The Crooked House (32 page)

The
yard dripped and when she stumbled on some broken brick in her bare feet his free hand was there, solicitous under her elbow. She had to put a hand up to her glasses to stop them falling. ‘Careful,’ he said.

It stank in the rain. Reeling, she looked up at the house. Lucy Carter was still inside, still in the bedroom as far as she knew. Alison had stopped at the foot of the stairs, expecting her to have followed them, but the house above them was silent, she’d stayed there obedient as a child sent to her room.

Filth on the coated kitchen surfaces. Cupboard doors open, one hanging askew from a broken hinge, ancient remains inside, like Pompeii, she thought as he led her, courteous for the moment, through the narrow space towards the back door. A beautiful woman, my mother – the words repeated themselves as she didn’t look down, at the floor where her mother had lain.

‘They were in here when I came up to the house,’ he’d said, stopping abruptly at the door, turning to explain as if he was a teacher and they were on an educational tour. ‘I came round
here and I saw them drinking.’ Two glasses on the draining board, she thought, Mum and Dad. ‘Arguing. She was winning, your mother. At least … he looked beaten.’ Paul looked amused, the kind of teacher who likes to show how much cleverer he is.

‘If he hadn’t come outside …’ he went on, musing, standing at the back door but still his hand was hard around her wrist. Her fingers felt numb as frozen sausages. She’d always known, it seemed to her then; she’d known since he lifted the wineglass from her hand at the office, since he held her by the wrists just inside his front door. She’d always known there was something behind the calm and the order. It was the dark that had drawn her in.

‘If he hadn’t come outside I’d never have known where to find it.’ And then Paul turned a key and they were in the yard. He looked back over his shoulder, pleased. ‘A good hiding place. A good one to remember, just in case.’

He had stepped towards the lean-to at the back of the yard, tugging her after him. He brought her out through the kitchen as if he knew where he was going – but then, one thing she knew about Paul was that he didn’t falter: once he had decided on something, he might go underground but he followed through. It ended how he wanted it to end.

He reached up now, under the sagging slate of the lean-to, and paused there, turned back.

‘We could even have been witnesses,’ he said. ‘Morgan and I were there the night he came into the pub asking for a gun. Up for the weekend. She’d said something about him. I’d seen the way everyone looked at him.’ His pale eyes rested on her, and there was a glitter in them she’d never seen before. ‘I suppose you might say the idea started there.’ His head tilted. ‘Did you know where your father kept the gun?’ And his shoulder followed the arm under the shed roof.

‘I never knew he had a gun,’ she said, and he stopped, his
hand somewhere under the tiles. ‘I never saw it until—’ She stopped. ‘My father was a good man.’ He was so close she could see the creases at his eyes but there was nothing left in the hard, handsome face of the Paul she’d invented, no kindness, no laughter. A reel of loving gestures played in her head – food offered, a present, his hands on her – but it had all been like a picture in a magazine you set a match to, light and empty as ash. The raw mark on her father’s neck as he lay on the hall carpet. She looked into Paul’s pale eyes.

‘He saw me out here and he came out and went straight for the gun, left her in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I got it off him before he’d even turned round, and once I’d knocked his glasses off he was helpless.’ And shrugged. Smiled. ‘I even thought to put both his hands to the trigger. Not straightforward, blowing your own brains out with a shotgun.’

Needs determination
. She stared, dumb.

‘You spent so much time covering your tracks,’ he said, and the smile hovered, his eyes greedy for something she couldn’t see. ‘I always knew where you’d been. You didn’t even wonder this morning, though, where I was, where I might have gone on my run. Did you? You didn’t know I’d come back to use your father’s hiding place.’

She stared. His hand came out from under the shed roof and it wasn’t empty any more. He held it out to her. ‘I knew we’d come back here together,’ he said. ‘I believe in preparation.’

It sat in his palm, dull and heavy and ugly, a lump of scratched metal, the only other gun she’d ever seen.
Herstal Belgique.

Then suddenly, brutally, he shoved her with the heel of his hand, the hand with the gun in it, she felt it connect below her ear and, unbalanced, shocked to the roots of her hair, she fell sideways. He was over her.

‘Run,’ he whispered, low and loving, but he was between her and the open gate. She raised herself on the sharp stone
and glass and rubble, feeling it dig into her palms and he was behind her. He gave her a push, contemptuously light and she was down again, only this time her glasses came off and the world blurred.

‘If I’d known then,’ he said, and he pressed himself against her from behind, she felt his weight, she felt him between her legs. ‘That you were upstairs, waiting for me. If I’d found you. That’d have given the police something to get excited about.’ And she started away from him, her knees ripped and bleeding, bare feet scrabbling for purchase. As she broke free she heard the crunch, and as she blundered painfully into the jamb of the kitchen door she knew her glasses were gone but she heard a sliding on the loose stone behind her, heard him mutter something in anger and she knew, in that instant, this was her only chance.

Back into the kitchen, blindly staggering, stickiness of the old blue and white vinyl underfoot, hands wide and feeling for the doorway at the other end. Through the door into the hall, her house around her, her house. She tripped: she was down.

On her knees she smelled the freshness of the rain through the open front door ahead of her; she knew she must get to her feet and run but she couldn’t move, she was stone. Dad, right here, his unshaven cheek on the blooded carpet, the raw mark on his neck where Paul had manhandled him in the yard, his dying brain flooded and all of it draining out of him, love and jealousy and fear. Dad stumbling over Mum’s body in the kitchen, listening to the shots in that blur, one after another. He’d have heard more than she had, high up in her attic – he’d have heard the girls crying in fear, he’d have stumbled from room to room. Mads struggling to get free and seeing Joe. The last thing she’d have seen. And all this time it hadn’t come from the village at all, not from the place she’d feared, it hadn’t bred in the cramped cottages or on the flat grey marsh: the darkness had drifted in from further off. Passing
over those who belonged here, it had wandered between washing lines and back gardens until it found the outsiders, in their crooked house: scenting blood and damage it had gathered itself, and rushed inside.

It washed through her, it turned her like a vast wave and sucked her down. She crawled and she was there where coats had once hung, her back against the wall, Esme.

She saw a shape fill the kitchen doorway and he was there, closer, close enough for her to see the thing in his hand and then she closed her eyes and felt it cold against her skull, there where the bone was thinnest, the nerves close to the surface. He was over her, he was all around her, she smelled his sweat, his breathing was in her ear. A small movement against her ear, his finger moving on the trigger.

She heard a woman’s voice. It yelled.

And as though the wave had rolled and lifted her and spat her back to the surface she moved up and forwards, heels braced against the wall, up. She felt herself catch him off balance and as he tipped she spun and was in the doorway up against another body blocking her. A woman’s body.

Lucy.

She smelled sweat and cigarettes, lank hair against her face. Not Lucy. Gina had her by the shoulders and was shifting her bodily out of the way, sidestepping into the house, and then she was screaming.

May was a ghost running along the top of the sea wall.

She ran into Sarah Rutherford’s arms, thin as a whip but more solid than a ghost, a tangle of elbows and legs and Sarah couldn’t tell who the sob came from.

‘Mummy,’ said May, her white terrified face all angles and dark eyes turned upwards, her tangle of hair falling back. ‘I told Mummy.’

‘Wait,’ said Sarah Rutherford, but there was no time, she
planted the girl to one side and ran. No time to make sure she stayed put, barely a glance over her shoulder to make sure Jennings was still there and the friend who’d made them bring her too. The track down here had been flooded, they’d had to drive on, as far as the sea wall. She ran: as far as she could see was grey water, the marsh drowned.

Her chest burned, her feet in heavy shoes sliding on the sodden path, heart pounding in her ears. Eyes fixed on it, the dark house, it beat a pulse inside her. Run. It was there in front of her and as she slid down the bank it blocked the sky: inside someone was screaming.

Gina Harling was screaming.

Paul Bartlett was lying where they’d found John Grace, he was curled and bleeding while Gina flailed and spat and kicked, drawing back a booted foot.

Behind her she heard Jennings’s heavy footsteps, further back Kay gasping as she scrambled down the slope.

Wherewherewhere
.

‘Where is she?’ she finally managed as Gina, still kicking, turned her clenched and raging face towards her and the light and despair flooded Sarah Rutherford’s system.

‘You bastard,’ she hissed, no breath left to scream like Gina was screaming. ‘You bastard.’

But something brushed her, soft in the shadows, she turned and saw a face streaked with dust and tears, her glasses gone, a child’s face defenceless and new. Sarah opened her arms and Esme Grace entered them.

The
nurse who’d led her down the corridor was different but the room was the same, the camera blinked above the door. It watched them.

She sat as close as his twisted body and the tubes attached to it would allow. She sat so close she could smell all the chemicals his stubbornly continuing life required, she felt the loose joints of his thin hand in hers, the cool slack unexercised flesh. She leaned against him, the two bodies motionless, she waited, she listened until it came to her from where it was buried, his heart beating on.

She laid her face by his.

‘
Daddy
,’ she said. The word that would make her known.