The Crooked House (26 page)

Morgan
was late. Of course she was late.

The church was packed: hats, suits, money. The crowded space hummed to the rafters, all the pews filled, brims bobbing as people turned and whispered, noise rising the longer the delay went on. The air smelled of lilies and incense and clashing perfumes.

Some grooms would have been pacing the aisle or hovering in the porch but Christian sat stolid in the front row, he didn’t even turn around. Paul was beside him. Assuming the space would be needed for more important guests Alison had detached herself, sitting one row back. She told herself they both knew where Morgan would want her, but Paul had been too distracted to protest anyway. He’d stood a good five minutes outside the church after they arrived, talking into his phone in the lee of a black yew. He’d put a hand up to hold her at a distance. She couldn’t hear what he said or who he was talking to and he didn’t make any explanation.

The groom’s side of the church was sparse as they entered. Christian had no family present, but Morgan seemed to have
enough for both of them, overflowing quickly to fill the vacuum, and for a moment Alison had the vision of the three of them – her, Paul and Christian – rootless and untethered among the crowd of businessmen and aunts and godfathers.

A big woman with a feathered hat and a smaller husband behind her were ushered into the space Alison might have occupied, and a harassed couple with a baby bundled up in lace were shunted into Alison’s pew. She moved gratefully to the edge, the shelter of a pillar at her shoulder, as close to invisible as she could be. She got out her phone, clutching it. The church had been so different when it had been empty for the rehearsal, its wooden beams and soft plaster, its barn smell: now it felt suffocating. Closing her eyes for one mad moment Alison imagined the mob thronging the porch outside, setting a fire at the doors: it would go up in minutes, a blaze like a beacon out along the spit. She pressed a button on her phone, recent calls, and saw their names, Gina. Kay. Did they still exist? Was Gina lighting up in her back garden while May played in the dirt, was London still there? Her desk was there, her job, the patient, weary faces, the buses, they were all still there. She had only to leave.

What was to stop her running out? She could slip around the pillar and run for the door. Instead she looked down at her phone and typed in,
This is a nightmare.

But at the back of the church something was happening, she could hear the quality of the chatter change: it rose, then hushed. Someone was hurrying down the aisle, Lucy Carter, her face odd under an unflattering hat. The organ wheezed into life and people were looking back towards the doors. Alison sensed Morgan without seeing her, in the heads turning, in the intake of breath. She moved her finger across the tiny keyboard. Beside her the mother, sweating in a tight suit, was wrestling with the lace-trussed baby – glancing at Alison she saw the mobile in her hands and glowered.

Got
to talk to you. What happened that night? When Mum came and got Joe from you. What happened?

‘Not in
here
!’ the woman was hissing at her over her child’s red upturned face and, recoiling, Alison fumbled to switch the thing off, stuffed it into her bag. Sat up straight and finally, after one last glare, the woman turned away, muttering something to her husband.

Who knew? Who else?
The words still glowed, though the screen was gone. That wasn’t it, though. She had the strongest sense of being in the wrong place again, in a high-walled dead end, looking in the wrong faces. Along the pew in front of her now Christian did turn, and in the movement of bodies she glimpsed his face as he looked back. In its smooth planes she saw nothing: no excitement, no nerves, no joy. She turned to look back up the aisle.

Processing towards them Morgan seemed a head taller than her father: shining and majestic in a stiff cloud of veil, she didn’t look right or left and the heavy dress moved like armour with her. But it wasn’t just that she towered, he seemed smaller, Roger Carter looked old. His head was held up but it looked like an effort, as if the whole performance was draining the life out of all of them, propelling them too fast towards an unknown end.

The vicar stood on the altar step with his hands clasped over a green surplice, and watched them come. Even he seemed nervous, shifting from foot to foot ahead of Morgan’s advance. In the aisle in front of her Christian faced the altar again and she realised, looking again at the back of his odd square head, that it must have been him who’d brought May back. He’d found her out on Power Station Beach and stayed with her till she told him who she was. Was he a good Samaritan?

Morgan came to a halt at the head of the aisle, the vicar made a gesture and with a rumble they were all getting to their feet. Morgan’s face turned to look at Christian and it
came to Alison that he was a strange sort of man: the sort of man who might often take himself off on long walks on his own. She wondered what May had said to him out on the sea wall, and he to her; she wondered if he often spoke to children he didn’t know, if Morgan would ever have a conversation with him like the one he’d had with May? She saw him look back at his bride-to-be, still calm. The alliance had nothing to do with love, it was a bargain, and for a moment she had the strongest feeling that his real interests lay elsewhere, somewhere she’d never have to go. One step above them, the vicar began to pronounce.

Hushed and obedient, they sat, and stood, and sang, and sat again. The maid of honour – a thinner, plainer blonde than Morgan, in a pink dress – read from the Song of Solomon in a fey, uncertain voice and Alison stared at her lap, trying not to hear the words.
Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.
She imagined Morgan choosing it and she kept her head down until she heard the big book close.

The maid of honour had just left the lectern when the noise came. She looked up from picking her way down from the altar in too-high heels, her face like a panicked hen’s under her feathered hat, and then they were all twisting in their seats to see where the racket was coming from. Someone was battering on the doors and outside a voice was raised, wild.

It was a man’s voice, though high-pitched, and uncontrolled, someone drunk or on drugs. In front of her Paul was half up on his feet, and she saw Lucy Carter in the opposite pew also rising, giving him a quick shake of the head: he hesitated. The two ushers, beefy in pearl grey tailcoats, were heading up one side of the pews, and reluctantly Paul lowered himself back down. She saw him lean to whisper in Christian’s ear; she saw his hand on Christian’s shoulder.

Behind them the doors opened and she heard a single word
expelled through the gap, high-pitched and horrible, before they banged shut behind the ushers.
Bitch.

The word expanded to dirty the whitewashed space, it was reflected in the faces the wedding guests turned to each other. But there was no more banging: the shouting had been terminated as abruptly as if the man had been thrown off a cliff. Martin Watts? His was the face Alison saw in her head, bloated and flushed with drink, telling her to get out.
Bitch.

After a moment the vicar raised his hands and gradually the congregation’s murmurs subsided too. Above his emerald brocade his face was strained, his gaze glassy but he beckoned to the bride and groom and haltingly, the vows began.

When the ushers slipped back in ten minutes later, as flushed and cheerful as if they’d won a Saturday afternoon rugby match, Morgan and Christian were man and wife.

Love, honour and obey
.

The Carters’ house was under siege: a field was full of cars and more were in the lane outside, carelessly thrust against the hedges.

The line of parked vehicles stretched almost as far back as the main road by the time they got there, and they had to leave the car and walk. Paul held her hand in the lane, but he didn’t say anything, he seemed intent only on something going on in his head.

The word had gone around under the hats in the church porch,
obey
. The whispers sounded mostly approving to Alison, stuck in the bottleneck while Morgan and Christian were posed with a succession of relatives, attendants and godparents.

Alison felt stifled, as if she could feel each one of the tiny buttons up the back of the blue crêpe dress pulling tighter. She wondered if she was going mad.

‘Who was it?’ She’d waited till they were in the car to ask, stiff with nerves and cold. ‘At the church door?’

Paul
had gone over to the ushers while she waited at the gate for him: the three men had talked for some moments while she watched. Paul looked spare and elegant beside them and she wondered if they’d actually been chosen for their brawn. Had Morgan anticipated needing bouncers?

Paul frowned back at the windscreen. ‘Some local guy with a grudge,’ he said. ‘I don’t know these people.’

‘I might, though,’ she said and he flicked a glance at her, distracted.

‘Martin Watts? Was it Martin Watts?’ He shook his head, but the gesture was impatient, as if he was flicking off a distraction. ‘No?’ she said.

‘They got rid of him, anyway,’ he said. ‘I told them they should call the police.’

‘The police? Did he do anything … criminal?’

The line of cars ahead of them was slowing, the lane narrowed and Paul indicated to turn.

Where had her mother been coming from when she’d struck Joshua Watts?

‘I think it could be the same guy,’ Paul said, leaning to look down the road.

‘What guy?’ said Alison.

‘The intruder. The man who’d got into The Laurels and cut the guy ropes. I told the ushers to get on to the police, only discreetly.’ He glanced at her.

The police. ‘They’re coming to find me,’ she said slowly. ‘The police are. I’d forgotten.’

Had she thought it would go away? Danny Watts had told the police he’d seen her, heading out to meet Bray.
Bitch
. Cathy Watts had backed him up. Could they really think Alison would have hurt him? It wouldn’t take five minutes to disprove. Could you ever say that?

‘You’re my alibi,’ Alison had said to Paul’s profile at the wheel, and his hand had come off the wheel a second to rest
on hers. It had been warm; in the passenger seat Alison had felt frozen through, to her centre. What if Paul didn’t believe her? Remembering something, she fumbled with the stupid little bag she’d had to bring because it was a party but had no strap, retrieved her phone and switched it back on.
Searching
, it said. He was looking at her and she put it away again.

‘What made you so sure,’ he said, ‘that it wasn’t your father?’ He glanced at the road then back at her. ‘Were you always sure?’

‘It was coming back here,’ she said. ‘I found something at the house. I ran out there that first morning and found something. I thought it was a clue.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Stupid. The arm of his glasses. I told the police, in the end. It might even have come from someone else’s glasses. But it made me think.’ She frowned down at her hands on the stupid little bag. ‘I started to remember things.’

He hadn’t answered: they were at the junction where Susie Price had seen her mother and he was leaning to look in his wing mirror. Alison found she didn’t want to say any more.

As they walked into The Laurels’ choked drive she was still cold. The stiff breeze off the sea that funnelled down the narrow lane had a steadily chill undercurrent and the sun was invisible, not even a glare behind the darkening blanket of cloud. The white-tented tunnel that led to the marquee billowed and cracked in the wind ahead of them. There was a receiving line: Alison saw Lucy Carter in her hat and her flowered chiffon at her end, turning to see her, staring. Even as she shook the hand of some man ridiculously dressed in a top hat, she was staring at Alison.

Shit.

His face strained, Paul looked from Lucy Carter to Alison, but a family had come up behind them, they were stuck in the pipeline and surrounded.

This place. Up ahead she saw someone else she recognised:
what were the odds? Karen Marshall, in a waitress’s uniform, hair scraped behind her ears. Holding a tray.

Who’d be Sarah Rutherford? They could all know, they could all be in on it, but they’d never tell her. Simon Chatwin, Stephen Bray, the Wattses, Ron the landlord if it came down to it. Someone must have seen something. Seen someone stumbling along the sea wall, seen a car come bumping down the track. They hated us, she thought with dull certainty. We came here, my miserable useless parents with their fucked-up kids, we made a mess. They hated us so they waited till we imploded then they just let the wind blow and the tide come up and they wrote their verdict on the crooked house. No need for police.

She stopped still on the gravel, turning her head this way and that. She couldn’t see the crooked house from here but it was there, it was waiting. Someone further back on the drive tutted and they moved on.

They had arrived at the line and Lucy Carter took her hands, gazing at Alison from under her stupid hat. The feathers on it bobbed and waved.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Lucy said in a low intense murmur, but if it was an attempt to be discreet it wasn’t working. The woman ahead of Alison in the receiving line – and in front of Roger Carter – was craning her neck to look back over her shoulder.

‘So brave of you,’ Lucy Carter continued, bending stiffly towards her.

Something in Alison’s face must have warned the woman shaking Roger Carter’s hand because she looked away quickly and got moving. Now both the Carters were looking at her. Beyond them even Morgan was looking, through the heads. She glittered with triumph in the gloom of the tented tunnel, Christian at her side leaning down politely to an elderly woman.

‘So brave,’ repeated Lucy Carter. ‘To come back.’ She seemed to be almost in a daze: as she leaned in Alison smelled wine.
A waiter stood pressed up against the tunnel’s white pvc wall with a tray of tantalising glasses, moisture-beaded. Cold champagne. Alison would have liked to take one and drain it then take another, then she caught the faint distaste on Roger Carter’s face. He seemed to have recovered himself. Detached from his strapping daughter’s arm he stood straighter, the arrogance restored.