Telling Tales (20 page)

James, however, seemed to regard the question with suspicion. “No one local,” he said. He shouted goodbye to Emma and left the house.

Emma apologized for the mess but didn’t make any move to clear it. “Who are you?” she asked Ashworth, then immediately she put her hand to her mouth, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I suppose I’m used to Dan.”

“This is my sergeant, Joe Ashworth.” Vera ignored the reference to Greenwood. She didn’t know what to make of it. Was there something going on there that she didn’t know about? Dan Greenwood playing silly beggars? She could see him as the sentimental type, falling for someone unattainable like the pilot’s wife. “Joe works with me in Northumberland. He’s here to help. Why don’t you chat to him while I make some coffee.”

Ashworth took a seat opposite Emma. He pushed aside a cereal box so there was nothing between them. Vera put the kettle on and stood by the sink, watching the conversation, keeping her mouth shut even when she was tempted to interrupt with a question of her own.

“Did Christopher have a girlfriend?” Ashworth asked gently. “Someone who should be informed of his death.”

“I don’t think so. No one regular.” Emma looked up sharply. Vera saw that she’d been crying. She’d probably been awake and crying for most of the night. The skin around her eyes was tender and swollen as if she’d been thumped. It looked as if you could rub it off with your thumb, like the skin of an over-cooked beetroot. “Christopher blamed Abigail for that. When we were talking that night he was here, he said he’d been obsessed by her. That summer and ever since. No one else could live up to her. That wasn’t true of course. If he was obsessed with her at all it was only the fantasy his girlfriends couldn’t live up to. How can you compete with make believe?”

“Are you saying he went out with Abigail the summer before she died?”

“No. Of course not. In his dreams.”

Are you sure?”

“She wouldn’t have looked at him twice. Except to mock. He was younger than she was, geeky a bit weird. I thought he’d grown out of that, but maybe not. He seemed weird enough when he was here.”

Abigail did have a boyfriend, though.”

No, Vera screamed in her head. Don’t move on. Not yet. Follow up on the weirdness. Was he different from the other times he visited? Why?

But Emma was already answering Ashworth. “I didn’t know about a boyfriend. It seems unlikely. I mean, we spent a lot of that summer together and she never mentioned it.”

“She wasn’t a virgin. Did you know that?”

“No!” Emma seemed astonished, shocked. There was a pause while she seemed to assimilate the information. “But I was very innocent, very naive. I’d led a sheltered life. When I thought about boys I imagined them kissing me, putting their arms round me. Nothing more than that. I knew about the biology, but it wouldn’t have crossed my mind…”

“And Abigail was more worldly-wise?”

“In every way, but that wouldn’t have been difficult. I thought of her as sophisticated. She knew so much more about everything.”

“Like what?”

“Music. I’d never heard of half the bands everyone was talking about at school. We didn’t have a television. Do you know what a handicap that is? I went to her house to watch Tbp of the Pops, and they had satellite even then… Make-up. I didn’t even know how to use cleanser and moisturizer. It wasn’t that I wasn’t allowed any of that stuff. Just that it would have been considered frivolous, a waste of time and money… Fashion… The names of film stars… She made me realize I was ignorant about everything.”

Ashworth smiled. “You must have known things that she didn’t.”

“Yeah, right. Latin verbs. Equations. The Bible. Just the stuff you want to boast about in front of your mates when you’re fifteen.” She paused. “Look, mostly it was her talking and me listening. I didn’t realize at the time, but that was what I was there for. To show her how clever she was in comparison.”

“Sounds like she was insecure, maybe? Always needing to be right.”

“You think so? I never saw it like that.”

There was a moment of silence. From the baby monitor on the dresser they could hear Matthew snuffling in his sleep. He began to whimper.

“Did she talk to you about sex at all?”

“All the time in general terms. At that age you don’t think about much else. But it was stuff like who we fancied. Which pop stars, which teachers, which of the lads at school. She certainly didn’t tell me she was sleeping with anyone.”

“Why do you think that was? Was she worried about shocking you?”

Again there was a silence. At last Emma said, “It’s so hard after all this time to know what she was thinking. I had one memory of her and then Christopher gave me another. I’m not sure any more what was going on in her head. I don’t think she’d worry about shocking me. She enjoyed making me out to be stuffy and old-fashioned. Perhaps her boyfriend wasn’t as impressive or cool as she’d want him to be. A bit of a loser. She’d keep that to herself. Otherwise I can’t see why she’d want it to be a secret.”

“Not even from her father?”

“No. I always thought she and Keith got on really well. I mean they never rowed. He never shouted. She could do what she liked. I thought he trusted her. But he can’t actually have spent much time with her. He had Jeanie to keep sweet and work took up most of his time. Abigail could have anything she wanted but I’m not sure he listened to her. His mind was on other things.”

“Poor little rich girl?”

“Yeah, something like that. I suppose she was lonely and that was why she took up with me.”

“Can you give me the names of her other friends?”

“It’s odd but there really wasn’t anyone else. Not once I turned up. Not girls, at least. It was as if she didn’t consider anyone else worth making an effort for. I found that flattering at the time.”

“Lads then?”

“There was one boy. Nick Lineham. His father was deputy head of our school. He was a couple of years older than us and she fancied him like crazy.”

“Could he have been the lover?”

“I can’t see why she wouldn’t have told me.”

“Does he still live round here?”

“He teaches English at the FE college in town. We kept in touch after school. The odd phone call, you know. He never bothered with me when Abigail was alive, but perhaps he felt sorry for me. Or felt we had something in common. He got me a job at the college. Adult education. I taught languages.”

Vera caught something wistful in the voice and wondered what had caused it. The man or the work? She poured water onto instant coffee, took it to them. She’d restrained herself for long enough. “Last night your husband said Christopher was drunk when he was here. Drunk and upset. Going through some sort of crisis. What do you think that was all about?” She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. It was one of those bent wood affairs, old and stripped down. It creaked when she moved.

“I think Christopher was being over dramatic blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Maybe he did have a crush on Abigail when he was fourteen. So what? He told me the other night that he followed her around like a juvenile stalker but I can’t see it was the big deal he made it out to be. We’d have noticed if he’d been lurking in the bean fields every day. Like you said, it’s pretty flat round here. There’s nowhere much to hide. And I don’t remember him changing that summer. He was still into the things he’d always been passionate about natural history, astronomy. If he was pining away he was discreet about it.”

“What had upset Christopher so much now, then?” Vera demanded. “Could it have been Jeanie Long’s suicide?”

“Perhaps. Though I don’t think he ever knew her. How could he?” Emma hesitated. “I think the publicity around the anniversary of Abigail’s death provided him with a convenient excuse. He was miserable. Perhaps some woman had dumped him. Perhaps things hadn’t been going well at work. So he resurrected his adolescent fantasies about Abigail and convinced himself that she was the cause of his depression.”

The baby’s whimper had turned into a high-pitched whine which shredded Vera’s nerves. “Look,” Emma said. “He’ll need changing. I’ll have to fetch him. Is there anything else?”

“Not for the present, pet.” Vera was glad of the excuse to leave.

“Do you think the brother was mad?” They were sitting in the car, cut off from the rest of the village by the horizontal slashes of rain. Ashworth was in the driver’s seat, waiting for instructions. The question seemed to come from nowhere. There was no thought behind it. He opened his mouth and it came out.

“I don’t know,” Vera said. “Depressed maybe.”

“You don’t suppose…” he hesitated.

“Go on, pet. Spit it out.”

“He couldn’t have killed the girl? If he was obsessed with her, despite what the sister says. Obsessed and keeping it to himself like a guilty secret. Perhaps she teased him, taunted him, like, and he snapped.”

“Then went home and pretended that nothing had happened?”

When they’d first started working together Ashworth would have left it at that. But he had more confidence these days. “Pretended so well that he convinced himself too. Hid it away somewhere at the back of his mind, told himself when Jeanie was found guilty that it was all a bad dream. Until she committed suicide and the case was reopened. That would explain why he was behaving so oddly. Imagine waking up one morning and remembering you strangled a lass. You’d need a few drinks to come to terms with that.”

“You’ve been watching too much day-time telly,” Vera said. “Tame psychologists spouting off. I don’t believe in that sort of amnesia. Too convenient. Besides, he didn’t leave the house the Sunday Abigail died. Everyone said so.”

“Would they remember? After ten years? Would they know? He could have gone out while they thought he was in his bedroom.”

She pictured the layout of Springhead House. There was one door into the kitchen from the yard which the Winters usually used, but another at the foot of the stairs leading out into a small walled garden. It was an old house and the walls were thick. They wouldn’t have heard his leaving.

i She saw the boy, slight and skinny, as he’d been in the photo there’dbeen of him in the hall at Springhead, running against the wind along the path between the fields towards the Mantel house. Had he been hoping to spy on Abigail? See her in her bedroom through an uncurtained window, trying on new clothes, brushing her hair? But perhaps the girl had been bored, left alone again by her father. Perhaps she’d set out for the Winters in search of an audience. And they’d met on the path.

He’d been a strange boy. They’d all said that. Self-contained. Obsessed. Vera pictured him blocking the girl’s way, insistent.

I have to talk to you.

What do you want?

I can’t stop thinking about you.

What? As if the thought had disgusted her. Though deep down she’d have been flattered, he wouldn’t have realized that.

Perhaps she’d tried to push past him and he’d held onto her shoulder, desperate now that he had her to himself to make her understand. And, excited by the touch of her, he hadn’t let her go.

Fuck off, you little prick.

But he’d twisted her towards him, stronger than he looked, and put his other hand on her neck, almost a caress. She’d shouted at him to let her go, told him what she thought of him in language which would have shocked a well-brought-up lad. He’d pulled her scarf tight around her neck, thinking only to cut off the words she was spitting out at him, but not able to stop, even when he realized what he was doing.

The rumble of an East Riding bin lorry, blurred by the rain into an unrecognizable shape, brought her back to the present. She shook her head to clear the nightmare from it.

“I can see Christopher killing her,” she said. “Being driven to it in the way that you said. But forgetting all about it afterwards. Nah, I don’t buy that.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

They drove in silence to Springhead House. Vera had her head full of the Winters and what it must have been like for Emma and Christopher growing up there. It was too close to making fiction, she thought, this attempt to recreate the past. But how else could she do it? She couldn’t depend oh the memories of the family. Even if they believed they were giving her the truth, after all this time there’d be gaps, bits that had changed with the telling over the years.

When they arrived they stood for a moment outside the house. The old farmyard was empty. There wasn’t even Robert’s car to provide shelter from the weather.

“A gloomy sort of place,” Ashworth said. “You can see why the lad wouldn’t want to come home much. What are they like, the parents?”

“Decent. Hard working. On the surface at least. You can never tell with families, can you, lad?” She slid him a sly, teasing look. He was a great one for families.

She knocked on the kitchen door and was surprised when Mary answered. The woman was wearing a grey tracksuit and a worn fleece, bobbled by too many washes. She’d aged overnight, shrunk inside her skin.

“What is it? Is there any news?” Vera couldn’t tell if she was grasping at the possibility or if she was scared that there might be something worse for her to cope with.

“Not yet, pet.” She paused. “Where’s Linda?” Linda was the officer who’d stayed overnight.

“I sent her away. She was very kind, but sometimes you need to be on your own.”

“And Robert?” Vera asked gently.

“He’s in church.” Mary stood aside to let them in. “I told him to go. He couldn’t settle. I heard him all night, moving around the house. I thought he might find some peace there. But he’s been longer than I expected. That was why I was so jumpy when you knocked at the door.”

Vera said nothing. She’d been brought up by her father to believe that atheism was the only rational standpoint, at a time when all her friends were sent to Sunday school. She’d watched the others straggle back from the parish hall clutching their coloured pictures of the disciples fishing and Jesus walking on the water and wished she could be allowed to join in. Church had been a forbidden attraction, the only social centre in their small village. Besides the pub. She’d crept in once to a harvest festival and had loved the noise of the organ and the singing, the colour of the stained-glass windows and the piles of fruit. But she couldn’t see what Robert would get out of being in church at a time like this. Wasn’t one gloomy building much like another? Wouldn’t he be better off here, comforting his wife?