In the empty corridor Rutherford had shot her a glance. ‘I’ve told no one,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean no one knows.’
Now Alison laid the envelope against the steering wheel of Paul’s neat little car, and put her hand inside.
It was nothing she hadn’t seen before, that’s what she’d said to Rutherford, but when the policewoman just shook her head they both knew, this could be worse. She was like a suicide bomber about to pull a cord, and the clean little space would turn to blood. She pulled out the first photograph, just halfway.
A fold of bloodstained nylon. A mouth half open, the gleam of baby teeth. An arm flung out, torn. Mads. There was a little sound in the car, a small soft catch, a groan: it came from her, it choked her.
The activity outside the police station had ceased. She looked from the photograph back to the dusty windows behind which Sarah Rutherford had told her what it was she needed to know. Rage rose in her. It roared.
They weren’t his, you see. The twins weren’t his.
And now she remembered, now what Rutherford had told her lined up with what she already knew, even though she hadn’t known she knew it. They had come back from taking Letty to the hospital, white with exhaustion after the accident at the playground. Something to do with blood groups, nothing to worry about, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at their stricken faces. Genes were odd things – and twins were mutants, that was what Joe was always telling them, grinning cheerfully.
The girls had flopped on the sofa over each other like dogs, Letty’s nose buried in Mads’s armpit. Esme had chucked the sleeping bag over them and gone to stand in the hall, listening. She could see Dad’s profile through the kitchen door, she could see him frowning as he made sense of it. Tried to. That had been early autumn, leaves turning. Letty bandaged up.
It was pretty straightforward, Rutherford said. Letty had needed a transfusion after the accident, they were short of blood in the hospital, tested everyone to see who would be a match. Letty’s blood group was O negative, which meant she couldn’t be her father’s daughter. There was the record then of an appointment, Mum and Dad together, and DNA testing. November.
Months before the shootings, Alison protested, but her brain galloped ahead. November. Why not then? Why wait eight, nine months?
Rutherford had only looked at her, sorrowful. ‘Sometimes it’s how it works,’ she said. ‘Your father was an educated man. He may have tried very hard to resist what he was feeling. Sometimes feelings accumulate.’ Alison had stared, unable to deny it.
‘You knew, then,’ she said. All this time, strangers had known. Mads and Letty not her sisters. Half-sisters.
‘We have the right to access medical records when someone is dead,’ the policewoman had said, gently. ‘Why would we tell you? It would only have hurt you.’
Hurt her.
Had Sarah Rutherford felt it, or seen it? Had her training taught her, or had her experience, to detect that thing that rose up inside Alison as she heard that her sisters had not been her sisters, not really? That one thing had tipped the next, on and on. That her mother had been fucking someone not her father. It was a force, an energy that was not containable, there was no place to put it, it would have to burst loose and lay waste to the room, the building. But it stayed inside, a boom that pushed at the walls of her body and turned back inwards.
* * *
Alison stood on the waterfront against the flaking weatherboarding of the chandlery, its window filled with coils of rope and weatherproof jackets. She’d parked the car at the other end of the quay; the envelope was beneath the passenger seat.
Across the marsh beyond the house now she could make out white tape that flickered in the wind as three, four figures in white boiler suits bent and straightened, came together and moved apart. There was a police van parked near the house. It was Stephen Bray who had died in the mud off Mulville’s Hard last night. Sometime just before midnight.
Had Rutherford even meant to tell her? The policewoman had waited till the last moment they were alone together, the corridor in which they stood briefly empty. And then she’d said quickly, ‘Do you remember a man called Stephen Bray?’
Why now? She’d seen that question in Rutherford’s eyes, gleaming in the police station’s strip lighting. You come back, and he dies.
‘I saw him,’ Alison had said. ‘I saw him in the pub the night we arrived. He didn’t recognise me.’ But she didn’t know if that was true or not.
A movement distracted her: two men were hauling a dinghy down across the muddy shingle at the end of the road. She could hear the scrape. Out in the estuary two barges had come to anchor, the big black hulls jostling against each other, the dark sails gathered up on the forked masts.
‘It wasn’t the first time he’d been hauled out of the mud,’ Rutherford had said, preoccupied – one eye on the envelope of photographs as if regretting handing them over already, another on the swing doors at the end of the corridor. ‘Only this time he wasn’t just drunk, he was dead.’
‘Was it an accident?’ Alison had thought of the old man’s hand on Paul’s arm in the bar. Of the crowded, magical interior of his boat. But the policewoman had only shaken her head.
‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘He was an alcoholic. He was only still alive because people looked out for him. He had … difficulties. We don’t know yet.’
The two men were almost at the water with their dinghy. They might be headed down the creek to see the barges gathering for tomorrow’s race, but she found herself wondering, how far round, by boat, to where the body was found? As she watched, the smaller of the two gave it one last shove and followed it, vaulting around on one hand in one agile, practised move, the boat bobbing and settling. The bigger man waded stolidly into the water and the stern dipped as he climbed over the transom. She saw a heavy profile, puffy. The other sat back in the boat from stepping the mast, tangled hair falling away from his smooth brown face turned up to the sky, and she knew him too. The last time she’d seen him had been thirteen years before, in a witness box. Danny Watts.
The other one, the one with the weathered, puffy face was his brother, Martin. It was Danny she couldn’t take her eyes off.
A little peaked square sail flew up with a distant rattle and with magical swiftness the dinghy began to move, gliding across the tide towards the estuary and abruptly half hidden behind a spur of mud.
The little church sat there beyond the boat on the horizon: it was six and the rehearsal would be finishing. She should go, she should talk to Paul and smile and be sociable. But the pictures lay under the passenger seat in the car. She had seen half of one photograph and no more. She was afraid. Alison turned away from the water and began to walk back towards the car. As she walked she took out her phone and dialled Polly.
‘You knew,’ she said, straight away, hardly able to breathe for getting the words out. ‘You knew, didn’t you? The twins.’
And Polly answered as if she’d been expecting the question for a long time. ‘I’ve always known,’ she said. ‘Why do you think we stopped talking, your mother and I?’ She sounded weary to the point of despair.
‘Who was it?’ said Alison, staring sightless through the window.
A sigh. ‘I never knew his name,’ said Polly. ‘She wanted to move to get away from the whole business. I think he’d dropped her.’ There was an intake of breath and when she spoke again there was a sharpness to her voice. ‘You’re not at home, are you? You’re there.’ Silence. ‘Are you in Saltleigh?’
‘This is home,’ said Alison.
‘It’s not,’ said Polly, hard as nails. ‘It never was. You can’t stay there. Get out of there.’
Alison ignored her. ‘So Dad – Dad knew. About the twins.’ She thought now of their light eyes and hair, their otherness. ‘How could he not know?’
‘He didn’t know,’ said Polly flatly. ‘About the other man, about the twins. I told her she had to tell him but she wouldn’t.’ Her voic
e was savage. Alison realised that all this time, all these years, she’d thought it was her father Polly had fallen out with. ‘Your mother was selfish.’ Her voice was congested. ‘There was a lot he just put up with.’ A pause. ‘Please,’ she continued. ‘Please. Go home. Go back to London, come back here. I’ll … I’ll tell you what I know.’
She sounded desperate. ‘Is there any more?’ Alison said, hearing how cold she sounded, feeling the temptation to soften and say, it’s all right, it’s all right. Would there be time for that? Not now. ‘What else did he put up with?’
A silence. ‘She’d stopped telling me anything.’ A sigh. ‘But the police said.’ Polly stopped.
‘Said what?’
‘There were rumours. Another affair. In the village. A local man.’
The best skirt. Two glasses. Voices below in the yard.
‘Alison?’ She said nothing. ‘Alison? Come home, please.’
Her mother’s top drawer, with rolled underwear and things she hadn’t wanted the children to find. Even as she’d headed unerringly for the same drawer in Paul’s flat, she realised, Alison had had her mother’s in mind. A tin with locks of their hair. A pack of pills whose purpose Esme had pondered, a circle with days marked on them. The scarf had been in there. Had Polly gone to the drawer and opened it or had the police already turned it out?
Alison stopped. She had arrived back at the car, it sat where she’d left it, under a low-hanging tree beside a patch of grass and the village hall. Only as she got closer she saw that parked behind it, nudged up too tight, was Simon Chatwin’s van.
‘Alison?’ She hung up. Polly’s voice echoed plaintive in her ears and she thought of Cornwall with a painful tug, the dripping hedgerows, the low-ceilinged, clean-swept cottage that had never felt like home but now, she saw, had been a safe place. Polly always there on guard. She circled the cars. The village hall was dark and its double doors padlocked, the grass glowed in the twilight. There was no one there. She got in and turned the key in the ignition. In the split second before the engine responded she already knew, the hair on the back of her neck told her.
The sound was wrong, the dying cough of a lost connection. She turned the key again, but this time it was no more than a wheeze.
She heard a voice, muffled. She thought it said ‘dead’. She turned and his face was in her window, his paint-spattered finger raised to tap.
It was Simon Chatwin.
Chapter Eighteen
‘Your battery. It’s dead.’
She was fairly sure Simon didn’t recognise her: he showed no sign of it. His face was inches from hers as she rolled her window down but he seemed to have trouble with eye contact, blinking, turning his head from side to side. She remembered what Gina had said about medication.
‘In town for the barge match?’
‘A wedding,’ she said, and Chatwin’s blinking increased.
‘I’ll jump-start you,’ he said. Abruptly his head was withdrawn.
She climbed out and he stepped back from her hurriedly, indicating the van. ‘This is me,’ he said, ‘I’ve got leads.’ He opened the rear doors and was inside before she could answer. She climbed back into Paul’s car slowly, released the bonnet and stayed in the driver’s seat in silence as he brought his van round to the front and took his time connecting the leads.
How could he not know her? It seemed impossible. But there was the medication. And he might have been the first man she’d kissed, but – and oddly she hadn’t thought this before she came back – she would probably have been one of many to him. She felt nauseous.
His head emerged from around the bonnet, pale. ‘I’ll start up,’ he called, staying back. ‘Give it a minute then you try.’
It occurred to her as she looked at the rusted bonnet of his van that his would be the vehicle you’d expect to break down, not Paul’s. Why would Paul’s battery be flat? She turned the key, and to her disproportionate relief the engine fired.
Chatwin reappeared at the window, still standing back, as if it was he who didn’t want to be recognised. ‘Don’t use it much?’ he said. ‘The car? Can happen.’
She nodded, feeling the comforting throb of the engine, readying herself to thank him, preparing for questions, introductions. But he was gone, the bonnet down, the door slammed and the van already in reverse.
* * *
The wedding rehearsal seemed to be winding down: voices echoed cheerfully off the little church’s steeply pitched wood and plaster ceiling. Roger Carter was laughing again at the centre of the little knot of them at the font and Morgan, wearing a pale shining dress and taller than all the rest in her high heels, had a hand resting on her father’s shoulder. Alison stood in the doorway.
The flowers were done. The tall blue spikes of delphiniums along the pews, electric in the dim plain church. Cathy Watts would have done them, that diminished figure all swathed in her son’s sweater. There had been no sign of her when Alison pulled up at the church.
She had driven slowly back through the village, wanting to give the engine time to recharge the battery. She came past the row of houses where she’d seen Gina and slowed further. The row where Kyra Price had lived. Her mother had been called Susan: the name came to Alison as she lifted her foot from the accelerator to give herself time to look. She willed the girl to have lived.
A small white car was parked outside the house. Peering, slowed almost to a stop, Alison saw boxes on the car’s back seat and then the house’s door opened. A woman in a nurse’s tunic, black tights in the heat, was coming through the door. She carried a bag, strapped in dayglo nylon – but Alison had to get her eyes back on the road.
Safely beyond the parked cars she had glanced in the rear-view mirror and seen the district nurse straightening from depositing her bag and standing, looking in her direction. Alison had driven on.
She stood in the church doorway now, looking in, and wondered if Kyra Price could have been ill all this time. She had always thought with leukaemia – children anyway – either you died quickly or you survived. Kyra Price had had big dark eyes, she remembered that much about her, without hair and eyebrows they had seemed huge, that time Esme had seen her, climbing out of the taxi. She would have been eleven or twelve. Old enough to know what dying was.
She must have let in a draught because by the font Morgan in pale silk, mid-laugh, turned her head a little towards the door, and then they had all turned to look at her.
Paul started towards her straight away. His face bent to her neck he said softly, against her skin, ‘We’re going back to their place for dinner. I hope that’s all right.’
There wasn’t really an answer she could give. No. He raised his head, and she just smiled.
* * *
The Laurels’ broad drive held three cars – a sleek, dark, overpowered one, a convertible and a jaunty yellow Italian number; of course they’d need one each, the Carters, she thought, and no trouble with their batteries – and two trucks, one belonging to a catering company, the other the marquee people. At the church Paul’s car had started without a problem and she hadn’t said anything to him about what had happened before, only holding her breath as he turned the key.
The Carters all seemed in a state of high excitement in the wake of the rehearsal, and the doctor was flushed with particular triumph, in spite of how much it was all supposed to be costing him. Alison noticed that in any situation he and Morgan gravitated towards each other, conspirators. Of all of them Christian was the calm one, remaining pale and faintly amused. To her surprise Alison found herself fascinated by him, the way his eyes rested cool and thoughtful on Morgan. There was a dining room and Lucy Carter led them to a big table with a high shine on it, laid very formally.
The dinner had obviously been part of the deal with the catering company because a waitress appeared and Lucy Carter sat down with them straight away, next to Paul. Morgan was on his other side. Alison was seated between Roger Carter and Christian. She couldn’t imagine what she would say to
them. She closed her eyes for an involuntary second as she sat, behind her eyelids seeing the tide coming in and the big boats gathering out in the estuary, the crooked house in the dark. When this was over she would never come back. She would never see any of it again.
Even before the first course – something mounded under cream sauce – was set down Roger Carter was talking about Stephen Bray, loudly, as if addressing all of them at once.
‘Of course, he was an alcoholic, and he probably had undiagnosed Asperger’s. The Watts woman looked after him, but she didn’t get any thanks for it.’ He prodded his food. Alison looked down at the white thing on her plate: it was hard, under blue cheese sauce. She lifted her knife and fork but hesitated, without appetite.
‘There seem to be plenty of alcoholics around here,’ said Paul, and Morgan laughed, lifting her glass to her lips and looking at him over it. Alison put a slice of the thing on her plate in her mouth. It was pear, hard and tasteless under the sauce: she wished she could spit it out.
‘Was he your patient?’ Christian’s voice was mild and uninflected, but Carter looked up from his plate frowning.
‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘You know the surgery’s fifteen miles away, Christian. I wouldn’t want this lot on my books.’
Lucy Carter was on her feet. ‘There’s something – I must just…’ but she didn’t finish her sentence. Creating a diversion, was Alison’s impression. She disappeared towards the kitchen.
‘Where was he found, exactly?’ said Christian. He had pushed his plate away. Alison laid her fork down.
‘Quite odd, that, actually,’ said Carter, putting a big piece of pear into his mouth, chewing. ‘Mulville’s Hard’s not on the way anywhere. Out past … well … out that way.’ He gestured with his knife. He meant past the crooked house.
‘How would he have got there?’ Paul asked the question. He was eating with a fixed expression of distaste.
‘He’d have walked, of course. Across the marsh, most probably.’ Carter’s plate was clean. ‘From that old wreck he lives on. Lived on.’
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