The Crooked House (31 page)

His
arms held her so softly. Paul.

Thunder rolled and cracked somewhere inland. Beyond the door the air darkened and suddenly it was raining hard, slanting across the rectangle of outside light. She could see the water glinting, high.

A hand came up and stroked: it was on her hair, it was on her neck. Alison held herself still inside his arms. She could smell his sweat, she could feel the heat of his body through the dress shirt, she could see the texture of his skin inches away and all she wanted was to lean and set her face against him. To be his. But she held her head back and listened.

‘She’s here,’ she said in a whisper, and above her he looked up too. Something dripped in the house, something rustled. A creak. Another. Footfall.

He nodded in silence, still looking up.

‘First floor,’ she said.

‘She followed you,’ Paul said, and looked down at her, thoughtful. ‘The boy wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone,’ he said.

‘Danny,’
she said, and Paul’s expression barely changed but he took up her hand, stroking the fingers one by one. Then he stopped and looked back up the stairs into the darkness. ‘Just a boy,’ he said.

The soft footsteps overhead were distinct now. She was moving, light as a feather. The twins’ room. Landing. Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

‘I had to let you find out for yourself,’ he said, examining her face. ‘I talked to Roger. I tried to make him see, he needed to go to the police about her.’ He kept looking, to make sure she understood. ‘About Lucy. But when I saw her heading off down the field and I couldn’t find you anywhere – I had to come.’

‘Did Roger know all along?’ She tried to reconstruct those evenings at The Laurels, hearty Roger at the fireplace, Lucy moving around nervously. Lucy drinking. Living with it thirteen years and Esme turns up on her doorstep.

Paul shook his head. ‘Roger?’ he said, almost impatient. ‘Roger’s not clever enough.’

‘But Morgan,’ she said, and the certainty settled. ‘She knew.’ He just shrugged, yes, an eye still on the stairs, but doggedly she went on.

‘And when you and Morgan got back,’ she said, swallowing, ‘the night of the … shooting. She wasn’t at home?’

But he only held up a finger, head cocked. Upstairs something crashed: a door flung back and suddenly Paul was gone.

‘Lucy.’ His voice echoed oddly on the stairs: it sounded menacing. He softened it as if he’d heard too. ‘Lucy, darling. Come on.’ In the hall Alison froze. She couldn’t move. His footsteps receded. The landing creaked overhead.

Darling.
It hung in the air after him.

Inside her chest Alison’s heart squeezed and expanded,
boom
, and she was back up the stairs after him.

On the landing she stepped across the scattered magazines
on her cut feet, heading towards a murmuring of low voices but at the slithering she made they stopped. Ahead of her was the door to the twins’ room. A stone had grown inside her now, it was hard and cold and it left no room for breathing. She pushed and saw grey light leaking around a window that showed her the room’s empty corners: they weren’t here. She backed out. She could have called for Paul but she didn’t. In the gloom she stepped back across the landing and straight in there, into their parents’ room, through the door they had always had to knock at, without knocking.

The bed her father had built was there still but its shape had changed: one post was gone and the mattress was sagging sideways on collapsed springs. On it Paul was sitting, close against Lucy Carter, his arm around her shoulders. They looked up at her, united. Lucy’s cheek was against his.

‘She’s sorry,’ he said, and looking up at her his eyes gleamed in light shed from somewhere she couldn’t locate. ‘She’s very sorry.’ There was a warning in his voice.

Alison looked from one to the other but in the same moment she was moving towards them, propelled by the hard thing that had gone on growing inside her, that would split her from top to toe. She felt Paul shift out of her way and as her knee came down on the rotted mattress and all the way through it to a metal edge she felt a sharp pain that righted her and she stopped. Her hands were round Lucy Carter’s throat.

Beside her Paul did nothing; she couldn’t even hear him breathing.

‘You killed them,’ she said, but even as the words came out of her mouth they sounded wrong. Lucy Carter’s eyes were wide. Alison took her hands away, and tried different words.

‘I saw you from my window,’ she said. ‘I heard you.’

Lucy Carter’s head began to move from side to side. The mattress shifted as Paul changed his position beside them. ‘You told my mother you’d see her dead.’ Alison swallowed, to keep
the thing down that rose in her throat. ‘You were screaming. All dead, you said.’ She curled her hands to keep them still: she had to stay level, she had to think clearly. ‘Where did you get the gun?’

They must have come inside, Lucy and Dad, they must have argued, all of them. But that part refused to come back to her.

She was half kneeling over the older woman on the bed, but with her hands pulled back the power shifted – Lucy Carter began to draw herself up.

‘That woman,’ she said, triumphant. ‘She telephoned! She called our home.’ An outrage Lucy Carter had repeated in her head over the years. ‘I’d already told her, if she came and made another scene at the house …’ Her head moved, fractionally, towards Paul, and in Alison’s head it ticked down, into place. ‘I told her if she made contact again I – we – wouldn’t be answerable. It was harassment. Trailing out here after him, she couldn’t understand it was only a stupid fling, a silly girl in a shop who flattered his ego. Just because she let herself get pregnant …’ Her voice wavered, reedy, but then recovered, the doctor’s wife almost brisk. ‘She couldn’t force him to have the test.’ Drawing herself up further now. ‘Just because her own husband was a … a …’ But Paul bent his head to her, leaning across Alison: he held a finger to his lips.

‘Shh …’ he said, gentle, confiding, and Lucy Carter’s face turned up to his, and fell still.

Alison set a foot down from the bed, backing off. As she retreated, the other two moved closer together.

‘You were there the night my mother went to The Laurels,’ Alison said wonderingly to Paul. His arm was around Lucy Carter again. ‘She said they’d had company, when she came back.’ He said nothing. ‘The night the boy was killed in the hit-and-run, the night she brought Joe home drunk, the night she went to tell the Carters the twins … the twins …’
Looking up at her Paul was waiting, patient. ‘Mum said they had company.’

In the kitchen with Dad, white-faced with panic, Joe vomiting upstairs.

‘You do look just like her,’ said Paul, and his voice was so soft. Disregarding Lucy in his embrace he leaned forward, upwards, closer to her, she felt his breath. The rain had stopped, the wind had fallen, it was quiet. Higher up in the crooked house something dripped, something creaked, easing. A tiny slithering, a snap. ‘She was a beautiful woman.’ Lucy moved on the bed like a restless child and Alison felt her anger stirring, a thread between them that turned her head from Paul to the woman.

‘Stephen Bray,’ she said, reaching for the thing she was sure of. ‘You arranged to meet him. You took the scarf.’

And even as she said it she remembered, down the years, the scarf had come from a customer at the art shop where Mum had worked. Lucy Carter’s portrait in oils.

‘You hit him with something,’ she said. ‘You killed him.’

Lucy Carter’s voice rose and wavered. ‘We went to Amalfi, of course,’ she said. ‘Second honeymoon. Lovely. He bought me a necklace there, you know, he went off on his own and bought it. Not some nasty cheap scarf.’ She gazed, her eyes liquid. ‘I didn’t mean to hit him. I had the bottle in my hand. I told him, he only had to promise not to tell. He wouldn’t promise.’

Alison looked down, pitiless. ‘You came to our house that night,’ she said, and Lucy Carter looked back up at her, hunched and silent. ‘Did you only mean to kill
her
?’

Her voice came out strange and choked, the air in the room was crowded, as though dark shapes were slipping silently back into the house and taking up positions they knew of old. Against the kitchen cabinets downstairs, curled on the floor, at the foot of the stairs, upright on the sofa. ‘I can’t … I can’t
understand. You wanted her dead. Letty and Mads, because they were his? And Dad? And Joe?’

And why not me?
Unspoken in the foster family’s front room, if he’d known you were there, Sarah Rutherford had said,
You’d be dead too.

A head turning in the market square to watch her pass.

‘And why didn’t you come for me?’ she said, and it was Alison’s head that turned, seeking him out. A tall man in the market square, pale eyes. A stranger watching the girl on her bicycle standing in the pedals.

Lucy’s eyes were huge and starry in the gloom, hypnotised. ‘I did … did … I … didn’t …’ she faltered and she looked for Paul, past Alison. ‘Tell her, Paul,’ she said, gazing at him. ‘He’s been like a son to me,’ she said and her hand fluttered up towards him, a moth in the gloom. ‘I don’t know why they couldn’t have got married.’ Her face fixed on his. ‘There’s never been anyone else for Morgan. Like a son to me. His own parents … think of that. They killed themselves with him in the house.’ Her voice rose plaintively but she was a child feeling sorry for herself, it was concocted, it was a sob story for both of them. ‘Like a son. I always wanted a son.’

In the gloom she saw his hand come up to cover Lucy Carter’s mouth; she sagged sideways against his neck.

‘We haven’t got long,’ he said, over her shoulder. The words settled soft and comfortless as dust.

‘Did she say you were in the house,’ Alison said, wondering, ‘when your parents killed themselves?’ His free hand came up to stroke her cheek.

‘They were very worried about the trauma, when I got back to school,’ he said lightly, almost amused. ‘About
damage
. How stupid my father was, to wait for the holidays.’ But doggedly she pursued it.

‘That wasn’t what you told me …’ And his hand stopped. ‘You said you were away at school.’ In the gloom she couldn’t
see what his face was doing: it seemed to her he was smiling, but that couldn’t be right. He said nothing.

Lucy was moving restlessly under his arm and he seemed to lose interest, releasing her. ‘I called him, you see,’ she murmured, to no one. ‘I couldn’t let that woman … Roger never stood up to her. That woman.’ Her head bobbed foolishly. ‘I think she’ll understand,’ she said.

‘A woman in distress.’ He sounded wistful; he sounded cruel. ‘Your mother, in her heels. Nothing more beautiful than a woman in distress. And Lucy is very dear to me.’ For a moment his hand grazed Lucy’s breast, and then he was on his feet and his body was pressed against Alison’s, all stone. His hand was on her waist, it had found its way through the torn dress. Behind him on the bed Lucy Carter sat mute, submissive, abandoned. Lovingly his hand explored.

Alison stood motionless, and still looking into her face he reached down casually to take hold of her under the skirt of the dress he’d bought for her. She saw the stranger’s face, turning to watch her as she rode through the village. It rose like a poison creeping through her veins, paralysing, burning.

‘You,’ she said. His hand turned hard between her thighs, all knuckles and nails, it felt like metal, like some contraption of steel and springs meant to open and expose her. She stayed quite still, her face turned up to his, and his hand stopped and slowly, insultingly, withdrew.

Beyond the walls of the crooked house the world was spinning, spinning and the faces in it blurred as they were flung away from her: Danny; Gina; Kay; Sarah. Sarah the policewoman with her anxious eyes under the straight fringe. They gazed forlornly back – this was where Esme belonged, in here with the loving dead.

She could hear the water lapping: she could smell the rising sea.

‘You
always wanted to know,’ Paul said, and took her hand. She felt the force of his grip even before, sharp and vicious, he tugged her alongside him to the door. ‘I’m going to show you.’

This was where the world ended.

She
hadn’t had her seat belt on. Sarah Rutherford lifted herself off the dashboard and put a hand to her temple – she registered a shocking pain in her head and Jennings staring white-faced from the driver’s seat. Tried to shake her head to tell him to stop looking at her like that, but it hurt too much.

‘Boss …’ he started to say, ‘Sarah …’ but she was already climbing out of the patrol car to work out what the fuck had happened.

She’d never been in a collision before, though she’d heard enough accident victims’ disjointed reports to know they often had no clue about the moment of impact. She stared. A knackered brown Volvo sat slewed across them at the junction with steam hissing from the bonnet. Unlicensed taxi. A pasty middle-aged man at the wheel in shock and a girl in the back seat, woman, short dyed hair, eyes dark and staring with panic, her shoulder at the crumpled door trying to shove her way out. Sarah Rutherford had no idea who she was.

Late
arrival for the wedding, though not dressed for it: too fucking late.
Get out of my way
.

They were no more than half a mile from The Laurels and the patrol car blocked in. With Jennings behind her struggling to get the car into gear she strode up to the Volvo and kicked the driver’s side front wheel, savagely. ‘Get it out the way,’ she said, fighting to pull the badge out of her jacket pocket to show him. The cheap fabric tore. ‘Out the fucking way.’ The cab driver only stared, wobble-chinned.

Morgan Carter’s husband had still been seated at the top table when they came back in, talking to the elderly couple, his mobile phone held loosely between his hands. He seemed entirely calm. His bride, with Sarah holding her hard by the elbow, hadn’t even looked at him as she was led up to the table: he might have been a waiter, or a perfect stranger.

She’d had to leave Morgan Carter there, in the end: she needed Jennings. She didn’t know how long it was going to take for another officer to get there, Saturday afternoon and someone had set fire to a shopping centre, a drunken man was holding his pregnant wife and in-laws hostage after a family barbecue. But she needed Jennings. She couldn’t take any chances.

Accessory to murder, at the least obstructing the course of justice; young and strong, with access to funds, a trained lawyer. Morgan Carter could still abscond. She could harm herself – that was what they called it, meaning, top herself.
Fuck it
. Rutherford took the bride over to her new husband who looked up at them calmly.

‘I charge you with holding her here until we return,’ she said, and saw confusion pass across the faces of the old couple. The bridegroom showed no surprise, only courteous compliance. ‘If you allow her to leave I will hold you responsible.’ Sullenly Morgan Carter sat down, and Sarah Rutherford saw his hand, with its bright new wedding band,
leave the mobile phone and settle on his wife’s knee below the table.

The woman in the unlicensed taxi had got the car door open and was standing in front of her. ‘I’m looking for The Laurels,’ she said, and she seemed quite heedless of the situation, the police car revving in front of them in the lane. She wasn’t dressed for a wedding: crumpled shirt, boy’s trousers. No make-up, no fascinator. ‘I’m looking for my friend. She’s …’ And finally she registered the flashes on the side of the police car. ‘She’s … her name’s Alison now but she was Esme Grace,’ she said, falling back against the car. ‘I’m Kay. I work with her, I found out … it’s the boyfriend, you see.’

Rutherford was having trouble with her head: she felt as though something had been shaken loose in there, she should know this girl, this woman. She knew Esme Grace, after all, and the name was secret. ‘The boyfriend,’ she said with difficulty. ‘Paul Bartlett.’ Her tongue felt thick.

Standing out there with Bob Argent’s words blown away in the wind, they had all looked at Morgan Carter. ‘He left me there,’ she said, her chin obstinate. ‘I wanted to come with him but he told me to wait in the car.’ Her father started to say something, a warning, but he didn’t seem to be able to get it out and Morgan’s colour heightened, spreading up her neck. ‘When he came back he was sweating, he smelled … he smelled strange.’ She smiled, satisfied. ‘He said, he’d dealt with it for Mummy, he said, it’s motiveless, they never catch you. Our secret, just ours.’ She looked around at them and she didn’t seem like a lawyer or a bride, she seemed like a vicious playground tormentor, ruling by shock tactics, driven by greed. ‘We did it in the car afterwards,’ she said, triumphant.

She seemed oblivious to her father in his morning coat at her side, his face appalled, on the point of collapse, but Sarah Rutherford had been obliged to register his response. To file it under
No Fucking Clue
.

She
hadn’t read Morgan Carter her rights, was that why she’d stood up and crowed it over them? Accessory, for sure. Witnesses, at least: Karen Marshall, Argent, even if the father would say he’d heard nothing. But twenty years of doing everything by the book seemed to have deserted Sarah Rutherford. Behind the Volvo’s smeared windscreen the driver appeared at last to have worked out that he was under some kind of imperative, bent over his ignition. There was a strangled sound.

‘It’s the gun, you see,’ said the woman who’d climbed out of the car, the woman who called herself Kay. She seemed uncertain suddenly. ‘He lied to her about the gun. He brought it with him, you know. He’s got it here.’

‘The gun.’ Morgan Carter’s words took a different shape. Jennings was looking at Sarah anxiously and she put a hand to the bruise on her temple. Was she bleeding into her brain?

Kay took a step towards Sarah Rutherford and put out a hand to her. ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Gun,’ said Sarah with difficulty.

‘She gave it to him,’ Kay said. ‘Morgan Carter.’

‘Of course, after that, we had to cool off,’ Morgan Carter had said, pretending carelessness. ‘We agreed. Our secret, though. Mummy had drunk a bottle and a half on the patio by the time we got back, she didn’t see a thing, never mentioned the phone call again. Our secret forever. He liked that, he even wanted me to get married and all the time we’d have our secret.’

A disbelieving sound had come from somewhere at that, and Morgan Carter had looked around the circle, settling on Karen Marshall who’d looked back at her, lips set in a line.

‘I gave him a gun for his birthday, that year. We’d broken up by then, in public of course, but he knew what it meant.’

Nobody asked the question: Morgan didn’t need a prompt. ‘It took me for ever to find the bloody thing, the one the
Germans fighting in France would have used. It had to be right. And of course it had to be fully functioning.’ That smile again. ‘I mean, what good’s a gun that can’t be used?’

Behind them the knackered Volvo’s ignition caught at last and the car jerked backwards into the ditch.