The Crooked House (27 page)

‘I’m fine,’ she said, pulling her hand from Lucy’s, nodding at the doctor without touching his, moving on past him not caring how hasty she looked. In her head a question was taking shape, forming out of mist. These people. They knew more than they were saying.

From behind, Paul’s hand was on her hip, steadying her; she slowed. She registered that Roger Carter’s expression was for his wife as she saw him lean and mutter something in her ear and her face turn sulky. When Carter glanced back at Alison he seemed only embarrassed. Something bubbled up inside her, a stupid elation. Soon it’ll be over. One way or the other. She turned and Paul’s hand fell away. ‘I can’t do this,’ she said, and nodded to where the tunnel opened out into the marquee. ‘I’ll be in there.’ She knew he wouldn’t follow.

And she went. She sidestepped the queue and entered the marquee itself. She stood and gazed at all its tables, its floral arrangements, its swagged sides and gilt chairs.

Someone was at her shoulder and resigned she turned, expecting Paul, but the waiter had followed her. Perhaps he had seen the way she’d looked at his tray – perhaps they all had. But as Alison reached for a glass her phone plinked in the bag under her arm, the bag too small for anything else that was useful, for money or keys. She scrabbled as the man waited patiently: she turned away from him. It was a message from Gina.
Outside
, it said.

Where
they stood, unobserved under the trees at the far end of the Carters’ property, the garden descended into gloom and tangled ivy. The marquee obscured the house and so far the other guests hadn’t ventured beyond it: perhaps the sight of Alison marching Gina past them had intimidated them.

Her fag carelessly ground out on the gravel behind her and still reeking of smoke, pushing through the smart crowd in her jeans, a faded pink T-shirt with a cartoon character on it that strained across her breasts, Gina hadn’t looked like a wedding guest, nor a member of the waiting staff, she’d looked like their worst enemy. Alison stayed close, their arms linked tight, let them see whose side she belonged on. She looked for Paul among the faces that turned on them but he wasn’t there.

The marquee was filling up, guests milling between the tables, scouting for their names. Alison tugged Gina after her out through a side entrance where the catering company had set up their kitchen, and dodging a girl in an apron they were outside, the wind whipping their legs. It was cold: far off inland something that might be thunder rumbled. They skirted the
marquee and made for the trees, where the wind stirred and rustled.

Gina was lighting up again already, frowning down as she did so at a place where the undergrowth had been trampled and there was a scattering of white among the dark ivy. Cigarette butts. ‘Naughty,’ she said.

Alison looked past the litter through the spindly tree trunks and saw a sagging chain-link fence, a hole pulled in it big enough to admit an adult. ‘Paul said someone got in,’ she said. ‘An intruder.’ So it had been true. Had she thought he was lying? Morgan would lie.

‘
Paul
,’ said Gina, jeering as if they were back in the school playground, and before she knew it Alison’s hand was out and grasping her, tight by the wrist, smoke from the cigarette in her face. Gina looked down in astonishment. With a sharp tug she freed herself.

‘All right,’ she muttered. She took a drag, blowing the smoke out of her mouth, and folded her arms across herself defiantly. Alison smelled her, sweat and dirty hair and fags.

‘Tell me, then,’ said Alison. ‘Or are you just here to wind me up?’ Gina shook out a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth with the first one, lit it, her eyes screwed up. She handed it to Alison. They were under the trees ten feet from the back of the marquee. Shapes moved inside, hats and suited shoulders silhouetted against the heavy fabric wall.

‘That night in November,’ said Gina. ‘I’d fancied Joe a year or more.’ She eyed Alison, who waited. ‘Every time I saw him I wanted to do things with him.’ She held the cigarette up, elbow against her hip, gazed up through the smoke and the shifting canopy of trees. ‘He knew all right. He kept away from me because he knew. He thought I was bad news, like everyone else did.’

Alison frowned. ‘He wasn’t like that,’ she said.

‘
You
weren’t,’ said Gina. She shifted her shoulders against
the tree. ‘Maybe that’s why I thought I had a chance. Anyway. I opened the door and there he was. He was in a right state and all I could think was,
It’s him. He’s here
.’ The cigarette had burned down to her fingers and she threw it away. ‘Blood on his face. Bruise coming under it when I washed it.’ Her mouth was a grim line. ‘Pissed. He threw up straight off. Thank Christ Dad wasn’t home. I held his head.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Then he told me what had happened.’

‘So you did know what it was about?’

‘They’d been out. They’d been drinking, and then they started fighting again. Joe got hit, he said he’d landed one on Joshua too. As to who wound who up – Joshua Watts always was a little fucker, liked stirring it.
He
was bad news.’

‘He was little when his dad died,’ said Alison, trying to find a reason. Beautiful savage Joshua. ‘Is that right?’

Gina shot her a disdainful glance. ‘That an excuse? He said the twins didn’t look much like your dad, and Joe tried to hit him. Got him down.’ Alison felt sick: she let the cigarette fall from her fingers. Had she ever looked at her sisters and wondered? But others had. ‘Joe was crying,’ Gina said. ‘I looked after him.’

Something blew through the trees horizontally, a flurry of rain and wind that sent dead leaves scattering around their ankles. ‘Joshua was all right when Joe left him, then,’ said Alison. Gina was looking past her. Alison turned and saw a bulge in the marquee wall, a tall two-headed silhouette pressed against the white nylon.

‘Yes,’ said Gina, faraway. ‘Joe said mostly they just rolled around. He kept saying he didn’t know how hard it was, fighting. Then he’d cry again. He let me hug him.’ She looked at Alison. ‘I wish I could have that night again,’ she said. ‘Your mum came very quick.’

Whoever the two inside the back of the marquee were, they were very close to each other. Fighting or kissing. At weddings
these things happened, thought Alison. ‘She wasn’t at home,’ she said. ‘My mum. She was out in the car, Dad phoned her.’

Where do you go after a day like that? A day when your husband finds out he’s not the father of your kids?

‘She must have been close by,’ said Gina. ‘He must have known where to find her straight off. Simon said—’ She broke off. ‘Have you seen him? He was in a right state this morning.’

‘He was at the hotel,’ said Alison warily. ‘Early.’ She didn’t elaborate: guilt stirred obscurely at the memory of her and Simon in his van. ‘Why?’

Gina was frowning. ‘He said, he was the one always got the blame, like yesterday when May ran off. Like the police hauling him in after your dad … after the shootings. He wasn’t the one came to your house that night, he didn’t kill anyone. He said, he’d had enough and now it was time to break it all up. Today. The wedding, and that.’

‘It wasn’t him came to the house that night,’ said Alison, staring blindly at the grey horizon, trying to make her brain work. ‘But someone else did come. Did he see someone?’ She blinked and saw Gina scowling at her from under her fringe, resistant. ‘Don’t you understand? He was out there on the marsh when it happened.’

‘Sure he was,’ said Gina, her mouth set stubborn. ‘But Bob Argent was beating the shit out of him.’ She tapped her skull. ‘Brain damaged, mate.’ With dull recognition Alison turned and looked into the gloomy space under the trees: she saw the cigarette butts in the ivy.

‘It was Simon turned up at the church, then,’ she said. ‘Calling me a bitch.’ Not Martin Watts. Gina hunched her shoulders tighter. ‘We’re all bitches, to some of them,’ she said, and Alison nodded. ‘Why take it out on them, though? On Morgan? The Carters?’

The hum of the wedding guests was in her ears, the clink of the glasses: Karen Marshall walked carefully from the kitchen
tent into the main marquee with a tray of champagne glasses, head held steady as if balancing a book.

Gina’s mouth was twisted, tough. ‘Dunno,’ she said, musing. ‘The doc. No one likes him. Because they’re rich? Because they’ve got a nice life? They’re … happy?’ She spoke the word as if it was in a foreign language.

Happy, thought Alison. Are they?

‘What did Simon say about my mum?’ she said, but Gina didn’t answer. ‘She was seen,’ she went on slowly and the pieces moved into place, one car rushing in the dark, the other passing it going the other way, the verge, the junction, the boy with his head in his hands, raising his head too late. It had to be. ‘Kyra Price’s mum saw her. Heading for your house.’

‘Twenty minutes,’ said Gina. ‘After he phoned. She was white as a sheet when she got here. She was shaken up. She didn’t say a word to me, she just wanted him out, in a big hurry.’

Something was happening between the two inside the marquee, pressed hard against the fabric and making a bulge. White as a sheet. Perhaps she thought she’d hit an animal.

‘What?’ said Gina. ‘You know why she looked like that, don’t you? You know what freaked her out.’

Alison nodded, looking at the marquee wall: two men, she guessed, from the height of the bulge, the silhouetted shoulders. She took a couple of steps towards them and Gina followed, close at her shoulder. There was a hum and clatter of conversation filling the tent behind the heavy rubberised fabric – if they wanted to eavesdrop they’d have to get closer.

‘I know,’ Alison said. ‘I think I know where she was coming from too. I just don’t know why.’ She turned to Gina. ‘Where’s May?’ she said, feeling a small flutter of anxiety separate itself from the hard sour knot in her stomach.

Gina’s arms were goose pimpled where they emerged from under the faded T-shirt, and she rubbed at them. ‘Ron’s keeping an eye,’ she said. ‘Down the pub. He helps me out now and again.’

‘Ron?’

‘He’s
a good bloke,’ said Gina defensively. ‘Gives her a bag of crisps. Nice down there.’ She glanced up at the sky. ‘When the sun’s out. She hates me, she says.’

There was movement and they turned towards it. From behind the marquee wall a voice that had been low intensified a notch. A warning. Alison took a step, then another, then they were so close, she and Gina, that they might have touched the men through the canvas.

‘I love her,’ she heard, and she froze. It was Paul. She registered a look of stiff scorn on Gina’s face.

Her.

‘Listen, Roger,’ Alison heard, and Paul’s voice was low again, and agitated. ‘You’ve got to tell someone. I mean, if you’re sure. If you’re positive.’

‘I was asleep,’ Carter insisted. ‘I can say that, can’t I? Just because there was mud on the carpet the next morning. Doesn’t mean … I knew nothing about it. Nothing.’

‘But you saw her putting something in my car? After the dinner.’ Paul sounded agonised.

In the car? Alison could only think of the photographs, and then she was there in the little car, craning her neck, reaching for something while Paul watched her, frowning. The scarf. The girl in the scarf.

Paul’s voice was low. ‘Where was she,’ he said, ‘when you got back from seeing that baby, the baby with pneumonia? Was she even at home? I’ll come with you, when Morgan and Christian have got off. You’re confused, it’s natural. We’ll go to the police. They’ll find out, you know, in the end. I should never have brought her back here, I had no idea.’

Roger Carter was muttering, the figures moved and they could see that Paul, several inches the taller, had his hands on the older man’s shoulders. Gina’s head turned towards Alison and she mouthed something.
Tell someone what?

‘But
what if they …’ said Roger Carter, and all the boom and authority was gone, he sounded shifty, evasive. ‘My daughter’s wedding, Paul. Look at it all. Gatecrashers. Drunks.’ He sounded choked, he whined. ‘It’ll all come out. Kate Grace. It’ll ruin me.’

Gatecrashers. Gina’s head was tilted so close to the nylon wall they must see her; if they shifted they would bump. The face she turned to Alison was lit up.

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ she said, gleeful, she couldn’t stop herself. ‘That’s it. The old doc. Your mum was fucking the old doc, and your dad found out.’

‘He knew all along,’ said Alison, feeling the misery rise and wanting to put a hand to the wall’s heavy fabric, to reach through it to the other side and pull back all the things she had never been told, the secrets she had had to guess. To take hold of Roger Carter and force an admission from him. Had he heard what Gina said? Let them all hear. ‘Dad knew that night they came back from the hospital, he knew when he phoned The Laurels to tell her to fetch Joe. He knew where to find her. She was here.’

There was a sound, a light metallic rattle, and they turned. A man stood at the torn garden fence, his hands held up and laced through the wire, his body a silhouetted cross. Danny Watts pressed his face against the links and his hand came through, pointing. ‘You,’ he said to Alison.

The police car was parked up a lane off the high street, behind a high privet hedge. DS Sarah Rutherford was leaning against it and looking between cottages across a field that sloped away from them to the grey water. The grass was eddying, blown silver by the wind. She’d known this place all her life, but it still turned its back on her. She turned towards Jennings.

‘You think she did it?’ she said patiently. She knew he went to the pub with the lads and moaned about her but she didn’t
think there was malice in it. You had to give them a chance to learn.

Jennings, leaning against the car, made an effort to stand up straighter. ‘Killed the old bloke?’ he said. ‘Didn’t get much of a look at her last night.’ He gave her a quick, furtive glance and she knew he was thinking, she was a good-looking girl. ‘Not exactly built like a killer. But maybe you can’t tell?’ Looking at her for help. ‘After something like that. Involvement in an incident like that, you know, the … the family murders.’

He was frowning furiously, trying to look like he was thinking. ‘You don’t think … was she ever a suspect, back then? Kids have been known …’ He broke off. At least, thought Sarah Rutherford as she eyed him gloomily, he had some idea of his own limitations. She stepped away from the car and walked to the end of the row of cottages and the horizon opened up.

The line of the dyke meandered along, where the land dissolved into mud and the pale tufted grey of whatever plants grew in the salt and slime. A swamp, a place where bodies could get sucked down, who knew what was under there, remains moving through the sludge. Creek House still stood, against the odds, black as an old stump. It should have been bulldozed years back, it should have been condemned and razed to the ground, and all the crap shovelled into the sea, shards and rubble and bits of someone’s old glasses and all.

The tide was already high, and still rising. Sarah could see where it lapped against the bumpy track that led down to the house. She scratched at her shoulder through the thin fabric of her jacket – the sight made her uneasy.

‘Yes,’ she said out loud. She turned to Jennings. ‘She was a suspect. Esme. She had to be treated as a suspect. It wasn’t nice. She was … what’s the word? Pretty much unreachable.’ She looked beyond the house to the far shore and the power station that squatted above the dunes and the fringe of grass.
It was due to be decommissioned, but they’d leave it standing, too dangerous, too expensive, to dismantle it. The cooling wall was dark offshore like a great rusting radiator in the lapping grey water.