By the time Sean and I left Jules and Lena at the Mill House yesterday, I’d worked myself up into a total state, and I was so pissed off at him I just came out with it, right there in the car. ‘What exactly was going on with you and Nel Abbott?’
He slammed his foot on the brake so hard I thought I’d go through the windscreen. We’d stopped in the middle of the lane, but Sean didn’t seem to care. ‘What did you say?’
‘Do you want to pull over?’ I asked, checking the rear-view mirror, but he didn’t. I felt like an idiot for blurting it out like that, not leading up to it, not testing the water at all.
‘Are you questioning my integrity?’ There was a look on his face I hadn’t seen before, a hardness I hadn’t yet come up against. ‘Well? Are you?’
‘It was suggested to me,’ I said, keeping my voice even, ‘hinted at …’
‘Hinted?’ He sounded incredulous. A car behind us hooted and Sean put his foot back on the accelerator. ‘Someone hinted at something, did they? And you thought it would be appropriate to question me about it?’
‘Sean, I—’
We’d reached the car park outside the church. He pulled over, leaned across me and opened the passenger door. ‘Have you seen my service record, Erin?’ he asked. ‘Because I’ve seen yours.’
‘Sir, I didn’t mean to offend you, but—’
‘Get out of the car.’
I barely had time to close the door behind me before he accelerated away.
I was out of puff by the time I’d climbed the hill north of the cottage; I stopped at the summit for a breather. It was still early – barely seven o’clock – the entire valley was mine. Perfectly, peacefully mine. I stretched out my legs and prepared myself for the descent. I felt I needed to sprint, to fly, to exhaust myself. Wasn’t that the way to find clarity?
Sean had reacted like a guilty man. Or like an offended man. A man who thought his integrity was being questioned without evidence. I picked up the pace. When he’d sneered at me about our respective records, he had a point. His is impeccable; I narrowly avoided getting sacked for sleeping with a younger colleague. I was sprinting now, going hell for leather down the hill, my eyes trained on the path, the gorse at the side of my vision a blur. He has an impressive arrest record, he is highly respected amongst his colleagues. He is, as Louise said, a good man. My right foot caught on a rock in the path and I went flying. I lay in the dust, fighting for breath, the wind knocked clean out of me. Sean Townsend is a good man.
There are a lot of them about. My father was a good man. He was a respected officer. Didn’t stop him beating the shit out of me and my brothers when he lost his temper, but still. When my mother complained to one of his colleagues after he broke my youngest brother’s nose, his colleague said, ‘There’s a thin blue line, love, and I’m afraid you just don’t cross it.’
I hauled myself up, dusting the dirt off me. I could say nothing. I could stay on the right side of the thin blue line, I could ignore Louise’s hints and intimations, I could ignore Sean’s possible personal connection to Nel Abbott. But if I did that, I’d be ignoring the fact that where there is sex, there is motive. He had a motive to get rid of Nel, and his wife did, too. I thought about her face the day I spoke to her at the school, the way she spoke about Nel, about Lena. What was it she despised? Her insistent, tiresome expression of sexual availability?
I reached the bottom of the slope and skirted around the gorse; the cottage was just a couple of hundred yards away and I could see that there was someone outside. A figure, stout and stooped, in a dark coat. Not Patrick and not Sean. As I got closer, I realized it was the old goth, the psychic, mad-as-a-hatter Nickie Sage.
She was leaning against the wall of the cottage, her face puce. She looked like she might be on the verge of a heart attack.
‘Mrs Sage!’ I called out. ‘Are you all right?’
She looked up at me, breathing heavily, and pushed her floppy velvet hat further up her brow. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘although it’s been a while since I’ve walked this far.’ She looked me up and down. ‘You look like you’ve been playing in the muck.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, doing an ineffectual job of brushing the remaining dirt off me. ‘Had a bit of a tumble.’ She nodded. As she straightened up I could hear the wheeze as she breathed. ‘Would you like to come in and sit down?’
‘In there?’ She jerked her head back towards the cottage. ‘Not likely.’ She took a few steps away from the front door. ‘Do you know what happened in there? Do you know what Anne Ward did?’
‘She murdered her husband,’ I replied. ‘And then she drowned herself, just out there in the river.’
Nickie shrugged, waddling off towards the river bank. I followed her. ‘More of an exorcism than a murder, if you ask me. She was getting rid of whatever evil spirit had taken hold of that man. It left him, but it didn’t leave that place, did it? You have trouble sleeping there?’
‘Well, I …’
‘Not surprised. Not surprised at all. I could have told you that – not that you’d have listened. The place is full of evil. Why do you think Townsend keeps it as his own, looks after it like it’s his special place?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘I thought he used it as a fishing cabin.’
‘Fishing!’ she exclaimed, as though she’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous in her entire life. ‘Fishing!’
‘Well, I have actually seen him out here fishing, so …’
Nickie harrumphed, dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand. We were at the water’s edge. Toe to heel and heel to toe, Nickie was working her swollen, mottled feet out of her slip-on shoes. She put a toe in the water and gave a satisfied chuckle. ‘The water’s cold up here, isn’t it? Clean.’ Standing ankle-deep in the river, she asked, ‘Have you been to see him? Townsend? Have you asked him about his wife?’
‘You mean Helen?’
She turned to look at me, her expression contemptuous. ‘Sean’s wife? That Helen, with her face like a slapped arse? What’s she got to do with anything? She’s about as interesting as paint drying on a damp day. No, the one you should be interested in is Patrick’s wife. Lauren.’
‘Lauren? Lauren who died thirty years ago?’
‘Yes, Lauren who died thirty years ago! You think the dead don’t matter? You think the dead don’t speak? You should hear the things they have to say.’ She shuffled a little further into the river, bending down to soak her hands. ‘This is it, this is where Annie came to wash her hands, just like this, see, only she kept going …’
I was losing interest. ‘I need to go, Nickie, I need to take a shower and get on with some work. It was good talking to you,’ I said, turning to leave her. I was halfway back to the cottage when I heard her call out.
‘You think the dead don’t speak? You should listen, you might hear something. It’s Lauren you’re looking for, she’s the one who started all this!’
I left her at the river. My plan was to get to Sean early; I thought if I showed up at his place, picked him up and drove him to the station, I’d have him captive for at least fifteen minutes. He wouldn’t be able to get away from me or throw me out of the car. It was better than confronting him at the station, where there would be other people around.