“I wanted . . . I wanted . . .”
I couldn’t tell him what I wanted, because what I wanted was for things to go back to the way they were. I wanted us to go back to the time when Katie and I were always together, when we spent every hour of every day with each other, when we swam in the river and no one looked at us and our bodies were our own. I wanted to go back to the time before we came up with that game, before we realized what we could do. But that’s only what I wanted. Katie didn’t. Katie liked being looked at. For her, the game wasn’t just a game, it was more. Right back at the beginning, when I first found out and we were arguing about it, she said to me, “You don’t know what it feels like, Lena. Can you imagine? To have someone want you so much that he’ll risk everything for you—like, everything. His job, his relationship, his freedom. You don’t understand what that feels like.”
I could feel Henderson watching me, waiting for me to speak. I wanted to find a way to say it, to make him see that she was getting off not just on him but on her power over him. I’d have liked to be able to tell him that, to wipe that look off his face, the one that said he knew her and I didn’t, not really. But I couldn’t find the words just then, and in any case it wasn’t the whole story, because no one could deny that she did love him.
There was a pain behind my eyes, a sharp pinch that told me I was about to cry again, and I stared down at the ground because I didn’t want him to see the tears in my eyes, and I saw that lying in the dirt, right between my feet, there was a nail. It was a long one, three or four inches at least. I moved my foot slightly so that I was covering the tip of it, then I pressed down to raise up the other end.
“You were just jealous, Lena,” Henderson said. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? You always were. I think you were jealous of both of us, weren’t you? Of me, because she chose me, and of her, because I chose her. Neither of us wanted you. And so you made us pay. You and your mother, you . . .”
I let him talk, I let him spout his deluded bullshit, and I didn’t even care then that he was so wrong about everything, because all I could focus on was the tip of that nail, which I’d levered up with my foot. I slipped my hand under the table. Mark stopped talking.
“You should never have been with her,” I said. I was looking behind him, over his shoulder, trying to distract him. “You know that. You must know that.”
“She loved me and I loved her, completely.”
“You’re an adult!” I said, keeping my eye on the space behind him, and it worked—for a second he glanced over his shoulder and I let my arm slip lower between my legs, stretching out my fingers. Cold metal in my grasp, I straightened my back, prepared myself. “Do you really think it matters how you felt about her? You were her teacher. You’re twice her fucking age. You were the one who was supposed to do the right thing.”
“She loved me,” he said again, hangdog. Pathetic.
“She was too young for you,” I said, gripping the shaft of the nail tightly in my fist. “She was too good for you.”
I went for him, but I wasn’t quick enough. As I sprang to my feet, I caught my hand under the table, just for a second. Mark lunged at me, grabbing my left arm, yanking it as hard as he could, pulling me halfway across the table.
“What are you doing?” He leaped to his feet, still holding on to me, and pulled me sideways, twisting my arm back behind me. I yelped with pain. “What are you doing?” he shouted, pushing my arm higher, opening my fist with his fingers. He took the nail from my hand and shoved me down on to the table, his hand in my hair, his body on top of mine. I felt the metal spike graze against my throat, the weight of him on top of me, just like how she must have felt him when they were together. Vomit came up to my throat and I spat it out and said, “She was too good for you! She was too good for you!” I said it again and again until he’d crushed the breath out of me.
JULES
A clicking sound. Click and hiss, click and hiss, then: “Oh. There you are. I let myself in, hope you don’t mind.”
The old woman—the one with the purple hair and the black eyeliner, the one who claims to be a psychic, the one who shuffles around town spitting and cursing at people, the one who I’d seen just the day before, arguing with Louise in front of the house—she was sitting on the window seat, swinging her swollen calves back and forth.
“I do mind!” I said loudly, trying not to show her that I’d been afraid, that I was still—stupidly, ridiculously—afraid of her. “I bloody do mind. What are you doing here?” Click and hiss, click and hiss. The lighter—the silver lighter with Libby’s initials engraved on it—she had it in her hand. “That’s . . . Where did you get that? That’s Nel’s lighter!” She shook her head. “It is! How did you get hold of that? Have you been in this house, taking things? Have you—”
She waved a fat, gaudily bejewelled hand at me. “Oh, calm down, will you?” She gave me a dirty brown smile. “Sit down. Sit down, Julia.” She pointed at the armchair in front of her. “Come and join me.”
I was so taken aback that I obliged. I crossed the room and sat down in front of her while she shifted around in her seat. “Not very comfy this, is it? Could do with a bit more padding. Although some might say I’ve got enough upholstery of my own!” She chortled at her own joke.
“What do you want?” I asked her. “Why do you have Nel’s lighter?”
“Not Nel’s, it’s not Nel’s, is it? See here.” She pointed to the engraving. “There, see? LS.”
“Yes, I know. LS, Libby Seeton. But it didn’t actually belong to Libby, did it? I don’t think they were manufacturing that particular sort of lighter in the seventeenth century.”
Nickie cackled. “It’s not Libby’s! You thought LS was for Libby? No, no, no! This lighter belonged to Lauren. Lauren Townsend. Lauren used-to-be-Slater.”
“Lauren Slater?”
“That’s right! Lauren Slater, also Lauren Townsend. Your detective inspector’s old girl.”
“Sean’s mother?” I was thinking about the boy coming up the steps, the boy on the bridge. “The Lauren in the story is Sean Townsend’s mother?”
“That’s right. Jesus! You’re not the sharpest, are you? And it’s not a story, is it? Not just a story. Lauren Slater married Patrick Townsend. She had a son who she loved to bits and pieces. All hunky-dory. Only then, so the coppers would have us believe, she went and topped herself!” She leaned forward and grinned at me. “Not very likely, is it? I said so at the time, of course, but no one listens to me.”
Was Sean really that boy? The one on the steps, the one who watched his mother fall, or didn’t watch his mother fall, depending on who you believed? Was that really true, not just something you made up, Nel? Lauren was the one who had the affair, the one who drank too much, the wanton one, the bad mother. Wasn’t that her story? Lauren was the one on whose page you wrote: Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women. What is it that you were trying to tell me?
Nickie was still talking. “See?” she said, jabbing a finger at me. “See? This is what I mean. No one listens to me. You’re sitting there and I’m right here in front of you and you’re not even listening!”
“I am listening, I am. I just . . . I don’t understand.”
She harrumphed. “Well, if you’d listen you would. This lighter”—click, hiss—“this belonged to Lauren, yes? You need to ask yourself, why’s your sister got it up there with her things?”
“Up there? So you have been in the house! You did take it, you . . . was it you? Have you been in the bathroom? Did you write something on the mirror?”
“Listen to me!” She hauled herself to her feet. “Don’t worry about that, that’s not important.” She took a step towards me, leaning forward, and clicked the lighter again, the flame flickering between us. She smelled of burned coffee and overblown roses. I leaned back, away from her old-woman scent.
“You know what he used this for?” she said.
“What who used it for? Sean?”
“No, you idiot.” She rolled her eyes at me and heaved herself back on to the window seat, which creaked painfully underneath her. “Patrick! The old man. He didn’t use it to light his smokes either. After his wife died, he took all her things—all her clothes and her paintings and everything she owned—and he put it out back and he burned it. Burned the lot. And this”—she clicked the lighter one final time—“is what he used to start the fire.”
“OK,” I said, my patience wearing thin. “But I still don’t get it. Why did Nel have it? And why did you take it from her?”
“Questions, questions,” Nickie said with a smile. “Well. As to why I’ve got it, I needed something of hers, didn’t I? So’s I could speak to her properly. I used to hear her voice nice and clear, but . . . you know. Sometimes voices get muted, don’t they?”
“I’ve really no idea about that,” I said coldly.
“Oh, get you! You don’t believe me? It’s not like you’d ever talk to the dead, is it?” She laughed knowingly and my scalp shrivelled. “I needed something to conjure with. Here!” She offered the lighter to me. “You can have it back. I could’ve sold it, couldn’t I? I could have taken all sorts and flogged them—your sister had some expensive things, didn’t she, jewellery and that? But I didn’t.”
“Very good of you.”
She grinned. “On to the next question: why did your sister have that lighter? Well, I can’t say for sure.”
My frustration got the better of me. “Really?” I sneered at her. “I thought you could talk to the spirits? I thought that was your thing?” I looked around the room. “Is she here now? Why don’t you just ask her directly?”
“It’s not that easy, is it?” she said, wounded. “I’ve been trying to raise her, but she’s gone silent.” Could have fooled me. “There’s no need to get sniffy. All I’m trying to do is help. All I’m trying to do is tell you—”
“Well, tell me, then!” I snapped. “Spit it out!”
“Keep your hair on,” she said, lower lip stuck out, chins wobbling. “I was telling you, if only you’d listen. The lighter is Lauren’s, and Patrick had it last. And that’s what’s important. I don’t know why Nel had it, but her having it is the thing, see? She took it from him, perhaps, or maybe he gave it to her. In any case, it’s the important thing. Lauren is the important one. All this—your Nel—it’s not about poor Katie Whittaker or that silly teacher or Katie’s mum or any of that. It’s about Lauren and Patrick.”
I bit my lip. “How is this about them?”
“Well”—she shifted in her seat—“she was writing her stories about them, wasn’t she? And she got her story from Sean Townsend, because, after all, he was supposed to be a witness, wasn’t he? So she thought he was telling the truth, and why wouldn’t she?”
“Why wouldn’t he? I mean, you’re saying Sean lied about what happened to his mother?”
She pursed her lips. “Have you met the old man? He’s a devil, he is, and I don’t mean in a good way.”
“So Sean lied about how his mother died because he’s afraid of his father?”
Nickie shrugged. “I can’t say for sure. But here’s what I know: the story Nel heard—the first version, the one where Lauren runs off in the night and her husband and son go chasing after her—it wasn’t true. I told her as much. Because you see, my Jeannie—that’s my sister—she was around at the time. She was there. That night—” Abruptly, she plunged her hand inside her coat and began fishing around. “Thing is,” she said, “I told your Nel our Jeannie’s story and Nel wrote it down.” She pulled out a sheaf of papers. I reached for them, but Nickie snatched them back.
“Just a minute,” she said. “You’ve got to understand that this”—she shook the pages at me—“is not the whole story. Because even though I told her the whole story, she wouldn’t write it all down. Stubborn woman, your sister. Part of the reason I liked her so much. So that’s when we had our little disagreement.” She settled back in her seat, swinging her legs more vigorously. “I told her about Jeannie, who was a policewoman back when Lauren died.” She coughed loudly. “Jeannie didn’t believe she went in without a push, because there was all sorts of other stuff going on, you see. She knew that Lauren’s old man was a devil and that he smacked her about and told stories about her meeting some fancy man up at Anne Ward’s place, even though no one had ever seen hide nor hair of such a man. That was supposed to be the reason, see? The bloke she was doing the dirty with, he’d run off and left her and she was upset about it, so she jumped.” Nickie waved a hand at me. “Nonsense. With a six-year-old at home? Nonsense.”
“Well, actually,” I said, “I think you’ll find that depression is a complicated thing—”
“Pffft!” She silenced me with another wave of her hand. “There was no fancy man. None that anyone around here ever saw. You could ask my Jeannie about that, except for the fact that she’s dead and gone. And you know who did for her, don’t you?”
When at last she stopped talking, I heard the water whispering in the quiet. “You’re saying that Patrick killed his wife and that Nel knew about it? You’re saying that she wrote it down?”
Nickie tutted crossly. “No! That’s what I’m telling you. She wrote down some things, but not other things, and that’s where we disagreed, because she was perfectly happy to write down the things Jeannie told me when she was still alive, but not the things Jeannie told me when she was dead. Which makes no sense at all.”
“Well . . .”
“No sense at all. But you need to listen. And if you won’t listen to me,” she said, thrusting the pages towards me, “you can listen to your sister. Because he did for them. After a fashion. Patrick Townsend did for Lauren, and he did for our Jeannie, and if I’m not mistaken, he’s done for your Nel and all.”
THE DROWNING POOL
1983
LAUREN, AGAIN
Lauren walked out to Anne Ward’s cottage. She went there more and more often these days—it was peaceful in a way that nowhere else in Beckford seemed to be. She felt an odd sort of kinship with poor Anne. She, too, was locked into a loveless marriage with a man who couldn’t stand her. Here Lauren could swim and smoke and read and not be bothered by anyone. Usually.
One morning, there were two women out walking. She recognized them: a policewoman, Jeannie, a stout WPC with a ruddy face, and her sister, Nickie, the one who spoke to the dead. Lauren rather liked Nickie. She was funny and seemed kind. Even if she was a con artist.
Jeannie called out to her and Lauren waved in a dismissive way that she hoped would see them off. Usually she would have gone over to chat. But her face was a mess and she wasn’t in the mood to explain.
She went for a swim. She was conscious of doing things one final time: one last walk, one last smoke, one last kiss of her son’s pale forehead, one last dip in the river (next to last). As she slipped under the water, she wondered if this was how it would be, whether she would feel anything. She wondered where all her fight had gone.
• • •
IT WAS JEANNIE who arrived at the river first. She’d been at the station watching the storm when the call came: Patrick Townsend had been panicking and incoherent, shouting something over the radio about his wife. His wife and the Drowning Pool. When Jeannie got there, the boy was under the trees, his head on his knees. At first she thought he was asleep, but when he looked up his eyes were wide and black.
“Sean,” she said, pulling off her coat and wrapping it around him. He was blue-white and shaking, his pyjamas sodden, his bare feet caked in mud. “What happened?”
“Mummy’s in the water,” he said. “I’m to stay here until he comes back.”
“Who? Your father? Where’s your father?”
Sean disentangled one skinny arm from the coat and pointed behind he
r, and Jeannie saw Patrick dragging himself on to the bank, his breath coming in sobs, his face twisted with agony.
Jeannie went to him. “Sir, I . . . The ambulance is on its way, ETA four minutes now—”
“Too late,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “I was too late. She’s gone.”
Others arrived: paramedics and uniforms and one or two senior detectives. Sean had got to his feet; with Jeannie’s coat wrapped around him like a cape, he clung to his father.
“Could you take him home?” one of the other detectives said to her.
The boy began to cry. “Please. No. I don’t want to. I don’t want to go.”
Patrick said, “Jeannie, could you take him to your place? He’s frightened and he doesn’t want to go home.”
Patrick kneeled in the mud, holding his son, cradling his head, whispering in his ear. By the time he stood, the boy seemed calm and docile. He slipped his hand into Jeannie’s, trotting along beside her without looking back.
• • •
BACK AT HER FLAT, Jeannie got Sean out of his wet things. She wrapped him up in a blanket and made cheese on toast. Sean ate, quietly and carefully, leaning forward over the plate so as not to drop crumbs. When he was finished, he asked, “Is Mum going to be all right?”
Jeannie busied herself with clearing away the plates. “Are you warm enough, Sean?” she asked him.
“I’m OK.”
Jeannie made cups of tea and gave them two sugars each. “Do you want to tell me what happened, Sean?” she asked, and he shook his head. “No? How did you get down to the river? You were terribly muddy.”
“We went in the car, but I fell over on the path,” he said.
“OK. Did your dad drive you there, then? Or was it your mum?”
“We all went together,” Sean said.
“All of you?”