It Could Have Been Her(41)
chapter thirty-three
Jane follows the little blue dot on her Maps app showing her location on the Heath. She’s currently heading on foot down a narrow, graveled pathway between an imposing mansion block and the Italianate frontage of a stucco villa with a wrought-iron balcony that overlooks the deep dip of Hampstead Heath. According to the Land Registry map, this path will eventually meet up with a much smaller path that should, if the drawing is accurate, connect her to the very back end of Thornwood.
This corner of the Heath is mysterious and feels strangely uncharted. There are no dog walkers here and very little sunshine gets through the thick green canopy of leaves overhead. Jane can see the rooftops of the villas and cottages of the Vale just below her to the right, but the map takes her in the other direction, through narrower paths and denser foliage, down a very steep slope, and there, in front of her, she sees the distinctive tiled roof of Thornwood.
The land is fenced at the back, but the slats are rotten and flapping away from each other. It’s easy to pull one panel partly open and to squeeze through. She can see the back of the house from here, through a mess of overgrown rosebushes, bony apple trees, outhouses, neglected vegetable patches, and fallen trellises. She can only imagine what this garden must have looked like in its prime, when it was being properly tended.
She makes her way down a side path, away from view of the cottage. At the back of the house is a ramshackle conservatory, old plant shelving rusting on York stone slabs outside. The interior of the conservatory is messy and unkempt. To the right of the conservatory is a door that looks as though it leads into a kitchen. Through the window next to it, Jane can see a cluttered windowsill, old-fashioned curtains, a dark wood dresser against a pale green wall.
She pulls out her phone and takes photographs. Farther along she sees the dimpled opaque glass of what must be a toilet or a bathroom, and to the other side of the house she sees an outhouse attached to the external wall. She heads around the back of the garden again and then toward the outhouse.
It is small, about ten feet square, and has a metal door with a padlock on the outside. The padlock, as she gets closer to it, appears to be open. She glances around herself and then upward toward the first-floor windows, but doesn’t sense anyone’s eyes on her, so she pulls the padlock gently open and eases the metal door toward her. It makes a terrible grinding sound as she does so, and she flinches and squeezes her eyes shut. She stops and looks around again, but nobody seems to have heard. When she pulls again, the door makes another small squeak and then opens, revealing a chilling sight.
A solitary chair, metal with a ripped vinyl seat, and there, on the walls on either side of the chair, a pair of metal rings, screwed into the walls. Jane steps into the outhouse and takes some photos; then, gingerly, she sits on the dirty old chair. She stretches out her arms, and gasps when she sees that they reach perfectly, on each side, to the metal rings.
chapter thirty-four
Her stomach turns with horror and disgust, and she jumps to her feet and pushes through the metal door, out into the perfect limpid air of the May morning, breathing in deeply to quell a terrible wave of nausea.
Allen Black’s face races across her mind’s eye, his back to her as he mixed her drink, the tightness of his jaw when she knocked it from his hand.
Had she drunk the martini that night back in the year 2000, she thinks, she would have ended up in that room, on that chair, shackled to those walls, she knows it, she just knows it. She bends in half, her fist pushed deep into her stomach, certain that she is about to throw up, but then from the house there is a low rumble, building quickly and dramatically into a succession of high-pitched barks, the sound of claws scampering hard and fast over York stone and heading straight toward her. Hugo. Of course. She doesn’t turn to look at him, just runs as fast as she can up the side path of the garden to the very back, where she jumps through the gap in the broken fence and pushes it back into place. On the other side of the fence she can hear Hugo’s insistent barking, his paws banging at the wood, his furious curiosity.
“Hugo!” she whispers from the other side. “It’s me. Jane.”
His barking stops and she hears a small whimper.
“Be a good boy and go back indoors. Good boy.”
He whimpers again, and then it is silent.
Distantly Jane hears Stuart’s voice. “What the fuck, Hugo? Chill. There’s nothing there.”
Jane holds her breath hard, and waits for a minute or two, then heads back through the depths of the Heath and out into the daylight, to the Hampstead ornamental pond gleaming in the sunshine, the shiny traffic in four directions, people, dogs, light.
In a pub called the White Swan a moment later, she orders herself a gin and tonic. It’s early for a drink but her nerves are shredded, her stomach is churning, and she needs something to absorb the shock waves. She has five minutes before her call from Oliver—yes, she remembered without her phone telling her—and she needs to gather herself. She squeezes the lemon slice into the drink and stirs it through, then takes a large slurp through a straw and readies herself to look at the photos of Thornwood on her phone. She swipes through them quickly until she gets to the photos of the interior of the outhouse. She thinks of the smell in there, the putrid green smell of moss and decay and damp, and she thinks of that chilling feeling of stretching her arms from wall to wall and realizing that they fitted. She sends the photos to Dexter with shocked-face emojis and the words “in Stuart’s back garden” and then she sees the time on her phone switch from 11:59 to 12:00 and calls Oliver.