And sure enough, as she follows the delicate threads on her map that denote footpaths, she sees one that looks as if it leads to the brook at the bottom of her land. At this time of year, the brook is shallow, more like a deep puddle, easy to cross even for a short-legged boy like Hugo. This, she considers, might have been his route to her bluebell wood. She tucks her phone back in her pocket and sets off.
There is only one house on this footpath. Its backside faces abruptly onto a quiet lane, while its front faces the countryside. It’s a shabby cottage, painted blue, with two outbuildings, one of which shimmers and coos with what sounds like pigeons. Jane crunches up a graveled footpath and knocks at the door. An elderly man opens it a moment later. He has long gray hair and is wearing a knitted waistcoat over a checked shirt. “Hi!” he booms. “Jane, isn’t it?”
“Oh,” says Jane, taken aback. “Yes. That’s right. Do I…?”
“I knew your parents.” He touches his chest with a gnarled hand. “Bill. Newsome. Last time I saw you, you must have been about sixteen, seventeen. You had very blond hair, I recall. Pounding up this pathway with a very stern look on your face. Looked like you meant business.”
Jane still has no recollection of this man called Bill Newsome, but he clearly remembers her vividly. “I probably did,” she says with a wry laugh. “I was a bit of a mess then.”
“Well, you look like you’ve sorted yourself out very well. You look super.”
His face is soft as he compliments her, and she absorbs it and smileswidely. “Thank you! Anyway. I was wondering, over the last few days, did you ever see a young woman, about eighteen years old, blond hair…?”
“That was you!” he interjects with a hearty laugh. “Forty years ago!”
“Ah.” She smiles again. “No. Different blond teenager. This one is called Rose. And she had a small white dog with her, a Westie.”
“Oh, a Westie! I always wanted one of those!”
“Do you remember seeing one? Around here? With a young woman?”
“You know,” he says, putting a hand to a raw-looking, freshly shaved chin. “I actually do, now I come to think of it. It was the dog I noticed first of course. And she was not as striking as you were at that age—gosh, you were striking!—but small? And a little scruffy?”
Jane thinks of the shabby clothes in Rose White’s suitcase and nods her head. “Yes,” she says. “That sounds about right. When did you see her?”
“A couple of times actually. My kitchen faces out toward the path, so I see lots of walkers. I noticed her because she looked so worried.”
“Worried?”
“Well, more than worried. Scared, I’d say. She looked scared.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“No, just her. She was on the phone both times. Typing things. She seemed to be agitated.”
“And when was this, that you saw her walking past your house?”
“A while back. Last Wednesday? Thursday maybe?”
Jane nods. “Well, Bill, thank you for your time. It’s nice to have finally met you.”
“Finally,” he says. “After all these years. And Jane, I was so terribly sad about your parents. They were way too young to go. And you were way too young to lose them.”
Jane is thoughtful as she takes the rest of the footpath back toward her house, checking the undergrowth and the hedgerow for any sign of a human having passed this way and come to some kind of harm.
She thinks of Bill Newsome’s memories of her as a young woman, looking like she “meant business,” when of course she’d meant nothing of the sort. She was an idiot of a girl, completely unfit for adult life, broken and feeble after a childhood being “raised” by low-functioning addicts. She wore a mask out in the world, pretended to be tough, when really what she wanted was to be scooped up and rescued by somebody, anybody, preferably a strong, wealthy man.
As Jane’s thoughts cycle through the mess of her upbringing, she scans the pathway, the branches, the possible routes to the left and the right that Rose White might have taken in an attempt to find her missing dog. Jane can’t possibly go up all of them, but she tries a couple, her gaze taking in trampled foliage, footprints, litter. She picks up a discarded drinks carton; she has no idea why—all she knows is that she has to find something.Anything.
And then, about halfway between the bottom of Jane’s bluebell wood and the footpath, slung across a fallen tree, she sees what looks like an item of clothing. As she gets closer, she sees that it is a hoodie—navy blue, small, and with a logo on the chest: a kind of pathway created out of curved white lines. It’s a school uniform hoodie. She picks it up and pulls out the tag: “14–15.” And there, in smudged felt tip, the initials “DB.”
So, thinks Jane, not Rose White. Just a local teenager. She takes pictures of it anyway, of the logo and the label, and then carefully places the hoodie back where she found it, just in case, she thinks, just in case the police are still looking for Rose White.
chapter thirteen
STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER
Jessamine and I sit together most days now, in the White Swan. She’s an interesting woman, especially after the second vodka, but not so much after the fourth, when she becomes harsh and bitter. I order my pints in halves so that I can keep up with her, round for round, without getting drunk myself.
