Chapter Fifty-Nine
Jane meets Dexter at his flat in Belsize Park an hour later.
He’s dressed and wet-haired, a small star-shaped sticker covering a zit on his cheekbone, in high-tops, a gigantic sweatshirt, and leggings.
He pulls her to him and hugs her hard. “So, how’s it going?
” he asks, filling the kettle from the tap.
Jane fills him on the details but doesn’t quite wander into the territory of her conversation with Dr. Twist about her childhood. He does not need to know about that.
“You know,” he says, “we have to find a way to talk to this Stuart guy away from the house. I mean, he must go to the shops, right? He must take the dog out? He must sometimes leave that bloody house. So let’s go and stake it out.”
They buy sugar buns and large coffees from the Swedish bakery on Hampstead High Street and take them to the small hill on the Heath opposite Thornwood.
It’s windy today, white clouds rolling briskly across a blue sky, a sign of nicer weather to come, Jane hopes.
Jane has a pair of binoculars and Dexter is using the camera lens of his phone to zoom down into the Vale.
All is quiet; all is still. Dexter is telling Jane about a girl at his Tuesday-night dance class who twisted a muscle so badly that she had to have surgery to put it back into place.
Jane winces and says, “That’s yet another good reason not to go to dance classes when you could be sitting in a restaurant eating nice food. ”
They talk about the preceding weekend, about the party Jane had thrown for her stepchildren; they gossip a little about the dynamics, some of the iffy parenting, the things people had said and the way they’d said it, poor fashion choices here and there.
After an hour and a half, the harsh wind is starting to get to Jane.
Her hair is tangled, her eyes are watering, and she’s cold, even inside her puffa.
Dexter has run out of steam and is staring mutely at TikTok clips on his phone.
Jane is about to suggest giving up when she notices something through the lenses of her binoculars.
It’s Hugo, attached to a lead, pulling desperately toward the front gate, and followed shortly afterward by Stuart Tucker.
“Dex!” She nudges her stepson, who looks at her and then down at the Vale and sees what she sees.
They jump quickly to their feet and walk back down the hill toward the lane.
When Stuart and Hugo have turned the corner, they follow them at a distance onto the Heath and then turn right past the ponds, where ducks float on tiny platforms and the blue and white of the sky is reflected in the limpid surface of the water.
Jane puts on sunglasses and a baseball cap; Dexter pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt.
After a while Stuart and the dog turn right again and are facing East Heath Road, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross over to Well Road.
They follow them via the backstreets toward Hampstead High Street, where Stuart heads into the tiny covered market next to the post office.
Jane and Dexter sit on a bench opposite and watch Stuart sniffing hunks of cheese and collecting small paper bags of produce, which he drops into a canvas shoulder bag.
He gives Hugo a piece of something to eat and then crosses back over the high street and right onto Flask Walk, where he heads into the pub at the top of the lane.
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?”
He blinks. “Bit of an accident. Should have gone to hospital to have it stitched up, didn’t, it healed badly, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it looks, honest.”
Jane nods. She can tell there’s a bigger story behind his deformed ear, but she’s not going to push him.
She’s going to sit quietly and watch him drink his beer and wait until he feels ready to let her in.
In stark contrast to Jane’s original take on Stuart Tucker, he is, she realizes, quite desperate for someone to talk to.
But before he has a chance to start, there is a ping on his phone. He glances at the screen and Jane hears him sigh.
“What was that?” she asks.
“Nothing.” He sighs again, pulling his hand down his face. “Just my partner. Wondering where I am.”
“Jessamine?”
“Yes. Jessamine.” He pulls himself straight suddenly, and stares back at Jane.
“OK. Listen. You’re right: There is shit going down at my place.
There is, like, really bad shit…” His voice cracks slightly, and Jane is concerned that he might be about to cry, but he rallies.
“I wish I could tell you, I really, really do. But if I tell you, you’ll tell the police, and then…
” He looks up at Jane. “Then Daisy really will be in danger.”
“Let me help you,” says Jane. “Please. Let me help you. I promise I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll only go to the police if I have to. Just tell me where she is. Please.”
And she sees it then: the carapace starts to crackle and craze and finally Stuart starts to talk.
“Things had always been difficult in that house—volatile, messy, dark. But everything came to a head during lockdown,” he says. “Early summer. When it was really hot? Remember? I was in the kitchen, clearing up after breakfast one morning, when there was a knock at the door.”