The Crooked House (6 page)

She climbed out of the car, and smelled the sea. Esme.

With
her eyes shut Alison would have known where she was, if she’d been blindfolded and walked into the Old Ship on Paul’s arm rather than blinking on the threshold. She shouldn’t have come.

‘We could do room service,’ she’d suggested back at the hotel as they dropped their bags and surveyed the room, and he’d looked at her sideways.

‘Can you imagine what room service is going to be like here?’ he said. The decor was chintzy and suffocating.

‘Some sandwiches and a bottle of wine?’ she pleaded. ‘Aren’t you tired?’

Paul had stepped up to her and put his arms around her, locked them behind her back so she couldn’t move, his face very close. His grey eyes danced, he seemed delighted with something. Being there, being with her? She didn’t know.

‘They’re not here yet,’ he said gently. ‘Morgan and what’s his name. If that’s what’s on your mind.’

Alison shook her head, marvelling. ‘No,’ she said dully. ‘I’m
just tired.’ Tuesday evening. The wedding on Saturday. The week yawned ahead of her, frightening.

‘Ah, come on,’ he said, and his lips brushed hers. ‘Don’t you think this place is rather – extraordinary? Geographically, I mean; the estuary, the feeling of being on the edge of nowhere? Rather interesting.’ He pulled his head back, examining her. ‘Besides, we need to get some air, after all that driving.’ And leaving her no room to respond, he released her abruptly.

The twilight had intensified outside and it was warm. A soft wind rustled in the darkening countryside and Alison pictured reed beds down along the sea wall inland. She had listened to directions from the hotel owner in silence, although she could have walked down there in her sleep.

‘It’s very … authentic,’ the woman had said, making a face when Paul asked about the pub. ‘Basic is another way of putting it.’ She’d told them to call her Jan – she was in her fifties, a groomed, stiff-haired blonde, and had come from another part of the country entirely: the far side of London, a place of clear streams and paddocks and expensive cars. ‘The prices were so good here,’ she confided. Her voice was nasal, carefully enunciated and to Alison’s ears it defined her as an outsider straight away. ‘A place like this, all these original features? I’d never have been able to afford it.’

‘We’ll give it a try, anyway,’ said Paul of the pub, to their hostess. Kindly, because Alison had known instantly the hotel wasn’t the kind of place he liked, even though she’d never been away with him before.

Paul had looked at her, amused, when she stuck her arm tight through his and hung on – she wasn’t a toucher, not in public – but he said nothing. They walked first along the empty unlit road, then past the village sign, a shabby petrol station, a barn, a terrace of houses, a farmhouse, all familiar – she also noted as they passed a small new development here, a conversion there. The estuary was no longer visible, but Alison could
smell it and as they got closer she could hear it too, the trickle and gurgle, the slap of halyards ringing on the boats as the wind got up and the tide lifted. They passed the row of tall sail-lofts, silent and unlit, the boatyard, the waterfront with the sea lapping below it. She pointed nothing out, walked past. The yellow glow of the pub windows appeared.

She blinked on the threshold, as if it might transport her somewhere else. The pub smelled the same, or almost. Beer-soaked bar towels, stale steam from the dishwasher: all pubs probably smelled like this but Alison had avoided them, since. At thirteen she’d just begun a job collecting glasses here on Sunday afternoons. It had used to smell of ashtrays too – one of her jobs had been wiping them out, the smell of slops and fag ash had made her gag. Now the smokers were outside among the wooden tables, murmuring by the water, the ends of their cigarettes flaring in the blue dusk.

Mum had only allowed her to do Sunday afternoons: there was homework to be done, had been her excuse, there was her room to tidy. But thirteen-year-old Esme had known it was that her mother wanted to minimise the chances she’d see her dad in there, because he didn’t go in until the evening on a Sunday.

Behind the cramped bar stood the bad-tempered landlord Ron, fatter, jowlier, redder. He gave her a glance as she came in, perhaps he paused a fraction but no more. An old man with a grey beard mumbling to himself on a bar stool, a youngish woman with untidy hair and cracked heels in high sandals as far from him as she could get, running her finger around a tumbler containing dregs. Vodka and tonic. A table of underage drinkers in a corner huddled over pints, would-be surfers with dirty dreadlocks and smelling of dope. The nearest surf would be a hundred miles away, up to Norfolk somewhere. There was a tacked up poster for a barge match on the wall beside the bar; abstractedly Alison registered that the race – between the
big old Thames coastal barges whose home the estuary would have been a hundred years earlier – would take place on Friday, the day before the wedding. The matches had been a feature of their years here, a couple every summer, an endless awards ceremony in the pub, heckling and singing and someone ending up in the water. Little boats loaded with drunken men heading back out to their barges moored in the estuary.

The floor was still dusty boards, the tables topped with chipped red melamine, the greasy glass cabinet on the bar holding cheese rolls in clingfilm still advertised a cheap fizzy drink. Funny thing was, in London it might all have been some kind of ironic reference but Alison couldn’t smile. She felt sick.

‘Gin and tonic?’ said Paul. ‘It’s probably safe enough.’

‘Vodka,’ said Alison. She hesitated, located an empty table and sat, her back against the wall. She watched Paul go to the bar, inserting himself between a bar stool and the old man with the beard. Watched him wait for Ron to finish some pointless restacking of crisp boxes, a gesture Alison recognised from out of the past, designed to show them all that the landlord was nobody’s servant.

The old man leaned down on his bar stool, reaching towards Paul as he stood patiently and said something Alison couldn’t hear. Even from the reckless lean of his body she could tell how drunk he was, and how ancient, but Paul turned politely towards him and answered. And then instantly she knew the old man, of course, something about the shabby coat he wore, a heavy tweed stiff with age and dirt, something about the point to his beard and the walnut gleam of his old bald head and there it was, even his name. Stephen Bray, the tilt of his boat on its side out in the marsh, the reek of home brew and unwashed clothes.

Still here? Alison was astonished, but then it occurred to her that those you thought were ancient, at thirteen, perhaps had only been middle-aged. She saw Paul answer politely, saw
him nod just faintly in her direction in response and the old man looked over. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and frowned down into the contents of her bag, pretending not to notice them looking her way. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Paul get Ron’s attention at last but Stephen Bray’s hand was on his arm, detaining him.

His boat had always been out on the marsh, out along the shingle path from the waterfront that was buttressed with timbers sunk decades ago into the mud and now rotting. In theory you could make your way from there to the crooked house but it was a maze of creeks and dead ends. A memory came to her, of her father getting in more than once with mud up to his knees, saying he’d been to see Stephen, and had struck out across the marsh afterwards.

The drinks were on the bar now, Ron’s hand not as steady as it had been. Stephen Bray was still talking, up into Paul’s frowning face; now he was trying to pay for the drinks and Paul’s hand was out and up, refusing.

Her father had taken her along to see him on his boat once or twice, when she’d been smaller, when they’d been happier. Their family on an even keel: that was a funny phrase in this place. She remembered clambering down the narrow gangway into the crowded space – it had once been a rich man’s yacht, her father had told her, sixty years before. And still there’d been something fairy-tale about it, even frowsty and cluttered, with the long sweeping curve of the hull inside, the tarnished rails and the narrow shelves stacked with cans and pots, the bunk covered in an ancient army blanket and all of it tilted at forty-five degrees. Her father whispering before they got there, ‘He’s all right,’ and holding her hand tight. ‘He’s just a lonely old man.’

There’d been a bottle he’d fished out from a cupboard that smelled of diesel, a liquid, straw-coloured and viscous, that had made her eyes water just to sniff it. He called it parsnip wine and never at nine or ten having even tasted wine Esme had
known no better. He’d got out tiny dusty glasses etched with grapes, one for each of them, and they’d laughed kindly when she spluttered and retched at the single sip she took.

Lonely. Maybe. Paul looked over at her but not in desperation, not yet. He seemed actually interested in what the old man was saying and she felt a tightening in her gut at his kindness, his patience.

Something wrong with Stephen Bray: her mother had thought that. Eccentric, her father had countered, and what was wrong with that –
Kate
, dismay in his voice chiding her for her cold heart – but she had given him a warning look. Esme could tell that her mother imagined the two of them huddled over illicit booze, outcasts on the mud, her husband turning into the old hobgoblin’s apprentice, talking to himself and holding his trousers up with string. If only.

What had they talked about? When she’d been there Bray had shown little interest in Esme, mostly talked to her father about the boat, listing races and classes and owners, the wood used in the hull and the decking, oak and spruce, maple from the Balkans. Charts and lists and numbers, he was happy as a kid reciting them. He’d been married once, long ago; she’d heard her father tell her mother that too and Alison could remember even now the sceptical sound her mother had made in reply.

Had she been right? Her mother hadn’t always been cold-hearted, perhaps wasn’t even then, perhaps she had just had to toughen up. When she’d come home from hospital with the twins she’d been a mess but overflowing with joy, in a grubby dressing gown all day, crying one minute, grabbing Esme the next, wrapping her arms around her. A sweet smell on her, milk and sleeplessness and sweat, nappies and bloodstained pads all over the place. Joe disgusted and laughing, too much mess, too much chaos, too much joy. It had to end.

There was a clatter of laughter from the surfer-boys’ table that turned the old man’s head and she saw Paul finally, almost
regretfully, slide from the stool where he’d settled, and lift the drinks from the bar. The dishevelled woman was waggling her empty glass at Ron but at the same time turned to follow Paul’s progress, and on instinct Alison shifted, out of her line of sight. Paul lowered the glasses.

That night, she thought, a small shock. That cool June night when her world ended. The last person who saw him, who saw my dad off at the back door of the pub, was that old man. Stephen Bray.

‘Well,’ Paul said. ‘Talk about the Ancient Mariner.’

She laughed shortly. ‘You were nice to him.’ To her relief Paul lowered himself into the seat opposite her, shielding her from the room. ‘Local colour?’

‘He hadn’t heard about the wedding,’ said Paul, sipping his murky pint with a grimace. ‘I wondered, you know. It might have been the social event of the decade, I thought.’ Pushed the pint away a little. ‘I should have got something to eat.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ said Alison, and lifted her own glass. The ice, if there had been any, had melted, the warmish liquid thin and watery.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Paul, quizzical at the memory. ‘All that lunch.’

‘Just a bit tired,’ she said, lifting her hand to her mouth, making herself yawn. ‘What was he talking about?’ She took her hand away. ‘The ancient mariner.’

‘He said you were a pretty girl,’ said Paul, lifting the glass to his lips and giving her a quick sideways glance.

‘And?’ She frowned.

Paul sighed, setting the glass down. ‘God,’ he said. ‘You forget. I suppose living here it’s impossible to get away from it.’ He shrugged, and his face was grim.

‘From what?’ She knew what.

‘In a bigger place maybe it would be different.’ He frowned down at the scratched table then raised his head to look at her, sheepish. ‘There was a murder here. A … multiple murder.’
He tilted his head. ‘In cities I suppose these things have less impact, they must happen all the time,’ he mused, distant. He came back into focus. ‘You’d be too young to remember it.’

She just shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

‘He hasn’t forgotten,’ he said, half turning to nod in the direction of the bar. ‘I suppose it leaves its mark on a community.’ A pause. ‘Some guy,’ he said then. ‘The old salt knew him, as a matter of fact, or so he was saying. Killed his whole family, out in some isolated farmhouse, then tried to kill himself.’

Not a farmhouse, she said, inside her head. Not the whole family.

‘Maybe,’ she said vaguely. ‘I don’t know, was that here?’ What else had he said? She took another gulp and to her surprise the glass was already empty. Paul’s pint hardly touched. ‘I suppose when you’re as old as him it doesn’t seem so long ago,’ she said.

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Paul, frowning. ‘Thirteen years? A third of my life. Something like that. Half yours.’ He glanced across at the bar. ‘Maybe it seems like last week to him.’

At the bar Stephen Bray was mumbling to himself and the landlord was looking at him with distaste. The sound was malevolent, suddenly, he wasn’t an innocent any longer, not a harmless eccentric, these were the mutterings of a madman, reflected in Ron’s stiff red face. It was the sound that had filled her ears as she crouched beside her father’s body, the sound of the invisible mob pressing against the walls. Had the sound been in her head, in the hall with them, or had there been someone out there, all that time?

The last one to see him.

‘There seems to be one a week, these days, men killing their kids.’ She heard her voice, sad, lost.

‘He did say you were pretty, though,’ said Paul, trying for light-hearted. He took her hand. ‘Maybe there’s hope for him.’