It Could Have Been Her(5)

“I won’t be long,” she’d said lightly. “I can’t drink gin without nicotine, you know what it’s—”

“Stay,” he’d said again, and she remembers the feel of his other hand on her wrist, the sense of being tugged, and she remembers the wife putting herself between them.

“Let her go,” she’d said to the man. “The children are awake.”

Jane had felt the tension drop, his grip soften and then loosen entirely.

Her hands shook as she lit her cigarette outside the front door. She’d looked up at the dark windows above, wondering about the scream and the bang, but all was dark, all was quiet. And then, with a driving sense of urgency, she’d tiptoed across the crunchy gravel, quietly unhooked the inside latch of the gate, and then, and only then, had held her bag tight to her stomach and run and run and run.

Now as she watches the dot on her phone app moving through the Vale toward the house called Thornwood, she feels it in her gut, even before they get there: It’s the same house.





chapter three


There’s a wooden sign nailed to the fence with the word “Thornwood” painted on it, which Jane doesn’t remember from that long-ago night, and there is a plastic button attached to a post by the gate that Jane presses. She hears the faint tinkle of an old-fashioned electric bell-chime from inside the house and notices Hugo react to it, look around expectantly, the beginnings of a low growl forming in the back of his throat.

There is the sound of a door being opened, and then a male voice calling from the other side of the beaten-up jeep, which is still there.

Jane feels her breath catch at the sight of it. If the jeep is still there then the man must also still be there.

“Yes?” comes a male voice.

Dexter and Jane exchange a look. “Oh,” Jane calls back. “Hello. Have you lost a dog?”

There is a brief silence and the sound of large feet on gravel. Then a man pulls the gate open and stares at them.

Jane braces herself for the man from that chilling night all those years ago but it is not that man. It is a very different man indeed.

He is fiftyish, average height, and scruffy-looking with long salt-and-pepper hair, thinning on top, and pulled back into a ponytail. He wears a faded Ramones T-shirt, black combat trousers, and worn black trainers, and holds a mug of something in a tattooed hand. His gaze goes down to Hugo.

“Fucking hell,” he says, resting his mug on a wall and crouching down to the dog. “Where the fuck have you been?”

Hugo looks pleased to see the man and nuzzles against his hands, his tail whipping back and forth. But Jane can also read a slight confusion in the dog’s body language, a sense that he doesn’t quite know what’s happening.

“What’s his name?” she asks the man pointedly.

“Hugo,” says the man, going back to standing. “He disappeared a few days ago. Thought he’d been nicked. Where d’you find him?”

“Near my house,” she says primly. “On the coast.”

The man looks surprised. “The…?” he starts, but then stops and shakes his head. “Whereabouts, exactly?”

“Brighton,” she says sharply. “Just outside.”

She senses Dexter throwing her a confused look and ignores it.

“Well,” says the man. “Thank you for bringing him back. Is he OK?”

Jane nods. “I took him to the vet. He was a little dehydrated but, apart from that, in good condition.”

“Do I owe you any money?” he asks, a hand going absent-mindedly to his trouser pocket. “For the vet?”

Jane shakes her head. “No,” she says. “It’s fine.”

He takes his hand away from his pocket and nods. “Well, cheers anyway. I appreciate it.” He leans down with a sigh. “Come on, mate,” he says to the dog. “Let’s get you inside.”

“My name is Jane, by the way. And this is my stepson Dexter; he only lives up the road, so if you ever need anyone to look after the dog, take care of him, I know he’d be more than happy.”

Dexter nods enthusiastically, but the man is already backing away, his hand on the gate, preparing to close it again.

“Sure,” he says, “thanks. Like I say. I appreciate it.”

“How long have you lived here?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Ten years? Or so?”

“The jeep? Is it yours?”

“Nah. Belonged to my landlady’s ex-husband. Why? Do you want to buy it? It’s up for sale.”

“Oh,” she says. “God. No. Thank you. I just, er… I just recognized it, that’s all. My dad had one like it. When I was little.”

He nods at her, and then he turns, the gate closes, and the man and his dog disappear from sight.





chapter four


Jane takes Dexter for coffee and cake in Hampstead Village. There is a heavy silence between them.

“Are you OK?” Dexter asks.

Jane cuts her salted caramel muffin into four pieces and puts one of them in her mouth. The sugar hit is immediate and gratifying.

“Not really,” she says. And then she takes a deep breath and she tells Dexter the story of the night she always remembers as the night she nearly died. It’s been her party piece for years. “Did I ever tell you about the night I went back to a stranger’s house, then decided I was about to be drugged and possibly murdered, freaked out, and ran away?” It always got a laugh. In her mind the anecdote had become distilled down to a one-sentence slice of life, but now it’s suddenly expanded back to full size: the feel of it, the chill on her flesh, the dead eyes of the man with no name, his pursed-mouthed beauty-queen wife wordlessly aiding her escape, the bang and scream overhead, the trees rustling in the dark wind as she ran helter-skelter through the Vale and back to the bright lights of the village.