The Crooked House (15 page)

It
hadn’t exactly been a tactic, asking him to come for a walk with her. Coming back into the hotel room after breakfast that morning – Christian silent on another table over a sheaf of newspapers and a laptop, barely raising his head to acknowledge them – Paul had gone straight over to the little desk as if to get back down to work again himself. She saw him frown down at the words on top of the file. Alison wondered what he was thinking.

Didn’t he even wonder what she got up to? Where she went, in his little car, to another world of police stations and ring roads, a world clogged and dirty as mud? When she made excuses, disappeared – this morning heading back upstairs from the dining room before they’d even sat down returning only as the full English arrived – what did he think? Perhaps he knew. She dismissed the idea, only not completely.

He hadn’t touched her either, at seven or whenever it was she had crept back into the room. She had sat quickly on the bed beside him and he’d looked up. Suddenly she’d been aware of the scent of outside in the folds of the sweater, of the dawn
cool on her skin, and she’d jumped up and into the shower. Was he angry?

It had been, in part, by way of testing him for a reaction that she’d suggested it, sitting on the bed and watching as he lifted his briefcase to the desk. ‘Come for a walk with me?’ Holding her mother’s scarf in her lap.

‘Sure,’ he said, barely even looking up.

She knew where she was going – but she couldn’t show it. Out there somewhere, between the quay and the crooked house – if it was still there. Simon Chatwin’s boat.

There was a big old barge halfway out along the marsh she hadn’t seen before, its mast gone, nudged in low-lying and indistinguishable from its element. It had been decommissioned and turned into some kind of activity centre, up against a patch of shingle that served as beach. A gang of kids in life-jackets were being loaded into a fleet of little dinghies, they shoved and jostled in a queue. Further out a boat bobbed at anchor, its sails stowed; it swung a little and she saw the name painted on its transom.
Bluebell
. It was the dinghy she’d seen Danny and Martin Watts sail out in the night before. How far around could you get? Where had the tide been when Bray was killed? They might have seen what happened, out there in the dusk. Their mother looked after him, who had said that?
The Watts woman.
Roger Carter had said it.

Paul was watching the children, frowning. Leading him all the way out here, she might have betrayed herself twenty times simply by knowing exactly where she was going, but Paul hadn’t seemed to notice anything.

It was windy but warm. As she tied the scarf Paul put his fingers to her cropped hairline under the fold of silk, tucking something away. On the far headland, just short of the shining square bulk of the power station, the tiny figures of a family group were walking out to sea and she fixed on them, too
aware of his hand at the soft part of her neck. The church on the closer spur of land, from here it sat inside the power station’s silvered silhouette.

Somewhere far off a horn sounded the start. ‘They’ll be out there all day,’ Alison said, surprising herself by still remembering, regretting it almost immediately as panic flared in her. How had he not guessed?

But Paul was looking out to sea. ‘Can we get any further?’ he asked. Anxiety ticking she shrugged, not very convincingly.
How would I know?

‘Why don’t we try along here,’ she said, following a narrow slatted boardwalk that meandered ahead of them through the clumped sea lavender.

Stephen Bray’s boat lay, tilted as she always appeared to Alison in dreams, a long, smooth-bellied elegant curve undiminished by the muddy berth, the long-gone spars and ropes. She was a certain famous class of yacht. On his chart table in the tilted cabin Bray and her father had pored over old photographs of her racing at regattas. Paul stopped, admiring.

Her decks were muddy as if the tide had come up over her, there were bootprints stamped all over the teak and the neat varnished cabin doors had hardboard crudely nailed over them. Because the police would have been here. Because he was dead. She raised her head and looked past the boat to the sea wall. What had he been doing on Mulville’s Hard? It wasn’t on the way to his boat. It was past the crooked house. She thought of him staggering in the dark, falling to his knees in the cold mud. The sound of the tide, creeping and lapping, in his ears.

Back on the shingle the little dinghies were setting off one by one now, bobbing in the water, the small passengers sitting trussed stiff and obedient in their lifejackets. She thought of Mads and Letty; she thought of Simon Chatwin.

Paul followed her gaze. She saw him frown again.

‘You
don’t want children, do you?’ she said.

‘Don’t I?’ he said, looking down into her face. In the sharp clean light she saw the fine lines around his eyes, the gleam of silver in his hair, his half smile, her insides churned.
Have me
.

His hand came up and rested warm on her cheek, turning her face to him.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ Alison said, feeling the ground shift under her. So dangerous. ‘Your family, your home, where you went to school, university. Your work.’ Even as she said it, as he looked down at her, smiling, it all sounded so trivial, so safe, so dull. Who needs to know? And anyway, you could make it all up. She knew that better than anyone.

‘My
work
?’ Now he was mocking her. ‘My family? I haven’t bored you with my idyllic childhood?’ He smiled, but his eyes were narrowed against the sharp light.

‘All right,’ she said, roused. ‘Why you haven’t … why you’re still single.’ He brought his hand away and suddenly she felt cold. She’d gone too far.

‘You’re the first one that meant anything,’ Paul said, looking away from her, out to sea. ‘Do you believe that?’

‘If we got married …’ she said, and he raised an eyebrow, but she persisted. ‘If we got married, who would come to the wedding?’

‘Now that,’ he said, and took her wrist, ‘that is an interesting question. I’d like to know that too.’ His hand gripped her tight. He raised the wrist and put his mouth to the inside, where the blue veins sat close to the surface. ‘Will you marry me?’ His hand warm and tight. For a moment the memory of the time before, the night he’d held her down, made her close her eyes for wanting that violence back. She thought of them bound close together, just the two of them, for ever, and she didn’t know what she should say. She saw with sudden certainty that she needed to be tied close to something and it opened
like a sinkhole inside her, a terrible lost feeling, as she saw what would happen if she let this go, let him go. She opened her eyes again quickly. He looked at her a long moment then he laughed and released her.

There’s something I need to tell you.
The line was in her head, but she said nothing.

‘Children,’ he said, turning to watch the dinghies gathering speed as they headed towards the estuary and the bigger boats on the horizon. The sky was pale, some high wisps of cloud. ‘I don’t think we’re the sort, do you?’

What sort are we? wondered Alison. The defective sort. In evolutionary terms. Damaged.

There was a sudden gust and the tiny boats heeled in unison. Alison watched, feeling her heart pound with panic at what she might have said. What if he hadn’t meant it, if it had been some kind of a joke, and because she believed it, because she wanted what she thought he’d been offering so badly, his mother’s engagement ring and his white-painted bedroom above a bustling London road for ever – she’d told him everything?

What if he asked her again?

She turned away from the horizon and there was Stephen Bray’s boat tilted in the mud, still there, turning derelict before her eyes. It would soon disintegrate: did anyone own it? The home-made landing stage, the slimy planks of the step. Her father used to hold her arm tight, handing her across to the slippery deck.
Try to remember
, Sarah Rutherford had said all that time ago, when Esme’s memory had been like a scrapyard in the dark, full of sharp things you could trip over and she hadn’t wanted to try.
Anything at all.

She remembered her father with his head suddenly in his hands over Stephen Bray’s chart table. ‘I don’t know what she wants,’ he’d said. ‘I’d do anything for her.’ The older man pushing his glasses up his nose and reaching around for the bottle of home brew, moving between Esme and her father.
Something shifted in Alison’s head at the memory of her father’s voice. He had taken her there, his girl, his favourite, she hadn’t really understood that before, how much he had loved her. She’d thought he loved all of them. And now he was sitting in that chair at the end of that corridor where the linoleum gleamed and the CCTV camera watched him, and he was alone.

If she had told Sarah Rutherford that her father’s voice hadn’t been angry when he talked to Stephen Bray about her mother, would it have made any difference? That when he said he would have done anything for her, it had been true? He had sounded lonely, he had sounded helpless.

Paul’s arms were around her. ‘Come on,’ he said, his breath on the nape of her neck.

They walked on, their backs to the power station, the crooked house on the skyline, black against the early sun, every step taking them closer.

Further along the sea wall was Mulville’s Hard, where Bray’s body had been found.

Earlier, as they had come into the dining room for breakfast, Alison had stopped on the threshold. ‘Damn,’ she’d said. ‘Forgot my phone.’

‘You don’t need it,’ he’d said, his expression clouding, and she’d made a face. ‘Kay tried to call me last night,’ she’d said. ‘I’d better make sure it’s not urgent.’

‘Kay.’ So he
didn’t
like her.

‘I’ll be quick,’ she’d said. ‘Get me the full works. Eggs, all that.’ Which might buy her some time.

But it wasn’t to phone Kay back that she’d gone upstairs. The reminder sat there blinking, missed call, but Kay belonged to another world, a world where they gossiped and drank and dreamed, where Esme had become Alison, where everything was possible and none of this had ever happened. She might never go back there.

Sitting
on the unmade bed, she’d phoned DCI Sarah Rutherford.

When the policewoman answered she sounded breathless. In the background Alison heard a tap running, a chink of plates. Washing up. ‘Do you know a man called Simon Chatwin?’

There was a sigh. ‘Esme,’ Rutherford said, resigned, and then Alison heard a muffled voice. Hand over the receiver. The background sounds were gone. A door closed.

She stood from the bed. ‘Alison,’ she said. ‘It’s Alison now.’ But at the sound of her real name something had stirred in her gut, fear, derailing her. ‘Does anyone know what happened to me, afterwards? Where I went?’ She walked to the big bay window and looked down. The woman from last night stood at the centre of the gravel. Alison saw a hand come up holding a cigarette. Stocky, middle-aged, her arms folded across her body, her hair under a kind of white cotton cap, she didn’t move. She was looking at Paul’s car.

‘There was a court ruling,’ said Sarah Rutherford. ‘Didn’t your aunt tell you?’ Alison made no answer, and she went on. ‘The media were banned from reporting anything that might identify you or your whereabouts.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Of course, it wouldn’t have stopped someone trying to find you. They just couldn’t make it public. But if you didn’t want anyone to find you, why are you back?’

The woman turned on the gravel below and hurriedly Alison stepped away from the glass.

‘I’m not back,’ she said, stubborn, illogical. ‘In a day, two days, I’ll be gone.’

‘I hope you will,’ said Sarah Rutherford.

‘Why are you even worried about me?’ said Alison, turning away from the window. ‘If you’re so sure my dad did it?’

Paul’s things were piled neatly on the desk, and she took a step towards them. On the top was a clear folder, and she could see the typed title on the top sheet below it.
Retribution
in Occupied France
. It was more than a centimetre thick; she put a finger down to the plastic. Other folders were stacked beneath it, cuttings, the edges of photographs, some books with the university’s library stamp on their spines. With a finger she pushed at the pile and there was a wartime crowd scene, a woman at the centre of it, shaven-headed She pushed it back in.

A silence. ‘People can be … this kind of incident … people don’t always react rationally.’ Sarah Rutherford sounded tense, wary. ‘You’re your father’s daughter. You could get hurt.’ There was a pause. A sigh. ‘As for your question. We know who Simon Chatwin is, yes. We know who he is and where he is now.’

‘You do?’ Sarah Rutherford didn’t answer, and Alison took a breath. ‘Did you know my father wore glasses?’ she said. ‘Like me. It’s genetic, runs in families. Short-sightedness.’ And she heard something, or rather nothing, the sound of Sarah Rutherford holding her breath. Then the policewoman spoke.

‘Your father was short-sighted.’ A question pretending not to be.

‘Yes,’ said Alison, letting the fact settle between them. ‘And he wasn’t wearing his glasses when you found him, was he? Did anyone even know? Did anyone ask?’

‘I – I’d have to—’

‘I found a piece of his glasses in the yard,’ said Alison, not waiting for her to finish. ‘If it wasn’t him, who was it? Simon Chatwin came to our house at least once. Was it him my mother was having an affair with? Was he …’ And she grappled with the timing, how old Simon was when they were born, how, where he and her mother might have met, the artists’ supplies shop, the distance to the town. ‘Was he their father? Was Chatwin my sisters’ father? Did you check that DNA, while you were about it?’

‘Alison,’
said Sarah Rutherford, and Alison heard alarm sound in her voice. ‘Are you sure? The glasses. How bad was your father’s eyesight?’

And it was Alison’s turn to hesitate. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She took off her own glasses. She held out her hand in front of her. How close did you have to be, to shoot someone? Could she do it, if someone had left her glasses smashed in the street? She thought of her father at the kitchen table, taking off his glasses to read. Rubbing his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’