The Crooked House (14 page)

The ashes burn where they’re buried, on Power Station Beach, and Esme hunkers down in the sharp sea grass in the lee of the dyke. The boys are talking at the water’s edge, the tide is high and the wide expanse of mud is covered, the broken bottles and chunks of brick and rotted posts hidden under the surface. Behind her the power station hums.

The boys are there, Danny and Joshua and Joe, the brothers burned biscuit-brown and gold, their eyelashes white from days and days drifting out on some borrowed boat or other, following races or rowing up creeks, to lie on their backs on the bottom boards, under the sun. Joe is paler, Joe is skinny and awkward, Joe has passions he keeps secret: music and sunrises and who knows what else.

A disturbance, and Esme burrows further down, feeling the cool damp firm sand below the silky shifting stuff. Hide. Something is happening, more than just messing about, she can hear it, she can hear Joe’s voice going up. She hears him shout words, angry words, and before she rolls away, to blot out what she hears, she sees Joe’s fist, Danny grabbing him from behind after he makes contact. Joshua’s cheek is bleeding, the trickle is black in the glow from the ashes.

Fire.

Someone else is there, in the dunes, a head rising behind the grass, gazing at Joe.

Why
do they fight? In her dream Alison knows that Joshua will die and Joe won’t be able to stop crying, but he’ll never tell her.

Come back.

Beyond
the car’s window the hotel rose grey and calm in the misty dawn, no sign of the disturbances of the night before. Only in Alison’s body the panic still turned, the terror, her insides like iron.

She’d woken from the dream knowing with a sickening certainty that it was real; or worse, that it told her something but she didn’t yet know what. Knowing that it had risen out of what had passed for conversation around the Carters’ dinner table, the annihilation of her family picked over for entertainment. How could she have thought she could move through four, five days here unharmed? She’d started something and she had to go on with it.

She sat in the driver’s seat with the envelope in her lap.

Had he really been asleep? It had been dawn, before five, when she’d sat up, a sour taste in her mouth. Paul lay on his side, turned away, his shoulder rising and falling evenly.

There had been someone, among that small crowd assembled for the fire drill. She knew that middle-aged woman with her battered, weary face, and that woman knew her.

The
hotel had been silent in the dawn, deserted, all the doors closed as she passed along the corridor, down the wide staircase. Leaves unswept on the hall mat. They were all sleeping soundly after the alarm, and Paul among them. Why would he pretend?

Pausing a moment after coming around the bed she had scanned his face, seen his cheek pressed immobile against a hand, before picking the car key from the table, noiselessly. Bare feet on the carpet, the door eased closed.

In the driver’s seat Alison pushed her glasses up her nose. The windows were filmed with moisture, she could escape attention in here for a second or two, if anyone came out. Was she hiding? Not exactly. But she had to bide her time before she climbed out of the car.

The woman had known her last night out on the gravel, but here people who recognised her could be everywhere. Someone in the pub, someone at the church, someone standing on the marsh early that first morning, someone who couldn’t sleep, like her. Someone who’d watched her pressed with her back against the crooked house as though she was up a high building and might fall.
Take care
, Sarah Rutherford had said. In her lap the envelope of photographs. With a quick movement she pulled them all out, they spilled and slithered and she grabbed for them before they fell.

She stared.

Driving across the country thirteen years ago beside Aunt Polly, dozing on faceless motorways, waking from the blanket on the back seat to watch Stonehenge pass in the twilight, they had brought no pictures. There were no other photographs of Esme’s family. She had never asked Polly if she had any: they had been hidden away, if they ever existed. These, then, were her family photographs. Longing and horror ballooned inside her, compressing her lungs.
Look
.

It’s not possible. It’s not bearable. She looked.

Mads’s
missing tooth. A small hand uncurled, the back of a head, hair sticky with blood. Letty. Alison felt her face move: I’m sorry. She didn’t know if she said it out loud or not. She had held Letty, not looked at her, had held her hidden in the soaked fabric of the sleeping bag. And here was her face framed in a fold. Her sweet face, unmarked, eyes shut, heart-shaped, dead.

Joe on the sofa, leaning slightly, eyes open, the lower part of his face not recognisable as human but the headphones in position. They had cost a lot of money. He had saved for them himself from his job on a record stall at the market; they were very effective at blocking out noise. He must have known nothing. If he’d known, if he’d seen … In her head Alison saw him look up, she saw him start up from the sofa, she saw him struggle, she saw him kneel, she saw him weep. But there he still sat, only startled. She had to breathe. She squared the photographs and laid them on the seat beside her carefully.
There
.

Her mother lay face down on the kitchen floor in her flowered skirt, a broad spreading stain across her back and beneath her on the vinyl floor. Kate Grace, beautiful Kate Grace. Mum. Alison blinked, and breathed. She looked, tracing the photograph with her fingers. Things she had forgotten: the mug tree. The cupboards Dad had built, the stainless steel draining board. Two wineglasses, overturned, on their sides. They’d been drinking together? After he got back from the pub?

Esme lies on her bed and hears voices at the front door, this chill midsummer night. The door bangs again, a car starts up. There is a whispering in the yard. A crunch and scuffle.

There were the blue and white vinyl floor tiles Dad hated, yellowed and turning up at the edges. They couldn’t afford to put a new floor down. And there was a shoe.

Alison
lifted the photograph closer to her face. She had forgotten that. Her mother wearing those shoes, her only pair of heels, suede with scalloped edges across the instep. Mum kept them in their box in the back of the wardrobe and had got furious when she caught Mads clopping around in them one evening. One heeled shoe was on her foot, the other on its side on the floor, half under a cupboard where it must have slid. When she went down. Bare legs.

The sole of the shoe was dirty, marked. She had been in the yard. Had those hissed whispers Alison had heard through her bedroom window been a row? It wouldn’t be the first time a row had been taken outside so the kids wouldn’t see, only on this occasion it had come roaring back into the house like a forest fire.

Slowly Alison laid the photograph face up on the passenger seat, beside Joe and the twins, and looked down at the next one. Her father. But he was absent: there was an odd arrangement of red string and chalk marks on the hall carpet, there was the rug, stained and rucked. A bloody mark in the doorway to the living room.

Of course, he had not been dead. They didn’t have the leisure to photograph him, they had to keep him alive until he was taken away in an ambulance. Was that it? Had someone worked on him, had they pumped his heart, resuscitated him, while Esme crouched in the mud, unable to move? She didn’t know – they’d kept her away, in the passenger seat of a police car.

In the picture there was no broken glass on the hall carpet, no twisted metal. Might the police have taken the glasses away?

Joe had been the last to die, her mother had been the first, the inquest had found. Her father had been the last to be shot, and all while Esme lay on her bed with her hands over her ears.
BOOM
. Alison squeezed her eyes shut. In her head she saw a leg outstretched, mud and dust on his shoe, his shirt
pulled out, blood … but nothing told her definitively what she wanted to know, the impression was of chaos. She tried to remember, until her head hurt.

Someone had wrapped her in a blanket and taken her away. Later, Sarah Rutherford had asked her where she had gone, which rooms she had entered, had asked her over and over and then she couldn’t think. Now, she knew, she hadn’t gone into the living room. She put her hand to the photograph, the bloody imprint in the doorway; she thought of the policemen moving between the rooms. Blood on their shoes?

There had been a raw mark on her father’s neck. Had they seen that? They must have seen that.

She couldn’t remember if he had glasses on. Did it make a difference? She closed her eyes and tried, she set herself back against the wall in her hall, she saw the hands reaching down the gun’s stock, she saw his callused thumb. The blood. She saw no glasses, she saw no broken glass. She upended the envelope and a card slid out. DS Sarah Rutherford. A mobile number.

She took out her phone. Startled, she saw she’d missed a call, Kay had called, just after one in the morning. Her friend Kay who inhabited the other universe that was London, had phoned when Alison had been dead to the world.

Something began, it ticked down, something from last night. Paul putting her to sleep. A face in the dark that had made her think of that other fire, and her mother crying over the newspaper at the kitchen table.

It was six thirty, the phone said. Too early to call but she had no choice. How long till Paul woke? This car was the only private place she had.

That other universe was too distant and Alison dialled not Kay’s but Gina’s number, and waited. Beyond the misted car window a white shape drove in through the gate, the gravel crunched. Alison stayed very still, the phone ringing at her ear.
Hang up, hang up
. Too late. She wedged the phone under her ear and in a panic stuffed the photographs back in the envelope, leaned down to put it back where she’d hidden it. She couldn’t go back inside carrying it. What if— There was a click as someone picked up.

‘What the
fuck
.’ Gina sounded drugged.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alison muttered. The decorator’s van had pulled up, on the far side of the drive, close to the hotel. He couldn’t see her from the driver’s seat, because she couldn’t see him. No one got out.

Gina coughed painfully. ‘What do you want?’

‘The couple whose baby died in the fire,’ said Alison, dogged. ‘Did he have a fight with my dad?’ There was a silence, that grew longer. ‘The baby’s father? What did his wife say to the police? After the … after the shootings. Did she talk to them?’

‘Christ, how should I know?’ said Gina. ‘He was dead by then. The baby was dead. Why would it have anything to do with … with that? Just leave it.’ There was a warning note in her voice.

‘There’s no one else to ask,’ said Alison. With a finger she rubbed a window in the misted glass. The door of the decorator’s van was still closed. ‘Does he help you?’ she said. ‘Simon? Does he give you money?’

‘I don’t want his money,’ said Gina flatly. ‘He’s a creep.’

Mads and Letty had had a biological father. From what Polly said, he knew they existed, at least. Mightn’t he have come looking for them? There was a silence from Gina.

‘Can I phone you later?’ said Alison, pleading.

‘Whatever,’ said Gina, and she was gone. In the ringing silence Alison felt abruptly alone. Only she wasn’t – there was the decorator’s van.

Joe had hated her kissing Simon Chatwin. It had been Joshua that had told him. That was why the dream had seemed real – there
had
been a fight on the beach. They’d gone down
there for one of those barbecues to mark the tail end of the summer – she and Joe and Joshua and Danny, Martin too grown-up to come, who else? – only this time she should have stayed away, she wasn’t a kid sister any more, she was something trickier. A fight between Joe and Joshua, and Danny had been trying to break it up, and she had burrowed down in the sand dunes so as not to hear, only she did hear. Joshua saying, in that voice, jeering,
Your sister
. Angry.
Your sister with her tongue down his throat.
The way they’d looked her over when she laid down her bike in the grass had been down to that.

Joshua must have been out on the marsh watching, out in his boat or messing about in the mud. He must have seen the decorator arrive, seen him lean down, his hand on the back of Esme’s neck, seen her look up at him.

Shut up, shut up
, Joe had said, his voice thick.
Don’t say that.

And for a moment Alison thought, was that him, then, watching me when I went back to the house, was it only yesterday? But of course it hadn’t been Joshua yesterday, because he was dead. He’d been dead before Joe, before all of it. Dead by the side of the road on a November night, while Esme sat in front of the fire with the twins and Dad kept disappearing into the kitchen. Drinking standing up at the counter, down in one.

In the car’s front seat she blinked through the glass, jolted back to the present as Simon Chatwin climbed out of his van and walked around to the back of the hotel. Hold on, she thought as she watched the set of his shoulders, saw his stiff hair that had been gold now streaked grey. Hold on. Her mother had worn those heels before.

Simon Chatwin had been in the yard more than once. The time he’d kissed her, what had he been doing there? She’d thought he’d come for her, she thought he must have seen her gaze at him as he sat on the shingle running a rag over
his windsurfer, he must have registered her hanging about outside the pub on warm Saturday evenings. Months before, though, before Esme had grown fascinated by him, when he’d been just some bloke, he’d been there. Hanging about in the yard as she came back from school, she’d pushed past him into the kitchen and there her mother had stood, tall and awkward in the high heels at the counter. Lipstick. Waiting for someone.

He was back, opening the rear of the van. He mustn’t see her. The doors clanged shut again and he was walking with a ladder, slowly. He disappeared again around the hotel’s veranda to the back. Taking her chance, Alison was out of the car and running across the gravel, swinging through the heavy door and past Jan looking up in surprise from the reception desk.

Upstairs, Paul was still asleep. As she set her mobile down quietly Alison saw that clutched with it in her hand was Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford’s card.