“Oh, thank God!” I said. “Thank God, Lena!” We stood like that, hugging each other, for a little while until I stopped crying and she started. She sobbed like a child, her skinny body crumpling, slipping through my arms to the floor. I crouched down next to her and tried to take her hand, but it was curled tightly into a fist.
“It’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Somehow it will be. I’ll take care of you.”
She looked at me, wordless; she didn’t seem to be able to speak. Instead she held out her hand, her fingers unfurling to reveal the treasure inside—a little silver bracelet with an onyx clasp—and then she found her voice.
“She didn’t jump,” she said, her eyes glittering. I felt the temperature in the room plummet. “Mum didn’t leave me. She didn’t jump.”
LENA
I stood in the shower for a long time with the water as hot as I could stand it. I wanted to scour my skin, I wanted the whole of the past day and night and week and month washed off me. I wanted him washed off me, his filthy house and his fists and the stink of him, his breath, his blood.
Julia was kind to me when I got home. She wasn’t faking, she was obviously glad that I was back, she was worried about me. She seemed to think that Mark had assaulted me, like she maybe thought he was some sort of pervert who couldn’t keep his hands off teenage girls. I’ll give him this: he was right about one thing—people don’t understand about him and K, they never will.
(There’s a tiny, twisted part of me that sort of wishes I believed in an afterlife, and that the two of them could pick up again there, and maybe things might be all right for them, and she’d be happy. As much as I hate him, I’d like to think that somehow Katie could be happy.)
When I felt clean, or at least as close to clean as I thought it was possible to get, I went to my room and sat on the windowsill, because that’s where I do all my best thinking. I lit a cigarette and tried to figure out what I should do. I wanted to ask Mum, I wanted to ask her so badly, but I couldn’t think about that because I’d just start crying again, and what good would that be to her? I didn’t know whether to tell Julia what Mark had told me. Whether I could trust her to do the right thing.
Maybe. When I told Julia that Mum didn’t jump, I expected her to tell me that I was wrong or crazy or whatever, but she just accepted it. Without question. Like she knew already. Like she’d always known.
I don’t even know if the shit Mark told me is true, though it would be a pretty weird thing to make up. Why point the finger at Mrs. Townsend, when there are more obvious people to blame? Like Louise, for example. But maybe he feels bad enough about the Whittakers, after what he’s done to them.
I don’t know whether he was lying or telling the truth, but either way he deserved what I said to him, what I did. He deserved everything he got.
JULES
When Lena came back downstairs, her face and hands scrubbed clean, she sat at the kitchen table and ate ravenously. Afterwards, when she smiled and said thank you, I shivered, because now that I have seen it, I can’t unsee it. She has her father’s smile.
(What else, I wondered, does she have of his?)
“What’s wrong?” Lena asked suddenly. “You’re staring at me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my face reddening. “I’m just . . . I’m glad you’re home. I’m glad you’re safe.”
“Me too.”
I hesitated a moment before going on. “I know you’re tired, but I need to ask you, Lena, about what happened today. About the bracelet.”
She turned her face from me towards the window. “Yeah. I know.”
“Mark had it?” She nodded again. “And you took it from him?”
She sighed. “He gave it to me.”
“Why did he give it to you? Why did he have it in the first place?”
“I don’t know.” She turned her head back to face me, her eyes blank, shuttered. “He told me he found it.”
“He found it? Where?” She didn’t answer. “Lena, we need to go to the police about this, we need to tell them.”
She got to her feet and took her plate over to the sink. Her back to me, she said, “We made a deal.”
“A deal?”
“That he would give me Mum’s bracelet and let me go home,” she said, “so long as I told the police that I’d lied about him and Katie.” Her voice was incongruously light as she busied herself with the dishes.
“And he believed you would do that?” She raised her skinny shoulders to her ears. “Lena. Tell me the truth. Do you think . . . do you believe Mark Henderson was the one who killed your mum?”
She turned around and looked at me. “I’m telling the truth. And I don’t know. He told me he took it from Mrs. Townsend’s office.”
“Helen Townsend?” Lena nodded. “Sean’s wife? Your head teacher? But why would she have the bracelet? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” she said quietly. “Not really.”
I made tea and we sat together at the kitchen table, sipping our drinks in silence. I held Nel’s bracelet in my hand. Lena sat loose-limbed, her head bowed, visibly sagging in front of me. I reached out and grazed her fingers with my own.
“You’re exhausted,” I said. “You should go to bed.”
She nodded, looking up at me with hooded eyes. “Will you come up with me, please? I don’t want to be by myself.”
I followed her up the stairs and into your room, not her own. She clambered onto your bed and lay her head on the pillow, patting the space next to her.
“When we first got here,” she said, “I couldn’t sleep by myself.”
“All the noises?” I asked, clambering up next to her and covering us with your coat.
She nodded. “All the creaking and the moaning . . .”
“And all your mother’s scary stories?”
“Exactly. I used to come in here and sleep next to Mum all the time.”
There was a lump in my throat, a pebble. I couldn’t swallow. “I used to do that with my mum, too.”
• • •
SHE FELL ASLEEP. I stayed at her side, looking down at her face, which in repose was yours exactly. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, to do something motherly, but I didn’t want to wake her or alarm her or do something wrong. I have no idea how to be a mother. I’ve never taken care of a child in my entire life. I wished that you would speak, that you would tell me what to do, what to feel. As she lay beside me, I think I did feel tenderness, but I felt it for you and for our mother, and the second her green eyes flicked open and fixed on mine, I shivered.
“Why are you always watching me like that?” she whispered, half smiling. “It’s really weird.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and rolled on to my back.
She slipped her fingers between mine. “It’s OK,” she said. “Weird’s OK. Weird can be good.”
We lay there, side by side, our fingers interlaced. I listened to her breathing slow, then quicken, and then slow once again.
“You know, what I don’t understand,” she whispered, “is why you hated her so much.”
“I didn’t . . .”
“She didn’t understand either.”
“I know,” I said. “I know she didn’t.”
“You’re crying,” she whispered, reaching over to touch my face. She brushed the tears from my cheek.
I told her. All the things I should have told you, I told them to your daughter instead. I told her how I’d let you down, how I’d believed the worst of you, how I’d allowed myself to blame you.
“But why didn’t you just tell her? Why didn’t you tell her what really happened?”
“It was complicated,” I said, and I felt her stiffen beside me.
“Complicated how? How complicated could it be?”
“Our mother was dying. Our parents were in a terrible way
and I didn’t want to do anything to make it worse.”
“But . . . but he raped you,” she said. “He should have gone to prison.”
“I didn’t see it that way. I was very young. I was younger than you are, and I don’t just mean in years, although I was that, too. But I was naive, completely inexperienced, I was clueless. We didn’t talk about consent in the way you girls do now. I thought . . .”
“You thought what he did was OK?”
“No, but I don’t think I saw it for what it was. What it really was. I thought rape was something a bad man did to you, a man who jumped out at you in an alleyway in the dead of night, a man who held a knife to your throat. I didn’t think boys did it. Not schoolboys like Robbie, not good-looking boys, the ones who go out with the prettiest girl in town. I didn’t think they did it to you in your own living room, I didn’t think they talked to you about it afterwards and asked you if you’d had a good time. I just thought I must have done something wrong, that I hadn’t made it clear enough that I didn’t want it.”
Lena was silent for a while, but when she spoke again her voice was higher, more insistent. “OK, maybe you didn’t want to say anything at the time, but what about later? Why didn’t you explain it to her later on?”
“Because I misunderstood her,” I said. “I misjudged her completely. I thought that she knew what had happened that night.”
“You thought that she knew and did nothing? How could you think that of her?”
How could I explain that? That I pieced together your words—the words you said to me that night and the words you said to me later, Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?—and I told myself a story about you that made sense to me, that allowed me to get on with my life without ever having to face what really happened.
“I thought that she chose to protect him,” I whispered. “I thought she chose him over me. I couldn’t blame him, because I couldn’t even think about him. If I’d have blamed him and thought about him, I’d have made it real. So I just . . . I thought about Nel instead.”
Lena’s voice grew cold. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there’s two people doing something wrong and one of them’s a girl, it’s got to be her fault, right?”
“No, Lena, it’s not like that, it isn’t—”
“Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?”
Tuesday, 25 August
ERIN
I left the cottage early, running upriver. I wanted to get away from Beckford, to clear my head, but though the air had been rinsed clean by rain and the sky was a perfect pale blue, the fog in my head got darker, murkier. Nothing about this place makes sense.
By the time Sean and I left Jules and Lena at the Mill House yesterday, I’d worked myself up into a total state, and I was so pissed off at him I just came out with it, right there in the car. “What exactly was going on with you and Nel Abbott?”
He slammed his foot on the brake so hard I thought I’d go through the windscreen. We’d stopped in the middle of the lane, but Sean didn’t seem to care. “What did you say?”
“Do you want to pull over?” I asked, checking the rearview mirror, but he didn’t. I felt like an idiot for blurting it out like that, not leading up to it, not testing the water at all.
“Are you questioning my integrity?” There was a look on his face I hadn’t seen before, a hardness I hadn’t yet come up against. “Well? Are you?”
“It was suggested to me,” I said, keeping my voice even, “hinted at . . .”
“Hinted?” He sounded incredulous. A car behind us hooted and Sean put his foot back on the accelerator. “Someone hinted at something, did they? And you thought it would be appropriate to question me about it?”
“Sean, I—”
We’d reached the car park outside the church. He pulled over, leaned across me and opened the passenger door. “Have you seen my service record, Erin?” he asked. “Because I’ve seen yours.”
“Sir, I didn’t mean to offend you, but—”
“Get out of the car.”
I barely had time to close the door behind me before he accelerated away.
• • •
I WAS OUT of puff by the time I’d climbed the hill north of the cottage; I stopped at the summit for a breather. It was still early—barely seven o’clock—the entire valley was mine. Perfectly, peacefully mine. I stretched out my legs and prepared myself for the descent. I felt I needed to sprint, to fly, to exhaust myself. Wasn’t that the way to find clarity?
Sean had reacted like a guilty man. Or like an offended man. A man who thought his integrity was being questioned without evidence. I picked up the pace. When he’d sneered at me about our respective records, he had a point. His is impeccable; I narrowly avoided getting sacked for sleeping with a younger colleague. I was sprinting now, going hell for leather down the hill, my eyes trained on the path, the gorse at the side of my vision a blur. He has an impressive arrest record; he is highly respected amongst his colleagues. He is, as Louise said, a good man. My right foot caught on a rock in the path and I went flying. I lay in the dust, fighting for breath, the wind knocked clean out of me. Sean Townsend is a good man.
There are a lot of them about. My father was a good man. He was a respected officer. Didn’t stop him beating the shit out of me and my brothers when he lost his temper, but still. When my mother complained to one of his colleagues after he broke my youngest brother’s nose, his colleague said, “There’s a thin blue line, love, and I’m afraid you just don’t cross it.”
I hauled myself up, dusting the dirt off me. I could say nothing. I could stay on the right side of the thin blue line, I could ignore Louise’s hints and intimations, I could ignore Sean’s possible personal connection to Nel Abbott. But if I did that, I’d be ignoring the fact that where there is sex, there is motive. He had a motive to get rid of Nel, and his wife did, too. I thought about her face the day I spoke to her at the school, the way she spoke about Nel, about Lena. What was it she despised? Her insistent, tiresome expression of sexual availability?
I reached the bottom of the slope and skirted around the gorse; the cottage was just a couple of hundred yards away and I could see that there was someone outside. A figure, stout and stooped, in a dark coat. Not Patrick and not Sean. As I got closer, I realized it was the old goth, the psychic, mad-as-a-hatter Nickie Sage.
She was leaning against the wall of the cottage, her face puce. She looked like she might be on the verge of a heart attack.
“Mrs. Sage!” I called out. “Are you all right?”
She looked up at me, breathing heavily, and pushed her floppy velvet hat farther up her brow. “I’m fine,” she said, “although it’s been a while since I’ve walked this far.” She looked me up and down. “You look like you’ve been playing in the muck.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, doing an ineffectual job of brushing the remaining dirt off me. “Had a bit of a tumble.” She nodded. As she straightened up I could hear the wheeze as she breathed. “Would you like to come in and sit down?”
“In there?” She jerked her head back towards the cottage. “Not likely.” She took a few steps away from the front door. “Do you know what happened in there? Do you know what Anne Ward did?”
“She murdered her husband,” I replied. “And then she drowned herself, just out there in the river.”
Nickie shrugged, waddling off towards the riverbank. I followed her. “More of an exorcism than a murder, if you ask me. She was getting rid of whatever evil spirit had taken hold of that man. It left him, but it didn’t leave that place, did it? You had trouble sleeping
there?”
“Well, I . . .”
“Not surprised. Not surprised at all. I could have told you that—not that you’d have listened. The place is full of evil. Why do you think Townsend keeps it as his own, looks after it like it’s his special place?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I thought he used it as a fishing cabin.”
“Fishing!” she exclaimed, as though she’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous in her entire life. “Fishing!”
“Well, I have actually seen him out here fishing, so . . .”
Nickie harrumphed, dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand. We were at the water’s edge. Toe to heel and heel to toe, Nickie was working her swollen, mottled feet out of her slip-on shoes. She put a toe in the water and gave a satisfied chuckle. “The water’s cold up here, isn’t it? Clean.” Standing ankle-deep in the river, she asked, “Have you been to see him? Townsend? Have you asked him about his wife?”
“You mean Helen?”
She turned to look at me, her expression contemptuous. “Sean’s wife? That Helen, with her face like a slapped arse? What’s she got to do with anything? She’s about as interesting as paint drying on a damp day. No, the one you should be interested in is Patrick’s wife. Lauren.”
“Lauren? Lauren who died thirty years ago?”
“Yes, Lauren who died thirty years ago! You think the dead don’t matter? You think the dead don’t speak? You should hear the things they have to say.” She shuffled a little farther into the river, bending down to soak her hands. “This is it, this is where Annie came to wash her hands, just like this, see, only she kept going . . .”
I was losing interest. “I need to go, Nickie, I need to take a shower and get on with some work. It was good talking to you,” I said, turning to leave her. I was halfway back to the cottage when I heard her call out.
“You think the dead don’t speak? You should listen, you might hear something. It’s Lauren you’re looking for, she’s the one who started all this!”
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