The Crooked House (12 page)

The high street was quiet, the long twilight subdued everything to shadows and murmured voices in back gardens, but as Esme came round the bus shelter she saw them there, inside. The brothers. Sobered, she sat back down in the saddle, freewheeling past, turning her head. Danny and Martin Watts. The younger boy, Danny, tough and golden and beautiful, was standing stiff and upright with an arm around his taller
brother. Martin the older one, his face roughened already with misery and weather, head bent and shaking from side to side. Danny stared back at her as she passed, over his brother’s shoulder.

It had been more than six months since their little brother Joshua died. Martin was the oldest by three years but it had been him that had lost it at the funeral, standing up jerky and ranting in the pew in the middle of the first reading. Yelling about murder. Joe had been there, as the friend of Joshua and Danny both, but he’d said nothing when he got home red-eyed, only pounded upstairs and banged his bedroom door. Mum looking stricken in the kitchen all day. Esme had wanted to go to the funeral but Mum had said no.
They don’t want a mob there
, and Dad for once had backed her up. Esme had overheard an old woman talking about it in the shop as she lurked by the biscuits, weeks later:
They say Cathy Watts’s older one’s on sleeping pills and all sorts.

And there was something in the sag of his shoulders as she went by, something in Danny’s warning look that said Martin wasn’t right, he might never be right. Danny had a place at university already sorted, he could go, he could fly.
It’s OK
, she wanted to say as she freewheeled past,
you can fly, like me
, only there was his brother’s head on his shoulder.

Gina’s house was silent and dark but she was there all right, smoking in the back garden among the weeds, sat up against the broken fence flicking ash into a shard of flowerpot. There was an alley that led to the back gardens and a field beyond it that sloped down to the estuary, because everywhere did in Saltleigh: all roads led to the water. The village was on a muddy peninsula that narrowed to the church on its spit, the sea wall snaking off to either side, advancing and retreating according to mysterious laws, around the ruins of farmsteads, the fossilised stumps of Saxon villages. Gina looked up at the sound of the gate, her face smooth and abstracted and peaceful
for once and Esme sniffed the heavy-scented smoke, as telltale as Gina’s expression. Gina held up the joint and Esme took it from her.

They headed upstairs to her bedroom, Esme shouldering her little backpack that held pyjamas and make-up bag and hair straighteners. Because she didn’t forget the straighteners, she could never have. Gina with her thick stiff crazy hair had an obsession with them, along with a boy she wouldn’t name to Esme. She would only scowl when Esme tried to worm it out of her.

Light-headed from the smoke Esme dropped her bag and subsided on to Gina’s unmade bed. It smelled of him, she realised, or he smelled of it, Simon’s hair, his neck where he’d held her against him. Dope. She should have thought then, perhaps, that it might be from him that Gina got the stuff. And the mushrooms she held out reverently once she’d parked herself at Esme’s side on the bed, folded in a Kleenex, grey and dusty and dull-looking.

‘I’ve made them into tea,’ said Gina, reaching for a flask and unscrewing it: an odd smell was released, of dead leaves and earth. ‘Show us, then. You bring them straighteners? You did, didn’t you?’

And Esme had shaken her head in a sudden access of mischief she’d never have dared without the dope scorching her insides. ‘Maybe I forgot,’ she said. ‘You guess something first. You guess.’

‘Guess what?’ Gina angrily pushing the hair back from her face, a warning sign.

‘Guess who.’

And that was when it began to go wrong.

Esme never told, she never knew what Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford had said to Gina or learned from her. She’d stuck to it being the straighteners because anything else would have tied her into knots, trying not to mention the dope, the slopping tea Gina had pushed into her hand with a fierce jeer,
the way her friend had finally flared up, her face burning,
No you never, you stupid, you stupid little …

So it must have been Simon Gina was after, all those years ago. Simon had been her secret.

And what difference, anyway, did it make? Because what Sarah Rutherford really wanted to know was not why she’d come home but who knew. Who knew she was supposed to be at Gina’s that night, and who knew she had come back home? Did she see anyone, did she tell anyone, would anyone have heard them argue, or seen her fly out again, rattling down the cool blue high street on her bicycle with her backpack hanging from the handlebars, in too much of a blind hurry even to put her arms through the straps?

Martin Watts had gone to bed early that night, he’d taken sleeping tablets. Danny had said so when he’d given evidence at the coroner’s inquest, called because he’d gone to the police with his mother to say he’d heard shots across the marsh. Their house was behind the boatyard and sound carried across the water in odd echoes and eddies – sometimes you could hear laughter from as far as Power Station Beach. Danny hadn’t looked at Esme from the wooden witness box as he told them, but she’d looked at him. It was Power Station Beach she thought of, her and Joe and the Wattses the summer before and Esme hiding in the marram grass, realising as they wrangled that something had changed, she was too big, too grown to be one of the boys any more. And Joe was made uncomfortable by her being along. In the courtroom she’d seen that Danny had always looked a lot like his little brother, she just hadn’t seen it before.

Who knew she’d come home? She’d just shaken her head to Sarah Rutherford, no one. Danny and Martin had seen her head up the high street to Gina’s but they hadn’t been there when she’d flown back down it, burning, shame burning her from the inside, her hair on end.

Later,
that ride came back to her at odd moments, in waking dreams and nightmares, the downward ride through the village with its shadows and whispering, out along the path towards the crooked house. Plunging into darkness, her last ride home.

There
was a smell of pub lunch when she walked back into the hotel after midday. In their room Paul rose quickly from the little writing table where he’d been working: he seemed surprised to see her back, as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t on his own. He could live without her. But then he stretched and held out his arms and she entered them, grateful he couldn’t see her expression.

Had she imagined that look on Gina’s face? It had gone almost as soon as it appeared. She had only shrugged, while Alison calculated. The child was eight, nine; Gina must have had her at seventeen.

‘It never lasted with Simon,’ she said. Then added, ‘Thank Christ. I don’t know what I thought I was up to.’ The girl had run off again. ‘She’s called May. Month she was born, I couldn’t think of anything else but it stuck. May.’ She stared away, the child dancing against the sky reflected in her eyes.

‘So we fell out over nothing,’ Alison said, ‘if you never wanted him that badly.’

Gina looked at her, thoughtful. ‘You could say that,’ she said.
‘If it hadn’t all gone tits up that night we’d probably have been all right. You mightn’t ever have got out of here. Think of that. Out of this dump.’

‘You still at your dad’s?’ asked Alison then, and Gina stared at her a moment before shaking her head.

‘Council give us a place on Western Avenue,’ she said. ‘Two beds, new kitchen an’ all.’ Contemptuous of anyone for being such a soft touch as to house a wildcat and her kid. Same old Gina.

‘That’s where the baby died,’ said Alison, automatically.

Gina’s head swivelled. ‘You remember that?’ she said warily. ‘The fire?’

Alison nodded. ‘It was in the paper,’ she said. ‘It made Mum cry.’ Her memory stirred, like dust rising. It had made her father cry too, she remembered now, big gulping sobs at the kitchen table. Drunk crying didn’t count. ‘What happened to them?’

‘The father topped himself,’ Gina said shortly, fumbling in her pocket for the fag packet again. ‘You don’t remember that? Week before your dad … before. Frank Marshall. He’d done the rewiring himself to save money – they weren’t council, see. It was electrical.’ She squinted around the cigarette. ‘She’s still around, somewhere.’

Gina didn’t hug her when she went, the arms round her shoulders had been a one-off. She’d never been one for softness, not like that, she’d always been more of a puncher and a shover for showing affection. When Alison turned at the playground gate she saw Gina standing beside her child, looking down into her face. She couldn’t see Gina’s expression but May was rapt, searching.

Walking back she’d looked in her bag for the scarf again, but it really wasn’t there. It nagged at her, knocking her off course. It would turn up. She wished she felt safe without it, but she didn’t.

She
looked up into Paul’s face now. ‘Lunch?’ he said, wary. ‘Or are you running off again?’

On the stairs she asked him, but he hadn’t seen her scarf. They sat in the hotel bar and ate something deep-fried beside a window that looked into the garden, and talked about Paul’s morning. A breakthrough in his research, apparently. He ate quickly as he described it to her, fired up. He’d uncovered a witness statement to a massacre in Northern France in 1944 that no one had seen before. Once or twice, watching his face lit up, last night came back to her, the distinct memory that he had wanted to hurt her and that she had colluded, but he showed no sign. Was that how it worked? Their secret violent life, under the civilised meals and books and quiet conversation. It sat inside her, mysterious, wrong, fascinating. She allowed a knot of resistance to form against it. No.

Alison worked her way through the food; it took about half a plateful before she remembered the fried clusters were fish. She made herself taste the stuff, made herself enjoy it. Salty, greasy, delicious. She kept an eye on the grass through the window in case Simon Chatwin walked past again, but he didn’t appear. The thought of him turned her stomach, she didn’t know why, but at least she could be fairly sure he hadn’t recognised her.

‘Does he see her?’ she’d asked Gina. ‘Does Simon see his daughter?’

A quick shake of the head and Gina had looked away. ‘Not him. He’s on a lot of medication.’ Hunched on the slide. ‘Prozac, that sort of shit.’ A quick glance at Alison. ‘He went off the rails. Too much dope. Or something.’

She would need the car again, she realised, as she forked the scampi into her mouth, calculating how she might put that to Paul.

‘You wolfed that,’ he said, amused, pushing his plate away. A pause. ‘Not pregnant?’ Smiling.

‘What?’
Mouth full, Alison laid her fork down, swallowed. ‘What kind of a question is that? Of course I’m not pregnant.’ They had never had a contraception conversation: she took care of it and she assumed he had worked that out. She felt an odd shiver as she saw she should have wondered why he’d never felt the need to make sure.

Paul shrugged, unruffled. ‘Something’s different, though,’ he said. ‘Since we got here.’

Alison coloured. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Sea air.’

He looked at her a moment then turned to signal to the girl behind the bar. ‘So,’ he said, turning back to Alison, ‘you want the car this afternoon? While I’m at the rehearsal.’ He grimaced. ‘You can drop me at the church, if you like.’ And then he smiled properly, the modest, determined smile that by now was familiar, the line appearing at the side of his mouth. He leaned in and kissed her, as the waitress appeared.

Alison
felt like she was in the car with something dangerous, a bottle of poison or a snake. She held the big buff envelope in both hands, it smelled of offices, of institutions, nothing more sinister, but that was sinister enough. Her family, in a drawer in that place for thirteen years.

There had seemed to be a lot more going on today when she arrived at the police station. Two patrol cars were parked at the front and as she sat there wondering what to do next she became aware of the buzz and crackle of urgent communication. A series of uniformed officers went in and came out with purpose, like drones at a hive. She remembered the police car out on the marsh and it coiled in her gut. Just leave it, forget it. Go to the wedding, go back to London, forget it.

But instead she opened the door and got out, came round the police cars. As she approached the tinted reinforced glass of the station’s door Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford was coming out, her face clouded.

‘No,’ she said, when she saw Alison’s face. ‘No, I—’ and she
stopped. The policeman Jennings stood beside her. His tie was straighter today but he looked older, weary and pouchy-eyed, and as his eyes met Alison’s Rutherford turned between them, deflecting him.

‘Ma’am …’ he said, resisting, but Sarah Rutherford stood firm.

‘You go on, get in,’ she said to him, gesturing to the car. ‘There’s something I’ve forgotten. Five minutes.’ And then she was shepherding Alison ahead of her, back inside.

Rutherford hesitated as they passed down a corridor. ‘Wait here,’ she said and disappeared through a door. When she came back she had the brown envelope in her hand, then they were back inside the room with the high window, and it was just the two of them, the door closed. They didn’t sit.

‘This isn’t how it should work,’ said Rutherford, her back against the door. ‘You know that, don’t you? You should have put in an official request. Perhaps you should have talked to a lawyer while you were at it.’ A hand to her head. ‘Perhaps I should.’ Alison stood in front of her, dumb, staring at the envelope. ‘I’m only doing it—’ Rutherford broke off. ‘Christ knows why I’m doing it. Because I remember you.’ Roughly she thrust the envelope at Alison. ‘You don’t have to look at them, just because you’ve got them. Do you have someone – someone who can be with you?’

Alison nodded slowly, thinking,
No. Not in a million years
. ‘Yes,’ she managed, her voice rusty.

‘Because there’s something else you need to know,’ Rutherford said.

Alison looked down at the envelope in her hands. ‘My father,’ she began, ‘was he—’

But the woman interrupted her. ‘Not him,’ she said. ‘Not about him. About the twins.’

Alison hugged the envelope to her chest. ‘What,’ she said. Not really asking, not wanting to know, suddenly. ‘What.’

Now
she sat there, in the car, watching the door to the police station. Rutherford had climbed into a waiting patrol car, not turning to acknowledge her but as the car moved away Alison saw Jennings’ upturned face, curious, in the passenger seat. They were going back down to the village, to Mulville’s Hard, where the body had been found.

‘Do they know I’m here?’ she’d asked Rutherford as they left the room with its high window. Under her breath. ‘Who knows?’

In the empty corridor Rutherford had shot her a glance. ‘I’ve told no one,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean no one knows.’

Now Alison laid the envelope against the steering wheel of Paul’s neat little car, and put her hand inside.

It was nothing she hadn’t seen before, that’s what she’d said to Rutherford, but when the policewoman just shook her head they both knew, this could be worse. She was like a suicide bomber about to pull a cord, and the clean little space would turn to blood. She pulled out the first photograph, just halfway.

A fold of bloodstained nylon. A mouth half open, the gleam of baby teeth. An arm flung out, torn. Mads. There was a little sound in the car, a small soft catch, a groan: it came from her, it choked her.

The activity outside the police station had ceased. She looked from the photograph back to the dusty windows behind which Sarah Rutherford had told her what it was she needed to know. Rage rose in her. It roared.

They weren’t his, you see
.
The twins weren’t his.

And now she remembered, now what Rutherford had told her lined up with what she already knew, even though she hadn’t known she knew it. They had come back from taking Letty to the hospital, white with exhaustion after the accident at the playground. Something to do with blood groups, nothing
to worry about, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at their stricken faces. Genes were odd things – and twins were mutants, that was what Joe was always telling them, grinning cheerfully.

The girls had flopped on the sofa over each other like dogs, Letty’s nose buried in Mads’s armpit. Esme had chucked the sleeping bag over them and gone to stand in the hall, listening. She could see Dad’s profile through the kitchen door, she could see him frowning as he made sense of it. Tried to. That had been early autumn, leaves turning. Letty bandaged up.

It was pretty straightforward, Rutherford said. Letty had needed a transfusion after the accident, they were short of blood in the hospital, tested everyone to see who would be a match. Letty’s blood group was AO positive, which meant she couldn’t be her father’s daughter. There was the record then of an appointment, Mum and Dad together, and DNA testing. November.

Months before the shootings, Alison protested, but her brain galloped ahead. November. Why not then? Why wait eight, nine months?

Rutherford had only looked at her, sorrowful. ‘Sometimes it’s how it works,’ she said. ‘Your father was an educated man. He may have tried very hard to resist what he was feeling. Sometimes feelings accumulate.’ Alison had stared, unable to deny it.

‘You knew, then,’ she said. All this time, strangers had known. Mads and Letty not her sisters. Half-sisters.

‘We have the right to access medical records when someone is dead,’ the policewoman had said, gently. ‘Why would we tell you? It would only have hurt you.’

Hurt her.

Had Sarah Rutherford felt it, or seen it? Had her training taught her, or had her experience, to detect that thing that
rose up inside Alison as she heard that her sisters had not been her sisters, not really? That one thing had tipped the next, on and on. That her mother had been fucking someone not her father. It was a force, an energy that was not containable, there was no place to put it, it would have to burst loose and lay waste to the room, the building. But it stayed inside, a
boom
that pushed at the walls of her body and turned back inwards.

Alison stood on the waterfront against the flaking weatherboarding of the chandlery, its window filled with coils of rope and weatherproof jackets. She’d parked the car at the other end of the quay; the envelope was beneath the passenger seat.

Across the marsh beyond the house now she could make out white tape that flickered in the wind as three, four figures in white boiler suits bent and straightened, came together and moved apart. There was a police van parked near the house. It was Stephen Bray who had died in the mud off Mulville’s Hard last night. Sometime just before midnight.

Had Rutherford even meant to tell her? The policewoman had waited till the last moment they were alone together, the corridor in which they stood briefly empty. And then she’d said quickly, ‘Do you remember a man called Stephen Bray?’

Why now?
She’d seen that question in Rutherford’s eyes, gleaming in the police station’s striplighting.
You come back, and he dies.

‘I saw him,’ Alison had said. ‘I saw him in the pub the night we arrived. He didn’t recognise me.’ But she didn’t know if that was true or not.

A movement distracted her: two men were hauling a dinghy down across the muddy shingle at the end of the road. She could hear the scrape. Out in the estuary two barges had come to anchor, the big black hulls jostling against each other, the dark sails gathered up on the forked masts.

‘It
wasn’t the first time he’d been hauled out of the mud,’ Rutherford had said, preoccupied – one eye on the envelope of photographs as if regretting handing them over already, another on the swing doors at the end of the corridor. ‘Only this time he wasn’t just drunk, he was dead.’

‘Was it an accident?’ Alison had thought of the old man’s hand on Paul’s arm in the bar. Of the crowded, magical interior of his boat. But the policewoman had only shaken her head.

‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘He was an alcoholic. He was only still alive because people looked out for him. He had … difficulties. We don’t know yet.’

The two men were almost at the water with their dinghy. They might be headed down the creek to see the barges gathering for tomorrow’s race, but she found herself wondering, how far round, by boat, to where the body was found? As she watched, the smaller of the two gave it one last shove and followed it, vaulting around on one hand in one agile, practised move, the boat bobbing and settling. The bigger man waded stolidly into the water and the stern dipped as he climbed over the transom. She saw a heavy profile, puffy. The other sat back in the boat from stepping the mast, tangled hair falling away from his smooth brown face turned up to the sky, and she knew him, too. The last time she’d seen him had been thirteen years before, in a witness box. Danny Watts.

The other one, the one with the weathered, puffy face was his brother, Martin. It was Danny she couldn’t take her eyes off.

A little peaked square sail flew up with a distant rattle and with magical swiftness the dinghy began to move, gliding across the tide towards the estuary and abruptly half hidden behind a spur of mud.

The little church sat there beyond the boat on the horizon:
it was six and the rehearsal would be finishing. She should go, she should talk to Paul and smile and be sociable. But the pictures lay under the passenger seat in the car. She had seen half of one photograph and no more. She was afraid. Alison turned away from the water and began to walk back towards the car. As she walked she took out her phone and dialled Polly.

‘You knew,’ she said, straight away, hardly able to breathe for getting the words out. ‘You knew, didn’t you? The twins.’

And Polly answered as if she’d been expecting the question for a long time. ‘I’ve always known,’ she said. ‘Why do you think we stopped talking, your mother and I?’ She sounded weary to the point of despair.

‘Who was it?’ said Alison, staring sightless through the window.

A sigh. ‘I never knew his name,’ said Polly. ‘She wanted to move to get away from the whole business. I think he’d dropped her.’ There was an intake of breath and when she spoke again there was a sharpness to her voice. ‘You’re not at home, are you? You’re there.’ Silence. ‘Are you in Saltleigh?’

‘This is home,’ said Alison.

‘It’s not,’ said Polly, hard as nails. ‘It never was. You can’t stay there. Get out of there.’

Alison ignored her. ‘So Dad – Dad knew. About the twins.’ She thought now of their light eyes and hair, their otherness. ‘How could he not know?’

‘He didn’t know,’ said Polly flatly. ‘About the other man, about the twins. I told her she had to tell him but she wouldn’t.’ Her voice was savage. Alison realised that all this time, all these years, she’d thought it was her father Polly had fallen out with. ‘Your mother was selfish.’ Her voice was congested. ‘There was a lot he just put up with.’ A pause. ‘Please,’ she continued. ‘Please. Go home. Go back to London, come back here. I’ll … I’ll tell you what I know.’

She
sounded desperate. ‘Is there any more?’ Alison said, hearing how cold she sounded, feeling the temptation to soften and say, it’s all right, it’s all right. Would there be time for that? Not now. ‘What else did he put up with?’

A silence. ‘She’d stopped telling me anything.’ A sigh. ‘But the police said.’ Polly stopped.

‘Said what?’

‘There were rumours. Another affair. In the village. A local man.’

The best skirt. Two glasses. Voices below in the yard.

‘Alison?’ She said nothing. ‘Alison? Come home, please.’ Her mother’s top drawer, with rolled underwear and things she hadn’t wanted the children to find. Even as she’d headed unerringly for the same drawer in Paul’s flat, she realised, Alison had had her mother’s in mind. A tin with locks of their hair. A pack of pills whose purpose Esme had pondered, a circle with days marked on them. The scarf had been in there. Had Polly gone to the drawer and opened it or had the police already turned it out?

Alison stopped. She had arrived back at the car, it sat where she’d left it, under a low-hanging tree beside a patch of grass and the village hall. Only as she got closer she saw that parked behind it, nudged up too tight, was Simon Chatwin’s van.

‘Alison?’ She hung up. Polly’s voice echoed plaintive in her ears and she thought of Cornwall with a painful tug, the dripping hedgerows, the low-ceilinged, clean-swept cottage that had never felt like home but now, she saw, had been a safe place. Polly always there on guard. She circled the cars. The village hall was dark and its double doors padlocked, the grass glowed in the twilight. There was no one there. She got in and turned the key in the ignition. In the split second before the engine responded she already knew, the hair on the back of her neck told her.

The sound was wrong, the dying cough of a lost
connection. She turned the key again, but this time it was no more than a wheeze.

She heard a voice, muffled. She thought it said ‘dead’. She turned and his face was in her window, his paint-spattered finger raised to tap.

It was Simon Chatwin.