The Crooked House (9 page)

Gina had a kid. She must have still been a kid herself when she got pregnant. Gina was unhappy: that much Alison knew, from how she’d sat on the bar stool last night and how she’d glared through the car window, just now. Their eyes had met, and in that moment the years evaporated, Gina might have been jeering from her bedroom door as Esme hurried down the stairs. ‘We’re supposed to be friends, remember?’ Gina had shouted after her. ‘Remember? Well, don’t come to me when you start freaking out.’ Had they got it out of her, had the nice policewoman been so nice when she talked to Gina, asked her why Esme hadn’t stayed after all, for the sleepover? Had it been boys? Had you been drinking?
What about drugs, you girls into drugs?

Gina wouldn’t have cracked: Gina wouldn’t have said a thing to the police, not a thing.

Gina.
It’s me.

Alison
sat in the car opposite the police station watching a man on the far kerb smoking. She saw him look up and down the street before going inside, head down, hands in his pockets. She could hardly go in and say,
She had a fringe, she had a big nose
: thirteen years on, who knew what she’d look like.

By the time they’d come for her down the track, in their emergency vehicles, Esme had no longer been able to move or speak, she had sealed herself over. Because if she didn’t the thing behind her in the house, the black horror in that house that lay over the bodies and fed, would gather and swell and come shrieking out through the door, the windows, the cracks. It would batten on her and she would be gone, the police would find only buttons and bones.

Sitting in the car now, looking at a head moving in one of the windows on the police station’s second floor but only seeing the grey line of that dawn horizon, Alison knew it was still there. It was out on the marsh, and it was waiting for her. She leaned down and rested her head on the steering wheel.

It had been the woman who’d talked at her through the
succeeding days who’d saved her, even if she had only been doing her job. The policewoman, turning to shush the younger male officer, lowering her voice when it needed to be lowered, carrying on talking, asking, not letting it go. Alison needed her name.

Hold on. She thought of Aunt Polly’s little cottage in Cornwall, and of official letters on the small table in her dark hall. Telephone calls, Polly’s hand over the mouthpiece waiting for Alison to run upstairs to her room and out of earshot. Alison got out her mobile, scrolled with her thumb through the names. She dialled.

‘Hello?’ The voice was rusty. Old.

‘Polly?’ There was a silence. ‘It’s me, Aunt Polly.’

‘Alison.’ She cleared her throat. ‘How lovely. To hear your voice.’ Heartbroken was how she sounded: for a moment Alison lost the thread.

‘Are you all right?’ she managed eventually. ‘Polly?’

‘Do you need something, Alison?’ And the old angry Polly was back.

‘I need a name.’ There was no point hedging. She didn’t say,
I know you went on talking to the police. I know there must have been things you kept from me. I know.
It was how Alison had wanted it, after all. Someone had to do it, to take Alison to the inquest, to hold her gaze in the cleared coroner’s courtroom while she recounted her evidence. Someone had had to shield her as she climbed into the black car afterwards and someone had to go on shielding her until she could walk away from it all on her own. Polly might not have had all the right skills but she had done her best. And she’d been all there was.

‘She was called Sarah Rutherford.’ The answer was immediate: Polly didn’t even need to think. But her voice was stiff and strange. ‘Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford. Why do you want to know? Now, I mean. After all this time?’ Panicky.

‘It’s
all right, Polly,’ said Alison. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid.’

Polly had always known when Alison was lying, and she probably knew now.

‘Where are you?’ she said, swift and afraid.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Alison. Then, ‘I’m at home.’ And it almost wasn’t a lie.

They put Alison in a room with no windows bar an internal one, high up. She had sat in the reception for a bit but then the desk officer had gone off and she’d heard a door bang and some voices and he’d reappeared and taken her further inside the police station.

Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford was at an incident but she was expected back in the station within the hour.

‘You want a coffee?’ The man who’d led Alison in there was no more than five years older than her, wearing a shirt and tie but the tie was loosened. She didn’t know what it meant about rank, if they didn’t wear uniforms: the uniformed officer at the front desk had mumbled some introduction but she hadn’t registered any of it.

Alison shook her head, imagining the plastic cup, and thought of Paul, working quietly in the hotel, turning up his nose at their coffee. The policeman hesitated a moment, then he was gone.

The room’s chairs were battered and the table scarred. An interview room. She hoped they hadn’t brought Gina somewhere like this, after. Her dread grew, like darkness. Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford knew things she didn’t. And knew things about her no one else did.

The door banged open: the tall woman in the doorway was looking back over her shoulder. ‘Not yet, Jennings,’ she said, and Alison glimpsed the young officer with his loosened tie, peering past her from the corridor. When he saw her he
stepped back, out of sight. ‘I’ll give you a buzz if I need you.’ And the door closed and she was there. Alison’s heart was suddenly in her mouth, it was like seeing someone you’d thought was dead.

Sarah Rutherford wasn’t wearing uniform, but close to it: trousers and a jacket shiny at the elbows. Older. Broader in the beam. Her skin was duller, but Alison’s heart still leapt to see her. Found her wide-set blue eyes the same, the fringe unchanged, the strong nose. Sad. Was that beauty? To Esme it had been. She sat down at the desk, then stood up again, her hands – bare of rings, Alison noticed, but perhaps that was just because she was at work – on the table. She came around it and sat next to Alison: she smelled of hospitals, some kind of antiseptic.

‘I’d have recognised you,’ she said, and frowned. ‘Even with that hair.’ She put a hand to her own, and Alison saw the grey in it. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘Where were you?’ said Alison, thinking even as she said it that Sarah Rutherford probably wouldn’t be able to tell her.

But she did. She sighed. ‘Pile-up,’ she said, and Alison had a picture in her head of debris spread, bodies covered up on a roadside verge and this woman kneeling to look at them carefully, respectfully. She probably had to wash her hands in that hospital spirit after. ‘Kids chucking breeze blocks off the motorway bridge.’ And without missing a beat. ‘What are you doing here?’

Alison took a deep breath. ‘There’s things I need to know,’ she said.

Alison
didn’t go straight back to the hotel. Instead, she drove out down the single-track road along the spit and parked.

Close to, the church seemed somehow even smaller in its modest churchyard, a single yew at the gate, tiny against all the wide silver-grey of the sea as the land fell away to either side. The roof was low almost to the long grass of the graveyard. Far out in the estuary she saw the distinctive shape of a big barge moving stealthily across the horizon under sail, a peaked dark-red quadrilateral with chalked letters on it. They would be gathering for the race.

She’d dreamed once of funerals in this church, of all the bodies in their coffins here, side by side in the nave. It was so narrow they’d been pressed together like sardines. The twins’ coffins had been white and tiny and heaped with flowers. It hadn’t been like that in real life.

The police had released the bodies more than a year after, in October. In real life Polly had pared the funeral down almost to nothing. There was no money, apart from anything else, no money for handwoven willow or flowers. Fifteen-year-old
Alison had stared and stared and stared at the shiny yellow wooden boxes as the crematorium’s minister read some psalm or other. Inside there. Inside there was something that had been deep-chilled for more than a year, cut and folded back then sewn together again, blood and brains and organs. Matter.

She had no idea what had happened to the ashes. They were gone.

A woman emerged from the church, an old woman, hunched over an armful of vegetation, trailing stuff and spikes of browning flowers that shed petals as she walked painfully slowly towards a smouldering heap up against the church wall. Her hair was chopped thick grey and despite the warmth she wore a man’s sweater, down almost to her skirted knees.

Alison took her mother’s scarf from her pocket and held it up to her face, to stifle the catch in her throat. She breathed, eyes closed, she searched it for her mother’s smell, but there was only her own soap, her own hair.

Look
, Sarah Rutherford had said, sitting, looking earnestly into her face, a hand creeping towards Alison’s across the table but stopping short.
I don’t want you to think … to have any sort of false hope. He did it. I’m afraid there’s no doubt that he did it.

Alison stared back at her, mulish as a teenager, saying nothing. She pulled her hands off the table and stayed stubbornly silent as to what she knew. That the dark predatory something she’d hidden from that cold midsummer night was still there. And that they were.
The glasses
. She might tell. But not now.

Sarah Rutherford tried again. ‘I want to help you.’ She glanced around, her eyes flickered up at the window glass above them. When she spoke again her voice was uneasy, defensive. ‘I can help you, up to a point,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘That is, I can give you access to those files that relate directly to you. But I have the right to refuse you access to those if I believe they might prejudice any future investigation.’

Alert,
Alison sat up straighter. ‘I see,’ she said slowly. The purpose she’d so long suspected, those days in the immediate aftermath, this woman asking her quiet questions in the foster family’s sitting room, grew solid. ‘So you did investigate me?’

Rutherford’s face was a weary blank now, a policewoman’s face that gave nothing away. ‘Esme,’ she began, but Alison jerked forward on the chair, she suddenly wanted to throw up.

‘No,’ she said, choked. ‘I’m called Alison now.’

She sat in the car in the lee of the church’s wall and thought of Sarah Rutherford with longing. She had passed a field with the gate open where gravel had been laid down and registered that the Carters were making arrangements for their guests’ cars with their farming neighbour.

‘Him he got the gun off,’ she’d said to Sarah Rutherford. ‘The farmer.’ Not caring about her grammar: she sounded like the child she’d been, back then. ‘My dad showed him the rats.’

The policewoman had shaken her head, looking at Alison from under her fringe, unblinking blue eyes. ‘He cried,’ she said. ‘The farmer. Old Jackson. He said, he should never have given your dad the gun, he knew there was something wrong about it. Only he felt sorry for him. He said, you know when someone just wants to end it. He said he thought he was helping him.’

‘He gave my dad the gun to kill himself with? He knew?’ She couldn’t even picture the man, and he’d cried for her dad.

‘He said, it never occurred to him your father could do what he did.’ The policewoman looked into Alison’s face. ‘It’s a human instinct, not to believe a man could kill his own children. But it happens.’ She leaned in, the hair swinging. ‘It’s difficult to kill yourself with a shotgun,’ she said gently. ‘It requires determination. He had to get both hands on the trigger to hold the barrel in place.’ She put her own hands out to Alison across the table, and Alison pulled hers back again.

‘Does
anyone know you’re here?’ There’d been a warning in Sarah Rutherford’s voice then. Alison had stared her out.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No one knows. I haven’t … no one knows me any more.’ Closing her eyes a moment before making to stand up and push past the policewoman. But Rutherford had put out a hand to stay her.

‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ she said, and she made sure Alison looked back. ‘You need to be careful.’

If you’re so sure, she wanted to hold her fast and say, if you’re so sure it was my father, why do I need to be careful?

‘Alison.’ Sarah Rutherford softened. ‘I’m sorry. Look. I’ll do what I can – I mean it. But it’s thirteen years. D’you think we’d have let it go, if we thought there was any doubt?’ She waited: Alison said nothing. ‘And you’ve sprung it on me. Come back tomorrow, all right? I’d like to help. I mean it.’

‘I want the pictures,’ blurted Alison then, and as Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford opened her mouth to protest she added, ‘I don’t care if it’s protocol, or whatever. I don’t care if it’s allowed. I want to see the pictures. The crime scene.’

Because I can’t remember, because I need to remember.

Because they’ll tell me if there’s something still out there.

BOOM
.

Behind her glasses Alison formed a smile at the old woman, who stood there weathered and impassive, her arm still thrown up against the sun. Then she turned to walk back inside the church. Relieved of her burden of stalks and branches, she wasn’t as old as Alison had first thought. And – though Alison couldn’t have said if it was the shape of her man’s sweater or the eyes, slanted like a Laplander’s, screwed up against the glare of the horizon – there was something about her that was familiar too.

She climbed back into the car and directed herself towards the hotel.

* * *

Stuart
Jennings had come in behind her but Sarah Rutherford hadn’t turned. She’d stood at the second-floor window, a finger to the dusty glass tracing the girl’s route, out through the car park, across to the gates. She had watched as Esme Grace crossed the road without looking and climbed into the driver’s seat of a small silver car. She had grown a foot taller, she’d learned to drive, she’d cut her hair.

Sarah Rutherford imagined her own daughter playing oblivious in the back garden, growing, growing. A plant growing towards the light, shedding whatever hurt her, moving on.

Briefly she closed her eyes to shut down the feeling that started up whenever, over the preceding thirteen years, she’d had cause to remember Esme Grace. Playing with a puzzle cube in the foster family’s front room, head bent over it, tangled long hair that the foster mother confided she wouldn’t let her touch. There was so much hidden inside Esme Grace, and they had never got to any of it.

When Sarah Rutherford had opened her eyes again the little silver car had gone. She had turned to Stuart Jennings.

‘Not good,’ she said. ‘This is not good.’

‘You don’t have to wear it,’ said Paul, pushing the package into her hands. ‘But I thought … I just thought …’

Alison took it. It was soft and heavy: another present and she hadn’t even worn the first one. He looked nervous and she made herself smile.

She’d got back to find Paul tidying his papers away, and his relief when he turned and saw her seemed disproportionate.

‘I thought you might have done a bunk,’ he said, putting his cheek against hers. ‘I don’t much fancy it myself, now.’ She blinked at him. ‘The drinks at The Laurels,’ he clarified. She registered that there was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket on the side table, a card dangling from its neck.

She set the package aside carefully. ‘I’m fine with it,’ she
said. ‘Morgan’s marrying someone else, after all, isn’t she?’ He was frowning at the package and obediently she picked it up again.

‘You got champagne,’ she said as she pulled at the tissue. He turned and lifted the bottle dripping from the ice and with careful fingers peeled back the foil. ‘Morgan sent it,’ he said, then corrected himself. ‘Morgan and Christian.’

Even before she held it up she could tell the dress was old: it was clean and pressed but the faint scent of years in drawers still lingered in its folds. The weight of it wasn’t modern, rough crêpe under her fingertips, the shape of the shoulders. She held it up. An old-fashioned colour, cornflower blue, a line of buttons down the back.

‘It’s got the utility mark,’ he said and when she looked puzzled, ‘Made under wartime rationing.’ He smiled, distant. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My specialist area. But it’s pretty, isn’t it?’

The cork popped.

‘Yes,’ she said, uneasy. ‘It’s lovely.’ She heard him exhale.

‘You see,’ he said, frowning, uneasy. ‘Morgan could never wear anything like that.’ His hand ran delicately down the little buttons.

She looked at the dress. He was right: she imagined Morgan bursting out of it, all broad shoulders and hair, too strong, too tall, too modern, too healthy. She felt herself contract to fit it, old-fashioned and fragile.

‘I was going to give it to you for the wedding,’ Paul said. ‘But then I thought maybe you’d want it for this evening.’ He was looking at her with a kind of stern exasperation, and with a prickle at the back of her neck Alison suddenly wanted to be out from under his gaze.

‘I’ll just,’ she said, ‘I’ll …’ and she almost dodged past him into the bathroom and closed the door.

Inside she laid the dress carefully over the rail of fresh towels and looked at herself in the bright mirror: pale as a ghost,
cropped hair. She looked like she might get blown away in a wind, or lost on the marsh among the tall silvery grasses. Wandering out there with the other ghosts. Alison looked at the glass of champagne in her hand and drank it, in one: she set it down and rubbed at her cheeks. She stripped off her practical clothes, jeans, T-shirt, socks, trainers, and her body emerged in the mirror. Perhaps it was the sudden lightness in her head but it seemed like someone else’s. She saw how thin her arms had got. How?

And then for some reason the therapist came into her head, the woman she hadn’t seen in six, seven years, with her anxious, flushed drinker’s face. This was what the woman had wanted to protect her from, this moment under the bright light with the dead and the lost whispering at the door and demanding to get in. Ghosts.

Breathe
. She tried to remember a single piece of the therapist’s advice, a single strategy. She turned on the shower and climbed inside, letting the drumming of the water fill her head, willing the feel of it on her skin to block the prickle of panic. She stood under there a long time.

It was as she dried herself off that it came to Alison who the old woman bent over the compost heap at the church had been. Not old, not ancient after all, she must be more or less the same age as Alison’s parents, in her fifties. As old as her mother would have been, had she lived. Her sons were at school with Alison and Joe, her three sons, Joe’s friends. She had been the woman, already widowed, who’d opened the door to the milkman and been told that her youngest child was dead by the side of the road. His name had been Joshua, a beautiful boy, a boy you would stare at hoping not to be caught looking. Oh. A sound, a breath escaped her lips.

Cathy Watts. The name repeated itself, drifting like a floater before her eyes. She had never looked like this, old and bent;
she’d been a big woman, a matriarch, big forearms, unsmiling except at the corners of the deep-set blue eyes. Now she was hiding here among the gravestones, bent and shrunken, a servant of the church in one of her sons’ sweaters.