The Crooked House (29 page)

Her jaw felt as though it was seizing up. She felt the cold through the thin polyester of her jacket. ‘You know what it means, her coming back here, if her dad didn’t do it? Do you know where she is now? Is she safe?’ Sarah Rutherford didn’t even know if she was making sense any more. She could feel Jennings’s eyes on her, could feel his incredulity. ‘Is that child
safe
?’

And in front of her Cathy Watts had collapsed, out of nowhere, her knees just seemed to give way and if Jennings hadn’t been quick off the mark as Sarah only stood and watched, she’d have fallen.

In his back doorway Ron glared at them now.

‘Gina’s girl?’ He turned to speak to someone behind him in the door: ‘I knew she’d heard.’ His jowly chin showed flushed through patchy stubble, ginger flecked with white. A girl with rusty-dyed hair appeared behind him in the doorway and he scowled at her. ‘Christ,’ he said to all of them. ‘This place, no place for a kid.’ The barmaid looked sullenly back.

‘I never knew she was listening,’ the girl said, sulky. Behind them the public bar was gloomy and quiet, a smell of sour beer.

‘Who?’ said Sarah Rutherford, impatient. ‘Who heard what?’

‘May,’ said Ron, and she saw a tremor in his hands, the broken veins on their backs. ‘Casey here,’ and he jerked his head angrily in the barmaid’s direction, ‘was giving us the benefit of her thoughts on May’s biological father.’ The girl stepped back abruptly. ‘Pervert’s all I said,’ she muttered, turning on her heel, and she was gone, back into the beer fumes.

Ron gave Sarah a hard stare. ‘And I haven’t got time to go
after her.’ He swept the horizon with bloodshot eyes, to where the brown water of the estuary ruffled white in the wind. ‘Do I look like anyone’s childminder?’ He looked at Sarah again. ‘What? She’ll just have gone looking for him. Her dad. Hates her mum just now, ’s why Gina leaves her here.’ He snorted. ‘Father figure.’

Shit, thought Sarah Rutherford, the kid another little unwanted blip on her radar, moving in the wrong direction. She watched him. First things first. ‘I’ve been talking to Cathy Watts,’ she said, and something changed in Ron’s face. ‘She told me something. Thirteen years too late, but she told me.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, wary.

‘Something she said maybe you’d be able to confirm.’

She’d stared at Cathy Watts when she came out with the name Stephen Bray had given her. The car he’d seen John Grace climb into that last night.
And why should I believe you
, she’d said,
after all this time?

Ask Ron
, Cathy Watts had said back, holding the hard stare.

At her side Jennings shifted uneasily, and spoke.

‘It’s not too late,’ he said to Ron, with an urgency that surprised Sarah. He must have been listening, after all. ‘Just tell us what you know now, and it won’t be too late.’

‘She says you saw John Grace leave with Stephen Bray the night his family were killed.’ Sarah kept her voice soft, and Ron nodded, cleared his throat. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I followed them out. Pretended I had crates to shift.’

They’d talked and talked to Bray, all that time ago. There’d been plenty who’d said, bring him in. She’d seen them look at him disgusted, the twenty-five-year-old constable flinching from the black nails, the scurfy hairline, gagging at the smell of him. Doesn’t make him a killer – she’d held that line – but Bray had felt the crush of the mob against him, he’d zigzagged and babbled about everything from lights at sea to number plates and eventually had clammed up. None of it usable as evidence – and Sarah Rutherford wouldn’t be party to putting a man with mental disabilities inside, not for perverting the course of justice. Not for murder, either. Stephen Bray wasn’t a killer.

‘She says,’ and Jennings took a step to flank Ron on the other side before continuing, ‘Bray walked with him to the end of the quay then John Grace leaned down to talk to someone in a car.’

Sarah’s turn. ‘He wanted John Grace to come back with him to the boat,’ she said gently. ‘Bray said Grace had told him his wife wanted a divorce, it’s why he’d come to the pub, and she’d start up about it again if he went back, so he wanted to stay away.’

She scanned Ron’s face for a reaction but saw none: then he spoke. ‘Some blokes kill their wives for asking for a divorce,’ Ron said. ‘Don’t they? Kill their wives and their families.’

It had nagged at her all these years. ‘And some women ask for a divorce, if they’ve got someone else to go to,’ she said.

He shifted his head slightly and she saw he was looking across the marsh to where it stood, like the dead stump of a tooth: the Grace house. ‘We never dreamed he’d have done that. Not John. I remember the night he came asking about a gun in the pub. The place went quiet.’

She could imagine it. That night still came back to her even now, those long moments on her knees on the bloody carpet taking his pulse, trying to look anywhere but at John Grace’s face.

‘We knew it wasn’t rats. It was for him, he got that gun. The faces, all watching him.’ She nodded, just barely. The murmur would have gone round the village, the consensus reached. ‘It’s a decent way to go, see,’ said Ron, his voice low, face averted. ‘Not a cry for help, no going back, quick. Done.’

Decent, she thought in disbelief.

Meeting her eye finally, he said, defiant, ‘Their mess. None of our business. None of it.’

‘So
someone came up with a gun for John Grace, and when it turned out he didn’t just want to use it on himself, you all clammed up.’ She was talking to herself but when she looked up Ron’s flush told her it was true.

‘Why didn’t he go back to Stephen Bray’s boat with him that night, sleep it off there? Bray wanted him to. Who did he lean down to talk to in the car? Whose car was it took him home?’

‘That was what did it,’ said Ron, and it took Sarah a minute to realise he was still stuck a way back in her interrogation, the night John Grace asked for a gun. ‘I remember being glad I told the kid, you only work Sundays, little Esme. Bad enough locals seeing him like that, listening to him go on about rats like a total fucking basket case – it was a busy night, too, a weekend, people up from town. Outsiders. Staring at the man like he was a freak show, like he was there for entertainment. Bad enough.’

Bad enough. And another blip came up on her radar: it sat there, this one wouldn’t move, even as she asked the next question on her list it sat and waited.
Outsiders
. Like who?

‘Whose car did he get into, Ron?’ she said softly, and at last he turned his head and his eyes slowly came into focus. She thought the word he murmured was
bitch
.

‘Who?’ she said.

She hadn’t got a ticket. Ten minutes in a queue that didn’t move while she watched the next train’s time get closer, four minutes, three and then Kay had given up and had broken away to go tearing round, batting through the milling crowd, Liverpool Street on a Saturday lunchtime, the smell of fast food, oil and metal, and stinking tracks, searching for the platform, shoving through a barrier and she was in the fusty train, pressed against the smeared window.

Rosa had turned slowly towards her under the high ceilings of her white-painted flat, barefoot, polished toes, everything about her neat and shining and perfect except her face. Her pretty face, sulky with having done wrong, ugly with resentment. Some people, Kay thought in disbelief, had no idea. No fucking clue.

‘Alison said he had a gun,’ she said, feeling suddenly sick at the thought, and Rosa tipped her head back, knowing. ‘Some kind of Second World War memento Saunders gave him. Did you know about that?’

Rosa
had smiled, a wide lazy smile. ‘Saunders?’ she said, and leaned her head back. ‘I don’t think so. Not what he told me. He showed it to me too, you see, he made me hold it. He wanted me to know there was still something between them. He was like that.’

Kay tried to understand. ‘Not Saunders?’ she said.

Rosa’s smile hardened. ‘He told me she gave it to him,’ she said. ‘That bitch.’

She’d tried to phone. It rang and rang and rang. She tried again, and again, and left a message, sent a text, another. She imagined Alison’s phone in long grass. She saw it arcing out into grey water, sinking.

Could she phone the police? And say what? Say,
He’s a liar
.

Kay sat pressed against the grimy window and watched East London crawl past: tenements, parks, kids playing. Saturday afternoon. It chuntered in her head with the sound of the wheels on iron track. Too slow. Too slow. Too fucking slow.

A woman’s voice.

Esme has heard the car coming, reckless over the bumps, revving, wheels spinning free. It’s still light outside and she’s looking at the clock to see the time, tick, tock, just as well Joe’s got those headphones. Hears the engine turning off. Silence. Whoever came hasn’t got out of the car.

Early for Dad to come home. Not yet ten. Is it him?

Don’t go out. She wants her mother to stay in the kitchen. Don’t go out, don’t shout at him, don’t start. In your heels, swaying back from the kitchen counter like a dancer to look when Esme got home, that arch in her back, that lipstick that’s not for him.

Her mother blinking as she meets Esme’s eyes. The last time Esme sees her mother alive.

The
car door opening at last and a woman’s voice and Esme can’t stop herself, she’s at the high window looking down, the sad balding place on the top of her father’s head in the summer twilight as he stumbles away from the car door. The other door opens and she sees a sharp ankle, painted toes. A woman. Getting out after him.

The woman’s voice says something but he doesn’t turn, he hasn’t heard. Doesn’t hear these days, doesn’t listen. Cautiously Esme pushes the catch of her window, feels the cold air and sees the gleam of the woman’s calf emerging now from the driver’s door.

The woman hisses sharper and then he turns, at last he turns, steadies himself.

The woman stands, hands on her hips, body bending forward to scream at him. A woman Esme doesn’t know. Didn’t know.

The back door. Kitchen door. Mum’s going to come out. Her best shoes scuffed in the yard. The woman.

Esme prays. Joe stay inside under his headphones, the girls watching TV. Turn up the sound. Never tell.

He’s not coming. Never coming, whore, can you hear me, whore? You little fucking bitch, I’ll see you dead first.

I’ll see you all dead.

Bitch.

Face down in the pillow, hands over your ears.

The
house was at her back now, warm as though it was a living thing, and Alison didn’t want to open her eyes.

How did I get here?

The last stretch – a hundred yards? five hundred? – a darkness had come up to either side of her, as though her peripheral vision was going. She had told herself, it’s what the brain does, you’re not breathing properly, that’s all, you’re hyperventilating and the brain is prioritising. You need to stop, you need to kneel, head between your knees.

But the thought of kneeling made Alison feel sick, dizzy as if the sea wall had become a mountain ridge, at the thought of her neck exposed under the wide sky and the darkness either side of her. Was that how Stephen Bray had felt, before he died? He’d seen the darkness.

Had it been May she’d seen running along the sea wall? Where had she gone?

The darkness was real. Her brain was turning to darkness, it crept in. It stank. Breathe.

Listen. Eyes closed.

The
wind whistling in halyards, clinking against masts in the fairway. The distant lazy whirr of a light aeroplane. Something rose and sobbed and was caught in the gust, a light, high-pitched sound from far away.

Then something else, close, so close. Her eyelids trembled, her throat closing up – and the sound halted. It was her own lungs Alison heard, her own blood pounding in her ears and cautiously she let out a slow breath but her eyes stayed shut.

Lucy Carter had come creeping out of her daughter’s wedding, edging along the white tent like a gatecrasher, a thief. Those fragile calves gleaming under the smudged floral, ankles like a foal’s, so pretty, so delicate, Morgan the great strapping child, all her father’s genes, how strange, Alison found herself thinking in the blood-dark behind her closed eyes, strange to give birth to anything, let alone something so unlike yourself.

It was Lucy Carter who had climbed out of the car after Esme’s father that midsummer night; it was Lucy Carter who’d screamed at him, at all of them.

Scream all you like, no one will hear.

Hands over your ears and never tell.

The police long gone now, and the house’s seams coming loose behind her back. Cracks finding their path through the mortar top to bottom, window frames loose in their apertures, the black inside showing through.

It was Lucy Carter Danny Watts had seen coming out across the marsh, her hair tied under the scarf, coming to stop Stephen Bray saying anything, ever again. Fragile Lucy Carter, bird-boned and narrow-shouldered: she’d hit the old man until the blood flooded his brain, and left him to drown in mud, because he’d seen her open the door of her car and let Esme’s father inside.

Folded against the house Alison felt her heartbeat. She had slowed it by sitting, by controlling each breath, but it was only waiting: a bird in a tree, it hopped from branch to branch to evade her.

Not
safe, it pattered. This wasn’t safe, this was the last place, the very last place …

It was Lucy Carter who’d taken the scarf from where Alison had left it tucked inside a jacket sleeve on the big flounced marital bed, and it was she had returned it, slipped it back under the seat of Paul’s little car to lie beside the brown envelope, the dead family photographs. The scarf with the orange and lemon trees and the bright blue Italian waves that someone not her father had given to her mother, the scarf her aunt had snatched up from all the heaped dark chaos of their abandoned house. How had Polly even dared enter the place to find it, thought Alison, her eyes still closed as she listened, brave Aunt Polly, brave as a lion, ducking under police tape.

How long had she been here, her eyes squeezed shut? She should have stayed, she should have risked it, all the hats turning towards her, Morgan and Christian, waitresses and godparents, she should have climbed on to one of those tables in among the placemats and floral arrangements and shouted,
I am his daughter, the murderer’s daughter, I am the child, I am the sister.
She should have found Paul and said,
It’s time to go to the police.

A soft sound, the weight of a footstep. It crunched.

Someone was there. Her eyes flew open and she scrambled upright, holding on to her glasses with one hand, steadying herself against the wall with the other. Cursing the sound of loose stones under her feet.

She was in the yard. The rear of the crooked house looked down on her and in one sweep she took it in: flat kitchen roof, tilted drainpipe, window above with a shard fallen out of it. Another sound, breathless, a high nervous giggle, and skidding on the rubble. Alison followed it.

As she reached the blistered wooden door that led out of the yard a different sound, further off, the one she’d heard high on the wind before, was blown by some eddy in her direction and she recognised it as a siren. Police or ambulance?
Go away
. She should be pleading for the siren and the flashing lights to come and save her from the whispering, the giggling, from the darkness that was drifting lazily in across the marsh towards her. She had no phone, no shoes, no coat.
Go away
.

A sharp pain stabbed at the soft place of her instep and unbalanced her. Leaning back against the wall she put her hand down and felt wetness, the iron smell of blood was in her nostrils and she heard the soft giggle somewhere out of sight and in that moment the house seemed to topple towards her. The dead weight of her sisters in her arms, too heavy for her to hold, pulled her to one side. She put out a hand to save herself and it skittered over the rough brick, she felt herself go and she closed her eyes, she surrendered to the fall. But something snagged her dress: it tore.

Staggering, she was upright again, a tatter brushed her from a rip down the side of the dress, but she was upright. Limping, she shoved herself through the yard door that hung from its hinges and underfoot she felt the soft mud through fine marsh grass.

‘Who is it?’ Alison shouted, and heard her voice loud here in the lee of the building, everything around her muffled, the grass bright under the dustbin-lid sky. She came around the blind flank of the house to the front and there was the porch, with the plant sprouting above the door; blood leaked from her foot and unthinking she wiped it to and fro on the soft grass.

‘Where are you?’ No one answered. She strained to hear but the siren had disappeared too, there was only the monotonous clink, clink of rigging in the bobbing tide out in the creek. The big bay window was at her side, the crumbling stone of its lintel invited her and she leaned against it.

The black-painted boarding gave a little under her shoulder and she turned to its blank face, she spread her arms and felt around its edges with a loving touch. Her face was against it but it was too close to see the words.
Joe
. She worked her
fingers in the crack where it met the stone sills and tugged – it came away, just a little. She heard her own intent breathing in her ears. This was it, this was the answer. They were all inside, they were waiting for her.

Planting her feet square in the mud she pulled, as hard as she could. There was a loud crack and a splinter came away in her hand, no more, it scored a deep cut alongside the veins of her wrist that she saw and felt in the same moment and then she fell back hard and landed on her backside, jarring her spine.

And from above and behind her on the sea wall came not a whisper, not a ghost, but a hard angry laugh. From where she’d landed in the mud Alison scrabbled around to look and saw only the fringed grass on the top of the dyke, and then it sprang up from its hiding place, a spiky shape, all elbows and knees, standing up against the grey sky in a T-shirt too short in the arms, grubby miniskirt, a wristful of cheap bracelets jangling on the arm she raised in triumph.
Hahahahaha
.

Alison was on her feet now and it seemed to her that the figure was pointing. And calling, jeering still but telling her something, showing her something.
Up there. There. That’s how, there.
Standing still, her hand stretched out steady, her head thrown back and her sharp little face a white blank. Alison turned to see what she was being shown.

Above the porch, the spray of leaves nodded in the stiff wind, and it was pointing to the same place. From the flat roof of the porch, a drainpipe led up to the window above, and what Alison had thought was black board in its frame was emptiness, a pane smashed right through, a hole.

She turned back but May was gone, as if she’d never been: bright spots danced before Alison’s eyes, like sparks or fireflies.

She set her bloodied foot against the porch, and climbed.