The boy nods too.
“Any idea,” Dexter begins, “where she might have gone? Did she know anyone? Outside London?”
“No idea,” says the boy. “We didn’t really talk about things like that. We didn’t really talk about anything. Just played games. Chatted shit. But I mean, she was your friend. She must have said stuff to you, right?”
Jane gulps.Good question. But Dexter doesn’t break his stride.
“She said some stuff, but yeah, she wasn’t very open about things. I could sense it, you know, that things weren’t right at home. That she wasn’t happy.”
“That’s for sure,” says the boy.
“I think,” says the man, “that your friend Daisy has done exactly the best thing she could have done and gotten the hell out of that house.”
chapter twenty-five
ANNIE
I met my husband when I was a child of thirteen. He was nineteen. Not how it sounds, I can assure you. He was my cousin’s best friend, and I was smitten from a distance. I didn’t tell him how smitten I’d been with him back then until we were on our first date when I was nineteen and he was twenty-five. He laughed uproariously and said he didn’t remember me.
How can I describe Allen? As he was back then? Or should I start with how he was at the end? No, I’ll start at the beginning. He was handsome. But not too handsome. Not handsome enough to outshine me. I was unbearably pretty. The early eighties weren’t a good time to be a young girl, in terms of the fashions, the ugly haircuts, but I somehow found a look that worked. Elfin, I think you might say. I was very popular with the boys, but I only wanted Allen. Allen dressed in a retro style: quiffed hair, vintage overcoat, peg-front trousers. We went to rockabilly clubs together and we danced, endlessly, until the early hours. We thought we were amazing, and we probably were.
I lived here at Thornwood with my mother and father at the time. I was an only child; mine were older parents, had me in their thirties. It was a happy enough childhood. But it was when Allen asked me to marry him that my life really began. We married at Hampstead Town Hall andwe had a party in the back garden here at Thornwood; not many people came because we didn’t really know many people. Allen moved in here; my parents gave us their room. Allen redecorated it for us, all by his own hand—you never had to get a tradesman in or a builder with Allen in the house. He was remarkable like that.
I was training to be a nurse back then. I didn’t really want to be a nurse, but I loved the uniform, the accessories, the idea of being adored. I qualified shortly after we married, and then the babies came, Jessamine when I was twenty-three, Jasper when I was twenty-five. Beautiful babies, of course. But difficult. So difficult. My mother was a godsend. She was reborn when those babies came. She’d waited so long to have me and then hadn’t been able to have another, and she virtually raised them herself and that was fine, because I was still too madly in love with my husband to want to care for them full-time. She had some old-fashioned ideas, my mother. She was born in 1930 after all, had lived through a war; it wasn’t necessarily the way I would have done it, but I wasn’t in much of a position to complain.
I knew what Allen was like. I absolutely knew the man I had married: his lightness, and his dark. I knew that he liked to be in control, and fortunately for me, I liked to be controlled. For even as he controlled me, he loved me.
And then my mother died in 2000 and everything changed. Allen insisted on the au pairs, refused to allow me to clean the house or cook a meal. I did not want the au pair girls, but neither did I want to have sex with my husband or wash his clothes. It made sense at the time, until it didn’t. And by then it was too late.
chapter twenty-six
STUART, NINE YEARS EARLIER
Jessamine hasn’t suggested that I leave, and so I haven’t. I’m still here when Daisy goes back to school that week and I offer to accompany them on their walk to school.
Daisy is an interesting girl. Like her mother and her grandmother there is something strangely old-fashioned and formal about her, like a character from a slightly mannered London-set film of the sixties.
“I can’t face it all,” says Daisy, tying up the laces of her sensible school shoes. “All those stupid people. After we’ve had such a nice time for Christmas.”
“Well,” says Jessamine, sliding Daisy’s packed lunch box into her school rucksack, “it’ll do you good to get out of the house; you’ve barely been outdoors.”
“Neither have you.”
“No. That’s true. But it’s a new year now, a new term, a fresh start. Let’s all try and be a bit healthier, shall we? Let’s all try and leave bad habits behind.”
When she says “bad habits” she’s talking about two things. She’s talking about the booze, which I have been gently trying to coax her into considering giving up, and she’s also talking about the old man.
Harvey.
That’s his name.
Harvey Moor.
She didn’t tell me that. Daisy did. And of course, naturally, I immediately googled the fuck out of the dirty old bastard and discovered a few things about him.
Harvey Moor is the founder of a very traditional ladies’ wear company called Moor & Co, with a head office in London and a factory based in the Midlands. His son Jason now runs the business and Harvey is semiretired. Harvey’s wife is called Sherri and there is a younger son too, Alex. I wonder if Alex and his brother know they have a little sister in London called Daisy.
“What job do you do?” Daisy asks as we cross over the busy road that separates the Vale from the rest of Hampstead Village.
