Alison pressed to return the call. It rang, and rang: it was close to six o’clock. Just another Friday evening. Kay would have left work. Maybe she was back in the same bar. Who would she be with? ‘Hello,’ Alison said awkwardly, to Kay’s answerphone message that said breathily, jokily seductive Sorry, I can’t get to the phone, tell me everything.
‘It’s me,’ she said, and stopped. What was that? A sound? Was there someone coming? She looked in the wing mirror, but the pavement was empty.
‘What’s too complicated to leave a message about, then?’ She tried to sound upbeat but her voice was reedy and anxious. She remembered something. ‘Rosa phoned,’ she said. ‘Is it to do with that?’ Then something overwhelmed her. I just want to talk to you. And before she could take it back, it was out. ‘Rosa knows, doesn’t she? About me. Do you all know?’ She heard her own intake of breath, horrified, trying to climb down. ‘Call me back, anyway. Please.’
When she got back to the hotel Paul was leaning on the reception desk, chatting to a pinkly pleased Jan.
‘You walked back,’ Alison said.
‘I said I would,’ he said, smiling easily, pushing himself off the polished counter, apparently unaware of Jan gazing at him.
‘Jan,’ said Alison. ‘Did you say you had some books about the area?’
Paul stretched. ‘I’ll get back to work,’ he said, eyeing the two of them with amusement.
‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ said Alison. She waited until he’d turned the bend in the wide staircase, then waited some more before turning back to Jan, catching that adoring look on her face again.
‘Does someone called Karen Marshall work here?’ she asked.
‘I … she … I … yes,’ Jan said, ruffled.
‘I’d like to talk to her,’ said Alison, the same smile on her face as she’d given Paul, brooking no opposition.
Jan summoned up authority. ‘She’s on our kitchen staff,’ she said. ‘She’s not on duty for half an hour.’
‘In that case,’ said Alison, ‘could we have some tea sent up?’ She smiled. ‘In a little while?’
When she came into the room Paul was lying on top of the bed, and he seemed to be asleep. Alison sat down at the desk, where his papers lay undisturbed, and looking down at them she wondered. In her head she mapped connections, down university corridors, at conferences, in emails. Paul’s life, who he knew, what he knew, where he’d been. Paul knew Saunders. Did Rosa know him too? They all exchanged information, they knew each other’s interests. Rosa knew. Holding still, Alison waited for the pieces to align, to give her an explanation: the machine in her head ticked and whirred, but it needed more time.
There was a soft knock at the door. On the bed Paul didn’t show any sign of having heard and Alison went to answer it.
At the door holding a tray of tea things, Karen Marshall smelled of cigarette smoke. She was the woman who’d stared at Paul’s car, smoke drifting up from the cigarette in her hand. She looked at Alison, sullenly suspicious, and Alison stepped out into the corridor, letting the door half close behind her. She took the tray from the woman.
‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ she said. Marshall clenched her empty hands and Alison saw that the skin on them was rough and red, the nails bitten to the quick.
‘Yes,’ said Marshall. ‘I know.’ Waiting. ‘Here for the wedding?’ A note of disbelief in her voice.
‘I don’t think my dad did it,’ said Alison, finding herself without any strategy, with the woman’s hard, wary eyes on her. ‘I don’t think he could have.’
Marshall said nothing.
‘Do you think it was his fault your baby died?’ Alison couldn’t waste time.
Something flared in the woman’s face, a blotch on each cheek and Alison thought of the smoke that hung in the village’s lanes. ‘Why are you still here?’ she asked, and at last Karen Marshall spoke.
‘I tried to go,’ she said, hoarse. ‘I ended up living rough for a bit.’ She wiped a raw hand across her nose. ‘She’s buried in the churchyard. It’s a live-in job, here.’
From somewhere distant a police siren sounded and they both turned to listen to it. ‘They talked to me after the alarms went off,’ said Karen Marshall, looking down at her bitten nails. ‘You see them? Seems to me I’m still the first one they think of when there’s a fire.’ Her face was grey, as if the blood had stopped flowing inside her.
But then she raised her head and looked at Alison with the smallest gleam of a response. ‘They talked to us back then too, you know that, right? Because of Frank, only he was dead by the time your dad … well. Maybe they thought I could have killed someone else’s kids, I was off my head, anyway. Everyone knew I was.’ She spoke flatly.
‘And could you have?’ As she looked at Karen Marshall Alison felt another presence shift in the back of her mind, shadowed and waiting. The tray felt heavy in her hands; she listened for movement behind the door to their room. Marshall’s arm came across her body in a defensive motion and Alison saw a tattoo on her wrist, crudely done, blurred blue. The child’s name that she hadn’t spoken, Mia.
The tattoo said she hadn’t done it. The tattoo, the trembling hands. She couldn’t say why she was so sure, only she was.
‘I was working that night,’ said Karen Marshall, and her eyes flickered to the door behind Alison. ‘Thought I had to keep going. Waitressing at the Plough.’ The same pub she and Paul had stopped at on the way to Saltleigh. Small world, thought Alison, dully unsurprised.
‘They was busy that night.’ Marshall was staring at the door.
‘What?’ said Alison, but the woman refocused, shook her head.
‘It wasn’t never your dad’s fault,’ she said roughly. ‘Not even Frank thought it, in the end. That night, when he had a go at your dad in the pub, he’d just gone mental.’ She said it as if it was routine. Her arms still across her body she turned, looking along the corridor and back, checking exits. Then unwillingly she looked back at Alison. ‘He put in the units for us,’ she said. ‘Kitchen units. They said the fire started in the upstairs hall, nowhere near.’ She looked away. ‘Ever so sweet with her, he was. The way he’d look at her.’
With the baby. A picture came into Alison’s head, of Dad joggling one of the twins against his shoulder to soothe her, the little head weaving, wobbly. Must have been not long after they moved, the twins just born.
Karen Marshall was frowning. ‘He was drinking, though.’ Alison nodded. ‘I weren’t sure about letting him hold her.’ She looked sideways at Alison, who was concentrating on not seeing something, staring down at the tray in her hands. Marshall went on. ‘We should have gone, left, after the fire, only we couldn’t think straight. Sometimes it … it just gets you under and you can’t even get up of a morning.’
‘He’s not buried here?’ Marshall stared and Alison blundered on. ‘With … with the baby? Your … Frank.’
‘They won’t let them in the churchyard,’ she said. ‘He took pills. They won’t bury suicides in … whatever. Holy ground.’ She drew a breath, staring at nothing. ‘I begged ’em.’
Standing on her own at the crematorium. The tray in Alison’s hands sat between them, but Karen Marshall had no hope or expectation of comfort, anyway, Alison could see that. The thought of putting her arms round her was only stupid. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
The woman barely nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Just leave it outside the door,’ was all she said, but something had moved across between them, not understanding exactly, but a fragment of it, a token. Alison pushed back into the room, the tray ahead of her.
Paul was sitting up in the bed, and he was holding her phone in his hand. Alison hoped that the great clumsy lurch her heart executed inside her didn’t show on her face.
‘Your friend,’ he said.
She set down the tray carefully, trying to stop herself grabbing for the phone. ‘I was only outside the door,’ she said. He shrugged, smiling, letting her take it. ‘She doesn’t like me much, does she?�
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Alison swallowed. ‘Who?’ she said.
‘The Facebook one,’ he said. ‘Gina? The one you were talking to earlier.’ Her face felt stiff. ‘That’s who it said it was on the screen, only when I answered she just hung up.’ Alison looked down at the phone, moved her finger on the screen. Recent calls. Gina.
‘Call her back,’ he said and she let out a quick laugh, throwing the phone down on the bed, the chemical rush of panic in her veins.
‘She can wait,’ she said. She felt drained, shivery, as grey as Karen Marshall. She sat down abruptly beside him on the bed. ‘I’m worn out. Isn’t that funny?’ He reached his arms around her, his body warm.
‘It was a busy night,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Fire alarm and everything.’ She let her head fall on his shoulder, and gently he took off her glasses, he set her down on the pillow. ‘You sleep,’ he said.
‘The tea,’ she murmured, and she heard the tray chink as he lifted it, then she was under.
In the half dark she dreamed, sounds and voices entering and leaving the room that opened in her head. There were footsteps on gravel outside her window.
In her sleep she kisses a boy who looks like Danny Watts, his eyebrows bleached white, she closes her eyes and hears the wind rustle in the stiff grass under the sea wall, and the power station hums. Then it is Simon she is kissing, and he tastes of mud and diesel, she flies, she flies, she lifts off and flies, and she looks down.
Moving slow across brown water is the long lozenge of the big boat and there he comes, swooping, a thin brown man with a shock of hair, riding on a sliver of plastic board. He tilts as he comes across the broad snub bow, he tilts and falls and he is down. He is under.
Below her they run like ants up and down the big boat’s rusted decks, looking down her sides. They wait, they stare and stare down into the lapping brown waves. He’s down too long, he’s under too long. Then something’s there, long hair trailing up through the water, the pale planes of a face stare back and as he comes up into the air he is a merman, he is a corpse, all that’s left of him is bones and slime and weed and a gleam of pearly eyeball. His jaw is blown away.
The phone rang and Alison started up.
The room was quite dark. Someone had drawn the curtains. The phone went on ringing: she could see a screen somewhere down at her feet on the bed pulsing blue but she didn’t know where her glasses were. Fear surged as she felt for them on the side table and heard them fall. ‘Paul?’ There was no answer. She slowed herself, she leaned and found her glasses, she put them on.
The phone was at the foot of the bed in the blankets and Alison picked it up, still ringing, and put it to her ear. Don’t hang up, Gina. ‘Hello?’
Paul wasn’t in the room. Paul was gone.
An explosion of breath. ‘At last, Jesus Christ,’ came the voice.
Kay.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The pub was packed, she could see that from the road. Light and noise and people spilling over into the dark yard and along the quay where the big boats that had come all the way upriver after the race were moored three deep. Inside, someone was playing an accordion and a song eddied. She stopped.
She’d found a note from Paul on the bedside table. For a while she hadn’t been able to focus on it, Kay’s voice still in her head, and the buzz in her veins.
See you at the pub. Walking down there. No kiss, no love. No exclamation marks.
From inside the pub came the sharp rapping sound of someone banging on a table and a shout, calling for order. A jeering set up in response then another ragged chorus.
Up in the village the police were talking to Gina.
From the opposite side of the road Alison had seen them as she walked past the bus stop with the little square beyond it where the buses turned, or had always used to. The bus shelter was so vandalised and tumbledown it occurred to her, before she saw Gina, that perhaps the buses had stopped coming here. They’d been antiques back then, with coarse velveteen seats and roll-down windows and a driver seated high above a big steering wheel. Perhaps it wasn’t worth anyone’s while to come here anymore, even if tonight, for one night of the year, Saltleigh was busy.
That was what she remembered, listening to the noise from the pub, when she’d been eight, nine, ten: barge-match day had been carnival and sports day and speeches all rolled into one, cars coming down through the village and the light and smell of beer spilling out of the pub.
From the far pavement she’d seen the car first, then Sarah Rutherford and a male officer, standing with a smaller figure between them. Then the figure banged a fist down on the car’s roof and she’d recognised it as Gina immediately. There was a murmur from Sarah Rutherford, a soft, pained sound and Alison had hurried on past, just glancing back to look for confirmation that it was who she thought it was, looking for the pushchair or the child. Seeing nothing but Gina’s head turning, alerted by her movement, she had kept on going.
Leaning against the shed Alison got out her phone. No one was looking at her. With half an eye she monitored the wandering crowd, listening for Roger Carter’s booming voice, looking for Morgan’s shiny hair. Looking for Paul.
If Alison closed her eyes now he would be there. His eyes that were somewhere between green and grey, the vertical line beside his mouth. She’d never had that before: before if she’d been asked to remember a face, the face even of someone she’d kissed and touched and wanted, she couldn’t have done it. She remembered trying once or twice, in wonderment, and drawing a blank – the therapist would probably have had a theory for why that was. A decade of shying away from remembering a smile. Joe, his face gone.
They must be inside.
Saw you by the bus stop, she tapped in the message on the phone, to Gina. What was that about? What did they ask you? Even before she’d sent it, it seemed, the phone shivered in her hand, a reply coming in. Only it wasn’t from Gina, it was from Kay.
I meant it, read the message. You just have to say and I can get there, borrow a car, get on a train. Inside Alison it pulsed hot, the last resort. If only it was that easy, just to reach out to Kay and say, save me. You can’t do it on your own. She put the phone back in her pocket and walked through the crowd.
The din hit her at the door, the heat, and the smell, sweat, beer, diesel. More sweat. Men. The lights were bright but it was so crowded she didn’t feel exposed: the man right in front of her in the doorway just shifted to let her in, not even breaking in his conversation, pint glass rising to his lips, talking about tides. ‘Better shift yer car,’ he said, elbowing the man beside him. ‘Highest one of the year tomorrow.’ Alison remembered it all. A big-bellied man with a beard in a spattered blue smock standing at the bar beside a tarnished silver trophy was some way through a rambling account of something that happened long ago, safely distant, the Dunkirk evacuations. People were talking through it steadily and she couldn’t tell if the trophy was his, and he’d won.
She remembered the heat of the packed bodies, the same faces coming back from other estuaries and inlets, a bit older, more battered, like gypsies. She pulled her scarf around her face and stepped to one side of the door.
Kay would come, if she asked, and then what?
‘So why haven’t you been answering my calls?’ she had said, blunt, as Alison sat up in bed in the darkened room. ‘Has he brainwashed you or something?’
‘You mean Paul?’ She felt slightly sick, something in Kay’s voice warned her.
‘I’ve spoken to that Rosa,’ Kay said then. ‘She told me all about him. Your Paul. He doesn’t like me much, does he?’
And now in the pub at the memory Alison suddenly felt hot, stifled; she tugged at the scarf. She heard people talking off to one side of her, men’s unfamiliar voices and a broad back blocking her view. They were talking about Stephen Bray. Her head buzzing with other things she tried to connect, to make sense of. The room was a blur of faces. Where was Paul?
‘If it was booze, maybe. But they say he hit his h
ead on something.’ The voice was disbelieving. ‘On what? Nothing out there but mud. Nothing to brain yourself on between here and the power station.’ A murmur. ‘Oh yeah. And that. That place. And what was he doing there, anyway?’
Hit his head. Her stomach clenched against the smell of beer and diesel, the heat and the droning voice made her queasy.
‘Paul knows who you are.’ The words in her ear in the dark hotel room had set her head spinning: she’d braced herself against the pillows.
‘And you,’ Alison said, only then she found she couldn’t say any more. You know who I am.
Kay’s voice was gentler then. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘A while back, someone said something, there was a rumour. People make things up, they get things wrong. First it was a plane crash, then a pile-up, a break-in gone wrong. A fire.’
‘Did people know or not?’ Alison spoke stubbornly, but she felt choked.
‘You mean at the office?’ Kay said, uneasy. ‘It’s an old story, details get lost. Some were interested, some weren’t. Mostly people had stopped thinking about it.’ There was a pause, and Alison imagined going back to the office, walking in, pulling off her scarf, sitting down at her desk. It looked impossible, a world seen down the wrong end of a telescope.
Kay went on. ‘I only knew the outline. But it wasn’t any of my business. I didn’t know…’ And she took a breath. ‘I didn’t know it happened … there.’
‘But Paul knew.’ Alison stated it patiently, not a question. ‘Paul knew it all.’
She moved against the wall of the saloon bar, so that the big beergut outline of the man who’d talked about Bray half-hid her from the rest of the room. The speech-maker was building to a climax, talking about the winner in a voice half resentful, half admiring. Something about taking risks, nerves of steel. A tall, spare weathered man with hair springing up from a high forehead stood beside him, so still, so camouflaged in battered clothes faded to the same shades of tan as his skin that he was almost invisible. Bob Argent, who’d run the other boats down.
The Crooked House Page 20