The Crooked House (30 page)

Sarah
Rutherford hated weddings at the best of times, but it was apparent to her straight away that there was something more than usually fucked up about this one.

Not all the guests seemed to know it yet, but the staff certainly did. A panicked-looking waiter in a cheap tailcoat gestured to a marquee and Sarah was aware of people – a woman in a pastel suit hastily draining a glass, waitresses, an usher – falling back to either side as she strode through towards the hubbub from inside the marquee, Jennings behind her trying to keep up. Even if they hadn’t seen the patrol car, even without the uniform, people knew. Thing was, she didn’t know if she was bringing the bad news or if it was already here.

‘Lucy Carter,’ Ron Thwaites had said, stepping off the pub’s threshold towards them. ‘You know what? That Dr Carter’s an arsehole: just because he wouldn’t lower himself to come in here from one year to the next he thought we never knew? I saw him, at the sailing club one time, watching those little girls on the beach. His daughters. Very pleased with himself, he looked,
like it made him quite the man even if he wouldn’t give them the time of day, even though she’d followed him here with the whole family in tow. Kate Grace. Thought he could get away with it, he thought the little wife’d do what he told her to.’ He spat, with feeling, a gobbet landing on the concrete. ‘But she’s a piece of work all right. Some couples deserve each other.’ And again, uneasy now, ‘None of our business.’

She’d be here.

Inside the marquee half the tables were seated: Sarah heard a cork pop and a burst of uneasy laughter but at the back of the tent there was an ominous huddle of morning coats and hats beside a flap in the heavy nylon canvas. Right, thought Rutherford, scanning the room, top table, and there it was, a whiteboard beside it holding a seating plan. A long rectangle where all the other tables were round, it was empty save for the man who’d brought May home the day before, neat in pale grey, looking down at his mobile phone with apparent unconcern. The groom.

The noise changed again, a ripple of whispers moving round the room and dying away. Rutherford saw several things at once: she saw the groom quietly lay down his phone; she saw the crowded morning coats part and shift a little to reveal the bride’s father in their midst, Roger Carter, his sandy hair dishevelled and his mouth slack; she saw the bride, his daughter, in the far corner, towering bare-shouldered and staring as a woman beside her spoke into her ear, as the woman raised a finger and jabbed her bare shoulder to make her turn and listen. The woman wore a waitress’s uniform, she had straggly hair and a booze-reddened face, and Sarah Rutherford knew her straight away: Karen Marshall.

Back to Roger Carter, because where Carter was, his wife would be. But she wasn’t. Searching the faces Rutherford threaded between the tables, heads turning to watch her in her cheap suit that was shiny at the elbows, unhesitating. She
saw Carter quail, she saw him step backwards, an usher steadying him at the elbow.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Karen Marshall register her presence, saw her step away from the bride, and saw the bride’s hand move to stop her.

Lucy Carter. Inside Rutherford it set up, it started pumping, where is she, where is she, where is she.
Where is she?

She stopped suddenly and felt Jennings come up short behind her, his breath on her neck. ‘Can you see the girl?’ she said urgently. ‘Come on, come on. The girl. Where’s the girl?’ In the middle of the tables they turned, looking. ‘Esme Grace, or whatever she’s called. Alison. You see them on the way in? Her or the boyfriend?’ Jennings began to shake his head.

A flap opened in the back of the tent and a voice broke loose, a stifled scream from somewhere that rose above the uneasy murmuring, a clamour rising with it.

‘Why?’ she’d said to Ron Thwaites, all out of understanding. ‘You never said.’ Flat. ‘None of you spoke up. The Carters and the Graces could rot together.’

He’d stared back at her and sullenly his expression shifted, panic entering his eyes. ‘I never, I never thought …’ and he was choked, the barmaid stepping into the threshold behind him. ‘It wasn’t
her
?’ He’d jerked his head round and the surly girl had disappeared again. ‘Lucy Carter? I still thought it must have been John did it.’ His bloodshot eyes bulging with alarm. ‘I thought it was over and done. We all did. No one left.’

‘And what about the girl? What about Esme?’

‘What good would it have done her?’ he mumbled. ‘To know Lucy Carter pushed her dad over the edge? Fucking mess.’ But he went still, as though he’d remembered something else.

‘Out of sight, out of mind? We all thought she’d never come back, but she did. We thought it was done, but it wasn’t.’

In
the marquee people were standing up at the tables and all looking in the same direction. ‘There he is,’ Jennings began to say but something stopped him. She turned to where he was staring and saw a tall man, tall and spare with a high forehead, not Esme Grace’s boyfriend, this was someone she knew better than that. Bob Argent, standing tall with outstretched arms, burdened with a thing in sacking from which legs dangled from one end, paint-spattered trousers and a shoeless foot. Stiff colourless hair. Chatwin.

The whispers moved around the tables.
Hanged himself.

As they watched, Bob Argent turned slowly towards Roger Carter, the doctor, holding out his burden but Carter stepped back so fast he stumbled.

‘Ambulance,’ barked Sarah Rutherford without turning her head, but Jennings was already muttering into his walkie-talkie.

‘You think a woman could have done it?’ Ron Thwaites had said numbly. ‘You think she could have killed them all?’

‘Who else?’ she’d said, and the blood had drained from his pouchy face.

Where is she?

She heard the ambulance again from where she crouched, on the landing in the dark.

She’d dreamed it so long, the house had metamorphosed in the dark behind its boarded windows. Climbing through the narrow window on the first-floor landing Alison smelled the change, latrine and damp, mould spores with something other underneath, something fishy. Bare feet first in the dark she slithered in a litter of magazines splayed across the damp carpet. She was next to the twins’ room: she couldn’t turn her head in case anything was left. Their soft hair, their bath-warm skin. She squatted with her back to their door among the torn pages and looked down in the narrow shaft of light from the broken window she’d climbed through. More dirty magazines.

Stealthily
the house was taking shape again around her in a grey darkness, the fogged outlines of things broken and sagging and abandoned. The splintered banister, the stairs she’d sat on with them in her arms; the door, out of sight, into the sitting room where Joe had sat, legs apart, headphones holding what was left of his skull together. Up. Up. She crawled to the stairs and as she climbed, on hands and knees, she felt a draught follow her, cold poking through the house’s cracks and openings.

There must be other places to get in. The village children would have found them, they would have covered their traces as she and the twins and Joe might have done, clambering in and out, whispering, agile. Carefully replacing board or corrugated iron, heaping leaves and rubble. At the top of the next flight of stairs she stood, on shaky legs.

The ceilings were lower on the second floor. Bathroom; Joe’s room. She set her cheek against the doorframe, she let the door move a crack under the weight of her body. The shape of a bed in there, the tatters of a poster hanging from the wall and as she registered the tiny sound the door made as it moved she realised the siren had stopped.

It had been an ambulance siren; she recognised the sound as she felt the wood against her cheek, the years were gone and she was back there crouching frozen against the rotted jetty. An ambulance, only this time it had stopped far off and she visualised the village ranged above her, impossibly distant.
Make all the noise you like.

Lucy Carter had said she’d heard the shots from her patio, she said they all heard the shots together, her and Morgan and Paul, but it wasn’t true.

A woman. A woman had killed them. A woman who’d given birth to a child of her own, both of them monsters. How did that happen? Alison stared up the attic stairs into the darkness. Lucy Carter, as Esme lay face down on her bed and waited,
the doctor’s fragile wife in the house below her, moving from room to room, struggling with Dad in the yard, his glasses falling. She tried to make it fit.

Alison looked down to the landing below and saw the gleam of the spread magazines: she listened. Something shifted and breathed, she wasn’t sure if it was inside or out: there it was again, a sigh; a rustle. The wind. It circled the house, rocked it, testing its strength. She looked up. The last flight of stairs waited for her, they only led to one room, her room, under the roof. She could hear the slates lifting as she climbed. The banister Dad had built felt flimsy under her hand. She was going back up, back inside, nowhere else to go. End of the line.

A slate fell below her, a slither and sharp crash at the back of the house into the rubble of the yard and then distinctly she heard a swear-word, softly spoken. She scrabbled backwards, shuffling on her backside into the attic space, into the corner, behind the door.

The room. Her room. There was more light up here, the boarding at the casement under the eaves had half fallen away but no one had bothered to replace it. Her heart swelled to fill her chest as the familiar space enfolded her, so intimate, so terrifying, every corner, every angle laid down in her head, and she crouched, tight and tighter.

No.

She didn’t know where the whisper came from, she squeezed her eyes shut.
Look. It’s coming
.

It came from inside her. It said,
Look
.

And then she was up, unsteady, and down the years she heard it.
BOOM
. On her raw feet, crossing to the window, raising herself to look down. She was on tiptoe trying to see and then it came. Not whispering or laughing this time, not the pleading or begging that had clamoured to be heard in the dark.

A
grunt. A crash.

From the front of the house this time. In two places at once.

She had heard someone at the back. Lucy Carter, dislodging a slate, trying to climb? Now someone was at the front, but the sound was wrong, it was too loud. Too big.

It was huge, it enfolded the house with her inside, the sound that came with the darkness, not human. She curled herself, her face pressed between her knees, and then at last she remembered those human sounds, or fractions of them, that had come to her, up the stairs, through the timbers. The scream that was stifled in a soft small mouth, Joe’s exhalation of disbelief as he raised his head to look, a high heel skittering, a gasp, a thud. Begging.
Don’t
. At her back she felt the vibrations coming up through the house along with the inhuman thing that was battering to get in, now.

Now.

It splintered and crashed and pounded. It wouldn’t stop.

Her father’s voice, deep, slurred, a crash as he fell against the wall, not believing.
BOOM
.

It stopped.

Wait. Hide. Wait. Behind the door and wait for it to come.

But then Alison wasn’t hiding. She was half crawling out of the horrible dust and clutter of her dead bedroom, she was on her feet. She was on the narrow staircase, the banister gave under her hand and she was sliding, falling, she landed, staggered: she stayed up. Across the landing. She was running towards it. Fight.

What had Lucy Carter hit Bray with? What was she using to batter the front door downstairs now? I can fight, thought Alison, not knowing if it was true. I’m younger, I’m strong.
Where are you?

‘Where are you?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, she felt the stair carpet loose under her bare feet as she skidded down, she saw the light where the rotted front door sagged inwards, now
swinging on broken hinges. A grey light that flooded the hall exposed the fur of dust and wallpaper stripped and peeling, the filthy kitchen floor where her mother had lain and she stumbled and fell, into the arms that were waiting to hold her.

My darling.

He
wasn’t dead.

Jennings was leaning over Simon Chatwin and administering CPR. Having set down his burden Bob Argent was standing silently with his arms folded, his back to the outside of the marquee. Most of the guests had found their way out through the flap like sheep and had formed a half circle around Jennings and the man lying prone under him on the grass, his head fallen back and his neck raw. The rope was still around it, blue nylon, frayed, a textbook noose. You could trust this lot to tie a knot, at least, thought Sarah Rutherford grimly. They could hear the ambulance coming, at the end of the lane.

‘Where’s Mother?’ Rutherford turned at the sound of Morgan Carter’s savage whisper and saw the doctor’s glazed eyes, saw him shake his head dumbly, the flesh slack under his chin. The wedding veil stood stiff off the back of the bride’s head, just mad fancy dress with that face under it.

From his place behind Sarah, Bob Argent spoke. His eyes held steady on Morgan: Rutherford saw her avoid his gaze.

‘Mother of the bride?’ he said. ‘She were watching him
string himself up.’ He looked down at Chatwin then back at Morgan. ‘Talking to herself.’ He almost smiled. ‘Pissed.’

‘You were watching him too,’ said Rutherford, feeling sick.

‘I cut him down, din’t I?’ said Argent. ‘Enough’s enough.’

At the far side of the house the ambulance gave a final loud whoop and Jennings sat back a moment on his heels, gasping. On the grass Chatwin’s head moved, from side to side; his eyes were opaque.

‘Where’d she go?’ said Sarah Rutherford and she saw Morgan Carter and her father turn to her together. ‘And the girl?’ she said, taking a step towards them. ‘Esme Grace?’

The doctor shifted at the name, unsteady on the grass, and he put out a hand towards his daughter; Morgan looked down at it as if she didn’t know what it was. ‘Paul …’ said Morgan Carter, looking around the faces. ‘I need Paul.’

And then there was a commotion inside the tent and two fluorescent-vested paramedics pushed their way through the opening with holdalls and were kneeling on the grass to either side of Chatwin. Karen Marshall in her black apron had come out of the tent behind them and was standing to one side. Moving closer Sarah smelled cigarettes on her, and would have killed for one.

‘She went off down after the girl,’ Bob Argent answered Sarah’s question, and he stepped into their circle, uninvited: Sarah next to Karen Marshall, the Carters reluctantly completing it, Jennings on the outside, looking down at the paramedics, who were putting a mask over Chatwin’s face.

‘Down the field,’ said the bargemaster. ‘Girl was running.’ He lifted his head, admiring. ‘No shoes nor nothing. Looked just like her mother, I said.’ He looked at Roger Carter. ‘Nice-looking woman,’ he said.

Sarah saw Morgan Carter’s hand fasten tight on her father’s forearm. Esme Grace and Lucy Carter: one young, barefoot, fast on her feet; the other drunk. Crazy. She shot a glance
between the Carters at Jennings, jerked her head to summon him. Slowly he got to his feet.

‘Your wife picked John Grace up in her car the night he shot his family,’ she stated. Clarified. ‘The night he is
believed
to have shot his family.’

‘She never … I didn’t … I knew nothing about it,’ Roger Carter said, his mouth moving oddly. Morgan Carter’s knuckles were white on the hand around his wrist, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop him babbling. ‘Paul said I should tell you,’ he went on. ‘About Bray, the headscarf, about the girl, Lucy wore the scarf, I … I … had no idea. She has these moments, it’s her age. Time of life, that’s what I thought, women—’ He broke off: his daughter was staring at him blank with fury, a child used to getting her own way. ‘Mud on the carpet in the morning is all I knew. Morning after Bray died. Mud on the carpet and a bottle of my best malt missing. That’s all.’

Sarah Rutherford disregarded what she didn’t understand. ‘What time did your wife get home the night of the shootings?’ she said, and his mouth went slack. He began to mumble but Morgan Carter had stepped forward, shouldering him out of view.

‘You are very well aware that you can’t ask him these things here,’ she said, chin up. ‘Under these circumstances. This is in contravention—’

‘Lucy was on the patio when I got back from the patient,’ said Roger Carter from behind her shoulder. ‘I can say that, can’t I? She’d been drinking.’ His daughter turned her face away but Sarah heard her make a sound in her throat.

Sarah felt Jennings step up at her shoulder, waiting. ‘I shall need to take you in for questioning,’ she began, but felt the form of words get away from her, the first time in twenty years that had happened. Karen Marshall had moved inwards: the circle tightened.

‘You was at the Plough with him,’ Marshall said in her
smoke-rough voice, looking at Morgan Carter. ‘That night, I knew I’d seen him before. I couldn’t make sense of it, back for her wedding with the other one.’ She turned to Rutherford. ‘You know they was an item, them two? The one staying with Esme Grace at the Queen’s now. Him.’

‘She means Paul,’ said Roger Carter helpfully, instantly paling under the look Morgan gave him. Karen Marshall didn’t look at him, only at his daughter.

‘You was with him at the Plough eating the night John Grace done it.’

Morgan Carter’s jaw was clenched. ‘Were we?’ she said stiffly. ‘I don’t remember.’

The paramedics were lifting Chatwin on to a stretcher: they’d fitted him with a neck brace and an oxygen mask covered his face. The circle shifted and compressed to allow them by and behind them the guests murmured, pretending sympathy.

‘Why would he come here to top himself?’

It was Jennings. Sarah saw Karen Marshall exchange a look with Argent, a flat, dead, weary look, a smile on both their faces that said,
if you need to ask
. Sarah just lifted a hand to gesture at all of it, the marquee, the big brash house rising behind it, the gilt chairs.

‘Some people get away with it,’ she said. ‘Other people never do.’

‘Get away with murder,’ said Bob Argent, and she turned to him.

‘You followed Chatwin up here,’ she said. ‘Did you know what he was planning?’ The man regarded her, quite expressionless – there was no point asking him if he felt guilty. Not now, not ever: there were men like that. ‘It was you left him for dead out there on the marsh the night of the shootings.’

‘Chatwin said that?’ Argent only raised an eyebrow. The stretcher was disappearing inside the tent, a sudden gust of
wind behind it pelting them all with rain. The guests eddied and formed a new shape, following the paramedics back inside.

Without being asked Jennings had moved closer to Morgan Carter. She had her father by the elbow and was trying to edge him out of the circle but he just stood there, stubbornly immobile. His expression was vacant. Sarah had the flicker of a thought about Jennings: maybe the boy knows what he’s doing, after all.

She shook her head. ‘Of course he didn’t. True though, isn’t it?’ The smile settled on the bargeman’s face. ‘Hear anything while you were out there on the marsh?’

‘You got a call,’ said Karen Marshall suddenly. Morgan Carter didn’t look, didn’t speak, but they all turned towards her. ‘You hadn’t finished your meal and a call came for you. You paid up and you left, you and him, there and then, desserts coming out of the kitchen already but he put cash right down and left ’em. It
were
him, weren’t it?’

Again her eyes rested, just a moment, on Bob Argent’s face – a mild look now, peaceful, exchanged between them. ‘Bartlett, booked in at the Queen’s as Paul Bartlett, and the Plough too, same name. All them years ago. That very night.’ Not looking at Morgan any more, nor Argent, Karen Marshall was looking at Sarah. ‘Funny thing him going with that little girl now, don’t you think? The Grace girl.’

Morgan stumbled backwards, a sudden jerky movement and Bob Argent’s hand shot out to grip her. She pulled away, but he held on.

Karen Marshall was patting her apron down, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and put one in her mouth while Roger Carter moved in half-remembered protest. She bent her body to light it.

‘I remember thinking, he’s one of them,’ she said, straightening, blowing smoke back. ‘All that time back but it sticks. Some people stick. One of those, likes sorting out the little
woman,’ she said. ‘He had a look in his eye, marching her out. Gets off on it, I thought.’

‘Who was on the phone?’ Sarah spoke quietly.

Karen Marshall tipped her head back, blew the smoke straight up. ‘A woman, hysterical. It was her took the call,’ nodding to Morgan, ‘then she says to him across the room, I can’t talk to her, and he goes over. Him being the big man and her gazing up at him. “We’ll deal with it, Lucy,” he says, all sweet and lovey-dovey like.’ She spoke scornfully. ‘Then he hangs up and next thing we know they’re off.’

‘Where did you go?’ said Sarah Rutherford and then they all turned to her but none of them seemed to have actually heard, Morgan paler than her dress. Only Argent spoke, and he wasn’t answering her question.

‘Do you know, I did see something,’ he said, and his voice was soft, no more than ruminative. ‘I’d been out there, just an evening walk, you know.’ He gave Sarah a humorous look, as if to say, all harmless fun. ‘I’d come in off the barge. It was a cold night, I went for a nightcap to warm myself up, Ron’ll tell you. He said John Grace’d been in earlier, ’s a matter of fact, it was all they was talking about, the state he’d been in. Anyway, I walked up a ways, just clearing my head, into the village then I passed the lane, you know, down by where they’ve just built the new houses now.’ Argent paused and they all gazed, silenced by the length of his speech. ‘I heard it.’

‘Heard it?’

‘Gunshots,’ he said, light and musing. ‘Who shoots at night? Even ducks is early morning. Funny, though, the whole village must’ve heard it but we never done nothing, not a one of us. Shots is what I heard, and I could tell where it was coming from.’ Sarah made herself wait, holding her breath. ‘So I stopped, end of Swains Lane and there was a car parked up there, almost missed it, parked like it was trying to keep out of sight, half in the hedge.’ Karen Marshall stood intent, one elbow tucked
in at her side. ‘Closest you can get in a car to the old Grace house, I reckon. Never liked that house. Why’n’t they bulldoze it after?’ He looked around, but no one had an answer.

So he went on. ‘There was a girl sitting in the car, see,’ he said. ‘Woman.’ He looked down almost in surprise to see that he was still holding on to Morgan Carter’s pale arm, goose-pimpled in the cool blue air. ‘It was her,’ he said and she looked back up at him, mesmerised, almost besotted. ‘Who was you waiting for?’

‘Paul,’ said Morgan, her head held high but turning, right and left. ‘I need Paul.’