The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  She took the coins from her pocket and jiggled them in anticipation. Mobile reception was unreliable in the village, but there was a public phone box in the park and she was going to take advantage of being out of Bertie’s earshot. She dropped her coins into the slot and waited, drumming her thumb against her lip as she stood there.

  “Raynes,” his grunt came down the line.

  “Donald, it’s Sadie.”

  “Sparrow? I can hardly hear you. How’s the leave?”

  “Yeah, great.” She hesitated and then added, “Restful,” because it seemed the sort of thing a person ought to say about a holiday.

  “Good, good.”

  The phone line hissed. Neither of them went in much for small talk so she decided to come straight to the point. “Listen, I’ve done a lot of thinking and I’m ready to come back.”

  Silence.

  “To work,” she added.

  “It’s only been a week.”

  “And it’s been very clarifying. Sea air and all that.”

  “I thought I made it clear, Sparrow. Four weeks, no buts.”

  “I know, Don, but look . . .” Sadie glanced over her shoulder and saw a woman pushing a child on a swing. She lowered her voice. “I know I was out of line. I got it completely wrong, I overreacted and I handled it badly. You were right, there was some other stuff going on, personal stuff, but it’s over now, dealt with, and—”

  “Hang on a tick.”

  Sadie heard someone muttering in the background at the other end.

  Donald murmured a reply before coming back to her. “Listen, Sparrow,” he said, “something’s happening here.”

  “Really? A new case?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah, right, of course. I was just saying, I’m ready—”

  “It’s a bad line. Give us a call in a few days, eh? Next week sometime. We’ll discuss it properly.”

  “But, I—”

  Sadie cursed into the receiver as the phone line went dead and dug around in her pockets for more change. She redialled but the call went straight to Donald’s voicemail. She waited a few seconds before trying again. Same thing. Sadie left no message.

  She sat for a while on the bench near the playground. A couple of seagulls were fighting over a pile of spilled chips in a newspaper shroud. The child on the swing was crying, the chains of the swing creaking in sympathy. Sadie wondered if it was possible Donald had ignored her subsequent calls on purpose. She decided it was. She wondered if there was anyone else she should call while she was sitting by the phone with coins in her pocket. She realised there wasn’t. Sadie bounced her knees up and down, restless. The need to get back to London, where she was useful and there was more to do in a day than buy pears, was almost painful. Frustration, impotence and the sudden quelling of excitement jostled about inside her. The child on the swing was having a full-blown tantrum now, arching its little body and refusing its mother’s attempts to wipe its smeary face. Sadie would have rather liked to join in.

  “Going cheap,” the woman said to Sadie as she walked by, the same eye-rolling tone all parents adopted when they joked about giving away their children.

  Sadie smiled thinly and continued to the village, where she made a greater job than was necessary of choosing the pears, sizing each one up like a suspect in a line-up before making her selection, paying at the till and starting for home.

  She’d passed the library before—the stone building was on the High Street and an unavoidable landmark between her grandfather’s house and the village proper—but she’d never thought to go inside before. She wasn’t a library person. Too many books, too much quiet. Now, though, the display in the window made her stop abruptly. It was a pyramid of mystery novels, lots of them, with black covers and the name A.C. Edevane spelled out across the front in bold silver. Sadie was familiar with the author, of course. A.C. Edevane was one of the few crime writers actually read by police officers, and a national institution besides. When Louise had spoken about the Edevane family and their house by the lake, Sadie hadn’t made the connection. Now, though, glancing at the poster strung above the display—local author to publish fiftieth book—she felt the singular thrill of two seemingly unconnected elements coming together.

  Without another thought Sadie entered the building. A helpful-looking man of gnome-like proportions and with a name tag pinned to his shirt assured her that yes, of course they had a local history section; was there anything in particular he could help her with? “Actually,” said Sadie, setting down her string bag of pears, “there is. I need to find out everything I can about a house. And an old police case. And, while I’m at it, I’ll take a recommendation for your favourite A.C. Edevane novel.”

  Six

  London, 2003

  Peter almost dropped the parcel as he ran for the bus. Thankfully a lifetime of clumsiness had given him practice at retrieving things and he managed to pinion it to his body with an elbow without breaking his stride. He took his bus pass from his pocket, pushed a curtain of hair from his eyes, and spotted a single vacant seat. “Excuse me,” he said, to nobody in particular, making his way down the aisle as the bus lurched forwards. “Excuse me, please. Sorry. So sorry.”

  The pursed-lipped woman occupying the window seat frowned over her open copy of The Times as the bus turned a corner and Peter fell into the space beside her. Her sideways shuffle and small-but-pointed sigh of indignation suggested he’d brought an unwelcome whirlwind of fluster and bother with him. It was something Peter had always suspected about himself and so the insinuation didn’t offend him in the least. “Thought I was going to be walking for a minute there,” he said affably, letting his satchel and the parcel slide to the floor between his feet. “Long way to Hampstead from here, especially in this heat.”

  The woman returned his smile, in a withering sort of way that might have been classed a grimace by someone less generous than Peter, before glancing back at her paper and giving the broadsheet a lavish shake to straighten its pages. It was a reading style that necessarily ignored her seat mate’s presence entirely, but Peter wasn’t a large man and found that if he leaned back hard against his seat the pages barely skimmed him. What was more, by this arrangement he was able to glean the day’s headlines, saving him a stop at the newsagent’s when he got to Hampstead.

  Alice expected him to keep up with the news. She could be a hungry conversationalist when the mood struck her, and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. The latter he’d learned from Alice herself; she’d announced the fact during their first day of working together, her eyes narrowing perceptibly as if she possessed the superhuman ability to scan a person and detect foolishness at a glance.

  Peter let his own gaze wander over page two, laid out helpfully by his seat mate across his lap: the latest MORI poll put Labour and the Conservatives on even terms, six members of the Royal Military Police had been killed in Iraq, and Margaret Hodge was being tipped as the first Minister for Children. At least the Bailey case had fallen off the front pages. It had been a terrible thing, a child left alone like that for days, abandoned by the very person you’d think might be counted on to care for her. Peter had said as much during tea one afternoon when the case was at its hottest and Alice had surprised him, staring fixedly over her cup before replying that they’d no business passing judgement when they didn’t know the full story. “You’re young,” she’d continued briskly. “Life will cure you of naive assumptions. The only thing one can count on is that no one else can truly be counted on.”

  Alice’s constitutional acerbity had been challenging at first. Peter had spent the first month of his employment convinced he was on the brink of being let go, before coming to understand it was just part of her nature, a sort of humour, scathing at times but never really nasty. Peter’s problem was that he was too earnest. It was a character flaw, he knew, and one he tried hard to correct, or at least
disguise. It wasn’t always easy; he’d been that way for as long as he could remember. His mum and dad, his big brothers, too, were a joyous lot, all fond of having a laugh, and throughout Peter’s childhood they’d shaken their heads and chuckled and tousled his hair whenever he puzzled too long over jokes and teases, saying what a cuckoo he was, what a serious little cuckoo, arrived in their nest from nowhere, bless him.

  The description had bothered Peter, but only a little. The fact was he had always been different, and not just in matters of sincerity. His two older brothers had been broad, sturdy boys who’d grown into broad, sturdy men, the sort who looked right with a pint of bitter in one hand and a football in the other. And then there was Peter: skinny, pale and tall, with a tendency to “mark easily.” His mother hadn’t said it as a criticism, more with a note of wonder that she and his father could have created this odd little changeling with bruisable skin and a quaint, unfathomable passion for his library card. “He likes reading,” his parents had told their friends in the same awed tones they might have used to announce he’d been awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Peter did like reading. He’d read his way through the entire children’s section of the Kilburn Library by the time he was eight, a feat that might have been a source of pride and celebration but for the problem posed by his still being years off acquiring the coveted adult borrowing card. Thank God for Miss Talbot, who’d bitten her lip and straightened the library name badge on her lemon cardigan, and told him—a faint quiver of purpose enlivening her usually soft, smooth voice—that she would personally ensure he never ran out of things to read. She was a magician, as far as Peter was concerned. Decipherer of secret codes, master of index cards and Dewey decimal, opener of doors to wonderful places.

  Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted. Two decades ago now, and yet here, on the No. 168 bus towards Hampstead Heath, Peter was beset with an almost bodily sense of being back there. His limbs twitched with the memory of being nine years old and lanky as a foal. His mood lifted as he remembered how large, how filled with possibilities, and yet, at once, how safe and navigable the world had seemed when he was shut within those four brick walls.

  Peter risked his seat mate’s put-upon sigh, reaching past the newspaper to rummage through his satchel for the programme. He’d tucked it inside the front cover of the dog-eared copy of Great Expectations he was rereading in honour of Miss Talbot, and now studied the smiling portrait on the front.

  When Peter had told Alice he needed Tuesday morning off to attend a funeral she’d been typically curious. She was, as a rule, rapaciously interested in the details of his life. She quizzed him whenever the mood took her, asking questions of the type one might more reasonably have expected from an alien student of the human race than from an eighty-six-year-old member of its ranks. Peter, who might, if he’d given it any thought, have described his life to that point as so ordinary as to be beneath notice, had found the older woman’s interest unnerving at first. He was far more comfortable reading about the lives and ideas of others than describing his own. But Alice wasn’t the sort to brook opposition and he had got better, with time and practice, at answering her questions straightforwardly. It wasn’t that he’d gained any greater sense of his own importance as much as he’d realised Alice’s interest in him wasn’t exclusive. She was equally inquisitive about the habits of the rangy foxes eking out a living behind her garden shed.

  “A funeral?” she’d said, glancing up sharply from the books she was signing for her Spanish publisher.

  “First I’ve ever been to.”

  “Won’t be the last,” she’d said matter-of-factly, scratching a flourish across the page before her. “One collects them over a lifetime. When you get to my age you find you’ve put more people in the ground than you could gather for morning tea. Necessary, of course; nothing good comes from a death without a funeral.” Peter might have wondered at that remark but before he could give it further thought Alice continued, “Family member, is it? Friend? Always worse when a young person dies.”

  Peter told her then about Miss Talbot, surprising himself with the things he remembered, the odd little details that had lodged within his nine-year-old brain. The delicate rose-gold watch she’d worn, her habit of rubbing the tip of her index finger against her thumb when she was thinking, the way her skin had smelled like musk and petals.

  “A guide,” she’d said, silvery brows raised. “A mentor. How fortunate you were. And you kept in contact all this time?”

  “Not exactly. We lost touch when I left for university.”

  “You visited, though.” A statement, not a question.

  “Not enough.”

  Not ever, but he’d been too ashamed to admit that to Alice. He’d thought about visiting the library, meant to, but life was busy and he’d just never got around to it. He’d only learned of Miss Talbot’s death by chance. He’d been running an errand for Alice at the British Library, flicking idly through a copy of the SCONUL Newsletter while waiting for a German book on poisons to be delivered from the archives, when her name leapt out at him. Miss Talbot—Lucy Talbot, because of course she’d had a first name—had lost her battle with cancer, the funeral would be held on Tuesday, June the tenth. Peter had experienced an electric flash of shock. He hadn’t even known that she was ill. No reason he should, really. He told himself it was the way of things, children grew, and grew away, and in any case he was overthinking it, memory had embroidered his friendship with Miss Talbot. He’d only imagined a special connection between them when in reality she’d just been doing her job, he’d only ever been one of many.

  “Doubtful,” Alice said to this. “Far more probable that the number of children she saw and didn’t connect with specially made the one with whom she did particularly important to her.”

  Peter hadn’t flattered himself that Alice was trying to bolster his esteem. The pronouncement was her considered opinion, expressed with characteristic candour, and if it made him feel a right heel, well, what concern was that of hers?

  He’d thought it the end of the matter, until hours later, when he was engrossed in his daily task of transferring Alice’s morning scenes onto the new computer she refused to use, she’d said, “Did she ever give you one of mine?”

  Peter had looked up from the heavily edited typewritten sentence he was transposing. He had no idea what Alice was talking about. He hadn’t even realised she was still in the room with him. It was highly unusual for Alice to stick around while he did his work; she went out like clockwork most afternoons, to run mysterious errands the purpose of which she didn’t disclose.

  “Your librarian. Did she ever give you one of my books?”

  He’d considered lying but only for a second. Alice had a nose for dishonesty. When he said that she had not, Alice surprised him by laughing. “A good thing, too. Not meant for children, not the things I write.”

  Which was true enough. Alice’s books were English mysteries, but there was nothing cosy about them. They were the sort of crime novels reviewers liked to describe as “psychologically taut’ and “morally ambiguous’, whydunits as much as they were whos or hows. As she herself had famously said in an interview with the BBC, murder in and of itself was not engaging; it was the drive to kill, the human factor, the fervours and furies motivating the dreadful act that rendered it compelling. Alice had a formidable grasp on those fervours and furies. She’d nodded when the interviewer said as much, listened politely as he implied she was, in fact, just a little too perceptive on the matter for his comfort, and then she’d replied: “But of course one does not need to have committed murder to write about it, any more than one needs a time machine to write about the Battle of Agincourt. One simply requires an acquaintance with the dark depths of the human soul, along with the inclination to explore them to their
very end.” She’d smiled then, almost sweetly. “Besides, haven’t we all experienced the desire to kill, if only for a moment?”

  Sales of her books had gone through the roof in the days following the interview, not that she’d needed them to. She was hugely successful and had been for decades. The name A.C. Edevane was shorthand for the entire procedural crime genre and her fictional detective, Diggory Brent, the curmudgeonly ex-soldier with a penchant for patchwork, was more beloved by a great swathe of readers than their own fathers. That wasn’t just Peter’s hyperbole; a recent poll in the Guardian had posed the question and the responses from readers had proved it. “Remarkable,” Alice had said after her publicist telephoned with the news. And then, lest Peter think for a moment she cared one jot for pleasing others, “And certainly not what I intended.”

  Peter had never told Alice, but he hadn’t read any of her books when he started work as her assistant. He hadn’t read much contemporary fiction at all, for that matter. Miss Talbot, who’d taken her responsibility as a dealer of illicit adult books to a minor very seriously, had vacillated briefly over whether non-fiction might be the best place to start (what harm, she’d reasoned aloud, could possibly come to a child’s mind from the pages of history?), before deciding a grounding in the classics was capital and plucking the library’s copy of Great Expectations from the shelves. Peter had fallen hard for gaslight, frockcoats and horse-drawn coaches, and never looked back. (Or forwards, as the case may be.)