Lausanne

Lausanne is the Swiss stop where Jane Glasson left a train during a journey home with Gareth Lawler, just months before her disappearance. Recalled later, the unexplained detour acquired a possible connection to Harkness Pharmaceuticals, whose headquarters were then in Basel, and became part of Gareth’s effort to understand Jane’s hidden life.

The Stop on the Journey Home

During the Easter trip, Jane Glasson and Gareth Lawler travelled by train through Rome, Florence, and Venice. Gareth remembered the weeks as among the happiest of his life. On their way home, Jane told him she needed to stop in Switzerland to visit a school friend she had never mentioned before. She also made clear that Gareth was not invited to join the diversion. He had been hoping to prolong the trip with a few days in Paris, but Jane got off the train in Lausanne and he continued without her.

A Possible Harkness Connection

At the time, Gareth did not connect Jane’s stop in Lausanne with Harkness Pharmaceuticals. The company was still headquartered in Basel, a couple of hours away by train. Only after Gareth later saw a woman he believed to be Jane at Paddington did the proximity take on new weight: he wondered whether the Switzerland visit had been connected to Harkness. The passage presents this as a suspicion formed in retrospect, not as proof of what Jane did in Switzerland.

The Stop in Retrospect

The Lausanne stop occurred a couple of months before Jane disappeared. In the following term, she ended her relationship with Gareth in a note left in his college pigeonhole, offering no explanation and refusing to discuss it. After learning that Jane was alive and concluding that she had staged her disappearance, Gareth wondered whether the breakup had been an attempt to let him down gently. Lausanne therefore stands in his recollection as one of several unresolved details that may have preceded Jane’s departure from her old life, while her reasons for stopping there remain unknown.