The Crooked House (4 page)

If he’d known. If he’d known. What did they think? That he could hold a gun in her mother’s face, murder Joe on the sofa, dreaming with some band still playing in his ears, he could pull the trigger on the live small bodies of her sisters, but not her?

If he’d known, you’d be dead too, said the policewoman’s eyes.

Alison
dreamed of the marsh for the first time in ten years. She dreamed she was waking on a boat, climbing up through a hatch and there was the wide expanse of mud silvered in the dawn, the birds stalking the creek on long legs and the power station’s cooling wall breaking the surface out in the estuary, as low and dark as a submarine. The little Saxon church stood on the horizon, no bigger than a hut, no more than a sharp black silhouette.

Then a man pulled her down, thick furred arms wrapped round her legs and pulled, into the hold of the boat. Diesel and rope and wood.

She woke, in her own bed, alone, and for a moment it was as though she couldn’t remember how to breathe.

She had cut down the nights she saw Paul – he didn’t seem to have noticed, although perhaps he was gentler when she did see him, more attentive. They went to see an Italian film at an old cinema in Mayfair, leaning against each other in the red velvet seats, below them the cinema almost empty, and he stroked her as he had before, for a long time, until she wondered
if he even knew he was doing it. He didn’t mention the wedding again, and although it was her plan to devise an escape from it, nor did she. The next time she came to his flat, loosened up after a drink with Kay, he was quietly ruthless, moving very quickly, holding her down. Which she liked.

Afterwards, when she pulled herself upright, feeling as though she was coming up for air, her eyes wide, a smile broke across his face and he kissed her.

Something had changed, it seemed to her. She didn’t want to look too closely at it. It didn’t feel like a change for the worse; it wasn’t exactly trouble Morgan’s wedding had caused, more like intensity: the stakes had suddenly jumped higher. She had discovered that Paul wanted to hang on to her, and he – he knew she was hiding something. Kay had said, once, men like secrets. They don’t want to know everything about you, you have to hold stuff back.

At work, Rosa, the long-limbed, glossy-haired girl from editorial who’d been witness to their first meeting, had been asking questions. People did, now and again: it always brought Alison to the alert but she had strategies. Alison wondered about the way the girl looked at her, a couple of years younger and not long out of one of the grand universities. Rosa knew Paul – or knew of Paul – through her supervisor: it seemed to be how she’d got the job, being a friend of a friend of an author. There was something about Rosa’s interest in her and Paul that made her uneasy. A girl prone to hero worship, was what Alison thought, from the big swimming avid eyes. That’d teach Alison, for helping her out.

So Rosa had tagged along with Alison and Kay for a drink one night, Kay giving her one of her looks when she asked, a sidelong look down her nose that went unnoticed, apparently. Rosa was pretty, with long dark hair and smooth golden skin: her mother was Brazilian, her father was wealthy. She started by talking, too much, about her flat in Pimlico, visits home
to the country at weekends, her mother’s mail-order company, her brother’s job in California and then she said, ‘Do you get home at all?’

‘Oh, it’s too far,’ Alison said, helping herself to a handful of crisps. Kay’s quick glance didn’t pass her by. To drain her glass would have been too dangerous, she’d learned that much. She crunched on the salty crisps, swallowed before her throat closed up in panic. Smiled.

‘Cornwall.’ She grimaced. ‘And too tragic.’

‘Tragic?’ Rosa leaned towards her, eyes wide. Her hair swung forward.

‘Schoolfriends. On the till in Budgen’s or pregnant with the dodgy boyfriend. Tragic. You know.’ And then Alison
did
drain her glass, and stand up. ‘My round.’ They were in a bar she suspected Kay of having selected for its startling ugliness, to put Rosa off. It was in the basement of the local YMCA, scratched tables and decor untouched for thirty years but mercifully dark.

‘Perhaps it’s not tragic like that where you came from, Rosa.’

She saw Kay smile at that: born in Croydon Kay was, like her if for different reasons, a girl from nowhere. Rosa stuck it for two more drinks, by which time Kay and Alison were jammed close in the dark, shoulder to shoulder, and talking about music. Rosa looked hurt as she stood to leave.

Thank God for Kay, she thought. But even woozy with the wine and waving Rosa off across the room, Alison didn’t confide in her friend. Maybe there’d come a time when she didn’t have to be obnoxious to naive, curious girls like Rosa. Maybe not.

As the wedding drew closer, Alison told herself she could always fake illness as a plan. She could even poison herself with something: old pâté or laxatives. She wanted to see Paul but five nights out of six she still made herself take the bus down through the West End, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, over the river.

Her
bedsit looked better for it. She had put everything away, in drawers and cupboards, under the bed, so that the room seemed one big window, filled with the luminous green-yellow tree. But as she tidied, and straightened the bed, she wished for Paul: she found herself doing everything as though he was watching her. It was dangerous.

Since the wedding invitation, too, crossing the water did something to her insides. From the top of the bus she always looked downriver, to the clustered skyscrapers that stood between her and the estuary.

He called her at work, the week before the wedding. Which was unusual: mostly they sent each other very brief, functional text messages if arrangements needed to be made, which was down to Alison’s habit of holding back and Paul’s distrust of mobile phones – his age, he always said, though he was only forty-odd. They did their talking in person, face to face, long peaceful silences, then he’d look up and say, ‘But did you like it?’ about some book he’d given her, searching her face, wanting to know, patient. Long, lazy conversations about books and movies and work, eating dinner at his big wooden table or leaning against each other on his old sofa, but silence in between. It was more exciting that way, she told herself, and messages and phone calls were for teenagers and never satisfactory anyway, but sometimes she wished for a sign, some kind of softer communication.

‘I’ve booked somewhere,’ he said. She could hear alertness in his voice.

‘Where?’ she blurted, knowing he meant Saltleigh, knowing he meant the wedding, but her mind abruptly, crazily, seesawing at the thought. Hotels, in Saltleigh? She could only remember the pub. It wasn’t the kind of place for bed and breakfast, even, not a tourist spot, what with the mud and the power station. Before anything was said she felt herself rise to its defence, the tufted grass of the dykes and the wide grey horizon, the
place where you could see the sun come up over the sea. Aware of a head raised across the cramped open-plan offices, Alison turned on her chair with the phone to her ear. Her heart bumped in her chest: he would find her out. How could he not? She waited for him to answer.

‘The wedding,’ he said. ‘You haven’t forgotten?’

‘No,’ she said, trying to sound bright. Normal. ‘Do we … um is there a wedding present list?’

‘The wedding’s on Saturday but I thought we’d go a few days ahead of time. Tuesday,’ said Paul, his voice warm now, reassured. ‘Make a, you know, a little holiday of it. There’s a place, it’s on the edge of the village, apparently, it’s even got a website. The Queen’s Head, an old Edwardian roadhouse, must have been done up quite recently. It looks all right, actually. Look it up.’

‘I’d have to talk to work – it’s short notice.’

‘Sure,’ he said equably. ‘But it’ll be fine, won’t it? Gerry’s always telling you you need a holiday.’ Gerry owned the company: he was also an acquaintance of Paul’s, and of course Paul was right, that was no escape route. ‘We can get you something to wear, if you like. Get a present. Do that together. If you’d like.’

‘Oh, I don’t need … I’ve got things to wear,’ she said, thinking of what Kay would say. Her eyes would open wide,
He’s hooked, all right. Wants to take you shopping?
She closed her eyes. She had talked herself out of faking illness, telling herself it would be a night. Twenty-four hours. But five nights? Her heart in its cage of ribs felt squeezed with fear, a hand in there groping for it.

‘I’ll look after you,’ he said. ‘If you’re still worried about Morgan.’

‘Morgan?’ Now she did sound shrill: with an effort she softened. ‘I’m not worried,’ she said.

‘I want some time with you,’ he said. ‘I want to get away
with you. All right?’ And he had a point: they’d never been away together, not even a weekend. She wondered if that made her look odd to him: magazines were full of articles about romantic mini-breaks, so maybe she could assume that was what most women wanted. Women who had nothing to hide, though.

He’d never suggested anything like it before, but now he sounded hurt, on the edge of angry.

‘All right,’ she said hurriedly, rattled into it. ‘Yes. It’ll be … perfect.’

After he’d hung up she went online and looked up the Queen’s Head, Saltleigh. The picture came up, a tall-gabled, red-brick roadhouse flanked with Leyland cypress trees, a wooden veranda. She knew it straight away, on the edge of the village; she remembered it as semi-derelict, inhabited by an ancient couple, the rooms piled with hoarded rubbish. They must have died.

She stared at the page, hypnotised.

Below it a gallery of photographs: a boat sailing in the estuary, the photo carefully angled so as to exclude the power station; a close-up of the little flint church; the row of sail-lofts. The roadhouse’s paintwork was fresh, the brick repointed. How could it be worth it, Alison wondered. Who would want to come to Saltleigh for their holidays? Especially … and then it dawned on her. It was on the map, wasn’t it? They’d put it on the map.

Family slaughtered.

How long did it take for people to forget?

In Cornwall, as the months passed, Alison registered dully that the things she’d seen, coming down the stairs of her family’s crooked house, had not altered the wider world, had barely
even surprised it; violence was something a man resorted to, when he was at the end of his tether. Within months there was a similar case: a man with money troubles and an unhappy marriage took his children off in a car and gassed them, and himself, while ranting to his wife on a mobile phone.

The world forgot quicker if there’d been no survivors. Although there were always relatives to milk for information, schoolfriends, work colleagues, survivors were what kept things going longer, in the newspapers. But the courts did a good job of keeping the press at a distance from Polly in Cornwall, or perhaps journalists were even decent people, because there was never a sign that Aunt Polly’s neighbours, or the children at Alison’s school, knew who she was. She didn’t ever think she was free, though. There were people who knew, even if they didn’t choose to act on it, they were out there, they kept tabs. A year on – a year to the day, newspapers working doggedly, Alison quickly understood, according to timetables, anniversaries, links – a newspaper published a picture. A photographer, disguised as an orderly, had managed to get into the rehabilitation ward where her father was being held and get off a couple of shots before he had to run.

Perhaps whoever sent the photographer had expected something more dramatic – ‘rehabilitation ward’ suggesting that some progress back towards human function, or release, was a possibility – but the photo only showed a humped figure in a hospital chair, hooked to tubes. His hands were like claws in his blanketed lap and his head bent sideways, eyelids half open to show a dull unfocused gleam. His chin was sore with the saliva that ran from his lopsided mouth. The photographer had got in because John Grace, Esme’s father, wasn’t being held in a secure unit – he was no threat to anyone: he would never walk or talk again. He had, the neurologist responsible for his care told Polly – who told Alison – some residual brain function. It wasn’t that there was only random electrical activity
in there, but there was – realistically – no possibility of a recovery or even improvement in his condition. No doubt if he had got there as a result of a car crash or a catastrophic aneurysm there would be family sitting at his bedside, trying to get through, playing him music or holding photographs up to his face. Talking to him, and holding his hand.

The gunshot had blown away half of his brain, damaging the part governing his motor functions, and the centres of speech. He responded to sound by increased agitation, and although they tried him with various computer devices, joysticks that could be operated by a single finger, or eye movement, he showed no ability to process or answer questions.

The inquest, Polly told Alison over her shoulder one night while at the kitchen stove, had decided that although the evidence that John Grace killed his wife, son and twin daughters, and attempted to kill himself, was overwhelming, as he was definitively unfit to plead the CPS decided no public interest would be served in proceeding with a prosecution. Alison’s interest would not be served. She didn’t tell Alison anything else: they lived for some time without watching the television news, and Polly didn’t get a newspaper. You couldn’t stay away from them altogether, though, how could you? How could you know that the front-page photograph of a man in a hospital bed – the paper carelessly left in the doctor’s reception area or standing on the garage forecourt – would be your dad?