The Crooked House

Christobel
Kent was born in London in 1962 and educated at Cambridge. She has lived variously in Essex, London and Italy, including a five-year stint on a Thames sailing barge in Maldon, Essex with her father, stepmother, three siblings and four step-siblings. She has worked in publishing and as a TEFL teacher, and since 2003 has worked full-time as a novelist. Since 1994 she has lived in both Cambridge and Florence with her husband and five children.

Christobel Kent

SPHERE

First
published in Great Britain in 2015 by Sphere

Copyright © Christobel Kent 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978-0-7515-5750-3
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-7515-5697-1

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To
Ilsa, her beauty, love and courage

I’d
like to thank my impeccable, surefooted editor Jade Chandler of Sphere, Richard Beswick of Little, Brown for his unstinting friendship and literary insight, Sara O’Keeffe of Corvus, without whose clear-eyed support and strategic genius this book would never have been begun, and Victoria Hobbs, the bravest literary agent, critic and champion a writer could ask for. But most of all my husband Donald, who has believed in me since 1981.

When
it starts again she is face down on her bed with her hands over her ears and she feels it more than hears it. A vibration through the mattress, through the flowered duvet, through the damp pillow she’s buried her face in. It comes up from below, through the house’s lower three storeys.
BOOM
. She feels it in her throat.

Wait, listen: one, two, three.
BOOM
.

Is this how it begins?

Leaning on the shelf over the desk, wooden letters spelling her name jitter against the wall. They were a present on her seventh birthday, jigsawn by Dad, E.S.M.E. The family’d just moved in, unloading their stuff outside this house they called the crooked house, she and Joe, as the sun went down over the dark marsh inland. Creek House to Crooked House, after the tilt to its roof-line, its foundations unsteady in the mud, out on its own in the dusk. Mum was gigantic with the twins, a Zeppelin staggering inside with bags in each hand.
We need more space now
, is how they told her and Joe they were moving. It was seven years ago, seven plus seven. Now she’s fourteen, nearly. Fourteen next week.

Ah
,
go on
, Gina had said.
Just down it
. Then, changing tack,
You can give it me back, then.

Esme’s been back an hour. She isn’t even sure Joe saw her pass the sitting-room door, jammed back on the sofa and frowning under his headphones: since he hit sixteen he’s stopped looking anyone in the eye. The girls, a two-headed caterpillar in an old sleeping bag on the floor, wriggled back from in front of the TV, twisting to see her. Letty’s lolling head, the pirate gap between Mads’s front teeth as she grins up at her, knowing. She mouths something.
Boyfriend
. Esme turns her face away and stomps past.

Mum opening the kitchen door a crack, leaning back from the counter to see who it is. Frowning like she can’t place her, she gets like that a lot these days.
What are you doing back?
Esme doesn’t answer: she is taking the stairs three at a time, raging.

Outside the dark presses on the window, the squat power station stands on the horizon, the church out on the spit that looks no bigger than a shed from here, the village lights distant. Make all the noise you like out here, Dad’s always saying, no one can hear.

Hands over your ears and never tell.

On the bed she lies very still, willing it to go, to leave the house. Whatever it is.

Her hands were already over her ears, before it started. Why? The boom expands in her head and she can’t even remember now. All she knows is, she was standing at the window, now she’s on the bed.

She grapples with detail. She heard a car. There were voices below in the yard and, after, noises downstairs. Something scraping across the floor, a low voice muttering and she didn’t want to deal with it, with his questions; she flung herself down on the bed and the tears began to leak into the pillow. She would have put on her music but she didn’t want him to know she was back.

Now.
A sound, a human sound, just barely: a wounded shout, a gasp, trying to climb to a scream that just stops, vanishes. And in the silence after it she hears breathing, heavy and ragged; up through three storeys and a closed door, it is as if the house is breathing. And Esme is off the bed, scrabbling for a place to hide.

BOOM
.

On the marsh behind the house there are the remains of an old hut with a little rotted jetty. The tide is beginning to come up, gurgling in its channels, trickling across the mud that stretches inland, flooding the clumps of samphire and marsh grass and the buried timbers. Behind her the house stands crooked in the wind freshening off the estuary.

The lights of the police cars come slowly, bumping down the long track, an ambulance, the cab lit. It is three in the morning but the inky dark is already leaching to grey behind the church on the spit. One of the coldest June nights on record, and it takes them a while to find her. She doesn’t make a sound.

Alone
in the bed Alison sat bolt upright. She had trained herself not to gasp when that happened, long before she woke next to anyone, long before there was anyone to ask her what had scared her. But she couldn’t stop the jerk upwards, as if she had to break through the surface, as if water was closing over her. Paul had never asked, though: it was one of the reasons she was still here, eight months on.

Not the only reason. She could hear him in the next room; she leaned down and groped for her glasses – no table on her side of the bed, they were entangled in the bedclothes on the floor – and the bright room swam into focus. Better.

In the small old-fashioned kitchen, Paul was making tea: she could hear the kettle spit and gurgle, coming to the boil. She liked everything about Paul’s flat, a modest three rooms in a white-balconied grey-brick tenement above the comforting roar of a main road. A white-painted mantelpiece, bookshelves, two large windows, the kind of desk you found in council offices. There would have been fires in these rooms once, and a maid to lay them, someone to sweep the big chimneys that
ran down through the six floors. It would be nice to live here.

It was out of her league. Alison rented a bedsit south of the river, not much more than a useful box; a bed and a foldaway kitchen and students for neighbours, although her room had a view of a tree. She liked it enough: she went back most nights still, on principle. Increasingly though, she didn’t know what to do with herself there – it had got untidy, downgraded to storage, a place where she dropped stuff without bothering to put it away. Now she shifted her gaze from Paul’s tidy desk – the pile of books, laptop, card index – to the mantelpiece. A couple of Japanese postcards, a pewter bowl, an old mirror framed in dark wood. An envelope leaned against the mirror, his name on it in big cursive script, heavy paper.

He was in the doorway watching her.

From the start there’d been that something about him, some natural reticence or perhaps just his age, that meant that other, secondary panic didn’t set in. Over the second meal out, after the first visit to the cinema. The strategies didn’t start building themselves in her head, for what to say, when he asked. About her life. About where she came from. About her family.

‘What’s that?’ she said now. She stood up and took the cup he held out to her.

Before Paul they’d been boys, scruffy, well-meaning, lazy. They’d hardly qualified as relationships: more mates, easy to close the door on quietly in the early morning, tiptoeing off to take her place in rush-hour traffic, to breathe a sigh of relief. Paul was more than a head taller than her so she had to look up to see in his face; he set his hand lightly on the small of her back and looked down. She took in all the detail of his face at once, as she’d got used to doing, gazing straight back into his light eyes, seeing him smile, seeing him approve her without thinking.

She had half an hour before she needed to get going. ‘What’s that, then?’ she said again, and pointed. He followed her gaze
and, removing his hand from her back, reached for the card on the mantelpiece. He held it out.

Dr Paul Bartlett
, it read, handwritten, real ink on vellum. No address, therefore hand-delivered. Something crept in between them.

‘Well, open it, if you’re so curious,’ he said, stepping back. She was aware of his eyes on her back as she took the envelope: it felt substantial. Inside there was an embossed card, gold-edged.

Dr and Mr … Request the pleasure …

‘I’m to be a best man,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’

‘Morgan Carter,’ she said. ‘Have I met her? I have.’ She stared at the script.
At St Peter’s on the Wall, Saltleigh.
The line before her eyes wavered, the line of a silver-grey horizon, the church on the spit in a freezing midsummer dawn: something jumped in her chest. Her lungs burned as if she’d been running.

‘June,’ she said, the first thing that came into her head. ‘Nice month to get married.’ The words sounded strange, mumbled. She handed it back to him.

‘Got to get to work,’ she said, ducking his gaze. He set the card on the mantel and took her by the wrists. Gently.

‘Come with me,’ he said.