The Crooked House (20 page)

Cathy Watts looked at her, unmoving, a long moment before she spoke. ‘We all know,’ she said, and her voice was hoarse. ‘We know he did it.’ She sounded grim, but still she didn’t turn and leave.

‘How do you know?’ said Alison. And then, gaining courage, ‘Was it Stephen Bray? He saw my dad that night, didn’t he? Maybe he was the last person to see him. Did he tell you something? Did you tell the police?’ Cathy Watts watched her, silent. ‘You looked after him,’ said Alison. ‘Mr Bray.’

‘Someone had to,’ Watts said, unfolding her arms at last. Alison saw her hands were knobbed and curled with arthritis as she let them hang by her sides. She looked at Alison strangely: accusingly. ‘He took it very hard,’ she said. ‘Your dad killing those girls.’

‘What did he say to you?’ Alison stepped towards Cathy Watts. ‘What did he know? Why did he die now, why now? I saw him the night I came back, did he know it was me? Was he going to tell me something?’ The older woman’s face was cold but Alison only became more desperate. ‘He died out near our house, didn’t he? What was he doing over there? It’s not on the way back to his boat from the pub, is it?’

Cathy Watts was shaking her head now, she was shifting on her arthritic hips, turning to set herself in motion. ‘Don’t you start that,’ she said, holding herself steady. ‘Not with me, you don’t. Why are you asking me when you know the answer? You know what he was doing out there. The boys saw you.’

‘What do you mean?’ Her hand was on Watts’s arm, anything to keep her, and the older woman stared down at it with her
black eyes as if an animal had got hold of her. Alison let go at once.

‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ said Watts, and then she was walking away, lopsided with silent pain.

It hung in the air behind her: a warning, the same one they’d all issued her with.
Go. You are his child
, it said. She had brought him back, brought it back, the bad thing that had lain there all the time in the marsh, that had sat dormant in the boarded house like disease, and when she drove over that hill and looked down to the estuary, under her gaze it had broken the mud’s surface and was exposed.

You will never be clean
, the warning said,
you will never be good, you will never be free.
They are drawn to her, they stare at her. The one who’d walked out of the rubble, the survivor.

They must have suspected her. Any investigations relating to you will be restricted, Rutherford had said. Of course they had investigated her, they had to. Perhaps they’d all wondered, whispering up and down the village’s high street as Esme sat in the foster family’s kitchen and talked to Sarah Rutherford, as she sat motionless in the strange bedroom among the battered toys. Children had been known to kill, even if it had always happened in America, where there were guns everywhere, guns and drugs and computer-game-addicted teens. The Wattses, the pub landlord, Stephen Bray – even Gina, even Kyra Price and her mother. Had it crossed all their minds, and did it still hang over her, even now, that under the influence of childish, murderous rage, not understanding she couldn’t take it back, she had found the rusty old shotgun and pulled the trigger again and again until they were all dead?

At least as likely as her dad doing it, her gentle hopeless dad, who’d never once even slapped a child.

In the lane Cathy Watts had turned the corner now and was gone.

Sometimes, sometimes, in the intervening years Alison had
wondered too, lying in the cold bedroom in Polly’s cold house or starting awake in a college room hundreds of miles away. At bad moments, she let the idea grow in the way clouds grow out of nothing until they turn the sky black that all she had heard as she lay on her bed were the sounds of a violent argument. That in fact it had been Esme who had come down, high on whatever had been in the cup Gina had goaded her to swallow, stirred up with their argument and ready for a fight, and that something had boiled up inside her when she came downstairs and saw them. Saw her mother in heels and lipstick ranting at her father from the kitchen doorway and him swaying drunken and blank and useless, saw the twins, entwined in their sleeping bag, turned silent and alien against her, and Joe, maddeningly oblivious, nodding under his headphones. And it flew out of her black and shrieking.
Wake up
.
BOOM
.

So no wonder.

Alison stared down the empty lane, seeing the cow parsley gleam like silver in the shadows, listening to the birds beginning to sing in the hedges as the twilight crept up. Listening.

She put her hands to her eyes so that there was only sound, she was Esme perched high up in her bedroom. Voices. She listened. Yes.

Voices in the yard, where she found the twisted piece of metal from her father’s glasses.

Someone screaming. Shrieking words.

Voices. Her mother’s voice, lowered. A man answering. Was she talking to Simon?

A car far off.

Out here in the crooked house you learn to listen for that, you know, when the sound detaches itself from the village, when it bumps and revs on the track coming closer, that someone is coming out here, because there is nowhere else, nothing else, only mud, concrete remains, rotted timber. Just us.

It
was all thrown in the air, she couldn’t get the order right, what came first, what was the last, the very last thing she heard?

Alison took her hands from her eyes. The night he died Stephen Bray must have been coming to meet someone in the crooked house, because there was nothing else to come for. Just their house, the Grace house, and her thoughts flew off, scattering; he was coming out to see ghosts, to see the dead. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, thinking of what that house might contain, behind the boarded windows. She put her hands back to her eyes, shutting herself in. Esme. Inside her own head.

The car is stopping, the voices in the yard are raised. Panic. It begins.

Kay’s
voice. In the car on the way back to the hotel with the phone pressed to her ear, Alison almost sobbed to hear it. She pulled up at random: she was on the high street.

It was just a message. Her mobile’s screen had been telling her about it for days, only she never registered that stuff, it had been just that she got the phone out to catch Rutherford and bring her back, before she got to whatever had called her away, to tell her she’d remembered something, and the icon had caught her eye at last.

‘Jesus, are you dead, or what?’ Kay’s voice, urgent. ‘I … there’s something … it’s too complicated to talk about on the phone.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you locked up in the bloody honeymoon suite? Can you stop shagging him for five minutes and call me at least?’

And her voice was gone. There’d been the noise of a bar in the message’s background, there’d been a moment when the voice faded then returned, when Kay must have turned from the phone to nod or get out of someone’s way or take a drink, and it came to Alison in that pause that she could
just … leave. Climb out of Paul’s car, walk to the hotel, call a taxi. She could buy a ticket and get on a train until it pulled in where there would be strangers, a thousand people heading across each other to their destinations under a big vaulted echoing station roof: just another Friday evening. London.

Alison pressed to return the call. It rang, and rang: it was close to six o’clock. Just another Friday evening. Kay would have left work. Maybe she was back in the same bar. Who would she be with? ‘Hello,’ Alison said awkwardly, to Kay’s answerphone message that said breathily, jokily seductive
Sorry, I can’t get to the phone, tell me everything
.

‘It’s me,’ she said, and stopped. What was that? A sound? Was there someone coming? She looked in the wing mirror, but the pavement was empty.

‘What’s too complicated to leave a message about, then?’ She tried to sound upbeat but her voice was reedy and anxious. She remembered something. ‘Rosa phoned,’ she said. ‘Is it to do with that?’ Then something overwhelmed her.
I just want to talk to you
. And before she could take it back, it was out. ‘Rosa knows, doesn’t she? About me. Do you all know?’ She heard her own intake of breath, horrified, trying to climb down. ‘Call me back, anyway. Please.’

When she got back to the hotel Paul was leaning on the reception desk, chatting to a pinkly pleased Jan.

‘You walked back,’ Alison said.

‘I said I would,’ he said, smiling easily, pushing himself off the polished counter, apparently unaware of Jan gazing at him.

‘Jan,’ said Alison. ‘Did you say you had some books about the area?’

Paul stretched. ‘I’ll get back to work,’ he said, eyeing the two of them with amusement.

‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ said Alison. She waited until he’d turned the bend in the wide staircase, then waited some more
before turning back to Jan, catching that adoring look on her face again.

‘Does someone called Karen Marshall work here?’ she asked.

‘I … she … I … yes,’ Jan said, ruffled.

‘I’d like to talk to her,’ said Alison, the same smile on her face as she’d given Paul, brooking no opposition.

Jan summoned up authority. ‘She’s on our kitchen staff,’ she said. ‘She’s not on duty for half an hour.’

‘In that case,’ said Alison, ‘could we have some tea sent up?’ She smiled. ‘In a little while?’

When she came into the room Paul was lying on top of the bed, and he seemed to be asleep. Alison sat down at the desk, where his papers lay undisturbed, and looking down at them she wondered. In her head she mapped connections, down university corridors, at conferences, in emails. Paul’s life, who he knew, what he knew, where he’d been. Paul knew Saunders. Did Rosa know him too? They all exchanged information, they knew each other’s interests. Rosa knew. Holding still, Alison waited for the pieces to align, to give her an explanation: the machine in her head ticked and whirred, but it needed more time.

There was a soft knock at the door. On the bed Paul didn’t show any sign of having heard and Alison went to answer it.

At the door holding a tray of tea things, Karen Marshall smelled of cigarette smoke. She was the woman who’d stared at Paul’s car, smoke drifting up from the cigarette in her hand. She looked at Alison, sullenly suspicious, and Alison stepped out into the corridor, letting the door half close behind her. She took the tray from the woman.

‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ she said. Marshall clenched her empty hands and Alison saw that the skin on them was rough and red, the nails bitten to the quick.

‘Yes,’ said Marshall. ‘I know.’ Waiting. ‘Here for the wedding?’ A note of disbelief in her voice.

‘I
don’t think my dad did it,’ said Alison, finding herself without any strategy, with the woman’s hard, wary eyes on her. ‘I don’t think he could have.’

Marshall said nothing.

‘Do you think it was his fault your baby died?’ Alison couldn’t waste time.

Something flared in the woman’s face, a blotch on each cheek and Alison thought of the smoke that hung in the village’s lanes. ‘Why are you still here?’ she asked, and at last Karen Marshall spoke.

‘I tried to go,’ she said, hoarse. ‘I ended up living rough for a bit.’ She wiped a raw hand across her nose. ‘She’s buried in the churchyard. It’s a live-in job, here.’

From somewhere distant a police siren sounded and they both turned to listen to it. ‘They talked to me after the alarms went off,’ said Karen Marshall, looking down at her bitten nails. ‘You see them? Seems to me I’m still the first one they think of when there’s a fire.’ Her face was grey, as if the blood had stopped flowing inside her.

But then she raised her head and looked at Alison with the smallest gleam of a response. ‘They talked to us back then too, you know that, right? Because of Frank, only he was dead by the time your dad … well. Maybe they thought
I
could have killed someone else’s kids, I was off my head, anyway. Everyone knew I was.’ She spoke flatly.

‘And could you have?’ As she looked at Karen Marshall Alison felt another presence shift in the back of her mind, shadowed and waiting. The tray felt heavy in her hands; she listened for movement behind the door to their room. Marshall’s arm came across her body in a defensive motion and Alison saw a tattoo on her wrist, crudely done, blurred blue. The child’s name, that she hadn’t spoken, Mia.

The tattoo said, she hadn’t done it. The tattoo, the trembling hands. She couldn’t say why she was so sure, only she was.

‘I
was working that night,’ said Karen Marshall, and her eyes flickered to the door behind Alison. ‘Thought I had to keep going. Waitressing at the Plough.’ The same pub she and Paul had stopped at on the way to Saltleigh. Small world, thought Alison, dully unsurprised.

‘They was busy that night.’ Marshall was staring at the door.

‘What?’ said Alison, but the woman refocused, shook her head.

‘It wasn’t never your dad’s fault,’ she said roughly. ‘Not even Frank thought it, in the end. That night, when he had a go at your dad in the pub, he’d just gone mental.’ She said it as if it was routine. Her arms still across her body she turned, looking along the corridor and back, checking exits. Then unwillingly she looked back at Alison. ‘He put in the units for us,’ she said. ‘Kitchen units. They said the fire started in the upstairs hall, nowhere near.’ She looked away. ‘Ever so sweet with her, he was. The way he’d look at her.’

With the baby. A picture came into Alison’s head, of Dad joggling one of the twins against his shoulder to soothe her, the little head weaving, wobbly. Must have been not long after they moved, the twins just born.

Karen Marshall was frowning. ‘He was drinking, though.’ Alison nodded. ‘I weren’t sure about letting him hold her.’ She looked sideways at Alison, who was concentrating on not seeing something, staring down at the tray in her hands. Marshall went on. ‘We should have gone, left, after the fire, only we couldn’t think straight. Sometimes it … it just gets you under and you can’t even get up of a morning.’

‘He’s not buried here?’ Marshall stared and Alison blundered on. ‘With … with the baby? Your … Frank.’

‘They won’t let them in the churchyard,’ she said. ‘He took pills. They won’t bury suicides in … whatever. Holy ground.’
She drew a breath, staring at nothing. ‘I begged ’em.’

Standing on her own at the crematorium. The tray in Alison’s hands sat between them, but Karen Marshall had no hope or expectation of comfort, anyway, Alison could see that. The thought of putting her arms round her was only stupid. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

The woman barely nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Just leave it outside the door,’ was all she said, but something had moved across between them, not understanding exactly, but a fragment of it, a token. Alison pushed back into the room, the tray ahead of her.

Paul was sitting up in the bed, and he was holding her phone in his hand. Alison hoped that the great clumsy lurch her heart executed inside her didn’t show on her face.

‘Your friend,’ he said.

She set down the tray carefully, trying to stop herself grabbing for the phone. ‘I was only outside the door,’ she said. He shrugged, smiling, letting her take it. ‘She doesn’t like me much, does she?’

Alison swallowed. ‘Who?’ she said.

‘The Facebook one,’ he said. ‘Gina? The one you were talking to earlier.’ Her face felt stiff. ‘That’s who it said it was on the screen, only when I answered she just hung up.’ Alison looked down at the phone, moved her finger on the screen. Recent calls. Gina.

‘Call her back,’ he said and she let out a quick laugh, throwing the phone down on the bed, the chemical rush of panic in her veins.

‘She can wait,’ she said. She felt drained, shivery, as grey as Karen Marshall. She sat down abruptly beside him on the bed. ‘I’m worn out. Isn’t that funny?’ He reached his arms around her, his body warm.

‘It was a busy night,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Fire alarm and everything.’ She let her head fall on his shoulder, and
gently he took off her glasses, he set her down on the pillow. ‘You sleep,’ he said.

The tea,’ she murmured and she heard the tray chink as he lifted it, then she was under.

In the half dark she dreamed, sounds and voices entering and leaving the room that opened in her head. There were footsteps on gravel outside her window.

In her sleep she kisses a boy who looks like Danny Watts, his eyebrows bleached white, she closes her eyes and hears the wind rustle in the stiff grass under the sea wall, and the power station hums. Then it is Simon she is kissing, and he tastes of mud and diesel, she flies, she flies, she lifts off and flies, and she looks down.

Moving slow across brown water is the long lozenge of the big boat and there he comes, swooping, a thin brown man with a shock of hair, riding on a sliver of plastic board. He tilts as he comes across the broad snub bow, he tilts and falls and he is down. He is under.

Below her they run like ants up and down the big boat’s rusted decks, looking down her sides. They wait, they stare and stare down into the lapping brown waves. He’s down too long, he’s under too long. Then something’s there, long hair trailing up through the water, the pale planes of a face stare back and as he comes up into the air he is a merman, he is a corpse, all that’s left of him is bones and slime and weed and a gleam of pearly eyeball. His jaw is blown away.

The phone rang and Alison started up.

The room was quite dark. Someone had drawn the curtains. The phone went on ringing: she could see a screen somewhere down at her feet on the bed pulsing blue but she didn’t know where her glasses were. Fear surged as she felt for them on the side table and heard them fall. ‘Paul?’ There was no answer. She slowed herself, she leaned, and found her glasses, she put them on.

The
phone was at the foot of the bed in the blankets and Alison picked it up, still ringing, and put it to her ear.
Don’t hang up, Gina
. ‘Hello?’

Paul wasn’t in the room. Paul was gone.

An explosion of breath. ‘At last, Jesus Christ,’ came the voice.

Kay.