The Crooked House (5 page)

They didn’t talk about it. About why. She could guess – she couldn’t stop herself – at the usual reasons. If she’d asked for information, Polly might have turned off the gas ring and sat down at the table and told her anything she wanted to know, although she wouldn’t have liked it. But Alison didn’t want to know, and when the sad-eyed psychiatrist with the drinker’s face probed her gently she only hardened her position. ‘I don’t have to know any of it,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be helping me? The less I know, the more normal I am.’

The
woman’s face sagged. ‘What’s normal?’ she said, game but hopeless. ‘We don’t have to be normal.’

The week after she turned eighteen, though, Alison asked Polly for the details of the unit in which her father was being held – now a secure ward, for his own protection as much as anyone else’s, in the grounds of a large psychiatric hospital – and went to see him.

It was a hot day, in early July. The nurse who looked up from the reception desk at Alison’s arrival and walked with her down the wide corridor, its polished blue linoleum gleaming, to the room where her father sat, showed no sign of horror or pity, for Alison or her father. She was broad and cheerful, with clean strong hands. She addressed John Grace as though he could understand her, leaning over him to adjust a tube. As if he was a human being; something inside Alison came untwisted painfully as she watched the nurse’s gentle familiarity. ‘You’ll see his eyes water,’ the woman said, straightening. ‘He’s not crying, it’s just damage. To the nerves supplying the tear ducts. He’s not in pain.’

She left Alison alone with him. As the door closed behind her Alison wondered why they trusted her not to harm him, and something weird happened, a ringing in her ears, a dizziness. She stood very still, for fear she’d fall. In the chair he didn’t move; eventually she took a breath, and a step. There was a bed with a hoist over it in the corner of the room and the nurse had pulled up another chair for her, close to his. She sat.
Dad.
She didn’t say it, she didn’t touch his hand or ask a question or say that word, the word that would identify her. It was all she could do to contain the terrible hardening in her chest; she felt it might swell and crack and burst, it might break her open. He was alone, and he’d be alone till he died. No one else came to sit in this chair, and she would never come back. Never.

She didn’t know how long she stayed. She looked at the
machine he was attached to, that had a number of readings displayed on it, a heart rate and other things. At one point he sighed, and a bubble appeared at his lips. At last she got up.

‘They thought I might have done it,’ she said, all in a rush, but he showed no sign of hearing her. ‘Did you think of that?’ His hand fluttered in his lap, wasted but still recognisable, the scar on his broad thumb where an adze had slipped. ‘I could have stopped you.’ Something was in her throat, threatening to choke her.

She looked into his face, and behind the slack mouth, the dull eyes and the raw skin, the hair that had been cut as he never cut it, in there somewhere was her father. Water leaked from his left eye, the side he’d lain on, the eye that had rested sightless on the bloody hall carpet. Damage.

As she turned to go she saw a closed-circuit camera above the door, a red light blinking. So they hadn’t trusted her.

She
had her hair cut very short over lunchtime, the week before they would leave for the wedding. She walked back, crossing the square in the clean June sunshine that filtered through the big London plane trees, and a man looked up from a bench when she passed: without hair to shield her she felt conspicuous. She had put her mother’s scarf in her bag that morning, to give her the nerve for the haircut; she took it out now and leaning to look at her reflection in a car window she tied it quickly, knotting the heavy, slippery silk twill at the nape of her neck. A spy, a girl from an old movie. But as she came out of the lift at work she pulled it off hastily and felt the nakedness all over again.

Her boss Gerry peered at her over his glasses, bewildered, when she crossed the office. ‘Respect,’ said Kay, brought to her feet behind her computer terminal, but she looked distinctly taken aback.

At thirteen Esme’s hair had been long and wavy, split-ended, tangled and streaked from the sun: it blew around her face when she cycled along the bumpy track into the village. Her
mother didn’t want her to cut it: a week after she arrived in Cornwall Alison had taken the kitchen scissors to it in her aunt’s cluttered bathroom, chopped it to below her ears and added a pack of black dye bought at random from the chemist’s into the bargain. At sixteen she got glasses – she’d started having trouble reading the school whiteboard – and the disguise was complete.

‘Suits you, actually,’ said Kay, when she’d recovered. But the question still hung between them:
Why?
When she looked at herself in the mirror Alison found herself quite unable to say whether anyone who’d known her as a thirteen-year-old would recognise her now. She felt a little itch of uncertainty. Was this what she wanted to look like? She had no choice.

She saw Paul that evening. There’d been no shopping trip in preparation for the wedding, much to Kay’s disdain; with Paul Alison had stuck to her line that she had something to wear although in fact she had no idea. And Paul had got them a wedding present on his own, he didn’t like wedding lists, he said, he’d chosen something himself.

Opening the door to her now he put his hand to the thick short hair, standing up from her forehead. ‘Pretty,’ he said, but his eyes had darkened, looking at her.

She came past him. ‘It’ll grow out,’ she said carelessly, not meeting his eye.

Her sisters had both had long hair too, theirs much fairer than hers, fairer even than her mother’s: the memory of that hair, their light, shifting eyes jolted her, after all this time. She’d trained herself not to see her sisters: they were there, always there, but they inhabited a soft dark place in her head, hidden as though behind a curtain. When this wedding was over it would stop, these images would stop, thought Alison, letting her bag drop on to the sofa. She sat beside it. Her head felt odd, shorn, cold.

‘No, I like it,’ he said, leaning down over the sofa behind
her, and for a moment he let his hand rest on the back of her neck. Then it was gone, he was gone. ‘I got you something.’

She recognised the logo on the box. A line appeared beside his mouth as he gave her that half-smile, looking down at her on the sofa, searching her face. Watching. No one had ever examined her before, as he did – it was as if he was memorising her.

‘For our holiday,’ he went on, standing, as if he’d read her mind. ‘Drink?’ He was by a long veneer sideboard, where he kept booze, odd bottles of foreign aperitifs made of things like artichokes. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘No tonic.’

She pulled at the ribbon around the box, but she knew already. There were layers of tissue, she could imagine the salesgirl with her startled eyebrows and her tight-buttoned dress folding the fine light stuff inside. ‘Oh,’ she said, panicked and excited at once.

Inside the shop’s changing room, a thick heavy curtain behind her that muffled whatever the salesgirl and Kay had said to each other, Alison had hardly dared look at herself when she’d tried it on, but she remembered the thrill of the garment’s unfamiliarity, the weight and coolness of it. It was something for an older woman, it was dressing up, it promised things. Kay had tugged at the curtain, her eyes appeared at the gap, an
oh
had escaped her, sounding almost put out and she’d pulled back straight away, out of sight. When Alison had come out and shaken her head to the assistant Kay had frowned. ‘Just as well,’ she said. ‘I’d have had to kill you for it, looking like that.’

He still had his back to her. ‘Did Kay tell you …’ She must have done – but Alison couldn’t imagine any such conspiracy. She held it up. She didn’t even know what it was supposed to be, for sleeping in? Or drifting about. She put a hand to her cropped head, thinking, stupidly, wrong time to cut your hair. But she couldn’t stop looking at it.

‘You
like it.’ Now Paul had turned, a bottle of gin in one hand.

She looked up at him over her shoulder. ‘How did you know?’ she said.

‘I was in Soho,’ he said. ‘I was on my way to lunch with someone and I saw you go in there, with that woman you work with.’

‘Kay.’ Something in his voice made her wonder if he didn’t like Kay. Had they ever even met?

‘I went back later,’ he said. ‘She told me what you tried on. The girl.’

‘Clever,’ said Alison. She thought of him talking to the foreign girl in her tight-buttoned uniform, in the dark room hung with expensive things to be worn in bedrooms. But she wanted the slip: she pulled it into her lap,
mine
.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Paul set the gin bottle down, came over and stroked her cheek. ‘You don’t mind, then,’ he said.

‘Mind?’

‘You’re a pretty independent girl,’ he said. ‘Woman.’ She flushed.

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘I’m going out for some tonic.’ He reached for his wallet, and the door swung behind him.

Alison had never been in his flat alone before: she was aware of that before the door even clicked shut. Did this mean something, that he trusted her, for example? It occurred to her as she stood from the sofa and let the slip fall that one of the reasons they’d got this far was that she had showed as much respect for his privacy as he had hers. Which meant that there was plenty she didn’t know.

She didn’t know if it was the knowledge that he’d watched her go into the underwear shop without disclosing himself, or that he’d been on his way to lunch with someone whose name he hadn’t told her, but she was curious; suddenly, greedily,
childishly curious. How long would it take him? There was an off-licence and convenience store at the foot of the building, with a security-grille for a window. Often a queue.

Three paces and she was inside the bedroom. She skimmed the shelves with her hand, coming away with dust; she looked at the objects on his side of the bed. An old watch with a heavy link strap, two books, both by colleagues of his, a packet of paracetamol in the little drawer. She turned. Unhesitating as a burglar, she went to the walnut chest. A single silver-framed photograph stood on it; she’d glanced at it a dozen times but had never picked it up. Nosy: never be nosy, you might get him nosy back. It was a picture of Paul, alone on a clifftop, arms folded across himself, shirtsleeves rolled. He must have been thirteen or fourteen; he stared at the camera, composed. She pulled open the top two drawers, the place everyone hid secrets.

Striped cotton boxers in rolls and two unopened packs on one side, on the other black socks, grey socks, a belt, ties, everything neat. A small box sat inside the curled belt; she lifted it out, didn’t even need to open it to know that it contained a ring. A large square stone that looked to her like a diamond, a setting from early last century. His mother’s? Quickly she put it back: the socks shifted and she saw something else, disguised among them. Something wrapped in a heavy woollen cloth, khaki, not clean. She cleared the socks and looked down at it nestling there, bewildered as she saw an outline that seemed ridiculously familiar. A child’s toy? She picked up the small bundle, and its weight was alarming, it was too heavy to be a toy. She set it down again with clumsy hands and stared at it. Then unrolled it. It was a gun. A real one.

An old gun. She grasped for an explanation. A memento? Old but she didn’t know how old: it was chunky scarred black metal with a cross-hatched metal grip, a handgun. It had
Herstal Belgique
stamped above the trigger, and there were some numbers. The khaki it was wrapped in looked old, certainly. Had his father served? Now she was embroidering, a dead mother who’d given him her engagement ring and a war hero for a father. Too young to have had a father in the war. She searched through their conversations, coming up only against how little she knew. One thing she was sure of, as she heard a sound from the stairwell, was it was none of her business. A gun. He’d find her with it in her hands and there was nothing she could do.

The doorbell rang and her heart jumped, hammering. He hadn’t taken his keys: she was saved.

Carefully, Alison replaced the gun in the bag and pushed it under the socks, slid the drawers closed quietly, went into the bathroom as unhurriedly as if sleepwalking, flushed the lavatory, walked out again. She picked up the slip from the sofa as she passed, to explain the rush of blood to her face.

Not a crime, to own such a thing. Or was it? Was it odd? A historian might own such a thing, a teenage boy might. A farmer or the owner of an isolated house might, to shoot rats. More of a crime to be searching through someone’s drawers.

Had it been loaded?

She opened the door.

It’s
Gina from her childhood that she dreams of, the night before they go, or at least she thinks so. Even awake, somewhere in the recesses of her mind Alison confuses Gina with Kay; they both share the sly sharpness, the knowingness, looking sideways at her, laughing. They both tug at her with their promises of friendship.

In the years between Alison has often wondered about Gina – she thinks about her more often than she does her mother, or the twins. Joe is the worst, she hardly dares ever approach Joe in her mind, she is terrified of remembering his smile, the frayed edges of his jeans at the heel, the way he would swing himself on to his bicycle. She didn’t even dream of him: it was one thing she did ask the therapist in that stuffy little room with the plastic flowers on the table, and the box of tissues. ‘Why not?’ The woman said, sadly, ‘Your brain’s protecting itself, I expect. It … it may change.’

The therapist never promised anything, Alison noticed that, as if she might get sued, and she never gave advice either. Always little tentative suggestions – it was one of the reasons Alison
stopped believing in her. Take up swimming, drawing, walking. The situation seemed to her to require something more extreme, not sensible civilised suggestions. It wanted some violent and dangerous therapy: jumping off high buildings with a rope around you or that kind of deep-water diving where you go down to the limits of your lung capacity and pass out. Or total denial.

Gina had looked nothing like Kay. Strong-willed and bold, she’d been tall and well-developed, breasts and everything at fourteen, too big for the crowded mess of the small terraced house where she lived with her father. When she was eleven her mother had left them for another man and her dad worked on the cargo boats, running freight around the coast for days at a time, Ipswich to Gravesend, mostly sand, he once told Esme, coming in glassy-eyed with the booze and uncharacteristically forthcoming. Esme generally steered clear when he was home. He worked sober, then drank when he came back. Social services were kept in the dark and Gina fed herself with money he’d dish out to her every couple of weeks. ‘He’s all right,’ was all she’d say of her father. ‘Better than being in care.’ Esme’s mother made noises but she never told on Gina.

Gina did badly at school: she could hardly write, Alison happened to know. She simply wasn’t interested: partly a matter of hating every authority figure, every teacher, on principle; partly a matter of recklessness. But she wasn’t stupid.

In the dream Gina was running, out along the horizon towards the little church, fast and fearless. She was running away, and Alison was behind her. They reached the end of the spit where the marsh dissolved into shingle and mud but Gina didn’t stop, Alison fought through the mud after her and into the grey tide where they twined around each other, down under the surface. Under the water Gina’s eyes were open. She spoke, bubbles rising from her pale lips in the clouded water.
‘He’s still there,’ she said. ‘It’s still there.’ And her face wavered, shifted in the water: it was Kay, it was Gina. It was someone else, someone she couldn’t name.

Alison woke up.

It was eight by her mobile, and Paul was coming for her at nine. He’d never been to her place before: she looked around, trying to see it through his eyes. A little bolthole for a scared rabbit. Where once it had been an untidy burrow heaped with crumpled clothes and piled books, now it looked neurotically neat. She sighed and got out of bed. So far her suitcase only contained the slip, still folded in its dark tissue. On impulse she dropped her trainers in on top, and a sports bra, but the dark red still glowed.

Kay had been impressed. ‘He actually took the trouble to find out what you wanted?’ she’d said, eyebrows up under her chopped fringe. ‘He didn’t just buy you a bit of scratchy red tat?’ And shrugged. ‘I suppose that’s cool.’

She’d told Kay about the gun, too; her eyes had widened. ‘Jesus.’ Then she’d gone quiet for a bit and finally had shrugged, unwillingly. ‘Second World War’s his thing? Men, though. Collecting gas masks and that stuff. A bit weird, if you ask me.’ They’d laughed.

Dodging the issue of the wedding outfit she put in jeans, a shirt, a jersey, thinking, there’ll be wind off the sea, feeling memory press against her. A swimsuit. She held it up, frowning, and something happened, the feel of the water from her dream and from further back flooded her senses. The memory of swimming out in the estuary off someone’s battered little dinghy, out by the power station’s cooling wall and the water marvellously, unnaturally warm.

And suddenly a face – broad, serious, a direct gaze from under a straight fringe – looked back at her from down the years. The woman who’d asked her those same questions over and over every day for a week after the murders. The
policewoman whose eyes had not left Esme’s, unwavering in their inquiry even as the too-full mug of tea burned her hand. And with the realisation it was as if Alison had answered a ringing phone and the policewoman was there on the other end and about to speak. Alison held her breath. The murders. She had never called them that, not even in her head, because that would have made her father a murderer. She reached up into the cupboard where her dresses hung and took a handful down. One of them would do.

The police hadn’t told her much of anything, during that terrible endless week, only asked her questions and dutifully she had answered. It only occurred to her much later that she could have screamed and shouted and demanded to know: also that they might not have told her anything because she could be a suspect. She had had blood everywhere when they came for her, her hands, legs, feet, even a smear on her neck, and there were bloody footprints on the hall carpet she didn’t remember leaving. That was one of the things they’d asked her, over and over, which rooms she’d been in afterwards, with blood on her feet.

Alison knelt with the dresses in her hands, laying them in the suitcase, as the questions they’d asked her all those years ago rattled in her head like grit in a wheel.

Shoes. Head down, she put in a pair of sandals she liked, with fine gold straps. She’d worn them at a work do one time and a man had knelt down to look at them.

Of course the policewoman still existed, she might even be still there, behind a desk at the police station. And with a pulse of certainty Alison knew that if no one else recognised her, the policewoman would. Her doorbell rang shrilly and she crossed the landing to the front window to look down.

Below her Paul stood looking into the square, his back to the door. He had his hands in his pockets, shifting on his feet,
impatient, and for a split second Alison thought about not answering. Then he turned, and looked up.

She’d delayed as long as she could in London, showing him around and registering the look of silent dismay he gave the battered hallway and the shared bathroom (a stale flannel over the sink, a ring round the bath). She moved him along, to her room. ‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ he said dubiously, glancing inside, the yellow light reflected off the big tree. ‘Well, short term, anyway.’

She stopped. ‘What, until I hit the big time, you mean?’ she said. An arm around her shoulders he laughed, squeezing her against him and smiling down.

‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look after you.’ And she said nothing, blinking, a secret stupid excitement inside her.

But then he was turning, briskly. ‘Come on, then.’

Getting out of London had seemed to take hours, but Alison had been grateful for every crawling minute. Stuck in traffic round arterial roads, between parades of houses and trees sooty with a century of exhaust fumes, past Turkish bakeries and fried chicken shops and used-car forecourts. Creeping through the suburbs, Alison covertly observed Paul’s driving, and his car; she hadn’t seen either before. The car was small and sensible and so clean it might have been hoovered. Paul was a confident, slightly impatient driver, too long in the leg for the car and shifting in his seat every time they got stuck in the sluggish traffic.

His phone had rung once and although they were stationary at that point his hand had gone straight to divert it. At last the lanes had multiplied, the shops and pavements disappeared behind siege-strength walls and the sprawling outskirts abruptly receded in the rear-view mirror. Paul straightened in his seat with visible relief; Alison realised she was pushing back in hers, as if bracing herself.

By
the time the estuary came into view it was evening, but not dark yet. They topped a slope and there it was, spread out, grey and silver, the low rays of a midsummer sun glinting off the mirrored cube of the power station, far out towards the horizon. Even from miles inland Alison could see that the tide was out, the meandering channels gleamed all the way to where brown water met the bruised-blue sky. If she closed her eyes she would smell the trickle of sea over mud, she would see the bristly lavender-grey plant that grew among the creeks. As they turned down the shallow incline around them the fields and orchards and hedges were luminous green in the low, flat midsummer light and she felt it, the thing she’d been resisting – not fear but the sweet yearning tug of home.

‘Look,’ said Paul, ‘that’s quite something, isn’t it?’ His head turned quickly to see her reaction but she only stared straight ahead, as though she was the one driving. It was like a great slow green wave pulling her down, washing and turning, her childhood a tide coming up to reclaim her.

He turned back. ‘Morgan grew up here,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Can you imagine that?’

Five miles or so from their destination they had stopped for a late lunch. Without saying anything Paul had indicated and pulled in at a thatched pub beside a pond. The Plough: she must have passed it a hundred times as a child in the back of her parents’ car. Someone they knew had even worked here, though she couldn’t remember who. As she sat in the garden it crowded in on her, the bulrushes in the pond, the leaning apple tree, the swinging pub sign, all horribly familiar, bringing with it the smell of the seats in the car, the line of her mother’s jaw as she leaned into the back to tell them off, her father’s hands on the wheel.

When the waitress came out for their order and she was too young to have been more than a baby the last time Alison was here, she realised she’d been holding her breath, half
dreading, half wanting a face she knew. Aware of his eyes on her she ate up every last crumb of her meal though it took an effort to remember what she’d actually eaten. Chicken pie, glutinous and pale, green beans. Watery coffee, some kind of cake with icing. Every time the gawping, near-wordless waitress came out with the laminated menu Paul would start to shake his head but Alison would take it from her and order something else she didn’t want, just to postpone the moment. In the end Paul had jumped up and gone inside for the bill, leaving her at the table.

In the car now as they crested the last long shallow incline to the estuary, Alison turned to look at him.

‘Don’t you like it?’ she said, before she could stop herself. ‘Not good enough for Morgan?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, and she could see that he meant it, the great silvered expanse of estuary reflected in his face as he drove. ‘That’s what I meant. Don’t you think so?’

And now they were coming fast down between high hedges, the sinking sun behind them. At intervals Alison registered a cottage – a long wall, a big shabby barn alone in a field, a row of poplars – and knew them instantly, one after the other, without even turning her head to look. Every feature of the landscape crowded in as the little car descended towards the first village houses, jostling for her attention. The apprehension she’d been holding at bay since they left London bloomed until it was all around her, there was nothing she could look at that would not hurtle her back thirteen years except the sealed interior of the car. She closed her eyes. She surrendered.

‘You all right?’ She blinked her eyes open. Paul had turned to look at her just as they came into a bend, too fast, a low building loomed and filled Alison’s line of vision and she saw dusty windows and a lopsided gate. He wrenched at the wheel and they were round.

But too late: she was back, she was here.

‘Sorry,’
said Paul, shaken. He changed gear, slowed the car right down, breathed out. ‘Nasty bend.’

‘Country roads,’ she said. ‘Give me London any day.’ And Paul made a sound of assent but he was concentrating on the road now. Alison looked back again surreptitiously, trying to remember. She’d spent so long trying not to, it was a rusty mechanism; how did you do it? Detail. One dark stormy evening, a November night, a friend of Joe’s, hit by a car on an unlit road. He’d died.

Things jostled in the luminous twilight. There was more to remember, a whole forgotten childhood unfolded in colours, showed her how grey her life had been since. There had been days on the water, borrowing someone’s boat, dreaming, walking out on the marsh. Watching, spying, giggling with Gina, their heads so close she could smell Gina’s gum, her perfume from the chemist’s discount basket. Alison turned back to look at the road.

‘It’s somewhere around here, isn’t it?’ she said, and as Paul flicked his head to examine her she made herself smile back. His car didn’t have satellite navigation, he didn’t even have a smartphone. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I looked at the website. I think we’re nearly there.’ They approached a junction. ‘Left,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s left.’ He paused, turned. Left.

‘You were right,’ he said, his indicator ticking, and there loomed the two cypresses, sooty-dark in the evening light, and behind them the red-brick and painted gables of the Edwardian roadhouse. There was the big bay window that used to be crowded with hoarded rubbish, the cluttered drive now cleared. The car crunched in on the gravel and a light blinked on in the hotel’s porch.

Stock-still in the car, Alison suddenly remembered a hairless child climbing out of an ambulance, sickness and the first blunt shock; cancer and the incontrovertible fact of death. What had come to the crooked house wasn’t the first horror to be visited
on the village, after all. The car felt stifling then, sweat on Alison’s upper lip as if she was on the edge of fever. There was worse, crowding into her head. Her father whistling in his workshop; the twins’ fifth birthday, opening presents in the garden among daffodils; Joe’s arm around her on the beach as his friends teased her.