It Could Have Been Her(74)
Jane and Dexter exchange a triumphant look and walk in behind him. He orders a pint of lager and a bag of crisps. Jane regards him from behind; this is the closest she’s ever been to him. He looks gaunt, spent. His clothes appear clean, but worn-out, faded, shambolic. His hair is also clean, but long and straggly, pale brown run through with gray and silver. His knuckles are red and sore-looking. There is an old bruise on his cheekbone. He has an earring in one ear, but not in the other, and as she looks closer she sees that his left ear is deformed, misshapen with a large keloid scar covering most of it.
She feels—strongly, and surprisingly—a kick of maternal concern for this thin, defenseless man. His pain is hers for a strange, almost sickening moment of kinetic symbiosis. His bruise is the bruise she always had somewhere on her body as a child, his ruined ear is her crooked wrist, his knobbled spine is her scrawny childhood body, emaciated by lack of nutrition: Weetabix eaten with water, cold frankfurters out of jars. She sees it all over him: abuse—neglect—hopelessness. Suddenly she wants to protect him, not confront him. She sees a slight tremor in his hand as he picks up his pint of lager and the corner of his crisp packet. She rests a gentle hand on her stepson’s arm and throws him a look. “Wait,” she says. “Just wait.”
But then Hugo turns, brightly, his snout tipped to the air, and moves toward Jane, slowly at first but then faster when he gets the scent of her, and he is pulling at his lead, pulling at Stuart, who slops beer out of his glass and curses quietly under his breath. Hugo tugs until he is at Jane’s feet and she crouches to her haunches to greet him.
She glances up and sees Stuart staring down at her.
“Fuck’s sake,” he says.
“Oh,” she says, “hi! Sorry, I wasn’t, I mean… We’re not following you, we just came in for a drink.” She gestures to Dexter behind her, who is slowly pulling down the hood of his sweatshirt.
“Hi,” says Dexter with a raised hand. “How are you?”
Stuart groans and calls to the dog, but Hugo doesn’t want to leave Jane, so he sets his pint back on the bar and leans against it. “What is it with you two?” he asks in a tired voice.
Jane pulls herself back to standing and smiles at Stuart. “We just like Hampstead,” she says.
Dexter nods his agreement.
“Listen,” she says, “I’ve been nosing around a little bit, still obsessed with the fact that Hugo ended up on my land, still obsessed with what on earth happened to the girl who disappeared, still got so many questions. I’m worried about her. I’m worried about you…” She sighs. “I’m just basically worried, that’s all.”
She sees a flash of something pass through Stuart’s tired eyes then, something hopeful, but scared.
He cocks his head toward the back area of the pub. “I’ll be sitting in there,” he says, “when you’ve got your drinks.”
Jane gets herself a glass of sparkling water and Dexter an orange juice and lemonade, and they take them to the back of the pub, where Stuart and Hugo are sitting in front of a large log fire. Stuart doesn’t say anything as they join him at his table, just watches them thoughtfully over the top of his pint glass. He rests it on the table and waits for them to settle.
“A couple of days ago,” Jane begins, “I realized there’d been a circus in my village around the time that Daisy was staying in the holiday rental. Your neighbor, a nice lady called Jane, she’d told us that Daisy’s uncle Jasper had left home when he was young, to ‘join the circus.’ I put two and two together and yesterday I went to the location of the circus while they were in town over the bank holiday weekend, and my dog found a used coffee cup—scent-matched it to a bra of Daisy’s from her suitcase, which makes me believe she was there, at the circus ground, looking for him, no doubt. What do you know about him? About Jasper?”
Stuart sighs heavily. “Literally nothing. Nobody talks to me about him. I just know that he ran away from home when he was seventeen.”
“OK,” Jane continues. “Well. I’ve been digging around, as you know, and I’ve got a crazy jumble of things, enough to make my head spin. I know that Jessamine probably isn’t Daisy’s mum, which means that Jasper is not her uncle, which means that Daisy is likely with an older man who is not related to her and who potentially has a track record as an abuser, possibly even a rapist.” She leaves a beat of silence for this word to register with Stuart, and then continues: “I need to go to the police now. OK? And they will come to you and you will need to answer their questions. You need to report her missing, Stuart, and you need to do it now.”
Stuart wipes his mouth hard with the back of his hand. His eyes dart around the room. “It’s not that simple,” he says. “I wish it was. But it’s not. Daisy’s family—it’s complicated. Allowing the police into their world—there’d be questions—it would… No. It can’t happen,” he says. “It cannot happen.”
This broken man with dead eyes, Jane thinks, this man who drinks alone in pubs, this man who is trapped in a house full of secrets, why does this man feel the need to protect the women in that house? What hold do they have over him? Why is he putting Jessamine and her mother ahead of a vulnerable teenage girl?
Jane looks at him steadily. “What happened to your ear, Stuart?”