The Crooked House (25 page)

‘I think you could,’ said Alison. ‘If you had to.’

‘I could never kill a child,’ Cathy Watts said, turning her head from the photographs to Alison. ‘Not mine, not another woman’s.’

And Alison remembered the peace in her face, before she’d turned. Could you ever be at peace? If you’d done that? She couldn’t name it but she could feel it, the sleeping bag’s weighted nylon, slipping through her hands. When she spoke it came out hoarse. ‘And the boys?’ Cathy Watts watched her, her face almost mild. Silent. ‘Your sons?’ Still nothing.

Alison leaned, a physical pain under her ribs as she thought of Danny, his hand on her waist in the pub, his fierce gaze. Could he? ‘I’ve got to know, see,’ she said, pleading. ‘Could they have done it? Knowing what losing Joshua did to you. Martin was out of it, wasn’t he?’ In her head she pictured the two of them, running silent out to the house in the dark, along the gravel path, catching Dad by surprise, drunk and reeling after the pub. Pushing past him into the kitchen: Mum. Going from room to room, Danny putting a hand on Martin’s arm, the two of them looking up the stairs to her room. Esme’s room.

BOOM
.

She’s not there. Remember?
Their heads turning as she stood in the pedals on her way past them at the bus stop to Gina’s. Had it been the sight of her that had set them off: there she
goes, not a care in the world? Had they been high on adrenalin? Had they known that he’d got his hands on a gun?

‘I don’t want … I won’t go to the police,’ Alison said. It sounded hollow. ‘But my dad … it’s my dad. It’s for him.’

The car, though. There’d been a car.

And then at last Cathy Watts sat back on the sofa, hands in her lap, and spoke. ‘They didn’t know,’ she said, but she didn’t look at Alison. ‘I never told them it was her killed him. Things was bad enough. I know what boys are like.’ She laid her head sideways as if tired and some of the peace settled back in the lines of her face. ‘I’d’ve lost them all three that way, wouldn’t I?’

Beyond the windows there was the crunch and scrape of something being dragged across muddy gravel, and muttered voices. They’d come back.

‘Could they have found out from someone else?’ She spoke quickly.

‘It was an accident.’ Cathy Watts was speaking, not looking at her. ‘It’s paid for, anyway, in’t it?’ she said. ‘One way or another. Wiped out.’

But there was nothing resembling forgiveness in her face. This was wrong, it had been the wrong place to come.

She could hear them inside the front door now, taking off their boots, talking to each other in low voices like conspirators. She could run out the back door. That midsummer night when the shots had echoed across the marsh. She had the wild feeling these people knew all her secrets. Her mother’s. Why had they gone to the police and told them they’d seen her going to meet Stephen Bray? The ceiling seemed very low suddenly, the sky outside very dark, and stepping back from the sofa in a hurry Alison banged her knee painfully against something.

‘Ma?’ Martin’s voice, panicked.

‘She’ll be all right.’ Danny calming him. ‘That you, Ma?’

Alison
blundered through the gloom towards their voices. ‘She’s fine,’ she said to no one, and her voice was high and frightened in the confined space.

Martin Watts stepped inside the door and even in the dim of the room his face was raw. She smelled booze on him, it made her sick. ‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘Leave her alone.’

She said she hadn’t told them. They knew something, though.

‘We were, we were …’ She swung back to see Cathy Watts watching her from the sofa, almost amused. ‘We were talking, we were just talking.’

And then the light was blocked a moment and Danny was inside too, big men’s bodies in the small room. In silence they watched her, without a word they stood to either side of the door as she stumbled past them towards the light.

Alison had got away from the waterfront at last, from the yard and the pub and the heads that turned as she ran, head down into the blustering wind. There were trees, a patch of green, some kind of pavilion, the scout hut. She recognised the place where she’d parked the car that time under a tree. Simon Chatwin. That seemed a long time ago. She skirted the hut and sat down hard, her back against it. She wiped her glasses: she thought she’d turned her back on the sea but a hundred yards away there was the sea wall: it had doubled back on itself, as if it was following her.

But down here she was out of the wind. The roaring in her ears abated. That first night. Where it started, that night, a November night by the fire that ended a summer later.

She closed her eyes.

Monopoly. Sandwiches for tea. Dad lighting the fire.
Where’s Joe?

It had been a Friday, she remembered that much, because Friday night was Joe’s night to go out. They’d been to see a band in town, and they’d be hitching back, the Watts’s mum
didn’t drive, Joe and she had long since given up on Dad for lifts, there was always some pretext or other, your mother’s got the car, it’s late. Never, I’m pissed, though they knew that was why.

A Friday and the girls were tired, but they hadn’t been to school. That day, they’d been out all day at the doctor’s, Mum and Dad with them, and all Joe and Esme had been told was it was routine, something to do with being twins. Their little faces had been weary when they came in, but he’d lit the fire, they’d had their sandwiches, egg and tomato, cheese and ham. They’d pinked up again at the prospect of Monopoly, that’s when they’d started asking for Joe.

Joe.
He’d only wind you up
, she’d said but Joe took Monopoly seriously, they had to have him. He would taunt them with his wad of bills, he piled up hotels and calculated rents and crowed when he cleaned them all out, one by one. Her back against the pavilion, Alison had her hands over her face and in the warm dark Joe was there.

She’d played with them. Dad had sat in his chair brooding, watching the levels in the bottles as if they might rise on their own; on the floor they’d all turned their backs on him unconsciously. He hadn’t moved when the phone began to ring, Letty had run to get it.

It had been that day they’d had it confirmed, the girls’ blood groups were wrong. AO positive and they couldn’t be his daughters. Dad had been the one insisted they go back to the hospital, she remembered that now. To be on the safe side, he’d said, loading them into the car that morning. Get to the bottom of this. He’d been sober then.

By the time they got home it had turned, soured, all of them climbing out of the car one by one in silence.

‘It’s Joe, he sounds funny,’ said Letty, holding up the receiver, and Alison saw his face, turning at the word, slack. Getting out of the chair like an old man, and Letty’s face falling.

‘Your
mother will come to get you,’ he’d stated into the receiver, a little slow, a little over-precise, perhaps no one outside the family would have even known how much he’d drunk. His finger down on the phone, hanging up, redialling. They had looked up at him from the floor, Letty back between Esme and Mads, backs to the fire but cold. Cold.

Your mother. But Mum hadn’t been in the house.

That was why they’d had sandwiches for their tea, why they’d been allowed Monopoly, why he’d lit the fire. They’d been home half an hour, furious hushed words in the bedroom upstairs and then he’d come down, his face blotched and red and Mum had flown down behind him, white and silent, past their watching faces and out through the door into the car. Long before Joe had called, from Gina’s house, needing to be brought home. She’d taken the car.

Against the pavilion Alison opened her eyes and stood up. On her feet now she could see the long grass at the top of the dyke flattened by the wind. The sky was layers of charcoal.

Something hurt her: she looked down and saw she was gripping her phone so tight her knuckles were cramped and white. She unbent them.

They’d waited. Monopoly dissolved into bickering and tears, Esme had cleared it away and given them a bath. Each of the girls had a plaster and a dab of cotton wool at the inside of their elbow, their arms thin and white, their veins fine blue-green threads. Downstairs the front door had opened, letting in the November evening, bonfires and seafog and Mum and Joe. Joe had thundered up the stairs, lurching side to side hitting the wall, and he’d banged the door behind him. On the landing Esme had listened to him retch, then a gush as if a bucket had been emptied into the toilet bowl.

She’d never seen him like this. Why had he got so drunk? He’d known, hadn’t he? He must have heard them. Fought with the Watts boys again. His mother a whore.

Mum
had been downstairs. Esme heard her.

Christ knows, I sometimes need an intelligent human being to talk to.

Dad mumbling. Not intelligent. Not even intelligible. Mum goes on.

There were people there, they had guests, I couldn’t—

And she’d gasped, as if something came to her. She’d stopped, a sob in her throat choked off, and run out. Esme, halfway down the stairs and pressed against the wall, had let her past.

She had moved on slowly, but by then she’d known something terrible must have happened. Mum’s face. Dad with his back to her in the kitchen, leaning on the cabinets as if for support. Whatever had happened was still unfolding.

Alison looked down at the phone in her hand. It was ringing but for a moment she didn’t recognise the sound, nor the object, she didn’t know what to do with it. Back then there’d been no money for mobile phones: Mum had never had one. The fact stalled her.

Creeping past her parents into the sitting room Esme had looked into the collapsed remains in the grate. It had seemed such a marvellous fire when Dad had lit it and stood back but now it had crumbled to nothing, a handful of cold ash.

Stepping away from the shelter of the pavilion Alison lifted the phone to her ear. ‘Hello,’ she said.

It was Paul.

‘Do you know what the time is?’ The phone had told her but she hadn’t registered. Almost eleven not much more than an hour before the wedding: her heart jumped in panic. She realised she’d been bracing herself for anger but his voice only sounded flat and dead and tired. ‘I thought you might have gone.’

‘No,’ she said, with a sudden access of pity: it kindled, a tiny warmth. She thought of his face, looking down at her. His smile. ‘I’m still here.’ And then the folded puzzle of that
November evening opened in front of her as she stared at her own feet on the scrubby grass.

Dad’s finger heavy on the phone cutting Joe off. Redialling. If there’d been no mobiles, how had he known where to find Mum?

In
a part of London not even Morgan and Christian could afford, Kay stood frowning outside a tall, white, pillared townhouse in a wide stuccoed street. It was hot but the sky was a low grey lid over the city and the street was quiet.

The house had four storeys, it was forty feet wide and a glossy-painted black lantern hung in the porch. Kay didn’t climb the steps, she didn’t ring the bell, she just waited, leaning against the low, white-plastered balustrade. Around her the city hummed across its twenty-mile radius, a shifting, gleaming ant heap, and she thought of her friend out there in the sticks.
Jesus, Alison
.

She’d looked the case up, in the end. She hadn’t wanted to before, because friends were friends and Kay had known from the off, with Alison in particular, that once privacy was breached there was no going back.

Now was different. Jesus, though. Rosa had affected to be totally cool about it –
one of those family murder things
– or perhaps she’d cut off, didn’t want to think about it. The part she’d played in the afterlife of a victim. Kay looked up at the
posh house, she saw the money that had bought it and done it up with white curtains and pot plants and all that shit. Did money buy you protection from what Alison had had to see? She wanted to bang on the door and shout through the window box.
It’s real. It really happened.
But instead she waited.

It had been Rosa that had come to her with it in the first place, though. Kay had seen her across the open-plan offices hanging up the phone with a clatter, in a hurry as if it might bite her, and she’d given Rosa a long hard look before turning away.
It’s not my fault
,’ the girl had said with a pout, standing in the street after work, fiddling with her fingers.
I never thought it would get this complicated.
Her pretty face uncertain. Though once she’d unloaded it on to Kay she was all brightness and swinging hair again, like she could forget it now, hurrying away from her in the trainers she power-walked home in. Let her forget it? Not likely.

At the top of the wide steps the door opened. Seeing Kay Rosa tried to back inside again, but Kay was up the stairs, two at a time. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want another word.’

Paul
was panicking: she hadn’t seen him like this before. Turning around and around in the hotel room, nervous as a cat. Looking for a sock, unable to get his tie right.

Alison had barely tied one before but she set her hands on his shoulders to still him and had a go. She felt him stop, obedient under her hands. He looked at her.

‘There
had
been someone in the garden,’ he said. He was pale and she could still smell the sweat on him. She stopped, her fingers in the knot of his tie.

‘What’s going on over there?’ she said.

‘The undergrowth was trampled right down by the back wall. Cigarette butts.’ He wiped at his forehead. ‘And a couple of the guy ropes on the marquee had been sliced through, it would have come down if we hadn’t seen them.’

She smoothed the silk down under the collar, thinking, with the smallest distracted fraction of her mind, what a strange thing a tie is. Something round your neck like that. ‘Kids?’ she said. ‘I wonder how people feel about them. The Carters. People in the village.’ She knew how Gina felt.

He
was calmer, though still white. Something had happened, she was sure of it. ‘Listen,’ he said, and he swayed in front of her.

‘Sit down,’ she said, manoeuvring him gently towards the bed.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ he said, but then he stopped, his eyes darting around. Through the big window the cypresses swayed wildly.

‘Stop,’ said Alison, sitting down next to him, and he turned and looked into her face.

‘Do they know?’ she said. Those conversations. Around the dinner table. ‘Do the Carters know who I am too?’

‘They didn’t recognise you,’ he said, his eyes dark. ‘Not Lucy and Roger. It didn’t occur to me that they would. You didn’t know them then, after all. Did you?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember them.’ He looked at her, appealing to be forgiven. ‘But Morgan recognised me,’ she said. ‘Didn’t she?’

He moved his shoulders, uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t really understand what this place was like. People talk. It was what we were talking about when you saw us outside the pub, she’d just heard someone inside in the pub, talking about you. The girl with the scarf.’ He sat very still, shoulders lowered. ‘Morgan said she remembered you riding around the village on your bike. When you were a kid.’

‘It fixes things in people’s memory,’ she said dully. ‘The murders. “That was the girl” – you know.’ He was looking into her face, hopeless. She wanted to forgive him, but it seemed impossible. ‘On my bike,’ she said, and it came back to her again, the heads that turned in the market square as she stood in her pedals and rode uphill to Gina’s.

Outside there were voices: she thought one of them was Christian’s. The wedding, an hour away. Less. The bloody wedding; its timetable ticked down, overriding everything. She watched Paul; she wanted out of it, the whole countdown. But he was talking almost to himself now. ‘I thought it would
help you to be back. I thought … if we were going to have a future, it needed to be addressed. I thought this would be the way.’ She could hear pain in his voice as it rose. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Morgan worked it out,’ said Alison. She held the pity she felt for him at a distance. A future. A future that wasn’t for her. ‘And she told her parents.’ He nodded mutely, watching her, his face set.

‘Was that what you had to tell me,’ she asked quietly. ‘Or was there something else?’

He raised his head slowly, and looked at her. ‘When I told you how my parents died,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t true.’ He looked down, examining his hands, clasped loose between his knees on the bed, then up again. ‘It wasn’t like that. While I was away at school they killed themselves. A pact. My mother had MS. My father had depression.’ His voice was flat. ‘He gave her an overdose of his tranquillisers then he shot himself.’ He kept looking at her, unflinching now. ‘I suppose a shrink would say it’s why I ended up where I did. When this … this thing happened to you I thought … Christ. I don’t know what I thought. I thought … there was this connection. Together we could make things normal.’

She stayed silent: she thought of the boy in the photograph in Paul’s bedroom, standing on the clifftop with his arms folded, staring coolly at the camera. Alone. ‘You know what that’s like,’ he went on, remote. ‘There are no connections. You feel a freak, there’s no one out there who knows what you know.’ His gaze refocused. ‘Who’s seen what you’ve seen.’

And slowly, slowly, she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice falling away, past her into emptiness. ‘What do you remember,’ she said, as though from a great distance, ‘about that night?’

Paul let out a long, tired breath. ‘We didn’t even know, to start with. Not then. We were off early the next morning, a Sunday morning. Morgan heard it on the news, when we got
back to London. Maybe even the day after.’ He was shaking his head, she saw something happening, a line appearing between his eyebrows. ‘You assume it’s all happened to someone else, you listen to the news report.’ Frowning.

‘What?’ she said, and she couldn’t stop herself, her hand was on him, shaking him. ‘What is it? What is it now? You remember something? Did you see anyone that evening? Were you out in the village, you and Morgan?’

‘We had been out,’ Paul said slowly, and he took her hand in his warm one, his fingers laced between hers. She thought of him holding her down, making her shout out. All that urgency was gone: he seemed quite blank with exhaustion.

Then he came back to life. ‘It could be nothing,’ he said, hesitating. ‘It was so long ago.’ He pulled, a little, she was closer to him. He put his free hand to her cheek and as she watched something came back to life in his face. ‘It’s funny,’ he said slowly, and his eyes settled on her. ‘It must be like this for you, too. Isn’t it? You remember things. That didn’t make sense at the time.’ His gaze was inward, he nodded to himself.

‘Like what things?’

Paul drew away, put his hands through his hair.

‘I thought …’ she hesitated. ‘I thought it might be the Watts boys,’ she said and he stopped, looked at her.

‘Who?’ he said, blank.

‘The Watts brothers. At the boatyard. Their brother died.’ She stopped.

She couldn’t say it out loud.
Mum killed him. My mother hit him with our car and killed him and drove off.

‘I don’t know who you mean,’ he said, not a flicker of recognition in his face. Beginning to shake his head. So whoever Paul suspected, it wasn’t them. Something like relief bubbled up under her ribs but she told herself to distrust it. Too soon.

‘What, then? Is it to do with what you heard? Did Lucy
really hear the shots? The baby with pneumonia – did Roger Carter see anything?’

Paul stood, turning away from her. The voices outside on the drive had fallen silent. ‘If I’m right,’ he said, distant, looking out at the thick grey sky, ‘I don’t know what Lucy thinks she remembers, but there’s something … there’s something not right about it.’ He moved his head a little, trying to shake something loose.

‘What?’ she said. Paul turned back and again took one of her hands in his, gently.

‘To start with,’ he said hesitantly, ‘if she did hear the shots from the patio—’ He stopped, frowned. ‘If she did hear them she was on her own, because we were miles away. We were having dinner, we were in some pub. I don’t know if she thinks she’s helping, or … if Roger …’ He stopped, lost.

Lucy?

‘It’s all right,’ she said.

I can’t believe I’ve told you,’ he said, wondering. ‘It feels … God. It feels so good.’

‘You haven’t told me, though,’ Alison said stubbornly.

‘In the southern Alps,’ he said, and he let her hand fall, ‘there was a settlement in a high valley cut off, inbred since the middle ages, the same four or five families for a thousand years. In the war a German jeep went up there, five soldiers looking for entertainment, it was said, to find women, to make fun of the locals, only they never came out again, no trace of them was found. The command sent a squad up after them two days later, searched the place, interrogated everyone, down to a four-year-old child. They found some bolts from the vehicle but they couldn’t get the locals to admit anything. Executed seventeen men, one by one, and no one said anything.’ He turned back to her, and she saw how his students must love him. He seemed absolutely involved, intent, he shone. ‘The community absorbs what it sees as evil, even if sometimes it’s
only foreign. It’s like a … a primitive organism. Its strategies are few and inflexible.’

A long speech. It chilled her.

‘Are you saying the people here know who killed my family?’ She felt breathless.

‘I think someone must know,’ said Paul, stepping to the window and looking down. ‘I think the community – the organism – tried to digest it. Maybe because your family were from outside, maybe because the murderer was one of theirs, maybe just because they didn’t want outsiders, they didn’t want police. But it’s still there.’

His eyes looking back at her were bright. She faltered under their gaze. ‘But do you know?’

In two steps Paul was back beside her. ‘It was me brought you here,’ he said gently. ‘Got you back into this. You didn’t ask to be part of my … experiment. Let me … just let me handle it on my own.’

‘You’re not going to do something stupid.’ Her stomach griped and churned. Not him. Don’t take him. ‘Please,’ she said, hopeless, forlorn, and his arms went around her, right around her.

He spoke into her hair. ‘Let’s just get this done, get the wedding done. I owe Morgan that, at least. Then I’m going to the police. Then we’ll be free to do what we want.’ His arms drew in closer and at the same time she felt the tension shift in his body, she felt something releasing.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Yes. We’ll be free. It’s all right.’

But she was Esme, her eyes closed tight.