The Crooked House (11 page)

Paul was up there before she’d removed the dress. He set both hands on her shoulders to keep her in place and then, once she was there, obediently still, he began meticulously to undo the tiny buttons, one by one. She could hear his breathing.

‘It’s from 1943,’ was all he said, his breath on her neck. ‘It has the clothing mark, clothes produced under rationing.’ Carefully he hung it in the wardrobe. Turning, she saw what he wanted next. And then he turned off the light.

He had hurt her.

In the dark Alison explored the new sensations. The inner part of her thighs, her neck where he had tugged her head back, on the soft insides of her upper arms. She had been pulled apart. She had offered quiet determined resistance and he had exerted silent force. He had made her still, holding her down while he entered her with a blunt repetitiveness until he had pulled out and come on her, making a sound in his throat as he did. Only when he was off her and lying at her side did he touch her kindly: she’d let him stroke her. Patiently, he restored her. She didn’t know if she’d wanted it; her body hummed and whispered to itself in the aftermath, still excited. Did you always know?

She didn’t know how she would get away in the morning, but she would. She had to. A children’s playground out along the spit, carved out of the marsh, she didn’t remember it but she’d find it. ‘Not too early,’ she’d whispered into the phone. ‘I’ll need to … give me time to think of something.’ She felt her body stiff with panic, her strategies and evasions deserting her, her lies looking ever balder, more obvious.

‘Did
you think I wouldn’t recognise you?’ The rough, sad, mocking voice. ‘I’d know you anywhere.’ She felt joy bubble up, even knowing it was wrong, that old perverse longing, trailing fear. My friend.

Gina.

She slept.

It
was cool and grey in the early light and Sarah Rutherford, called from her bed at six, leaned across the steering wheel of the patrol car.

Thursday morning, and she thanked Christ for small mercies it wasn’t race day yet, with all the idle gawpers that pulled in. Beyond them the ambulance was leaning alarmingly in the soft ground, but in the end it didn’t look like them getting stuck in the mud would make a difference to the outcome. She gazed at the men in fluorescent jackets struggling knee-deep in mud to retrieve something past saving.

They’d got almost right to the scene, thanks to the shingle track Jennings of all people knew about. He spent his weekends walking here, he’d told her gloomily on the way, as Sarah drove too fast between the hedgerows in the thin dawn light. If she turned her head just a little she’d be able to see the skewed black roofline of the Grace house, a way back along the sea wall, but she didn’t turn, she didn’t need to. Creek House came to her in nightmares, it wasn’t going anywhere. She could hear Jennings, outside the car and leaning on the roof muttering
something into his walkie-talkie about timing, trying to chivvy a forensics team as he watched the paramedics grappling in the mud. Too late.

The body was hardly distinguishable from its churned element, a coated thing hauled from the slime, slipping in their arms, streaking and spattering them while they struggled to get a purchase. The mud was black underneath, and stank. Arms, legs, trousers all in a slick of grey, hair matted, a shoe clogged, an ankle exposed blue-white against the sludge as at last between them they got him on to a stretcher.

Out in the estuary two barges duelled on the horizon, while others gathered further off, smudges beyond the power station, jockeying already, a day ahead of the start of the race. The tide crept in.

The man in decorator’s overalls Alison had glimpsed the day before was leaning over the desk in reception, his mop of hair dusty and stiff from behind and a paint-spattered bucket on the floor beside him.

‘Eight hours, I heard, give or take. Plod pulled him out the mud out past Mulville’s Hard. There’s a police car out there now. They say the race’ll go ahead tomorrow though.’

He spoke in a hoarse whisper to Jan behind the reception desk. She smiled stiffly over his shoulder at them and, nodding, Alison turned away, not wanting to be seen listening. And there was Paul, smiling down at her while the words echoed in her head. Police car? And as his smile persisted the question evaded her and the things Paul had done to her came back with a secret, fearful jolt, that hum setting up again like electricity in power lines. Her body loosened and aching at the joints, tenderised.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ she heard herself say. ‘I thought out along the sea wall.’

His smile hovered. ‘There’s some good walking, I seem to
remember,’ he said, and as if anticipating what she might feel thinking of him here with Morgan, his hand brushed hers, the touch of his forefinger on her wrist. ‘I expect she’s got some maps.’ A nod towards Jan. ‘Don’t get lost, will you?’

‘I’ll ask her,’ said Alison, placating him so he wouldn’t see inside her head and know that she could have traced those paths blindfold.

Turning at the sound of her voice the decorator leaned and picked up his bucket of tools. She saw his eyebrows white with dust, his stubble, his shock of hair and then he was past her and walking out through the front door, a skinny, stooped figure, old before his time.

I know you.

Jan did have a map, a photocopy of a hand-drawn thing that Alison just accepted, hardly focusing.
I know you
. She turned away and Paul was still there, waiting, his hands in his pockets.

‘Sure you’ll be all right on your own?’ he said lightly. She stood in front of him, awkward, her face tilted up, and he leaned and brushed her dry lips with his.

‘I won’t be long,’ she said.

‘And then there’s the rehearsal. You don’t need to come to that,’ he said, and shifted, uneasy. She thanked Roger Carter in her head for his rudeness. ‘Honestly.’

She nodded, hiding her relief. ‘Whatever.’

The decorator’s van was out there on the gravel and his name still on it:
Simon Chatwin
. Faded, the same lettering as he’d had thirteen years before. When he’d been brown from windsurfing, something otherworldly about him, something strange and beautiful about him. Simon. He’d tried to persuade Alison into the back of the van, once, after the kiss in the yard she’d glimpsed inside it, sacking laid down. She’d said no, but she’d lain awake wondering, for nights after. Lain awake thinking of the rough skin on his hands. She walked
on past and out into the road, the map she didn’t need in her pocket.

The playground had been there all the time, snug behind the dyke on the power station side, instantly familiar. It had just been hiding from her, and when she pushed through the low gate she knew why. The twins: this had been their place, until the accident. The heavy wood and iron swingboats, ready to crack a child’s skull, had gone. The girls had used to stand up on them, hanging crosswise as if in rigging, wild and hollering as they flew higher, but as Alison heard the creak of the playground gate something else came back to her. Here: something had begun here.

The lopsided roundabout had also gone, but she could still see it in her head. Letty on her side half under it, an awful sound catching in her throat. Mum had come running, fetched by Joe, Letty white with pain and not letting anyone touch her but the blood soaking her shirt where some broken-off cast-iron shaft under the thing had gouged her. Esme begging, Mads stiff and pale perched up on the roundabout, her eyes gone dark. The ambulance had arrived within minutes that had seemed hours with Mum’s two hands like a vice round Letty’s arm the whole time to stop the blood. That had been the start of a new phase, of hospital visits and doors closed on Esme and Joe.

There was a bright painted climbing frame, all curves, instead. The old slide was still there and on the bottom of it, knees together, feet apart, sat Gina hunched in a parka.

The wonky pushchair sat empty beside her. Her child – her daughter – was tangled in the climbing frame, hair hanging down. Thursday morning but Alison didn’t need to wonder why she was there. Gina might even have had a child just to keep her off school, just to show them.

‘You’re back.’ She was the same old Gina, just roughened
round the edges. Her lips looked bruised, high cheekbones under reddened skin, dark under the eyes. Heavier but careless of it; everything about the way she sat and her black gypsy stare said that she didn’t give a fuck. She fished in the parka’s pockets and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She stuck one in her mouth then shook another out for Alison, lit them both without asking and Alison didn’t say no. It had been thirteen years since she’d smoked and she felt it hit the back of her throat. The child was perched right way up in the climbing frame now and still, watching them.

‘I had to,’ said Alison, suddenly helpless to explain it. ‘The wedding.’

The cigarette hung in mid-air halfway to Gina’s mouth. ‘The wedding?’ Scornful. ‘Not her? Not that Morgan Carter bitch? You didn’t come to
my
wedding.’ And laughed suddenly, a machine-gun rattle. She took a drag and with her eyes screwed up against the smoke said, ‘You never even knew her.’

‘
Did
you get married?’

Gina shook her head, blew out a plume, eyes flicking over to the girl. ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Not the marrying kind, am I?’

‘It wasn’t me she invited,’ said Alison, pleading. ‘They don’t know. It was him. My … my boyfriend. Paul. No one knows I’m here.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Gina, her voice rich with scorn, ‘sure they don’t.’ Tilted her head to look round the smoke. ‘Boyfriend?’

‘What do you mean?’ Alison said, trying to catch her breath, sidestepping the idea of Paul. ‘You didn’t tell anyone? How did you find out where we were staying?’

Gina looked at her, expressionless. ‘Only one place to stay,’ she said, ‘in this poxy little dump.’ Alison gazed, waiting. ‘I don’t tell,’ Gina went on, with grudging pity. ‘I tell no one, I don’t say nothing. You know that. You know me.’ On the
climbing frame the girl was threading her way down, hair swinging. Her mother’s long legs.

‘The police,’ said Alison. ‘After. After.’ She searched her brain for words but she was dumb. Gina leaned in, their faces very close, smoke on her breath, the sore-looking cheeks Alison suddenly wanted to touch, to kiss.

‘I don’t tell,’ Gina repeated, and she jerked back, flicked the cigarette away. Her eyes were flat now. ‘You stupid or something? Me, tell that one?’ She meant Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford.

‘She’s all right,’ said Alison. Gina didn’t seem to hear. ‘Tell her what, anyway?’ she said. ‘That we was doing mushrooms, that night? And where would that have landed me?’

Alison stared, thirteen years of trying not to wonder, and in a blink the panic rushed back in, the hairs on her neck stood up. ‘We … I didn’t know,’ she said, her lips numb. ‘I was up in my room and I was feeling so … so … messed up. My head was all over the place. I …’ That sensation, of being out of control, sitting up there and listening to sounds that didn’t make sense and having no idea what would happen if she stepped out of her room, flooded back in an instant. The chunk and clatter of a gun being re-loaded.

Gina stared back, eyes narrowed, realisation dawning. ‘Christ,’ she said, disgusted. ‘It’s not like you took anything. You didn’t swallow enough to get a cat going.’ Shook her head wonderingly. ‘You never,’ she said. ‘You never thought you was high?’

‘We didn’t know, did we?’ said Alison, feeling a sob in her throat. ‘Not then. Not even you knew how much you needed, to get out of it. I didn’t know.’ Gina’s arm went out and was round her shoulders and suddenly, roughly, she tugged Alison to her, Alison’s face burying in the parka hood.

‘Fuck,’ said Gina, reverently, somewhere above her. ‘You were up there, though. All the time he was doing it. That true?’

Alison
nodded into the soft acrylic fur that smelled of her hair. ‘I don’t know, though,’ she said.

‘Don’t know what?’ She felt Gina go still, waiting.

‘I don’t know if he did do it,’ Alison said, muffled.

And then abruptly she was pushed away, back into the air.

‘You what?’ Gina’s face was suddenly changed, alert. ‘You
are
joking?’

‘Joking?’ She repeated the word in wonder. Gina grimaced impatiently. ‘I didn’t see him do it,’ said Alison, and it was an effort not to close her eyes to blot out what she did see. ‘I heard … I don’t know what I heard. His glasses. I found them in the yard. There was …’ She felt herself begin to tremble: subdued it. ‘My mum.’
Unfaithful
.

She started again. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. She was in the kitchen wearing her best skirt. I think … I think …’ Gina had both hands on her shoulders now, her face rough.

‘What?’ said Gina. ‘You better be sure. Because if it wasn’t him … fuck. Why did you come back?’ Her voice was strained with fear. ‘Why?’

And finally it was out, like something that had been choking her. Alison said, ‘I think there was someone else there.’ She stood abruptly, looking out over the marsh. She saw the white and fluorescent shape of a car over to the north beyond the crooked house. Mulville’s Hard, the name came back to her from long ago – and then again, from this morning. Simon Chatwin had been talking about the police at Mulville’s Hard. Eight hours, give or take, he’d said, and understanding began to tick down. Something had been there eight hours, waiting for the police to find it.

But Gina was turning away, looking away, and the child stood in front of them, solemn, brushing the hair from her face.

Narrow little face, something strange and beautiful, something different, the barest hint of Gina in the set of her mouth, otherwise she was all her father’s.

‘She’s …’ Alison
looked from the girl to Gina and back. ‘She’s his.’ The girl whirled and was gone. ‘She’s Simon’s.’

For a moment her face seemed to close against Alison, boarded like the house, swept blank as the marsh.
Get out
, it said.
Stay out
.

‘She’s
mine
,’ said Gina.

The night, that last night of her old life had started so well: midsummer and the bright day lingered on and on, a day that would never end. A cool grey-blue evening, the tide still high and bringing with it the glitter of the open sea; it was lapping under the sea wall as she left the house, a sound like a whisper, like a kiss. Esme rode at breakneck speed up the bumpy path to Gina’s house, her mouth smiling wide with joy and a secret bubble of it in her chest.

She had no lights for the bike, but it was midsummer and here on the edge of the world it never got dark. She rode through the village in triumph.
She had been kissed.
Behind her, home dwindled. Dad at the pub, Mum in the kitchen, only shrugging, nothing new. Esme stood up on the pedals, her hair blowing back, and she flew.

It wasn’t that it was Simon she wanted. She tried to say that to Gina, but it seemed to make it worse. She looked for him as she flew: a man stood on a street corner, not him, but his head turned to watch her go.