The Crooked House (22 page)

The thing inside her sprang back down, it shrank to a hard pebble. She looked up again into Danny’s face and behind them in the bar someone began to sing, rusty but strong. She knew without looking that it was the day’s winner, Bob Argent, but other voices were already joining in, and it was turning raucous.

May’s run off again
.

Danny was leaning down and whispering in her ear and she could feel stubble against her neck. His hair was stiff with salt, it smelled of the marsh. She heard him say, ‘Joshua and Joe weren’t fighting about you that time, you know.’ His bright eyes fixed her and all she heard was,
This isn’t about you
. She blinked. ‘Gina let you think that.’ Was it contempt that made his voice like that? He raised his head and looked across the room towards the bar. ‘It was your mum they fought over. Not just on the beach. The night Joshua died, too.’ His eyes dulled, he looked back at her. ‘Her and Chatwin. Joshua never knew when to leave it.’

She stepped back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘What did he say? What did Joshua say about my mum?’ Her lips felt numb. She turned to look at the bar to see whose eye he’d caught but saw only Bob Argent raising a glass to his lips, looking back at them.

And then as her head swivelled back to him instead of Danny she saw Paul, a head taller, coming into the room. He looked down into Alison’s face expectantly but she couldn’t smile, she couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t seen what she’d seen. They blocked her exit between them, Danny frowning, turning, Paul’s mouth opening.
I can explain
. Was that what he was going to say?

Alison couldn’t run. She turned the other way instead and pushed deeper into the room.

There were the Carters, in a tight uncomfortable knot,
Roger Carter with his elbows raised up against his body in the scrum, Morgan shaking her head. Lucy turned to look at her. Alison skirted them, not looking back, and stopped only when she reached the bar. She held on to the counter – out of the corner of her eye she saw Paul moving through the room but she turned her back. Ron was there, hands on the bar, waiting for her. Just one, she thought.
Run off again.
Wasn’t that serious? She was like Gina’s kid. For a woman stuck here all her life she’d been permanently running.

‘Miss Grace,’ he said. She thrust a crumpled fiver at him. ‘Vodka and tonic,’ she said and he said nothing, only reached up to the bottle with a wineglass but she knew what he was thinking. Her dad’s drink.

Ron set the glass down and turned away from the fiver, leaving it in her hand.

‘Miss Grace, then, is it?’ His voice was amused, with the deadpan see-saw sound of those who never left the villages out here, on the muddy edge.

It was Bob Argent.

‘You look just like your mother,’ he said.

The
letters had been sprayed across the cabin top. PEDO. Alison stood in the dark, looking back at the lights on the shore.

Gina’s number had taken her to answerphone. ‘Let me know what’s going on,’ she’d whispered into it, hearing her own hoarse breath as she ran, feeling the mud slide under her sandals thinking, You could fall.

You could fall. Careful. You could hit your head, like Stephen Bray. What had Dad said to him, that night before their lives had ended?

Who was she running from? All of them. Her chest still burned from the great tearing panic of her escape.

Taller than most of the crowd, Morgan had turned to watch her push her way through the public bar and like a sheep Lucy Carter’s head had followed her daughter’s, her face blotched and anxious. Roger Carter had called out after her, jovial, brutish,
Alice
. The Carters were probably the only ones there who didn’t know her real name, and he even managed to get her fake one wrong.

The
word had appeared on the cabin top since she was last here. Alison took a step on to the rickety landing stage and crouched there: the tide was going out. She could hear it trickle and creep, she could hear the boat settle. She listened for something else.

She squeezed her eyes shut and saw the girl, May, dancing in and out of the coiled ropes on the quay, looking down at her own clever feet. Long legs hooked over the climbing frame, sun-streaked hair hanging down. She felt cold.

Paul’s hand had reached out to her from between bodies as she made for the door and he’d got hold of her wrist. She hadn’t looked back at him but she knew he was watching and she was almost there, but he got her. Lowest common denominator, basest need.
You’re mine
.

But she shook his hand off, and then she was out of the door.

He hadn’t followed. Outside, Danny Watts was nowhere to be seen.

Bob Argent’s face, unsmiling, was all she held in her head as she began to run. Ahead of her the sail-lofts loomed, their roofs dark points against the night sky.

Bob Argent had looked down impassively, his eyes ranging across her face, seeking out her mother, and for a moment he and Paul might have been the same man, she a child raging while they stood cold above her keeping back what she wanted.

She took a gulp of her drink and the glass sloshed. ‘What did my mum have to do with you?’ she blurted, reckless. The vodka was warm and slimy, she felt it burn as it hit her stomach, then wiped her mouth. ‘You ran him down, didn’t you? Simon Chatwin. Were you after my mum too?’ Something came into his weathered, expressionless face, his eyes creased. Was he laughing?

‘Your mother.’ Bob Argent’s accent was slow and halting, from deep in the marshland. He held his full pint in front of him and contemplated it. ‘Simon Chatwin after your mother?’
It seemed Alison had entertained him. He set the drink down untouched.

‘Danny said you never do anything by accident,’ said Alison, and her own glass felt sticky in her hands.

‘You got any ideas,’ he said, ruminatively, ‘about what Simon Chatwin goes for? Sex, like.’ An upward lilt.

Me, Gina, Mum. Alison felt her throat close, but she managed to get it out. ‘So tell me why you tried to kill him,’ she said. Then, something dawning. ‘Danny said it was your daughter he wanted.’

‘Tried to kill him?’ he said, and there was something dangerously warm in his voice. ‘Police never said anything about that to me.’ She stood dumb, waiting. He eyed his glass on the bar but didn’t touch it. ‘They know, we do things our way,’ he said. ‘Police do. I run him down, but like Watts told you, nothing by accident. If I’d’ve wanted him dead, he’d be dead. It wasn’t your mum he was interested in.’

‘So it was me?’ she said, faltering. And for a second she saw pity, only then he lifted his head to look away, across the room.

‘You had sisters, didn’t you?’ he said, not meeting her eye. ‘Them little girls. It was Chatwin your dad should’ve killed, not them.’

‘My sisters.’ She didn’t understand, and then she did. Perhaps she always had.

‘My girl,’ said Bob Argent distinctly, turning to study her with narrowed eyes, chips of grey. Alison thought of the girl. Studying at university now, Martin Watts had said, looking hard at her.

‘My daughter,’ Argent said, and the words grated, like iron on iron. ‘He asked her if he could put his hand in her knickers.’

Something sparked and floated in Alison’s vision: she saw Simon Chatwin’s face up close, his mouth moving towards hers in the backyard. The words came as if from a distance. ‘She was eleven.’

* * *

PEDO.

Alison
stepped on to the cluttered deck and heard something scrabble below her feet. She crouched to listen. She heard a sound, a low sound that might have been a dog chained in the dark. Frightened. ‘May,’ she said, her face close to the chipboard cabin doors, putting her fingers to the crack between them. ‘May. Is that you?’ Something fell and smashed inside and it was Simon’s voice she heard.

‘Please,’ he begged. Alison thought of her sisters, and a wave rolled and gathered inside her, compressing her chest.

‘Where’s your daughter?’ she hissed. ‘What have you done with her? Is she down there?’

‘Nononono.’ It gibbered, keening. ‘They came. She’s not here. They came.’ She could visualise the dark space behind the doors, the pit filled with junk and unwashed dishes. The grey sheets and the magazines. To take the girl there even once would be too often. It had gone very still below; she put her ear to the crack and listened. She heard breathing, quick and uneven.

‘You don’t know who I am,’ said Alison, and for a second she felt power surge unmanageable through her veins; she was a black angel spreading her wings in the dark. Silence. ‘My family …’ The breathing behind the doors stopped, caught, there was a stifled, choking sound and satisfied he knew now, she went on. ‘Were you after my sisters?’ There was something intimate and horrible about it, her mouth to the gap whispering precious things to him in the dark. ‘Is that why you came round to our yard? Did you try it on my mum too? Is it why you kissed me?’

It was in her throat then, she thought she might vomit and to stop it she raised her fist and brought it down on the chip-board, hard. The pain jolted her, the sound reverberated across the water and her knuckles were raw and bleeding but she couldn’t stop, it was like a hunger. ‘I’ve come back for you,’
she said, and then she did stop, before something terrible happened, she stopped with her cheek pressed against the rough surface.

The chipboard trembled in front of her, she saw broken fingernails in the gap. Then one side was pulled inwards and Simon Chatwin’s eyes were there in front of her; she saw patchy stubble and something dried at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were roaming uncontrollably, looking anywhere but at her. Your father should have killed him, Argent had said. We do things our way, he’d said. Was that right? Alison felt the toxic residue of it in her system, her willingness to go along with that. PEDO.

She pushed herself back on the deck and crouched, ready to run. ‘I take my medication,’ Simon said. ‘I go to my therapy.’ His mouth was slack between words, but his eyes had stopped moving, they had settled on her. ‘May runs off sometimes,’ he said. ‘They’ll find her. I don’t see her. I don’t go near her.’ His eyes were black, bottomless.

‘My family,’ she made herself say, although her certainty had come loose, it drifted out of her reach. Simon’s head moved from side to side but his eyes stayed on her. ‘I wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘He tell you that too? Argent. He knows I wasn’t there.’ And trembling he lifted a hand, blunt-fingered, to the side of his head. He lifted a flap of stiff hair behind his ear and she saw a line, a long vertical seam of white in the scalp. A scar.

The odour inside the cabin drifted out past him and Alison was on her feet. She groped behind her for the rail, and stepped away from him: she ran. Turning as she reached the gravel path she saw he was still there standing between his cabin doors, watching her go.

She slowed as she came up to the sail-lofts, looking for the narrow place where she could pass through, then she saw it and stepped in between the high weatherboarded sides. As she entered the dark space she first registered that the sound had
dropped, the soft wind in the marsh grass and the clink of the boats bobbing cut out by the tall wooden walls, and then that she wasn’t alone. She smelled beer and sweat and a hand seized her upper arm, a hand as strong and thoughtless as a vice. It hurt her.

‘So now you know.’ He spoke and for a second her heart leapt foolishly, treacherously, and then he slammed her back against the boarding.

So
now you know
. At first she’d thought the voice had been Danny’s, and her heart had risen with her face turned up towards him in the dark between the sail-lofts, even if he sounded angry. And drunk. But it had been his brother. Martin. The one who’d gone to pieces at the funeral, the one who’d never recovered.

Why did they hate her? She hadn’t asked him that as he ranted in the dark. It wasn’t just her Martin Watts hated. He swayed over her in the dark, not touching her – after he’d heard the thud of her head hitting the boarding he’d pulled back, letting her go. But she stayed where she was.

‘So now you know what that creep was up to,’ he said, and she smelled beer. ‘Chatwin. That what you came back for? Worth it, was it? He liked them even younger than you, we all knew that.’

‘He killed my family,’ she said, feeling the breath leave her, and the certainty along with it. The words sounded wrong, but she had to go on. ‘Maybe my dad was going to go to the police. Maybe Simon needed to shut him up, shut all of us up. And …
and … he thought I wasn’t there because Gina would’ve told him I was at hers.’ Making it up as she went along. ‘None of you thought Simon had the balls, maybe, I don’t know, you’d rather think my dad was a murderer.
My
dad.’

Watts made an incredulous noise, a pitying noise. ‘Your dad …’ he began, unsteady.

‘Yes,’ she said, before he could say another thing. ‘He wasn’t like you. He’d never … he’s not a fucking savage. He was, is, he’s a … a … civilised man.’

‘He was a pisshead,’ said Martin Watts, slurred but succinct, stepping back with a slight stagger. ‘Ah, don’t give me any of this,’ he said. ‘I saw you out there. I saw you out there hiding your face. It was you he was going to meet.’

Leaning against the high flank of the sail-loft he tipped his head back and she could see the pale sheen of his face, blank. Somewhere there was a moon but she couldn’t see it. The words settled, stubbornly incomprehensible.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Meet who?’

Martin smiled up at the dark sky, saying nothing, and she grabbed hold of him by the sleeve, feeling the worn ragged fabric, the skin and bone underneath it, there was nothing to him. He looked down. Pushing himself off the boarding carelessly he took her by the wrist and detached her.

He had turned away from her then, not towards the road and the village but into the unlit marsh, where the tide trickled and the wind blew. ‘Meet who?’ she’d shouted after him, swaying away from her into the dark. ‘I’m not hiding from anyone. Meet who?’ But he hadn’t answered.

There was a car stopped on the dark verge a little way ahead.

The pub had been quiet by the time she came out on to the road, and most of the crowd dispersed. Alison’s legs had been unsteady and she’d had to concentrate hard to keep going in a straight line as she turned up into the village.

She
might have called someone – Paul? Gina? – to come and get her but she didn’t want it. Her thoughts were overloaded, they jumped and fired at random, and she needed to be on her own. Distantly the thought of May floated:
She runs off
, he’d said.
I don’t go near her
. The phone hadn’t rung: would Gina tell her though, either way? Stupid to think they were still friends. She kept walking as the little car waited for her. She came up on the inside and saw that the driver’s window had been wound down. She hesitated.

The hand on the passenger window of the little car was a woman’s. Tentatively the indistinct oval of a face peered out, turned towards her. ‘Is everything all right?’ the woman said. Coming alongside Alison saw boxes on the back seat and then she knew who it was. ‘Let me give you a lift,’ the nurse said, and as she came closer Alison saw anxiety in her face, and kindness.

‘Yes,’ she said, defeated. ‘Thank you.’

Inside the little car it was as though her ears were blocked, her head buzzed. She had to ask the woman to say it again, as they set off. ‘Where are you staying?’ The nurse’s voice was soft, her glance sidelong.

‘Oh.’ Take me anywhere, she thought. Take me away. Take me home. Who would be at the hotel? Paul. Christian. Would the Carters be there, camped out in the bar, avid for gossip, where had she been, why had she run off? ‘The Queen’s Head,’ she said.

‘It’s not safe,’ said the woman at the wheel. Eyes shone white in the headlights low down in a hedgerow, something crouching. ‘These unlit roads, I mean.’

‘A boy got killed, didn’t he?’ said Alison and the nurse’s glance flickered towards her, then back. Alison thought she would be about fifty.

‘That was a long time ago,’ she said carefully, eyes on the road.

‘They
never caught him,’ said Alison. It didn’t matter any more, after all. She was in plain sight now.

‘Him?’ They were at the junction and the nurse was leaning cautiously over her steering wheel, looking left and right.

‘The hit-and-run driver,’ said Alison. Engaging gear the woman made a sound in her throat, not so much contemptuous as despairing.

‘They’re useless,’ she said. ‘The police.’ The lane narrowed, the unkempt hedges feathering the car’s sides. They slowed to a crawl.

‘Must be difficult for them,’ said Alison. ‘In a place like this.’

The nurse just frowned. Alison went on. ‘Everyone knows everyone else,’ she said. ‘And none of you seems to trust the police.’

Silence. The car accelerated jerkily, a bend, another bend. Something flew low beside the passenger window, a big soft wingspan and then its dark shape lifted off over the roof and the lit gables of the hotel appeared. The nurse pulled up in the road and turned off the engine. She turned to Alison.

‘She wants to see you,’ she said, and Alison felt herself freeze in fear, without knowing why. A ghost, she thought:
Mum
, she thought.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘Susie,’ said the nurse. ‘Susie Price. Susan Price.’ Alison let out her breath.

‘Mrs Price,’ she said. A ghost. ‘What happened to Kyra?’ She thought of the child walking hairless on the high street, survivor of a blast. ‘I remember Kyra.’

‘We lost her,’ said the nurse sadly, and Alison felt it like a thump to her chest.

‘She died?’ The privet hedge’s leaves looked ghostly in the light cast out from the hotel, silver-blue and gleaming, like poison. Privet
was
poison, she thought, errant. ‘When?’

The nurse turned to her, her hands in her lap. ‘She hung
on for eight years,’ she said. ‘Advancing and remitting. She could take a lot of treatments, she was strong. But in the end it got her.’ Her face was pouchy and sad in the blue light. ‘Now it’s killing Susie.’

Run, Alison told herself, run now, get out of here. She felt for a moment that if she opened the door and set her foot on the ground it would get her too, the poison would enter her body. She stayed where she was. ‘What’s killing her?’

‘A different cancer, but it’s all part of the same thing. That’s not a medical diagnosis, of course, but it’s still true.’

Alison turned to look through the hedge at the hotel: she could see heads moving through the big front door. She saw the gleam of car roofs. ‘She wants to see me?’

The nurse set her veined hands on the wheel. ‘When I told her … you’d been seen in the village.’ Alison drew breath, but didn’t ask, how. Who. ‘It was the first time she’d opened her eyes properly in months. She sat up.’ The woman stared straight ahead into the dark. ‘She’s on medication,’ she said wearily. ‘She’s had these … dreams. But when she said it, she wasn’t under, I was about to top her up, she was in pain, she was lucid.’

‘Said what?’

And then the nurse turned to look at her. ‘She said, bring her to me, I’ve got to tell her something.’ She put out a hand and touched Alison, lightly, on the wrist. ‘She said, I’ve got to tell her something about her mother.’

The police car was parked at the far side of the hotel, and Alison only saw it when she was at the door. It wasn’t Rutherford she saw first, it was the other one. The man.

‘He’s gone up,’ Jan had said to her brightly from behind reception and for a moment Alison didn’t know who she meant. ‘Your husband.’

‘Right,’ she said, but the word made her stomach clench. It
was gone eleven on the clock over the door – it had been two, three hours since she had shaken Paul’s hand off her in the public bar.

Jan frowned. ‘Are you all right?’ She peered over the desk, and Alison looked down at herself. There was a scratch on one of her bare calves, her feet in the sandals were edged with mud.

‘I think I’ll just have a quick one before I go up,’ she said. ‘In the bar. It’s got cold, don’t you think?’ Jan made a noncommittal murmur, looking carefully away.

In the toilet mirrors Alison saw her lips were pale, her temples blue-veined. The hair suddenly looked much too short, like something that would be done to you in prison. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

There was a solitary middle-aged couple in the bar, holding hands across their table, and the foreign girl who’d served them breakfast was wiping things down behind it: she looked resigned when Alison asked for a glass of brandy. Alison sat down where she could see the door into reception, and through it Jan, weary under her neat helmet of hair and careful make-up, talking to the young policeman. Jan hadn’t signed up for this, thought Alison. She must have wanted a quiet little country hotel with the clink of glasses and the murmur of conversation. She had come round the reception desk as if to head the policeman off. Jennings.

The policeman hadn’t come here to see her, was Alison’s thought. If they had, Jan would have said something. But he looked at her. Then he was gone.

She waited. Through the bar’s long windows the garden was dark, but something gleamed in the distance, mud snaking away silver under the moon. Across the room the middle-aged man had his hand to the woman’s cheek. And then Sarah Rutherford came through the door, half turned back towards the man to say something, her hand gesturing to him to wait. The door swung closed.

Rutherford
sat next to her, a solid presence. ‘We got her,’ she said, and the thing inside Alison that had just begun to settle leapt up again in panic. ‘It’s OK,’ said the policewoman. ‘I thought you’d be worried.’ Alison stared. ‘Your friend’s kid … she went missing.’

Alison subsided, allowing relief in. ‘Where was she?’ she said. Rutherford’s eyes flicked up to the ceiling and back. ‘May?’ she said. ‘It’s not the first time she’s run off.’ So Chatwin had been telling the truth. ‘She was hiding, out on the beach, in the grass. Some guy saw her there, we came here to thank him, as a matter of fact – he saw her and it was getting dark, and …’ She cleared her throat. ‘Fortunately for us he wouldn’t leave her till she told him where her mum was.’ Rutherford smiled, dead tired. ‘She gave him all sorts of grief, he said.’ She looked around, restless, and her eye settled on the middle-aged couple. She looked away quickly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.

‘Why are you here?’ Alison asked, wondering who’d put Rutherford’s own child to bed. She must have a husband. ‘You didn’t come here to tell me that?’

Rutherford’s wide-spaced dark blue eyes examined her. ‘The man who found May—’ she began, but Alison interrupted her.

‘I went to see Simon Chatwin,’ she said, ‘but May wasn’t with him.’ The policewoman shook her head, frowning.

And then the question rattled out of her, before the policeman watching through the door to reception could come in and stop her. ‘Chatwin was after my sisters, did you know that?’

Rutherford raised herself wearily. ‘Simon Chatwin is on the Sex Offenders Register following a conviction for indecent exposure to a minor eight years ago,’ she said. ‘He takes his medication. He’s never missed a therapy session.’ Her voice was low but tough. ‘I shouldn’t tell you any of this. We couldn’t trace your sisters’ father but we know it wasn’t Simon Chatwin: apart from anything else he’d have been seventeen when they were conceived. We also know he didn’t kill your family.’

‘How
do you know?’

Rutherford looked up steadily from under her heavy fringe. ‘When paedophiles kill,’ she said, ‘they kill the defenceless. They kill their victims: they kill children and almost always on impulse. They don’t go into houses where there are men with guns who can fight back. It’s statistics. It’s profiling. It’s science.’

‘Is that all?’ Alison found herself saying, Alison who’d studied maths and physics and chemistry, only girl in the class half the time. Alison who knew science doesn’t explain everything.

Rutherford tilted her head and shook it and the ponytail swung. ‘We had a body of evidence. This isn’t a matter of glaring facts, not always. It takes us months. Just believe me, Chatwin couldn’t have done it.’ She studied Alison, grave. We also know your father’s myopia had been improving, as yours will, as it does with age. Even without his glasses his eyesight wouldn’t have prevented him from killing your mother, your brother, your sisters. The shots were fired at close range.’ She paused, earnest: Alison saw how she’d recovered from panic, reassessed. ‘This isn’t good for you.’

Alison held herself very still. ‘I can decide what’s good for me,’ she said. ‘It’s my life. It’s my life.’

Rutherford said nothing and, goaded, Alison felt something slip from her control. ‘It’s not like you’re worried about me, are you?’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘After all this time? I mean, you’ve got it covered, haven’t you? My dad did it, so it’s not like there’s a murderer out there.’

But Rutherford’s head moved, slightly, and following it Alison saw that Jennings had appeared in the door to the bar and was looking at his boss, questioning. Rutherford had shifted forward on the seat, about to leave.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, looking straight at Alison, a look that cooled her skin, immobilised her. ‘There is.’

‘What?’ said Alison, and everything hung, the honeymooners,
the girl behind the bar, the gleam of the estuary through the window.

‘Stephen Bray’s death wasn’t an accident,’ said Rutherford.

She spoke deliberately, levelly, and Alison saw that this was what she’d come for, after all. This woman who had appeared in Alison’s dreams, whom she had always, down the years, thought of as having been on her side, was watching her for a reaction, like a suspect. And for a terrible suffocating moment Alison understood that it was connected to her, because it had to be. She was bound to the dead weight of Bray’s body in the cold mud.