Reading all this for the third time is getting me nowhere. The only mildly attention-grabbing fact here is that Kat Allen, as a child, acted in three television dramas. Though ‘acted’ might be putting it a bit strongly, since she was four, five and six when she played her three roles: ‘shy girl on bus’ in Bubblegum Breakdown, ‘second drowning girl’ in Washed Clean Away and ‘Lily-Anne’ in The Dollface Diaries. Her two sisters had brief stints as child stars too. It’s clear that whichever detective made these notes did not find the Allen sisters’ dramatic backgrounds to be either interesting or relevant.
There’s a funny smell in the house; I’m not imagining it. And an odd noise, too, coming from downstairs. I drag myself out of my chair to go and investigate, and fail to yawn because the muscles around my mouth are too weary. I need to lie down on a floor somewhere and close my eyes. I think I’ve set a record tonight: I can’t remember having felt quite as tired as I do now at any point in the last eighteen months. With luck, I might black out for a whole hour, which hardly ever happens.
I feel the heat as I approach, before I see it. Then there’s the colour, stronger than I’ve seen in my house before, and more mobile, flaring and trembling.
I interpret what I’m seeing and I think, ‘Oh. That.’ I am not panicking. I don’t think I am panicking. Our hall is on fire. Waves of horror flow towards me but they don’t touch me, though I am trapped in the circle they make. I can hear screams that no one is screaming. Move. Everything has gone into slow-motion.
The flames have already climbed to the top of both walls, like a deadly species of ivy, golden and flickering. Through the smoke, I see something that looks like metal on the floor by the letterbox. I can’t tell what it is. Move. Now.
This is my fault. I took the batteries out of all our smoke alarms. They kept going off when Luke cooked, and each time, no matter what we said, Dinah and Nonie started shaking and crying hysterically, insisting there must be a fire somewhere in the house.
Did Sharon’s killer do this?
Mustn’t think about that now. I know exactly what to do. I turn away from the blaze, walk upstairs, wake Luke, tell him to keep calm. Through a sort of filter, I become aware that he is not calm, that I am better at keeping calm than he is. He immediately starts to cough. I am only coughing occasionally. I tell him the girls are safe: they’re above us, on the next floor up. I tell him to open the window on the landing outside Nonie’s bedroom. From there, we can climb out and it’s just a small drop down onto the flat roof of the two-storey extension the previous owners added to the house. I pick up Luke’s mobile, put it in his hands, say that as soon as he’s opened the window he must ring for help.
I run upstairs and wake the girls, whispering reassurances. From their point of view, it must seem as if my sole reason for waking them is to tell them that everything is going to be fine, and nothing to do with anything bad happening. I’m telling the truth: I believe everything will be okay, and that’s why I’m not scared. I’m shocked, but not afraid – that’s what I’m telling myself. Not scared. Not scared. I’ve worked it out: the only way we won’t be fine is if the flames climb all the way up the stairs to the second landing before we get out of that window, and they won’t. When I last saw them – the flames – they were up to the top of the walls but still only halfway along, halfway into the space between the front door and the beginning of the stairs. As I guide a silent Nonie and an outraged Dinah into their dressing gowns and slippers, I make sure not to use the word ‘fire’.
Luke is waiting for us by the window. He helps the girls to climb out and tries to help me too, but I make him go first. I have to be last, have to risk myself and no one else. Nonie is coughing. If I knew who had started the fire I would kill them, no question, for making her cough like that.
Some time later – I have no idea how long – we are sitting at the far end of the extension’s roof, dangling our feet off the edge, waiting to hear the sound of a fire engine. We shiver from the cold and cling to one another. It’s ridiculous that our house is ablaze behind us and we’re still freezing.
‘Will we be able to fix the house?’ Nonie asks.
‘The house doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘We’re all that matters.’
Dinah bursts into tears, covers her face with her hands. ‘It’s my fault. This is my fault.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ I say.
‘It is. I made you buy this house. You bought it because I said I loved it.’
‘And because we loved it.’
‘But you wouldn’t have bought it if I’d said I didn’t like it, and I loved it for a bad reason. I thought it looked like the sort of house a really famous person might have used to live in, and I want to be famous.’
Luke and I exchange a look that fails to deliver a unanimous verdict on which of us is best qualified to deal with this.
‘I wanted a house that could have a plaque on it one day saying, “Dinah Lendrim lived here from 2009 to . . .’’ whenever I moved out,’ Dinah sobs. ‘I’ve seen them on houses in London, when Mum used to take us, and they’re always tall old-looking houses like this one. Like number 10 Downing Street. Remember that bungalow we looked at, with the beautiful garden? I loved that house really, but I pretended I hated it because you never see a house like that with a famous person plaque on it!’
Luke says something in response: the right thing, hopefully. I can’t concentrate. Why are the fire brigade taking so long? Maybe they aren’t; maybe we’ve only been out here for a few seconds. If you’re outside sitting on a roof, several metres from the burning house behind you, is there any way the fire or the smoke can get you? At what point ought we to jump off? Not yet. The ceilings of our old plaque-worthy townhouse are high. I’m not risking the girls breaking bones unless and until I have to.
From the front, our house looks very similar to number 10 Downing Street. Why has this never occurred to me before?
‘If we’d bought that bungalow, this wouldn’t have happened.’
‘Yes, it would,’ Nonie corrects her older sister, something she doesn’t dare do often. ‘Whoever it is that started the fire, it isn’t the house they want to burn. If we were in the bungalow, they’d have set fire to the bungalow. Wouldn’t they, Amber?’
I hug her tightly.
‘Amber?’
‘Mm?’
‘Last time . . . when Mum died, the bad person who started the fire made sure that me and Dinah were safely out of the house.’
Oh, God, please don’t let her ask what she’s about to ask.
‘Why didn’t they do that this time?’
Last time, this time, next time. For most seven-year-olds, having someone set fire to their house would be, at most, a one-off event. Something black and hard is growing inside me. It might be a hunger for revenge.
Luke says, ‘We don’t know that anyone started this fire. It could have been an accident.’
No, it couldn’t.
‘Amber? Do you think Granny Marianne set fire to our house?’ Nonie asks.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Dinah.
‘Why’s it stupid? She was always mean to Mum, and she never wants to see us. She doesn’t even ring up any more.’
‘Your grandmother didn’t start the fire,’ I say.
Why? Because she couldn’t have started the last one? Does it have to be the same person?
‘We shouldn’t have taken the batteries out of the smoke alarms,’ says Luke.
‘We’ve got a human smoke alarm.’ I point to myself. One that spends all night moving from room to room, checking everything’s okay, just in case.
‘Amber?’
‘Yes, Nones?
‘I’d hate to be famous. Sometimes at school when people ask me what Nonie’s short for, if I can’t be bothered saying Oenone and explaining that it’s Greek, I say it’s short for Anonymous. Can I change my name to Anonymous, before people at school find out it’s not true?’
I hear a siren in the distance. It’s c
oming closer. I start to cry.
If something happens once, we might not pay much attention to it. If it happens twice or more, we start to see a pattern. The human psyche loves patterns so much that it does its best to find them whenever it can, even sometimes seeing ones that aren’t there.
The row about the key to the locked study at Little Orchard was part of a pattern: Jo has a long history of thinking herself more virtuous than other people and claiming the moral high ground whenever she can. Once when Amber asked if Kirsty’s condition had a name – if she was born that way or had had some kind of accident – Jo demanded to know why Amber felt it was an acceptable question to ask. Does anyone ever ask you what made you the way you are? she said. She didn’t give Amber any answers, except to say that there was nothing wrong with Kirsty. She was just different, and everyone loved her exactly as she was. Amber had taken care not to use the word ‘wrong’, knowing it would upset Jo; she had phrased her question as sensitively as possible, yet Jo had heard the unspoken insensitive version and responded to that.
Amber knows not to give Jo a hello kiss, as she is in the habit of doing with most people she’s close to. She tried it once in the very early days of her and Luke’s relationship, and Jo burst out laughing and backed away, saying, ‘Don’t kiss me. I won’t be able to keep a straight face.’ When Amber asked what she meant, Jo said, ‘That whole pretentious mwa-mwa thing. Sorry, I’m a northerner – I just can’t do it.’ Amber must have been taken aback. Hurt, too, I would imagine. For many people, it’s not pretentious at all to kiss someone hello. It’s simply an expression of affection, and no one likes to have their affection rejected. Neil, who witnessed the exchange, might have been aware of Amber’s embarrassment. Perhaps that was why he decided to shift the focus and tease Jo. ‘Northern girls will only kiss you if there’s something in it for them,’ Neil told Amber. ‘Preferably a good seeing-to, marriage and two children, in that order.’ Did Amber hope Jo would be hurt? If so, she must have been disappointed when Jo just shrugged and said, ‘I’m not a tactile person.’
Later, when Amber told Luke what had happened, he agreed that it was true, Jo wasn’t tactile, though he’d never thought about it before. ‘She always hangs back when the kiss-greeting stuff’s going on, makes sure she’s not in the firing line.’ Did this corroboration from Luke that it was nothing personal take the sting out of the incident for Amber? Clearly not, or she wouldn’t today, years later, think it worth mentioning. Hanging back is one thing, she might have thought, but if you screw up and someone gets close enough to lean forward and try to kiss you hello, surely you should let them get on with it, however uncomfortable you feel, if the alternative is to embarrass and reject them.
And Jo’s policy is inconsistent. Amber has walked into Jo’s lounge and found her sitting on the sofa with William and Barney on either side of her, giving them both a big cuddle. Seeing Amber there, Jo sprang up immediately, almost pushing the boys away as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, Amber would have forgotten about the earlier incident. Maybe that’s what reactivated it in her mind: concrete evidence that Jo doesn’t mind kissing people in general, only Amber in particular.
If this is what Amber believes, I think she’s wrong. Children who have been victims of physical, sexual or emotional abuse often grow up to be non-tactile adults. Often the sole exception they’re willing to make is for their children.
Jo’s thoughtlessness is a recurring theme for Amber, and particularly wounding, I would guess, because Jo has proven herself time and time again to be capable of its opposite; there’s no doubt she knows how to be considerate when she wants to be.
Shortly after Amber and Luke got married, Jo asked Amber if she planned to give up her job when she had her first baby. Amber said no: she couldn’t bear the thought of giving up her career. Jo, who had been a speech therapist until she had William and stopped working, laughed at this quite openly. Assuming Amber’s recall is accurate, Jo’s response was to say, ‘Anyone’d think you were a Hollywood actress or a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist. You’re a licensing officer for the council, for God’s sake.’ In fact, Amber wasn’t a licensing officer, she was the Licensing Officer for Rawndesley city council – she didn’t, of course, point this out. Nor did she tell Jo that it was possible to love and take pride in a job that, from its title, didn’t sound particularly glamorous. I’m assuming Jo decided to end the conversation there, secure in her assumption that Amber was wrong to prize her professional identity so highly. What she ought to have done was say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, how ignorant of me. Tell me about your job. What do you love about it?’
When Amber told Jo about her promotion from Licensing Officer to Licensing Manager, Jo said, ‘Aren’t those just different names for the same job? I still don’t understand what it is you do all day.’ When Amber tried, not for the first time, to describe the ins and outs of her work, Jo interrupted her and changed the subject.
Once, before Barney was born, Amber and Luke went away for the weekend with Jo, Neil and William. On the Friday evening, Amber had a bath immediately before going to bed. The next morning, when Jo asked her if she’d had a good night’s sleep, Amber replied that she had and that she’d known she would when she got into bed. ‘I always sleep well on the rare nights that I and my bedding are spotlessly clean at the same time. Not that it happens very often,’ she joked. Luke and Neil laughed. Jo wrinkled her nose and said, ‘Yuck! That’s disgusting. Did you really need to tell us that?’
Generally, Jo seems to feel free to question Amber’s ethics and behaviour whenever it suits her. She tried to interfere in Amber’s wedding plans, leading Amber to tell Luke she’d always wanted to elope abroad to get married, which was a lie. After Sharon died, when Amber told Jo that she and Luke were planning to buy a bigger house that could more easily accommodate four people, Jo was dead set against the plan and seemed unaware that it was none of her business. She accused Amber of being selfish, putting her own needs before Dinah and Nonie’s.
Amber was confused. Her main reason for wanting a bigger house was so that the girls wouldn’t have to share the only spare bedroom she and Luke had at the time. Amber made the mistake of admitting to Jo that a secondary consideration was that she herself might feel the need for space, both physical and psychological, once Dinah and Nonie moved in. Jo tutted and said, ‘The size of your house is neither here nor there. What those poor kids need is stability. They’ve always known you and Luke in that house. Don’t you think they’ve got enough change and trauma to deal with, without you adding to it?’ When Amber pointed out that Dinah and Nonie were excited about helping to choose the new house, Jo shook her head dismissively and said, ‘There’s no point talking to you. You’ll think what you want to think, whatever I say.’
Point or not, that conversation wasn’t followed by a change of policy on Jo’s part. She continued to criticise Amber’s actions and decisions, particularly with regard to the girls, and regularly expressed the view that it was ‘wrong’ for Amber and Luke to have guardianship of them. ‘They should be with their grandmother,’ she doggedly insisted whenever the subject came up. ‘You and Luke might be fond of them, but you’re not family. It can’t be the same.’ On being reminded that Marianne Lendrim, though opposed to the idea of adoption, was perfectly happy for her granddaughters to live with Amber and Luke and had said it would be impossible for her to have them live or even stay the occasional night with her, Jo’s response was to sigh heavily and say, ‘Well, of course she’s going to say that, isn’t she? If I were in her shoes, I’d also minimise contact, protect myself. She knows that one day Dinah and Nonie are going to be old enough to be told that their dead mother made a will that said she’d rather her daughters were brought up by any old heroin addict or paedophile than by their own grandmother.’
Does any or all of this explain why Amber resents Jo as much as she does? I think there’s something else, something she’s not telling us.
Amber?
6
2/12/2010
‘Waterhouse!’ Proust sounded pleased to see him. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d present yourself at the appointed hour, but here you are: nine o’clock on the nose. Shut the door behind you, please.’
‘Six words. That’s all it takes.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘“Waterhouse, you’re sacked. Gibbs, you’re sacked.” Say it and get on with what matters. Someone tried to kill Amber Hewerdine and her family last night. They’ll try again. Next time they might succeed.’
Proust looked to his left, then his right. ‘Gibbs? You’re hallucinating, Waterhouse. Have a seat.’ He gestured towards the only one in his office.
‘That’s your chair.’
‘Am I using it at the moment? If I’m offering it to you and not sitting in it myself, how can there be a problem?’
Simon walked around the inspector’s desk and sat down. He felt foolish, as if he was trying to impersonate a DI, indulging an embarrassing ego-boosting delusion in public. First point to the Snowman. Soon it would be game, set and match.
‘I’m afraid I have more than six words for you, but let me suggest another time-saving ruse. How about you don’t interrupt me every ten seconds?’
Simon nodded.
‘Instant agreement. That means you imagine it’ll be easy for you.’ Proust smiled as he paced the floor. ‘You’re not afraid of me any more, Waterhouse. You always have been – until very recently you were – but no longer.’
Was this item one on the agenda, or preamble? Did it matter?
‘There was never any need for you to be, and I always wondered why you were. There’s nothing so terrifying about me, is there? I speak my mind, and I don’t suffer fools – which would be particularly problematic for you, I can see that – but still . . . why the fear? Nobody else is frightened of me. Anyone would think I was some sort of tyrannical bully.’
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