Kind of Cruel (27 page)

‘Dear Veronique,’ I type. ‘Thanks for your reply. Do the words “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” mean anything to you? Or the name Katharine (Kat) Allen? Yours, Amber Hewerdine.’ My heart racing, I press ‘Send’. Then I turn my attention to Charlie’s notes.

They’re disappointing. It’s not her fault; it’s mine, for expecting something significant to leap out at me. I read everything through twice and find no point of overlap between Katharine Allen’s life and mine. She was born in Pulham Market, where her apparently happily married parents still live. She has two sisters, one married with two children and living in Belize and the other single with a baby and living in Norwich. Katharine worked as a primary school teacher at Meadowcroft School in Spilling. She and her boyfriend, Luke, were on the point of moving in together when she was murdered. Luke has a solid alibi and was never a suspect.

Kat Allen’s boyfriend shares a Christian name with my husband. I decide that doesn’t count as overlap.

A new email from Veronique Coudert appears in my inbox. I click to open it. It says, ‘Dear Ms Hewerdine, Please do not respond to this message. Yours, Mme Coudert’.

Two middle-of-the-night emails, two instant responses.
Odd
. She can’t possibly have been sitting at her computer waiting for me, a complete stranger, to contact her.
Unless Neil warned her . . .
No, that’s ridiculous.

I chew the inside of my lip, thinking. Please do not respond to what? There’s nothing to respond to. And she’s switched from Veronique to Madame; pushing me away.

I sniff the air, imagining I can smell something bad: more lies. It’s possible to lie incredibly subtly, I realise, by referring to the absence of a message as a message.

She didn’t answer my questions. She could have, but she chose not to.

Because they were intrusive and inappropriate.

I sigh, turn my attention back to the notes in front of me. Katharine Allen was popular at work: her pupils and fellow teachers liked her a lot. She was friendly, helpful, a team player . . .

Reading all this for the third time is getting me nowhere. The only mildly attention-grabbing fact here is that Kat Allen, as a child, acted in three television dramas. Though ‘acted’ might be putting it a bit strongly, since she was four, five and six when she played her three roles: ‘shy girl on bus’ in
Bubblegum Breakdown
, ‘second drowning girl’ in
Washed Clean Away
and ‘Lily-Anne’ in
The Dollface Diaries
. Her two sisters had brief stints as child stars too. It’s clear that whichever detective made these notes did not find the Allen sisters’ dramatic backgrounds to be either interesting or relevant.

There’s a funny smell in the house; I’m not imagining it. And an odd noise, too, coming from downstairs. I drag myself out of my chair to go and investigate, and fail to yawn because the muscles around my mouth are too weary. I need to lie down on a floor somewhere and close my eyes. I think I’ve set a record tonight: I can’t remember having felt quite as tired as I do now at any point in the last eighteen months. With luck, I might black out for a whole hour, which hardly ever happens.

I feel the heat as I approach, before I see it. Then there’s the colour, stronger than I’ve seen in my house before, and more mobile, flaring and trembling.

I interpret what I’m seeing and I think, ‘Oh. That.’ I am not panicking. I don’t think I am panicking. Our hall is on fire. Waves of horror flow towards me but they don’t touch me, though I am trapped in the circle they make. I can hear screams that no one is screaming.
Move
. Everything has gone into slow-motion.

The flames have already climbed to the top of both walls, like a deadly species of ivy, golden and flickering. Through the smoke, I see something that looks like metal on the floor by the letterbox. I can’t tell what it is.
Move. Now.

This is my fault
. I took the batteries out of all our smoke alarms. They kept going off when Luke cooked, and each time, no matter what we said, Dinah and Nonie started shaking and crying hysterically, insisting there must be a fire somewhere in the house.

Did Sharon’s killer do this?

Mustn’t think about that now. I know exactly what to do. I turn away from the blaze, walk upstairs, wake Luke, tell him to keep calm. Through a sort of filter, I become aware that he is not calm, that I am better at keeping calm than he is. He immediately starts to cough. I am only coughing occasionally. I tell him the girls are safe: they’re above us, on the next floor up. I tell him to open the window on the landing outside Nonie’s bedroom. From there, we can climb out and it’s just a small drop down onto the flat roof of the two-storey extension the previous owners added to the house. I pick up Luke’s mobile, put it in his hands, say that as soon as he’s opened the window he must ring for help.

I run upstairs and wake the girls, whispering reassurances. From their point of view, it must seem as if my sole reason for waking them is to tell them that everything is going to be fine, and nothing to do with anything bad happening. I’m telling the truth: I believe everything will be okay, and that’s why I’m not scared. I’m shocked, but not afraid – that’s what I’m telling myself.
Not scared. Not scared
. I’ve worked it out: the only way we won’t be fine is if the flames climb all the way up the stairs to the second landing before we get out of that window, and they won’t. When I last saw them – the flames – they were up to the top of the walls but still only halfway along, halfway into the space between the front door and the beginning of the stairs. As I guide a silent Nonie and an outraged Dinah into their dressing gowns and slippers, I make sure not to use the word ‘fire’.

Luke is waiting for us by the window. He helps the girls to climb out and tries to help me too, but I make him go first. I have to be last, have to risk myself and no one else. Nonie is coughing. If I knew who had started the fire I would kill them, no question, for making her cough like that.

Some time later – I have no idea how long – we are sitting at the far end of the extension’s roof, dangling our feet off the edge, waiting to hear the sound of a fire engine. We shiver from the cold and cling to one another. It’s ridiculous that our house is ablaze behind us and we’re still freezing.

‘Will we be able to fix the house?’ Nonie asks.

‘The house doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘We’re all that matters.’

Dinah bursts into tears, covers her face with her hands. ‘It’s my fault. This is my fault.’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ I say.

‘It is. I made you buy this house. You bought it because I said I loved it.’

‘And because
we
loved it.’

‘But you wouldn’t have bought it if I’d said I
didn’t
like it, and I loved it for a bad reason. I thought it looked like the sort of house a really famous person might have used to live in, and I want to be famous.’

Luke and I exchange a look that fails to deliver a unanimous verdict on which of us is best qualified to deal with this.

‘I wanted a house that could have a plaque on it one day saying, “Dinah Lendrim lived here from 2009 to . . .’’ whenever I moved out,’ Dinah sobs. ‘I’ve seen them on houses in London, when Mum used to take us, and they’re always tall old-looking houses like this one. Like number 10 Downing Street. Remember that bungalow we looked at, with the beautiful garden? I loved that house really, but I pretended I hated it because you never see a house like that with a famous person plaque on it!’

Luke says something in response: the right thing, hopefully. I can’t concentrate. Why are the fire brigade taking so long? Maybe they aren’t; maybe we’ve only been out here for a few seconds. If you’re outside sitting on a roof, several metres from the burning house behind you, is there any way the fire or the smoke can get you? At what point ought we to jump off?
Not yet
. The ceilings of our old plaque-worthy townhouse are high. I’m not risking the girls breaking bones unless and until I have to.

From the front, our house looks very similar to number 10 Downing Street. Why has this never occurred to me before?

‘If we’d bought that bungalow, this wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Yes, it would,’ Nonie corrects her older sister, something she doesn’t dare do often. ‘Whoever it is that started the fire, it isn’t the house they want to burn. If we were in the bungalow, they’d have set fire to the bungalow. Wouldn’t they, Amber?’

I hug her tightly.

‘Amber?’

‘Mm?’

‘Last time . . . when Mum died, the bad person who started the fire made sure that me and Dinah were safely out of the house.’

Oh, God, please don’t let her ask what she’s about to ask.

‘Why didn’t they do that this time?’

Last time, this time, next time
. For most seven-year-olds, having someone set fire to their house would be, at most, a one-off event. Something black and hard is growing inside me. It might be a hunger for revenge.

Luke says, ‘We don’t know that anyone started this fire. It could have been an accident.’

No, it couldn’t.

‘Amber? Do you think Granny Marianne set fire to our house?’ Nonie asks.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Dinah.

‘Why’s it stupid? She was always mean to Mum, and she never wants to see us. She doesn’t even ring up any more.’

‘Your grandmother didn’t start the fire,’ I say.

Why? Because she couldn’t have started the last one? Does it have to be the same person?

‘We shouldn’t have taken the batteries out of the smoke alarms,’ says Luke.

‘We’ve got a human smoke alarm.’ I point to myself.
One that spends all night moving from room to room, checking everything’s okay, just in case
.

‘Amber?’

‘Yes, Nones?

‘I’d hate to be famous. Sometimes at school when people ask me what Nonie’s short for, if I can’t be bothered saying Oenone and explaining that it’s Greek, I say it’s short for Anonymous. Can I change my name to Anonymous, before people at school find out it’s not true?’

I hear a siren in the distance. It’s coming closer. I start to cry.

If something happens once, we might not pay much attention to it. If it happens twice or more, we start to see a pattern. The human psyche loves patterns so much that it does its best to find them whenever it can, even sometimes seeing ones that aren’t there.

The row about the key to the locked study at Little Orchard was part of a pattern: Jo has a long history of thinking herself more virtuous than other people and claiming the moral high ground whenever she can. Once when Amber asked if Kirsty’s condition had a name – if she was born that way or had had some kind of accident – Jo demanded to know why Amber felt it was an acceptable question to ask. Does anyone ever ask you what made you the way you are? she said. She didn’t give Amber any answers, except to say that there was nothing
wrong
with Kirsty. She was just different, and everyone loved her exactly as she was. Amber had taken care not to use the word ‘wrong’, knowing it would upset Jo; she had phrased her question as sensitively as possible, yet Jo had heard the unspoken insensitive version and responded to that.

Amber knows not to give Jo a hello kiss, as she is in the habit of doing with most people she’s close to. She tried it once in the very early days of her and Luke’s relationship, and Jo burst out laughing and backed away, saying, ‘Don’t kiss me. I won’t be able to keep a straight face.’ When Amber asked what she meant, Jo said, ‘That whole pretentious mwa-mwa thing. Sorry, I’m a northerner – I just can’t do it.’ Amber must have been taken aback. Hurt, too, I would imagine. For many people, it’s not pretentious at all to kiss someone hello. It’s simply an expression of affection, and no one likes to have their affection rejected. Neil, who witnessed the exchange, might have been aware of Amber’s embarrassment. Perhaps that was why he decided to shift the focus and tease Jo. ‘Northern girls will only kiss you if there’s something in it for them,’ Neil told Amber. ‘Preferably a good seeing-to, marriage and two children, in that order.’ Did Amber hope Jo would be hurt? If so, she must have been disappointed when Jo just shrugged and said, ‘I’m not a tactile person.’

Later, when Amber told Luke what had happened, he agreed that it was true, Jo wasn’t tactile, though he’d never thought about it before. ‘She always hangs back when the kiss-greeting stuff’s going on, makes sure she’s not in the firing line.’ Did this corroboration from Luke that it was nothing personal take the sting out of the incident for Amber? Clearly not, or she wouldn’t today, years later, think it worth mentioning. Hanging back is one thing, she might have thought, but if you screw up and someone gets close enough to lean forward and try to kiss you hello, surely you should let them get on with it, however uncomfortable you feel, if the alternative is to embarrass and reject them.

And Jo’s policy is inconsistent. Amber has walked into Jo’s lounge and found her sitting on the sofa with William and Barney on either side of her, giving them both a big cuddle. Seeing Amber there, Jo sprang up immediately, almost pushing the boys away as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, Amber would have forgotten about the earlier incident. Maybe that’s what reactivated it in her mind: concrete evidence that Jo doesn’t mind kissing people in general, only Amber in particular.