Given how much there is to talk about, it is a strangely quiet journey from Ridinghouse Bay to Coxwold. Lesley uses her hands-free to make some high-octane work calls about other stories she’s working on: a woman raped in Hull, three Filipino men dead in the hold of a ship berthed at Goole Docks, residents’ reaction to the demolition of a well-loved pub in Beverley.
Alice zones out and stares at the countryside. It’s beautiful: pale and sun-dappled, fields full of golden rape and sunflowers. Then she looks at Frank. He is still and quiet, staring from his respective window.
‘Where do you think he is?’ she asks.
He shrugs. ‘He’s disappeared before. He could be anywhere by now.’
She lowers her voice. ‘What you said, about what you did.’ She mimes strangling someone. ‘Are you sure it happened? That you definitely . . .?’
‘I’m sure,’ he says firmly. ‘It happened.’
She nods. What’s going on in Frank’s mind is impossible for her to imagine. She thinks of him that first night, barefoot and fresh out of the bath, wearing Kai’s hoodie. He was empty then, and unburdened. Now he seems different, heavier somehow, buried under the weight of so many resurfaced memories.
A sign on the side of the road says ‘Coxwold ½’. A minute later Lesley’s satnav tells her to turn right. They maintain silence for the last leg of the journey. Alice admires the picture-postcard village as they enter it: the wide street with bright-green lawns on either side sloping up to attractive, pale-stone houses, coaching inns and tea shops. They pass a handsome church at the top of the vale and then the satnav tells them to turn left and they take a tiny turning away from the village and they are there. The Old Rectory, set right behind the church. It is a beautiful three-winged house with a gravelled driveway and ancient trees, a huge magnolia in full bloom taking centre stage by the front door.
Lesley kills the engine and they all look at the house for a moment.
‘I will go,’ says Lily, unclipping her seatbelt. ‘She is related to me and I will go.’
Lesley starts to protest but Lily raises her hand unpleasantly close to her face and says, ‘No. I came here alone to find this woman. I did not ask for all of you.’
‘Erm, excuse me,’ says Lesley, ‘but without us you’d still be walking around Ridinghouse Bay going shop to shop with your little photo album. I’m sorry, but Frank and Alice have just as much right to hear what this woman has to say as you do. Frank’s life has been ruined by what this woman’s nephew did to him and his family. We’re all going in or I’m turning round right now and going home.’
‘You only care about the story.’
‘Yes. Of course I care about the story. That’s my job. But caring about “the story” doesn’t mean I don’t care about the outcome or about the players.’
‘Fine,’ says Lily after a petulant silence that reminds Alice of both her daughters. ‘We’ll all go.’
The front door is set into the left-hand section of the house. Lesley rings the bell and there is the sound of heels against flagstones and then the door opens on a chain and there is a woman’s face, pale and pretty: downy, sunken cheeks, a hopeful stain of pink on her lips, a puff of white-blonde hair, the soft scent of jasmine.
‘Hello!’ she greets them easily but then, as she looks from each one of them to the next, she looks worried. ‘Oh! Sorry, I was expecting an Ocado delivery. Can I help you?’
‘My name is Lily,’ says Lily, ‘I spoke to you yesterday on the phone. I am married to your nephew, Mark.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says, grimacing. ‘Mark is dead.’
‘Actually,’ says Lesley, pushing forward, ‘he isn’t. And we know he isn’t because this man’ – she points at Frank – ‘had him locked up in an empty flat last week and your “dead” nephew told him everything, including how you scooped him up off the rocks the night he supposedly drowned and took him home and didn’t tell anyone including his own mother.’
Kitty Tate narrows her eyes. ‘And who are you?’ she asks Lesley.
‘Lesley Wade.’ She offers Kitty her hand. ‘Ridinghouse Gazette.’
Kitty starts to close the door in her face but Lesley already has her foot in the gap. ‘I’m working off the record,’ she says. ‘I’m helping. There’s no story. Not yet. If there is it will be investigative, a big spread, full interviews, nothing salacious.’
Kitty tries again to close the door.
‘Look!’ says Lesley. ‘See this man? This is Graham Ross. Remember him? He’s Kirsty’s brother, Kitty. The boy who came to your house; the boy your nephew took hostage and attacked, broke his arm. Terrorised. And he’s lived his whole adult life in a state of limbo because he couldn’t remember what happened that night.’ She pauses to force the door harder against Kitty’s determination to shut it. ‘And now he has remembered. He’s remembered what Mark Tate did. You owe it to him, Kitty, you owe it to him to tell him what you know.’
Kitty suddenly relaxes her pressure against the door and peers through the gap. She looks directly at Frank and sighs. Her eyes fill with tears. ‘You poor boy.’
Then she pulls herself straight and turns her gaze to Lesley. ‘He can come in,’ she says, ‘but not the rest of you.’
‘But—!’ starts Lily.
Kitty ignores her and turns her gaze back to Frank. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘come in. I’ll tell you as much as I can.’
Frank looks at Alice and then at Kitty. ‘Please can I bring my friend in? Alice has been looking after me. She’s not part of anything. Just a good person.’
Kitty nods tersely and then opens the door to let them in.
They turn to Lily and Lesley and smile apologetically.
‘Well,’ says Lesley, ‘I guess we could go and try a cream tea?’
‘What is “cream tea”?’
‘It’s cakes. Come on.’
Kitty takes them through to her kitchen. It’s a blend of dark wood and off-white Formica, hanging pendant lights over a central island, two large sofas at the other end and French windows opening up on to a manicured garden. She seats them at her kitchen table, makes them tea in an oversized polka-dot pot and opens a packet of Duchy stem ginger biscuits.
Finally she sits, smoothing the legs of her neat navy trousers over her tiny thighs. ‘I’m so sorry for what happened to you,’ she says to Frank. ‘I’m so sorry about your father and your sister and I wish that . . .’ She pauses. ‘I knew the minute he came home from the beach that day and told me about this “nice family”, that we were to make a cake, I knew that some switch had been flicked. That it would end badly. Mark was always . . .’ She pauses again, lifts the lid of the teapot, stirs it, closes it again, ‘. . . troubled,’ she finishes. ‘My husband’s brother and his wife, they adopted him when he was quite old. Eight years, nine years, something like that. Their daughter was a teenager, becoming more independent, and I think they thought they weren’t ready to end that phase of their lives. But they weren’t up to the idea of a baby and starting all over again. So they had this idea of adopting an older child. And of course Mark was the most beautiful little boy, and he clung to them for dear life and they didn’t think too hard about the implications of a boy who’d experienced abuse. They thought they could heal all the wounds and make up for all the hurt and unfortunately they were wrong. It was hard-wired.’
She pours three cups of tea from the pot, places the pot back on to a mat and passes Alice the milk jug. ‘I’ll let you do your own milk – everyone has different tastes, don’t they? Anyway. They couldn’t cope with him. Mark wanted everything: the best clothes, the best toys, the pick of his parents’ time and attention. The sister, Camilla, she moved out when she was seventeen, to live with a friend’s family because she couldn’t deal with the maelstrom. But, for some reason, Mark was calm around my husband and me. I think because we had no children of our own. Because he didn’t live with us so we didn’t need to try to tame him. We had all this land’ – she gestures through the French windows – ‘the dogs, the big house by the seaside. He spent holidays with us, most weekends. And I’m not suggesting for a second that he was easy. Mark has never been easy. But he was less complicated. And he and I in particular had a very strong bond. But as he got older . . .’ She passes the plate of biscuits towards Alice. ‘I don’t know, I just saw this much darker side emerge. Especially the way he was around girls. He was a bully, I suppose. He thought girls were just there to service his needs. I saw him behave really quite unpleasantly with these lovely girls he brought home all wide-eyed at his beauty.’ She shakes her head and sighs. ‘I did worry, even then, that something bad might happen one day. But, I don’t know, he’d turn up here with his overnight bag, a box of chocolates for me, a bear hug; I did love his bear hugs. My husband was never one for hugging and I guess I kind of got a taste for it from Mark. Anyway, he’d scoop the dogs up and take them out and throw balls for them for hours and I’d sit here and watch him and think: He’ll grow out of all his silliness, he’ll meet a wonderful girl and he’ll finally get it and then he’ll be perfect.
‘And then my husband died.’ Kitty sighs. ‘And he didn’t handle it very well. Seemed to blame me for it, for some reason. The bear hugs stopped. The chocolates and the fun and the laughter stopped and, I have to admit, I started to find his presence quite oppressive, just me and him alone. He was estranged from his parents completely by this stage and living with us. They disowned him when he was eighteen, after an incident . . .’
‘Incident?’ says Frank. ‘What incident?’
Kitty smooths out her trouser legs again. ‘Something to do with a girl. A friend of his sister’s. No charges were pressed but it was very unpleasant and his parents decided to cut the cord. Unforgivable, really unforgivable.’ She shakes her head slowly. ‘At first I appreciated him being here after my husband died, but after a few weeks, he . . . well, he became increasingly difficult to live with. We headed off to Ridinghouse Bay that summer, as we’d done so many summers before. I thought it might lighten things up a little. But if anything he was angrier there, angry with me, angry with the world. There was a . . . malevolence about him. I started to sleep with my bedroom door locked.’ She looks up at both of them, checking that they have registered the poignancy of her last comment.
‘Then one day he came bounding into the house, full of joy and talk of cakes and of you, this “nice family”. And I understood there was a girl and I suppose part of me thought, well, maybe this is it? The mythical girl who was going to fix him. And then you all turned up that day and I saw little Kirsty: so young, so pure, so completely incapable of dealing with a damaged soul like Mark. And my heart dropped.’
Alice looks at Frank. What is he thinking? she wonders. He looks so closed, so numb.
‘Anyway,’ Kitty continues, delicate fingertips running up and down the curve of her teacup. ‘He took her out, seemed smitten, bought her flowers, took her to the movies, then suddenly he came home saying it was over, he didn’t care, “didn’t give a shit” were his exact words, that he could do better, she was just a little . . .’ She stops and purses her mouth. ‘Well, you know, not very nice. But it only lasted a day or two and then he seemed to move on, there was a girl coming from home, he told me, a singer. He was going to watch her perform, with some friends. I was relieved. So relieved. It seemed as though he was finally moving on after the death of my husband. His strange obsession with your sister felt like a distant memory. And he asked me if I could go out for the night as he wanted to invite his friends back after the gig, maybe a few of the nicer people from the town. He said it would be confined to the bar. Manageable. He wouldn’t let it get out of hand. And of course I said yes. Anything to make him happy when he’d been so unhappy; anything to see him behaving normally when he’d been behaving so abnormally. So I came back here for the night. It was nice, having the house to myself, not having to worry about Mark. Until . . .’ A muscle in her cheek twitches and she taps her fingernails against the sides of her cup. ‘A phone call from a roadside box, at one a.m. “I’m in trouble.” God. I’ll never forget. I’m in trouble. It was as if I’d been waiting for that call from the first day I met him. And here it was. And he was breathless and in pain. “I’m dying,” he kept saying. I’m dying! He wouldn’t let me call the police. I didn’t even ask why because deep down I knew why. Not what. But why. I got straight into the car and there he was, sitting on the rocks, down by Middlehurst Bay, in a pool of blood. He was white-blue. Like something dreadful spat out by the sea. I parked and I clambered down those rocks in the most stupid shoes, the first ones my feet found as I left the house. I cut my leg open on something as I slipped down. I still have the scar. Here.’ She rolls up the neat trousers and shows them a livid vertical scar up the side of her left shin. She slowly pulls the trouser leg down again and continues. ‘The sea was wild that night, deafening. I could see the coastguards with their flashlights out on their boats, the lifeboat pushing out to sea, the blue lights flashing in the town. Sleepy old Ridinghouse Bay was alive that night. I’ll never forget it. I found my way down to him and I managed to get him to his feet. The boats were coming closer. We only had a few minutes. And then he pointed, to the slope below. Check, he said, check if she’s dead.’
Frank stiffens; his shoulders push back.
‘So I slid down the rocks and there she was . . .’
‘She?’ Alice says sharply. ‘You mean Kirsty?’
‘Yes,’ Kitty says. ‘Of course. Didn’t Mark tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’ Frank voice emerges as a soft groan.
‘Oh.’ Kitty looks flustered. ‘I assumed . . . well. What exactly did he tell you?’
‘That he let go of her. That she “faded”, that there was nothing he could do to save her.’
‘Oh.’ Kitty blanches and her fingers move to the pearl that hangs from a fine gold chain around her neck. ‘I . . . I . . . I didn’t know what had happened. I assumed at first, I don’t know, drunken high jinks, that maybe he’d been trying to rescue her. So I went to her and I felt her pulse and she was still alive. But not conscious.’
‘And you didn’t call an ambulance?’ The tendons on Frank’s neck are tight with rage. ‘You didn’t—’
‘He put a knife to my throat.’
‘Who?’ says Frank incredulously. ‘Mark? I thought you said he was injured? That he’d lost loads of blood?’
‘He was injured. Well, he seemed to be. But when I came back from checking Kirsty and he said, “Well?” I said, “She’s breathing.” And he said, “Get us out of here, now.” And of course I refused. Of course I did. I said, “No. I’m calling an ambulance!” And he staggered to his feet and this knife appeared. And suddenly he had me, from behind, knife to my throat and I thought: Well, here it is. He’s going to kill me.’
She pauses for a moment and takes a sip of tea. ‘We carried your sister to my car and laid her out in the back.’
‘She was still alive?’ Frank sounds hollow with disbelief.
‘She was alive. Yes. She was.’
‘Did you . . . did you try to resuscitate her?’
‘He wouldn’t let me.’
‘And she died? Yes?’
Tears have turned Kitty’s eyes to glass. She nods, just once. ‘Very soon afterwards. Before we were halfway home.’
‘On the back seat of your car?’ he asks.
Kitty is crying now. Her tears splash on to her pale cheeks and she wipes them away with the backs of curled-up fingers. ‘I am so sorry. It was just . . . I was so scared. He had the knife. I didn’t know . . .’
‘Where is she?’ Frank too is crying now. ‘Where’s Kirsty?’
‘She’s – oh, God. I am so, so sorry. We parked the car in my garage around the back.’ She indicates the far end of her beautiful garden. ‘We stayed there for hours. I mean, literally, hours and hours. With Kirsty in the back. I was hysterical. Utterly hysterical. We were waiting for a knock on the door. We were waiting for sirens.’ She covers her face with both her hands for a moment. ‘We had the car radio tuned into the local news. We waited and we waited until finally, lunchtime the next day, it came across: they’d called off the search. There were still people out there, townspeople, on their own boats, but the official search was over. A sweet policeman came to my door that evening to tell me. Mark and your sister were assumed to have drowned. Your father was the hero who’d died trying to rescue them. There was no mention of you. I had to pretend to be shocked.’
‘But what did you do with my sister?’ Franks booms. He gets to his feet. ‘Where is she?’
Kitty’s body becomes small, as though she is trying to fit herself into a box. Then she gets slowly to her feet and says, ‘Come.’
Alice looks at Frank and he looks back at her in alarm.
‘Just come.’
They get to their feet and follow Kitty to the French windows. She unhooks a key from a nail behind the curtains and opens up the door. Then she guides them across the garden, all curved beds full of meadow flowers, lichen-mottled urns and weeping willows, towards the far end where it meets the fields beyond. Here there is an oak tree, old and imposing, a giant puffball of green leaves stark against the bright blue sky.
Kitty stands next to a rose bush, bejewelled with small white buds. ‘Kirsty is here.’
‘You buried her?’
‘No, I didn’t bury her. Of course I didn’t bury her! Mark buried her. He locked me in the house and he buried her. I planted the rose bush. Afterwards.’
Frank sinks to his knees, on to the soft spring grass. He opens up his hands and caresses the ground with his palms. Then he glances up at Kitty with suppressed rage. ‘All these years,’ he says, his voice cracking. ‘My mum.’
‘There has not been a day gone by when I have not thought of your mother.’
Franks flicks his gaze up to her again, angrily. ‘Where is he?’ he demands. ‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No. I don’t. I haven’t spoken to him since the day he made me talk to that girl on the phone and pretend to be his mother. I don’t know why he made me do that. To spite me, I suppose. To cause me pain.’ She sighs. ‘I wished him luck, and then I told him I was going to remove myself from his life, not that I’d been a great part of it. Not since he changed his identity. It was too risky for him to talk to me or visit me. But I told him that I could play no more part in this subterfuge. So I sent him some money. And I hoped he would just finally settle down and be normal. The girl sounded . . .’ She shrugs. ‘Well, she sounded like she could look after herself. She sounded tough. So I left them to it.’
Frank is still staring at the ground where his sister was buried twenty-two years previously. He looks broken.
Alice crouches down next to him and puts her arm across his shoulders.
He looks up at Kitty. ‘What were her last words?’ His words are strangulated with grief.
‘There were no words, Graham. She didn’t even open her eyes.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he cries, tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘All these years, sitting here in your designer kitchen. Eating your dinner. Watching TV. Looking out at the view, knowing she was there? How could you?’
‘But I don’t live here!’ Kitty cries. ‘Of course I don’t! I live in Ridinghouse Bay, in the attic. I hate it here! I’d love to sell this place, move on with my life. But I can’t. How can I sell a house with a body in the garden? And I’m only here now because of that girl, the one you came with,’ she says, gesturing to the front of her house. ‘She called me. Yesterday morning. I don’t know why I answered, I really don’t. She’d been trying me for hours. I assumed it was Mark so I didn’t answer. Then the ringing finally stopped and another number came up about half an hour later, a mobile number, and I knew it wasn’t Mark’s number and I’d been expecting a call from someone else and I just instinctively, unthinkingly picked it up. Christ. And then the doorbell started to ring and I thought it was her! So I threw all my stuff into a bag and ran.’
‘But we were there,’ says Alice. ‘That was us ringing the bell. We didn’t see you leave. There was no car parked outside.’
Kitty sighs. ‘I went down the back way, down the cliff stairs. I keep my car parked down in the car park by the beach. I don’t like people knowing that I’m there. I like to be . . . invisible. And that’s why I’m here, Graham, in this blighted, awful house. Not because I’m heartless. Because, I promise you this, my heart has not stopped hurting since the night your sister died. Not for one moment.’
The talking stops but the three of them stay in position, Kitty and Alice standing, Frank still on his knees by the rosebush, a terrible vignette of grief and guilt and horror and lies.
For a moment the silence is absolute. Then Alice turns slowly towards the house and says, ‘We need to find the others. We need to make some calls.’