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 leaveJane, 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. Iknow 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.”
chapter sixty
STUART, SIX YEARS EARLIER
