“Well, I . . .”
“Not surprised. Not surprised at all. I could have told you that—not that you’d have listened. The place is full of evil. Why do you think Townsend keeps it as his own, looks after it like it’s his special place?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I thought he used it as a fishing cabin.”
“Fishing!” she exclaimed, as though she’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous in her entire life. “Fishing!”
“Well, I have actually seen him out here fishing, so . . .”
Nickie harrumphed, dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand. We were at the water’s edge. Toe to heel and heel to toe, Nickie was working her swollen, mottled feet out of her slip-on shoes. She put a toe in the water and gave a satisfied chuckle. “The water’s cold up here, isn’t it? Clean.” Standing ankle-deep in the river, she asked, “Have you been to see him? Townsend? Have you asked him about his wife?”
“You mean Helen?”
She turned to look at me, her expression contemptuous. “Sean’s wife? That Helen, with her face like a slapped arse? What’s she got to do with anything? She’s about as interesting as paint drying on a damp day. No, the one you should be interested in is Patrick’s wife. Lauren.”
“Lauren? Lauren who died thirty years ago?”
“Yes, Lauren who died thirty years ago! You think the dead don’t matter? You think the dead don’t speak? You should hear the things they have to say.” She shuffled a little farther into the river, bending down to soak her hands. “This is it, this is where Annie came to wash her hands, just like this, see, only she kept going . . .”
I was losing interest. “I need to go, Nickie, I need to take a shower and get on with some work. It was good talking to you,” I said, turning to leave her. I was halfway back to the cottage when I heard her call out.
“You think the dead don’t speak? You should listen, you might hear something. It’s Lauren you’re looking for, she’s the one who started all this!”
I left her at the river. My plan was to get to Sean early; I thought if I showed up at his place, picked him up and drove him to the station, I’d have him captive for at least fifteen minutes. He wouldn’t be able to get away from me or throw me out of the car. It was better than confronting him at the station, where there would be other people around.
• • •
IT’S NOT FAR from the cottage to the Townsends’ place. Along the river it’s probably about three miles, but there’s no direct road, you have to drive all the way into the town and then back out again, so it was after eight a.m. by the time I got there. I was too late. There were no cars in the courtyard—he’d already left. The sensible thing, I knew, would be to turn the car around and head for the office, but I had Nickie’s voice in my head and Louise’s, too, and I thought I’d just see, on the off chance, whether Helen was around.
She wasn’t. I knocked on the door a few times and there was no reply. I was heading back to my car when I thought I might as well try Patrick Townsend’s place next door. No answer there either. I peered through the front window but couldn’t see much, just a dark and seemingly empty room. I went back to the front door and knocked again. Nothing. But when I tried the handle, the door swung open, and that seemed as good as an invitation.
“Hello?” I called out. “Mr. Townsend? Hello?” There was no answer. I walked into the living room, a spartan space with dark wooden floors and bare walls; the only concession to decoration was a selection of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. Patrick Townsend in uniform—first army, then police—and a number of pictures of Sean as a child and then a teenager, smiling stiffly at the camera, the same pose and the same expression in each one. There was a photograph of Sean and Helen on their wedding day, too, standing in front of the church in Beckford. Sean looked young, handsome and unhappy. Helen looked much the same as she does today—a bit thinner, perhaps. She looked happier, though, smiling shyly at the camera in spite of her ugly dress.
Over on a wooden sideboard in front of the window was another set of frames, these ones containing certificates, commendations, qualifications, a monument to the achievements of father and son. There were no pictures, as far as I could see, of Sean’s mother.
I left the living room and called out again. “Mr. Townsend?” My voice echoed back to me in the hallway. The whole place felt abandoned, and yet it was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust on the skirting boards or the bannister. I walked up the stairs and onto the landing. There were two bedrooms there, side by side, as sparsely furnished as the living room downstairs, but lived in. Both of them, by the looks of things. In the main bedroom, with its large window looking down the valley to the river, were Patrick’s things: polished black shoes by the wall, his suits hanging in the wardrobe. Next door, beside a neatly made single bed, was a chair with a suit jacket hanging over it, which I recognized as the one Helen wore when I interviewed her at the school. And in the wardrobe were more of her clothes, black and grey and navy and shapeless.
My phone beeped, deafeningly loud in the funeral-parlour silence of that house. I had a voice mail, a missed call. It was Jules. “DS Morgan,” she was saying, her voice solemn, “I need to talk to you. It’s quite urgent. I’m coming in to see you. I . . . er . . . I need to talk to you alone. I’ll see you at the station.”
I slipped the phone back into my pocket. I went back into Patrick’s room and took another quick look around, at the books on the shelves, in the drawer next to the bed. There were photographs in there, too, old ones, of Sean and Helen together, fishing at the river near the cottage, Sean and Helen leaning proudly against a new car, Helen standing in front of the school, looking at once happy and embarrassed, Helen out in the courtyard, cradling a cat in her arms, Helen, Helen, Helen.
I heard a noise, a click, the sound of a latch lifting and then a creak of floorboards. I put the photographs back hastily and shut the drawer, then moved as quietly as I could out onto the landing. Then I froze. Helen was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. She had a paring knife in her left hand and was gripping its blade so tightly that blood was dripping onto the floor.
HELEN
Helen had no idea why Erin Morgan was wandering about Patrick’s house as though she owned it, but for the moment she was more concerned with the blood on the floor. Patrick liked a clean house. She fetched a cloth from the kitchen and began to wipe it up, only for more to spill from the deep cut across her palm.
“I was chopping onions,” she said to the detective by way of an explanation. “You startled me.”
This wasn’t exactly true, because she’d stopped chopping onions when she’d seen the car pull up. With the knife in her hand she’d stood stock-still while Erin knocked, and then had watched her wander over to Patrick’s place. She knew that he was out, so she’d assumed the detective would just leave. But then she remembered that when she’d left that morning, she hadn’t locked the front door. So, knife still in hand, she walked across the courtyard to check.
“It’s quite deep,” Erin said. “You need to clean and bandage that properly.” Erin had come downstairs and was standing over Helen, watching her wipe the floor. Standing there in Patrick’s house as though she had every right to be there.
“He’ll be livid if he sees this,” Helen said. “He likes a clean house. Always has.”
“And you . . . keep house for him, do you?”
Helen gave Erin a sharp look. “I help out. He does most things himself, but he’s getting on. And he likes things to be just so. His late wife,” she said, looking up at Erin, “was a slattern. His word. An old-fashioned word. You’re not allowed to say slut any longer, are you? It’s politically incorrect.”