they’d made pleas-ant small talk about the traffic, the coming theatre season, the likelihood of the road works being finished in time for the Olympics, all the way back down the M11. Safely arrived in London, Laurel had forced herself to stand in the dusk with her suitcase, waving goodbye until the car disappeared from sight, and then she’d gone calmly up the stairs, unlocked the flat without a hint of key fumbling, and let herself in. She’d closed the door quietly behind her and then, only then, in the safety of her very own sitting room, had she let the suitcase and the facade drop. Without even pausing to switch on the lights, she’d fired up her laptop and typed his name into Google. In the fraction of time it took for results to appear, Laurel became a nail-biter again.
The Henry Jenkins Wikipedia page wasn’t detailed, but it provided a bibliography and a brief biography (born London, 1901, married Oxford, 1938, lived at 25 Campden Grove, Lon-don, died Suffolk, 1961); his novels were listed on a few second-hand bookstore sites (Laurel ordered two); and he was mentioned on pages as varied as the ‘Nordstrom School Alumni List’ and ‘Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious Literary Deaths’. Laurel was able to glean some information about his writing—fiction that was semi-autobiographical, a focus on bleak settings and working-class anti-heroes until his breakthrough love story in 1939, work for the Ministry of Information during the war; but there was far more material about his unmasking as the Suffolk Summer Picnic Stalker. She pored over it, page by page, teetering on the rim of panic as she waited for a familiar name or address to leap out and bite her.
It didn’t happen. No mention anywhere of Dorothy Nicolson, mother of Oscar-winning actress and Nation’s (second) Favourite Face, Laurel Nicolson; no more specific geographical reference than ‘a meadow outside Lavenham, Suffolk’; no salacious gossip as to birthday knives or crying babies or family parties by the stream. Of course. Of course there wasn’t. The gentlemanly deceit of 1961 had been shored up nicely by the online history-makers: Henry Jenkins was an author who’d enjoyed success preceding the Second World War but found his star on the wane afterwards. He lost money, influence, friends, and eventually his sense of decency; what he managed to find, in turn, was infamy, and even that had now largely faded. Laurel read the same sorry story over and over again, and each time the pencil-drawn picture became more permanent. She exhaled. She gave her chewed thumbnail a rest. She almost started to believe the fiction herself.
But then she went one click too far. A seemingly innocuous link to a website titled: ‘The Imaginarium of Rupert Holdstock’. The photograph appeared onscreen like a face at the window: Henry Jenkins, unmistakable, though younger than when she’d watched him coming up the driveway. Laurel’s skin flushed hot and cold. Neither of the newspaper articles she’d found when it happened had included a photograph and this was the first time she’d seen his face since that afternoon from the tree house.
She couldn’t help it; she ran an image search. Within 0.27 seconds Google had assembled a screen tiled with identical photographs of marginally different proportions. Seeing them en masse made him look macabre. (Or was it her own associations doing that? The creak of the gate hinge; Barnaby’s growl; the white sheet turned russet red). Row upon row of black-and-white portraits: formal attire, dark moustache, heavy brows framing an alarmingly direct gaze. ‘Hello, Dorothy,’ the multiple sets of thin lips seemed to move on the screen. ‘It’s been a long time.’
Laurel slammed the laptop lid shut and cast the room into darkness.
She’d refused to look at Henry Jenkins any longer, but she’d thought about him, and she’d thought about this house, just around the corner from her own, and when the first parcel arrived by overnight mail and she sat up reading it from cover to cover, she’d thought about her mother, too. The Sometime Maid was the eighth novel by Henry Jenkins, published in 1940 and detailing the love affair between a respected author and his wife’s maid-companion. The girl—Sally, she was called—was something of a minx, and the male protagonist a tortured fellow whose wife was beautiful but cold. It wasn’t a bad read, once one made allowance for the stuffy prose; the characters were richly drawn and the narrator’s dilemma was timeless, particularly as Sally and the wife became friends. The ending