It Could Have Been Her(47)
A few weeks later, after graduating, she would leave, make a film, have a stupid affair, get her heart broken, get an office job, fall in love with her married boss, move back home, and never leave. And Jasper… well, we could never have imagined the path his life would take.
But on that warm summer’s day back in 2005, we knew none of that. We were happy at last and we were blissful in our ignorance of all that was to come.
I had just sliced into a quiche. Or was it a pork pie? I can’t remember. I just know that I was holding my slicing knife when it happened: the sound of a small, friendly female voice over the fence at the side of the garden.
“Excuse me?”
We all stopped and looked at each other.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
Allen put down his napkin in that slow, measured way of his and got to his feet. He stood and turned to the fence and said, “Can we help you?”
“Well, maybe. It’s just there’s a cat out here and it’s stuck and I wondered if it was yours?”
I saw Allen’s expression change to alarm. “Is it gray?” he asked.
“Yes,” came the voice.
“Wait there, I’m coming round.”
“Actually, it’s OK,” came the female voice. “I’ve got him free. Shall I pop him over?”
“No,” said Allen. “Come to the side, just to your left. There’s a gate.”
And then a moment later, the gate opened, and a girl walked in carrying Allen’s cat in her arms. She was pretty, with long, dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, a pale denim jacket, a spotty dress, white Converse, a canvas bag with badges on it—scruffy, but artfully so.
The cat jumped down and ran toward the back door of the house.
“His collar was caught on a tangle,” the girl explained.
“Her,” said Allen. “She’s a girl. And thank you. We’re very grateful to you. Would you like to sit down? Have a glass of water, something to eat?”
There was a gleam of sweat on the girl’s forehead. “Yes,” she said thankfully, “actually, a glass of water would be amazing.”
I could tell then that she was enchanted, tantalized, could barely believe that she had entered this secret corner of this magical enclave. People peer over walls and fences and gates in the Vale; they want to know what’s behind them, who lives here, what secret universe we inhabit. And now this gorgeous, fresh-faced girl was on the other side and there was a table laid with a French linen cloth that had been in my mother’s family since the early 1900s, two lovely teenagers, me, my handsome husband and his precious cat, the sun shining through trees and rosebushes, the sense of being somehow a part of the Heath itself here, right at the very farthest tip of the Vale. I could imagine her telling her friends about this later on, this magical interlude.
Allen had not brought a girl home for a long time at that point in our lives. I thought that phase was over, but I could feel it in the air that afternoon—smell it even, and my smile was brittle, my voice was flat.
My husband pulled a chair out for her; I poured her a glass of iced water; she sat down.
chapter thirty-nine
Back at Seven Dials, Jane searches her email contacts for a man called Tobias Wilson.
Tobias is retired now, but was once Tony’s security consultant, and of course, when she was Tony’s wife, he’d been responsible for Jane’s safety too. He’s everything you’d imagine a private security manager to be: plainly handsome, low-key, gently spoken, and hugely discreet. A former assistant commissioner at the Met, he’s married with twin daughters who are both lawyers and he lives somewhere in a place that’s near London but not London and that’s as much as Jane knows about him. But he was very helpful earlier in the year when Jane was trying to track down the marriage scammer, and now she is hoping that Tobias Wilson might be equally helpful with information about the missing person investigated by police at Thornwood in 2020.
Dearest Tobias
I hope you are well and that your lovely girls and lovely wife are all flourishing.
I’m back with another request for information. I know, anyone would think I was a private investigator! But I seem somehow to have stumbled upon another wrong ’un. This one lives in Hampstead and appears to have had something to do with a missing person investigation. And now there is another person missing from the same address and that is who I am trying to find.
Anyway, the family name is “Black” and the house address is Thornwood, The Vale of Health, London NW3. Police visited this address during the early weeks of the first lockdown in 2020. Do let me know if you can uncover anything. I can pay you for your time, or, if you’ve still got that lovely retriever, I’d be happy to board her for free with me down in Dorset. Or wine, I can always send wine!
Thank you, Tobias. I am always in your debt and so very grateful to you for all your help over so many years.
Yours, with love
Jane
After the email is sent, Jane spends some time googling local restaurants that might be able to deliver food for her get-together with the stepchildren on Saturday. Then she googles the weather and sees that Saturday is the last day of the current hot spell and that means she can move the lunch party onto the roof terrace, but then wonders if it’s childproof up there and goes upstairs to check it out, establishes that only a very acrobatic child would be able to breach the walls, and then she calculates how many chairs she can get up here and decides it might need to be a sit-down picnic, in which case the food will need to be simple and thinks: Pizza, yes, pizza on the roof, lots of cushions, blankets, champagne; it will be wonderful.