“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 notthoseunderpants 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.”
