The Crooked House by Christobel Kent Read Free Book Online Page B

direct gaze from under a straight fringe – looked back at her from down the years. The woman who’d asked her those same questions over and over every day for a week after the murders. Thepolicewoman whose eyes had not left Esme’s, unwavering in their inquiry even as the too-full mug of tea burned her hand. And with the realisation it was as if Alison had answered a ringing phone and the policewoman was there on the other end and about to speak. Alison held her breath. The murders. She had never called them that, not even in her head, because that would have made her father a murderer. She reached up into the cupboard where her dresses hung and took a handful down. One of them would do.
    The police hadn’t told her much of anything, during that terrible endless week, only asked her questions and dutifully she had answered. It only occurred to her much later that she could have screamed and shouted and demanded to know: also that they might not have told her anything because she could be a suspect. She had had blood everywhere when they came for her, her hands, legs, feet, even a smear on her neck, and there were bloody footprints on the hall carpet she didn’t remember leaving. That was one of the things they’d asked her, over and over, which rooms she’d been in afterwards, with blood on her feet.
    Alison knelt with the dresses in her hands, laying them in the suitcase, as the questions they’d asked her all those years ago rattled in her head like grit in a wheel.
    Shoes. Head down, she put in a pair of sandals she liked, with fine gold straps. She’d worn them at a work do one time and a man had knelt down to look at them.
    Of course the policewoman still existed, she might even be still there, behind a desk at the police station. And with a pulse of certainty Alison knew that if no one else recognised her, the policewoman would. Her doorbell rang shrilly and she crossed the landing to the front window to look down.
    Below her Paul stood looking into the square, his back to the door. He had his hands in his pockets, shifting on his feet,impatient, and for a split second Alison thought about not answering. Then he turned, and looked up.
    She’d delayed as long as she could in London, showing him around and registering the look of silent dismay he gave the battered hallway and the shared bathroom (a stale flannel over the sink, a ring round the bath). She moved him along, to her room. ‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ he said dubiously, glancing inside, the yellow light reflected off the big tree. ‘Well, short term, anyway.’
    She stopped. ‘What, until I hit the big time, you mean?’ she said. An arm around her shoulders he laughed, squeezing her against him and smiling down.
    ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look after you.’ And she said nothing, blinking, a secret stupid excitement inside her.
    But then he was turning, briskly. ‘Come on, then.’
    Getting out of London had seemed to take hours, but Alison had been grateful for every crawling minute. Stuck in traffic round arterial roads, between parades of houses and trees sooty with a century of exhaust fumes, past Turkish bakeries and fried chicken shops and used-car forecourts. Creeping through the suburbs, Alison covertly observed Paul’s driving, and his car; she hadn’t seen either before. The car was small and sensible and so clean it might have been hoovered. Paul was a confident, slightly impatient driver, too long in the leg for the car and shifting in his seat every time they got stuck in the sluggish traffic.
    His phone had rung once and although they were stationary at that point his hand had gone straight to divert it. At last the lanes had multiplied, the shops and pavements disappeared behind siege-strength walls and the sprawling outskirts abruptly receded in the rear-view mirror. Paul straightened in his seat with visible relief; Alison realised she was pushing back in hers, as if bracing herself.
    Bythe time