I Found You (32 page)

Lily sighs again. Her brief investigations in town had yielded very little. Kitty Tate had last been seen in Ridinghouse Bay about two years ago by the lady who owned the posh shoe shop. Kitty had told her she was here for the day to meet a buyer for her grand piano, that she wasn’t staying overnight, would be heading home early evening. She’d tried on a pair
of leather boots but hadn’t bought anything. She’d seemed
unhappy
.

Nobody seemed to know exactly where Kitty lived now. ‘Harrogate way’ was the general impression. And that was that.

‘They say she hasn’t been here for years,’ says Lily. ‘But I know that she has. That she was here yesterday. So.’ She shrugs. ‘It is all still a mystery.’

‘And what about your friend? The one who’s going to the deserted flat? Have you heard anything from him yet?’

She shakes her head. ‘I called him a few minutes ago. He was on the train, twenty minutes away. We will have to wait.’

‘Well,’ says Lesley, looking towards the house. ‘Shall we go in?’

The man, Frank, acts strangely as he enters the house. He moves tentatively and slowly, his hands subconsciously feeling the walls and the surfaces as he passes through. He looks up and then down and she notices his hands shaking.

‘It’s all exactly the same,’ he says. ‘It’s just like it was. Except . . .’ He turns and says this to Alice, ‘. . . it’s dead.’

Yes, thinks Lily, yes. It is a dead house.

‘There’s one room left alive,’ she says. ‘Come.’

They follow her silently up the stairs.

As they walk up the second staircase Frank starts shaking uncontrollably.

‘This is where he brought us,’ he says. ‘Where he
dragged
us. And this’ – he points at the step he’s standing on – ‘this is where he pinned my sister down and tried to rape her in front of me.’

He kneels down and runs his fingertips across the old carpet. ‘Look, blood. That’s Mark’s blood. From his scalp. Where I ripped it open with a coat hanger. Your husband,’ he says, suddenly staring right at Lily. ‘Did he have a scar? Under his hair? About here?’ He points at the crown of his head.

‘My husband has very thick hair,’ Lily says. ‘I would not know what was underneath.’ But this is a lie. She has felt the scar he describes, has felt it at night as she runs her hands through that hair. He has a ridge of skin there, hard, like a small piece of old chewing gum. She asked him about it once; he said it was a childhood accident. That had made her love the scar, love it both as a physical part of him and as a symbolic emblem of the personal history he so very rarely shared with her. She would seek it out during their lovemaking, let her fingertips brush against it, surreptitiously, fleetingly. And now that same scar was proof, as though she needed it in the light of so much other proof, that the man she loved above all others, the man she had given up her family for, given up her home and her life for, was a violent and evil man who hurt women.

She pushes all this down and carries on leading them to the room in the attic.

‘This is the room,’ says Frank as she pushes open the door. ‘The room where he kept us locked up. Except it looks totally different.’

They all stand for a while, appraising the empty room.

‘Right,’ says Lesley. ‘We all need to split up. And we need to go through this place forensically until we find something with her address on it.’

It doesn’t take long. Alice finds it on a delivery note in the back of a drawer in an old dresser in the kitchen.

They all stare at it for a moment. Lily doesn’t know what to think. She wants to meet this woman, this woman who for whatever reason protected Carl from the police for many years, who pretended to be his mother when they spoke on the phone on the day of their wedding, this sad, lonely woman who smells of jasmine and owns beautiful clothes and hides herself away from the people of this town in a dead house on a cliff. She wants to meet her so that she can understand everything more clearly. But she is scared, too, scared to hear things that will make her hate Carl.
Because she doesn’t hate Carl. She knows she should, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t hate him at all.

And as she thinks this her phone rings and it is Russ, and she looks at her phone and then at the other people and they look at her with a range of expressions from fear to concern to impatience. She breathes in deeply and then she answers.

‘Hello, Russ. Are you there yet?’

‘Yes,’ says Russ. ‘I’m here. But Carl isn’t.’

She pulls her hair off her face and frowns. ‘Are you in the right place?’

‘Yes. Yes. Apartment one. Wolf’s Hill Boulevard. He was definitely here, I can see the ties, the ropes – it’s a mess. It’s . . . Well, he must have been here for quite some time, let’s put it that way. But he isn’t here now. He’s gone.’

Her heart quickens and softens with relief. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘thank God. Thank God for that.’

The other people stare at her, eyes wide.

‘Well, yes,’ Russ continues. ‘I suppose in one way it’s good. In another way it’s . . . Well, you know, where is he? What’s he doing? I mean, Lily, he could be dangerous.’

She breathes in angrily, knowing that her anger is misplaced but not being able to change the way she feels. ‘Not to me, he isn’t.’ Then she hangs up.

The others are still staring at her.

‘He’s not there,’ she tells them.

‘You mean, he’s escaped?’ asks Alice. She looks stunned.

She sighs. ‘Yes. He untied himself and escaped.’ She tries not to think about the fact that he has not tried to contact her, that he has not come to find her.

Derry and Alice turn to Frank and look at him questioningly.

‘You didn’t kill him?’ says Alice.

He looks white and shaken. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I thought . . . but maybe not. Maybe he was just unconscious?’ He sighs. ‘I really don’t know.’

For a moment no one says anything.

Then Lesley looks at her wristwatch and says, ‘Right. It’s quarter past twelve. I’m going to call the office and tell them not to expect me back. Then I’m driving to Coxwold to find Kitty Tate. What about the rest of you?’

Derry tells Alice that she will collect her child from school and then the rest of them wait for Lesley to return with her car. They sit on the front steps of the big white house in an awkward silence. It has become a pretty day; the sky is pale blue and a soft breeze scatters cherry blossom at their feet.

Finally Lily turns to Frank and says, ‘So. You thought you had killed him?’

He looks at her as though he had forgotten she was there. Then he nods. ‘Yes,’ he says simply. ‘I did.’ He turns away from her and looks at his hands. ‘The man you love is a monster,’ he adds quietly.

‘But still,’ she says. ‘You tried to kill him. You left him there for dead. What does that make you?’

Frank sighs. There is silence for a moment, but for the distant sound of seagulls, the scratch of small birds in the hedgerow, the song of a chaffinch looking down upon them from the treetops. ‘It makes me wrong,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t make me a monster.’

Given how much there is to talk about, it is a strangely quiet journey from Ridinghouse Bay to Coxwold. Lesley uses her hands-free to make some high-octane work calls about other stories she’s working on: a woman raped in Hull, three Filipino men dead in the hold of a ship berthed at Goole Docks, residents’ reaction to the demolition of a well-loved pub in Beverley.

Alice zones out and stares at the countryside. It’s beautiful: pale and sun-dappled, fields full of golden rape and sunflowers. Then she looks at Frank. He is still and quiet, staring from his respective window.

‘Where do you think he is?’ she asks.

He shrugs. ‘He’s disappeared before. He could be anywhere by now.’

She lowers her voice. ‘What you said, about what you did.’ She mimes strangling someone. ‘Are you sure it happened? That you definitely . . .?’

‘I’m sure,’ he says firmly. ‘It happened.’

She nods. What’s going on in Frank’s mind is impossible for her to imagine. She thinks of him that first night, barefoot and fresh out of the bath, wearing Kai’s hoodie. He was empty then, and unburdened. Now he seems different, heavier somehow, buried under the weight of so many resurfaced memories.

A sign on the side of the road says ‘Coxwold ½’. A minute later Lesley’s satnav tells her to turn right. They maintain silence for the last leg of the journey. Alice admires the picture-postcard village as they enter it: the wide street with bright-green lawns on either side sloping up to attractive, pale-stone houses, coaching inns and tea shops. They pass a handsome church at the top of the vale and then the satnav tells them to turn left and they take a tiny turning away from the village and they are there. The Old Rectory, set right behind the church. It is a beautiful three-winged house with a gravelled driveway and ancient trees, a huge magnolia in full bloom taking centre stage by the front door.

Lesley kills the engine and they all look at the house for a moment.

‘I will go,’ says Lily, unclipping her seatbelt. ‘She is related to me and I will go.’

Lesley starts to protest but Lily raises her hand unpleasantly close to her face and says, ‘
No
. I came here alone to find this woman. I did not ask for all of you.’

‘Erm, excuse me,’ says Lesley, ‘but without us you’d still be walking around Ridinghouse Bay going shop to shop with your little photo album. I’m sorry, but Frank and Alice have just as much right to hear what this woman has to say as you do. Frank’s life has been ruined by what this woman’s nephew did to him and his family. We’re all going in or I’m turning round right now and going home.’

‘You only care about the story.’

‘Yes. Of course I care about the story. That’s my job. But caring about “the story” doesn’t mean I don’t care about the outcome or about the players.’

‘Fine,’ says Lily after a petulant silence that reminds Alice of both her daughters. ‘We’ll all go.’

The front door is set into the left-hand section of the house. Lesley rings the bell and there is the sound of heels against flagstones and then the door opens on a chain and there is a woman’s face, pale and pretty: downy, sunken cheeks, a hopeful stain of pink on her lips, a puff of white-blonde hair, the soft scent of jasmine.

‘Hello!’ she greets them easily but then, as she looks from each one of them to the next, she looks worried. ‘Oh! Sorry, I was expecting an Ocado delivery. Can I help you?’

‘My name is Lily,’ says Lily, ‘I spoke to you yesterday on the phone. I am married to your nephew, Mark.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says, grimacing. ‘Mark is dead.’

‘Actually,’ says Lesley, pushing forward, ‘he isn’t. And we know he isn’t because this man’ – she points at Frank – ‘had him locked up in an empty flat last week and your “dead” nephew told him everything, including how you scooped him up off the rocks the night he supposedly drowned and took him home and didn’t tell anyone including his own mother.’

Kitty Tate narrows her eyes. ‘And who are
you
?’ she asks Lesley.

‘Lesley Wade.’ She offers Kitty her hand. ‘
Ridinghouse Gazette
.’

Kitty starts to close the door in her face but Lesley already has her foot in the gap. ‘I’m working off the record,’ she says. ‘I’m helping. There’s no story. Not yet. If there is it will be investigative, a big spread, full interviews, nothing salacious.’

Kitty tries again to close the door.

‘Look!’ says Lesley. ‘See this man? This is Graham Ross. Remember him? He’s Kirsty’s brother, Kitty. The boy who came to your house; the boy your nephew took hostage and attacked, broke his arm. Terrorised. And he’s lived his whole adult life in a state of limbo because he couldn’t remember what happened that night.’ She pauses to force the door harder against Kitty’s
determination to shut it. ‘And now he has remembered. He’s remembered what Mark Tate did. You owe it to him, Kitty, you owe it to him to tell him what you know.’

Kitty suddenly relaxes her pressure against the door and peers through the gap. She looks directly at Frank and sighs. Her eyes fill with tears. ‘You poor boy.’

Then she pulls herself straight and turns her gaze to Lesley. ‘He can come in,’ she says, ‘but not the rest of you.’

‘But—!’ starts Lily.

Kitty ignores her and turns her gaze back to Frank. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘come in. I’ll tell you as much as I can.’

Frank looks at Alice and then at Kitty. ‘Please can I bring my friend in? Alice has been looking after me. She’s not part of anything. Just a good person.’

Kitty nods tersely and then opens the door to let them in.

They turn to Lily and Lesley and smile apologetically.

‘Well,’ says Lesley, ‘I guess we could go and try a cream tea?’

‘What is “cream tea”?’

‘It’s cakes. Come on.’

Kitty takes them through to her kitchen. It’s a blend of dark wood and off-white Formica, hanging pendant lights over a central island, two large sofas at the
other end and French windows opening up on to a manicured garden. She seats them at her kitchen table, makes them tea in an oversized polka-dot pot and opens a packet of Duchy stem ginger biscuits.

Finally she sits, smoothing the legs of her neat navy trousers over her tiny thighs. ‘I’m so sorry for what happened to you,’ she says to Frank. ‘I’m so sorry about your father and your sister and I wish that . . .’ She pauses. ‘I knew the minute he came home from the beach that day and told me about this “nice family”, that we were to make a cake, I knew that some switch had been flicked. That it would end badly. Mark was always . . .’ She pauses again, lifts the lid of the teapot, stirs it, closes it again, ‘. . . troubled,’ she finishes. ‘My husband’s brother and his wife, they adopted him when he was quite old. Eight years, nine years, something like that. Their daughter was a teenager, becoming more independent, and I think they thought they weren’t ready to end that phase of their lives. But they weren’t up to the idea of a baby and starting all over again. So they had this idea of adopting an older child. And of course Mark was the most beautiful little boy, and he clung to them for dear life and they didn’t think too hard about the implications of a boy who’d experienced abuse. They thought they could heal all the wounds and make up for all the hurt and unfortunately they were
wrong
. It was hard-wired.’