It Could Have Been Her(84)

The man smiles. “You’re welcome. And good luck.” He’s about to close the door but then he opens it again slightly and says, “My name’s Spencer, by the way.”

“Yes,” she says. “I know. My name’s Jane.”

“Yes,” he says, with a small smile. “I know.”



* * *



Stuart opens the door to her a moment later, Hugo jumping around at his feet. Stuart looks serious, in an off-white T-shirt and jeans. He looks behind her and then toward her. “Just you?” he asks.

“Just me,” Jane replies, crouching down to greet Hugo before straightening up again. “I thought I was going to die here that night, you know. Twenty-six years ago. I thought it was the end of me.”

She leaves this dark pronouncement hanging between them for a second before turning her eye to the detail of the house she’s remembered only as a drunken, panic-stricken blur for so many years. It’s as she recalls, but also not. It was a smart but old-fashioned home when she was here in 2000, but now it’s on the edge of neglect, its faded elegance riven through with the smell of damp walls, dog, stale furnishings, dust, and sadness. She thinks of her own house—does her home have this smell too? she wonders. Do visitors notice it, when she doesn’t?

“Come through,” says Stuart, leading her into an overcast kitchen with terra-cotta flooring and elderly Formica-clad kitchen units. “Sorry about the mess,” he adds. “I tried to do a bit of a tidy up, but really, we’ve let the place go to pot lately. Well, for a while.”

“It’s fine,” says Jane, looking around at the piles of recycling, the sink full of washing up, the clothes dryer hanging by the back door. “I’m used to it.”

“Bacon sandwich?” he asks, waving an unopened packet of bacon at her. Under normal circumstances, there’s nothing Jane would enjoy more than a bacon sandwich, but right now her stomach couldn’t cope.

“I’m fine, thank you. I had breakfast at home.” She clears her throat and pulls out a chair to sit down. “Don’t let me stop you though.”

Soon the kitchen is vibrant with the smell of frying bacon and innocuous small talk about Jane’s temporary living arrangements in Covent Garden. Stuart is telling Jane that he once lived in Covent Garden, in a squat just behind the Strand, when he was a hairdresser. She’s expressing surprise at his former career while staring through the door of the kitchen into the dank garden beyond, at the wall of the outhouse where it protrudes menacingly into view. Finally, he returns to the table with two cups of tea, one for her, one for him, and his bacon sandwich cut into two pieces and oozing ketchup from its edges. She notices a second bacon sandwich sitting on the kitchen counter but doesn’t mention it.

“I’m really grateful you came,” he says, lifting the sandwich halfway to his mouth. As he does so Jane notices fresh scratches along the inside of his wrist.

“No problem,” she says. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

He puts the sandwich down again and sighs. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t want you to freak out. But there’s something you need to know. And I think—well, we all think—it would be better coming direct from the horse’s mouth.” He turns then and directs his voice toward the hallway outside the kitchen. “Are you there?”

A young woman’s voice replies: “I’m here.”

“Come on then, come in and sit with us.”

Jane catches her breath and waits. A moment later a girl walks in. She has badly bleached hair, wide-set eyes, and a terrified look on her face.

“Hi,” she says to Jane. “I’m Daisy.”





chapter sixty-eight


Daisy picks at the edges of the bacon sandwich that Stuart has placed in front of her. “Thanks and everything,” she says to Jane, “for trying to find me. And for bringing Hugo home.”

Jane stares in awe at the young woman who she can now see is both the small, quirky dark-haired girl in Spencer’s son’s photograph and also the plain, dumpy blond girl described by Helen Yaxley. She has put on weight, and she is older now, less elfin, but it is definitely her: the same dark eyes, the same slightly protruding ears and fine-boned nose.

“You’re welcome,” says Jane.

“It was stupid of me to take Hugo. I don’t know what I was thinking—I just had never been anywhere on my own before and I was scared to be alone. But I’m glad you found him. I’m glad he was OK. I was so worried about him.”

There’s a small silence and then Jane says, “So, how long have you been home?”

Daisy shrugs and pulls a piece of bacon out of the edge of her sandwich. “A couple of weeks.”

“Bloody hell,” says Jane, thinking, of course, of course she has. “Right. And what happened, with Helen’s Airbnb? Why did you abandon it like that?”

Daisy stirs slightly in her chair and sighs. She looks up at Jane with those liquid brown eyes and she says, “Listen. If you want to know everything, I’ll have to start at the beginning.”

“Which is?”

“Which is the day that policewoman came here and showed me that picture.”





chapter sixty-nine