Two

Matthew Aubrete walked out of the hospital and into the dark.

It was two o’clock, and in the soft darkness, the rose gardens along the entrance still smelled alluringly sweet, a warm memory of the day. He stopped, drinking in their shadowy presence, the yielding thumbprint of scent.

The car was parked only a few feet away; he walked to it and got in, more tired than he had ever been. When he had closed the door he sat staring ahead at the lit windows of the block, trying to discern which window was the one close to his father’s bed.

‘Get the hell out of my life,’ his father had said yesterday. Then fallen back to his pillows, rasping laughter, exhausted by his own joke. ‘You see?’ he had asked Matthew, hand grasping at the edge of the sheet. ‘You can’t. You never could. I’ll get out of yours, then.’

It would be that window, almost hidden by the beech tree, he decided. When you stood at the bed, the branches almost touched the glass.

‘Why don’t you bring Anna?’ his father had demanded.

‘I can’t,’ Matthew had told him. ‘She won’t come.’

‘She would if you told her.’

‘I’ve told her, Father.’

The old man had grimaced. Fury, not pain.

‘You can’t do anything.’ Spat into the air between them. Nightlight on the bedside. Mouthwash. Wet wipes and balled tissues in a brown paper bag on the side of the locker. His father’s mouth, stained brown, the lips cracked. Sudden descents into snoring sleep. Sudden flurries of words. ‘You don’t bring Laura either. She brings herself, the bitch.’

It was taking the old man weeks to die. Everyone was weary of it, even the nurses. They bore his curses with indifference, just as they bore, or ignored, his groping shows of affection.

Matthew had been called at eight last night. ‘Would you like to come, Mr Aubrete? You might prefer it.’

Or he might not.

Still, he went, to watch his father. Watch the numbers on the faces of the machines slowly creep higher. Blood pressure, pulse.

‘He knows you’re here,’ the nurse had said tonight. ‘He rallies.’

Does he, he thought.

The last few days had been reduced to this empty landscape. Walks down the long corridors with a drink. Daily pacing along the same routes. So much of it at night now. Black coffee. Empty rooms, waiting for the day shift.

Beyond his father’s window, beyond the beech and the sibilant hushing sound of its leaves, beyond the hospital itself, stretched the yellow-on-black panorama of the town. Matthew would press his face to the cold glass. Small country town. Haphazard grid of light. Small landscape of fields stretching away behind the yellow string of illumination.

Matthew picked up the mobile phone from the seat now, and dialled Anna’s number. He heard the machine answer. Her terse voice. Yet, just as he hung up, he thought he heard the handset picked up. He hesitated, then decided against redialling. After all, what time was it? Two in the morning. No need to wake her. Not yet.

He switched on the ignition, put the Shogun into gear, and swung out.

He drove home on the lower road, and so never saw the police standing guard at Anna’s gate.

‘You can’t even tell us her name?’ the Chief Inspector asked.

Anna turned and looked at him.

It was five a.m., and just beginning to get light. Anna was standing at the fence, overlooking the field, down the long slope of the hill. The inlet of water just before the beach showed as a thin strip of white, the sea itself an iron blue. The rain had gone, the late spring storm blown out as quickly as it had come. The morning was surprisingly still, the blackthorn blossom blown about the field like wet confetti.

She looked at him. ‘I’ve told you everything,’ she said.

‘Not everything. Perhaps there’s something you missed.’

She was so exhausted that she could hardly stand up. ‘I don’t know her. I really don’t. I’ve never seen either of them before.’

The Chief Inspector was forty-something, wiry and tall. He, too, looked tired. The uniformed constables came first, then he and another man, in rumpled suits, a little while later. He had shown his warrant: Detective Chief Inspector Robert Wilde.

‘And you touched nothing,’ he said.

‘The ignition, the door, the keys. And her.’

‘Nothing else.’

‘Perhaps the seat, the dashboard … I don’t know.’

‘And they came here at one o’clock,’ he said.

‘Past one. Ten past? Something like that.’

‘And woke you up.’

‘I was already awake.’ She looked away from him.

He seemed to decide to change the subject. ‘Nice spot,’ he said. ‘Nice little valley. Lived here long?’

‘A year.’

‘Not local, then.’

‘No.’

‘Come far?’

She put her head in her hands, resting her elbows on the top slat of the fence. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It might,’ he said.

‘How can it?’

‘If they came from where you came from. If they know you.’

‘Look, they don’t know me,’ she repeated irritatedly. ‘I don’t know them. I’ve never seen either of them before. Never. I don’t even know their names.’

He leaned on the fence next to her. He seemed to consider the coastline, the distant grey line of the horizon, the dark blue foreground of the sea, before he replied. ‘Alisha Graham.’

‘The girl is Alisha Graham?’ she asked.

‘No. The woman in the car. She’s from Manningham.’

Manningham? Anna’s heart gave a small, painful thump of surprise. ‘I don’t know her,’ she repeated.

‘Don’t you?’ he asked. ‘She was coming here, to the gardens.’

‘The Manor Gardens?’

Aubrete Manor was a mile up the coast, a semi-tropical miracle carved out of the downs, its lawns and lakes, redwoods and flametrees, magnolias and lilies stretching to the very edge of the beach.

‘You work there, don’t you?’ Wilde asked.

‘I work in the café,’ she replied. ‘Three days a week.’

‘Do you know Matthew Aubrete, the owner?’

‘No,’ she lied.

‘He had invited Miss Graham here,’ he said.

She waited a while before she spoke. ‘They came to the wrong house, then,’ she said.

‘Do you think so?’

She shook her head, smiling, sighing in exasperation. This deliberate dimness was obviously designed to provoke her. ‘The road to the Manor is the next turning, a mile further on.’

‘But it looks nothing like yours.’

That was true. Hers was a crude gate, awkward to open, on the brow of an exposed hill. The Manor was entirely different, shaded by chestnut trees, now in full candle-heavy flower. Or perhaps not, after last night; perhaps all the candles were spattered on the road. Like the blackthorn. She, too, gazed at the landscape ahead of her. ‘No, it looks nothing like mine,’ she agreed. ‘But if she’d never been here before, and was looking for a left-hand turn …’

‘Very late to be travelling,’ he said.

Anna knotted her fist at her forehead. In other circumstances, any other circumstances, she might have thought that Robert Wilde was a nice man, perfectly polite, perhaps a little slow, a well-lined and amiable face, a wedding ring on the left hand—a family man. He had patience. Numbing, persistent patience. Of which she had none.

‘She wasn’t travelling, though, was she?’ Anna said.

‘How so?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t her travelling, was it? I mean, it wasn’t Alisha Graham driving.’

‘That’s true,’ he said.

She turned, leaned her back on the fence, looked at the house.

The girl was inside. Anna hadn’t seen her in an hour or more. In fact, she had gone nowhere near her, even after seeing the woman dead in the car. Instead, she had grabbed the cordless handset from the hall table and run with it into the kitchen. Dialled the police. She must have sounded insane. Garbled, insane.

‘What has she said?’ she asked Wilde now.

‘The girl? Nothing.’

‘She said nothing to me either,’ Anna murmured. ‘I ran inside, I don’t know what I said, I think perhaps I said, your friend has died …’

‘She has been dead more than a day,’ Wilde said. ‘I should think.’

‘My God,’ Anna whispered. She turned now to stare at the car, where a team were working in white protective overalls. Inside, Alisha Graham still sat in the passenger seat. As the light grew brighter, it was possible to see her face. The mouth was a little open, the eyes fixed.

‘Do you know where Mr Aubrete is?’ Wilde asked.

She forced herself to look away from the car. ‘At the Manor,’ she said.

‘There’s no one there. Just an answerphone.’

‘Well, how would I know? I’ve hardly met him.’ More lies.

‘Did anyone at the café mention that he was away this week?’

‘No. But … I heard someone say that his father was ill, in hospital. Perhaps he was there. You could ask Richard Forbes. The estate manager.’

‘We will.’

‘More than a day,’ Anna murmured. ‘That’s … grotesque, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘That girl must have driven, with her dead …’ Anna’s voice trailed away. ‘What’s her name? Who is she?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘She must have a handbag, a suitcase …’

‘Did you see one?’ he asked.

‘No, but …’

‘There’s nothing in the car except Miss Graham’s holdall. Nothing in the boot, nothing in the glove compartment but Miss Graham’s licence, personal papers, and service history of the car.’

‘A coat, then?’

‘No coat.’

She stared at him. ‘But it was pouring with rain. It had been pouring all day. And not just here.’

‘Yes.’

Anna stared at the ground. ‘When she got out of the car she looked dry. Neat. Dry.’

‘Which means …?’ Wilde asked.

She paused, bit the inside of her lip against her impatience. Same game. A shame he never got bored of it. ‘She doesn’t look like a person who had been travelling for hours, let alone days. She’s so neat and tidy.’

He stayed quiet for some time.

Light, the light of a May morning, began to flood the valley, turning the house rosy, then white. The climbing rose that grew up the side and across one of the top windows was a vibrant pink. When Anna had moved here last year, in this same month, she had looked out at the sea through those beautiful apricot-pink roses and thought, This is an omen. Roses framing the view. I’m going to be happy here.

Oh, God, you could be wrong. You could be very wrong.

‘It’s the wrong house,’ she murmured.

Wilde seemed not to hear her.

‘Why was she coming to the Manor?’ Anna asked. ‘Alisha Graham.’

‘There was a letter in her holdall from Matthew Aubrete, arranging for her to come to check the groundwater. She’s a researcher at the Ashworth Trust.’ She said nothing. Wilde was watching her. ‘Why does he need her, I wonder?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘There’s some problem with the water. Something in it killing the lily beds, the fish. So they tell me.’

Robert Wilde knew Aubrete Manor well. He remembered the lilies as a perfect Monet picture, light reflecting light under the trees, floating as if mid-air in the high Victorian ponds. Once built as a necessity, in which to keep fish alive for the table, they were now a piece of magic, a study in green and white. Lilies in full flower, drifting in water that mirrored the sky. Looking down into the water was like watching the sky plastered with flowers.

‘I haven’t been up to the gardens in ages,’ Wilde was saying, his tone conversational. Over by the car, they were taking photographs of Alisha Graham. ‘How long have you worked there?’

‘Six months. Since just before Christmas.’

‘I thought they were closed until June.’

‘They are, to the public. But there are school visits, gardening clubs in the winter.’

‘And the parties.’

She glanced at him. Wilde smiled—a bland, conversational smile. ‘I hear that Dominic Aubrete, the old man, throws parties.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You don’t know anything about the parties?’

‘No.’

He laughed. ‘You must be the only one in the village who doesn’t.’

‘I don’t live in the village,’ she said.

He paused. ‘Miss Miles,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

She smiled, the best she could summon up. ‘A strange girl dumps a dead woman in my drive,’ she murmured.

‘A girl you don’t know.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Did you live in Manningham, Miss Miles?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You don’t have a local accent. Not even a south-west accent.’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘Are you Irish?’ he asked. ‘I can hear a lilt.’

‘I’m not Irish.’

He paused. ‘The Lakes, perhaps,’ he said. ‘I know the Lakes. Which part?’

‘It’s not the Lakes.’

‘A little rural community like this one?’

‘Yes.’ No. Not like this one at all. She pushed herself away from the fence. Another car had pulled up in the drive.

‘Excuse me a minute,’ Wilde said.

She touched his arm briefly. ‘Can I go back in the house?’ she asked. ‘Have you finished looking in it?’

‘I’ll let you know,’ he said.