Lily sees them standing outside the house, deep in conversation. She sighs and pulls herself taller, then heads towards them with a cheery, ‘Hello!’
They turn at her greeting and she flinches.
‘What is it?’ she says.
They exchange panicky looks and then the Lesley woman smiles and says, ‘Nothing. It’s all good. So, how did you get on?’
Lily sighs again. Her brief investigations in town had yielded very little. Kitty Tate had last been seen in Ridinghouse Bay about two years ago by the lady who owned the posh shoe shop. Kitty had told her she was here for the day to meet a buyer for her grand piano, that she wasn’t staying overnight, would be heading home early evening. She’d tried on a pair of leather boots but hadn’t bought anything. She’d seemed unhappy.
Nobody seemed to know exactly where Kitty lived now. ‘Harrogate way’ was the general impression. And that was that.
‘They say she hasn’t been here for years,’ says Lily. ‘But I know that she has. That she was here yesterday. So.’ She shrugs. ‘It is all still a mystery.’
‘And what about your friend? The one who’s going to the deserted flat? Have you heard anything from him yet?’
She shakes her head. ‘I called him a few minutes ago. He was on the train, twenty minutes away. We will have to wait.’
‘Well,’ says Lesley, looking towards the house. ‘Shall we go in?’
The man, Frank, acts strangely as he enters the house. He moves tentatively and slowly, his hands subconsciously feeling the walls and the surfaces as he passes through. He looks up and then down and she notices his hands shaking.
‘It’s all exactly the same,’ he says. ‘It’s just like it was. Except . . .’ He turns and says this to Alice, ‘. . . it’s dead.’
Yes, thinks Lily, yes. It is a dead house.
‘There’s one room left alive,’ she says. ‘Come.’
They follow her silently up the stairs.
As they walk up the second staircase Frank starts shaking uncontrollably.
‘This is where he brought us,’ he says. ‘Where he dragged us. And this’ – he points at the step he’s standing on – ‘this is where he pinned my sister down and tried to rape her in front of me.’
He kneels down and runs his fingertips across the old carpet. ‘Look, blood. That’s Mark’s blood. From his scalp. Where I ripped it open with a coat hanger. Your husband,’ he says, suddenly staring right at Lily. ‘Did he have a scar? Under his hair? About here?’ He points at the crown of his head.
‘My husband has very thick hair,’ Lily says. ‘I would not know what was underneath.’ But this is a lie. She has felt the scar he describes, has felt it at night as she runs her hands through that hair. He has a ridge of skin there, hard, like a small piece of old chewing gum. She asked him about it once; he said it was a childhood accident. That had made her love the scar, love it both as a physical part of him and as a symbolic emblem of the personal history he so very rarely shared with her. She would seek it out during their lovemaking, let her fingertips brush against it, surreptitiously, fleetingly. And now that same scar was proof, as though she needed it in the light of so much other proof, that the man she loved above all others, the man she had given up her family for, given up her home and her life for, was a violent and evil man who hurt women.
She pushes all this down and carries on leading them to the room in the attic.
‘This is the room,’ says Frank as she pushes open the door. ‘The room where he kept us locked up. Except it looks totally different.’
They all stand for a while, appraising the empty room.
‘Right,’ says Lesley. ‘We all need to split up. And we need to go through this place forensically until we find something with her address on it.’
It doesn’t take long. Alice finds it on a delivery note in the back of a drawer in an old dresser in the kitchen.
Mrs Kitty Tate
The Old Rectory
Coxwold
Harrogate
YO61 3FG
They all stare at it for a moment. Lily doesn’t know what to think. She wants to meet this woman, this woman who for whatever reason protected Carl from the police for many years, who pretended to be his mother when they spoke on the phone on the day of their wedding, this sad, lonely woman who smells of jasmine and owns beautiful clothes and hides herself away from the people of this town in a dead house on a cliff. She wants to meet her so that she can understand everything more clearly. But she is scared, too, scared to hear things that will make her hate Carl. Because she doesn’t hate Carl. She knows she should, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t hate him at all.
And as she thinks this her phone rings and it is Russ, and she looks at her phone and then at the other people and they look at her with a range of expressions from fear to concern to impatience. She breathes in deeply and then she answers.
‘Hello, Russ. Are you there yet?’
‘Yes,’ says Russ. ‘I’m here. But Carl isn’t.’
She pulls her hair off her face and frowns. ‘Are you in the right place?’
‘Yes. Yes. Apartment one. Wolf’s Hill Boulevard. He was definitely here, I can see the ties, the ropes – it’s a mess. It’s . . . Well, he must have been here for quite some time, let’s put it that way. But he isn’t here now. He’s gone.’
Her heart quickens and softens with relief. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘thank God. Thank God for that.’
The other people stare at her, eyes wide.
‘Well, yes,’ Russ continues. ‘I suppose in one way it’s good. In another way it’s . . . Well, you know, where is he? What’s he doing? I mean, Lily, he could be dangerous.’
She breathes in angrily, knowing that her anger is misplaced but not being able to change the way she feels. ‘Not to me, he isn’t.’ Then she hangs up.
The others are still staring at her.
‘He’s not there,’ she tells them.
‘You mean, he’s escaped?’ asks Alice. She looks stunned.
She sighs. ‘Yes. He untied himself and escaped.’ She tries not to think about the fact that he has not tried to contact her, that he has not come to find her.
Derry and Alice turn to Frank and look at him questioningly.
‘You didn’t kill him?’ says Alice.
He looks white and shaken. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I thought . . . but maybe not. Maybe he was just unconscious?’ He sighs. ‘I really don’t know.’
For a moment no one says anything.
Then Lesley looks at her wristwatch and says, ‘Right. It’s quarter past twelve. I’m going to call the office and tell them not to expect me back. Then I’m driving to Coxwold to find Kitty Tate. What about the rest of you?’
Derry tells Alice that she will collect her child from school and then the rest of them wait for Lesley to return with her car. They sit on the front steps of the big white house in an awkward silence. It has become a pretty day; the sky is pale blue and a soft breeze scatters cherry blossom at their feet.
Finally Lily turns to Frank and says, ‘So. You thought you had killed him?’
He looks at her as though he had forgotten she was there. Then he nods. ‘Yes,’ he says simply. ‘I did.’ He turns away from her and looks at his hands. ‘The man you love is a monster,’ he adds quietly.
‘But still,’ she says. ‘You tried to kill him. You left him there for dead. What does that make you?’
Frank sighs. There is silence for a moment, but for the distant sound of seagulls, the scratch of small birds in the hedgerow, the song of a chaffinch looking down upon them from the treetops. ‘It makes me wrong,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t make me a monster.’