The Crooked House Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 awaywith 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 barelyeven 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