Chapter Forty-Eight
Jane narrows her eyes at the woman in the park behind the circus and says, “He disappeared? Jasper?”
“Yes. Gone. Vanished. Everyone is very angry.”
“Has it been reported to the police?”
“Psht!” She rolls her eyes. “Of course it hasn’t! Why would it? A grown man, a strange man, a traveling man. They would have no interest in him.”
“But where do you think he might have gone?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody really knew him. A very quiet man, and, like I say, a very strange man. He left after the last performance of the bank holiday weekend. One minute he was there, the next his caravan was empty, his things packed: he’d gone. No note. Nothing.”
“So he didn’t have a family? A girlfriend?”
“Ha!” She laughs drily. “No, he most definitely did not have a girlfriend. He has been here with us for nearly twenty years and never in that time has he even had a friend.”
“A loner?”
“Yes. A loner. And, you know, his persona… this Patch. He made it too real. We had to call him Patch, even when we were not at work. He would mime, even when he was not wearing his makeup, his costume. The children, they didn’t like him.
Nobody really liked him. But he was a very good clown. So, we kept him…”
“And now he’s gone?”
“Yes, now the clown has gone. Maybe he’ll come back. Maybe he won’t. First he runs away to the circus, and now he has run away from the circus…” She sighs. “You could talk to the others; they might know.”
“The others?”
“Yes, the other clowns. Dave and Steve.”
“Raimondo and Mikki?”
“That’s correct. They’re in that blue-and-white caravan, just behind the showers?” She gestures behind her. “You see?”
“And it’s OK for me to…?”
The woman nods. “Say I sent you. My name is Morea.”
Jane knocks gently against the plastic-clad door of the caravan. A man’s voice says, “Come in.”
Jane breathes in, uncertainty racing through her nervous system.
Then she pulls down the handle and peers into the unit.
She sees two men sitting on the sofa area at the back of the caravan.
Both are in sportswear. One, wearing a baseball cap, is eating a wrap and watching the other, who is wearing pink Nike slides, play a video game.
“Steve?” she says. “Dave? Morea sent me.”
“Yeah,” says the guy with the wrap. “I’m Steve.”
The other guy doesn’t take his eyes from the TV screen.
“Come in,” says Steve. “Excuse the mess.”
She steps into the unit. It’s not messy, but it does smell overwhelmingly of whatever is inside Steve’s wrap.
“Thank you.”
The other guy makes a noise of annoyance at something that has just happened in his game and then slams down his console. He looks at Jane and says, “Hi.”
“I’m really sorry to disturb you,” she says. “But I’m looking for your colleague. Jasper? Or… Patch?”
“Yeah,” says Dave. “Aren’t we all.” His accent is pure estuary. Steve’s is a little more West Country.
“I was just talking to Morea. Out there. She said he disappeared? On the bank holiday?”
“Yup,” says Steve. “That’s right. Did a runner. Left us in the shit.”
“She said he was a bit of a mystery man. Is that how you think of him?”
Steve moves across the seat and gestures to Jane to sit down.
Dave says, “Yeah. Jasper, total freak. But kind of… innocent? If you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” says Steve. “Like a child really.”
“So him being out there in the world? Is that unlikely?”
Dave nods. “Totally. That man has only known this place, this world, since he was virtually a kid, you know? I can’t see him out there.
Fending for himself. In here, you see”—he gestures through the window—“he had us to look after him. To make sure he didn’t just, you know, spiral into his weird fantasy world. ”
“You hung out?”
“Yeah, we hung out. He liked a drink or two. He liked playing games with us. He liked reading books.”
“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “Always, always reading.”
“What sort of books?”
They both shrug. “Facts?” says Steve.
“Yeah. Nonfiction.”
“And what about family? Did he ever tell you about them?”
They glance at each other. Then Steve says, “Not really. I mean, I know he left home when he was quite young and I did get the impression that something bad had happened. That maybe his family life was a little bit…”
“Dysfunctional,” Dave finishes.
“Yeah. Dysfunctional.”
“Where was he from?”
“London, I think?”
Jane nods. “Hampstead?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“And did he mention a sister? Or a niece?”
They glance at each other and shake their heads.
“He didn’t talk much,” says Steve. “He said his family was a ‘bad memory.’ ”
“Yeah,” says Dave. “I remember him saying that once.”
“So, do either of you have any idea at all where he might have gone? Was he doing anything unusual? Did he seem different? Talk about anything new?”
They both look at each other again and shake their heads. “No,” says Dave, “he was totally normal…”
“Well,” says Steve, “as normal as he ever really was.”
“Which wasn’t very,” says Dave, and they both laugh wryly.
“You didn’t see him with a young woman? A girl with a white dog? Here.” She shows them the photo of Daisy in her phone, and then a photo of Hugo.
“Nope. I’d definitely have noticed if I’d seen him with a girl. Or a dog. And I definitely didn’t.”
“Me neither,” says Steve.
Jane sighs and puts her phone back in her pocket. “So, what happened to his stuff? His caravan?”
“Well, it’s not his, is it? It belongs to Martello’s. So it stays with the circus. Did you want to have a look?”
Jane widens her eyes and nods. “Yes, please,” she says, “that would be amazing.”
Jasper’s caravan is a one-berth unit in a pale lemony yellow. Dave opens it up and then stands back to let her in. It’s small and cozy, with a cream seating area at the back and a tiny, well-maintained kitchenette. “Could I have a snoop around?”
“Go for it. We’ll just be over there. Take your time.”
The unit appears to have been cleared out completely; everything is clean and shiny, no personal effects on display.
Jane goes through drawers and cupboards.
She finds utensils and cutlery, packets of tissues, of batteries.
She finds tins of greasepaints and pots of brushes.
She also finds a wad of printed flyers of Jasper in full clown regalia, smiling unnervingly into the camera, with the name “Patch” in curly graphic printed in the corner.
She takes a couple and slides them into her bag.
She goes to the built-in wardrobe next to the seating area and finds a denim jacket, two red ties, a pair of rubber boots, a pair of sandals, a couple of folded T-shirts.
She pulls one out and sniffs it. It’s from Marks it’s a clown face, similar to the one that Jasper was holding in his lap in the spooky family portrait that Daisy had brought with her to Little Belmont.
Jane pulls it out and holds it at arm’s length.
It’s horrible, really quite, quite horrible, the clown’s face more of a devil’s rictus than a jolly buffoon, two white light flares painted into the center of each eyeball, a snarl at the corners of its lips.
Jane turns it around to look at the back, and then recoils again at the sight of what looks, without the benefit of her reading glasses, like four bloody fingerprints, but could just as easily be dirt.
“Eww!” she says, dropping the mask back in the drawer. She shudders, then picks it up again and very gingerly pops it into her shoulder bag.
She pulls the cushions off the sofas and lifts up the wooden hinged seat.
Inside is bedding: a floral-patterned duvet, two floral pillowcases, and a soft, fleecy blanket.
Jane groans. This is pointless. She lets the hinged lid shut heavily, and as she does so, something is dislodged and comes floating toward her feet.
She picks it up and sees that it is a torn corner from a piece of paper; it looks as though it might have been left behind by accident when the rest of the letter was ripped away.
It displays a section of a letterhead, a date and the first line of a name and address. The date is this time last year. The name is Jasper Black. The first line of the address is c/o someone called Stella Madden, who lives at number 21 Dresden Close, but the rest of the address is missing.
What remains of the logo shows the letters “Dr. A. J. Tw” and then a partial address of “Dov” and a postcode with a W and two As in it.
Jane slides it into her shoulder bag alongside the terrible clown mask. It’s almost nothing, but it will have to do.
She goes back to Steve and Dave’s caravan before she leaves. “Did you have a phone number for him?” she asks. “For Jasper?”
“Er, yeah.” Steve feels the pocket of his joggers and pulls out his smartphone. “Yeah. I mean, we’ve tried calling him, a ton of times. Called and called. Never picks up. But yeah, here it is.” He turns the screen of his phone toward Jane, who types the number into her phone.
“Amazing,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Did you find anything?”
She shakes her head. “He cleaned it out pretty comprehensively.”
“Yeah. He definitely intended to go; it wasn’t some last-minute decision.
He’d obviously been planning it. I suppose,” he says, “that’s why none of us have been worried about him.
He wanted to go, you know? And in a lot of ways it doesn’t surprise me, because he always seemed like he was running away from something.
Always seemed like he was looking over his shoulder. You know what I mean?”
Jane climbs back into her car and opens up her Maps app.
According to Street View, Dresden Close, where Stella Madden lives, is a small turning off a mini-roundabout just outside Winchester, and number 21 is a neat eighties-style house with a red car in the driveway and a very healthy-looking palm tree outside the front window.
There are no photos of Stella Madden on the internet, but Jane can get a feel for her from the jauntiness of her little red car, the happiness of her palm tree, which must make every day feel like a holiday, and the fact that she is on the board of governors of a primary school about half a mile away.
The small car suggests either no children or grown children.
The tidy frontage suggests some free time or a green-fingered hubby.
Stella Madden, in other words, and on the basis of googleable intel, seems to be a normal, possibly even nice person, probably retired.
So what is her connection to Jasper? And why has his mail been coming to her house? There is only one way to find out, but that line of investigation will have to wait now until tomorrow.