The Crooked House (19 page)

This
close to, the boats were huge. Alison saw tiny figures bracing themselves, a man running forward at a crouch under the shadow of the sail.

Gina had her back to the sea, smoking at the edge of the water. She was alone. Alison had wondered where she’d left May, if she was with someone or playing alone in the back garden, but she didn’t ask.

‘Christ, I’ll be glad when you’ve gone,’ said Gina and Alison almost laughed but then she saw there was something different. Gina turned her cheek away into the wind and blew the smoke defiantly but she was quiet. Fearful: staring into the dunes.

‘There was a barbecue,’ said Alison, waiting. ‘We all came here.’ Silence. ‘You remember, don’t you?’

But Gina didn’t seem to have heard. ‘I know what they’d have said about Simon.’ Her jaw was set. ‘Those Watts boys. I know what they think of him. But the police talked to him, they did tests and that shit, I don’t know what. But they let him go.’ Resting her chin on her knees she drew her lower lip into her mouth and when she spoke again it was
swollen as if she’d bitten down on it. ‘He’s the father of my kid.’

‘But he doesn’t see her.’ Ducked back behind her raised knees Gina froze, her eyes gleaming slits. ‘He doesn’t even have her for an afternoon? Where is she now?’

‘No,’ said Gina, muffled. ‘She’s with a mate.’ She cleared her throat, and then she turned and looked. ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘There was a barbecue, yes.’

And then it was all there, that evening, before it got dark. Gina has been there all along. She’s the first to arrive, in the low September light, she’s standing with her arms wrapped around herself as they stumble down through the sand off the sea wall and she is staring, staring, as if she could eat him.

‘It was Joe you fancied,’ said Alison. ‘It wasn’t Simon. Why did you settle for Simon,’ she said, ‘if it was Joe you wanted?’ But even as she said it she thought, would Joe have had her? Messed-up Gina.

Above her knees Gina’s eyes glittered. Her voice was low, strangely muddied, Alison strained to hear. ‘He was dead, wasn’t he,’ said Gina, and to her astonishment Alison realised she was crying. ‘Joe was dead by then.’

So Gina hadn’t turned on her at the sleepover because she was jealous of Simon’s kiss, because at the time she’d wanted Joe, not Simon. So why did she flare up, telling Esme she was stupid?
Stupid girl.
All she could think was, Joe had been still alive when they’d rowed, when Esme had banged out of Gina’s back door and pedalled furiously back down the high street on her bicycle. For another two, three hours, her brother would live. Alison’s head spun as she resisted the longing to howl,
Take me back, let me start again. Let me stop it, this time.

‘Do you remember the night Joshua Watts died?’ she said, and slowly Gina’s head turned, she nodded. ‘Joe was out that night,’ Alison went on. ‘He was in a state when he got home.’ It couldn’t be unsaid. ‘Mum had to go and get him, nearly midnight.’

A
scrape on his cheek, hair wild. Eyes bloodshot with something, drink or dope. Mum white-faced, in a stand-off with Dad in the hall and Esme at the top of the stairs shivering. Listening.
And where were you when he needed you?

‘Did they catch him?’ she said. ‘The hit-and-run driver? Did they ever catch him? Because he’d have had to be someone local, wouldn’t he? All the way out here in the middle of nowhere? Some drunk on his way back from the pub?’ She heard her voice rising; she saw Gina staring. Dad too drunk to drive.
Bitch.

‘Don’t,’ said Gina, stiff. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

But she couldn’t stop. ‘Are they even sure it was a car? Not a … a fight or something? Couldn’t he … couldn’t they—’

‘Joe was with me,’ said Gina. Alison turned and stared, but Gina didn’t look at her. ‘That night. They got into something, I don’t know what, if it was about you or who it was about.’ She ducked her head. ‘Joe came to me. He rang you from my place.’ Silence. ‘He talked to … one of the little ones first, all right? Was it Letty answered? I heard him telling her to get someone.’ Gina’s face was stone.

Horns blared, one after the other, and both at once they looked up, across the grey water. Two boats were racing, neck and neck, so aggressively, sinisterly close it must, thought Alison, be dangerous. She braced herself for a grinding crash, a horrible tilt and dive but they were still moving. A tall man stood quite calm at the wheel of the vessel closest to the shore, not even looking at the other boat whose wake frothed over his gunwales. The barge’s name was etched in yellow on bright blue at her bow.
Lady Maud
.

‘Are you going to the prize-giving?’ she asked, and hearing her own plaintive voice it occurred to her that soon she would be gone. She would never see Gina again.

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ said Gina, her eyes fixed on the
man at the
Lady Maud
’s helm. ‘All those bearded weirdos? Not a fucking chance.’ And she turned her head to stare straight into Alison’s eyes. ‘Not if you’re coming along with that boyfriend of yours,’ she said, and immediately Alison felt winded, as if she’d been slapped.

‘When have you even seen him?’ she said, although even as she spoke she worked it out. It must have been the first night in the pub, Gina with her cracked heels on the bar stool and Paul getting the drinks in.

‘Oh, I’ve seen him,’ said Gina. ‘Good-looking bloke.’ Her voice was flat. ‘He went out with her, didn’t he?’ And she jerked her head back towards the clustered houses of the village, across the inlet and the marsh. ‘Morgan Carter the bitch. He dump her? Or is it one of those things, you know. A quick shag now and again and no one the wiser. For old times’ sake.’

And Alison was on her feet, heels slipping in the sand. ‘Why … why …’ But she didn’t say it.
Why do you want to hurt me?
And she realised what hurt her was partly just the thought of the lost years here, Gina at the pub, Gina growing up without Esme.

And then Gina was up too, the rage and poison gone out of her face, and only misery left. ‘I miss him,’ she said. ‘I miss Joe.’ Her voice, high and sad and lost, blew away from them on the wind.

The police car gleamed white and striped below the crumbling churchyard wall and at the sight of it Alison braked the little car in panic, looked around for somewhere to turn, to escape. There were no other cars there and the chapel was unlit: whatever Paul had come over here to help with had been sorted. Hold on, she told herself. Hold on. What can they do to you? You’re not the suspect.

She parked under a tree further back down the lane and sat. Not Joe. How long had she been afraid it had been, without
allowing herself to admit it? Thank Christ for that, not Joe, her brother hadn’t killed Joshua Watts throwing a punch in some new drunken argument – or the same one they’d had on the beach in September, boiling over again that November night. She didn’t know why it would be such a relief, except that she knew if he’d hurt someone, if he’d killed someone, even accidentally, he would have been in agony, he would have been destroyed. Why had she believed it, why had she wondered, even for a second? Because losing a child might have driven someone to come out to the crooked house and take revenge. Driven someone to savagery.

Joe’s life was gone, all the same.

Two people were sitting in the police car. Alison got out and stood in the road, looking through its back window. She waited, one eye on the car, one on the little chapel’s double doors.

The police car’s passenger door opened and Sarah Rutherford stood there, looking back at Alison. The policewoman leaned down and said something into the car and then she was walking towards her unhurriedly, strong-shouldered, wide-hipped, the gleam on her shabby trousers visible in the evening light. Alison turned quickly and walked away from the chapel, listening for Sarah Rutherford’s footsteps behind her. She kept going until she was out of sight of the churchyard and an open gate appeared, a tufted field. She felt the policewoman come after her. The gate banged behind them.

The grass was clumped and boggy underfoot as if the field was reverting to marsh. The hedges were tangled and hugely overgrown, tumbling with blown hawthorn, and Alison set herself with her back to it, facing Rutherford.

‘It wasn’t him,’ said Alison. ‘I can’t do this on my own. It’s your job to do this. Isn’t that why you’re here? You know it wasn’t my dad.’

She saw pity flicker in Sarah Rutherford’s wide grey eyes, and her heart sank.

‘It
was him,’ said Rutherford. Alison took a breath but the policewoman held up a hand to stop her then stood there, feet planted square in the long grass.

‘You’re fooling yourself,’ she said. ‘There was ample evidence, biological, circumstantial, that he did it, no evidence that anyone else did. To start with, another perpetrator would have killed your father first, would have made sure he was dead.’

Alison took a step back, she could give in, she thought, but then something clicked in her head. Think. All right. ‘How do you know he wasn’t shot first,’ she countered, ‘and the killer believed him to be dead? He wasn’t going to get up and fight, was he?’

Her voice sounded brutal in her ears and she heard Rutherford’s intake of breath. ‘We have ample evidence,’ the policewoman repeated, and took her by the upper arms, gently, holding her in place. ‘And who do you think would have wanted to kill your family? Your whole family? To shoot a woman, a boy, two eight-year-olds?’

‘They were shot through the sleeping bag,’ says Alison, remembering then. Fibres in the blood, the brown and orange fabric, holes in the nylon. ‘Whoever did it couldn’t bear to look at them.’ Faltering.

There was silence, and she filled it. She might not have another chance. ‘A mother lost her child in a fire,’ she said. Somewhere far off she heard the organ rising, she tried to blot it out. ‘And then the child’s father died.’ Still silence: Rutherford dropped her arms, looked away, looked back. Was she even listening? ‘Two boys lost their brother in a hit-and-run, and they had to watch their mother destroyed by it.’

Sarah Rutherford was frowning now, a deep vertical line between her eyebrows. Alison felt cold, suddenly, in the deep shade of the big hedge, the ground beneath her feet had soaked her shoes.

‘Do you think we didn’t talk to people?’ said Rutherford,
roused from weariness to anger. ‘Do you think we’re stupid?’ She leaned closer, her face was in Alison’s but she spoke gently. ‘Your father did it.’

‘You never caught anyone for the hit-and-run,’ said Alison, not looking away. ‘Two boys lost their brother. She’s destroyed by it, their mother is, did you know that? And for the house fire. You never had to catch anyone for any of those deaths. Where is she now? The woman whose baby died, whose husband topped himself? She works at the hotel, doesn’t she?’

‘Karen Marshall,’ said Sarah Rutherford.

Alison registered the name, found a place to store it. ‘My father wasn’t wearing his glasses when he shot himself,’ she said, holding Sarah Rutherford’s steady blue gaze. ‘How could you not have known he wore glasses?’ The policewoman’s eyes darkened, and at last Alison saw what she’d been waiting for. She saw doubt.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘If it’s all over?’

‘There are other crimes,’ said Rutherford wearily. ‘Believe it or not. This is my job.’

A sound came from inside her jacket somewhere, and she turned her lapel to her mouth and spoke into it, shielding herself from Alison as she did it. Alison saw her back tense, saw a hand come up to rub at the place between her shoulder blades, saw it stop.

‘No,’ she heard Rutherford say, almost with a groan. Then, ‘All right, all right.’ The policewoman’s head turned just slightly, to gauge where Alison stood, then back again. ‘A hundred yards, I’ll be at the gate.’ She turned back, letting the lapel fall back and with it the tiny microphone.

‘Talking of which,’ she said, ‘duty calls.’

‘What?’ said Alison. ‘What is it?’

Rutherford frowned a little, shaking her head. ‘Kids,’ she said. ‘It’ll be nothing.’ But she chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘If
my dad didn’t do it, who did?’ said Alison, standing her ground.

Rutherford put out her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said, a warning note in her voice. The lapel crackled again – ‘Wait’ – then she put a hand over the mike and spoke to Alison.

‘Please,’ she said. She was pale. ‘Go to your wedding. Listen to the speeches. Then go and get on with your life somewhere as far away from here as you can.’

Alison stepped back, as if Rutherford had shoved her, but the policewoman’s hand reached after her and took hold of her arm.

‘Leave it,’ said Rutherford, gripping her. ‘Please.’ And then she let go and she was striding away, uneven in the clumped grass. Alison saw the white shape of the car beyond the gate, Rutherford’s long straight hair swinging as she ducked to climb in and then it was moving off, neon stripes flickering past the hedge.

As she came around the bend and the chapel was back in view Alison saw that where the police car had been parked a woman stood in a shabby coat. As if she’d been waiting. The moment she saw Alison she began walking towards her. She came slowly, with a kind of rolling walk, as if her joints gave her pain but she kept coming, her slanted Eskimo eyes slits in the low sun. She stopped squarely in front of Alison.

It was Cathy Watts. Her face had deep creases and a gleam like soft leather. ‘Why did you come back?’ she said, unmerciful, and without warning, somewhere inside Alison anger turned and sparked and caught.

‘Why not?’ she said, ragged with rage. They all wanted her to disappear. They wanted her to have died along with the rest. Cathy Watts folded her arms, but she stood her ground, she didn’t turn and walk away.

‘I couldn’t stay away for ever,’ Alison said, the anger ebbing. ‘My father’s still alive,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’ A small
movement of the head, yes, but Danny’s mother’s arms were still folded. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be me? To have people say, people tell you someone you … someone you loved all your life could do that? Wouldn’t you want to be sure?’ She ran out of breath.