It Could Have Been Her(73)
She pauses and looks at Dr. Twist. She has no idea what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling about this curveball. He issues a small nod and says, “Ah.”
She stares at him, waiting for him to expand on the syllable.
“Well,” he says eventually. “Obviously I’m not allowed to share personal details with you, but yes, he was my patient, and yes, I believe he might present a danger to young women.”
She sees his cheeks draw in as he blinks slowly at her. He has a slight flush as though he is embarrassed somehow.
“God,” says Jane, blowing out her cheeks with the horror of knowing that her fears were fully founded. “Is there anything else you could tell me? Anything that might help me track him down? I believe you wrote to him, about a year ago?”
“I did,” he says gravely. “I’d seen a story in the papers, an attack on a young woman, a similar assault to the ones he told me he’d been carrying out when I first met him, and I was concerned that maybe his old behaviors were breaking through again. So I wrote to him out of the blue to see if he’d like to resume his treatment.”
“And?” says Jane. “Did he?”
“No. I didn’t hear from him. I wasn’t surprised.” He pauses. “Look. I shouldn’t really be having this conversation with you, but on the other hand, I’ve been feeling uncomfortable ever since I saw that news article. I’ve been almost, as it were, waiting for something like this to happen.”
There is a small, brittle silence between them. Neither of them is moving or even, it seems, breathing. They are both behaving in ways that are outside their remits.
“What shall I do?” Jane asks.
He looks at her apologetically, and shrugs.
“I mean, do you have any idea where he might be? Where he might have taken Daisy? Did he ever mention anywhere that was important to him?”
Dr. Twist shakes his head. “No. Never. In fact he barely spoke. The only place he ever told me about was his home, where he grew up. He described it as a hellhole. He told me that he dreamed about his home every night of his life. Dreamed that he was back there, trapped.”
Trapped, thinks Jane. Just like whoever was once chained to the chair in the outhouse. And as she so very nearly was when she was just twenty-nine years old.
Once again, Jane realizes, it all comes back to that house, that terrible, impenetrable house, and she knows, more than anything, she has to get inside again.
chapter fifty-nine
Jane meets Dexter at his flat in Belsize Park an hour later. He’s dressed and wet-haired, a small star-shaped sticker covering a zit on his cheekbone, in high-tops, a gigantic sweatshirt, and leggings. He pulls her to him and hugs her hard. “So, how’s it going?” he asks, filling the kettle from the tap.
Jane fills him on the details but doesn’t quite wander into the territory of her conversation with Dr. Twist about her childhood. He does not need to know about that.
“You know,” he says, “we have to find a way to talk to this Stuart guy away from the house. I mean, he must go to the shops, right? He must take the dog out? He must sometimes leave that bloody house. So let’s go and stake it out.”
* * *
They buy sugar buns and large coffees from the Swedish bakery on Hampstead High Street and take them to the small hill on the Heath opposite Thornwood. It’s windy today, white clouds rolling briskly across a blue sky, a sign of nicer weather to come, Jane hopes. Jane has a pair of binoculars and Dexter is using the camera lens of his phone to zoom down into the Vale. All is quiet; all is still. Dexter is telling Jane about a girl at his Tuesday-night dance class who twisted a muscle so badly that she had to have surgery to put it back into place. Jane winces and says, “That’s yet another good reason not to go to dance classes when you could be sitting in a restaurant eating nice food.”
They talk about the preceding weekend, about the party Jane had thrown for her stepchildren; they gossip a little about the dynamics, some of the iffy parenting, the things people had said and the way they’d said it, poor fashion choices here and there.
After an hour and a half, the harsh wind is starting to get to Jane. Her hair is tangled, her eyes are watering, and she’s cold, even inside her puffa. Dexter has run out of steam and is staring mutely at TikTok clips on his phone. Jane is about to suggest giving up when she notices something through the lenses of her binoculars. It’s Hugo, attached to a lead, pulling desperately toward the front gate, and followed shortly afterward by Stuart Tucker.
“Dex!” She nudges her stepson, who looks at her and then down at the Vale and sees what she sees. They jump quickly to their feet and walk back down the hill toward the lane. When Stuart and Hugo have turned the corner, they follow them at a distance onto the Heath and then turn right past the ponds, where ducks float on tiny platforms and the blue and white of the sky is reflected in the limpid surface of the water. Jane puts on sunglasses and a baseball cap; Dexter pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt.
After a while Stuart and the dog turn right again and are facing East Heath Road, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross over to Well Road. They follow them via the backstreets toward Hampstead High Street, where Stuart heads into the tiny covered market next to the post office. Jane and Dexter sit on a bench opposite and watch Stuart sniffing hunks of cheese and collecting small paper bags of produce, which he drops into a canvas shoulder bag. He gives Hugo a piece of something to eat and then crosses back over the high street and right onto Flask Walk, where he heads into the pub at the top of the lane.