‘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 blind spot, 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.
Gina had a kid. She must have still been a kid herself when she got pregnant. Gina was unhappy: that much Alison knew, from how she’d sat on the bar stool last night and how she’d glared through the car window, just now. Their eyes had met, and in that moment the years evaporated, Gina might have been jeering from her bedroom door as Esme hurried down the stairs. ‘We’re supposed to be friends, remember?’ Gina had shouted after her. ‘Remember? Well, don’t come to me when you start freaking out.’ Had they got it out of her, had the nice policewoman been so nice when she talked to Gina, asked her why Esme hadn’t stayed after all, for the sleepover? Had it been boys? Had you been drinking? What about drugs, you girls into drugs?
Gina wouldn’t have cracked: Gina wouldn’t have said a thing to the police, not a thing.
Gina. It’s me.
Chapter Twelve
Alison sat in the car opposite the police station watching a man on the far kerb smoking. She saw him look up and down the street before going inside, head down, hands in his pockets. She could hardly go in and say, She had a fringe, she had a big nose: thirteen years on, who knew what she’d look like.
By the time they’d come for her down the track, in their emergency vehicles, Esme had no longer been able to move or speak, she had sealed herself over. Because if she didn’t the thing behind her in the house, the black horror in that house that lay over the bodies and fed, would gather and swell and come shrieking out through the door, the windows, the cracks. It would batten on her and she would be gone, the police would find only buttons and bones.
Sitting in the car now, looking at a head moving in one of the windows on the police station’s second floor but only seeing the grey line of that dawn horizon, Alison knew it was still there. It was out on the marsh, and it was waiting for her. She leaned down and rested her head on the steering wheel.
It had been the woman who’d talked at her through the succeeding days who’d saved her, even if she had only been doing her job. The policewoman, turning to shush the younger male officer, lowering her voice when it needed to be lowered, carrying on talking, asking, not letting it go. Alison needed her name.
Hold on. She thought of Aunt Polly’s little cottage in Cornwall, and of official letters on the small table in her dark hall. Telephone calls, Polly’s hand over the mouthpiece waiting for Alison to run upstairs to her room and out of earshot. Alison got out her mobile, scrolled with her thumb through the names. She dialled.
‘Hello?’ The voice was rusty. Old.
‘Polly?’ There was a silence. ‘It’s me, Aunt Polly.’
‘Alison.’ She cleared her throat. ‘How lovely. To hear your voice.’ Heartbroken was how she sounded: for a moment Alison lost the thread.
‘Are you all right?’ she managed eventually. ‘Polly?’
‘Do you need something, Alison?’ And the old angry Polly was back.
‘I need a name.’ There was no point hedging. She didn’t say, I know you went on talking to the police. I know there must have been things you kept from me. I know. It was how Alison had wanted it, after all. Someone had to do it, to take Alison to the inquest, to hold her gaze in the cleared coroner’s courtroom while she recounted her evidence. Someone had had to shield her as she climbed into the black car afterwards and someone had to go on shielding her until she could walk away from it all on her own. Polly might not have had all the right skills but she had done her best. And she’d been all there was.
‘She was called Sarah Rutherford.’ The answer was immediate: Polly didn’t even need to think. But her voice was stiff and strange. ‘Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford. Why do you want to know? Now, I mean. After all this time?’ Panicky.
‘It’s all right, Polly,’ said Alison. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid.’
Polly had always known when Alison was lying, and she probably knew now.
‘Where are you?’ she said, swift and afraid.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Alison. Then, ‘I’m at home.’ And it almost wasn’t a lie.
* * *
They put Alison in a room with no windows bar an internal one, high up. She had sat in the reception for a bit but then the desk officer had gone off and she’d heard a door bang and some voices and he’d reappeared and taken her further inside the police station.
Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford was at an incident but she was expected back in the station within the hour.
‘You want a coffee?’ The man who’d led Alison in there was no more than five years older than her, wearing a shirt and tie but the tie was loosened. She didn’t know what it meant about rank, if they didn’t wear uniforms: the uniformed officer at the front desk had mumbled some introduction but she hadn’t registered any of it.
Alison shook her head, imagining the plastic cup, and thought of Paul, working quietly in the hotel, turning up his nose at their coffee. The policeman hesitated a moment, then he was gone.
The room’s chairs were battered and the table scarred. An interview room. She hoped they hadn’t brought Gina somewhere like this, after. Her dread grew, like darkness. Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford knew things she didn’t. And knew things about her no one else did.
The door banged open: the tall woman in the doorway was looking back over her shoulder. ‘Not yet, Jennings,’ she said, and Alison glimpsed the young officer with his loosened tie, peering past her from the corridor. When he saw her he stepped back, out of sight. ‘I’ll give you a buzz if I need you.’ And the door closed and she was there. Alison’s heart was suddenly in her mouth, it was like seeing someone you’d thought was dead.
Sarah Rutherford wasn’t wearing uniform, but close to it: trousers and a jacket shiny at the elbows. Older. Broader in the beam. Her skin was duller, but Alison’s heart still leapt to see her. Found her wide-set blue eyes the same, the fringe unchanged, the strong nose. Sad. Was that beauty? To Esme it had been. She sat down at the desk, then stood up again, her hands – bare of rings, Alison noticed, but perhaps that was just because she was at work – on the table. She came around it and sat next to Alison: she smelled of hospitals, some kind of antiseptic.
‘I’d have recognised you,’ she said, and frowned. ‘Even with that hair.’ She put a hand to her own, and Alison saw the grey in it. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’
‘Where were you?’ said Alison, thinking even as she said it that Sarah Rutherford probably wouldn’t be able to tell her.
But she did. She sighed. ‘Pile-up,’ she said, and Alison had a picture in her head of debris spread, bodies covered up on a roadside verge and this woman kneeling to look at them carefully, respectfully. She probably had to wash her hands in that hospital spirit after. ‘Kids chucking breeze blocks off the motorway bridge.’ And without missing a beat. ‘What are you doing here?’
Alison took a deep breath. ‘There’s things I need to know,’ she said.
Chapter Thirteen
Alison didn’t go straight back to the hotel. Instead, she drove out down the single-track road along the spit and parked.
Close to, the church seemed somehow even smaller in its modest churchyard, a single yew at the gate, tiny against all the wide silver-grey of the sea as the land fell away to either side. The roof was low almost to the long grass of the graveyard. Far out in the estuary she saw the distinctive shape of a big barge moving stealthily across the h
orizon under sail, a peaked dark-red quadrilateral with chalked letters on it. They would be gathering for the race.
She’d dreamed once of funerals in this church, of all the bodies in their coffins here, side by side in the nave. It was so narrow they’d been pressed together like sardines. The twins’ coffins had been white and tiny and heaped with flowers. It hadn’t been like that in real life.
The police had released the bodies more than a year after, in October. In real life Polly had pared the funeral down almost to nothing. There was no money, apart from anything else, no money for handwoven willow or flowers. Fifteen-year-old Alison had stared and stared and stared at the shiny yellow wooden boxes as the crematorium’s minister read some psalm or other. Inside there. Inside there was something that had been deep-chilled for more than a year, cut and folded back then sewn together again, blood and brains and organs. Matter.
She had no idea what had happened to the ashes. They were gone.
A woman emerged from the church, an old woman, hunched over an armful of vegetation, trailing stuff and spikes of browning flowers that shed petals as she walked painfully slowly towards a smouldering heap up against the church wall. Her hair was chopped thick grey and despite the warmth she wore a man’s sweater, down almost to her skirted knees.
Alison took her mother’s scarf from her pocket and held it up to her face, to stifle the catch in her throat. She breathed, eyes closed, she searched it for her mother’s smell, but there was only her own soap, her own hair.
Look, Sarah Rutherford had said, sitting, looking earnestly into her face, a hand creeping towards Alison’s across the table but stopping short. I don’t want you to think … to have any sort of false hope. He did it. I’m afraid there’s no doubt that he did it.
Alison stared back at her, mulish as a teenager, saying nothing. She pulled her hands off the table and stayed stubbornly silent as to what she knew. That the dark predatory something she’d hidden from that cold midsummer night was still there. And that they were. The glasses. She might tell. But not now.
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