‘Why don’t we try along here,’ she said, following a narrow slatted boardwalk that meandered ahead of them through the clumped sea lavender.
Stephen Bray’s boat lay, tilted as she always appeared to Alison in dreams, a long, smooth-bellied elegant curve undiminished by the muddy berth, the long-gone spars and ropes. She was a certain famous class of yacht. On his chart table in the tilted cabin Bray and her father had pored over old photographs of her racing at regattas. Paul stopped, admiring.
Her decks were muddy as if the tide had come up over her, there were bootprints stamped all over the teak and the neat varnished cabin doors had hardboard crudely nailed over them. Because the police would have been here. Because he was dead. She raised her head and looked past the boat to the sea wall. What had he been doing on Mulville’s Hard? It wasn’t on the way to his boat. It was past the crooked house. She thought of him staggering in the dark, falling to his knees in the cold mud. The sound of the tide, creeping and lapping, in his ears.
Back on the shingle the little dinghies were setting off one by one now, bobbing in the water, the small passengers sitting trussed stiff and obedient in their lifejackets. She thought of Mads and Letty; she thought of Simon Chatwin.
Paul followed her gaze. She saw him frown again.
‘You don’t want children, do you?’ she said.
‘Don’t I?’ he said, looking down into her face. In the sharp clean light she saw the fine lines around his eyes, the gleam of silver in his hair, his half smile, her insides churned. Have me.
His hand came up and rested warm on her cheek, turning her face to him.
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ Alison said, feeling the ground shift under her. So dangerous. ‘Your family, your home, where you went to school, university. Your work.’ Even as she said it, as he looked down at her, smiling, it all sounded so trivial, so safe, so dull. Who needs to know? And anyway, you could make it all up. She knew that better than anyone.
‘My work?’ Now he was mocking her. ‘My family? I haven’t bored you with my idyllic childhood?’ He smiled, but his eyes were narrowed against the sharp light.
‘All right,’ she said, roused. ‘Why you haven’t … why you’re still single.’ He brought his hand away and suddenly she felt cold. She’d gone too far.
‘You’re the first one that meant anything,’ Paul said, looking away from her, out to sea. ‘Do you believe that?’
‘If we got married…’ she said, and he raised an eyebrow, but she persisted. ‘If we got married, who would come to the wedding?’
‘Now that,’ he said, and took her wrist, ‘that is an interesting question. I’d like to know that too.’ His hand gripped her tight. He raised the wrist and put his mouth to the inside, where the blue veins sat close to the surface. ‘Will you marry me?’ His hand warm and tight. For a moment the memory of the time before, the night he’d held her down, made her close her eyes for wanting that violence back. She thought of them bound close together, just the two of them, forever, and she didn’t know what she should say. She saw with sudden certainty that she needed to be tied close to something and it opened like a sinkhole inside her, a terrible lost feeling, as she saw what would happen if she let this go, let him go. She opened her eyes again quickly. He looked at her a long moment then he laughed and released her.
There’s something I need to tell you. The line was in her head, but she said nothing.
‘Children,’ he said, turning to watch the dinghies gathering speed as they headed towards the estuary and the bigger boats on the horizon. The sky was pale, some high wisps of cloud. ‘I don’t think we’re the sort, do you?’
What sort are we? wondered Alison. The defective sort. In evolutionary terms. Damaged.
There was a sudden gust and the tiny boats heeled in unison. Alison watched, feeling her heart pound with panic at what she might have said. What if he hadn’t meant it, if it had been some kind of a joke, and because she believed it, because she wanted what she thought he’d been offering so badly, his mother’s engagement ring and his white-painted bedroom above a bustling London road forever – she’d told him everything?
What if he asked her again?
She turned away from the horizon and there was Stephen Bray’s boat tilted in the mud, still there, turning derelict before her eyes. It would soon disintegrate: did anyone own it? The home-made landing stage, the slimy planks of the step. Her father used to hold her arm tight, handing her across to the slippery deck. Try to remember, Sarah Rutherford had said all that time ago, when Esme’s memory had been like a scrapyard in the dark, full of sharp things you could trip over and she hadn’t wanted to try. Anything at all.
She remembered her father with his head suddenly in his hands over Stephen Bray’s chart table. ‘I don’t know what she wants,’ he’d said. ‘I’d do anything for her.’ The older man pushing his glasses up his nose and reaching around for the bottle of home brew, moving between Esme and her father. Something shifted in Alison’s head at the memory of her father’s voice. He had taken her there, his girl, his favourite, she hadn’t really understood that before, how much he had loved her. She’d thought he loved all of them. And now he was sitting in that chair at the end of that corridor where the linoleum gleamed and the CCTV camera watched him, and he was alone.
If she had told Sarah Rutherford that her father’s voice hadn’t been angry when he talked to Stephen Bray about her mother, would it have made any difference? That when he said he would have done anything for her, it had been true? He had sounded lonely, he had sounded helpless.
Paul’s arms were around her. ‘Come on,’ he said, his breath on the nape of her neck.
They walked on, their backs to the power station, the crooked house on the skyline, black against the early sun, every step taking them closer.
Further along the sea wall was Mulville’s Hard, where Bray’s body had been found.
Earlier, as they had come into the dining room for breakfast, Alison had stopped on the threshold. ‘Damn,’ she’d said. ‘Forgot my phone.’
‘You don’t need it,’ he’d said, his expression clouding, and she’d made a face. ‘Kay tried to call me last night,’ she’d said. ‘I’d better make sure it’s not urgent.’
‘Kay.’ So he didn’t like her.
‘I’ll be quick,’ she’d said. ‘Get me the full works. Eggs, all that.’ Which might buy her some time.
But it wasn’t to phone Kay back that she’d gone upstairs. The reminder sat there blinking, missed call, but Kay belonged to another world, a world where they gossiped and drank and dreamed, where Esme had become Alison, where everything was possible and none of this had ever happened. She might never go back there.
Sitting on the unmade bed, she’d phoned DCI Sarah Rutherford.
When the policewoman answered she sounded breathless. In the background Alison heard a tap running, a chink of plates. Washing up. ‘Do you know a man called Simon Chatwin?’
There was a sigh. ‘Esme,’ Rutherford said, resigned, and then Alison heard a muffled voice. Hand over the receiver. The background sounds were gone. A door closed.
She stood from the bed. ‘Alison,’ she said. ‘It’s Alison now.’ But at the sound of her real name something had stirred in her gut, fear, derailing her. ‘Does anyone know what happened to me, afterwards? Where I went?’ She walked to the big bay window and looked down. The woman from last night stood at the centre of the gravel. Alison saw a hand come up holding a cigarette. Stocky, middle-aged, her arms folded across her body, her hair under a kind of white cotton cap, she didn’t move. She was looking at Paul’s car.
‘There was a court ruling,’ said Sarah Rutherford. ‘Didn’t your aunt tell you?’ Alison made no answer, and she went on. ‘The media were banned from reporting anything that might identify you or your whereabouts.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Of course, it wouldn’t have stopped someone trying to find you. They just couldn’t make it public. But if you didn’t want anyone to find yo
u, why are you back?’
The woman turned on the gravel below and hurriedly Alison stepped away from the glass.
‘I’m not back,’ she said, stubborn, illogical. ‘In a day, two days, I’ll be gone.’
‘I hope you will,’ said Sarah Rutherford.
‘Why are you even worried about me?’ said Alison, turning away from the window. ‘If you’re so sure my dad did it?’
Paul’s things were piled neatly on the desk, and she took a step towards them. On the top was a clear folder, and she could see the typed title on the top sheet below it. Retribution in Occupied France. It was more than a centimetre thick; she put a finger down to the plastic. Other folders were stacked beneath it, cuttings, the edges of photographs, some books with the university’s library stamp on their spines. With a finger she pushed at the pile and there was a wartime crowd scene, a woman at the centre of it, shaven-headed. She pushed it back in.
A silence. ‘People can be … this kind of incident … people don’t always react rationally.’ Sarah Rutherford sounded tense, wary. ‘You’re your father’s daughter. You could get hurt.’ There was a pause. A sigh. ‘As for your question. We know who Simon Chatwin is, yes. We know who he is and where he is now.’
‘You do?’ Sarah Rutherford didn’t answer, and Alison took a breath. ‘Did you know my father wore glasses?’ she said. ‘Like me. It’s genetic, runs in families. Short-sightedness.’ And she heard something, or rather nothing, the sound of Sarah Rutherford holding her breath. Then the policewoman spoke.
‘Your father was short-sighted.’ A question pretending not to be.
‘Yes,’ said Alison, letting the fact settle between them. ‘And he wasn’t wearing his glasses when you found him, was he? Did anyone even know? Did anyone ask?’
‘I – I’d have to—’
‘I found a piece of his glasses in the yard,’ said Alison, not waiting for her to finish. ‘If it wasn’t him, who was it? Simon Chatwin came to our house at least once. Was it him my mother was having an affair with? Was he…’ And she grappled with the timing, how old Simon was when they were born, how, where he and her mother might have met, the artists’ supplies shop, the distance to the town. ‘Was he their father? Was Chatwin my sisters’ father? Did you check that DNA, while you were about it?’
‘Alison,’ said Sarah Rutherford, and Alison heard alarm sound in her voice. ‘Are you sure? The glasses. How bad was your father’s eyesight?’
And it was Alison’s turn to hesitate. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She took off her own glasses. She held out her hand in front of her. How close did you have to be, to shoot someone? Could she do it, if someone had left her glasses smashed in the street? She thought of her father at the kitchen table, taking off his glasses to read. Rubbing his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
On the stairs she had heard voices then: Jan, talking to someone. A low female voice answering, sullen, submissive: the woman she’d just seen outside, somehow she was sure of it. She crossed to the door and stood with her back to it; she needed to get back downstairs. ‘Simon Chatwin,’ she said again.
‘We ruled him out,’ said Sarah Rutherford. A pause. ‘He wasn’t their father. We tested him, he gave his permission. I can’t … I can’t talk to you about him, Alison. But you need to believe me, we ruled him out. When we found him out there, the morning after … there’s no way…’ There was noise again in the background, the door banged louder and Alison heard a child’s voice. She brought a hand to her mouth – she had a kid. ‘Can you come over?’ the policewoman said. ‘Come into the station?’
‘I – I have to go now,’ said Alison. ‘I have to go.’
* * *
It was still there. Simon Chatwin’s boat.
The look Paul gave it was very different from the one he’d given Stephen Bray’s. The cabin looked like it had been made of chipboard by a child. It looked as though you could open the lopsided doors with a kick.
If the police had ruled Chatwin out, why were they still watching him? In her pocket the phone rang, and Paul’s head turned, looking for the sound. Reluctantly she took it out. Gina, said the screen, and with her heart thumping, Paul’s eyes on her she put it to her ear. Smiled at him.
‘Hi!’ she said brightly.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Watts brothers were in their boatyard, planing a boat on blocks.
‘You’re good at this,’ Paul had said, when Alison led them back towards the quay by a different route on instinct, picking her way between jetties, not even knowing how she knew which path to take back, realising only as they got there that they would end up coming alongside the boatbuilders’ shed.
‘Fluke,’ she’d said, watching the men bent over the upturned boat. Martin had always been the quiet one, the peacemaker between Joshua and Joe, Danny more heedless, doing his own thing. But they seemed in unison now, heads down. Maybe it was how you got through stuff. ‘You can have a go next time,’ she said to Paul. ‘You know this place, I don’t.’ He shrugged.
The Wattses’ house was a low cottage behind a patch of shorn grass at the back of the boatyard, a splash of green startling in the grey that stretched to the horizon behind it. That was where the milkman had come that morning, to tell their mother, his float abandoned in the yard. Alison no longer knew where she’d been told the story, if she’d overheard it whispered in the kitchen, between her parents. Had it been Joe who told her? November. Her and Dad and the twins in front of the fire, the night it happened.
Joshua Watts must have been very clearly dead when the milkman found him, because otherwise you’d stay with him, wouldn’t you? You’d wait for an ambulance. Esme hadn’t stayed with her father. She’d stepped over him and gone into the dark.
‘It is an amazing place, isn’t it?’ said Paul, watching the Wattses’ rhythmic movements along the curved length of the upturned boat. ‘The land that time forgot.’ He turned to her. ‘So who was it?’
In her pocket Alison’s hand tightened around the mobile. ‘Who?’
His arm came around her and she held very still, small in his embrace. ‘On the phone,’ he said, smiling down, patient.
‘Gina?’ The name came easily. A lie has to contain elements of truth. ‘An old friend.’ Something came to her. ‘Bloody Facebook, can you believe it? There’s no hiding place these days.’ She thrust her hands down in her pockets. ‘Not even in the land that time forgot.’
‘Really,’ said Paul, his lips on her cheek. ‘I didn’t know you did Facebook.’
‘You don’t have to,’ she answered, smooth, ‘if everyone else does. Your so-called friends will dish out your mobile number.’
Paul nodded, raising his head to look back at the boatyard, making no objection. Did he have reason to? She didn’t know how much he’d heard of their conversation.
Gina had launched straight in. ‘They know you’re here,’ she’d said, urgently. Alison had to concentrate so hard, to keep smiling with Paul’s eyes on her. She’d taken a step away from him, then another, holding a hand over the speaker and making an apologetic face before turning. ‘Who?’ she said to Gina. Now her back was to Paul. ‘Who knows?’
‘All of them,’ said Gina. ‘You know this place. Someone must have seen you. Recognised you.’ Then when Alison said nothing, she went on, hissing, ‘It wasn’t me, you know. I said nothing. Nothing.’
They knew? Alison stood still and cold despite the sunshine, gripping the mobile tight. Who knew? She thought of Rosa in that grim London basement pub and her questions, her inexplicable phone call. Take care. Did she know? And all these years she had thought herself invisible, below the radar.
‘Tell me names.’ On the quay she saw Simon Chatwin’s van pull up outside the pub. Identifiable by his overalls, some kind of bandana over his shock of hair, he got out. Ron the landlord was only just opening up, and he had to wait on the doorstep. He didn’t look in their direction.
But Gina exhaled impatiently. ‘You think I’ve gone door to door asking? We
knew it was Cornwall you’d gone to, you know that, don’t you? We left you alone, didn’t we? Safe out there, we thought.’
Across the marsh Chatwin disappeared inside the pub. The place was full of drunks, Paul had said, and it looked like Simon Chatwin was one. Esme had only worked at the place three Sundays, before that midsummer night that ended her childhood, and already she’d hated it, the bleary sozzled sticky afternoons, daytrippers and locals, laughter breaking out at tables. She didn’t think the landlord had given Esme a second glance, not then, nor Alison the night she and Paul had gone into the pub, either.
‘How do you know that was what I wanted?’ Alison said, keeping her voice low. ‘To be left alone?’ She’d thought of Gina so often. She’d wondered. ‘And who’s we? The Wattses?’ She paused. ‘Simon?’ She glanced back over her shoulder. Paul had moved away a little and was watching the horizon, his hands behind his back.
‘Ron knows,’ said Gina. ‘You went to the pub, right? If he knows, everyone’s going to know, sooner or later. Why did you have to come back?’
‘I told you why,’ said Alison. ‘It’s a wedding.’ And something occurred to her, the knot tightening in her chest. ‘You don’t think they know? The Carters?’ She searched her memory. They’d given no sign. Could Roger Carter be so good an actor?
Gina made a sound of contempt. ‘I don’t mean them,’ she said. ‘They’re not us, are they? See them down the pub ever?’ A quick intake of breath. ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ she went on quickly.
Alison heard Paul’s feet shifting on the gravel five, ten feet away and she turned.
‘I think I know,’ she said, raising her hand to shade her eyes, looking at him. Smiling. He stood, hands in pockets. Alison turned back.
‘I can’t talk,’ she said quickly. If he heard her mentioning the Carters’ name … ‘I’ll call you when I can?’ Gina had hung up without waiting a beat, leaving Alison turning back to Paul, all too aware of her heart thudding in her chest.
And now, as they watched, Danny Watts straightened from the boat and Martin with him, and the two men looked straight back at them. They were a hundred yards away, maybe less. Poised beside their boat, each with the heavy implement in his hand, they watched. Alison pulled the scarf close around her ears, hands in her pocket.
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