فصل 44

44

Friday, 21 August

ERIN

The cottage by the river, the one I saw when I went running, is to be my new home. In the short term, at least. Just until we sort out this business with Henderson. It was Sean who suggested it. He overheard me telling Callie, the DC, that I’d almost run the car off the road this morning I’d been so knackered, and he said, “Well, we can’t have that. You should stay in town. You could use the Wards’ cottage. It’s just upriver and it’s empty. It’s not luxurious, but it won’t cost you anything. I’ll get you the keys this afternoon.”

As he left, Callie grinned at me. “The Wards’ cottage, eh? Watch out for mad Annie.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That place by the river that Patrick Townsend uses as his fishing cabin—it’s known as the Wards’ cottage. As in Anne Ward? She’s one of the women. They say,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “that if you look hard enough you can still see the blood on the walls.” I must have looked nonplussed—I had no idea what she was talking about—because she smiled and said, “It’s just a story, one of the old ones. One of those ancient Beckford stories.” I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to century-old Beckford stories—I had fresher ones to concern myself with.

Henderson hadn’t been answering his phone, and we’d taken the decision to leave him alone until his return. If the Katie Whittaker story was true, and if he got wind that we knew about it, he might not come back at all.

In the meantime, Sean had asked me to question his wife, who, as head teacher at the school, is Henderson’s boss. “I’m certain she never had the faintest suspicion about Mark Henderson,” he said. “I believe she thinks rather highly of him, but someone needs to talk to her and it obviously can’t be me.” He told me she’d be at the school, and that she’d be expecting me.

• • •

IF SHE WAS EXPECTING ME, she certainly didn’t act like it. I found her in her office on her hands and knees, her cheek pressed to the grey carpet as she craned her head to look under a bookcase. I coughed politely and she jerked her head up, alarmed.

“Mrs. Townsend?” I said. “I’m DS Morgan. Erin.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” She blushed, putting a hand to her neck. “Lost an earring,” she said.

“Both, by the looks of it,” I said.

She made an odd sort of huffing noise and indicated that I should sit. She tugged at the hem of her blouse and smoothed her grey trousers before sitting herself. If I’d been asked to picture the DI’s wife, I’d have imagined someone quite different. Attractive, well dressed, probably sporty—a marathon runner, a triathlete. Helen wore clothes more suited to a woman twenty years her senior. She was pale, and her limbs soft, like someone who rarely went out or saw the sun.

“You wanted to speak to me about Mark Henderson,” she said, frowning slightly at a pile of papers in front of her. No small talk, then, no preamble—straight down to business. Perhaps that’s what the DI likes about her.

“Yes,” I said. “You’ve heard the allegations made by Josh Whittaker and Lena Abbott, I take it?”

She nodded, her thin lips disappearing as she pressed them together. “My husband told me yesterday. It was, I can assure you, the first I’d heard of such a thing.” I opened my mouth to say something, but she continued. “I recruited Mark Henderson two years ago. He came with excellent references and his results so far have been encouraging.” She shuffled the pages in front of her. “I have specifics if you need them?” I shook my head, and again, she started speaking before I could ask the next question. “Katie Whittaker was conscientious and hardworking. I have her grades here. There was, admittedly, some slippage last spring, but it was short term, she’d improved again by the time . . . by the time she . . .”—she passed a hand over her eyes—“by the summer.” She sank a little into her chair.

“So you had no suspicions, there were no rumours?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Oh, I didn’t say anything about rumours. Detective . . . er . . . Morgan. The rumours that fly around the average secondary school would make your hair curl. I’m sure,” she said, a twitch around her mouth, “that if you put your mind to it, you might be able to imagine the sort of things they say and write and tweet about me and Ms. Mitchell, the PE teacher.” She paused. “Have you met Mark Henderson?”

“I have.”

“So you understand, then. He’s young. Good-looking. The girls—it is always the girls—say all sorts of things about him. All sorts. But you have to learn to cut through the noise. And I believed I had done that. I still believe I’d done that.” Again I wanted to speak, and again she pressed ahead. “I have to tell you,” she said, raising her voice, “that I am deeply suspicious about these allegations. Deeply suspicious, because of their source and because of the timing.”

“I—”

“I understand that the allegation came first from Josh Whittaker, but I’d be surprised if Lena Abbott isn’t behind all this—Josh dotes on her. If Lena decided that she wanted to deflect attention away from her own wrongdoing—purchasing illegal drugs for her friend, for example—I’m sure she could have persuaded Josh to come up with this story.”

“Mrs. Townsend—”

“Another thing I should mention,” she continued, permitting no interruption, “is that there was some history between Lena Abbott and Mark Henderson.”

“History?”

“A couple of things. First, that her behaviour could at times be inappropriate.”

“In what way?”

“She flirts. Not just with Mark either. It seems she’s been taught that it’s the best way to get what she wants. Many of the girls do it, but in Lena’s case, Mark seemed to feel that it went too far. She made remarks, touched him . . .”

“Touched him?”

“On the arm—nothing outrageous. She stood too close, as the song goes. I had to speak to her about it.” She seemed to flinch slightly at the memory. “She was reprimanded, though of course she didn’t take it seriously. I think she said something along the lines of He wishes.” I laughed at that, and she frowned at me. “It really isn’t a laughing matter, Detective. These things can be terribly damaging.”

“Yes, of course. I know. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Well.” She pursed her lips again, every inch the schoolmarm. “Her mother didn’t take it seriously, either. Which is hardly surprising.” She coloured, an angry flush of red appearing at her neck, her voice rising. “Hardly surprising at all. All that flirting, the endless batting of lashes and tossing of hair, that insistent, tiresome expression of sexual availability—where do you imagine Lena learned that?” She took a deep breath and exhaled, pushing her hair from her eyes. “The second thing,” she said, calmer now, more measured, “was an incident in the spring. Not flirting this time, but aggression. Mark had to send Lena out of his class because she was being aggressive and quite abusive, using foul language during a discussion about a text they were studying.” She glanced down at her notes. “Lolita, I believe it was.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Well, that’s . . . interesting,” I said.

“Quite. It might even suggest where she got the idea for these accusations,” Helen said, which wasn’t what I’d been thinking at all.

• • •

IN THE EVENING, I drove out to my temporary cottage. It looked much lonelier with dusk looming, the bright birches behind it now ghostly, the chuckle of the river not so much cheerful as menacing. The banks of the river and the hillside opposite were deserted. No one to hear you scream. When I’d come past on my run I’d seen a peaceful idyll. Now I was thinking more along the lines of the desolate cabin of a hundred horror films.

I unlocked the door and took a quick look around, trying, as I did, not to look for blood on the walls. But the place was tidy, with the astringent smell of some sort of citrusy cleaning product, the fireplace swept, a pile of chopped wood neatly arranged at its side. There wasn’t much to it; it was more of a cabin than a cottage, really: just two rooms—a living room with a galley kitchen leading off it, and a bedroom with a small double bed, a pile of clean sheets and a blanket folded on the mattress.

I opened the windows and the door to get rid of the artificial lemon smell, opened one of the beers I’d bought at the Co-op on the way down and sat on the front step, watching the bracken on the hill opposite turn bronze to gold with the sinking sun. As the shadows lengthened, I felt solitude morph into loneliness, and I reached for my phone, not certain who I was going to call. Then I realized—of course—no signal. I hauled myself to my feet and wandered about, waving the phone in the air—nothing, nothing, nothing, until I walked right down to the river’s edge, where a couple of bars appeared. I stood there a while, the water just about lapping my toes, watching the black river run past, quick and shallow. I kept thinking I could hear someone laughing, but it was just the water, sliding nimbly over the rocks.

• • •

I TOOK AGES to fall asleep and when I woke suddenly, feverishly hot, it was to inky darkness, the kind of deep black that makes it impossible to see your hand in front of your face. Something had woken me, I felt sure: a sound? Yes, a cough.

I reached for my phone, knocking it off the little bedside table, the clatter as it fell to the floor startlingly loud in the silence. I scrabbled around for it, gripped suddenly by fear, sure that if I turned on the light it would reveal someone standing there in the room. In the trees behind the cottage I could hear an owl hooting, and then again: someone coughing. My heart was beating too fast, I was stupidly afraid to pull back the curtain above my bed, just in case there was a face on the other side of the glass, looking back at me.

Whose face was I expecting? Anne Ward’s? Her husband’s? Ridiculous. Muttering reassurances to myself, I turned on the light and flung back the curtains. Nothing and no one. Obviously. I slipped out of bed, pulled on tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt and went through to the kitchen. I considered making a cup of tea, but thought better of it when I discovered a half-empty bottle of Talisker in the kitchen cupboard. I poured myself a couple of fingers’ worth and drank it quickly. I slipped on my trainers, put my phone in my pocket, grabbed a torch from the counter and unlocked the front door.

The batteries in the torch must have been low. The beam was weak, reaching no more than six or seven feet in front of me. Beyond that was perfect obscurity. I angled the torch downwards to light up the ground in front of my feet, and walked out into the night.

The grass was heavy with dew. Within a few steps my trainers and tracksuit bottoms were soaked through. I walked slowly all the way around the cottage, watching the torchlight dancing off the silvery bark of the beech trees, a cohort of pale ghosts. The air felt soft and cool, and there was a kiss of rain in the breeze. I heard the owl again, and the low chatter of the river, and the rhythmic croak of a toad. I finished my circuit of the cottage and started walking towards the riverbank. Then the croaking suddenly stopped, and again I heard that coughing sound. It wasn’t nearby at all, it was coming from the hillside, somewhere across the river, and it didn’t sound so much like a cough this time either. More of a bleat. A sheep.

Feeling somewhat sheepish myself, I went back into the cottage, poured myself another shot of whiskey and grabbed Nel Abbott’s manuscript from my bag. I curled up in the armchair in the living room and began to read.