by Flynn Berry
He reached his hand down her throat. She couldn’t breathe, his hand was choking her. She drove her knee between his legs, and he jerked backwards.
She stumbled through the door, onto the road, and ran to the Blacksmith’s Arms. She stood on the threshold in her dress and stockinged feet, washed in blood, and said, “Help me.”
• • •
Upstairs, in my bedroom, I heard a rasping, tearing sound. Like someone trying to breathe. I thought I was imagining it at first. Then there was a thud, hard enough to shake the wall in my room, and the sound stopped. I closed my eyes, but my body was trembling under the blanket.
I went to Mum’s room first, but her bed was empty, the covers drawn back. I climbed down the stairs in the dark. The front door was open and cold air was blowing into the house. My teeth started to chatter.
Mum wouldn’t have left the door open. I thought I should close it, in case someone was outside, but couldn’t bring myself to go near it. There was something wet by the door. I couldn’t see it clearly in the dark, but it was moving, dripping down the wall.
The skin all across my body was jumping with my pulse. I made it down to the kitchen. A faint circle of light from the pendant lamp shone on Emma’s script and glass of red wine, and everything was still and quiet.
Someone had knocked over the draining rack, and one of the knives lay near my feet. There was a terrible, rusty smell in the room. I moved around the counter. Emma was lying on her back, with her arm bent towards her face. The room was dark, but I could see that her head was wet.
I crawled to her side. The floor was slippery under my hands and knees. I started to push the wet hair from her face, but my fingers were thick and clumsy. I bent close to her, until I could see the red wine stains in the grooves in her mouth. She smelled like sandalwood.
When I heard voices, I thought the people who hurt Emma had come back, and I ran into the other room to hide. I crawled behind a chair and stared at its fabric with both of my hands over my mouth. Someone at the top of the stairs switched on the lights in the basement, and I covered my head in my arms.
A man was bending down to pick me up. I kept making the same keening sound, and he said, “It’s all right, love, you’re safe, you’re safe.” He lifted me and my arms went around his neck, my mouth gaping against his coat. He told me to close my eyes. He said, “I’ll count down from ten for you.”
But I opened them too early, and over his shoulder I saw Emma lying on her back, under the lights. There was chipped gold varnish on her nails and a faint stamp on the back of her hand from the concert she’d been to the night before. There was red on the floor around her, and it was on me too, my legs and arms and nightdress were stained.
• • •
In the morning, an officer found my father’s car seventy miles south of London, abandoned in a field above the Channel. One of its doors was hanging open, and there were stains on the front seat, as though the driver had been head to toe in blood.
PART TWO
FOREIGN
15
THE SEARCH BEGAN in the field by the Channel where his car was found. Soon there were dozens of police officers spread across it. The police didn’t know if any of the blood in the car was his, if he had been injured in the attack, if he had crawled somewhere nearby to hide.
The edge of the field was a cliff, with a sheer drop to the water. A Zodiac with police divers was sent from around the headland. There was a chance he had jumped. They’d found his wallet in the car, with cash inside. He hadn’t tried to clean the bloodstains from the seat and he’d left the car in a field within clear view of the village, where it would be easily found.
If he hadn’t jumped, he might have walked down to the village, Newhaven, and boarded a ferry across the Channel to France. He might have left his car by the cliff deliberately, to make it look like a suicide. By the time the car was found, the first two crossings had already left. Officers interviewed everyone at the port, and detectives in France waited at Dieppe to search the ferries when they arrived.
The search spread across Newhaven. Officers knocked on doors and climbed into attics and searched the row of painted beach huts. The town curved around a harbor, and on the docks officers searched under tangles of nets and buoys for stains or footprints. Everyone who owned a boat in Newhaven was ordered to check if it had been stolen. My father had experience with boats, he’d grown up sailing on the Norfolk Broads.
A hundred army reservists joined the search. The police had been granted more resources than usual. They didn’t want to make a mistake, with the story leading every newspaper in the country.
The soldiers and officers spread from Newhaven onto the South Downs, where they needed scythes to cut through the gorse. They kept searching overnight while the rain turned to sleet.
• • •
On the second day of the search, a motorboat was reported missing. It was a small wooden boat, white with a green stripe. A local man owned six of them to rent to tourists, and now there were five.
The boat had an outboard engine and a rudder. It was meant for short trips, but could in theory make it across the Channel. The owner didn’t know when the boat had gone missing, since he hadn’t rented any of them since August. There had been a strong storm a few weeks before, the boat might have been torn from its moorings.
It looked like the boat my father and Mum rented in Positano years before. They went out on it with a bottle of wine and grissini. They’d told me the story, about how my father fell asleep, how they hadn’t realized there was a strong current, how the boat floated so far from shore that they didn’t make it back until after dark. I think he’d been drunk, though they left that part out. It would have happened faster than usual, he’d been in the sun all day. Mum could have gotten something around his neck then, if she’d known. Instead of lying next to him on the boat’s bench, lifting his heavy arm and putting it around herself, and letting the boat drift further from the coast.
* * *
—
A STRANGE THING happens when I read about the search. It seems to have nothing to do with those first days afterwards in London, or with what had happened inside our house, or with me now.
The search seems staged. I look at a picture of officers in a field, and I can’t believe they ever expected to find him.
Six years ago, I drove to Newhaven. I crossed the field where his car was found and looked over the edge of the cliff. There were a lot of rocks, you’d have to be careful to avoid them if you wanted to land in the water. But I know he didn’t jump. His friends wouldn’t have risked so much to protect him unless they knew he was alive.
16
THE FIRST DAYS afterwards were quiet and muffled for me. It was raining. I couldn’t eat, and I slept a lot. Mum was still in hospital, and we were staying with Sabrina at her flat in Edgware. I don’t remember leaving the flat. Sabrina read to me, and we played with Robbie. I had no idea what was happening at the same time. This huge, frantic search. Sabrina kept me away from the news, though I don’t remember being curious. I didn’t know then that my father was a suspect. I thought it had been burglars.
While the police were searching the Downs for my father, Sabrina was folding my hands in a warm towel. She wiped my palms, between my fingers. I expected the towel to be stained red and brown when she finished, but there was nothing on me, she had put me into the shower the night before as soon as we got to her flat.
Sabrina rubbed my knuckles and the webbing between each finger, then filled a bowl with pebbles and warm water. “What are the pebbles for?” I asked.
“No idea,” she said. When I stirred my fingers, the pebbles clinked. It was a good sound, like the shingle clattering on a beach, and I did it again.
She’d made a nest for me with quilts and a velveteen bear on one side of her bed. Sometime in the night, I had screamed hard enough to burst the blood vessels a
bove my eye, leaving a row of bright red dots.
Sabrina shook a bottle of coral varnish. She worked carefully, dragging the brush over each nail. The scent of the varnish filled my nose, burning away the smells from the night before.
My nails were still wet when Sabrina drove me to the hospital to visit Mum. A nurse led us down the corridor and into a room where Mum was spitting blood into a cup. When she saw us, she wiped the red mess from her mouth with the back of her hand. I didn’t move from the doorway. Sabrina was already next to Mum, kissing her, taking the dirty cup, asking the nurse for some water.
Mum looked past Sabrina at me, hopefully at first, then her face sagged as she realized that I was afraid of her. There was still red around her mouth, and Sabrina handed her a tissue. I stepped closer. Her cheeks were bruised and swollen, like apples had been pushed underneath them. She was trying to angle part of her head away from me, but I could see where her blond hair had been shaved and her scalp punched with black stitches. Her hospital gown was thin enough to show the gauze bandages on her chest and stomach. She touched her hand to one of the bandages, like something was happening underneath it, or it was hurting her.
I sat next to her on the bed and she took my hand, even though two of her fingers were in splints. She said, “I’m so sorry. I know it’s not easy to see me like this, but there’s something I have to tell you.” She was speaking slowly, trying not to slur the words. She said, “Your father was angry with me. He wasn’t angry with you.”
I didn’t understand why she was telling me this. I hadn’t thought he was angry with me, though I was furious with him. He shouldn’t have moved into the flat on Ebury Street, he should have been there to help Mum and Emma fight them.
“He loved you very much,” she said, then stopped, and stared down at her lap. She was having trouble breathing. Behind her, Sabrina was crying, with her face lifted and her eyes closed. “Your father hurt me and Emma.”
“Did they make him?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The burglars.”
“No. There weren’t any burglars. No one came into the house except him.”
I nodded, but only to make her stop. I didn’t believe her.
• • •
The next day, while Sabrina gave Robbie a bath, I called my grandmother. Someone else answered—one of her staff—and I waited, staring at the door, listening for water draining from the tub.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked when she came on the line.
“We don’t know,” said my grandmother. Her voice sounded even more brittle on the phone.
“Mum said he hurt her.”
“She’s confused. Anyone could be under those conditions,” she said. “Your father was walking past the house and saw a fight in the basement. He went inside to stop it and the man ran off.”
I wasn’t relieved, exactly, I’d known that Mum was wrong.
“He’s going away to collect his thoughts,” she said. “He’ll be back soon, and all of this will be straightened out.” She knew this because he’d sent her a letter, she said.
“Did he send a letter for me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said my grandmother. “Where are you?”
I looked through the window and tried to think of a lie. “Sabrina’s flat.”
My grandmother sighed. “You should be with family.” It had been wrong of me to call her, and now this would be my punishment, the cold house in Norfolk. “I’d like to speak to Sabrina.”
In the bathroom, Sabrina lifted Robbie into a towel and took the phone from me, cradling him against her with one arm. “Hi, Deborah,” she said. She glanced at me and I looked at the floor, ashamed. “Hmm,” said Sabrina. “No, Faye wants the children to stay here.” She moved into the sitting room, but I could still hear her. “Would you like to come visit them?” she asked. There was a long pause, then she said, “I think while Faye’s in hospital, it would be best not to involve lawyers, don’t you?”
After the call ended, Sabrina went into the kitchen and began beating a packet of frozen strawberries against the counter.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That’s all right, she’s your grandmother, you’re allowed to call her.” Sabrina dropped a handful of strawberries into the blender and poured in milk. “Do you want honey?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “Sweetheart, you have to try to eat something.”
“Dad sent her a letter.” It seemed to take Sabrina a long time to cross the room and come to stand in front of me. “It’s a mistake. Mum thinks it’s him, but it wasn’t.”
She went still. “Where did he send the letter from?”
* * *
—
MY GRANDMOTHER had already brought the letter to the police by the time she told me. My father probably included instructions asking her to turn it in as his defense. The letter was postmarked from Sussex, from the village where Rose and James Fraser live.
In his memoir, the lead detective described asking Rose, “Did Colin Spenser come to your house on the eighteenth of November?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“It didn’t seem relevant,” said Rose.
She had been alone in the house that night. James was working in London, and Alice was away at boarding school. As she told it, she was surprised to see my father’s car at the gate. He was in shock, said Rose, and almost incoherent.
He told her he’d seen something through the window and went inside to help. The attacker ran away, but Mum was badly hurt, and confused, and accused him of trying to kill her.
“Why didn’t he call the police?” asked the detective.
Rose said, “He panicked. He thought they wouldn’t believe him, if it was her word against his. She can make herself very sympathetic.”
When the detective mentioned the stains in Colin’s car, Rose said yes, there was blood on his clothes when he arrived at her house. He’d tried to resuscitate Emma, there had been a lot of blood, he was barely aware it was on him. She gave him some brandy for the shock, and he promised to call the police in the morning and explain. She said he went upstairs to bed, but when she woke in the morning he was gone.
Rose is a barrister. She must have planned every word to protect herself from being charged with obstruction.
The police descended on Ashdown. I’ve seen aerial photographs of their search, the drive so full of vehicles that some were parked on the grass. Dozens of officers in white forensic suits searched the terrace and the lawn on their hands and knees. More were down by the stables, and two officers were rolling back the cover on the swimming pool. And there was one, standing inside the walled garden, ghostly in his pale boilersuit. He looked strange in there, away from the others, as though he’d gotten lost.
It had been forty-eight hours since the murder. The police now believed that my father had never been in Newhaven, that one of his friends had left his car in the field as a decoy, that searching it and the South Downs had been pointless. Rose denied that she’d driven my father’s car to Newhaven. The detective asked, “Where did Lord Spenser go when he left your house?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I expect he’ll be back soon.”
Two detectives separated the household staff and began interviews inside one of the vans parked on the grass. They brought photographs. The first was of Emma on the Pont Marie, sitting on the bridge wall in a jumper and rolled-up jeans. Behind her was a hotel on the Île Saint-Louis with small yellow awnings over every window. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and her eyes were warm and bright.
In the second she was on her back with wet hair scraped away from her face. She had bruises on her shoulders where my father had held her in place and a red mark on her mouth where he’d slapped her. Some of the staff cried, but none of them admitted to seeing him.
&n
bsp; The next day, while officers continued to search the house, Rose maintained her Sunday routine. She went for a hack in the woods behind the property, and spent a while cleaning her horse. She took a bath. Neither she nor James had been arrested, they would still eat at home that night, at the table in the kitchen, as they always did on Sundays.
From our visits, I remember the dinners Rose requested for the end of the weekend. A shepherd’s pie, fish cakes, a roast leg of lamb. The sort of food she considered simple, even though it took hours to prepare. They ate in the warm kitchen, with the curtains drawn so they didn’t have to see the police torches outside.
17
I’LL PICK YOU up at seven,” I tell Robbie, trying to work out how to get from the practice to St. Thomas’ in time. “We’ll get to Penbridge around eight thirty, they said that’s fine.”
“I talked to my boss,” says Robbie.
He works as an insurance adjuster. The firm sends him in after a storm, flood, or fire to assess the damage and decide how much the homeowners should be paid. I think he does this work not because he likes it, but so that someone less sympathetic, who might try to save money for the insurance firm, won’t. He was hired last winter after the floods in Yorkshire. There was a short interview and training process, the firm was desperate for assessors. He usually works for a few months at a time, then has a long break before the next assignment.
“Good,” I say. “It was probably best to let him know you’ll be out of touch this month.”
“They want me to go up to Lancashire.”
“No.”