فصل 66

66

SEAN

I was about halfway there when it started to rain, a light drizzle that suddenly turned into a downpour. Visibility was next to nothing and I had to slow to a crawl. One of the uniforms dispatched to the house in Howick rang, and I put him on speaker.

“Nothing here,” he said over a crackling line.

“Nothing?”

“No one here. There’s a car—a red Vauxhall—but no sign of him.”

“Lena?”

“No sign of either of them. The house is all locked up. We’re looking. We’ll keep looking . . .”

The car is there, but they are not. Which means that they must be on foot somewhere, and why would they be on foot? Car broke down? If he got to the house and he found he couldn’t get inside, couldn’t hole up there—why not just break in? Surely that’s better than running? Unless someone picked them up? A friend? Someone helping him? Perhaps someone might help him out of a tight spot, but we were talking about a schoolteacher, not some habitual criminal—I couldn’t imagine him having the sort of friends who would get involved in a kidnapping.

And I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse. Because if Lena wasn’t with him, we had no clue where she was. No one had seen her for almost twenty-four hours. The thought was enough to make me panic. I needed to make her safe. After all, I’d failed her mother so badly.

I’d stopped seeing Nel after the incident with my father. In fact, I did not spend another moment alone in her company until after Katie Whittaker’s death, and then I had no choice. I had to question her, given her link to Katie via her daughter, given the allegations that Louise was throwing around.

I interviewed her as a witness. Which of course was unprofessional—a good deal of my conduct over the past year could fall under that description—but once I had become entangled with Nel, that seemed to be an inevitability. There was nothing I could do about it.

It felt like grief, seeing her again, because I sensed almost immediately that the Nel from before, the one who had smiled so candidly, who had grabbed hold of me, who had bewitched me, was no longer there. She hadn’t disappeared so much as receded, withdrawn into another self, one I didn’t know. My idle imaginings—a new life, with her and Lena, Helen left contentedly behind—seemed embarrassingly childish. The Nel who opened her door to me that day was a different woman, strange and unreachable.

Guilt spilled out of her during our interview, but it was an amorphous, nonspecific guilt. Nel was still committed to her work, she insisted that the Drowning Pool project had nothing to do with Katie’s tragedy, and yet she radiated culpability, her sentences all prefaced with I should have or We should have or I didn’t realize. But what she should have done, what she didn’t realize, we didn’t seem to get to. Knowing what I know now, I can only imagine that her guilt was about Henderson, that she must have known something or suspected something and yet done nothing.

After the interview, I left her at the Mill House and went to the cottage. I waited for her, in hope more than expectation. It was after midnight when she arrived: not entirely sober, tearful, on the edge. Afterwards, at dawn, when we were finally finished with each other, we went out to the river.

Nel was hyper, manic almost. She talked with the passion of a zealot about the truth, how she was tired of telling stories, she just wanted the truth. The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. I said to her, “You know better than that, don’t you? Sometimes, with things like these, there is no truth to be found. We can’t ever know what was going through Katie’s mind.”

She shook her head. “Not that, it’s not just that, it’s not just . . .” Her left hand gripped mine, her right tracing circles in the dirt. “Why,” she whispered, not looking at me, “does your father keep this place? Why does he look after it the way he does?”

“Because . . .”

“If this was the place your mother came, if this was the place where she betrayed him, why, Sean? It makes no sense.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I’d wondered the same thing myself, but I’d never asked him about it. We don’t talk about that.

“And this man, this lover: Why does no one know his name? Why did no one ever see him?”

“No one? Just because I didn’t see him, Nel—”

“Nickie Sage told me that no one knew who this man was.”

“Nickie?” I had to laugh. “You’re talking to Nickie? You’re listening to Nickie?”

“Why does everyone dismiss what she says?” she snapped at me. “Because she’s an old woman? Because she’s ugly?”

“Because she’s crazy.”

“Right,” she muttered to herself. “Bitches be crazy.”

“Oh, come on, Nel! She’s a fraudster! She claims to commune with the dead.”

“Yes.” Her fingers dug deeper into the soil. “Yes, she’s a con artist, but that doesn’t mean everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie. You’d be surprised, Sean, at how much of what she says rings true.”

“She cold-reads, Nel. And in your case, she doesn’t even need to cold-read. She knows what you want from her, she knows what you want to hear.”

She fell silent. Her fingers stopped moving, and then it came from her—a whisper, a hiss. “Why would Nickie imagine I wanted to hear that your mother was murdered?”