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.
She spares no details now as she describes the incident to Dexter, and his face performs a theater of reactions as she speaks.
“Fucking hell, Jane,” he says when she’s finished. “And it was definitely that house?”
“Oh God, yes, totally. It was the jeep that sealed it for me.”
“But that wasn’t the man?”
“No, the man would be seventyish by now, I reckon. And he was very elegant and well-dressed, very tall. But did you hear what the man said about the jeep belonging to his landlady’s ex?
That must have been her. The pretty wife.
She must still own the house. And maybe she finally got rid of the old pervert. ”
“So that guy, Mr. Tucker. You’ve never seen him before?”
“No. It was just the three of us that night. And the screaming child upstairs.”
“It’s such a strange coincidence,” says Dexter. “Freakish almost.”
“I know,” says Jane, but then, her life has always worked like this, she feels; there’s always been a strange pattern to things, invisible threads making invisible connections, leading her from one bizarre episode to the next.
“Well,” she says, “that’s that. The Hugo Incident is officially over.”
“I feel sad about it,” says Dexter.
Jane thinks about Hugo curled into a neat ball on her bed last night, slumbering peacefully between her own dogs, and nods. “Me too.”
Her phone rings then. It’s Hester, the vet.
“Jane! Hi! Glad I caught you! Do you still have Hugo?”
“No. We just left him with his owner. Is anything wrong?”
“No. Nothing’s wrong. At least, there’s nothing wrong with the dog.
But I just heard something weird, from Helen Yaxley.
You know, the woman with all the donkeys?
She has that annex on her land that she rents out.
And she’s been renting it out to a young woman.
She arrived a week ago with, according to Helen Yaxley, a small white dog.
Helen didn’t catch the dog’s name, but she agreed that it was probably a West Highland.
Anyway, Helen went to check in on them this morning.
The back door to the annex was unlocked.
The girl’s stuff was still there. There was a filled mug of tea on the counter.
Hand-washed underwear hanging up to dry.
Half-eaten bowl of cereal congealed on the kitchen counter.
And no sign of the girl, or of the dog. The police are on their way there now.
I just thought you might want to know. Maybe you can let the owner know?
It might be a friend of his. Someone he knows? ”
Jane lets her fork drop onto her plate and eyes Dexter urgently. “Yes. Right. Definitely. We’ll go back. We’ll tell him. And the girl. What was her name? Did Helen say?”
“Yes,” says Hester. “Her name was Rose. Rose White.”