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“My trip was…eventful.”
“Solve your case?”
“Not quite. Upended some applecarts though.” A thought occurs to her. “Hey, listen, Julius. Tell me again what your boyfriend does? I mean, his job?”
“He’s a pharmaceutical engineer.”
“Oh yeah. I thought it was something like that. What is that, exactly?”
Julius gives a small dry laugh. “I swear I don’t even know. Something to do with pharmaceuticals and engineering, I guess.”
“Do you think he might be able to do me a huge favor. For my case?”
“Er, maybe.” He grimaces. “That depends. What is it?”
“It’s this….” She puts her groceries down on the hall floor and pulls the small green plastic pot out of her pocket. “These kids I’m investigating, for my case. Found this in the girl’s bedroom. The smell of it. The look of it. I dunno. I feel like it might be something…”
“Sinister?”
“Yeah. Right. Is that the sort of thing he might be able to test for me? Do you think?”
“Hell knows. But I can ask. I’m meeting him for lunch later. Want me to give it to him?”
Jessica eyes the plastic pot and then glances up at Julius. “I dunno. What if you lose it?”
He rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”
“No, but…tell you what, where are you meeting him? I’ll bring it myself.”
Julius shrugs. “Sure,” he says, before giving her an address for a bistro in Soho. “One p.m.,” he says. “See you then.”
Jessica waves at him as he heads toward the elevator and then she turns and lets herself into her apartment. She takes the shopping into the kitchen and starts to unload it. She pulls open her fridge and is ready for that smell to hit her, the stale smell that always hits her when she opens her refrigerator. But it’s clean and white and shiny and smells of spray. All her sad, half-empty jars of pasta sauce and mayonnaise have been polished and lined up neatly in the door shelves. The arrangement of ancient vegetables swimming in brown juices in the crisper has been removed, and the drawers shined and polished. There’s even a gallon of fresh milk and a four-pack of green apples.
“Malcolm,” she says under her breath, affectionately. “You bad, bad boy.”
She makes herself a decaf coffee and sits with it at her desk, her laptop open in front of her. She takes a bite out of the protein ball and immediately spits it across the desk.
“Urgh.”
She sorts through her travel backpack to find the card for the female police officer in the UK and calls the number.
It goes to voicemail, and Jessica sighs. “Hey,” she says after the tone. “Jessica Jones. Have you checked Debra Phipps’s ID? Sounds like the woman you have in custody might not actually be the same woman who lives there under that name. Apparently the real Debra Phipps is quite elderly. Give me a call when you get a minute.”
For the next hour she reads everything she can find on the internet about the Grace Partridge case, about Debra Phipps, about John Warshaw, trying to find the connection. She pins notes to her corkboard as she goes, and printouts of all the attachments from Malcolm’s messages: the photo of the twins’ reflectionless eyeballs, the shots from inside their bedrooms, the inside of the Upside Down bar and its Wiki page, articles about the Harlem Vampire, pictures of the plaque in the church in Barton Wallop, the photo of the sketch in Fox Randall’s Essex bedroom, a screenshot of the Google Earth image of Debra Phipps’s farmhouse, the news article about the Truscott House disappearances, and the news of Grace’s discovery.
She steps back from the corkboard and stares. And stares. And stares.
What? she thinks. What is this?
She finds herself wishing that Malcolm was here; she needs someone to bounce off, because none of this makes the least bit of sense. Her last message to him is still unopened, and she sighs.
She looks again at the photo of the plaque in the tiny church and then at the flyer pinned in Lark’s bedroom and at Fox’s sketch, the three iterations of the child with the outstretched arms, and she thinks of Madame Web’s words last night and she thinks, It’s there, in Barton Wallop. The truth, it’s in that image. It’s in that village. It has to be. But where?
Four Years Ago
Lincoln, UK
They can see the cathedral spire from the attic bedroom of their tiny apartment in the ancient city of Lincoln. The bells chime on the hour and each time they sound, it sends a rumble of awe and pleasure through Polly. The sound of cathedral bells aligns with her imaginings of what an adult life might look like, what it might sound like. Their flat is small, but it has character and high ceilings and beams and plush carpets and a cute kitchen with metro tiles. But most importantly, it is not a caravan.
