Page 21 of It Could Have Been Her
“Well, this whole thing,” she says. “With Hugo, and the girl and the Airbnb andallof that. I found a hoodie in the woods near my house, near where Hugo found his way onto my land. It comes from a school, not far from here. I mean, it could be a coincidence. Obviously it could. But seriously, where I live, it’s the back end of nowhere. It’s not full of North London holidaymakers. And yet, there he was, Hugo, a North Londondog, far from home. And now a sweatshirt from a North London school. And—of course—the missing girl called Rose White who ties the two things together.”
“I told you,” he says. “I don’t know anything about this girl. She clearly nicked my dog. End of. What more do you need from me?”
“The child,” Jane says, dropping her gaze to the old scooter, the old trampoline. “You told me your stepdaughter used to live here. What was her name?”
The man stares at Jane impassively.
“Does she have the initials DB? Your stepdaughter?”
“I haven’t got time for this,” he says. “I’m going back indoors now. And seriously, I don’t want to sound rude, but I’d rather you didn’t come round again.”
Jane sees it then, a slight pulse through his frame, a shiver of discomfort. He pauses, just for a second; then he grabs Hugo’s collar and guides him back inside the house. A moment later the door closes hard behind him.
Jane gets back to Seven Dials, where she immediately swings open the lid of her laptop and begins a deep dive into everything Mr. Tucker– and Thornwood-related. She’s infuriated with herself for not asking for his name just now while she had the chance.
She tries dozens of different combinations of his surname and his address and scrolls through nearly twenty pages of results before finally finding something. It’s an online petition signed in July 2018 calling for an early general election.
Stuart Tucker.
Bingo.
And not only that but there is another signatory at the same address: a woman named Jessamine Black. Jane inhales sharply. This must be themother of Stuart’s stepdaughter. And if she is, then she might also be the daughter of the weird man who brought Jane home all those years ago, and maybe, just maybe, she was the child asleep in bed that night, the child who fell and screamed?
Adrenaline courses through Jane’s veins as all these tiny cogs and wheels start to slot into place and things feel as if they are moving again.
On a roll, she types the name “Jessamine Black” into Google and is stunned when there is a direct hit on the first page of search results.
IMDB
https://www.imdb.com
Jessamine Black
Known for The Bedsitter (2006)
Jane quickly clicks the link and scans the rest of the page. There’s no photo, no biography, no signs of Jessamine having appeared in anything before or since.
Then she stops.
There, next to “Costume Designer,” is the name “Natasha de Large.”
Jane knows someone called Natasha de Large.
But the woman she knows is a dog trainer.
She picks up her phone and flicks through her contacts. No Natasha. She switches to Instagram and there she is: @natashathedogwoman. She looks ruddier than Jane remembers. Bigger. A little perimenopausal, maybe. But it is definitely her. Jane hasn’t seen Natasha since roughly 2012. She’d just started her dog-training business then and Jane had taken a beagle called Numpty to see her. She’d spent a small fortune having him trained to stop barking all night long, and then poor Numpty had died of cancer less than six months later.
Jane composes a message.
Hi Natasha,
Remember me?
And Numpty the Noisy Beagle?
It’s been a long time!
Strange question, but did you ever work in costume design? I’m doing some research and found your name in the credits of a low-budget movie called THE BEDSITTER from 2006? Was that you? And if so, would you mind if I picked your brain a bit about the film and the experience? If it’s not you then just call me mad and pretend you never read this
