I thought about that.
“She was conscious after the fall?”
“She wasn’t when I arrived, but obviously, she must have been. All I can tell you, Mr. Adams, is that I was on the premises within half an hour. It would have been sooner, but it was late in the evening.”
She must have been.
Unless for some reason she had pressed it before the fall. Maybe because something or someone in the house had frightened her.
“Mr. Adams? Is there anything else?”
“Yes, sorry.” I shook my head. “There is just one more thing, actually. Was the door unlocked when you arrived?”
Silence for a moment.
“I have a set of keys. Well—you have them now.”
“Yes. But did you use them that night?”
More silence as she tried to remember.
“Now that you say it, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think I did. I knocked, and when there was no response I went straight inside. But I don’t think I had to use the key.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“But what—”
I ended the call. Which was intolerably rude, of course, but given the circumstances I figured the universe would forgive me even if Sally didn’t.
I stared out of the window at the street and the shops opposite the hotel, the people going about their business, and tried to balance what I knew already with what I’d just learned.
On the night of my mother’s fall, she had sent an alert signaling she needed help, and the door had been unlocked when Sally arrived. There was an obvious, innocent narrative you could construct from that, which was clearly what people had done.
Except that my mother was disoriented and scared of something. She claimed to have seen Charlie in the woods. And if it had been my doll that was mailed to me, then someone else must have been in the house at some point. I wondered now if there might have been more to my mother’s fall than everyone thought. That maybe she hadn’t been alone that night.
That perhaps she hadn’t fallen at all.
And as I sat there in the hotel room, feeling lost and frightened, the thought kept returning to me.
The game isn’t finished with you yet.
* * *
And so I made a decision.
That did not, however, mean that my determination would survive an encounter with reality, and I began to feel foolish before I’d even arrived at the police station. The sensation was compounded when I walked inside. The reception had barely changed over the years, and for a moment I remembered walking in here beside my mother, lost and numb, and with her arm around me, guiding me behind the two officers who had led us there.
But I wasn’t a teenager anymore.
At the desk, I asked for Amanda first, but after some initial confusion it turned out she wasn’t on the premises. So then I asked for Officer Owen Holder, the man who had seen the blood left on my mother’s door, and then I waited in the reception for a while.
“Mr. Adams?” When he arrived, Holder looked distinctly nonplussed to see me but did his best to hide it. “Follow me.”
He led me through to a small room on one side of reception. It was more of a storeroom than an office, but it had a computer, and he sat down on the far side of the desk and tapped at the keyboard. I sat across from him and waited. From the changing expressions on his face, I thought he was worried he hadn’t logged the door-pounding incident as I’d asked him to, and then he seemed suddenly relieved to discover he had.
“Has there been more … damage to your property?”
“It’s not my property,” I said. “It’s my mother’s house.”
“Yes, of course.”
“My mother had an accident—a fall down the stairs. Except I’m not sure that’s what really happened.”
“Oh?”
“I think that someone else might have been in the house.”
Holder had been peering at the computer, but he looked up at me now. On the way here, I’d been imagining that might sound ridiculous spoken out loud, and perhaps it did, but it also felt right. Holder leaned back from the screen and stared at me thoughtfully.
“Go on.”
I told him everything that had happened. To begin with he simply nodded along, but then he leaned forward again, searched out a pen and paper on the desk, and began making notes. He seemed skeptical about the man I’d seen in the woods.
But then I put the doll of Red Hands on the desk.
Holder looked up from his writing and froze.
“What in God’s name is that?” he said.
“It’s a doll,” I said. “Someone put it through my mother’s mail slot. Charlie Crabtree made it a long time ago. Charlie was—”
“I know who Charlie Crabtree was.”
Holder picked up the doll tentatively and examined it. He was too young to recall the case itself, but perhaps I’d underestimated the memory that places can have: the way stories are retold over the years. And Gritten, in particular, had always been like that. It held close to its people and tales, even if nobody wanted to talk about them outright.
“It’s … disgusting,” Holder said finally.
“Yes. It is.”
He put it down, then moved his hands below the desk. I wondered if, without even realizing it, he was rubbing his fingers against his trousers, trying to remove the invisible stain he felt the doll carried with it.
“And you say someone pushed this through your mail slot?”
“My mother’s door,” I said. “But yes.”
Holder’s gaze remained fixed on the doll. It was as though he were seeing something in real life that before now he’d only ever read about in history books. I could tell he was troubled by what I’d told him, but that he was also struggling to work out what to do about it.
But at least he was listening to me.
“You know who Charlie Crabtree was,” I said.
“Of course. Everybody around here does.”
“So you know what happened. You know what this is.”
“Yes. And I know who you are. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Adams. That’s the only reason I took the marks on your door—your mother’s door, I mean—as seriously as I did. And…”
He looked off to one side, suddenly awkward.
“And?” I prompted.
“And so I also understand that coming back here must be very difficult for you, especially after all this time.”
I waited.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that grief can do strange things to a person. And I’m genuinely not meaning that rudely. But what I’m wondering is if maybe you’ve built all this up in your head a bit. Enough for it to seem like more than it is. To make more of it, even.”
Again, I said nothing.
I’d been prepared to feel foolish coming here, or to be told there wasn’t enough evidence for the police to do anything, but I hadn’t expected to be accused of lying—even indirectly—about what had happened. For a moment, I felt embarrassed, but then Jenny’s words came back to me.
You used to be more decisive.
“I’m not making this up,” I said.
“I’m really not saying that.”
“Yes, you are.”