chapter thirty-four
Her stomach turns with horror and disgust, and she jumps to her feet and pushes through the metal door, out into the perfect limpid air of the May morning, breathing in deeply to quell a terrible wave of nausea.
Allen Black’s face races across her mind’s eye, his back to her as he mixed her drink, the tightness of his jaw when she knocked it from his hand.
Had she drunk the martini that night back in the year 2000, she thinks, she would have ended up in that room, on that chair, shackled to those walls, she knows it, she just knows it. She bends in half, her st pushed deep into her stomach, certain that she is about to throw up, but then from the house there is a low rumble, building quickly and dramatically into a succession of high- pitched barks, the sound of claws scampering hard and fast over York stone and heading straight toward her. Hugo. Of course. She doesn’t turn to look at him, just runs as fast as she can up the side path of the garden to the very back, where she jumps through the gap in the broken fence and pushes it back into place. On the other side of the fence she can hear Hugo’s insistent barking, his paws banging at the wood, his furious curiosity.
“Hugo!” she whispers from the other side. “It’s me. Jane.”
His barking stops and she hears a small whimper.
“Be a good boy and go back indoors. Good boy.”
He whimpers again, and then it is silent.
Distantly Jane hears Stuart’s voice. “What the fuck, Hugo? Chill. There’s nothing there.”
Jane holds her breath hard, and waits for a minute or two, then heads back through the depths of the Heath and out into the daylight, to the Hampstead
ornamental pond gleaming in the sunshine, the shiny trac in four directions, people, dogs, light.
In a pub called the White Swan a moment later, she orders herself a gin and tonic. It’s early for a drink but her nerves are shredded, her stomach is churning, and she needs something to absorb the shock waves. She has ve minutes before her call from Oliver—yes, she remembered without her phone telling her—and she needs to gather herself. She squeezes the lemon slice into the drink and stirs it through, then takes a large slurp through a straw and readies herself to look at the photos of Thornwood on her phone. She swipes through them quickly until she gets to the photos of the interior of the outhouse. She thinks of the smell in there, the putrid green smell of moss and decay and damp, and she thinks of that chilling feeling of stretching her arms from wall to wall and realizing that they tted. She sends the photos to Dexter with shocked-face emojis and the words “in Stuart’s back garden” and then she sees the time on her phone switch from 11:59 to 12:00 and calls Oliver.
“She was nuts,” says Oliver, and Jane immediately rankles. Only the worst men describe their exes as nuts and she knows this because she has, in her time, been described as nuts—she was known as Mad Jane Trevally by some. But the best men she has been with never talked about her in derogatory terms when their relationships broke down, and she includes both of her ex-husbands in that.
“Nuts?” she says circumspectly. “In what way?”
“Oh, just intense. Too much. You know.”
“No. I don’t. Not really. Give me some examples. Tell me how it started.”
“Well, I mean, there were some scenes, in the lm, intimate scenes. We had to play them out together. I had a girlfriend at the time, and this was the rst time I’d ever had to kiss someone, do sex scenes on a lm set, and I think I, er, misread the situation, thought it meant something that it didn’t, kind of pursued her o camera when I really shouldn’t have and possibly gave her the impression that I was, er, well, you know, crazy about her, when really, in retrospect, I was just crazy about being young and making a movie and getting to kiss a pretty girl on a lm set and all of that and she kind of fell in love with me and I kind of didn’t
handle the situation very well and tried to get out of it and she kind of went a bit
bunny boiler on me.”
“In what way?”
“Turning up places. She literally walked into a restaurant one night when I was having dinner with friends, took a seat at a table across the room, and stared at me. Just stared. She followed my girlfriend all the way down Oxford Street once, from one end to the other, three paces behind, in and out of clothes shops.
I tried to be nice to her, tried to make up for leading her on. But she wouldn’t take it. I was close, you know, to getting a police restraining order out on her, and then suddenly, it all stopped. Silence. I never saw her again.”
“How long did your aair go on for, before you ended it?”
“Oh, maybe four, ve months tops. She was living in a rented room in a shared house. Not with friends, with strangers. Her room was spartan. Not much in the way of décor. Thin sheets. Nothing on the walls, none of the, you know, clutter that you normally nd in a woman’s bedroom. Cushions. That kind of thing. She was lthy. You know. Sexually. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but she wanted it every which way it came, nonstop, to the point, frankly, that I couldn’t keep up.”
“Did you know much about her background? Her family?”
“She didn’t talk about her family. I never met them. She had… scars?”
“Scars?”
“Yes. Strange marks on her body. I asked her about them; she said she was in a car accident when she was fourteen.”
There’s a small, dry silence on the line between them. Jane thinks again of the horrible little jail cell attached to the back of the house. “Do you think she might have been abused?” she asks softly.
“It would not surprise me, and it would explain a lot… of her strangeness.”
“Can you remember where she lived? When she was sharing the house?”
“Somewhere near Ally Pally; you could see it from her bedroom window.
That’s all I remember.”
Jane scribbles “Ally Pally” into her notepad.
“And at this time, how old were you both?”
“I was, well, twenty-two? Twenty-three? And Jessamine was about eighteen, nineteen? Young, you know. Both so young, and stupid, and I do feel bad to this day. I don’t make it my business to hurt people but I feel like I really did hurt her. I caused her pain, and at the time all I could see was what she was doing to me. But it was my fault. I can see that now. I hope she’s OK…” He sighs heavily and then says, “Why are you trying to nd her?”
“Oh, I’m not trying to nd her. I’m trying to nd her daughter. She’s gone
missing.”
“Daughter?” Oliver sounds surprised.
“Yes. Her name is Daisy.”
“And what makes you thinks she’s Jessamine’s daughter?”
It’s a good question, Jane thinks, but she’s sticking by her instincts. “Well,”
she says. “They have the same surname.”
“Hmmm.”
“What?”
“Well, I don’t know… Jessamine was a bizarre girl, and she might have been lying to me, but when we were together, she told me… that she was infertile.”
