Kind of Cruel (50 page)

Charlie

13

Friday 3 December 2010

For the third time in my life, I have arrived at Little Orchard. The snow is still falling, but it didn’t stop us from getting here. I asked Simon on the way if he was worried about it and he told me he wasn’t. ‘Snow’s never been a problem for me,’ he said. ‘I drive as if it’s not there, and I’m fine.’

I know he’s hoping the third-time-lucky rule will work tonight: I’ll walk into Little Orchard’s kitchen and it will come to me – I’ll know where I saw ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ written down, and Simon will have the link he’s desperate to find between Jo and Kat Allen’s murder.

As we trudge in silence through snow to the back door, I say a silent prayer:
Please let this not be all down to me. Please let Simon not be relying solely on my unstable memory
. Even if I do remember, what will it achieve? If I can’t produce the sheet of paper, which was probably tossed in a recycling bin weeks ago, how can he prove that Kat Allen’s killer tore it off the notepad in her flat? Even Simon Waterhouse is not a good enough detective to run DNA tests on a mental image.

Little Orchard’s back door opens as we approach. In the doorway, backlit by the glow from the kitchen, stands a woman I’ve never seen before. The collar and cuffs of her coat look oddly inflated and puffed up, as if someone’s injected them with the clothes equivalent of Botox.

‘Liv,’ says Simon. ‘You made it, then.’

‘Have you brought anything?’ the woman snaps at him, as if he’s done something wrong.

‘Anything such as . . . ?’

‘Food, wine, loo paper, soap? There are eight loos in this house and only two nearly finished rolls of loo paper. There’s nothing to eat. Nothing!’ She glances at me, decides I’m not important, and turns her attention back to Simon. ‘Sorry to lower the tone. I know your mind’s on higher things, but I seem to be the only person who’s worked out that we’re about an hour away from being totally snowed in here, so . . .’ She marches out into the night, tries to push past him.

‘Where are you going?’ He blocks her path. ‘You can’t drive in this weather.’

‘Says the man who’s just stepped out of his car, and doesn’t mind if we all starve.’

I hope he lets her go. I’ve heard enough of her voice already.

‘Where’s Charlie?’ Simon asks her.

‘In the locked study, which we’ve renamed the unlocked study. You can nose around in there all you like.’

My heart beats double time. I think about running into the house and up the stairs, picture myself doing it. I stay where I am.

‘Charlie found the key?’ Simon asks.

‘There’s a desk in there. Key was in the top drawer.’ Liv smiles at me suddenly, as if she’s decided it’s okay for me to be included in this part of the conversation. ‘I smashed the window earlier.’

‘You did
what
?’

‘I used a stone from the garden. Three, actually. It took three attempts, but I did it eventually. Char and I carried a ladder from the garage and Char climbed in through the smashed window. It was my idea,’ Liv raises her voice as Simon marches into the house. I run after him. ‘Charlie knew nothing about it until I’d done it!’

Through the kitchen, into the hall, up the stairs.
Don’t think, don’t think
. I can do this if I tell myself that all I’m doing is following Simon Waterhouse.

A minute or two later I am standing on the half-landing outside the study, looking in. I don’t know what I was expecting. I see nothing that shocks me. The study contains two wing-back armchairs, a desk, a computer, a rug, a whole wall of bookshelves, but only the top two shelves have books on them. The rest are covered with family photographs: Jo, Neil, the boys with their grandparents. There’s a photo of me, Luke, Dinah and Nonie in our new house, just after we’d moved in.

I try to imagine how terrified Jo must have been in 2003, when I stood with the key in my hand, threatening to unlock the door to this room, joking about what fun it would be. What would have happened if I’d insisted? Overpowered Jo, gone in against her wishes? What would we all have said and done once the locked study of Little Orchard had been found to contain row upon row of photographs of us, Jo’s family?

And Neil’s
. Neil isn’t a killer, but he knew about this. No wonder he looked scared on Wednesday, when I asked about Little Orchard and said Luke and I were thinking of going again.

‘Anything?’ Simon asks Charlie, who is sitting at the computer as if it’s her own.

‘Just a bit,’ she says. She hands him a blue envelope file. ‘From a desk drawer.’ The file has black handwriting on it, but I can’t see what it says, not before Simon opens the flap and folds it back.

‘Coming here turned out to be a good idea after all,’ Charlie tells me.

I can’t answer her. My sister-in-law, my husband’s brother’s wife, the woman who gives Dinah and Nonie their tea every Wednesday after school and usually once at the weekend too, is probably a murderer. And here I am in a country house in Surrey with two police officers, about to be snowed in. Who will tell Luke? Someone needs to tell him, everything.

‘I should phone home,’ I say. Simon doesn’t look up from the papers he’s studying. Telling myself that I don’t need his permission to ring my husband, I make my way to the bedroom that was Luke’s and mine seven years ago, when we stayed here. Only the bedding has changed: from white with a blue border to plain white.

‘It’s me,’ I say when Luke picks up. ‘Is everything okay? Are the girls okay?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ he says. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Yes, but . . . not now. I have to go. Can I talk to Dinah and Nonie, quickly?’

‘No, you can talk to me.’ I’ve made him angry.

‘Don’t let them out of your sight, okay? Until I get home.’

‘That’s it, end of conversation?’

‘I have to go.’

‘So why bother ringing at all?’ he asks. ‘You can’t just say “not now” and—’

‘Don’t let them out of your sight,’ I repeat, cutting him off, as anxious to get back to the study as I was to leave it a few minutes ago. I shouldn’t have phoned Luke; all it did was make me aware of the distance between us.

Simon hasn’t moved; he is still flicking through papers. ‘Veronique Coudert was the previous owner of Little Orchard,’ he tells me. ‘She sold it to Jo and Neil.’

That’s right
, I think, as if his words have jogged my memory.
Of what?
Then I realise: whether he knows it or not, he is reminding me that I mustn’t fall apart. There are things I need to find out. Things
we
need to find out.

‘Looks like they had a previous second home before they bought this one,’ Simon says. ‘Little Manor Farm, in Pulham Market.’

‘Where Kat Allen came from,’ I say.

‘They sold it in 2002, traded up,’ says Charlie.

I force myself to listen as she tells Simon about a meeting in a costume shop: Jo meeting Kat Allen and not being pleased to see her. I don’t want to listen. I want to know what all of this means, but without having to pay attention. Normally I’m good at paying attention, but tonight it’s frightening, too hard. My mind is in pieces, held together only by taut threads stretched nearly to breaking point. For a long time, as Charlie talks, I feel unreal, too aware of myself, as if I’m a ghost no one else can see, but even that feeling isn’t strong enough to prevent me from knowing what Charlie’s story means, even though the precise details slide past me before I have the chance to grasp and grip onto them. It means that Jo is a killer. She hired a fireman’s uniform from a costume shop in Pulham Market. She wore it to kill Sharon.

Jo killed Sharon. The idea rolls around in my head, echoing in black space.

Think about Dinah and Nonie. Think how much they need you not to do anything stupid.

Jo killed Sharon. Luke will have to find out. I can’t let him hear it from anyone but me.

Kat Allen was murdered because Jo wanted peace of mind, Charlie is telling Simon. Jo knew Kat worked in Spilling, too close for safety. Kat’s friend who owns the costume business said to Jo, ‘Oh, you’ve come for your fireman costume, haven’t you?’ in front of Kat, who heard every word and was killed because of it.

‘Amber? Amber!’ Simon is shaking me. I think about the Tree Shaker, Ginny’s hypnotherapy exercise.
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears . . .
‘Why would Jo kill Sharon? What did she gain from Sharon’s death?’

‘Nothing. I already told you the only thing I can think of. She wants Dinah and Nonie.’

‘Would you and Luke ever make a will saying you wanted the girls to go to Jo and Neil?’

‘Never. Even before. Never.’

Simon nods. ‘And Jo knows that. Ginny said narcissists are shrewd when it comes to knowing who’s for them and who’s against. Getting her hands on Dinah and Nonie can’t be the motive. There has to be something else.’

‘There’s nothing else,’ I say tearfully, trying to pull away from him.

‘I want to know whatever you’re still not telling me. Now!’ he yells in my face.

‘I never wrote down her address,’ Charlie says. I hear a new note in her voice: surprise, moving towards disbelief. As if she’s in the process of working something out. She stands up. ‘Simon, wait.’

‘Whose address?’ he asks, impatient. I’m no longer the focus of his attention. The relief is overwhelming.

‘Ginny’s. 77 Great Holling Road, Great Holling. I didn’t write it down. I didn’t need to. 77’s an easy number to remember.’

‘So you didn’t write down Ginny’s address. So what?’

‘Did you, Amber?’ Charlie asks me. ‘Did you write it down and take it with you, the first time you went to see her?’

Why is she asking me this? What does it have to do with anything?

‘Not only the address but the phone number too, in case you got lost on the way?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Wait here,’ she says, and disappears from the room. I fight the urge to run after her. Anything is better than being left alone with Simon.

You’re going to have to tell him. He won’t let you not tell him. You won’t let yourself, knowing how important it is to him to know.

Why have I made this one man, this virtual stranger, my yardstick for measuring how I ought to behave? It’s crazy.

‘I’m waiting,’ he says. ‘I’ll be waiting until you tell me.’

‘It has nothing to do with any murders,’ I say. ‘I told Jo a secret. Something I did, a lie I told. I couldn’t talk to Luke about it, or Sharon. They were the ones I was lying to. I had to tell someone, it was driving me crazy. I told Jo.’

‘Whatever you told her, that’s the reason she killed Sharon,’ says Simon.

‘No! No, it’s not. It can’t be. Look, just . . . take my word for it. I could tell you the whole truth, everything, and you’d have no new information.’

‘How can that be true? If you tell me something I don’t already know . . .’

‘Because it’s about Dinah and Nonie! Jo knew Sharon had made a will saying she wanted me to have Dinah and Nonie if she died. You’ve just said yourself, she wouldn’t kill Sharon in the hope of getting her hands on the girls because she’d have no reason to think that would happen. There’s no motive!’

‘Jo
knew
. . .’ Simon stops, hearing Charlie’s footsteps stomping up the stairs. She reappears, out of breath, holding up a piece of paper with Ginny’s address written on it. And her phone number. ‘Is this your handwriting?’ she asks me.

I nod. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘It was in my car, on the floor.’

Sitting in the driver’s seat, looking at her notebook . . .

‘It was in my jacket pocket,’ I say. ‘It must have fallen out when I was . . .’ I am trying to tell Simon and Charlie what they worked out long before I did. Speaking has become difficult. I stare at the piece of paper with Ginny’s address on it and start to shake.
Pink line for the margin, blue horizontal lines
.

Charlie turns it round so that Simon and I can see the other side: the three headings written in handwriting that isn’t mine, black ink instead of the blue I used for Ginny’s address: ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’.

Now I remember.