‘If only I’d done something different,’ I continue. ‘If only I hadn’t broken up with Jane, gone off with Miss Wick.’
Carla sighs. ‘Naomi.’
‘I might have got home earlier; I might have caught her there; I might have prevented her from swimming.’
If she’d suggested it, would I have stopped her? Or would I have gone with her? It might have been like when we were children, pulled out to sea together. ‘Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.’ The Book of Ruth. That was where our names came from.
There’s the faint tinkle of the shop door and I turn back as Alice comes out. And for a moment I think it has happened: my prayer has worked. My heart swoops and falls.
But I’ve got it wrong. The woman with Alice isn’t Ruth. No. It’s just a resemblance. Her features are longer than Ruth’s, her eyes slightly closer together.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say to Carla. ‘I’ll call you back.’ And I hang up.
Alice is watching me carefully as they cross the road. She doesn’t know how I’m going to react, but I can tell she is pleased, a little pleased with herself, for succeeding on our mission.
‘This is Paula,’ she says.
Faded copper hair, swept up messily. Loose trousers, a tie-dye top. A Morrison’s bag in her hand. A beautiful face, I’ll give her that – not my sister’s, but you could see the likeness.
‘I used to get mistaken for Ruth,’ she says. ‘It happened quite a bit.’
Her voice is unexpected. Higher than Ruth’s. A local accent.
‘You wore a red dress,’ I say. ‘On the night of the ball.’ I turn to Alice. ‘Is this who you saw on the train from Edinburgh?’
‘No,’ says Alice. ‘Her hair was brighter.’ She says to the woman, ‘It wasn’t you, was it? You haven’t seen me before?’
The woman shakes her head.
‘But you were there at the ball?’ I persist.
‘I was, yes.’ The woman shifts her weight from one foot to the other. ‘The Hope’s just round the corner. Perhaps we could have a drink there.’
The Hope and Anchor smells like the hotel used to when we were children: beer and sea salt. Everyone knows Paula. Alice buys her a drink – a large glass of the house red, which blackens her mouth and teeth as she sips it.
‘It used to happen all the time,’ she says to me.
‘You said that.’ I tidy a few peanuts left on the table into a neat pile.
Alice looks at me reproachfully. But I ignore her. To Alice this is just a mystery. Like Agatha Christie. Nothing real. Not her family.
‘And then it stopped,’ Paula continues.
‘When she died,’ I say.
‘Yes.’ Paula looks back at me steadily. ‘But I helped it to stop. I dyed my hair for a while. I couldn’t bear it – being mistaken for her.’
A heavyset man in a flat cap comes up to our table.
‘All right, Paula,’ he says. He looks hopefully at Alice and me. ‘Who are your friends?’
‘Not now, Jeff,’ she says. ‘Give us a second.’
He wanders off, thankfully, and returns to the bar to pester the barmaid.
‘As I said, I met your sister,’ says Paula as she begins to roll a cigarette. She pauses for a moment. There’s a burst of laughter from Jeff and a couple of the other drinkers at the bar. ‘On the night of the ball,’ she explains.
I am sitting too close to the table. It makes me feel fenced in, so I push the chair away. My breathing is shallow.
‘Where did you see her?’
‘At the house at the top of the hill.’
‘On Top Cliff?’ Alice says breathlessly. ‘The cottage?’
Paula nods. She fiddles with the tobacco, pushing it onto the paper, and it occurs to me that she is more nervous than she has let on.
‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’
‘There were lots of reasons.’ She carries on rolling with infuriating exactitude. ‘I was married. I didn’t want my husband to know I’d been seeing one of the students.’
Alice blinks. We are all silent for a moment.
I say, ‘Dan?’ I think of the scene in the chapel.
She nods, picks a fleck of tobacco from her lip. ‘Let me smoke this,’ she says. ‘And then I’ll tell you everything. It’s a long story and it’s likely you’ll want me to tell the police again afterwards, but let me tell you my way first.’ She smiles, looking relieved for a moment. ‘You’re George’s wife, aren’t you?’ she says to Alice. ‘And you’re Ruth’s sister?’ She nods at me. ‘I always had a feeling you two might come looking for me.’
Alice
In the pub, someone has put ‘Light My Fire’ on the jukebox. Paula returns to the table, smelling of fresh smoke. Naomi is in the loo. Paula waits for her to come back before she begins.
‘Dan came into the pub where I worked back then,’ she starts softly. ‘That’s how I met him. I thought he looked like a movie star. He was so beautiful, you’d never imagine the filth going on in his head.’
Alice shifts in her seat. She wonders if Dan hurt this woman, too, forced her to do things she didn’t want.
‘I dream of him sometimes,’ says Paula, glancing down at the table. ‘In one dream he came back from the dead and asked, “What was so special about you, then?” And I said: “I survive. I forgive myself.” You have to forgive yourself, otherwise how can you ever move on?’ She pauses briefly. ‘He brought out the worst in me,’ she continues. ‘Have you ever been with someone like that?’ She looks at Alice.
‘I was married,’ Paula continues. ‘And Andy was on the road a lot, so for all I know he was screwing around behind my back. But, still, it wasn’t right. There were times when we crossed the line, like when Andy was in the pub, and I went and did it with Dan in the toilet. And the church thing, in college. I went to that very same chapel when I was a child.’ She sighs, takes a sip of wine. ‘When I heard he died, I was shocked. Really shocked. But I also felt something else – like relief.’
Alice realises she is barely breathing. She looks over at Naomi, who is sitting like a cat, poised, tense.
Paula continues, ‘It was like a dream that night. I was never sure if it happened.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Naomi coolly.
‘I was really out of it. So for ages I couldn’t work it all out – it took me a long time.’
‘Tell us,’ says Alice as she might to a stressed client. ‘Just tell us what you remember.’
Paula shrugs. ‘I hadn’t been invited to the ball, of course.’ She smirks. ‘They were having a laugh with the price of the tickets, in my opinion. I looked better back then.’ She puts a hand to her fading red hair. ‘It was satisfying, just to wander in at the end of my shift – there’s no one on the door then – and nick one of the best-looking boys from under the noses of those posh girls.’
‘When did you get there?’ asks Alice.
Paula wrinkles her nose. ‘It must have been around midnight.’ She takes a gulp of her wine. ‘Dan looked like James Bond,’ she smiles. ‘Only a bit rough around the edges. I thought I’d never seen anything so sexy in all my life. At first, I didn’t speak to him in front of the others. That wasn’t usually part of it. The game we played. I just watched him from a distance, smoking, and sooner or later he wandered away from his friends, made his way to me.’
Dan used to hold his drink pretty well, recalls Alice. Not like some of the boys back then, whose cheeks went all pink and puffy. They’d stumble around, their bow ties undone – so unsubtle, so transparent. When Dan was pissed, there wasn’t much change: just the pupils slightly bigger. That’s dangerous, though, in its own way.
‘This time was different,’ Paula continues. ‘He introduced me to his friends. We had a few shots – I should have known then.’
‘Should have known what?’ asks Alice.
She gives Alice a sidelong look. ‘They were being too friendly. Dan wouldn’t normally make a fuss of me. It wasn’t the kind of thing
he did – and not just because I was married – he never held my hand or told me I was pretty. It wasn’t about that. He didn’t even know my surname.’
‘You had some shots,’ Naomi reminds her, still sitting very straight.
‘Yeah.’ Paula looks away. ‘And we went for a quickie in his room at one point, I remember that much.’
‘And then what?’ presses Naomi.
Paula blinks. ‘The evening sort of scrambled.’
‘How do you mean scrambled?’ asks Alice.
‘I was in one place and then I was in another, and I can’t remember how I got from A to B. You know how things happen in flashes when you’re pissed – there’s a flash, like a snapshot, and one minute you’re at the bar. And the next you’re on the dance floor …’
‘What do you mean?’ says Naomi impatiently.
‘I came round in someone else’s house,’ says Paula. ‘Somewhere I’d never been before. I’ve thought about this over the years,’ she continues quietly. ‘And the thought of it has got worse, not better. Some things you think over and the crapness sort of wears out, so that something that seemed like the end of the world appears a bit brighter. But not this.’ She shakes her head. ‘This gets worse every time I think about it.’ She takes another gulp of wine. ‘I probably would have done it anyway,’ she says. ‘They didn’t need to drug me. They must have done – why else was I so out of it?’
‘Where were you?’
‘A red room in the cottage.’
Naomi looks pale. ‘Ruth’s bedroom?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ says Paula. She pauses for a moment.
‘But it was so tidy,’ says Naomi, her voice getting higher, more agitated. ‘When I got back, it looked so tidy.’
‘Someone like George,’ says Paula. ‘You think he would leave a thing like that undone?’ She laughs as if she knows him well.
Alice thinks of his study, the way his books are lined up so neatly. ‘George was there?’ she says. But she knew – she always knew, deep down – that he was involved somehow.
‘It was like Twin Peaks,’ Paula says. ‘The whole night was like that: red velvet curtains, the men in black tie and not being able to understand anything because everyone’s speaking a backward language. When I woke up in Ruth’s room, Dan was on top of me. I couldn’t remember getting there or how it started. I just woke up and we were doing it. It’s hard to explain.’ She rubs her forehead. ‘George was there too, standing there watching, with a camera in his hand. I wanted Dan to stop. But it was like moving through syrup – I couldn’t speak properly, couldn’t move my limbs. And then it felt for a moment like I was watching myself: that there was another me in the room.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Alice.
‘I thought at first it was a mirror. That I was watching myself in the mirror. But, you know, my brain wasn’t working properly. Why would I be watching myself fully clothed?’
‘What are you talking about?’ asks Alice more impatiently.
‘Ruth was there,’ Paula says. ‘Ruth was suddenly in the room.’
‘What time was it then?’ asks Naomi.
She’s trying to work it out, thinks Alice, but the story is moving too strangely, too quickly.
‘God knows,’ says Paula, giving her a withering look. ‘But Ruth starts shouting and screaming. She goes for George and he’s fighting her off. And Dan is on his feet, putting on clothes.’
‘And you?’ asks Alice.
She has heard about nights like this before in her work. Nights in which one thing leads to another, events get out of hand and, before you know it, life has changed irreparably.
‘I could barely move. I just wrapped a blanket around myself.’ Paula shivers at the memory. ‘And then Ruth picks up a poker from the fireplace and starts thrashing it around, and the boys are laughing at her. Really laughing. And all the time I was wondering how I might get dressed and get out of there. I was already thinking,’ she smiles sadly, ‘about the stories I could tell at the pub. They loved hearing how fucking weird the students were. I would have changed it, made it less …’
‘Rapey,’ says Alice coolly.
‘Sure,’ agrees Paula. ‘Yeah, I might not have told them everything, but I was thinking: this’ll make a story.’ She swallows. ‘Mentally, I was already out of there, you know.’
‘Did they hurt her?’ says Naomi urgently. ‘Did they hurt her next?’
‘No.’ Paula shakes her head. ‘That’s not how it went.’
‘Tell us,’ says Naomi. ‘Just tell us what happened.’
‘One minute I’m trying to pull on my dress while they’re all shouting and fighting. And the next minute, there’s a terrible smack. The sound of someone falling down the stairs like a sack of potatoes.’
Alice remembers seeing an old lady fall down an escalator at a train station. The way her body collapsed and folded. The way she had been struck then – as bystanders flapped and panicked as they looked for the button to stop the machine, as her limbs flipped over, as her body crumpled like paper – by how fragile humans could be.
‘I got there a few moments after the rest of them,’ continues Paula. ‘At first I thought it was Dan on the floor because of the short dark hair – I couldn’t see the face. The body was bent all wrong and it wasn’t moving. But then I saw it wasn’t Dan, because he couldn’t be looking down at himself any more than I’d been looking down at myself earlier.’
Alice wishes that she would get to the point.
‘What do you mean?’ she snaps.
‘It was a woman who had fallen,’ says Paula. ‘But she was wearing a tux.’
Naomi
A tuxedo, she’d said. A tux. An American word, stolen from the movies. The wearer hadn’t been British either, so I don’t know why it bothered me. She may well have called it a tux herself. I don’t know the word in Spanish, or why I think of that now, or remember that Carla, who’d spent a few months in Argentina in her twenties, had told me stories of beautiful, charming friends, as unreliable as the wind. ‘Fantasmas todos,’ someone had told her. And, as the years had gone by, I had put Miss Wick’s disappearing, twice, down to that.
Someone cheers at the telly in the corner of the pub. There’s the plinkety plink of the quiz machine. The silence at our table hardens. Paula puts a hand to her hair, waiting. It occurs to me how long she must have been waiting like this. For us. But then something shifts, like a lens refocusing, and I understand that another person waiting to be caught, who I haven’t seen straight on all this time, is Ruth.
‘It was Miss Wick,’ I say. ‘It’s her skeleton that they’ve found.’
The others are quiet.
I think of the back of Miss Wick’s head in the queue; her hair closely cropped; that sense of déjà vu and then wondering, as the years passed, if she had come to St Anthony’s at all, if it had been a figment of my traumatised mind.
‘George took control that night,’ says Paula. ‘He knew exactly what to do.’
Alice snorts in derision. ‘That sounds like him.’
‘It’s like he was born for it,’ agrees Paula, almost in wonder. ‘He told Dan to take me home – I wasn’t in a fit state to do anything. And Ruth was wailing, so he made her take something to calm down.’ She rolls her eyes as if at a harmless prank. ‘Probably similar to what he gave me, just a lighter dose. He said she needed to be quiet, so he could think.’ She adds as an afterthought, ‘He was gentle with her, though. Tender, almost. Anyway, Dan and I left – we staggered home together – it was still dark – and I collapsed into bed.’
Paula missed the early days of the search, she explains to us, as the pub gets noisier, filling up with evening customers.
‘Whatever they put in my drink wiped me out for most of the week. I nearly lost my job. And when I found out that they were looking for Ruth, I was so confused,’ she says. ‘I was in the newsagent’s looking at the papers and I said to the guy in there: “They’re looking for the wrong girl – it happened to that oth
er girl. The dark-haired one.” But he just said, “What are you on about? Ruth Walker’s been missing for days.” He said: “It’s funny how much she looks like you, Paula.”’ She pauses, pushes her hair behind her ears. ‘I bought some cheap black dye that afternoon,’ she says. ‘I dyed my hair straight away.’
‘When did you let it grow back? I ask, wondering if she has rehearsed this conversation and if she has told anyone before us.
‘Quite recently,’ she says. ‘It’s never been the same as it was, but the truth has to come out eventually, doesn’t it?’
‘All these years,’ I say bitterly. ‘All these years and you never said a thing.’
‘I didn’t know who to talk to,’ she says. ‘I went to the house once but there were so many people there – your mother, you.’ She looks at me. ‘Police officers everywhere – and someone came out and said, “Can I help?” I just said no, that I’d made a mistake, and I ran away. I had no idea what to do: Dan had gone by then, like most of the students. I tried to persuade myself that the woman in the tux had recovered and that maybe Ruth’s disappearance was pure coincidence.’
‘What changed your mind?’ asks Alice.
‘I started seeing George on television,’ says Paula as one of the barmaids passes our table, looking for glasses. ‘I worked out who he was – it was easy to track him down. I just wanted to know what happened. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, but I kept at him and eventually he said he had some pretty interesting photos of me from that night, so I might like to keep my mouth shut. He offered me money, too. People like that think everything can be bought.’ She looks angry for a moment.
‘Did you say anything?’ I ask.
She shakes her head. ‘You’ve got to understand – I didn’t know myself, at first, what had happened. And later, when it was clearer, I’d left it too long. But it weighs on you – keeping a secret like that.’
‘But Ruth hated George,’ I say. ‘I can’t get the pieces to add up.’
‘Ruth was in a terrible state,’ says Paula. She gets her tobacco and cigarette papers out again. ‘She’d killed someone. And George took control.’ She glances at Alice to see how she will react.
The Girl Before You Page 27