He looked up at me. I brandished the cover of the pamphlet and pointed to Jack.
‘Could you tell me where I might find this man?’
The warden looked down at the cover and gave a smile of recognition.
‘He got into there by mistake. Yes. That’s John Baptiste. He works here. You’ll find him over there.’ He pointed just north of me to the conservatory that was also featured on the front of the pamphlet.
As I approached the conservatory, I saw a small figure running towards me down the path. As it grew nearer, I could see that she was a young girl of about nine, in a lemon dress, with long chestnut hair. Tears were disfiguring her face. She stopped when she reached me.
‘I’ve lost my doll’, she said with abrupt impertinence. ‘You haven’t seen her, have you?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t’, I replied. ‘But I know the feeling.’
She looked at me crossly and ran on.
Inside the greenhouse, the air was humid – I felt it was trying to pull me inside out. I could hardly breathe. From high up above, water trickled down from carefully positioned fountains, running down the tips of the tall jungle plants, but dissolving in the heat below. I was surrounded by a dark green lushness, except for the neon flashes of orange, yellow and red blooms. The sun beat down from the glass above.
FORTY
‘Can I help you?’ one of the tops of the plants seemed to ask. I looked up into the centre of the white heat of the sun. A face was peering at me from the balcony that ran along the top of the conservatory. A hand was resting on the balustrade and I thought for a moment the fingers were bleeding badly, until I saw that they were grasping a scarlet petalled plant.
‘Are you John Baptiste?’ I asked.
He moved out of the direct sunlight into the shade where I could see him more clearly. He was.
‘Come on up. If you follow the path where you are standing, round, it will take you to the foot of a spiral staircase.’
I expected the air to grow hotter as I climbed but the fountains of water were freshening the atmosphere of the upper half of the greenhouse. Jack was bending down over a flowerpot, his back to me, planting the flower that I had seen in his hand. His fingers confidently manipulated the soil around its roots. He stood up when he heard me coming and turned to face me. He stood at least a foot above me, emanating masculine health.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘It’s about Justine,’ I said.
‘It’s always about Justine. You’re a friend of hers?’
‘She came to me for help,’ I started to explain.
‘She came to you for help?’ Jack repeated, obviously astonished. ‘Justine never needs help…’
She must have kept the threatening letters a secret from him, I thought, she didn’t want to worry him.
‘But surely you’ve noticed that she’s gone?’ I persevered.
The conversation was verging on the surreal.
‘Oh, I never worry about that. Justine is always disappearing. She’s addicted to disappearing. She does it to make her life more interesting – to compensate.’
The heat of the greenhouse was making the headache that I had had since I had woken up, worse.
‘Compensate for what?’ I asked.
‘For not succeeding as a writer.’
‘But she’s a successful writer!’
‘Who on earth told you that?’
‘Both Juliette and Justine.’
‘Oh, they’re as bad as each other.’
‘Are you saying that Justine has never been published?’ ‘Never. She has been working on a novel called Death is a Woman for years, but she can’t get the plot to work out. Or the characters, for that matter: they all seem to merge into each other. So she lives her life as if it were a novel instead. It livens things up for her – she’s the prototype drama queen. Don’t worry that she has disappeared. In fact, now that you mention it, I remember her telling me she was leaving the house for a few days.’
‘When was this?’
‘About twelve days ago, I think.’
Twelve days ago was the day that she had been abducted. This was making no sense. Had Justine known that the abductor was going to be successful? Ridiculous. For whatever reason, Jack was lying.
FORTY-ONE
I realized that there was no point in my explaining to Jack the true circumstances of Justine’s disappearance. I took his phone number and his address and left realizing that he knew even less than I did. And also feeling, since our meeting, that I now knew less than I had done before. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Jack had been lying. If Death is a Woman had not been published, how could the abductor have become obsessed by its heroine? The only person who had read her writing was Jack. Surely he couldn’t be the abductor? But if he had followed Justine for all those weeks, wouldn’t she at some point have caught a glimpse of him and recognized him?
I climbed back down the spiral staircase, through the artificial rain. A few minutes later I heard the sound of running footsteps and my name being called. I turned around to see that it was Jack.
‘Do you mind if I walk with you a while?’ he asked. The light changed the colour of his eyes from slate grey to blue.
We walked down towards the lake. He’s like Puck, I thought, a grown-up Puck. He causes trouble. Wherever he is, his sense of playful irresponsibility, his lack of introspection, will cause trouble. He will be the catalyst for his own destruction. He will be the carrier of distorted messages. This is the man whom Justine loves.
‘Do you love Justine?’ I suddenly felt compelled to ask.
‘Love is…’ he paused and then laughed. ‘Love is… like an armchair cover. It hides a multitude of sins. It’s washable and may well have a riot of roses and auriculas splashed over it, but underneath everything is all ripped up.’
He turned and looked directly into my eyes. His eyes were now blue black like the water of the lake. A child’s pram was floating in the water.
‘Do you love Justine?’ he asked.
I was taken aback. It had not occurred to me that he would attempt to analyse my feelings, that he had a consciousness of his own that would not be acting in exact conjunction with my own.
‘How can you ask that, if you don’t, as you have just implied, believe in love?’
‘Ah, but you do and so does Justine. So why don’t the both of you play let’s-pretend?’
He skipped a stone across the surface of the lake. It bounced six times.
Something plastic squashed beneath the heavy platform of my right foot. I had stood on a doll. I bent down and picked her up; she was in a hot pink dress, with frothy golden curls and forget-me-not eyes. She batted her eyelashes at me.
‘You should hand her in,’ Jack said before turning away and walking back towards the greenhouse.
I put the doll under my jacket, obscurely angry with the little girl who had lost it for being so careless. Arriving home, I phoned Waterstone’s but there was no reply. I stuck the doll up on the mantelpiece, just under the portrait of Justine. She had been lost, and I had found her, and I had taken her home where I could keep her forever.
FORTY-TWO
The events of the story of Justine had become my new drug of choice. But I saw through the haze of my obsession that blood was now dripping from one of Justine’s painted eyes.
The letter arrived the next morning. It lay propped up on my mantelpiece, a missive from the underworld, defiling my sanctuary. My name and address were written in the unformed handwriting that I now immediately recognized. It did not occur to me to wonder how the abductor had found out where I lived. I opened the letter with a mixture of fear and anticipation.