Sarah Rutherford tried again. ‘I want to help you.’ She glanced around, her eyes flickered up at the window glass above them. When she spoke again her voice was uneasy, defensive. ‘I can help you, up to a point,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘That is, I can give you access to those files that relate directly to you. But I have the right to refuse you access to those if I believe they might prejudice any future investigation.’
Alert, Alison sat up straighter. ‘I see,’ she said slowly. The purpose she’d so long suspected, those days in the immediate aftermath, this woman asking her quiet questions in the foster family’s sitting room, grew solid. ‘So you did investigate me?’
Rutherford’s face was a weary blank now, a policewoman’s face that gave nothing away. ‘Esme,’ she began, but Alison jerked forward on the chair, she suddenly wanted to throw up.
‘No,’ she said, choked. ‘I’m called Alison now.’
She sat in the car in the lee of the church’s wall and thought of Sarah Rutherford with longing. She had passed a field with the gate open where gravel had been laid down and registered that the Carters were making arrangements for their guests’ cars with their farming neighbour.
‘Him he got the gun off,’ she’d said to Sarah Rutherford. ‘The farmer.’ Not caring about her grammar: she sounded like the child she’d been, back then. ‘My dad showed him the rats.’
The policewoman had shaken her head, looking at Alison from under her fringe, unblinking blue eyes. ‘He cried,’ she said. ‘The farmer. Old Jackson. He said, he should never have given your dad the gun, he knew there was something wrong about it. Only he felt sorry for him. He said, you know when someone just wants to end it. He said he thought he was helping him.’
‘He gave my dad the gun to kill himself with? He knew?’ She couldn’t even picture the man, and he’d cried for her dad.
‘He said, it never occurred to him your father could do what he did.’ The policewoman looked into Alison’s face. ‘It’s a human instinct, not to believe a man could kill his own children. But it happens.’ She leaned in, the hair swinging. ‘It’s difficult to kill yourself with a shotgun,’ she said gently. ‘It requires determination. He had to get both hands on the trigger to hold the barrel in place.’ She put her own hands out to Alison across the table, and Alison pulled hers back again.
‘Does anyone know you’re here?’ There’d been a warning in Sarah Rutherford’s voice then. Alison had stared her out.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No one knows. I haven’t … no one knows me anymore.’ Closing her eyes a moment before making to stand up and push past the policewoman. But Rutherford had put out a hand to stay her.
‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ she said, and she made sure Alison looked back. ‘You need to be careful.’
If you’re so sure, she wanted to hold her fast and say, if you’re so sure it was my father, why do I need to be careful?
‘Alison.’ Sarah Rutherford softened. ‘I’m sorry. Look. I’ll do what I can – I mean it. But it’s thirteen years. D’you think we’d have let it go, if we thought there was any doubt?’ She waited: Alison said nothing. ‘And you’ve sprung it on me. Come back tomorrow, all right? I’d like to help. I mean it.’
‘I want the pictures,’ blurted Alison then, and as Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford opened her mouth to protest she added, ‘I don’t care if it’s protocol, or whatever. I don’t care if it’s allowed. I want to see the pictures. The crime scene.’
Because I can’t remember, because I need to remember.
Because they’ll tell me if there’s something still out there.
BOOM.
Behind her glasses Alison formed a smile at the old woman, who stood there weathered and impassive, her arm still thrown up against the sun. Then she turned to walk back inside the church. Relieved of her burden of stalks and branches, she wasn’t as old as Alison had first thought. And – though Alison couldn’t have said if it was the shape of her man’s sweater or the eyes, slanted like a Laplander’s, screwed up against the glare of the horizon – there was something about her that was familiar too.
She climbed back into the car and directed herself towards the hotel.
* * *
Stuart Jennings had come in behind her but Sarah Rutherford hadn’t turned. She’d stood at the second-floor window, a finger to the dusty glass tracing the girl’s route, out through the car park, across to the gates. She had watched as Esme Grace crossed the road without looking and climbed into the driver’s seat of a small silver car. She had grown a foot taller, she’d learned to drive, she’d cut her hair.
Sarah Rutherford imagined her own daughter playing oblivious in the back garden, growing, growing. A plant growing towards the light, shedding whatever hurt her, moving on.
Briefly she closed her eyes to shut down the feeling that started up whenever, over the preceding thirteen years, she’d had cause to remember Esme Grace. Playing with a puzzle cube in the foster family’s front room, head bent over it, tangled long hair that the foster mother confided she wouldn’t let her touch. There was so much hidden inside Esme Grace, and they had never got to any of it.
When Sarah Rutherford had opened her eyes again the little silver car had gone. She had turned to Stuart Jennings.
‘Not good,’ she said. ‘This is not good.’
* * *
‘You don’t have to wear it,’ said Paul, pushing the package into her hands. ‘But I thought … I just thought…’
Alison took it. It was soft and heavy: another present and she hadn’t even worn the first one. He looked nervous and she made herself smile.
She’d got back to find Paul tidying his papers away, and his relief when he turned and saw her seemed disproportionate.
‘I thought you might have done a bunk,’ he said, putting his cheek against hers. ‘I don’t much fancy it myself, now.’ She blinked at him. ‘The drinks at The Laurels,’ he clarified. She registered that there was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket on the side table, a card dangling from its neck.
She set the package aside carefully. ‘I’m fine with it,’ she said. ‘Morgan’s marrying someone else, after all, isn’t she?’ He was frowning at the package and obediently she picked it up again.
‘You got champagne,’ she said as she pulled at the tissue. He turned and lifted the bottle dripping from the ice and with careful fingers peeled back the foil. ‘Morgan sent it,’ he said, then corrected himself. ‘Morgan and Christian.’
Even before she held it up she could tell the dress was old: it was clean and pressed but the faint scent of years in drawers still lingered in its folds. The weight of it wasn’t modern, rough crêpe under her fingertips, the shape of the shoulders. She held it up. An old-fashioned colour, cornflower blue, a line of buttons down the back.
‘It’s got the utility mark,’ he said and when she looked puzzled, ‘Made under wartime rationing.’ He smiled, distant. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My specialist area. But it’s pretty, isn’t it?’
The cork popped.
‘Yes,’ she said, uneasy. ‘It’s lovely.’ She heard him exhale.
‘You see,’ he said, frowning, uneasy. ‘Morgan could never wear anything like that.’ His hand ran delicately down the little buttons.
She looked at the dress. He was right: she imagined Morgan bursting out of it, all broad shoulders and hair, too strong, too tall, too modern, too healthy. She felt herself contract to fit it, old-fashioned and fragile.
‘I was going to give it to you for the wedding,’ Paul said. ‘But then I thought maybe you’d want it for this evening.’ He was looking at her with a kind of stern exasperation, and with a prickle at the back of her neck Alison suddenly wanted to be out from under his gaze.
‘I’ll just,’ she said, ‘I’ll…’ and she almost dodged past him into the bathroom and closed the door.
Inside she laid the dress carefully over the rail of fresh towels and looked at herself in the bright mirror: pale as a ghost, cropped hair. Sh
e looked like she might get blown away in a wind, or lost on the marsh among the tall silvery grasses. Wandering out there with the other ghosts. Alison looked at the glass of champagne in her hand and drank it, in one: she set it down and rubbed at her cheeks. She stripped off her practical clothes, jeans, T-shirt, socks, trainers, and her body emerged in the mirror. Perhaps it was the sudden lightness in her head but it seemed like someone else’s. She saw how thin her arms had got. How?
And then for some reason the therapist came into her head, the woman she hadn’t seen in six, seven years, with her anxious, flushed drinker’s face. This was what the woman had wanted to protect her from, this moment under the bright light with the dead and the lost whispering at the door and demanding to get in. Ghosts.
Breathe. She tried to remember a single piece of the therapist’s advice, a single strategy. She turned on the shower and climbed inside, letting the drumming of the water fill her head, willing the feel of it on her skin to block the prickle of panic. She stood under there a long time.
It was as she dried herself off that it came to Alison who the old woman bent over the compost heap at the church had been. Not old, not ancient after all, she must be more or less the same age as Alison’s parents, in her fifties. As old as her mother would have been, had she lived. Her sons were at school with Alison and Joe, her three sons, Joe’s friends. She had been the woman, already widowed, who’d opened the door to the milkman and been told that her youngest child was dead by the side of the road. His name had been Joshua, a beautiful boy, a boy you would stare at hoping not to be caught looking. Oh. A sound, a breath escaped her lips.
Cathy Watts. The name repeated itself, drifting like a floater before her eyes. She had never looked like this, old and bent; she’d been a big woman, a matriarch, big forearms, unsmiling except at the corners of the deep-set blue eyes. Now she was hiding here among the gravestones, bent and shrunken, a servant of the church in one of her sons’ sweaters.
Chapter Fourteen
There was a gust of laughter that brought the sweat out on the back of Alison’s neck, and Roger Carter at the centre of it, his sandy head thrown back. ‘I swear,’ she heard. ‘The constitution of an ox. The Watts woman keeps an eye out for him, God knows why. Last year they had to fish him out of the mud before the prizes. I don’t know what he puts in that home brew but it hasn’t killed him yet.’
They were talking about the barge match, the race still two days away. Wednesday now – Wednesday night, one day gone. Alison looked with longing towards release. Thursday to get through; Friday the race; Saturday the wedding; Sunday, they’d be back in London.
The party had been in full swing when they arrived, the house not a new-build after all, Alison registered, but only thirty or so years old, a big ugly solid building in unfaded brick, with an over-imposing porch and heavy lintels. Lucy Carter met them at the door with a glitter of excitement about her and a glass in her hand. The fragile, tentative woman they’d seen at the hotel had gone: elegant in high-heeled shoes she had paused dramatically to take Alison in, her sandals, the strong, old-fashioned colour, the scarf twisted in her cropped hair. Paul stepped back slightly, showing her.
‘What a lovely—’ Lucy Carter put her hand towards Alison’s head. ‘Lovely, is it a scarf?’ Her smile glazing slightly.
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, Alison reached up and pulled it off. She must look mad. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and before she could stop herself, ‘It was my mother’s.’ That was stupid. Dangerous. She didn’t know why she had this urge to give herself away.
But Lucy Carter was holding out her arms for their coats, the glass in one hand tipping precariously. ‘You go on, darling,’ she said to Paul, ‘you know where it is, don’t you?’ Darling.
There wasn’t much doubt where the guests were gathered: a din of party noise came through a door beside the wide baronial stairway. A woman’s loudly delighted laughter. Alison knew it would be Morgan and as she came through the door there she was, glowing and excitable at the centre of it all, looking over the heads at them. At Paul. Alison had a moment to take in the room, the big windows, antiques, flowers, a poorly executed amateur oil painting of Lucy Carter above the fireplace, hands in her lap, big-eyed. Roger Carter gesturing up at it with pride. Paul leaned down and whispered in her ear, ‘Quite the Renaissance man, our Roger,’ and she realised the doctor must have painted the hideous thing himself.
And then Morgan was raising her arms in greeting and pushing towards them. Alison’s eye was caught by a man watching her passage through the big room: a pale, watchful face, light hair brushed back, in a city suit and tie. The husband-to-be, Christian: the man she’d seen with Morgan in the pub. Alison was diverted by Lucy Carter at her elbow, steering her into the room.
‘You must meet, let me think…’ and again she was absorbed by Alison’s dress, putting out her hand to touch the fabric. ‘Is it old?’ Alison mumbled something, still uneasy. The dress made her feel like a doll dressed up, the colour attracting too much attention, the crêpe clinging. They had stopped beside a big bay with window seats and Lucy Carter sank onto a cushion. Awkwardly, Alison sat beside her. Through the window on a big lawn a marquee was being erected, three white walls up already, and a floor, and a stack of gold chairs. The garden was surrounded by dark trees and the grass was deep green in the midsummer twilight. Looking back into the room Alison saw that Morgan was talking to Paul beside another fireplace, leaning to look up into his face.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ said Lucy Carter quickly. ‘They’re old friends.’
Alison just smiled. ‘It’s a lovely house,’ she said politely, thinking actually how horrible it was. Lucy Carter didn’t seem to hear. She lifted her glass to her lips, looked puzzled to see it already empty.
She waved across the room and a sullen-looking girl in a white apron began to make her way towards them with a tray. Lucy took two glasses and thrust one at Alison.
‘How long have you lived here?’ Alison asked, and it was at that moment that Roger Carter laughed, not far from where they sat, and his head turned to take them in. Lucy Carter carefully set her glass down.
‘More than twenty years,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that funny. Morgan was a little girl.’ She gazed across at her daughter without noticeable affection. Alison saw Paul glance across at them, and he held up a finger to Morgan and leaned to say something.
Alison looked away, feeling something perverse stir inside her. ‘It’s one of those places, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘In the pub last night someone was talking to Paul about … well, it was ages ago now, I suppose.’ Lucy Carter’s head turned slowly and her big luminous eyes rested on Alison, suddenly anxious. ‘The killings,’ said Alison.
‘Oh, that,’ Lucy Carter said, and her hands fidgeted in her lap. She reached for her glass again. ‘The killings. It was a terrible time, awful, the reverberations in the village, it seemed to go on forever. That poor family. Those children.’ Her eyes brimmed. ‘But really it’s all forgotten now. So long ago, as you say.’
‘What can you two be talking about?’ Alison started at the voice at her shoulder. It was Paul, his grey-green eyes meeting hers, thoughtful, intent, moving from her face to her breasts in the dress and back up again. Lucy Carter gazed at him and he smiled.
‘We were talking about the … the village’s history,’ said Alison. She felt the alcohol in her system making her reckless. ‘About how terrible the murders were. How hard for a place to be known for … something like that.’ She glanced to see Lucy Carter looking faintly confused, as if wondering that that had indeed been what she’d said.
Paul nodded. ‘Well, certainly it doesn’t seem to have gone away, to judge from the pub last night.’
Lucy Carter’s face fell abruptly. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s the last thing…’ She became agitated. ‘It’s hardly what I want the wedding guests to be talking about. I really thought … who’s bringing it up after all this time?’
Paul sat between them
on the window seat. ‘Lucy, don’t worry,’ he said gently. His face was concerned, his voice solicitous. ‘It was only some old drunk, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him before.’
‘Old drunk?’
And now it was Roger Carter, looming over them, affable. ‘Darling,’ he said. ‘There’s something going on in the kitchen.’ And Lucy Carter fled.
On his feet, eye to eye with the doctor, Paul grimaced.
‘Sorry, Roger,’ he said. ‘Said the wrong thing. Poor Lucy.’
Carter rolled his eyes, then smiled down at Alison without seeing her. ‘Never have daughters,’ he said. ‘Weddings are a bloody pain in the arse.’ He looked back at Paul, who had held his hand out to her. She stood. Morgan was approaching.
‘I suppose it’s that old story rearing its ugly head again, is it? Well, no doubt it’s all terribly interesting if you’re into history.’ With a dismissive look at Paul. ‘But it’s hardly breaking news, is it? Happens every day.’ Morgan came up and threaded her arm inside her father’s elbow proprietorially.
‘It does seem to,’ said Alison and both men looked at her. ‘Women never seem to do it, do they?’
‘Well, there was a suggestion in this case…’ Carter tailed off. ‘But no, you’re right. A certain kind of man, anyway. Sadly, it is rather a familiar story.’ He was pompous. Alison kept her face still.
‘How d’you mean?’ she said. She felt Paul close to her. Perhaps after all he knew her well enough by now to hear the danger in her voice.
‘It was pretty much a classic case,’ said Carter. ‘The man’s a failure, financially. He’s a drunk. And she’s … she’s not interested in him anymore.’
‘Unfaithful,’ said Morgan, looking at Paul over her glass.
Carter shrugged. ‘Some people simply don’t have the … what would you call it? The mental resources to deal with it.’
Unfaithful. Alison felt hatred surge and balloon inside her. ‘Oh, unfaithful,’ she said. ‘Well, I suppose.’ Carter looked down at her, patronising. She imagined him as a GP, this must simply be his bedside manner.
The Crooked House Page 9