She said, and I always smiled wryly at the memory, that she would be our au pair girl.
chapter fifteen
When she gets back to Rosebery, Jane makes herself a cup of tea and scrolls though her phone to the photo she’s just taken of the school sweatshirt. She does a reverse image search on the logo and keeps scrolling through the results until she spots it, ten images down, the exact same logo. She clicks on the link, which leads her to a website for a school uniform supplier in North London. She finds the logo halfway down their page and sees that it belongs to a secondary school in Islington called the Waterside Academy.
Islington is in North London. Close to Hampstead.
Jane’s breath catches.
Might the sweatshirt then belong to Rose White? Regardless of the initials “DB” penned on the label? It’s a stretch, but it’s possible.
And either way, Jane is sure that Mr. Tucker has lied to her, that Rose White is in fact his stepdaughter and that she has been the victim of some kind of domestic trauma, possibly at the hands of Mr. Tucker, or of the man who tried to drug Jane with a martini in the very same house twenty-six years ago. She believes that Rose White took the family dog and made her escape and that something went horribly wrong and caused her to flee without the dog and Jane feels it like a punch in her gut; Jane wantsthis mystery, wants it all for herself, because on some subconscious level she wants to return to that terrible night in the Vale of Health, and fix it.
Jane takes an early train into London the following morning. By 8:45 a.m. she is outside Waterside Academy in Islington, and by nine o’clock, thirty students or so have told her that they’ve never heard of a girl called Rose White.
The morning rush outside the big, shiny new-build school dwindles down to a small trickle of latecomers and Jane accosts the last to arrive, a boy and girl holding hands, both smelling strongly of cigarettes.
The young boy squints at her from under a hood. “No. Never heard of her. You should ask the head of sixth form. They’d know.”
“Thank you!” says Jane, pleasantly taken aback by the amenability and good thinking of the young man. “Where would I find them? And what are they called?”
The boy and girl look at each other. The girl shrugs. The boy look back at Jane, scrunches up his face, and says, “Wen-something? Wenlock? Wendover? Wen… ham?”
He looks at the girl and she shakes her head. “No clue.”
“Anyway. We need to…” He indicates the school gates.
“Sure. Sorry. Off you go. Thank you. You’re both adorable.”
The boy says, “Calm,” and they head inside.
Jane wanders away feeling a little deflated. She’s not sure what she was expecting. She was stupid to imagine that she would be able to find Rose White so easily.
In a nice café on Upper Street Jane drinks mint tea and eats a large sugary cookie to soothe herself. She finishes the last crumbs of the cookie, chases the fallen granules of sugar around the plate with a wet fingertip, and licks them off. It’s nearly 10 a.m. and she has no plan. Right now she just wants to go shopping—Upper Street is jammed full of brilliant-looking boutiques—and then maybe head back to Tony’splace to open a bottle of wine. But that is precisely, exactly, what she should not be doing.
Although Jane has never had a full-time job, she has been a good person: cared for animals; looked after other women’s children as if they were her own. She has been a reasonable friend—though she wonders now why she doesn’t seem to have any—and she is a good laugh and fun to be with.
Jane has also had… let us call them “episodes” during which she may not have been all that easy to live with; she’d been a little wild, a little cuckoo. She might in fact have been an absolute pain in the arse. She virtually terrorized poor Paddy Swann, the man she was with from the ages of eighteen to twenty-two. She had behaved appallingly, turning their entire existence into an overlong, badly paced drama from which he wisely escaped before the final act. She was a restless wife to both her husbands, tricky to deal with, prone to moods and existential nonsense. But she has also brought joy to people, she knows she has. Her good relations with both her ex-husbands and their offspring surely bear that out.
But now, before she hits the next decade of her life, the age that marks the end of most adults’ working lives, she should really have something more to tell people at parties than that she looks after a crumbling house and four dogs.
She thinks of her failure to uncover one useful piece of information outside the Waterside Academy, the blank faces and shaken heads, and how stupid she’d felt as she walked away from the gates an hour ago.
But then she remembers how helpful the kids had tried to be, how each of them had stopped and connected with her, really engaged, called around for other people to come and join the conversation, and she reminds herself that if there is one thing she is really good at, it’s getting people to talk. All her life she has inspired confidences, been a person that others turned to to share their secrets, their woes.
People feel comfortable around Jane.
People trust her.
And surely, that, more than anything, provides the essential basis ofperforming a private investigation—getting people to talk to you—and there is one person more than any other that Jane wants to talk to her right now, and his name is Mr. Tucker.
Jane collects her belongings and heads toward the tube, back toward the Vale of Health.
chapter sixteen
STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER
Hello, Jessamine,” I say. Then I look down at the dog. “Hello, Hugo.” I wave the bottle of champagne at them both. “Merry Christmas!”
