Chapter Thirty-One
It is time, Jane realizes, to make a timeline.
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.
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 find 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 finds her sunglasses, fills a bottle with water, adds a slick of SPF to her nose, and heads out toward the tube station.