فصل 59

59

ERIN

Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras. Not out of hand. Which is why, while Sean took Callie to have a look at the scene at Henderson’s place, I’d been dispatched to speak to Louise Whittaker about this “confrontation” she’d had with Lena just before Lena disappeared.

When I got to the Whittakers’ house, Josh answered the door, as he always seemed to do. And, as always seemed to be the case, he looked alarmed to see me. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Have you found Lena?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. But don’t worry . . .”

He turned away from me, shoulders slumped. I followed him into the house. At the bottom of the stairs he turned back to face me. “Is it because of Mum that she ran away?” he asked, his cheeks reddening a little.

“Why would you ask that, Josh?”

“Mum made her feel bad,” he replied sourly. “Now that Lena’s mum’s not alive, she blames Lena for everything. It’s stupid. It’s as much my fault as hers, but she blames her for everything. And now Lena’s gone,” he said, his voice rising. “She’s gone.”

“Who are you talking to, Josh?” Louise called from upstairs. Her son ignored her, so I responded. “It’s me, Mrs. Whittaker. DS Morgan. Can I come up?”

Louise was wearing a grey tracksuit that had seen better days. Her hair was pulled back, her face wan. “He’s angry with me,” she said by way of greeting. “He blames me for Lena’s running off. He thinks it’s my fault.” I followed her along the landing. “He blames me, I blame Nel, I blame Lena, round and round and round we go.” I stopped in the bedroom doorway. The room was all but empty, bed stripped, wardrobe empty. The pale lilac walls bore the scars of hastily removed Blu-Tack. Louise smiled wearily. “You can come in. I’m almost done in here.” She kneeled down, returning to the task I must have interrupted, which was placing books into cardboard boxes. I squatted down at her side to help, but before I was able to pick up my first book, she placed her hand firmly on my arm. “No, thank you. I’d rather do this myself.” I stood up. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “I just don’t want other people to touch her things. It’s silly, isn’t it?” she said, looking up at me, eyes shining. “But I only want her to have touched them. I want there to be something left of her, on the book jackets, on the bedclothes, on her hairbrush.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I don’t seem to be making a lot of progress. Moving on, moving past things, moving at all . . .”

“I don’t think anyone would expect you to,” I said softly. “Not—”

“Not yet? Which implies that at some point I won’t feel like this. But the thing people don’t seem to realize is that I don’t want to not feel like this. How can I not feel like this? My sadness feels right. It . . . weighs the right amount, crushes me just enough. My anger is clean, it bolsters me. Well . . .” She sighed. “Only now my son thinks I’m responsible for Lena going missing. Sometimes I wonder if he thinks I pushed Nel Abbott off that cliff.” She sniffed. “In any case, he holds me responsible for the fact that Lena was left like that. Motherless. Alone.”

I stood in the middle of the room, my arms carefully folded, trying not to touch anything. Like I was at a crime scene, like I didn’t want to contaminate anything.

“She’s motherless,” I said, “but is she fatherless? Do you honestly believe that Lena has no idea who her father is? Do you know if she and Katie ever spoke about that?”

Louise shook her head. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know. That was what Nel always said. I thought it was odd. Like a lot of Nel’s parenting choices, not just odd but irresponsible—I mean, what if there was a genetic issue, an illness, something like that? It seemed unfair on Lena in any case, not to even give the child the option of getting to know her father. When pressed—and I did press her, back when she and I were on better terms—she said it was a one-night stand, someone she met when she first moved to New York. She claimed not to have known his last name. When I thought about that later on, I concluded it must have been a lie, because I’d seen a photograph of Nel moving into her first flat in Brooklyn, her T-shirt stretched tight over her already pregnant belly.”

Louise stopped stacking books. She shook her head again. “So, in that sense, Josh is right. She is alone. There’s no other family apart from the aunt. Or none that I ever heard of. And as for boyfriends . . .” She gave a rueful smile. “Nel once told me that she only ever slept with married men, because they were discreet and undemanding and they let her get on with her life. Her affairs were private. I’ve no doubt there were men, but she didn’t make that sort of thing public. Whenever you saw her, she was alone. Alone or with her daughter.” She gave a little sigh. “The only man I think I’ve ever seen Lena be even vaguely affectionate to is Sean.” She coloured slightly as she said his name, turning her head away from me, as though she’d said something she shouldn’t have.

“Sean Townsend? Really?” She didn’t reply. “Louise?” She got to her feet to fetch another pile of books from the shelf. “Louise, what are you saying? That there’s something . . . untoward between Sean and Lena?”

“God, no!” She gave a brittle laugh. “Not Lena.”

“Not Lena? So . . . Nel? Are you saying there was something between him and Nel Abbott?”

Louise pursed her lips and turned her face from mine so I couldn’t read her expression.

“Because, you know, that would be highly inappropriate. To investigate the suspicious death of someone with whom he’d had a relationship, that would be . . .”

What would that be? Unprofessional, unethical, grounds for dismissal? He wouldn’t. There is no way he could have done that, no way he could have kept that from me. I would have seen something, noticed something, wouldn’t I? And then I thought of how he looked the first time I saw him, stood there on the banks of the pool with Nel Abbott at his feet, head bowed as though he was praying over her. His watery eyes, his shaking hands, his absent manner, his sadness. But that was about his mother, surely?

Louise continued silently packing books into boxes.

“Listen to me,” I said, raising my voice to get her full attention. “If you are aware that there was some sort of relationship between Sean and Nel, then—”

“I didn’t say that,” she said, looking me dead in the eye. “I didn’t say anything of the sort. Sean Townsend is a good man.” She got to her feet. “Now, I have a lot to do, Detective. I think it’s probably time you left.”