The Crooked House (8 page)

She
closed it behind her and the wind died, her ears buzzed in the respite. It smelled of old rotted things, low-level stink: ancient dustbins, stale air, blocked sewage. With her back to the rough flaking door she surveyed the yard.

It was here he’d kissed her. Her first real kiss. The windsurfer, his chin rough with golden stubble, his crinkled smile, his smell of sweat and cigarettes. She had seen him on the water, had seen him on a ladder in overalls, painting someone’s house, and then one night outside the pub he’d talked to her, standing close, asked her where she lived. Older than her: Esme still with her centre parting, her starter bra. And her best friend Gina wanting to know all about it, rough and jeering.

The yard was smaller than she remembered. To her right was the shed for bins and junk, a piece of wall, the back door, and the hidden place. Their place. A niche created between the crude flat-roofed kitchen extension, the original rear of the house and the yard wall, a space big enough to accommodate a child, or two if squeezed together and giggling in a game of hide and seek. And more tempting still, the single brick, low down, the first in a row above the stone base, that had been loose from the start and that within weeks Joe had begun to dig at with a kitchen knife. A space behind not big enough for more than a note or a penny or possibly a pocket knife, a shard of something. She squatted now: the brick was in its place.

Alison thought of the police here, searching. She didn’t know where they’d looked, what they’d been looking for – perhaps it had all been clear-cut to them from the beginning. Had it been to her? She remembered the emergency services operator’s voice even now, asking her,
Is he still there?
The killer, the man who might kill her too. And she’d known then, that’s Dad. The long gun between his hands.

Her adult fingers weren’t so much bigger than Esme’s aged ten: she worked them either side of the loose brick and it shifted with a scrape and was out.

Alison
felt in the space with her hand, and had to bend lower to see, pushing her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose. There was nothing there.

What had she expected? She squatted on her heels, leaned her back a moment against the wall and something crunched under her feet, snagging her attention. She peered down between her trainers.

A curved wire, a single tiny teardrop-shaped piece of transparent plastic attached to it, where she’d have expected two. She frowned, and put her hand to the dust and rubble, sifting it with her forefinger. After thirteen years?
No
.

Shifting position, Alison was on her bare knees now, heedless of broken glass. She passed her hand across the rubble, searching intently. Knowing what she was after. Not his, not necessarily his. She felt a sob in her throat at the thought that, after all this time she would know it when she saw it. If she saw it. There.

The metal was bent, snapped off, but the tiny logo was intact. The arm of a pair of glasses, long ground in the dust. She stood, it fell from her hand. In the rehabilitation unit his eyes had leaked tears, sightless. No one had thought to help him see. No one had thought to look for them.

Her father’s glasses.

She saw his face, pressed sideways into the dark-soaked hall rug. She blundered, blinded, back through the rickety yard door and gasped for air.

Out on the marsh the wind flattened the samphire and as she gazed back towards the peaked line of sail-lofts something caught her eye, halfway to the foreground. Upright as a totem in the early sun someone stood on the mud, turned her way.

She was being watched.

When
the middle-aged couple appeared in the doorway of the sun room Alison’s first feeling was of relief. Theirs had been the only table laid for breakfast, near the French windows that opened on to the rickety veranda and a stretch of rough grass. As she watched, a man in white decorator’s overalls with a rough mop of hair walked past outside carrying a bucket of tools.

With only one table to serve the waitress had hovered incessantly, urging foods on them: bacon, kippers. ‘From the next village, nearly,’ the girl had urged them in accented English. ‘Artisan smokehouse.’ Alison wondered if it had been this girl Jan had been shouting at in the kitchen this morning – perhaps they had a fridge full of food and no guests. She and Paul must be the only ones to have turned up so early for the wedding, and she wondered now why she’d agreed to it, why he had wanted it.

Paul accepted the kippers, and toast, and coffee, good-humoured although she knew by now that he wouldn’t like the coffee, he was particular. Queasy, Alison asked for toast and tea.

‘Really?’
he said, as the waitress finally left. ‘I’d have thought you’d be starving.’

‘I only went a couple of miles,’ she said, forcing herself to smile, deprecatingly. ‘Terrible. I’m not fit at all.’

It was his first overt reference to Alison’s expedition since she’d got back. It had been almost eight when, breathless, she’d slipped back into the dim room. The bed was empty and the shower drumming loudly the other side of the bathroom door. She’d stripped everything off in a panic and gone in there with him quickly, reaching for him in the steam, under the fierce jets of the hotel shower. He let her take hold of him: she had the feeling he was playing along, amused, that he knew she was trying to distract them both from something, and that he grew hard as part of a game of his own. Only at the end did he move, raising his own hands to her upper arms and holding her in his grip, and only then did she feel herself rise to the bait, instantly impatient.

She couldn’t find her own glasses for some time after they came out, but was grateful for the blurred world, as if it made her less visible as she groped and searched through the bedcovers. Paul had found them in the end, straightening to pick them off the floor. ‘You were in a hurry,’ he observed mildly, and she tilted her head back to smile up at him, afraid.

At first she had thought, looking at the fragment of metal and plastic, that there would be an explanation. Carried out to the yard on a policeman’s boot. Caught in her own clothing as she stepped around her father’s body. Her reflexes buzzed a warning, but her brain tried to rationalise. Only this wasn’t normal, there was nothing rational about holding a weapon to a child’s head, seeing your own child torn open, blood and guts and splintered bone.

His glasses. Always by her father’s bed, as hers had been since she’d turned sixteen. It occurred to her only now that that little tic of mortality, or dread, that sounded every morning
as she turned to reach for her glasses was not just the fear of helplessness without them, it was because the action set some obscure clockwork of memory going, unacknowledged. It made her think of him, her father picking his latest pair off the side table and setting them on his nose, his face rumpled from sleep, his thinning hair tufted, owlish.

Had he had a spare pair? One or two, old pairs stashed in drawers. A pair in the workshop, hanging from a red string. She also remembered him out for a run with his glasses on – never contact lenses because like hers his eyes couldn’t tolerate them. It must have been early on, he had long since stopped anything so worthy at the end, when work had dried up and he’d have had the time to run but drank instead. A branch had knocked his glasses off and he hadn’t been able to find them, he’d got home in a blur and almost weeping with helplessness. They had gone out on their bikes, she and Joe retracing his steps, and found them for him. He’d hugged them with a teary fierceness that worried even Joe, disentangling himself.

But the question was … Her thoughts fractured. His face side-on in blood on the rug. She willed herself to concentrate. Had his glasses been there, or near, smashed or fallen or kicked aside, had they been there, anywhere? Had the force of the gunshot sent them to a corner of the hall, twisted and shattered?

But she didn’t know. She couldn’t remember.

The police would know. Alison felt a slow burn of anxiety, somewhere at the centre of her chest. But would they? Had anyone even said,
He wears glasses
? She bent over her plate and, head down, she saw Paul’s long fingers delicate on the knife and fork, meticulously lifting the bones out of the coppery fish.

Facing the doorway, Alison saw the couple first. A tall man, broad-shouldered in a pale-coloured jacket, freckled and tanned, a good head of sandy hair mostly turned to grey. The woman
beside him wore a flowered silk dress, delicate, pretty, girlish but no longer a girl. His wife, not his daughter. Her hair curled up on her shoulders and her eyes, even from where Alison sat, were big and dark blue, with spidery lashes. She looked nervy.

Quickly Alison understood they weren’t guests – something about the way they stood, they had a purpose. Then the man raised a hand in greeting. ‘Paul,’ he said heartily, and Paul laid down his knife and fork.

‘Dr Carter.’ He stood, putting a hand out to Alison. ‘This is my … my … my girlfriend. Alison, this is Dr Carter.’ The man clapped him on his shoulder and Paul cleared his throat. ‘Morgan’s father.’

‘Father of the bride,’ said Carter, with a theatrical grimace. ‘For my sins.’

‘Darling,’ the woman admonished, nervously. He looked at her in irritation then turned to Alison. ‘Roger,’ he said with a stiff little bow. ‘And this is my wife, Lucy,’ and he put his hand back on Paul’s shoulder, proprietorial.

Morgan took after her father, then, thought Alison. Not just their sandy blond vigour, either, it was a sort of steamroller quality, a greedy energy. The word was probably arrogance.

‘You look lovely, Lucy,’ said Paul with conscious gallantry and Lucy Carter pinked, her eyelashes turned starrier as she gazed at him. ‘When do they arrive?’ he said gently. ‘Morgan and ah … ah …’

‘You’d better remember his name, at least,’ said Carter, bluff, ‘if you’re to be best man. He’ll be staying here until the wedding, too. He’s called Christian.’

Paul began to remonstrate but Carter stopped him. ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve done your homework, Paul, I’m only joking. And you were the natural choice.’ Alison must have been looking confused because he turned to her then. ‘Christian’s South African, the old friend he’d marked out couldn’t make it over, and Paul – well, Paul stepped in.’

So
Paul barely even knew the groom. Alison didn’t know what to make of that fact but it made her uneasy, it seemed like a deception. She found herself dreading the speeches. Carter had turned back to Paul. ‘Of course if it had been up to me to find her a husband … well.’ He darted a glance at Paul from under sandy eyebrows. ‘Water under the bridge, I suppose.’

‘They’re arriving tonight?’ said Paul.

‘Yes. The happy couple,’ said Roger Carter, looking around the room. ‘Come for a drink, we’re having drinks, aren’t we?’ Lucy Carter brightened.

‘Yes, do come, Paul,’ she said. ‘Sixish? I mean, it won’t be anything glamorous.’ Her husband snorted.

Alison sat back down carefully and Roger Carter glanced down at her, put out. ‘Darling,’ whispered his wife.

‘What?’ said Carter, frowning at the kipper congealing on the table. ‘Oh. Well, I suppose you must get on with your breakfasts. I only came to tell you the rehearsal’s at four tomorrow. Of course there’ll be another run-through, last minute, next day, bloody endless. Anyway, St Peter’s on the Wall, you remember how to get there?’ He had Paul’s hands between his, now, as he glanced at Alison. ‘You too, ah …’

‘Alison,’ said his wife.

‘You’re very welcome, too, Alison,’ said Roger Carter, and bowed again. She saw that his hair, which had looked so thick, was thinning on top. ‘So glad you could come at all, short notice I know. Although the rehearsal will be a chore, don’t feel … anyway …’ He dropped Paul’s hands, at last, pulled out his chair for him. ‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘Six o’clock, remember.’

And they were gone, leaving dust motes and Lucy Carter’s scent drifting in their wake and the waitress bobbing futilely in the doorway.

‘Well,’ said Paul, prodding his cold kipper.

‘Well,’ said Alison, knowing she shouldn’t. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

The
gears grated as Alison put the little car into reverse, but when she looked up at him Paul wasn’t even wincing. He leaned down and smiled through the window. ‘Have fun,’ he said. ‘See you later. Whenever.’

As she turned to check there was nothing behind her he put a hand to her cheek. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. He meant Morgan. His hand stayed. ‘I’ve waited a long time for you, you know,’ he said softly. She searched his face and he smiled wearily. ‘I do want to make you happy, you see. It’ll be fine.’

Perhaps their row had softened him up. Not that it had been a row, by most people’s standards – the waitress certainly hadn’t seemed to notice but perhaps she’d been too anxious about the abandoned kippers. ‘So sorry,’ she’d said. ‘I bring you something else? Is all included, breakfast. There is no charge?’

It felt like a row to Alison because they’d never had one before: it consisted mostly of silence but it was like being at a crossroads, and the wrong path would lead to catastrophe. She had to think really very hard before saying the next thing.

Paul had laid down his knife and fork and set his hands flat
on the table either side of his plate. He hadn’t drunk his coffee, as she had predicted.

‘Come
on
,’ he said. ‘Really?’

She made herself smile. ‘You know what I’m talking about, though, don’t you?’ she said. Beyond Paul the sunlight dazzled through the big windows; she saw the decorator lighting a cigarette on the veranda, cupping his hand around the flame. The gesture stirred something in her memory.

‘Morgan? You knew,’ he said. She looked at him then. ‘You always knew. Come on.’ He leaned his arm back over the chair and examined her thoughtfully. ‘Didn’t you?’

Had
she always known? She was pretty sure they’d never had a conversation about Morgan Carter and what she meant – or had meant – to Paul, even if on the one occasion she’d met her, turning her back and tumbling blond hair on Alison to talk to Paul, there’d been something palpable between them. But he seemed quite unruffled at the breakfast table, no trace of guilt.

‘And now I’m just looking for a fight?’ she said.

Paul shrugged, smiled. ‘Well, I surrender,’ he said. ‘We went out for quite a long time, quite a long time ago. I met her parents. We broke up. End of story.’

‘Perhaps I did know,’ Alison said slowly, as something surfaced uneasily. She just wanted to get away from it now, she had no interest in being the girlfriend jealous of his exes. Except it occurred to her that looking upset might buy her some more time to herself. ‘I just didn’t think … Oh, never mind.’ There were so many other questions she might ask:
Did you live together? Why did it end? Did you love her?
She discarded them all. ‘So you know this place already?’

‘Over three, four years – I came up here a lot,’ said Paul, readily. But he was watching her closely. Don’t lose it, Alison told herself. ‘Weekends. Once upon a time,’ he continued. ‘I was part of the family, you know how that goes.’ She almost
shook her head. No, I don’t. ‘Christmases, even,’ he said, and his face softened. ‘It’s quite different in the winter.’

It shook her and she felt herself stiffen, working to hold her composure. She thought of her father kneeling to light the fire on dank November evenings when it grew dark on the marsh long before tea, the sun setting as they walked from the bus stop after school. The hit-and-run that killed Joe’s friend had been in November, she recalled then, a hushed announcement before the Remembrance Day assembly, a warning about taking care walking home in the dark.

Paul went on. ‘I remember a Christmas Eve service. The church was freezing.’

Alison’s family hadn’t been attenders of religious services. She imagined the little party from The Laurels, the Carters like royalty setting out for the tiny church. Village royalty – although she couldn’t remember or visualise the house, The Laurels itself. Perhaps it was a big new-build somewhere on the other side, the Carters looked like the type. The waitress was back, taking away their plates, making small sounds of apology and disappointment over what they’d left. Alison waited, trying to think of how to put it to him.
I want to be alone
.

But Paul headed her off, on his feet before the waitress had even turned away from the table. Alison followed him up the wide carpeted staircase, along the little panelled corridor that smelled of wax polish. She sat on the bed, that had been made, saw the fresh towels on the rail through the bathroom door. She tried to imagine a life where the two of them got up and went to bed every day together, where sex wasn’t much more than a ripple in the day, and failed. Paul was at the small writing table in the corner, clicking open the briefcase he’d brought with him. In her pocket her mobile rang and she got it out.

‘Work,’ she said to Paul, as he turned to her with a look of
mild inquiry. It was Rosa, immediately launching into some halting questions about the terms of an author’s contract, the disbursement of funds from a foreign deal, something Alison barely had anything to do with but she answered as best she could. Then Rosa blurted, ‘How’s the weather? They say it’s set to be nice over there. You could do with a holiday. I hope you’re OK.’ All in a rush.

‘It’s lovely,’ Alison replied slowly. ‘Thank you.’ She had the feeling that this hasty stumbling question was the real purpose of the call; at the same time she was aware of Paul watching her. ‘Back on Sunday.’ She hung up, puzzled, turned to him but couldn’t ask the question. How did Rosa know where she was? She’d only told Kay. Kay wasn’t the type to dish out information unsolicited – but you never knew.

‘Darling,’ said Paul, behind her now, his hand on her shoulder. He sounded hesitant, weary. ‘Look I should have said but … I’ve got some work to get done today. Could we … would you …’ Alison twisted to look up at him, wrong-footed. Had he known what she was thinking? Was he giving her space?

This is where Morgan grew up
, was what Paul had said, as they crested the hill and looked down. So the Carters would have been here, they’d have known about that night, it would be part of their lives. The killings. It occurred to Alison that everyone in the village probably knew more about the killings than she did.

‘I might get out and explore, then,’ she said quickly, making her face sunny. ‘Would that be OK?’

She didn’t even have to ask for the car. He was back at the briefcase, fishing out the keys. ‘As long as you’re back for the drinks at six,’ he said, dangling them. The light poured in through the window behind him, his face in shadow, but as she reached for the keys he took her hand and held it. ‘Give yourself time.’

Now
as she reversed across the gravel he had already turned to go back into the hotel, walking quickly. He didn’t look back to watch her go.

She drove out of the village, leaving the estuary down behind her, heading inland. She knew where she was going.

The big ugly police station on the dwindling edge of the town where they’d used to go for the Saturday morning supermarket shop, a ten-mile drive. Remembering no more than a wall of grimy barred windows and a blue lantern, Alison knew she would find it. She would find the female detective with her straight brown hair and her big nose and her gentle voice, and as the face swam up to meet her she remembered. The last time.

The last time she had seen the policewoman was when they were loading Polly’s car with Esme’s things.

A suitcase full of clothes that she would have grown out of within the year, some books, a carrier bag of threadbare soft toys she should already have grown out of. She had left the letters that spelled her name on the shelf, not because it was no longer her name, that occurred to her only later. But because her father had made them. Because that relationship was gone.

Beside the car the policewoman had put her arms around her, so hastily that Esme wondered afterwards if she’d been mistaken, the detective immediately straightening back up and tugging at her jacket. Perhaps it was against the rules. Almost certainly. Esme had looked up into her face then and had seen her, for what seemed like the first time. A woman of thirty years old or so with a straight fringe and hair tied back, a worried-looking woman. Esme had wondered if she had children.
Keep me
.

‘Good luck,’ the policewoman said, her mouth set in a line. ‘I won’t see you again.’

Why
had they come here, her little family, why had they come here, to be entangled, to be destroyed?

We need more space.

Alison had never consciously thought about it but she’d always known, deep down, that there’d been more to their move here, twenty years ago now, than that. The old house had been in a town a bit more than an hour away, inland, one in a terrace of houses, they’d had neighbours, a garden with apple trees.

When they lived in the old house Mum had always had a job: dinner lady, doctor’s receptionist, then full time at the artists’ supplies shop. Sometimes Dad would take her to pick Mum up at the end of the day and Esme would play among the shelves, squeezing the packs of clay and grabbing whole handfuls of new pencils. Mum had been trained in fine arts at the college where she and Dad had met: there had been a portfolio of sketches in a drawer that Esme and Joe used to sneak a look at, marvelling at the things their mother could do. Had once been able to do. Dad had once told them she’d stopped drawing when they were born and then looked as if he regretted it, seeing their puzzled faces fall.

There’d been no job for Kate Grace in Saltleigh, nor in the nearest town. She’d looked, once the twins were in nursery, but there’d been nothing. Dad had held on to some of his old contacts, building firms, private clients, but one after the other they evaporated, settling for someone closer, more available. More sober.

Because his drinking was why they’d come away, that much had always been clear, if unspoken. In the year before they moved she remembered him odd, distant, morose, remembered giving up waiting for the bedtime kiss. There’d been a night she’d been woken by a terrible clatter and Mum gasping, then she’d appeared in the bedroom door telling Esme it was all right, to go back to sleep. But it wasn’t all right: he’d fallen
down the stairs drunk. He’d come to breakfast with a black eye. They’d moved no more than a few months after, and for a time the drinking receded, became an uncomfortable memory. A blip.

So it seemed to have worked, and if the house wasn’t noticeably bigger than the old one there were other reasons to be here, better reasons, if you asked Joe and Esme. There was the grey sea, Power Station Beach and the paths through the marsh and the big empty sky; they were more space, all right.

But then it stopped working.

Behind the wheel of the strange car Alison slowed. Here was where it went wrong – and she stared, as if the front gardens, the net curtains and empty pavements might have an answer. A small row of council houses appeared, she recognised them. They must have been built in the 1970s, dull beige brick boxes with double glazing. They looked as though, against the odds, they were still council houses, each front door painted the same red. On impulse Alison pulled up and parked.

This was where she’d lived, the local girl who’d had cancer. Alison groped for the name but it was evading her. She remembered seeing the girl climbing out of a taxi with her mother. The hood of her coat was up but that didn’t disguise the hairless forehead, the face smooth as an egg, no eyebrows or lashes.

A name bobbed up out of the dark waters.
Kyra Price
.

The house she identified as the sick girl’s had net curtains that looked like they hadn’t been moved in some time, and windows filmed with dust. Suddenly it seemed important to Alison to know if Kyra Price had lived. She’d had leukaemia, which could be survived – at least children could survive it, if you believed the magazines and their feel-good stories, their campaigns. The dirty windows offered nothing in the way of hope. Could she get out, ring the bell, ask, did your child live? No.

Leaning
a little to turn the key in the ignition, in a sudden hurry to leave, in the wing mirror she saw a figure approaching along the pavement. It was a woman pushing a buggy. Still crouched over the ignition, Alison watched her approach. Hair pulled back, broad-shouldered, she shoved the buggy along with one hand, careless, a cigarette in the other. The dishevelled woman from the pub last night, thought Alison with sudden certainty. But there was more, there was something about her, the heavy breasts, the way she brushed the hair back from her face with the flat of her cigarette hand. Alison sat up in the driver’s seat, waiting for her to draw nearer, to be sure. The child was asleep, slumped a little in the flimsy stroller. Eight or so, too big for a buggy.

They disappeared from the mirror, in the car’s blindspot, then suddenly the woman was there at the window, leaning in with aggressive curiosity. Their eyes met, something about the movement must have roused the child because there was a wail and the woman straightened, the woman she knew. Her heart pounding, Alison fumbled for the ignition, turned to reverse, pulled away.

Gina. Her friend Gina. Gina had a kid, Gina still here, disconsolate on a bar stool, big handsome fearless angry Gina. Alison accelerated towards the edge of the village, before she could look round, before she could turn back and get out of the car and grab Gina and hold on to her, arms around her, Gina. Gina, it’s me.

And suddenly she was on the edge of the village, at a junction with what they’d always known as the fast road, the road the buses rocked along on the way to and from the town, the supermarket, the school. A sign on her left, half buried in the hedge said
Dyke End
, and she turned to see a lane that led to trees. A car loomed in her rear-view mirror, a horn tooted. Panicked, Alison made as if to pull away but out of nowhere, across her path, came a truck loaded with turnips, swaying,
scattering grass and dust in its wake. The car behind her pulled out and past, a man glowering sideways at her. Alison leaned her head on the steering wheel and sobbed.