It Could Have Been Her(16)

As Jane’s thoughts cycle through the mess of her upbringing, she scans the pathway, the branches, the possible routes to the left and the right that Rose White might have taken in an attempt to find her missing dog. Jane can’t possibly go up all of them, but she tries a couple, her gaze taking in trampled foliage, footprints, litter. She picks up a discarded drinks carton; she has no idea why—all she knows is that she has to find something. Anything.

And then, about halfway between the bottom of Jane’s bluebell wood and the footpath, slung across a fallen tree, she sees what looks like an item of clothing. As she gets closer, she sees that it is a hoodie—navy blue, small, and with a logo on the chest: a kind of pathway created out of curved white lines. It’s a school uniform hoodie. She picks it up and pulls out the tag: “14–15.” And there, in smudged felt tip, the initials “DB.”

So, thinks Jane, not Rose White. Just a local teenager. She takes pictures of it anyway, of the logo and the label, and then carefully places the hoodie back where she found it, just in case, she thinks, just in case the police are still looking for Rose White.





chapter thirteen


STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER

Jessamine and I sit together most days now, in the White Swan. She’s an interesting woman, especially after the second vodka, but not so much after the fourth, when she becomes harsh and bitter. I order my pints in halves so that I can keep up with her, round for round, without getting drunk myself.

“Daisy and I live with my mother,” she tells me now. “In her house.”

“What sort of house is it?”

“It’s a special house, I suppose.” Her accent is North London. Born and bred. “A cottage, but it’s detached, right at the edge of the Heath, feels like being at the end of the world.” She smiles as she says this. Her teeth are straight. Orthodontic straight. She was cared for.

“What’s it like, living with your mum?”

She grimaces slightly but then smiles again. “Pros and cons. Mainly cons. She’s a difficult woman.”

“And where’s your dad?”

It takes her a moment to find an answer to this one. “No idea,” she replies eventually. “Disappeared ten years ago.”

“When Daisy was born?” I observe.

She shrugs.

“Where’d he go?”

“Who cares?”

She flashes her eyes at me, and I see it then, her sadness, her fear, her fury, her hate. I think: You are a cruel, unhappy person. I think: You have been hurt. I think: I want to help you.

“Another one?” I say, eyeing her glass. She shoots me a venomous look. She wants to say no. Tell me to fuck off. But she doesn’t.

She drinks the last inch in her glass and hands it to me. “Yes,” she says. “Please.”



* * *



Soon after that, school ends for the Christmas break and Jessamine cannot come to the pub during the day. I wonder what she does at home with her moody tween and her miserable mother in their house at the end of the world. Does she drink vodka out of a water bottle? Does Hugo get walked at all?

I wander down through the Vale of Health a few days after Christmas, pleasantly faded around the edges after a lazy, boozy few days with my big brother and his family of gigantic teenage boys in Banstead. I have brought a gift, or should I say a regift—a bottle of champagne (I hate the stuff), a card, and a Christmas stocking full of dog treats for Hugo that I picked up on sale from Tesco for ninety-nine pence. It’s a windswept kind of day, dots of rain in the air, the sky dark and grisly, but I’ve had a pint on the way through Hampstead and I’m feeling good about life.

I meander through the Vale—is this place even real? I wonder vaguely. Do people actually live here, in these Christmas-card houses? Or are they cardboard cutouts, lit up from inside, puppets moving behind windows?

At the end of the Vale, I have two options—left or right. I turn left just as the streetlights go on: a buzz, a fizz, a sudden transformation from gray to gold. At the farthest end of the street, I see it. A yellow cottage behind a gated driveway. It’s scruffy, unloved, wreathed in damp, pus-colored light. In front are a small red car that looks as if it is never driven, an old army jeep, and a trampoline with two broken springs. A small plume of smoke rises from a spindly chimney pot. There is a half-hearted string of fairy lights in the window, the suggestion of a tree. As I reach the side gate, I hear Jessamine’s dog barking furiously. Then I hear Jessamine saying, “Hugo. Shut up. There’s nobody there.” The dog keeps barking, and eventually I see her face at the small window to the side of the front door.

I ring the doorbell.





chapter fourteen


ALLEN

I was born in 1958, in Beckenham, in deepest South London. My father was undiagnosed bipolar. My mother was addicted to sleeping pills. My childhood was unconventional. When my father was manic, life was fun; when he wasn’t… well. You can imagine. From a very young age I always wanted a wife. I aways wanted children. I wanted apple trees and a neatly folded newspaper and something nice to eat when I got home from work. As a child I wanted to be like the men in the illustrations on the covers of old-fashioned magazines with a pipe and handkerchief in their top pocket, a small child by my side. I wanted to be a family man.