‘So now you know.’ He spoke and for a second her heart leapt foolishly, treacherously, and then he slammed her back against the boarding.
Chapter Thirty
So now you know. At first she’d thought the voice had been Danny’s, and her heart had risen with her face turned up towards him in the dark between the sail-lofts, even if he sounded angry. And drunk. But it had been his brother. Martin. The one who’d gone to pieces at the funeral, the one who’d never recovered.
Why did they hate her? She hadn’t asked him that as he ranted in the dark. It wasn’t just her Martin Watts hated. He swayed over her in the dark, not touching her – after he’d heard the thud of her head hitting the boarding he’d pulled back, letting her go. But she stayed where she was.
‘So now you know what that creep was up to,’ he said, and she smelled beer. ‘Chatwin. That what you came back for? Worth it, was it? He liked them even younger than you, we all knew that.’
‘He killed my family,’ she said, feeling the breath leave her, and the certainty along with it. The words sounded wrong, but she had to go on. ‘Maybe my dad was going to go to the police. Maybe Simon needed to shut him up, shut all of us up. And … and … he thought I wasn’t there because Gina would’ve told him I was at hers.’ Making it up as she went along. ‘None of you thought Simon had the balls, maybe, I don’t know, you’d rather think my dad was a murderer. My dad.’
Watts made an incredulous noise, a pitying noise. ‘Your dad…’ he began, unsteady.
‘Yes,’ she said, before he could say another thing. ‘He wasn’t like you. He’d never … he’s not a fucking savage. He was, is, he’s a … a … civilised man.’
‘He was a pisshead,’ said Martin Watts, slurred but succinct, stepping back with a slight stagger. ‘Ah, don’t give me any of this,’ he said. ‘I saw you out there. I saw you out there hiding your face. It was you he was going to meet.’
Leaning against the high flank of the sail-loft he tipped his head back and she could see the pale sheen of his face, blank. Somewhere there was a moon but she couldn’t see it. The words settled, stubbornly incomprehensible.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Meet who?’
Martin smiled up at the dark sky, saying nothing, and she grabbed hold of him by the sleeve, feeling the worn ragged fabric, the skin and bone underneath it, there was nothing to him. He looked down. Pushing himself off the boarding carelessly he took her by the wrist and detached her.
He had turned away from her then, not towards the road and the village but into the unlit marsh, where the tide trickled and the wind blew. ‘Meet who?’ she’d shouted after him, swaying away from her into the dark. ‘I’m not hiding from anyone. Meet who?’ But he hadn’t answered.
There was a car stopped on the dark verge a little way ahead.
The pub had been quiet by the time she came out onto the road, and most of the crowd dispersed. Alison’s legs had been unsteady and she’d had to concentrate hard to keep going in a straight line as she turned up into the village.
She might have called someone – Paul? Gina? – to come and get her but she didn’t want it. Her thoughts were overloaded, they jumped and fired at random, and she needed to be on her own. Distantly the thought of May floated: She runs off, he’d said. I don’t go near her. The phone hadn’t rung: would Gina tell her though, either way? Stupid to think they were still friends. She kept walking as the little car waited for her. She came up on the inside and saw that the driver’s window had been wound down. She hesitated.
The hand on the passenger window of the little car was a woman’s. Tentatively the indistinct oval of a face peered out, turned towards her. ‘Is everything all right?’ the woman said. Coming alongside Alison saw boxes on the back seat and then she knew who it was. ‘Let me give you a lift,’ the nurse said, and as she came closer Alison saw anxiety in her face, and kindness.
‘Yes,’ she said, defeated. ‘Thank you.’
Inside the little car it was as though her ears were blocked, her head buzzed. She had to ask the woman to say it again, as they set off. ‘Where are you staying?’ The nurse’s voice was soft, her glance sidelong.
‘Oh.’ Take me anywhere, she thought. Take me away. Take me home. Who would be at the hotel? Paul. Christian. Would the Carters be there, camped out in the bar, avid for gossip, where had she been, why had she run off? ‘The Queen’s Head,’ she said.
‘It’s not safe,’ said the woman at the wheel. Eyes shone white in the headlights low down in a hedgerow, something crouching. ‘These unlit roads, I mean.’
‘A boy got killed, didn’t he?’ said Alison and the nurse’s glance flickered towards her, then back. Alison thought she would be about fifty.
‘That was a long time ago,’ she said carefully, eyes on the road.
‘They never caught him,’ said Alison. It didn’t matter any-more, after all. She was in plain sight now.
‘Him?’ They were at the junction and the nurse was leaning cautiously over her steering wheel, looking left and right.
‘The hit-and-run driver,’ said Alison. Engaging gear the woman made a sound in her throat, not so much contemptuous as despairing.
‘They’re useless,’ she said. ‘The police.’ The lane narrowed, the unkempt hedges feathering the car’s sides. They slowed to a crawl.
‘Must be difficult for them,’ said Alison. ‘In a place like this.’
The nurse just frowned. Alison went on. ‘Everyone knows everyone else,’ she said. ‘And none of you seems to trust the police.’
Silence. The car accelerated jerkily, a bend, another bend. Something flew low beside the passenger window, a big soft wingspan and then its dark shape lifted off over the roof and the lit gables of the hotel appeared. The nurse pulled up in the road and turned off the engine. She turned to Alison.
‘She wants to see you,’ she said, and Alison felt herself freeze in fear, without knowing why. A ghost, she thought: Mum, she thought.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Susie,’ said the nurse. ‘Susie Price. Susan Price.’ Alison let out her breath.
‘Mrs Price,’ she said. A ghost. ‘What happened to Kyra?’ She thought of the child walking hairless on the high street, survivor of a blast. ‘I remember Kyra.’
‘We lost her,’ said the nurse sadly, and Alison felt it like a thump to her chest.
‘She died?’ The privet hedge’s leaves looked ghostly in the light cast out from the hotel, silver-blue and gleaming, like poison. Privet was poison, she thought, errant. ‘When?’
The nurse turned to her, her hands in her lap. ‘She hung on for eight years,’ she said. ‘Advancing and remitting. She could take a lot of treatments, she was strong. But in the end it got her.’ Her face was pouchy and sad in the blue light. ‘Now it’s killing Susie.’
Run, Alison told herself, run now, get out of here. She felt for a moment that if she opened the door and set her foot on the ground it would get her too, the poison would enter her body. She stayed where she was. ‘What’s killing her?’
‘A different cancer, but it’s all part of the same thing. That’s not a medical diagnosis, of course, but it’s still true.’
Alison turned to look through the hedge at the hotel: she could see heads moving through the big front door. She saw the gleam of car roofs. ‘She wants to see me?’
The nurse set her veined hands on the wheel. ‘When I told her … you’d been seen in the village.’ Alison drew breath, but didn’t ask, how. Who. ‘It was the first time she’d opened her eyes properly in months. She sat up.’ The woman stared straight ahead into the dark. ‘She’s on medication,’ she said wearily. ‘She’s had these … dreams. But when she said it, she wasn’t under, I was about to top her up, she was in pain, she was lucid.’
‘Said what?’
And then the nurse turned to look at her. ‘She said, bring her to me, I’ve got to tell her something.’ She put out a hand and touched Alison, lightly, on the wrist. ‘She said, I’ve go
t to tell her something about her mother.’
* * *
The police car was parked at the far side of the hotel, and Alison only saw it when she was at the door. It wasn’t Rutherford she saw first, it was the other one. The man.
‘He’s gone up,’ Jan had said to her brightly from behind reception and for a moment Alison didn’t know who she meant. ‘Your husband.’
‘Right,’ she said, but the word made her stomach clench. It was gone eleven on the clock over the door – it had been two, three hours since she had shaken Paul’s hand off her in the public bar.
Jan frowned. ‘Are you all right?’ She peered over the desk, and Alison looked down at herself. There was a scratch on one of her bare calves, her feet in the sandals were edged with mud.
‘I think I’ll just have a quick one before I go up,’ she said. ‘In the bar. It’s got cold, don’t you think?’ Jan made a non-committal murmur, looking carefully away.
In the toilet mirrors Alison saw her lips were pale, her temples blue-veined. The hair suddenly looked much too short, like something that would be done to you in prison. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
There was a solitary middle-aged couple in the bar, holding hands across their table, and the foreign girl who’d served them breakfast was wiping things down behind it: she looked resigned when Alison asked for a glass of brandy. Alison sat down where she could see the door into reception, and through it Jan, weary under her neat helmet of hair and careful make-up, talking to the young policeman. Jan hadn’t signed up for this, thought Alison. She must have wanted a quiet little country hotel with the clink of glasses and the murmur of conversation. She had come round the reception desk as if to head the policeman off. Jennings.
The policeman hadn’t come here to see her, was Alison’s thought. If they had, Jan would have said something. But he looked at her. Then he was gone.
She waited. Through the bar’s long windows the garden was dark, but something gleamed in the distance, mud snaking away silver under the moon. Across the room the middle-aged man had his hand to the woman’s cheek. And then Sarah Rutherford came through the door, half turned back towards the man to say something, her hand gesturing to him to wait. The door swung closed.
Rutherford sat next to her, a solid presence. ‘We got her,’ she said, and the thing inside Alison that had just begun to settle leapt up again in panic. ‘It’s OK,’ said the policewoman. ‘I thought you’d be worried.’ Alison stared. ‘Your friend’s kid … she went missing.’
Alison subsided, allowing relief in. ‘Where was she?’ she said.
Rutherford’s eyes flicked up to the ceiling and back. ‘May?’ she said. ‘It’s not the first time she’s run off.’ So Chatwin had been telling the truth. ‘She was hiding, out on the beach, in the grass. Some guy saw her there, we came here to thank him, as a matter of fact – he saw her and it was getting dark, and…’ She cleared her throat. ‘Fortunately for us he wouldn’t leave her till she told him where her mum was.’ Rutherford smiled, dead tired. ‘She gave him all sorts of grief, he said.’ She looked around, restless, and her eye settled on the middle-aged couple. She looked away quickly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.
‘Why are you here?’ Alison asked, wondering who’d put Rutherford’s own child to bed. She must have a husband. ‘You didn’t come here to tell me that?’
Rutherford’s wide-spaced dark blue eyes examined her. ‘The man who found May—’ she began, but Alison interrupted her.
‘I went to see Simon Chatwin,’ she said, ‘but May wasn’t with him.’ The policewoman shook her head, frowning.
And then the question rattled out of her, before the policeman watching through the door to reception could come in and stop her. ‘Chatwin was after my sisters, did you know that?’
Rutherford raised herself wearily. ‘Simon Chatwin is on the Sex Offenders Register following a conviction for indecent exposure to a minor eight years ago,’ she said. ‘He takes his medication. He’s never missed a therapy session.’ Her voice was low but tough. ‘I shouldn’t tell you any of this. We couldn’t trace your sisters’ father but we know it wasn’t Simon Chatwin: apart from anything else he’d have been seventeen when they were conceived. We also know he didn’t kill your family.’
‘How do you know?’
Rutherford looked up steadily from under her heavy fringe. ‘When paedophiles kill,’ she said, ‘they kill the defenceless. They kill their victims: they kill children and almost always on impulse. They don’t go into houses where there are men with guns who can fight back. It’s statistics. It’s profiling. It’s science.’
‘Is that all?’ Alison found herself saying, Alison who’d studied maths and physics and chemistry, only girl in the class half the time. Alison who knew science doesn’t explain everything.
Rutherford tilted her head and shook it and the ponytail swung. ‘We had a body of evidence. This isn’t a matter of glaring facts, not always. It takes us months. Just believe me, Chatwin couldn’t have done it.’ She studied Alison, grave. We also know your father’s myopia had been improving, as yours will, as it does with age. Even without his glasses his eyesight wouldn’t have prevented him from killing your mother, your brother, your sisters. The shots were fired at close range.’ She paused, earnest: Alison saw how she’d recovered from panic, reassessed. ‘This isn’t good for you.’
Alison held herself very still. ‘I can decide what’s good for me,’ she said. ‘It’s my life. It’s my life.’
Rutherford said nothing and, goaded, Alison felt something slip from her control. ‘It’s not like you’re worried about me, are you?’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘After all this time? I mean, you’ve got it covered, haven’t you? My dad did it, so it’s not like there’s a murderer out there.’
But Rutherford’s head moved, slightly, and following it Alison saw that Jennings had appeared in the door to the bar and was looking at his boss, questioning. Rutherford had shifted forward on the seat, about to leave.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, looking straight at Alison, a look that cooled her skin, immobilised her. ‘There is.’
‘What?’ said Alison, and everything hung, the honeymooners, the girl behind the bar, the gleam of the estuary through the window.
‘Stephen Bray’s death wasn’t an accident,’ said Rutherford.
She spoke deliberately, levelly, and Alison saw that this was what she’d come for, after all. This woman who had appeared in Alison’s dreams, whom she had always, down the years, thought of as having been on her side, was watching her for a reaction, like a suspect. And for a terrible suffocating moment Alison understood that it was connected to her, because it had to be. She was bound to the dead weight of Bray’s body in the cold mud.
If they wired Alison up, if they monitored her responses, what would it tell them? Her heart was racing, her mouth was dry, even her skin felt weird and clammy. She thought she had learned to hide what she was feeling, but with Sarah Rutherford watching her, guilt rose inside her like sickness.
‘Who do you think killed him?’ she said, her tongue like rubber in her mouth.
‘Stephen Bray didn’t drown, he didn’t fall and hit his head, there was nothing he could have hit it on out there.’ Sarah Rutherford leaned close to her across the bar table. ‘But he sustained a massive depression fracture to the skull and consequent brain injury that killed him almost immediately.’ The policewoman sat back. ‘He managed to stagger a couple of steps into the mud but by the time he hit the ground, he was dead.’ She passed a hand over her forehead, rubbing: her skin looked dry at the temples, her hair coming out of its ponytail now. ‘There was still whisky in his stomach, but everyone knew he couldn’t afford whisky, and the last witness we have, someone who saw him after the pub had closed, said he wasn’t drunk.’
If she closed her eyes Alison could smell the home brew and paraffin and tar, she could see the old man poring over maps and photographs, his head next to her father’s
. She managed to say, ‘Who was the last person to see him? He knew something. Maybe that’s why. My dad must have told him something.’
But Sarah Rutherford looked at her strangely, and Alison knew something was different. ‘Cathy Watts saw him,’ Rutherford said, watching her. ‘She said, he was excited about something. He said he was going to meet someone, someone he hadn’t seen for a long time.’ And then she stood as if she was about to leave, but still she didn’t go.
* * *
The lights were off in the hotel bedroom when Alison opened the door but Paul wasn’t asleep. He was waiting for her: she could see the gleam of his eyes as he watched her move about the room in the dark. He lifted the covers to let her in and she lay against him. He didn’t speak and although since Kay’s phone call, since the pub car park, the conversation she needed to have with him had changed shape twenty times, nor did she.
By now it all seemed like something that had happened a thousand miles away and years ago. Did it even matter, him and Morgan, whatever that was? A woman about to get married gets drunk and kisses her ex-boyfriend, big news. Kyra Price had died after eight years fighting to stay alive, getting sicker and sicker. An old man had been beaten to death out on the lonely marsh, a hundred yards from where her family had died. And she was a suspect.
Paul knew who she was. Did he think she might have done it too, was that what he wanted her for, he wanted to play detective? Perhaps he wouldn’t even be surprised when the police came back for her. His body was warm, his heartbeat at her ear steady, she closed her eyes and the thought took shape, seductive as smoke. He knows me.
Sarah Rutherford had stood there fiddling with something in her hands, turning to look at the policeman waiting for her in the doorway, and then she said, her voice low, ‘Someone says they saw you out there, Alison. Out there by the house.’
Yes, thought Alison, hypnotised by the way Rutherford was looking at her. She’d seen someone watching her herself, she almost said it, agreeing, yes. Standing by the crooked house in the wind in her trainers that first morning, someone had stood out on the marsh and watched her, yes. But Rutherford seemed to mean something different: Alison struggled to understand what she was saying.
The Crooked House Page 22