The Crooked House Read Online Free PDF Page 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 wonderedif 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 hometo 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