‘Apparently’ – Kay’s voice was level, cool – ‘apparently it was a preoccupation of his. Knowing Morgan, and all. According to Rosa,’ and Alison registered the dislike in her voice, ‘according to Rosa it was what got him started on massacres. And survivors, of course. He wasn’t at that launch by accident, when he met you. Rosa kept dropping hints and … I’d just had enough. I cornered her yesterday and made her tell me.’
‘Rosa.’ It was the way she’d said it. ‘He … did he and Rosa…’ Rosa was three, four years younger than she was. That long dark hair, streaked with gold. What did Morgan think of Rosa?
Kay sighed. ‘I don’t think it lasted very long,’ she said, reluctantly. ‘Jeez. I didn’t want to have that conversation with her. He was … he didn’t actually teach her but she met him through … well.’ Another sigh. ‘Roy Saunders was her supervisor, that’s how they met. I bet she thought she was being all grown up, you know. Those things don’t last long.’
Alison thought of Rosa’s slyness at the party, slipping away as Alison turned to look up at Paul, that first time. I thought you wanted to be alone. And now she’s wondering if she did the right thing. Take care. Her stomach turned.
‘Are you all right?’ said Kay, into the silence. ‘You don’t sound all right.’ Her voice was tense. ‘What a mindfuck, though.’ Awe, turning to fear, crept into her voice. ‘Being back there.’
‘So Rosa knew Saunders too?’ said Alison. ‘Their little gang.’ She took a breath. ‘You remember that gun I told you about? Paul takes it everywhere with him. He brought it here and showed it to me. He told me it was Saunders who gave it to him.’
Kay made a disbelieving noise. ‘That’s weird,’ she said. ‘Christ. Men and guns. I always wondered about Saunders, all that military history shit. Maybe he’s – maybe it’s a homoerotic thing.’
She laughed, but her heart wasn’t in it and Alison said nothing. Even down the hissing line Kay seemed to know. ‘Something’s up, isn’t it? Is there anyone there you can talk to? Who knows … what happened?’
‘I’m all right,’ said Alison. She didn’t feel all right. In the darkened room she felt like a madwoman; it was in the air she breathed here; it was in every face she saw; it was outside the window. She didn’t want to tell Kay about Gina: something told her Gina wouldn’t put Kay’s mind at rest. ‘There’s a policewoman from back then. Sarah Rutherford.’ She said the name for comfort. ‘I made contact.’
‘Uh-huh.’ She heard Kay process that. ‘And him? Paul? Are you going to tell him, now?’
‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she said, grim. ‘Shit. I don’t want to be anyone’s case study.’
‘I expect it helped,’ said Kay drily, ‘that you don’t exactly look like Shrek.’ A pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ she went on, and she did sound it. ‘What I mean is, I expect he … it’s also possible he … he’s really into you,’ she said, grudgingly. ‘I mean you’re … you’re…’
I’m what? thought Alison. What am I? Sexy? Beautiful? Interesting? I’m Alison from accounts, I keep my head down.
Kay let out an angry sigh. ‘What a fuck-up,’ she said. ‘If he loved you, how could he take you back there?’
In the pub now Alison stood with her back to the wall as though on the edge of a cliff. In the bedroom she’d leaned against the headboard and willed the world to stop spinning. How? How? The question wouldn’t go away. ‘Perhaps he … perhaps he wants to…’ She stopped.
‘Perhaps he wants to make you better?’ said Kay, gruffly.
‘Is that what you think?’ Alison couldn’t bear how forlorn her voice sounded.
There was a long, long pause and when Kay spoke she sounded tired. ‘I hardly know him,’ she said with finality. ‘It’s what you think that matters.’
And now in front of her in the crowded gaseous air of the public bar the groupings shifted and a woman turned, a woman Alison knew. Not knew, really; a woman she’d seen before, and recently. Beside her more people were crowding in through the door, the woman met her eye and then someone else was between them but something had already clicked into place. She was the district nurse Alison had seen coming out of Susan Price’s house, boxes of medicine on the back seat of her car.
‘Oh God.’
She heard the words whispered with distaste almost in her ear, and recognising the voice Alison shrank back. She could see Roger’s hand on his wife’s shoulder, pale reddish hairs on the knuckles. It was Lucy Carter she’d heard speak: now she was looking down at the handbag she clutched. They were less than a metre from her. Alison waited, but Morgan wasn’t behind them. She peered.
‘And the winner is Bob Argent!’ came the announcement and she saw the tarnished little trophy raised over the heads at the bar, saw the weathered face of the tall bargeman still immobile, unsurprised. ‘Mr Argent. And the Lady Maud.’ And under cover of the ragged applause, cheers mixed with some barracking sounds, she ducked behind the Carters and was back out of the door.
Her phone blipped in her pocket as she sidestepped, out of the light, and she looked at it. Two messages, from Gina. She opened the first: all it said was Ma. She looked up again, puzzling, focusing only gradually on what was out there. Two figures stood at the river’s edge with their arms around each other, both tall. The door swung and the beam of light broadened, she saw the gleam of blond but by then she’d have known Morgan. The man was only an inch or so taller. Paul.
The phone sat heavy in her hand but Alison didn’t look back down, she was watching Morgan raise her hands to take Paul’s face between them. Watching her kiss him.
Alison turned and stumbled. Someone’s hand was at her waist to stop her going over but she didn’t look, she pulled away and was back in the pub. She stepped to one side of the door, and inside her it expanded, under the lights, in the din, her head hammered with what she’d seen. No. Why. No. If she had a gun she would shoot them.
The hand was on her waist still. ‘You all right?’ It was Danny Watts.
Say nothing. Give nothing away. But when she opened her mouth she gasped like a fish. Stopped herself. ‘Fine,’ she said. His face was close, his eyes were very bright blue in the dark skin, she could see his soft face beginning to weather, to seam. Water gypsy. Her thoughts were scrambled.
Danny stood between her and the door, looking at her, his jaw set – something about her seemed to be making him angry, but the hand was still there. Behind him the door banged and she saw the gleam of a blond head: Morgan strode past them into the crowded bar not looking right or left. Her face was like thunder. As if she felt the glare Lucy Carter turned from where she stood behind her husband at the bar, and saw her daughter.
Ma, said the message. Ma?
She looked at the phone, not caring what Danny thought of her, and there was another message. May’s run off.
The thing inside her sprang back down, it shrank to a hard pebble. She looked up again into Danny’s face and behind them in the bar someone began to sing, rusty but strong. She knew without looking that it was the day’s winner, Bob Argent, but other voices were already joining in, and it was turning raucous.
May’s run off again.
Danny was leaning down and whispering in her ear and she could feel stubble against her neck. His hair was stiff with salt, it smelled of the marsh. She heard him say, ‘Joshua and Joe weren’t fighting about you that time, you know.’ His bright eyes fixed her and all she heard was, This isn’t about you. She blinked. ‘Gina let you think that.’ Was it contempt that made his voice like that? He raised his head and looked across the room towards the bar. ‘It was your mum they fought over. Not just on the beach. The night Joshua died too.’ His eyes dulled, he looked back at her. ‘Her and Chatwin. Joshua never knew when to leave it.’
She stepped back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘What did he say? What did Joshua say about my mum?’ Her lips felt numb. She turned to look at the bar to see whose eye he’d caught but saw only Bob Argent raising a glass to his lips, looking back at them.
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br /> And then as her head swivelled back to him instead of Danny she saw Paul, a head taller, coming into the room. He looked down into Alison’s face expectantly but she couldn’t smile, she couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t seen what she’d seen. They blocked her exit between them, Danny frowning, turning, Paul’s mouth opening. I can explain. Was that what he was going to say?
Alison couldn’t run. She turned the other way instead and pushed deeper into the room.
There were the Carters, in a tight uncomfortable knot, Roger Carter with his elbows raised up against his body in the scrum, Morgan shaking her head. Lucy turned to look at her. Alison skirted them, not looking back, and stopped only when she reached the bar. She held on to the counter – out of the corner of her eye she saw Paul moving through the room but she turned her back. Ron was there, hands on the bar, waiting for her. Just one, she thought. Run off again. Wasn’t that serious? She was like Gina’s kid. For a woman stuck here all her life she’d been permanently running.
‘Miss Grace,’ he said. She thrust a crumpled fiver at him. ‘Vodka and tonic,’ she said and he said nothing, only reached up to the bottle with a wineglass but she knew what he was thinking. Her dad’s drink.
Ron set the glass down and turned away from the fiver, leaving it in her hand.
‘Miss Grace, then, is it?’ His voice was amused, with the deadpan see-saw sound of those who never left the villages out here, on the muddy edge.
It was Bob Argent.
‘You look just like your mother,’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The letters had been sprayed across the cabin top. PEDO. Alison stood in the dark, looking back at the lights on the shore.
Gina’s number had taken her to answerphone. ‘Let me know what’s going on,’ she’d whispered into it, hearing her own hoarse breath as she ran, feeling the mud slide under her sandals thinking, You could fall.
You could fall. Careful. You could hit your head, like Stephen Bray. What had Dad said to him, that night before their lives had ended?
Who was she running from? All of them. Her chest still burned from the great tearing panic of her escape.
Taller than most of the crowd, Morgan had turned to watch her push her way through the public bar and like a sheep Lucy Carter’s head had followed her daughter’s, her face blotched and anxious. Roger Carter had called out after her, jovial, brutish, Alice. The Carters were probably the only ones there who didn’t know her real name, and he even managed to get her fake one wrong.
The word had appeared on the cabin top since she was last here. Alison took a step onto the rickety landing stage and crouched there: the tide was going out. She could hear it trickle and creep, she could hear the boat settle. She listened for something else.
She squeezed her eyes shut and saw the girl, May, dancing in and out of the coiled ropes on the quay, looking down at her own clever feet. Long legs hooked over the climbing frame, sun-streaked hair hanging down. She felt cold.
Paul’s hand had reached out to her from between bodies as she made for the door and he’d got hold of her wrist. She hadn’t looked back at him but she knew he was watching and she was almost there, but he got her. Lowest common denominator, basest need. You’re mine.
But she shook his hand off, and then she was out of the door.
He hadn’t followed. Outside, Danny Watts was nowhere to be seen.
Bob Argent’s face, unsmiling, was all she held in her head as she began to run. Ahead of her the sail-lofts loomed, their roofs dark points against the night sky.
Bob Argent had looked down impassively, his eyes ranging across her face, seeking out her mother, and for a moment he and Paul might have been the same man, she a child raging while they stood cold above her keeping back what she wanted.
She took a gulp of her drink and the glass sloshed. ‘What did my mum have to do with you?’ she blurted, reckless. The vodka was warm and slimy, she felt it burn as it hit her stomach, then wiped her mouth. ‘You ran him down, didn’t you? Simon Chatwin. Were you after my mum too?’ Something came into his weathered, expressionless face, his eyes creased. Was he laughing?
‘Your mother.’ Bob Argent’s accent was slow and halting, from deep in the marshland. He held his full pint in front of him and contemplated it. ‘Simon Chatwin after your mother?’ It seemed Alison had entertained him. He set the drink down untouched.
‘Danny said you never do anything by accident,’ said Alison, and her own glass felt sticky in her hands.
‘You got any ideas,’ he said, ruminatively, ‘about what Simon Chatwin goes for? Sex, like.’ An upward lilt.
Me, Gina, Mum. Alison felt her throat close, but she managed to get it out. ‘So tell me why you tried to kill him,’ she said. Then, something dawning. ‘Danny said it was your daughter he wanted.’
‘Tried to kill him?’ he said, and there was something dangerously warm in his voice. ‘Police never said anything about that to me.’ She stood dumb, waiting. He eyed his glass on the bar but didn’t touch it. ‘They know, we do things our way,’ he said. ‘Police do. I run him down, but like Watts told you, nothing by accident. If I’d’ve wanted him dead, he’d be dead. It wasn’t your mum he was interested in.’
‘So it was me?’ she said, faltering. And for a second she saw pity, only then he lifted his head to look away, across the room.
‘You had sisters, didn’t you?’ he said, not meeting her eye. ‘Them little girls. It was Chatwin your dad should’ve killed, not them.’
‘My sisters.’ She didn’t understand, and then she did. Perhaps she always had.
‘My girl,’ said Bob Argent distinctly, turning to study her with narrowed eyes, chips of grey. Alison thought of the girl. Studying at university now, Martin Watts had said, looking hard at her.
‘My daughter,’ Argent said, and the words grated, like iron on iron. ‘He asked her if he could put his hand in her knickers.’
Something sparked and floated in Alison’s vision: she saw Simon Chatwin’s face up close, his mouth moving towards hers in the backyard. The words came as if from a distance. ‘She was eleven.’
* * *
PEDO.
Alison stepped onto the cluttered deck and heard something scrabble below her feet. She crouched to listen. She heard a sound, a low sound that might have been a dog chained in the dark. Frightened. ‘May,’ she said, her face close to the chipboard cabin doors, putting her fingers to the crack between them. ‘May. Is that you?’ Something fell and smashed inside and it was Simon’s voice she heard.
‘Please,’ he begged. Alison thought of her sisters, and a wave rolled and gathered inside her, compressing her chest.
‘Where’s your daughter?’ she hissed. ‘What have you done with her? Is she down there?’
‘Nononono.’ It gibbered, keening. ‘They came. She’s not here. They came.’ She could visualise the dark space behind the doors, the pit filled with junk and unwashed dishes. The grey sheets and the magazines. To take the girl there even once would be too often. It had gone very still below; she put her ear to the crack and listened. She heard breathing, quick and uneven.
‘You don’t know who I am,’ said Alison, and for a second she felt power surge unmanageable through her veins; she was a black angel spreading her wings in the dark. Silence. ‘My family…’ The breathing behind the doors stopped, caught, there was a stifled, choking sound and satisfied he knew now, she went on. ‘Were you after my sisters?’ There was something intimate and horrible about it, her mouth to the gap whispering precious things to him in the dark. ‘Is that why you came round to our yard? Did you try it on my mum too? Is it why you kissed me?’
It was in her throat then, she thought she might vomit and to stop it she raised her fist and brought it down on the chipboard, hard. The pain jolted her, the sound reverberated across the water and her knuckles were raw and bleeding but she couldn’t stop, it was like a hunger. ‘I’ve come back for you,’ she said, and then she did stop, before something terri
ble happened, she stopped with her cheek pressed against the rough surface.
The chipboard trembled in front of her, she saw broken fingernails in the gap. Then one side was pulled inwards and Simon Chatwin’s eyes were there in front of her; she saw patchy stubble and something dried at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were roaming uncontrollably, looking anywhere but at her. Your father should have killed him, Argent had said. We do things our way, he’d said. Was that right? Alison felt the toxic residue of it in her system, her willingness to go along with that. PEDO.
She pushed herself back on the deck and crouched, ready to run. ‘I take my medication,’ Simon said. ‘I go to my therapy.’ His mouth was slack between words, but his eyes had stopped moving, they had settled on her. ‘May runs off sometimes,’ he said. ‘They’ll find her. I don’t see her. I don’t go near her.’ His eyes were black, bottomless.
‘My family,’ she made herself say, although her certainty had come loose, it drifted out of her reach. Simon’s head moved from side to side but his eyes stayed on her. ‘I wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘He tell you that too? Argent. He knows I wasn’t there.’ And trembling he lifted a hand, blunt-fingered, to the side of his head. He lifted a flap of stiff hair behind his ear and she saw a line, a long vertical seam of white in the scalp. A scar.
The odour inside the cabin drifted out past him and Alison was on her feet. She groped behind her for the rail, and stepped away from him: she ran. Turning as she reached the gravel path she saw he was still there standing between his cabin doors, watching her go.
She slowed as she came up to the sail-lofts, looking for the narrow place where she could pass through, then she saw it and stepped in between the high weatherboarded sides. As she entered the dark space she first registered that the sound had dropped, the soft wind in the marsh grass and the clink of the boats bobbing cut out by the tall wooden walls, and then that she wasn’t alone. She smelled beer and sweat and a hand seized her upper arm, a hand as strong and thoughtless as a vice. It hurt her.
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