It Could Have Been Her(21)

Immediately I knew that something had shifted. Everything tilted in the wrong direction, Mummy’s face turned hard, I saw her nostrils flare, and then I saw her stride across the kitchen to Sandra and slap her around her face. There was a terrible moment of silence and Sandra’s hand went to her cheek, her eyes went wide, and then, and I don’t know why, Mummy slapped her again, even harder, hard enough to unbalance Sandra and nearly knock her over.

I saw that there was a small trickle of blood coming out of Sandra’s nose and I wanted to go to her, to offer her a tissue, to check she was OK, but I was too scared.

“How dare you?” Mummy said to Sandra. “How dare you mutilate my child?”

“Oh my God,” said Sandra, touching the blood on her lip with the side of her finger and looking at it in horror. “Calm down. They’re fake. It was a joke.”

I saw Mummy’s nostrils flare again; I saw her eyes absorb the extent of her overreaction; I saw her double down on everything. When my father walked into the kitchen she said to him, “Get this woman out of here. Now.”



* * *



I watched my father open the door of his jeep to Sandra, then close it after she put herself in the passenger seat. I saw her little wheelie suitcase on the back seat, her puffy winter coat, a shopping bag bulging with clothes. I could still see the red mark on her cheek from where Mummy had slapped her. She looked tired, resigned. She turned just once to look back at the house, to smile at me, and then she was gone.



* * *



Two days later, Daddy brought back another au pair girl. But this one didn’t live in the guest room, she lived in the attic. This one didn’t smile, and this one wasn’t allowed to talk to us.





chapter eighteen


Jane heads back to the Vale of Health later that day. Mr. Tucker pulls open the front door of Thornwood and looks at her with an expression of displeasure and annoyance.

“Hi,” says Jane. “Sorry to bother you. Again. But—” She stops at the sight of the white Westie appearing from behind the man’s legs, his tail wagging hard. “Hugo!” she calls out, and he runs from the doorway to the gate. Jane crouches and pets him through a gap. Her feelings for this dog seem strangely disproportionate to the amount of time she has known him. She wishes she’d never brought him back.

“I wondered,” she says to the man, “if I could have a minute of your time? To talk?”

He scowls at her and folds his arms across his rotund middle. “What is there to talk about?”

“Well, this whole thing,” she says. “With Hugo, and the girl and the Airbnb and all of that. I found a hoodie in the woods near my house, near where Hugo found his way onto my land. It comes from a school, not far from here. I mean, it could be a coincidence. Obviously it could. But seriously, where I live, it’s the back end of nowhere. It’s not full of North London holidaymakers. And yet, there he was, Hugo, a North London dog, far from home. And now a sweatshirt from a North London school. And—of course—the missing girl called Rose White who ties the two things together.”

“I told you,” he says. “I don’t know anything about this girl. She clearly nicked my dog. End of. What more do you need from me?”

“The child,” Jane says, dropping her gaze to the old scooter, the old trampoline. “You told me your stepdaughter used to live here. What was her name?”

The man stares at Jane impassively.

“Does she have the initials DB? Your stepdaughter?”

“I haven’t got time for this,” he says. “I’m going back indoors now. And seriously, I don’t want to sound rude, but I’d rather you didn’t come round again.”

Jane sees it then, a slight pulse through his frame, a shiver of discomfort. He pauses, just for a second; then he grabs Hugo’s collar and guides him back inside the house. A moment later the door closes hard behind him.



* * *



Jane gets back to Seven Dials, where she immediately swings open the lid of her laptop and begins a deep dive into everything Mr. Tucker– and Thornwood-related. She’s infuriated with herself for not asking for his name just now while she had the chance.

She tries dozens of different combinations of his surname and his address and scrolls through nearly twenty pages of results before finally finding something. It’s an online petition signed in July 2018 calling for an early general election.

Stuart Tucker.

Bingo.

And not only that but there is another signatory at the same address: a woman named Jessamine Black. Jane inhales sharply. This must be the mother of Stuart’s stepdaughter. And if she is, then she might also be the daughter of the weird man who brought Jane home all those years ago, and maybe, just maybe, she was the child asleep in bed that night, the child who fell and screamed?

Adrenaline courses through Jane’s veins as all these tiny cogs and wheels start to slot into place and things feel as if they are moving again.

On a roll, she types the name “Jessamine Black” into Google and is stunned when there is a direct hit on the first page of search results.

IMDB

https://www.imdb.com

Jessamine Black

Known for The Bedsitter (2006)



Jane quickly clicks the link and scans the rest of the page. There’s no photo, no biography, no signs of Jessamine having appeared in anything before or since.