The Crooked House (17 page)

‘Yes, please,’ said Alison obediently.

‘Drink up,’ said Morgan. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’ And she disappeared through a door without waiting for an answer. Alison glimpsed shoes ranked up to the ceiling beyond her, coloured leather, tall heels, the edge of a hanging rail. Sod it, she thought, and drank.

The dress was a column of raw, white, heavy fabric. Morgan hung it from the four-poster and it dominated the flounced room straight away, not floating or ghostly but statuesque, as if it already had a body inside it. It was discreetly laced down the back but otherwise quite plain. Alison touched it, then coming closer she saw tiny stitches, made by hand; she felt the weight of it, she imagined Morgan’s strong shoulders rising up out of the column.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, and she supposed it was, though for a moment it seemed like a kind of expensive straitjacket, with the lacing and the rough dull silk.

‘Twenty grand,’ said Morgan carelessly, taking Alison’s glass and turning to refill it.

‘No,’ said Alison, too quickly, before softening it. ‘No thanks.’

Morgan stopped pouring but she gave the glass back to Alison, half full. ‘I always get what I want, you see,’ she said, smiling, leaning back against the wall beside her doll’s house. ‘Christian insisted. Has to be the best.’ And then without drawing breath, tilting her head. ‘He’d come back in a heartbeat, you know.’

Paul.

The glass trembled in Alison’s hand, what she’d already drunk pushing her to be reckless. She stayed silent.

Morgan examined her. ‘I suppose he has some idea of … I don’t know. Moulding you? That might be fun for him. For a bit. Curiosity value, a little tiny challenge.’

Hostilities
were laid out, unmistakable. My enemy. Alison found herself holding her breath at the nakedness of the attack, looking around for witnesses. Lucy Carter, in her dressing gown? She’d just smile and pretend she hadn’t heard.

‘A challenge,’ Alison repeated, feeling the stiffness of her smile but keeping it there. Pretend it’s a joke. ‘Maybe.’

You’re the first one that’s meant anything.
She said nothing.

‘He always liked one to put up resistance,’ said Morgan. ‘Have you found that?’ She shifted her hip and the doll’s house quivered. In its kitchen a figure fell, bringing a tiny clatter of miniature implements with it.

‘What about Christian?’ said Alison, finding some small space for manoeuvre with the sound. ‘They’re off on some stag thing this afternoon, Paul said. They seem to get along so well.’

The ghost of annoyance passed over Morgan’s face. ‘Christian does what he’s told,’ she said shortly.

As if on cue there was the sound of a heavy door closing downstairs, followed by voices raised in hearty conversation, getting louder. Men’s voices, in the big baronial hall below them.

‘Is that Paul?’ said Alison, starting up from the bed. Morgan shook her head, too quickly.

‘This has been nice,’ she said, not even pretending to sound sincere. ‘But I think I’d better get dressed.’

Alison set her glass down. ‘I’ll get going,’ she said, but Morgan had already turned away, fabric floating behind her.

Christian was in the hall as she came down the stairs, and he looked up at her, his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a T-shirt, trainers; he looked different, not bland at all.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, frowning, as she reached the bottom, and she was startled by his concern.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. Christian set a hand on the banister, drawing closer. He hadn’t shaved – Alison hadn’t noticed that in the hotel’s dining room this morning, but then she’d been distracted.

‘She
likes to wind people up, you know,’ he said, and she heard his odd accent come out stronger. ‘Only happy when she’s making trouble. Pay no attention.’

Alison laughed awkwardly. ‘I don’t think you’re allowed up there,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to catch sight of the wedding dress.’

He smiled, his grey eyes cool on her. ‘I wouldn’t dream of dropping that kind of money on something I hadn’t seen,’ he said.

So he’d paid for the dress. And neither of them believed in bad luck.

As she came out through the front door Roger Carter was standing on the drive, chest puffed, hectoring a man with the marquee company’s logo on his overalls. She was pulling her scarf back over her ears as he turned to eye her, in mid-rant. She raised a hand and smiled but kept walking, and he watched her go. She felt his eyes still on her back as she turned out into the lane and smelled the hedgerows in the sun, saw the cow parsley dancing along the verge. What had she seen in his face?

She came around a bend in the lane and saw the sea, the wide channel snaking olive-green out to the horizon and the big dark sails, gliding across each other’s paths as they made their slow way across it.

Roger Carter might have had trouble with her name at first, but there was something about her he recognised. She wondered how long it would take him.

Gina’s
daughter danced between the mooring ropes on the quay. She looked down, intent on her own small clever feet, hair tangled down her back.

From the pub’s backyard Alison heard the girl’s breathing as she skipped, heard her count her steps. May was nine. Not far off the twins’ age when they died, not far off Esme’s when she saw the crooked house for the first time. When they unloaded all their belongings and smelled the mud and the strangeness of their new home, hoping to start again.

Joe had been the older by so little, but already he’d known so much more. His face had been pale and watchful climbing out of the car. He’d looked from Mum to Dad, checking for something, as they stood and looked at their new home. Following suit, Esme had seen only tiredness. When the last bag was set down inside the hall and Dad put his arm around their mother’s shoulders, narrow over the big belly, Joe had turned away.

They’d found their rooms, Joe slinging his bag down in the gloom, the two of them alone together. He’d put his arms around his sister. Joe had known.

Even
as she had the thought Alison saw May’s head fly up, saw her look around, monitoring her surroundings, seeking her mother, eyes skating over the empty tables. The younger one is protected, but May had no older sibling to hide the truth from her, to allow her to think she was safe. She had Gina, though.

Gina came out of the pub’s back door with two pints of lager in her hands and an unlit cigarette in her mouth. Straight away Alison had said, I’ll get them, but Gina had given her that look. Alison had known she was at the pub when she called from the lane, something unmistakeable about the too-loud voices in the background. She wondered if Chatwin was still there.

Two o’clock: Paul would be on his way to the golf course with Christian. Alison eyed the lager, grimaced. Lighting her cigarette, Gina laughed. ‘You’ve been away too long,’ she said.

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ said Alison. Gina looked away, her eyes narrowed. In the lee of the building, the tables were still damp from last night’s dew. The backyard was filling up: a couple in anoraks were on the next table, watching the boats through binoculars.

‘Stephen Bray was the last one to see my dad,’ Alison said. ‘That night.’

Gina tilted her head, looking at her through the smoke. ‘Was he?’

‘As far as they know,’ she said. ‘And now he’s dead. You knew that, right?’

Gina threw her head back, blew smoke straight up, brought her chin down again. ‘I knew he was dead,’ she said carelessly, stubbing out the fag and taking a long drink from the tall glass. ‘He was old. He was a pisshead.’ She shrugged, but her free hand on the table jittered a moment, and Alison shifted her ground.

‘You said there was something you hadn’t told me,’ Alison said. ‘On the phone.’

Gina
stared her down, mulish. ‘You said you already knew,’ she countered. She leaned forward and Alison smelled smoke on her. ‘You said you couldn’t talk,’ she went on. ‘That boyfriend of yours. He doesn’t know, does he? He doesn’t know who you are.’

She pushed the big glass over towards Alison, moisture beaded down its sides. The champagne had gone from her system, leaving the nagging beginnings of a headache, and a small, horrible emptiness. A hundred yards away at the water’s edge May had stopped and she stood watching them. Alison lifted the glass to her lips, and something inside her came loose.

‘My mother had an affair,’ she said. ‘They moved here to get away from it. But Mum did it again.’
Bitch
. ‘Another man, someone here.’ Gina was sitting back against the wall, relaxed, her hand out on the table and her green-brown eyes shining gold in the reflection off the water, lager eyes. ‘My dad had just found out the twins weren’t his.’

Joe knew.
She suddenly felt sure of it. Joe had known something about Mum, and he’d been angry that Simon Chatwin had kissed Esme, but as she held those two certainties in suspension they seemed to move together, they bumped softly. A connection.

Gina sat up a little. ‘Never,’ she said, but her disbelief was detached, almost dreamy, and she lifted her glass. Alison put out a hand to stop her.

‘Was it Simon?’ she said. Gina frowned. She tugged her hand with the glass in it out of Alison’s and the liquid slopped.

‘You what?’ Her voice was sharp.

‘Simon. Having an affair with my mother. I came home and he was in our backyard. More than once. The time he kissed me, I thought he was waiting for me …’ That distance that had opened up between Esme and her mother had a shape now.

Gina was scrabbling for her cigarette pack on the table. May
was standing on the edge of the pub’s yard now, scuffing a foot, not coming any closer. The anoraked couple were watching her, disapproving. Behind them the back door to the pub opened and someone stood there.

‘Simon wasn’t interested in your mum,’ said Gina, contemptuous, squinting round a cigarette. She lit up.

‘She was in the kitchen in heels then. And later. The night she died, heels and her best skirt.’ She frowned, remembering the glasses on the draining board. ‘She … she might have been drinking with someone. I told you.’

Gina blew the smoke out. ‘She might have been interested in him, all right.’ She gave Alison a hard look. ‘He can lay it on when he wants to, or back then he could, anyway.’

‘Are you jealous?’ said Alison. ‘After all this time?’

But Gina didn’t rise to it, she just laid her hand on the table, the smoke drifting up in the blue air.

‘She wasn’t his type,’ she said flatly, and as Alison watched she gave a little nod in May’s direction. Not needing more encouragement the girl skipped towards them between the tables. Gina raised the arm with the cigarette and May was under it.

‘Morgan Carter says she saw my dad fighting with the man whose baby died,’ she said. ‘Do you remember that?’

‘Your dad was an arsehole, welcome to the club,’ said Gina. Under her arm May squirmed, looking up at whoever was standing in the pub’s back door.

Alison turned to see.

‘Hello, Esme,’ said Danny Watts.

The night Joshua Watts dies. November.

They’re sitting by the fire when the telephone rings. Dad’s been fidgety all evening after the second hospital visit, looking
up from his paper to the bottles on the sideboard every five minutes, and Esme knows he’s making the same calculation each time, the half-inch of cooking brandy, the old vermouth, the Campari there was nothing to mix with. In and out of the kitchen, cups of tea he leaves to go cold. The twins are on the rug playing Monopoly as the fire smoulders, the logs are wet as usual and Dad just pokes it distractedly; it collapses white into ash.

In the hall the phone rings and the girls jump up from Monopoly and run to answer it, squabbling. Letty gets there first, frowning into the receiver, her face falling, holding it up through the doorway to someone else, to Dad, to Esme, back to Dad.

‘It’s Joe,’ she says. ‘He sounds funny.’

Dad takes it from her, his face set. ‘All right,’ he says into the receiver, Letty skirting round him back into the room. ‘How much have you had? All right. All right. Where are you then? Mum’ll come for you.’

That’s when Esme knows Dad’s got a stash somewhere else. He won’t get in the car if he’s had a drink. In and out of the kitchen; it must be in there, in the back of a cupboard, under the sink, somewhere Mum won’t find it. He’s been in the yard.

Dad comes back into the room, talking to himself. Esme is on her knees with the girls tidying the Monopoly. They don’t look up.

She
stood on the edge of the water with them.
Esme
. It was on the tip of her tongue to say to him,
It’s Alison now
, but she just looked up into his face and nodded.

‘Hello, Danny.’ They stood shoulder to shoulder on the pub’s back step looking down on her, not boys any more, close-up. Men. Nearly thirty: life was taking them. ‘Hello, Martin.’

Gina had jumped up and drained her pint at one go, May still nestled in her armpit. She nodded warily to the brothers, all three, it seemed to Alison, careful not to start anything – and she was gone, tugging the girl after her.

The two men stared at Alison; she couldn’t see if they were friendly or hostile. She tolerated it. She felt something circle the three of them, binding. They had violence in common, they had the dead, who refused to go away. She pulled off her scarf.

‘You cut your hair,’ said Danny. She shrugged, standing up. They walked to the water’s edge, Alison in the lead, wanting to get away from the anoraked couple.

They flanked her in silence. Then Martin spoke, and it took her
a moment to realise he was answering the question she’d asked Gina. ‘Frank Marshall had a go at your dad because he’d done some work in the house before the fire,’ he said. ‘Was that what you wanted to know? He thought he’d put a nail through some wiring. But Frank must have known it was his own fault all along. He topped himself, after all.’ His voice was rough – she didn’t know if he was trying to comfort her.

Danny made a sound, raising his shoulders, shoving his hands down in his pockets. ‘Why did you come back?’ he said.

‘I had to,’ Alison said, because the wedding seemed meaningless now, the resistance she’d put up. How could she have ever thought she could stay away? Live out a whole life without coming back? Whatever happened, she’d had to come.

‘How’s your dad?’ It was Danny, looking at her from under dark brows. The question almost felled her.

‘He’s a vegetable,’ she said, unable to use a kinder word. ‘I’ve only seen him once. Since … since.’ Martin nodded; Danny looked away. Of course, she thought, they knew, that picture in the paper. Alison sensed that they felt sorry for her, and the feeling brought something up, dangerously close to the surface. She could break down, after all this time, in front of these boys who knew her whole story, she could ask for help. Forgiveness.

‘How’s your mother?’ she said, polite. ‘I saw her in the church.’ She hesitated. ‘She knew Stephen Bray, didn’t she? The old man that died.’

‘She never got over it,’ said Martin bluntly, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the old man. ‘Looking after the old bastard was a distraction. She got obsessed, fussing over him. She never got over Joshua.’ And they hadn’t got over it either. Were they married, attached, had they even left the village, since? She had only seen them together.

‘Did they ever find it?’ said Alison, and they both turned to look at her, a pincer movement. She blundered on. ‘Find
the car? The driver, the hit-and-run?’ A quick shake of Martin’s head that meant, shut up. Danny turned to look back out to sea.

‘No,’ he said.

And then they were all looking out towards the horizon because all at once it looked as though the big dark sails were on top of each other off the spit beyond the power station and somewhere out there a horn blared. A smaller motor boat bobbed in the mouth of the estuary, a tiny figure holding up a flag off the bow.

‘Warning,’ said Danny, and the brothers exchanged a look across her.

‘You know who that’ll be,’ said Martin. ‘Likes cutting it close.’

‘Who?’ said Alison. They stood either side of her like guards.

‘It’s the
Lady Maud
,’ said Martin, and with the name that day came back, the heavy skies, the hot humid air and the brown water. The small crowd on the quay, the letters etched blue along the big boat’s bow as it came on, the sunburned figure on his board tipping and going under. Down under the brown water.

‘Isn’t that …’ she said. ‘Isn’t that the one …’ They turned, waiting for her. ‘The one that ran Simon Chatwin down?’

‘Bob Argent,’ said Martin grimly. ‘The
Lady Maud
’s master is Bob Argent. God, remember that? Chatwin must have needed his head examining.’ Alison stared from Martin’s face out to sea where the sails had disentangled, the big shapes moving slowly apart, regrouping like pack animals.

‘It wasn’t an accident?’ she said.

Danny laughed shortly. ‘Bob Argent does nothing by mistake,’ he said. ‘He wanted to teach the bloke a lesson. Chatwin went after the wrong girl that time.’

The last of the magic ebbed from that kiss in the backyard. ‘What d’you mean?’ she said, but it was obvious.

‘He’d
been after Bob’s daughter,’ said Danny, and his voice was cold.

‘And if he’d died?’ She remembered Bob Argent’s face now, unruffled at the commotion on the quay, people rushing to the edge to look down. A tall lean man, the polished gleam of a high forehead, his hand resting on the wheel.

Martin Watts shrugged. ‘Who’d have cried over Simon Chatwin?’ he said, dismissive. ‘I suppose Bob’d have had to answer some questions. But the police are so fucking dumb round here.’

He turned away so she couldn’t see his face but there was a ragged edge to his voice. She pictured Sarah Rutherford sitting at a table with these two, getting nowhere. Stonewalled.

‘Are you staying?’ said Danny, his eyes on his brother’s back. Martin’s hands were in his pockets and he was looking at the pub.

‘Me?’ said Alison. His gaze shifted to her and for a second something like a smile was there – then it was gone.

‘You,’ he said. ‘Staying for the prizes, in the pub. Tonight.’

Alison nodded yes, uncertain, but in that moment only wanting to comply, and watched as he felt in his pockets. He brought out a pen. He took her hand, turned it, and before she could be surprised he wrote a number on her palm. She felt calluses on his fingers, hard skin. He raised his eyes to check on Martin’s back again.

‘They’ll all be in,’ he said, straightening. ‘Even Bob Argent comes to the prizes. If you’re interested.’ He let her hand go. ‘His daughter’s training to be a doctor, I heard.’ Alison searched his face for the smile, wanting to see it again, but he was impassive. She thought of him pinning Joshua’s arms back as he went for Joe and she had lain in the dunes in the warm dark and covered her ears. She held her palm up to her face, adjusted her glasses to look at the number. ‘If you need anything,’ he said, and stepped across her to go.

She
touched him quickly as he went and he turned immediately. She pulled her hand back. ‘I’m not Esme any more,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. ‘You can’t call me that.’ His eyes met hers and then he was gone, but she’d seen it, a sad smile that said, perhaps this is where you belong, after all.

There was nowhere to hide out on the marsh. Every human figure on the flat grey landscape stood out. There might, Alison supposed, watching another family group further out, walking along the dyke towards the crooked house, be safety in numbers, but she was on her own.

The scarf, it occurred to her too late, served in this situation as the opposite of a disguise. By now to everyone in the village she must be the girl in the scarf, but then there’d always been more to it than hiding. She put both hands up to the silk, she pulled a corner across to search it for that smell, she breathed in. There was nothing left of her mother in it, it smelled of a stranger.

She had arrived back at Simon Chatwin’s boat, only this time she was alone.

The afternoon was wearing on: it was almost four o’clock now. The sun was halfway to the horizon, the low yellow light was warm but the wind kept up steadily, the big boats getting closer in. The buoy that marked the last leg bobbed in the glitter of waves, waiting for them.

Simon Chatwin had picked the wrong girl. Her mother hadn’t been his type – but there she’d been, waiting for him in heels, not once but twice. Did Dad catch them?

Alison looked at the boat’s filthy sides and cluttered deck. She focused on the flimsy chipboard that served to secure the cabin and, wondering briefly what had happened to the original doors, she looked from left to right before stepping across, from the soft treacherous mud to the slimed shambles of a deck. She crouched, edged crabwise. He would be working at the hotel, she told herself.

She
jumped as in her pocket her phone rang. On her hand as she took it out she saw the number Danny had written.

It was Paul. ‘Where have you got to this time?’ His voice was even, reasonable, but he was angry. Something in his tone made it hard for her to catch her breath.

‘You’re back already?’ she said, shifting so she was propped against Simon Chatwin’s cabin top. She drew her knees up to her chin, hoping to make herself invisible. ‘How was the golf?’

‘Morgan said you left hours ago,’ he said levelly.

‘Don’t you think sometimes Morgan’s not very nice?’ Alison said, before she could stop herself. She heard an intake of breath and went on quickly, ‘I’m trying to clear my head.’

‘Where are you?’ he said, and as she held her breath, not answering she heard his patience slip. A click: he’d gone.

Hurry. She looked across the marsh back inland. She saw the family on the sea wall, couples hand in hand on the hard, a man with binoculars standing on the end of the quay looking out to sea.

She edged around to the rear of the cabin, set her shoulder to the chipboard and suddenly, before she was ready, she was down there, in the dark. Inside.

The only other boat she’d been below in had been Stephen Bray’s, and more than once its smell had come back to her, paraffin and wood and raw alcohol, an oily clash with the sweet bad-egg whiff of the mud. This was different. She raised a forearm to her face, breathing through the cloth of her shirt. A stale, crusted combination of stagnant water, soiled clothes. Unwashed sheets. Something else. Something worse.

How had Esme imagined this boat, in the days, weeks after Simon Chatwin had kissed her? Standing in the pub’s backyard and looking across the mud, wondering what excuse she might make to walk out here, to step on to the deck, to knock at the cabin top. Rehearsing.
Hello
. A knot formed
in her gut, Esme at thirteen, stepping down into the dark. Into this.

Alison took the arm away from her face, looking around for light. Something swung beside the hatch and she took hold of it: an electric lantern. She felt around its base, found a switch and it brightened slowly, to a dull glare. She looked around. A wide bunk with tangled sheets, grey and sheeny in the flat light. A crusted sink opposite, mugs with mould puffed inside them, a grillpan tilted on a filthy hob, full of grease.

A stack of magazines sat beside the bed – at the sight of them she moved abruptly. She waded through clutter on the floor, kicked something and a gust of rubbish smell rose up. She felt the creeping horror of this man kissing her. She had to stop, her heart pounded, it did not slow. Dirty magazines. She leaned across the bed, her bare knee in the greasy sheets, she smelled but did not see a chemical toilet.

The magazines were old, dog-eared. Alison had no experience beyond a glance up at a petrol station’s top shelf but she knew there were worse things than this, worse than tits and spread legs. The torn pages, the curled-up corners, the signs of use were what tightened the knot inside her, but somewhere in there too, alongside the distaste, there was a spark of relief. Could have been worse, a small voice repeated in her head, only then something stopped it, stopped her too, where she knelt on his filthy bed, magazine in hand. She listened.

All around her, something was happening. Small creaks, a distinct shifting, something familiar about the sensation from long ago. She held very still with the stink in her nostrils. The creaks escalated, the boat groaned and bobbed and suddenly Alison was weightless, light-headed. She shoved the magazine back where it had lain, reverse-crawled off the bed into whatever was on the cabin floor, wading back to the busted chipboard and – no longer caring who she might find on the deck waiting for her – through it, gasping, into the air.

Around
her the tide was right up, lapping across the path. The boat had come afloat, that was all, the physical memory of it happening in Bray’s boat was what she’d felt below in the dark and now came the visual, that swelled in her throat and burned behind her eyes. Esme bracing her feet in panic as Stephen Bray’s liqueur glasses chinked and trembled, and her father laughing and taking hold of her hand to steady her.

That other night. Dad might have been as frightened as me that night, the thought came to her, astounding. She had lain crouched behind the door waiting for the next boom, until it never came. Downstairs her father had struggled with someone, with something. Her father had seen what she’d seen. Joe with his face half gone. The bloodied, weighted sleeping bag that held another man’s exterminated young. And Mum, face down, the mole on her calf, the high-heeled shoe skittered from her hand.
I’d do anything for her
. Had he stared, as she had stared? She raised her head and looked across the marsh.

Out along the winding path the figure of a man was coming her way, hunched into the wind, not looking up. Alison scrabbled around the deck out of his line of sight and splashed heedless into the water, her heart pounding. It was warm. Her sandals slid under her in the mud and as she crouched to take them off she knew he was coming, he was coming for her. Still bent, she shuffled as far as she could get from the boat before straightening – she knew already that she would have to pass him. She risked a glance up, searching for the white shape of a van parked along the quay, outside the pub, but could see nothing. The man moved slowly, hands in pockets, she ducked her head.

Danny Watts had been trying to tell her something about Simon Chatwin. Head down, watching her own bare feet pick their way through the rising water, she told herself, Trust no one. If Danny wants you to think a certain way, ask yourself why. She reached the main path. Her head still
lowered, she turned towards the mainland and she could feel him, up ahead.