Chapter Ten
Tony had folded something into the palm of Jane’s hand as she left his house that morning.
It was a key. “Use the house,” he’d said.
“Whenever you want. I’m going back to Nevada tomorrow, and I won’t be here again in London until October.
” He’d closed her fingers over the key, then put one of his own fingers to his lips and said, “Just don’t let it get back to Maddy. ”
Jane had stared down at the key, her stomach swirling. “Seriously?”
“Absolutely seriously! You’re losing yourself out there in the country. You need a change of pace.”
“Do you trust me not to change the locks and keep it forever?”
“Yes.” He’d laughed. “Of course I do. You and I—whatever it was that went wrong between us, it was never about lack of trust. If anything, it was about too much honesty…” He’d smiled and tipped his head to one side.
“I would trust you with my life. Just don’t bring all those crazy dogs here and let them on the beds, OK? Especially that one that drools.”
She’d smiled. “That would be great. Honestly. Just what I needed,” she’d said. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Well, you are so great with the kids, especially Dexter, I feel better being all the way over there knowing that you’re here for them if they need anything.
I should have thought of it before. But I always assumed you were down there in the chaos living your best life. I didn’t know you were lonely.”
“I’m not lonely, Tony. Just bored.”
“Bored. Lonely. Whatever. Use the house. Have some fun. Meet some people. Solve some crimes.”
Helen meets her at the front door of her smart cottage.
She’s crisp and charming as always in a white blouse and blue turned-up jeans, her gray hair tied back into a ponytail and her feet in Birkenstocks.
Her dogs follow them as they walk across her land toward the annex, a black-clad rectangle with a wraparound terrace set in a quiet corner out of view.
“She was so young,” Helen is saying. “Felt almost too young to be out here on her own. She told me she was studying for her A levels, that she couldn’t concentrate at home because it was too noisy. She said she needed some space and peace. She just seemed really, really sweet.”
“What did she look like?” Jane asks as Helen turns a key in the door of the annex.
“Pretty, I suppose,” says Helen. “Tiny bit overweight. A little scruffy. Dyed blond hair, kind of to here.” She touches her collarbone.
“Accent?”
“Normal. London, I’d guess. Not posh. Just average.”
“And what was she like? I mean, did she seem happy?”
Helen sighs. “Happy? No. Definitely not happy. Subdued, I would say. And I just put that down to shyness. Maybe stress about her exams. But polite, and sweet. Yes. Very.”
“And she didn’t tell you anything about herself?”
“No. Nothing. But then—I didn’t ask. I never ask about my guests. It’s not my place.” She leads Jane into the annex and pulls open the curtains. “I haven’t touched anything. I’m still half expecting her to come back.”
“How long did she book the place for?”
“Unspecified. But A levels start mid-May, so I’d assumed she’d be gone before then.
She paid a hundred-pound deposit in cash, asked if she could pay the rest when she left, and I said I’d be happy to wait.
In all honesty, I think I wasn’t too fussed whether she paid or not, the place was just sitting there empty, and I wanted her to do well in her A levels.
I saw her take the dog out two or three times a day.
She smiled and waved but didn’t come over to say hi and that was fine with me. ”
“I assume she gave you details? An address? Passport? Some form of ID?”
“Well, no. Like I say, it was all very last minute. She messaged me the day before. I said it was available. She turned up with cash. She was young, sweet—I didn’t think I needed anything else from her.
Stupid, really, in hindsight.” Helen shrugs.
“Anyway,” she says, “what are you looking for exactly?”
“I’m not sure,” says Jane, eyeing the mug on the kitchen counter full of cold tea, the open suitcase on the floor by the unmade bed, the loaf of white sliced bread by the toaster left unsealed, a tub of butter, a tube of Beroccas, a phone charger still plugged into the USB socket above the kitchen counter, a tin of Lily’s Kitchen dog food, a bag of dog biscuits, the water bowl on the floor.
“No sign of any schoolbooks,” she observes crisply.
Helen grimaces. “Yes,” she says. “I did wonder about that.”
The ladies’ underpants she sees hanging to dry on the radiator are not the sort of thing that Jane would normally associate with a teenage girl.
She has known a lot of teenage girls over her long career as a stepmother and not one of them ever wore underpants that covered their bellies. But these are very large indeed.
“You said she was a bit overweight?”
“Only a tiny bit. Puppy fat, probably.”
“But not those underpants overweight?”
“I have to say, Jane,” Helen says with a dry laugh, “I hadn’t really given it any thought!”
Jane crouches by the open suitcase and carefully goes through the contents.
Plain T-shirts. A scruffy bra. A pair of pale pink leggings.
A pair of knitted slippers with a fur lining.
A packet of tarot cards. A Matt Haig novel.
A small leather pouch containing two pairs of silver stud earrings.
A roll of dog poo bags. A Ziploc bag containing small vials of essential oils.
A packet of tampons. In the tiny bathroom in the corner of the annex there is a damp towel pooled on the floor, deodorant and Simple face cream on the glass shelf above the sink, supermarket-brand shampoo and conditioner (both for blond hair, Jane notes), a pair of discarded underpants on the floor, this pair much smaller than the others, making Jane’s observation of the oversized underwear in the main room more pertinent.
There’s no makeup anywhere in the place.
No products beyond the very, very basic.
Nothing nice. Nothing fancy. Nothing pretty.
Which is fine, Jane surmises. Just because Jane loves pretty things, just because nearly every woman Jane knows likes pretty things, doesn’t mean that everyone does.
“Well,” she says to Helen. “Thank you for letting me have a nose around. The police have the details of the guy in London from Hester the vet so there’s a chance they might want to talk to him, to see if there’s anything connecting the two of them.
But otherwise, yes, maybe she did just steal someone’s dog in London, travel halfway across the country to a random Airbnb, then completely disappear minutes after making herself a cup of tea and washing her underwear.
Stranger things have happened.” She sighs.
Helen nods skeptically. “Occam’s razor,” she says.
“But you’ll keep me posted?”
“I’ll keep you posted. Yes.” Helen’s smile is slightly long-suffering as if she has had to spend a vast chunk of her life humoring Jane’s private-eye fantasies.
“Thanks. You’re the best.” Jane throws Helen one of her smiles, the one that she knows people find hard to resist. Sure enough she sees Helen’s face soften, breaking into a smile of her own.
“No problem, Jane. And how are things? With you? How’s the house?”
Everyone in the village knows that Jane’s house is an ongoing nightmare. Helen is old enough to remember Jane’s parents, Jane’s brother, the tragedy of it all. Asking after the house is her rather British way of asking how Jane is dealing with the shrapnel of her life.
“Disastrous as ever. But summer’s on its way. Rosebery is always better when the weather’s good.”
This is not entirely true, but the last thing Jane wants is anyone to feel sorry for her.
Yes, she had a raw, brutal childhood; yes, she lost her parents to their addictions when she was barely a grown-up; and yes, her brother went the same way as her parents and left her all alone in the world when she was still a young woman.
But she’s had a good life. She has more than most. She does not want to inspire pity.
She wants to find Rose White. That is what she wants.
The dogs are ecstatic when Jane returns. She falls to her knees and allows the five minutes of wet noses and dank breath, the whoosh of tails and weight of heavy paws on her shoulders, on her legs.
Shannon gathers her things and smiles fondly. “They’ve all been so good,” she says, and then regales Jane with the sorts of dog-based minutiae and anecdotes that only a dog’s owner would want to hear.
Jane hands Shannon three twenty-pound notes.
Shannon says, “Oh, by the way, what happened to the cute white dog? Did you get him home OK?”
Jane tells her about the cottage in the Vale of Health, the strange man, the sense that something wasn’t quite right, and then Shannon says, “Yes, I saw that girl a few times out in the woods near Helen’s place—you know, the parkland where I walk the Clarkes’ dogs?”
“Oh,” says Jane, brushing dog hair off her jeans. “Right. Did you ever talk to her?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Nothing much. Her dog. The Clarkes’ dogs. Dogs in general, you know. She said she was going to be here for a few days, studying for exams.”
“Did she seem OK?”
“Well, yes. I mean, shy. Slightly anxious, edgy, but all young people are like that these days, aren’t they?”
“You’re a young person, Shannon.”
“Not really. Not anymore. I’ll be thirty in eight months.”
“That is young.”
“Yes, but too old to be doing with all that anxiety and whatnot. Just got to get on with it eventually, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Jane agrees heartily. “Yes, you really do.”
“Anyway, I’m free a lot over the summer—I’ve left the spa, going to be focusing more on the dog business from now on, thinking of starting a daycare place. So I’ll be around if you need me, just call me whenever. You know how much I love your boys. And how much I love this house.”
Shannon is obsessed with trashy Victorian literature about rich people in big houses falling on hard times, thus she loves the pandemonium of Rosebery Hall, the peeling wallpaper, broken hall tiles, dusty fireplaces, crumbling ceilings.
And she loves Jane’s tragic backstory; the dead parents, the dead brother, the viscount ex-husband with a stately home and half of Gloucestershire to his name.
Jane meanwhile craves the clean lines of Shannon’s village apartment, three bedrooms and an open-plan living room above the spa where she sometimes works, lots of windows, a brand-new kitchen, a tiny terrace at the back just big enough for a friend and a bottle of wine.
But every time she thinks about the estate agent’s visit last Friday to value Rosebery Hall, Jane’s skin turns clammy, her heart rate picks up.
She thinks of the utter essence of herself knitted into every inch of this place and the realization that by selling the house, she will be selling the only thing that remains of what used to be her family, and she will be cast adrift.
“Well, thank you, Shannon. That would be great, actually. My ex Tony, he’s lent me his London place, so I might be away quite a bit over the next couple of weeks. It’d be great if you could stay with the boys.”
“It would be my pleasure,” says Shannon, her face lighting up at the prospect. “Honestly. You barely even need to pay me. Well, obviously, you do need to pay me. But you know what I mean.”
She smiles again at Jane, says goodbye to the dogs, and then Jane is alone, her head a mess of thoughts and feelings and, finally, after a time, the comforting sense that, as Tony so rightly said, there is a job that needs to be done.
There are eight rooms on the ground floor of Jane’s house, but the kitchen and the morning room are the only two that Jane uses.
Upstairs she has her parents’ old master suite, a vast twenty-five-square-foot bedroom with William Morris wallpaper, a bay window overlooking the grounds, and an en suite that her grandfather fitted himself that gives Jane the ick every time she uses it; it’s a putrid putty pink, with rusty, leaky taps and a green linoleum that is peeling around the edges. It also smells.
Jane could have used the money from her divorce from Tony to replace the bathroom, but instead she’d given it all to the dog shelter in Spain, washing the decay and humiliation of another failed marriage off her psyche by giving the money away.
She’d kept just enough, by her calculations, to live a relatively low-maintenance life until she was ninety.
She wishes now she’d kept just a little more.
Just enough for a new bathroom, maybe, some new kitchen cabinets.
The money from her first husband, the Viscount, she’d spent on saving this stupid house from collapsing.
It had gone to scaffolding and girders, breeze blocks, boilers, and roof tiles, and the house had looked exactly the same after spending ￡400,000 on it as it had before, but less likely to collapse, explode, or flood.
She walks into the grandest of her three living rooms. Even at this pleasant time of year when the last frost of the winter was at least six weeks ago, it is cold in this room, cold in its very bones.
In here is a portrait that was painted by a friend of her parents’ when she and her brother were about seven or eight.
The four of them are posed under a large tree in the front garden, with a dog called Blue whom Jane still feels tearful about when she remembers her death even now, nearly fifty years on.
They look like a Hollywood fantasy of a quirky, eccentric British family, with their messy hair, muddy boots, ruddy cheeks, brightly colored knitwear: a Paddington Bear wet dream.
But behind the dream were addiction, depression, mental health issues.
Behind the dream were bad decisions, dysfunction, and early deaths.
She takes the painting from the wall, blowing away the lace of cobwebs that comes with it.
The wallpaper behind is a perfect rectangle of richly colored roses, unfaded by decades of daylight.
Jane takes the portrait to the morning room and props it on the sideboard.
This, she realizes, is all she needs from Rosebery now.
This painting of a moment, which might have been real, but probably wasn’t, and encapsulates everything she thinks she would lose if she sold this house.
She would not lose a damp bathroom or a broken ceiling or leaking kitchen tap.
She might just lose herself.