‘Did they catch him?’ she said. ‘The hit-and-run driver? Did they ever catch him? Because he’d have had to be someone local, wouldn’t he? All the way out here in the middle of nowhere? Some drunk on his way back from the pub?’ She heard her voice rising; she saw Gina staring. Dad too drunk to drive. Bitch.
‘Don’t,’ said Gina, stiff. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But she couldn’t stop. ‘Are they even sure it was a car? Not a … a fight or something? Couldn’t he … couldn’t they—’
‘Joe was with me,’ said Gina. Alison turned and stared, but Gina didn’t look at her. ‘That night. They got into something, I don’t know what, if it was about you or who it was about.’ She ducked her head. ‘Joe came to me. He rang you from my place.’ Silence. ‘He talked to … one of the little ones first, all right? Was it Letty answered? I heard him telling her to get someone.’ Gina’s face was stone.
Horns blared, one after the other, and both at once they looked up, across the grey water. Two boats were racing, neck and neck, so aggressively, sinisterly close it must, thought Alison, be dangerous. She braced herself for a grinding crash, a horrible tilt and dive but they were still moving. A tall man stood quite calm at the wheel of the vessel closest to the shore, not even looking at the other boat whose wake frothed over his gunwales. The barge’s name was etched in yellow on bright blue at her bow. Lady Maud.
‘Are you going to the prize-giving?’ she asked, and hearing her own plaintive voice it occurred to her that soon she would be gone. She would never see Gina again.
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ said Gina, her eyes fixed on the man at the Lady Maud’s helm. ‘All those bearded weirdos? Not a fucking chance.’ And she turned her head to stare straight into Alison’s eyes. ‘Not if you’re coming along with that boyfriend of yours,’ she said, and immediately Alison felt winded, as if she’d been slapped.
‘When have you even seen him?’ she said, although even as she spoke she worked it out. It must have been the first night in the pub, Gina with her cracked heels on the bar stool and Paul getting the drinks in.
‘Oh, I’ve seen him,’ said Gina. ‘Good-looking bloke.’ Her voice was flat. ‘He went out with her, didn’t he?’ And she jerked her head back towards the clustered houses of the village, across the inlet and the marsh. ‘Morgan Carter the bitch. He dump her? Or is it one of those things, you know. A quick shag now and again and no one the wiser. For old times’ sake.’
And Alison was on her feet, heels slipping in the sand. ‘Why … why…’ But she didn’t say it. Why do you want to hurt me? And she realised what hurt her was partly just the thought of the lost years here, Gina at the pub, Gina growing up without Esme.
And then Gina was up too, the rage and poison gone out of her face, and only misery left. ‘I miss him,’ she said. ‘I miss Joe.’ Her voice, high and sad and lost, blew away from them on the wind.
* * *
The police car gleamed white and striped below the crumbling churchyard wall and at the sight of it Alison braked the little car in panic, looked around for somewhere to turn, to escape. There were no other cars there and the chapel was unlit: whatever Paul had come over here to help with had been sorted. Hold on, she told herself. Hold on. What can they do to you? You’re not the suspect.
She parked under a tree further back down the lane and sat. Not Joe. How long had she been afraid it had been, without allowing herself to admit it? Thank Christ for that, not Joe, her brother hadn’t killed Joshua Watts throwing a punch in some new drunken argument – or the same one they’d had on the beach in September, boiling over again that November night. She didn’t know why it would be such a relief, except that she knew if he’d hurt someone, if he’d killed someone, even accidentally, he would have been in agony, he would have been destroyed. Why had she believed it, why had she wondered, even for a second? Because losing a child might have driven someone to come out to the crooked house and take revenge. Driven someone to savagery.
Joe’s life was gone, all the same.
Two people were sitting in the police car. Alison got out and stood in the road, looking through its back window. She waited, one eye on the car, one on the little chapel’s double doors.
The police car’s passenger door opened and Sarah Rutherford stood there, looking back at Alison. The policewoman leaned down and said something into the car and then she was walking towards her unhurriedly, strong-shouldered, wide-hipped, the gleam on her shabby trousers visible in the evening light. Alison turned quickly and walked away from the chapel, listening for Sarah Rutherford’s footsteps behind her. She kept going until she was out of sight of the churchyard and an open gate appeared, a tufted field. She felt the policewoman come after her. The gate banged behind them.
The grass was clumped and boggy underfoot as if the field was reverting to marsh. The hedges were tangled and hugely overgrown, tumbling with blown hawthorn, and Alison set herself with her back to it, facing Rutherford.
‘It wasn’t him,’ said Alison. ‘I can’t do this on my own. It’s your job to do this. Isn’t that why you’re here? You know it wasn’t my dad.’
She saw pity flicker in Sarah Rutherford’s wide grey eyes, and her heart sank.
‘It was him,’ said Rutherford. Alison took a breath but the policewoman held up a hand to stop her then stood there, feet planted square in the long grass.
‘You’re fooling yourself,’ she said. ‘There was ample evidence, biological, circumstantial, that he did it, no evidence that anyone else did. To start with, another perpetrator would have killed your father first, would have made sure he was dead.’
Alison took a step back, she could give in, she thought, but then something clicked in her head. Think. All right. ‘How do you know he wasn’t shot first,’ she countered, ‘and the killer believed him to be dead? He wasn’t going to get up and fight, was he?’
Her voice sounded brutal in her ears and she heard Rutherford’s intake of breath. ‘We have ample evidence,’ the policewoman repeated, and took her by the upper arms, gently, holding her in place. ‘And who do you think would have wanted to kill your family? Your whole family? To shoot a woman, a boy, two eight-year-olds?’
‘They were shot through the sleeping bag,’ says Alison, remembering then. Fibres in the blood, the brown and orange fabric, holes in the nylon. ‘Whoever did it couldn’t bear to look at them.’ Faltering.
There was silence, and she filled it. She might not have another chance. ‘A mother lost her child in a fire,’ she said. Somewhere far off she heard the organ rising, she tried to blot it out. ‘And then the child’s father died.’ Still silence: Rutherford dropped her arms, looked away, looked back. Was she even listening? ‘Two boys lost their brother in a hit-and-run, and they had to watch their mother destroyed by it.’
Sarah Rutherford was frowning now, a deep vertical line between her eyebrows. Alison felt cold, suddenly, in the deep shade of the big hedge, the ground beneath her feet had soaked her shoes.
‘Do you think we didn’t talk to people?’ said Rutherford, roused from weariness to anger. ‘Do you think we’re stupid?’ She leaned closer, her face was in Alison’s but she spoke gently. ‘Your father did it.’
‘You never caught anyone for the hit-and-run,’ said Alison, not looking away. ‘Two boys lost their brother. She’s destroyed by it, their mother is, did you know that? And for the house fire. You never had to catch anyone for any of those deaths. Where is she now? The woman whose baby died, whose husband topped himself? She works at the hotel, doesn’t she?’
‘Karen Marshall,’ said Sarah Rutherford.
Alison registered the name, found a place to store it. ‘My father wasn’t wearing his glasses when he shot himself,’ she said, holding Sarah Rutherford’s steady blue gaze. ‘How could you not have known he wore glasses?’ The policewoman’s eyes darkened, and at last Alison saw what she’d been waiting for. She saw doubt.
‘What are you doing here?’ she
said. ‘If it’s all over?’
‘There are other crimes,’ said Rutherford wearily. ‘Believe it or not. This is my job.’
A sound came from inside her jacket somewhere, and she turned her lapel to her mouth and spoke into it, shielding herself from Alison as she did it. Alison saw her back tense, saw a hand come up to rub at the place between her shoulder blades, saw it stop.
‘No,’ she heard Rutherford say, almost with a groan. Then, ‘All right, all right.’ The policewoman’s head turned just slightly, to gauge where Alison stood, then back again. ‘A hundred yards, I’ll be at the gate.’ She turned back, letting the lapel fall back and with it the tiny microphone.
‘Talking of which,’ she said, ‘duty calls.’
‘What?’ said Alison. ‘What is it?’
Rutherford frowned a little, shaking her head. ‘Kids,’ she said. ‘It’ll be nothing.’ But she chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘If my dad didn’t do it, who did?’ said Alison, standing her ground.
Rutherford put out her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said, a warning note in her voice. The lapel crackled again – ‘Wait’ – then she put a hand over the mike and spoke to Alison.
‘Please,’ she said. She was pale. ‘Go to your wedding. Listen to the speeches. Then go and get on with your life somewhere as far away from here as you can.’
Alison stepped back, as if Rutherford had shoved her, but the policewoman’s hand reached after her and took hold of her arm.
‘Leave it,’ said Rutherford, gripping her. ‘Please.’ And then she let go and she was striding away, uneven in the clumped grass. Alison saw the white shape of the car beyond the gate, Rutherford’s long straight hair swinging as she ducked to climb in and then it was moving off, neon stripes flickering past the hedge.
As she came around the bend and the chapel was back in view Alison saw that where the police car had been parked a woman stood in a shabby coat. As if she’d been waiting. The moment she saw Alison she began walking towards her. She came slowly, with a kind of rolling walk, as if her joints gave her pain but she kept coming, her slanted Eskimo eyes slits in the low sun. She stopped squarely in front of Alison.
It was Cathy Watts. Her face had deep creases and a gleam like soft leather. ‘Why did you come back?’ she said, unmerciful, and without warning, somewhere inside Alison anger turned and sparked and caught.
‘Why not?’ she said, ragged with rage. They all wanted her to disappear. They wanted her to have died along with the rest. Cathy Watts folded her arms, but she stood her ground, she didn’t turn and walk away.
‘I couldn’t stay away forever,’ Alison said, the anger ebbing. ‘My father’s still alive,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’ A small movement of the head, yes, but Danny’s mother’s arms were still folded. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be me? To have people say, people tell you someone you … someone you loved all your life could do that? Wouldn’t you want to be sure?’ She ran out of breath.
Cathy Watts looked at her, unmoving, a long moment before she spoke. ‘We all know,’ she said, and her voice was hoarse. ‘We know he did it.’ She sounded grim, but still she didn’t turn and leave.
‘How do you know?’ said Alison. And then, gaining courage, ‘Was it Stephen Bray? He saw my dad that night, didn’t he? Maybe he was the last person to see him. Did he tell you something? Did you tell the police?’ Cathy Watts watched her, silent. ‘You looked after him,’ said Alison. ‘Mr Bray.’
‘Someone had to,’ Watts said, unfolding her arms at last. Alison saw her hands were knobbed and curled with arthritis as she let them hang by her sides. She looked at Alison strangely: accusingly. ‘He took it very hard,’ she said. ‘Your dad killing those girls.’
‘What did he say to you?’ Alison stepped towards Cathy Watts. ‘What did he know? Why did he die now, why now? I saw him the night I came back, did he know it was me? Was he going to tell me something?’ The older woman’s face was cold but Alison only became more desperate. ‘He died out near our house, didn’t he? What was he doing over there? It’s not on the way back to his boat from the pub, is it?’
Cathy Watts was shaking her head now, she was shifting on her arthritic hips, turning to set herself in motion. ‘Don’t you start that,’ she said, holding herself steady. ‘Not with me, you don’t. Why are you asking me when you know the answer? You know what he was doing out there. The boys saw you.’
‘What do you mean?’ Her hand was on Watts’s arm, anything to keep her, and the older woman stared down at it with her black eyes as if an animal had got hold of her. Alison let go at once.
‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ said Watts, and then she was walking away, lopsided with silent pain.
It hung in the air behind her: a warning, the same one they’d all issued her with. Go. You are his child, it said. She had brought him back, brought it back, the bad thing that had lain there all the time in the marsh, that had sat dormant in the boarded house like disease, and when she drove over that hill and looked down to the estuary, under her gaze it had broken the mud’s surface and was exposed.
You will never be clean, the warning said, you will never be good, you will never be free. They are drawn to her, they stare at her. The one who’d walked out of the rubble, the survivor.
They must have suspected her. Any investigations relating to you will be restricted, Rutherford had said. Of course they had investigated her, they had to. Perhaps they’d all wondered, whispering up and down the village’s high street as Esme sat in the foster family’s kitchen and talked to Sarah Rutherford, as she sat motionless in the strange bedroom among the battered toys. Children had been known to kill, even if it had always happened in America, where there were guns everywhere, guns and drugs and computer-game-addicted teens. The Wattses, the pub landlord, Stephen Bray – even Gina, even Kyra Price and her mother. Had it crossed all their minds, and did it still hang over her, even now, that under the influence of childish, murderous rage, not understanding she couldn’t take it back, she had found the rusty old shotgun and pulled the trigger again and again until they were all dead?
At least as likely as her dad doing it, her gentle hopeless dad, who’d never once even slapped a child.
In the lane Cathy Watts had turned the corner now and was gone.
Sometimes, sometimes, in the intervening years Alison had wondered too, lying in the cold bedroom in Polly’s cold house or starting awake in a college room hundreds of miles away. At bad moments, she let the idea grow in the way clouds grow out of nothing until they turn the sky black that all she had heard as she lay on her bed were the sounds of a violent argument. That in fact it had been Esme who had come down, high on whatever had been in the cup Gina had goaded her to swallow, stirred up with their argument and ready for a fight, and that something had boiled up inside her when she came downstairs and saw them. Saw her mother in heels and lipstick ranting at her father from the kitchen doorway and him swaying drunken and blank and useless, saw the twins, entwined in their sleeping bag, turned silent and alien against her, and Joe, maddeningly oblivious, nodding under his headphones. And it flew out of her black and shrieking. Wake up. BOOM.
So no wonder.
Alison stared down the empty lane, seeing the cow parsley gleam like silver in the shadows, listening to the birds beginning to sing in the hedges as the twilight crept up. Listening.
She put her hands to her eyes so that there was only sound, she was Esme perched high up in her bedroom. Voices. She listened. Yes.
Voices in the yard, where she found the twisted piece of metal from her father’s glasses.
Someone screaming. Shrieking words.
Voices. Her mother’s voice, lowered. A man answering. Was she talking to Simon?
A car far off.
Out here in the crooked house you learn to listen for that, you know, when the sound detaches itself from the village, when it bumps and revs on the track coming closer, that someone is coming
out here, because there is nowhere else, nothing else, only mud, concrete remains, rotted timber. Just us.
It was all thrown in the air, she couldn’t get the order right, what came first, what was the last, the very last thing she heard?
Alison took her hands from her eyes. The night he died Stephen Bray must have been coming to meet someone in the crooked house, because there was nothing else to come for. Just their house, the Grace house, and her thoughts flew off, scattering; he was coming out to see ghosts, to see the dead. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, thinking of what that house might contain, behind the boarded windows. She put her hands back to her eyes, shutting herself in. Esme. Inside her own head.
The car is stopping, the voices in the yard are raised. Panic. It begins.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Kay’s voice. In the car on the way back to the hotel with the phone pressed to her ear, Alison almost sobbed to hear it. She pulled up at random: she was on the high street.
It was just a message. Her mobile’s screen had been telling her about it for days, only she never registered that stuff, it had been just that she got the phone out to catch Rutherford and bring her back, before she got to whatever had called her away, to tell her she’d remembered something, and the icon had caught her eye at last.
‘Jesus, are you dead, or what?’ Kay’s voice, urgent. ‘I … there’s something … it’s too complicated to talk about on the phone.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you locked up in the bloody honeymoon suite? Can you stop shagging him for five minutes and call me at least?’
And her voice was gone. There’d been the noise of a bar in the message’s background, there’d been a moment when the voice faded then returned, when Kay must have turned from the phone to nod or get out of someone’s way or take a drink, and it came to Alison in that pause that she could just … leave. Climb out of Paul’s car, walk to the hotel, call a taxi. She could buy a ticket and get on a train until it pulled in where there would be strangers, a thousand people heading across each other to their destinations under a big vaulted echoing station roof: just another Friday evening. London.
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