“What happened to the dog rescue place in Spain?”
Jane had gone straight from their marriage to Andalucia, where she’d co-founded and helped to run a dog sanctuary, but returned to the UK late last year because she was homesick.
“Oh, I’m still involved with it, I still raise money for them, and I’ll go back every year, when I can. But I couldn’t live there anymore. I needed to be here. This is where I want to finish. But it’s also…” She pauses again. “It’s also where I want to begin.”
“Well,” says Tony. “Go find Rose, I guess!” Then he smiles and says, “Come on, let’s take these up to the terrace and watch the sun set while we work out how you’re going to do it.”
chapter eight
Jane calls Helen Yaxley the following morning through the fug of a Kraken hangover.
“Helen, it’s Jane Trevally, from Rosebery.”
“Oh, Jane, hi! I hear it was you who found the missing dog?”
“It was. Brought him back to his owner in London yesterday. And then Hester the vet told me that the girl who had him at your annex had disappeared. What did the police say?”
“Oh, not a lot. No signs of foul play. Just done a runner they reckon.”
“But leaving her underwear?” Jane asks. “All her things? Herdog. Why?”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me either. And she was such a lovely girl. Not the type to do a runner. And certainly not without her dog. She doted on that dog. Adored him.”
“Did she?”
“Yes, you could tell they were very bonded.”
Jane frowns. So, maybe not a dog-napper after all. “What are the police going to do?” she asks. “The dog’s owner in London claims he doesn’t know anyone called Rose and thinks whoever she was, she must have stolen the dog or found him on the Heath and taken him.”
“I really don’t know. They weren’t very forthcoming. But unless someone reports her missing, or she makes a sudden reappearance, I think that’s the end of it.”
Jane pauses, her gut telling her that that can’t possibly be the end of it, that a young woman called Rose White could not appear in the middle of the countryside with a dog that she had either stolen or found in North London and then disappear a few days later leaving her dog to wander into Jane’s bluebell woods.
She thinks of the hand-washed underwear Hester had told her about. She thinks of strange Mr. Tucker, his air of discomfort. And then she thinks again of the overhead scream and bang that night in the Vale of Health twenty-six years ago, thetick tickof the heavy clock on the mantelpiece, the pursed lips of the wife. She thinks of that sense that she’d walked into a trap. She thinks of the thin woman she and Dexter had glimpsed fleetingly in the house yesterday and she shivers.
“Helen,” she says, “I’ve got a funny feeling about all of this. Could I possibly pop over, this afternoon, have a look at the annex? Would that be OK?”
“Well, yes. I don’t see why not. I’ll be around after two.”
“Great,” says Jane. “I’ll see you then.”
As she sits on the train back to Little Belmont later that morning, Jane remembers Tony’s words from the night before up on the roof terrace. “Why don’t you take a course?” he’d said.
“In what?” she’d said.
“In private investigation,” he’d said with a tut and a roll of his eyes. “Whaddya think? Balloon animals?”
Jane hadn’t realized you could take courses in private investigation. She couldn’t quite imagine it, pictured a room full of people in trench coats and trilbies with folded newspapers under their arms—or was that spies?
She’d googled it on her phone in bed that night and seen a dozen courses, mostly online, done from the privacy of your own home, and actually, surely, if there was ever a job that was designed for an older woman who’d barely worked a day in her life, it must be that? Miss Marple herself had been in her mid-seventies for the entirety of her career. But could she? she thinks now. Could she really? She hadn’t studied since she was eighteen years old, when she’d left her stupidly expensive sixth-form college with no A levels because she’d spent the whole two years chasing tragic love affairs with stupid boys and the occasional stupid grown man. Then she’d become an orphan at nineteen and clung on to her first love, a man called Paddy Swann, for dear life while she grieved. What a bloody idiot she’d been, hanging around, waiting for him to marry her when in reality he’d been trying to find a way to get away from her.
She’d almost gotten a job after they split up, but then a few months later she met a man in a bar in Pimlico who looked like Paul Newman and talked like Hugh Grant and it turned out he was a viscount, and not a poor one, and he’d swept her completely off her feet. They were married less than a year after Paddy Swann dumped her for a woman called Nina.
No need for a job when you live in an eighteen-bedroom stately home in the Cotswolds. No need for a job when you’re looking after three young, motherless children, four dogs, and some peacocks. Job enough in all of that.
chapter nine
STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER
