Ann Cleeves - Telling Tales

Vera nodded encouragingly. “Like I said, you can leave that for me to decide.”

“According to Abigail, Keith hadn’t really wanted Jeanie there in the first place. She’d had a row with her parents and just stormed out of her home. She turned up on the doorstep of the Chapel with a rucksack of clothes and her violin. He couldn’t turn her away.”

“Too kind-hearted for his own good, I daresay,” Vera said, and Emma could tell she’d already formed an opinion of the man and disapproved of him.

“The first thing Abigail knew about it was when she found Jeanie in the kitchen cooking supper.”

Abigail had recounted the story the next day. It had been another hot afternoon, sultry, airless. There must have been rain that summer, sea fog, but Emma couldn’t remember it. That day Abigail had agreed to go with her to the beach and they’d walked there together down the path between the sandy fields. Already most of the harvest had been in but in the distance she’d heard the churning of a baler and there’d still been a patch of barley left to cut. The feathery fronds had brushed their legs as they walked. There had been a row of swallows on the wire, and clouds of insects, and Abigail, striding in front along the narrow path, had shouted to Emma, following behind. She hadn’t stopped talking all the way. Her voice had been incredulous and she’d repeated herself often to show that she still couldn’t believe the cheek.

“I mean she was just standing there, rooting through the cupboards. And then she started on the freezer. “I thought I’d do ri sotto Is that OK with you, Abby?” I mean, no one, but no one calls me Abby. You don’t call me Abby and you’re my best mate. And still I didn’t get it. I thought it was a one-off, one night. Then I went up to dad’s room and there were the things she’d already unpacked. Like, she’d been there an hour, and already her clothes were hanging in his wardrobe and her knickers were in his drawer. Well, I know he won’t stand for it. She’ll be out by the end of the week. Dad likes his space. Even I’m not allowed into his room without asking.”

“Why did he stand for it?” Vera asked. “That’s the question. More relevant than why he asked her to leave in the end. Jeanie was there for three months. Why didn’t he boot her out sooner?”

“He loved her,” Emma said. “Didn’t he?”

“Oh, no,” Vera replied, quite certain. “Love didn’t come into it. Not on his part.”

“Abigail was certainly surprised that she didn’t get her own way immediately.” Emma smiled, remembering her friend’s frustration, the strategies which all seemed to fail. There had seemed some justice in the fact that Abigail had been forced to suffer an upset in her life. Emma had looked on at the rows with the same mixture of sympathy and pleasure as if Abigail had sprouted an enormous pimple on the end of her nose.

“Why did Keith suddenly give in?” Vera demanded. After three months?”

“Perhaps she just wore him down with her persistence.”

“Aye. Maybe.”

“Why don’t you ask the inspector who worked on the case at the time? She must have spoken to people, come to a conclusion.”

“Caroline Fletcher doesn’t work for the service any more,” Vera said briskly. “Like Danny here.” She paused. “Strange, isn’t it, that the two officers most actively involved in the investigation retired from the police soon after Jeanie Long went to court?”

She turned her wide smile on Dan, inviting him not to take offence.

Outside the sun was still shining. A gusty westerly promised more rain. Cloud-shaped shadows were blown across the fields where the green shoots of winter wheat were already showing. In the little house Vera was still holding forth and Dan was still listening. Emma made her excuses and left them to it. She drove to the end of the Crescent, then, instead of turning towards the village, she took the opposite direction towards the coast. Wendy, the coxswain of the pilot launch, was the nearest thing she had to a friend here, and liked it when she dropped in with Matthew. Emma felt she needed an excuse to be out of the house, away from the television and the local news. She couldn’t face seeing Dan again on the screen. He’d been thinner then, his hair shorter. But the way he’d been glowering at the camera, you could still imagine him letting his temper get the better of him. She couldn’t imagine him taking orders easily and wondered if that was why he’d left the police.

Every year in the autumn there were predictions that the Point would be washed away by the tides of the equinox. One big gale, people said. That was all it would take. And certainly it was skinnier than it had been, a spit of land, shaped like a drooping, wasted phallus, hanging into the mouth of the river from the north bank. In places the old road disappeared into the sea and a new track had been made through the sand, the sea holly and the buckthorn. The Point bulged slightly at the tip, where the jetty was and the houses belonging to the lifeboat station had been built. These houses were incongruously modern, all the same, as if they’d been made from a kit. Easy to leave behind, Emma supposed, if that one big gale did come. Only the cottages where the coxswains lived had any substance.

She parked opposite the houses, next to the mobile cafe which sold coffee and fry-ups to the birdwatchers and fishermen. Matthew was awake and began grumbling as soon as the car stopped. She fed him there, sitting in the front passenger seat, looking out over the water, with her coat draped around them both. There was no one to see but she didn’t even like going without a bra. Wendy, who claimed never to have been bjjpody in her life, loved to watch the baby feeding, but Emma didn’t want an audience. Not today. James said the baby was as regular as the tide in his habits and it was true. Her life was punctuated by six hourly interruptions. She was getting used to it.

Mathew settled and she allowed her mind to wander. These quiet times of waiting were when she would usually conjure up dreams of Dan Greenwood. There would be nothing exotic about her fantasies. At night she would wander into the pottery and he would kiss her and touch her. She seldom imagined herself making love. Hers were the fantasies of an immature teenager, comforting and harmless. The fantasies she might have had when she was fifteen, before Abigail had died. She told herself she should leave them behind. She was grown up and they had no meaning now. But it was harder than she had imagined to let them go.

As she pulled down her jumper two teenage lads raced from one of the houses and began to kick a ball against the sea wall. Still carrying Matthew she got out of the car and looked down the river. The smell of mud and seaweed mixed with the frying bacon and chip fat from the cafe.

The cafe was a relatively new arrival on the Point. Before it, there had been an ice-cream van, but only on fine days and at the weekends. And, thinking of the ice-cream van, Emma suddenly remembered that this was where she had first met Abigail Mantel. She hadn’t thought of the encounter for more than ten years. Even relating the history of their friendship to Caroline Fletcher, it had slid somehow out of the story. Perhaps it had been too trivial. Now it came back in jagged flashes, like the sunlight on the pavements. She thought, This is what it is like to be old. This is how old people remember their childhood.

It was June, the end of their first week in Springhead House. Robert was still elated by the new purpose in his life, optimistic about the house, his work, the whole deal of living in the country. “A new start,” he’d say, over and over again. “Really, we are so blessed.” Though Emma didn’t feel blessed. She felt uprooted. Literally. As if someone had yanked her out of hard-packed soil and dumped her to rot. She’d tried to talk about it to Christopher, but he’d only shrugged. “It’s done,” he’d said. “They won’t move back. Not now. Best make the most of it.” She’d thought then it was the sort of thing an adult might say and had considered him almost a traitor.