The Crooked House (24 page)

But Alison felt nothing. She felt no danger. If he’d wanted to do it, he could have killed her last night, out on the marsh. It came to her that the only fear in the enclosed space came from him. But still she wanted to punish him.

‘My sisters were wrapped in their sleeping bag,’ she said. ‘Whoever killed them couldn’t stand to look at them.’ He was blinking. ‘I found them,’ she said. ‘I was there.’

He made a noise then, like something broken, he began to rock minutely, his hands still in his lap. ‘I want to get better,’ he said. ‘I do what they tell me. I never hurt anyone.’ Alison thought of the porn mags, an ache in her jaw as if she was going to throw up.

‘Is it part of your therapy, trying to chat up … adult women?’ she said. ‘You did something to my car.’ His eyes darted her way.

‘I didn’t touch it,’ he said, too quickly. Then, ‘You wouldn’t have talked to me otherwise.’ There was a whiny note to his voice. She felt hollow, the adrenalin going from her as she understood, Rutherford had been right.

‘Was it you in the yard that night?’ she said dully. ‘Did you come to the house?’ At the change in her voice he stopped rocking, he looked at her.

‘Your mum talked to me now and again,’ he said. There was something dreamy in his voice. ‘She probably didn’t think too hard about why I was there.’ He gazed through the windscreen
as if at something far away and Alison had an uncomfortable feeling, that she was encouraging something like nostalgia. ‘Other things on her mind. She wasn’t interested in me. She did it to make him jealous.’ His eyes flickered towards Alison and away. She sensed he was groping towards something, his brain muddied. ‘They weren’t your dad’s, were they? I heard. Not your sisters. Half. Half-sisters.’ He looked towards her hopefully, as if of having said the right thing. She clenched her hands in her lap.

‘Make who jealous?’ she said. ‘My dad?’ His head turned quickly away from her, he faced front.

‘I wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You were found out on the marsh that next morning,’ she said, looking at Simon Chatwin’s profile, and she suppressed pity. ‘You
were
there.’

Chatwin’s head dipped, he shook it slowly from side to side. ‘I’ve got an alibi,’ he said. ‘He’ll never admit it. She knows it’s true, though. She knows. The policewoman.’

‘Who’s your alibi?’ There was movement through the smeared window. Someone had come out on to the hotel’s porch and was smoking. She could smell it.

Turning to her, Chatwin looked almost crafty. ‘Argent took me out to the spit that night and beat the shit out of me and left me there. I was the other side of the estuary and they said I’d had the injuries six hours at least. It was minus two and I could have died.’ His head held high, the fear briefly gone at the thought of his own extinction. ‘Coldest June night ever. I could have died.’

And as she watched his face changed and she glimpsed it, still there, the thing that twisted inside him. From the other side of the medication, from long ago when he’d grabbed her in the yard, something that had been there before he’d gone under the barge in the grey water, a mute reaching for what he wanted, blind as a worm in soil, innocent and horrible.

And
then he turned away, not answering, his face against the side window and she saw him stop. She looked where he was looking. It was Christian standing on the porch, smoking, in shirtsleeves.

Chatwin rubbed at the glass. ‘They found her,’ he said. ‘Someone here found her. My kid.’

Christian didn’t look like a man about to take a momentous step. He looked bored, impatient. Good, thought Alison, a little spiteful reflex she couldn’t restrain, and all at once she knew she had to get out of the van, something toxic was leaching into her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘May. Good.’ She set her shoulder against the door and paused.

‘I stay away from her,’ said Chatwin, and the fear was back.

‘You better,’ she said. And she was out.

At the tinny chunk of the van’s door closing Christian’s head turned and she saw him take it in – her, the van, the motionless figure in the driving seat – but he betrayed nothing. His face didn’t change.

In Alison’s head things spun and settled; rows of fruit coming into line; a counter clicking down. She walked around the van and then Christian did smile at her, although it was distantly. ‘Plenty of time, right?’ he said lightly, looking at her jeans, flip-flops.

‘Sure,’ said Alison, although it wasn’t true. No time. ‘I won’t be late,’ she said, ‘don’t worry.’ She felt his eyes on her back as she turned and walked away, out in to the road. She knew where she had to go next.

In
the cottage’s dim sitting room, in among the bookshelves and armchairs there were things that didn’t belong in anyone’s home. An ugly, oversized chair loomed under the net-curtained window: it was a commode, Alison realised as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. An oxygen cylinder, battered and scratched, leaned against it. Boxes and plastic pouches of medicines sat on a wheeled trolley.

Alison had knocked, and heard something only vague and frightening, the sound of disintegrating speech. She’d pushed at the door and it had opened.

The real furniture was pressed back against the walls, into corners, the three piece suite redundant. There was a bed in here now, too high for the low ceilings, a drip on its gantry beside it, and attached to the drip was Susan Price. Susie, the nurse had called her, because after twenty years of sickness together they’d be old friends. On the pillow her face turned slowly in the grey light. She looked at Alison.

‘Mrs Price?’

On the bed the woman’s mouth opened, dark.

The
village had seemed dead as she walked up through it; a Saturday morning but in the soft grey light it was deserted. Alison had been grateful for the silence, for her invisibility. She wanted absolution, even if she didn’t know what for, except for being her mother’s daughter, her mother the slag, her father the drunk, the madman: that was why she was coming here. Gina wasn’t in the business of forgiving anybody.

‘Mrs Price?’ she said again. ‘It’s Esme Grace. You wanted to tell me something.’

The mouth was a black hole. What could she tell Alison? What could she know?

But there was something in the room with them, it lay soft and dark in the corners, it crept and settled under the crowded furniture, hiding in the dust. The thing that had come into the crooked house hadn’t been ordinary – if you exposed it to the light it wouldn’t look like her father, it wouldn’t lie there broken and defenceless. It was a shape-changer, it was crafty and swift, it was ruthless. It was here.

‘Oh.’ And then Susan Price was struggling on the bed like a creature crushed, her thin arms pushing down, but as Alison reached her something had been gained. She was upright, her breathing shallow but triumphant. Alive.

‘Esme.’ It was a small gasp. Alison moved closer, drawn by the sound of her lost name. There was a tasselled stool by the bed and she sat on it, low, her face at the same height as Kyra’s mother’s. Susie. She saw there was a little dial on the drip.

‘Why are you on your own?’ she said. ‘You can’t be on your own.’

‘They’re coming to get me this morning,’ said Susan Price, and she was almost smiling. ‘The hospice.’ Another gasp. ‘It’s all right.’

Is it? thought Alison. No. Her hand crept on to the blankets, and rested there: the dying woman’s hand lifted a bit and then
fell back, but they didn’t touch. She was looking at Alison, still and calm, just concentrating on breathing. ‘It’s better on my own but’ – and then she shrugged minutely, ran out of breath – ‘I wanted to tell you.’

She seemed unclouded, but it was only that she was conserving her energy for sentences worth finishing. Was that what dying was like? At best.

Susan Price’s eyes fluttered, closing. She opened them again and looked around the room, her gaze resting on the mantelpiece, a chair, a picture then back to Alison. ‘I was in a hurry,’ she said, quite clear and distinct. ‘November. Kyra had a fever, I was driving her to the hospital.’ Her head moved restlessly on the pillow at the memory. ‘First I saw the boy.’ A breath. ‘He was sitting by the side of the road, I only saw him at the last moment, he wasn’t on my side of the road or I’d have, I might have.’ She blinked. ‘The boy that died.’

‘Joshua Watts.’ Alison saw the chest rise and fall, rise and fall. ‘Was he on his own?’

‘He had his head in his hands,’ said Susan Price. Another breath. ‘He looked up when the car came and it looked like he’d been in a fight.’ There was more. ‘I saw her further out, she was coming the other way. All white. Her face all white.’ Her lips together. ‘Your mother. The night the boy died.’

And her eyes wandered, inquiring, gentle, to the morphine pump at her shoulder on the gantry. Perhaps she’s out of it, thought Alison, grasping at straws, but somewhere Susan Price had found more of whatever her failing biology needed, oxygen or glucose, her system, now in motion, wanted to keep going. She was still talking.

‘Came out of the lane,’ and she licked dry lips, ‘she did. Came out fast, just before the junction.’

‘Would she have seen him?’ Her mother had never said a thing about seeing Joshua Watts that night. Not a thing.

‘She
was going very fast.’

And it grew and hardened, somewhere under her ribs. ‘You mean she …’ And it was her breath gave out this time.

Susan Price laid her head back, her fingers moving on the blanket, feeling for something. On the pillow her head moved, up and down. Yes.

Joshua Watts had died between that lane and Gina’s house, where the road was still narrow, where his body had lain till morning. The lane just before the junction with the main road, where Alison had watched the truck full of turnips sway past, where a man had come around her shaking his fist from the driver’s seat. In the fallout from the huge terrible thing her mother had done she realised something else.

‘You didn’t tell the police.’ On the bed Susie’s mouth opened, closed, opened again.

‘Oh,’ she said, her voice falling off, her eyes distant now, seeking. ‘Police?’ she said. ‘What good are they?’ Alison felt a painful tug: poor Sarah Rutherford, shaking her fringe out of her eyes, just trying to keep at it.

‘It was Kyra,’ said Susie. ‘I was in the hospital with her that week, I never left her more than twenty minutes because they said she might go.’ She turned her head away. ‘I didn’t care about anyone else,’ she said, and Alison heard a kind of greediness in her voice, a longing. ‘They can all die, I thought, just let me keep her,’ she said. ‘Let them all die.’

The girl had lived another eight years, the nurse had said. Advancing and remitting. That had been the bargain.

All Alison could see was the line of Susan’s jaw, where the flesh had fallen away. Susan’s eyes were looking somewhere else now, they were looking off into a corner of the room, where the dark was.

Esme’s pretty mother had killed a child, and had driven away without stopping. Had she even known what she’d done? And in the dim room Alison prayed, she prayed that Mum
hadn’t known she hit him, she couldn’t have left another woman’s child to die alone beside the road. That she had only known when it was too late and the milkman found him, the next morning, battered and dead. Even then, had she told herself, it might not have been her?

Who else knew? Because in a place like this, it couldn’t stay hidden, knowledge like this ran underground like the roots of trees. Who else?

Sometimes you couldn’t choose. Sometimes the bad thing came to get you.

At first sight, before she turned and saw who had walked into her garden, Cathy Watts had looked different: she had looked at peace, looking down at all the flowers in her arms. Then she turned.

Standing there with her arms full and her feet slopping in ancient men’s slippers, she didn’t look startled at Alison’s appearance in the patch of luminous green behind the boatyard, her expression only hardened into grimness. Under the heavy sky the grass seemed to glow even brighter. The flowers were roses: big, heavy, ivory-yellow heads already on the turn, petals dropping. Leaves and branches were scattered under the great overgrown bush that covered the back of the shed where Cathy Watts must have been cutting. There were scratches all up her dry brown forearms and her hair was a wild halo.

There’d been no sign of her sons. Crossing the muddied forecourt to the yard looking out for them Alison had noticed that their little boat was gone. The big peeling doors to the shed were closed and a rusted padlock hung from the chain that secured them.

As Alison had walked down through the village towards the Watts’s boatyard, the crooked house had sat in the corner of her vision, waiting, even though the tilted gable had been
concealed from her until she got to the waterfront. Sometimes you couldn’t choose: sometimes it came for you.

‘Are those for the church?’ said Alison, although she could see straight away they would be rejected by Morgan, their big heads too messy, some petals browning. And it must be too late, by now. The sun was no more than a glare behind low blustery cloud, but it was high.

‘They’ve had bought flowers,’ said Cathy Watts, looking at her levelly, and she looked over her shoulder at the house. ‘You’re not coming in.’

‘Am I not?’ said Alison, standing her ground. Watts looked at her and something new was in her face, it stirred fear up in Alison’s gut.

‘You dare, do you?’ said Cathy Watts softly, and turned towards her door.

The house had low windows and through each of them the grey line of the muddy horizon was visible. There was a smell of oil and mud, and it was untidy: a battered sofa held a coil of rope, there was a bucket of something in the middle of the floor but in amongst it all on one wall an old sideboard gleamed with polish. Glass doors with plates behind and some photographs in frames. Cathy Watts dropped her armful of roses on top of the coiled rope and leaned stiffly to turn on a lamp standing by the photographs: shadows moved in the room’s corners, as though something was hiding.

Alison was meant to see the photographs so she held her ground and looked. A big-eyed baby, half his mother’s face visible behind him as she held him up for the photograph, Cathy Watts, her eyes soft with adoration. She looked no more than a girl herself although she must have been in her thirties, she already had two children. He was her littlest, her last. An intent toddler in a sandpit, a tearaway standing up on a bicycle’s pedals, a young man with a bleached shock of hair and his mother’s Eskimo eyes in a brown face, staring
direct and serious at the camera. Joshua. Alison felt her throat close.

‘I’ve just been to see Susie Price,’ she said, her voice low. ‘She wanted to tell me something.’

‘Yes,’ said Cathy Watts, looking without interest at blood on her fingers from the scratches. She frowned around the room as if it was unfamiliar and leaned to shove the rope with the roses on it along the sofa. Lowering herself painfully she sat beside it and pointed to a wooden chair. Alison obeyed.

‘She’ll have thought it was time,’ said Cathy. ‘She’s not got more than a week or so. Maybe she was waiting for you.’ Her tone was musing.

The comment snagged on Alison’s thoughts. She stared: Cathy Watts wasn’t a whimsical woman. There was no way Susie Price could have expected her to come back, no way any of them could have, it wasn’t like she’d known the Carters before … and yet. And yet. The idea was outlandish but there was a germ of something in it. Was it the wedding, was it even the slightest disturbance in the surface? The district nurse sitting down beside Susie and saying, the Carter girl’s getting married, her patient raising herself to listen. Something, anything, to be the catalyst. Thinking,
This might be the time
.

Cathy Watts was looking at her, waiting for something.

Alison spoke. ‘Susie never told the police,’ she said, watching the woman’s face. ‘She told you, though, didn’t she?’ She felt it lapping at the edges, she saw the dark, she felt the cold. Had it come from here, from this room heaped with flotsam, rope and buckets, this half-wild family that let the marsh inside with them?
We do things our way.
The wrong way.

‘There was no need to tell the police, once she’d told me,’ said Cathy Watts, grim.

‘Because you took matters into your own hands?’ said Alison. ‘When did Susie tell you?’
Bitch.
Would a woman scrawl that? ‘Was it you, or your boys?’ One dead child for a whole family.
She imagined a blackness like ink, seeping. What did you call it? Grief; rage; madness.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Cathy Watts’s voice was low, it vibrated in the room. ‘My boys?’ A dangerous edge.

‘I don’t know what it’s like,’ said Alison, back at her, ‘to lose a child. But my sisters’ – and she could hear herself as if from a distance, her voice unnaturally level – ‘my brother.’ She held herself very still. ‘I was nowhere near Stephen Bray the night he died and you know it. You sent your boys to the police with stories about me.’ She watched Cathy Watts for a reaction. ‘Was he the only one that knew; had he started talking?’

‘What stories?’ the older woman said, calm. ‘They saw you.’

‘You mean Danny saw me running out there my first day here,’ said Alison.

Because it had been him. Standing there as if walking on water out in the creek, upright with an oar resting in his hand, letting the boat drift with the trickling tide and watching her. He’d known then, she wasn’t a stranger. Had he turned and gone home and told his mother?

‘I haven’t been back out there since.’ But as she said it she felt the tug, the dark inside the crooked house calling to her across the marsh, its fingers reaching between the banks of mud and samphire.

‘Stephen told me that night, when he got out of the pub. He said someone left a message for him,’ said Cathy Watts. ‘He said he was going to meet you.’ Alison felt a prickle at the back of her neck: Cathy Watts believed what she was saying.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Alison said, her voice rising. ‘I didn’t leave him a note, I didn’t talk to him, I didn’t touch him.’ Me? she thought. Me? Hit an old man over the head? She felt her breath run away with her, like a panting dog. ‘Did you come out to our house that night? Did you see my mum in the kitchen? The boys knew I’d gone out. I saw them at the bus
stop on my way to Gina’s. Is that why you didn’t come after me?’

The old woman, squeezed into the corner of her sofa, made a brushing motion with her hand, impatient. Unafraid. ‘You think I could kill a child?’ She turned her head slightly, so that the photographs came into her line of sight and she looked at them, a long unwavering look. There was nothing soft in her face that Alison could see, only iron strength. ‘Kill another woman’s child?’