It Could Have Been Her(93)
“But where will you go?”
“Somewhere quiet and boring in London. With a park nearby and a big garden for the dogs, and nice neighbors and maybe a trendy little coffee shop at the top of the road and somewhere to buy bread and milk, and a tube station. And yeah, just something boring. Something nice. Something to be proud of. You know.”
Dexter puts his hand over hers and squeezes it. “On the Northern Line?” he asks hopefully.
“Yes,” she says. “On the Northern Line!”
“And then we could start the agency?”
“Yes! Trevally and Stepson?”
“Or, even better,” says Dexter, throwing her a soft smile, “how about Trevally and Son?”
Jane sighs and squeezes his hand, a solitary, foolish tear spilling from her eye. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”
* * *
They take the dogs for a walk later. At the spot in the woods where Jane had first seen Hugo, she stops and points. “This is where it all started,” she says. “Just there. That little dog appearing. My God. A small white dog and then…” She makes an explosion with her hands and shudders gently. There is no need for words.
“What happened to Hugo?” he asks.
“Stuart has him. But I’ve told him that if he needs me to, I’ll take him.”
“Me too,” says Dexter. “I’ll take him.”
“We can share him.”
“Yes, we can share him.” Dexter smiles. “And what will happen to Daisy?”
Jane smiles now. “She’s staying with the lovely man.”
“The lovely handsome man? Who lives on the Northern Line.”
He gives Jane a playful punch, which she ignores. Men, she thinks, even lovely handsome ones, are not on her radar right now and won’t be for quite some time. “Yes,” she says. “Spencer and George are putting her up.”
“That’s nice,” he says. Then he winces and says, “But still, she’s all alone?”
“She’s all alone. Yes. Nineteen years old, and all alone.”
Dexter throws her a knowing look. “Just like you were?” he says.
“Yes,” says Jane. “Like I was. Except,” she adds, “she has Stuart. And Stuart, to be entirely frank, is ten times more than I ever had.”
The dogs circle them then, waiting for sticks to be found and thrown, and for a few minutes Jane and Dexter lose themselves in the pure, undarkened joy of watching the dogs run back and forth, the skitter of their paws, the heat of their breath, the brightness of their eyes.
six months later
BBC BREAKING NEWS
The body of Jasper Allen Black, the 37-year-old brother of Jessamine Black and son of Allen and Annie Black, the so-called Vale of Health Killers, has been found in woods near the village of Little Belmont in Dorset. Mr. Black had last been seen alive two weeks before the discovery of eight sets of human remains in the basement of his childhood home in the exclusive Vale of Health enclave in Hampstead, North London. Daisy Black, 20, who was believed to be the daughter of Jessamine Black but has now been proved to be the daughter of Claire Connolly, the Blacks’ final victim, traced Black using the online forum Reddit. Upon her confronting him with her belief that he was not in fact her uncle and that the young woman who’d last been seen outside the Blacks’ property twenty years earlier was her real mother, Jasper Black tried to kill Daisy by strangulation, before escaping. It is believed that Mr. Black took his own life shortly thereafter. Mr. Black, a circus performer known professionally as Patch the Clown, has also been reported as being behind a scattering of antisocial interactions with young women at night, forcing himself upon them while dressed in the attire of a clown and appearing to be aroused by instilling terror in his victims. The circus that employed Mr. Black for the last eighteen years is currently preparing a statement, but a colleague at Martello’s told a reporter earlier today that Mr. Black was known as a loner and an “oddbod.” It is not known what, if any, involvement Mr. Black had with the atrocities that took place in his childhood “house of horrors,” and his sister, Jessamine Black, is currently hospitalized in an addiction rehabilitation center in Surrey, awaiting trial for manslaughter charges in the case of her mother’s death, and has not been able to comment.
chapter seventy-seven
STUART, ONE MONTH LATER
It has been ten years since I last celebrated Christmas with my brother. I had no idea, of course, when I drove away from his house that day back in 2016, waving and making faces at my nephews from the passenger seat of my brother’s car, that I would not come back to his house for a full decade, that I would make excuses, year after year, delivering half-truths and lies about my absences, because how could I, Stuart Tucker, self-proclaimed free spirit, tell my brother that I’d had my wings clipped by a manipulative, abusive woman?
On Christmas Eve, I collect Daisy from the house where she is staying with her old childhood friend George and George’s amiable and slightly dull dad, Spencer. She looks so different seven months on from the events of May. At some point, while I’ve been out in the suburbs with my brother, Daisy has had something professional done to her hair and looks suddenly grown up and womanly as result. She’s also bought new clothes, something she hadn’t done for years, existing as she did in castoffs and things she found lying around the house. The dull man called Spencer tells her to have a wonderful Christmas and, as we leave, we both turn to regard the yellow house at the bottom of the Vale. It is boarded up against prying eyes, its front garden still churned up and broken from the police excavation of the basement. I touch Daisy’s shoulder reassuringly. “Isn’t it weird,” I ask, “living here, so close?”