
Jane showers and dresses and makes herself a coee. Looking down through the window of the rst-oor 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 nds 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 nd 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 nd 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.
Jane is about to leave the house when her phone buzzes once more. It’s an email notication and she quickly clicks it open when she sees it is from Oliver Bloom, the cheesemaker man from the B-movie that Jessamine made back in the early 2000s.
Hi. V. mysterious! Yeah, I remember Jessamine. Between you and me we had a thing. Brief. Weird. I could tell you things. Here’s my number. Give me a call. But
make it later, maybe midday?
Jane puts a reminder into her phone to call Oliver at midday. She does not subscribe to all the brain fog nonsense that is continuously spouted about menopausal women. She is, she is quite sure, sharp as a pin; HRT and lots of fresh air. No fog whatsoever. But she does nd it’s usually a good idea to set things down in writing, to pin things into the matrix to make sure they don’t slip away. Chances are she will remember to call Oliver at midday with or without the automated reminder, but it really doesn’t hurt to set one anyway.
She nds her sunglasses, lls a bottle with water, adds a slick of SPF to her nose, and heads out toward the tube station.
