Telling Tales (3 page)

“What did she want to thank her father for?” Though Emma had the impression that the policewoman already knew the answer, or at least had guessed at it. How could she? Had she had time to find out? Perhaps it was just that she carried round with her an aura of omnipotence.

“For asking Jeanie Long to leave, so they could have the house to themselves again.”

And at that the policewoman nodded once more, satisfied, as if she was a teacher and Emma had answered a test question correctly.

“Who is Jeanie Long?” she asked and once more Emma had the impression that she already knew the answer.

“She was Mr. Mantel’s girlfriend. She used to live with them.”

The policewoman made notes in a book but she made no comment.

“Tell me all you can about Abigail.”

Emma, no longer the rebellious teenager that had been shocked out of her was eager to please and started talking at once. Once she started there was so much to say.

“Abigail was my best friend. When we moved here it was hard, different, you know. We were used to the city. Abigail had lived here most of her life but she didn’t really fit in either.”

It had been something they’d talked about at sleep-overs, how much they had in common. How they were soulmates. But even at the time Emma had known that wasn’t true. They’d both been misfits that was all. Abigail because she had no mother and her father gave her everything she asked for. Emma because she’d moved from the city and her parents said grace before meals.

Abigail lived on her own with her dad. Until Jeanie came to stay, at least, and Abigail couldn’t stand her. There’s someone to do the cleaning and the cooking, but she lives in a flat over the garage and that doesn’t really count, does it? Abigail’s dad’s a businessman.”

Those words still conjured up for Emma the same glamour as when she’d first heard them. They made her think of the big smart car, with the leather seats, which had collected them sometimes from school, of Abigail all dressed up to go out to dinner with her father because he was entertaining clients, of the champagne Keith Mantel had opened when it was her fifteenth birthday. Of the man himself, suave and charming and attentive. She couldn’t explain that to the woman, though. To her ‘businessman’ would just be the description of an occupation. Like ‘probation officer’ or ‘priest’.

“Does Abigail’s father know?” Emma asked suddenly, feeling sick.

“Yes,” the policewoman said. She looked very serious as she spoke and Emma wondered if she’d been the one to tell him.

“They were so close,” Emma murmured, but she felt those words to be inadequate. She pictured father and daughter cuddled on the sofa in the immaculate house, laughing at a comedy on the television.

She must have told the policewoman more about Jeanie Long at that first meeting, about why Abigail disliked her, but lying in the bed next to James, the details of that part of the conversation eluded her. Neither could she recall seeing Christopher in the house between lunch and much later in the evening. Now Christopher was a scientist, a postgraduate student, studying the breeding behaviour of puffins and spending part of every year on Shetland. Then he had been her little brother, self-contained and annoyingly brainy.

Had he always been like that, so distant and closed off from the rest of them? Or had that only happened after Abigail’s death? Perhaps he’d changed then too, although he’d only witnessed the drama second hand, and it was her memory which was faulty. Had it been the move to Elvet that had changed him and made him so focused and intense, or Abigail’s murder? At this distance she couldn’t decide. She wondered how much of that day he remembered and whether he’d be prepared to discuss it with her.

Certainly in York he’d been more open, more … in her mind she paused, hesitating to use the word, even to herself, more… normal. She remembered a rowdy little boy, chasing round the house with his friends, waving a plastic sword in the air, then at another time sitting in the back seat of the car on a long journey, giggling at a joke he’d brought back from school until tears had run down his cheeks.

She was now certain that he was in the house on the day Abigail died. He hadn’t been away on one of his solitary walks. Later, once the policewoman had gone, they sat together in his bedroom which was in the roof, and which looked out over the fields. The wind blew a gap in the clouds and there was a full moon. They watched the activity in the bean field, the flashlights throwing strange shadows, the men below them looking very small. Christopher pointed to two of them struggling through the mud, carrying a stretcher between them.

“I suppose that’s her.”

Then one of the stretcher bearers tripped and fell onto one knee, and the stretcher tilted alarmingly. Emma and Christopher looked at each other and both gave an awkward and embarrassed giggle.

The church clock struck two. The baby cried out in his sleep as if he were having a nightmare. Emma began to doze, and remembered, as if she were already dreaming, that the policewoman’s name had been Caroline. Caroline Fletcher.

Chapter Four

In the beginning was the word. Even as a teenager Emma hadn’t believed that literally. How could you have a word without someone to speak it? Impossible for the word to come first. She’d never had it properly explained though. Not in the sermons she’d sat through during the family service on Sunday mornings. Not during the dreary evenings of the confirmation classes.

What she’d thought it meant was: In the beginning was the story. The Bible was all stories. What else was there to it? The only way she could make sense of her own life was to turn it into a story.

As she grew older the fiction was it fiction? grew more elaborate.

Once upon a time there was a family. An ordinary family. The Winters. A mother and father and a son and daughter. They lived in a pleasant house on the outskirts of York in a street with trees on the pavement. In spring the trees were pink with blossom and in autumn the leaves were gold. Robert, the father, was an architect. Mary, the mother, worked part time in the university library. Emma and Christopher went to the school at the end of the street. They wore a uniform with a maroon blazer and a grey tie.

And repeating the story in her head now, Emma saw the garden in the York house. A red brick wall with sunflowers in a row against it, the colours so vivid that they almost hurt her eyes. Christopher was squatting next to a terra cotta pot with lavender growing in it, a butterfly trapped between his cupped hands. She could smell the lavender and there was sound too, the bubbling notes of a flute from an open window, played by the teenage girl who came occasionally to babysit.

I’ll never be so happy again. The thought came unbidden into her head, but she couldn’t allow that to be part of the narrative. It was too painful. So she continued the story as it was always told…

Then Robert discovered Jesus and everything changed. He said he couldn’t be an architect any more. He left his old office with the long windows and went to university to become a probation officer.

“Why not a vicar?” Emma had asked. By now they had started going regularly to church. She’d thought he’d be a good vicar.

“Because I don’t feel the calling,” Robert had said.

He couldn’t be a probation officer in York. He wasn’t called to stay and anyway there wasn’t enough money to keep the big house in the quiet street. Instead they’d moved east to Elvet, where the land was flat and they needed probation officers. Mary had left the university and took a job in a tiny public library. If she’d missed the students she hadn’t said. She’d gone to the church in the village with Robert every Sunday and sang the hymns as loudly as he did. What she’d thought about their new life in the draughty house, the bean fields and the mud, Emma hadn’t been able to tell.

But of course that wasn’t the complete story. Even aged fifteen Emma had known it couldn’t be. Robert wouldn’t just have discovered Jesus in a flash of lightning and a crashing of cymbals. Something had led up to it. Something had made him change. In the books she read, every action had a cause. How unsatisfactory if events came out of the blue, at random, unexplained. There had been some trauma in Robert’s life, some depression. He had never discussed it, so she was free to create her own explanation, her own fiction.

It was Sunday, and on Sunday the whole family went together to family Communion in the church on the other side of the square. After Matthew had been born Emma had been allowed a few weeks off, but a month after the birth Robert had called at the house. It had been mid morning, a week day, and she’d been surprised to see him.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” she’d said.

“I’m on my way to Spinney Fen. Plenty of time for a coffee and a look at my new grandson.”

Spinney Fen was the women’s prison with the high concrete walls on the cliff next to the gas terminal. He had clients there, offenders he’d been supervising in the community and others about to be released on licence. Emma hated driving past Spinney Fen. Often it seemed shrouded in sea mist, so the concrete walls seemed to go up for ever into the clouds. When they’d first moved to Elvet she’d had nightmares about his going in through the narrow metal gate and never being allowed out.

She had made him coffee and let him hold

Matthew, but all the time she’d wondered what he was really doing in her home. On his way out he’d paused on the doorstep.

“Will we be seeing you at church on Sunday? Don’t worry about the baby. You can always take him out if he cries.”

And of course on the following Sunday she’d been there, because since the death of Abigail Mantel, she hadn’t had the will to stand up to him. To stand up to anyone. And he still had a way of making her feel guilty. Part of her felt that if she hadn’t disobeyed him that Sunday, ten years before, history might have been different. If she hadn’t been there to find the body, Abigail might not have died.

Robert and Mary always arrived at the church, St. Mary Magdalene, before Emma and James. Robert was churchwarden and dressed up in a white robe himself, when it was time, and served wine from the big silver chalice. Emma was not quite sure what he did in the half hour before the service began. He disappeared into the vestry. Perhaps there were practical tasks; perhaps he was praying. Mary always went into the small kitchen in the hall to switch on the urn and set out the cups for coffee afterwards. Then she went back into church and stood by the door to hand out hymn books and service sheets. When Emma had still been living at home she had been expected to help.

James hadn’t been at all religious when Emma first met him. She had brought the matter up on their first date just to check. Even now, she thought, he didn’t actually believe in God, or in fact in any of the things he claimed to believe, when he was reciting the creed. He was the most rational man she had ever met. He laughed at the superstitions of the foreign sailors he met at’ work. He liked going to church for the same reason that he liked living in the Captain’s House. It represented tradition, a solid respectability. He had no family of his own and that too had been a major attraction. Often Emma felt he was closer to Robert and Mary than she was, certainly he was more comfortable in their company.

They were late arriving at church. The story of Jeanie’s suicide had been on the front page of the newspaper, which was always delivered on Sunday. Her staring face had looked up from the doormat at Emma, stopping her in her tracks. Then there had been a last-minute flap because Matthew threw up over his clothes just as they were leaving the house. In the end they scuttled over the square like fractious children late for school. There was a sudden squall and Emma tucked the baby under her coat to protect him from the rain. She realized it made her look pregnant again. A group of reporters who were standing, smoking outside the church, ran for their cars.

The first hymn had already begun and they followed the vicar and the three old ladies who made up the choir up the aisle, forming an undignified tail to an already shambling procession. Mary moved up to let them into their usual places near the front. Emma tripped over the fat patchwork bag that her mother always carried and which had been left on the floor.

Only after she’d knelt for a moment of breath-catching, which passed as prayer, and was on her feet to sing the last verse, did she notice that the church was busier than normal. The pews were usually only this full for a baptism, when, as her father scathingly put it, ‘the pagans’ were in. But today there was no baptism and, besides, most of the faces were familiar. It was not that the church was full of strangers, rather, it seemed everyone had made the effort to turn out. In Elvet bad news always generated excitement. If Jeanie Long’s suicide could be considered bad news.

The arthritic organist was coming to a close with a trembling chord when the door opened again. The wind must have got behind it because it closed with a bang and the congregation turned in disapproval. Dan Greenwood was standing at the back of the church next to a large, formidably ugly woman. Although Emma felt the usual thrill of excitement at his presence, she was disappointed to find Dan there. She had never seen him in church and thought he despised it. He’d made no concession in his dress, however, and was still wearing the jeans and smock from the night before. The woman was in a shapeless Crimplene dress covered with small purple flowers and a fluffy purple cardigan. Despite the cold, on her feet she wore flat leather sandals. There was something portentous about the way they stood there and for a moment Emma expected an announcement, a demand that the church be cleared because of a fire in the vicinity or a bomb threat. Even the vicar hesitated for a moment and looked at them.

The woman, however, seemed perfectly composed, even to be enjoying the attention. She took Dan by the arm and pulled him into a seat. The familiarity of the gesture disturbed Emma. What was her relationship with him? She was too young to be a mother, not ten years older than he was. But her ugliness surely made it impossible that they could be romantically attached.

Emma had many insecurities but was always confident that she was physically attractive. She took it for granted that James would never have asked her to marry him if she’d been fat or had acne. During the remainder of the service Emma heard the woman’s voice above the others in the hymns and responses. It was clear and loud and quite out of tune.