‘When was that?’
‘About two or three years ago. I didn’t hear anything after that, and I thought it had stopped, but then a few weeks ago they started again. First it was the sheep and then …’ She swallows. ‘Then after you left, I got a letter saying Why don’t you ask your friends? But I never dreamt –’
‘Jesus Christ, Kate!’ I stand up, too full of nerves to keep still, but there is nowhere to go and I sit again, picking restlessly at the frayed material of the sofa. I want to say, why didn’t you tell us? But I know why. Because Kate has been trying to protect us, all these years. I want to ask, why didn’t you go to the police? But I know that too. I want to say, they’re only pictures. But we know – we both know – that’s not true. The pictures don’t matter. It’s the note with the sheep that tells the whole story.
‘I keep wondering …’ Kate says in a low voice, and then stops.
‘Go on,’ I prompt her. She twists her fingers together, and then gets up and goes across to the dresser. In one of the drawers is a sheaf of papers, bound together with a piece of red string, and right in the middle of the sheaf is a letter in an envelope, very old and creased. It’s a letter that makes my heart stutter in my chest.
‘Is that –?’ I manage, and Kate nods.
‘I kept it. I didn’t know what else to do.’
She holds it out to me, and for a minute I’m reluctant to take it, thinking of forensics and fingerprints, but it’s too late. We handled that note seventeen years ago, all of us. I take it, very gently, as though using the tips of my fingers will make it harder to trace back to me, but I don’t open it. I don’t need to. Now that the letter is in my hands, the phrases float up through from the deep water of my memory – so sorry … don’t blame yourself, my sweet … the only thing I can do to make things right …
‘Should I give it to Mark Wren?’ Kate asks huskily. ‘I mean it might stop this whole thing. It answers so many questions …’
But it raises so many more. Like, why didn’t Kate go to the police with this note seventeen years ago?
‘What would you say?’ I ask at last. ‘About where you found it? How would you explain it?’
‘I don’t know. I could say I found it that night, but I didn’t tell anyone – I could say the truth, basically, that Dad was gone, that I was afraid of losing the house. But I don’t have to involve the rest of you – the burial, everything else, I could leave that out. Or I could say that I only found it later, months afterwards.’
‘God, Kate, I don’t know.’ I scrub my fists into my eyes, trying to chase away the remnants of bleary-eyed exhaustion that seem to be stopping me from thinking properly. Behind my lids, lights spark and dark flowers bloom. ‘All those stories, they seem to be asking more questions than they answer, and besides –’
And then I stop.
‘Besides what?’ Kate says, and there’s a note in her voice I can’t quite read. Defensiveness? Fear?
Shit. I did not mean to go down this route. But I can’t think what else to say. Rule Four of the Lying Game – we don’t lie to each other, right?
‘Besides … if you give them that note they’ll want to verify it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Kate, I have to ask this.’ I swallow, trying to think of a way to phrase it that doesn’t sound like I am thinking what I’m thinking. ‘Please understand, whatever you say, whatever happened, I won’t judge you. I just have to know – you owe us that, right?’
‘Isa, you’re scaring me,’ Kate says flatly, but there’s something in her eyes I don’t like, something worried and evasive.
‘That note. It – it doesn’t add up. You know it doesn’t. Ambrose committed suicide because of the drawings, that’s what we always thought, right?’
Kate nods, but slowly, like she’s wary of where I am going.
‘But the timings are all wrong – the drawings didn’t turn up at school until after he died.’ I swallow again. I think of Kate’s facility for forgery, for the paintings she faked for years after Ambrose’s death. I think of the blackmail demands she has been paying for more than fifteen years, rather than go to the police with this note – demands she has concealed from us, though we had a right to know. ‘Kate, I guess what I’m asking is … did Ambrose definitely write that note?’
‘He wrote that note,’ she says, and her face is hard.
‘But it doesn’t make sense. And look, he took a heroin overdose, right? That’s what we’ve always thought. But then why were his works all neatly packed up in the tin? Wouldn’t he have just shot up and dropped them beside his chair?’
‘He wrote that note,’ Kate repeats doggedly. ‘If anyone should know, I should.’
‘It’s just –’ I stop. I can’t think how to say this, say what I’m thinking. Kate squares her shoulders, pulls her dressing gown around herself.
‘What are you asking, Isa? Are you asking if I killed my own father?’
There is silence.
The words are shocking, spoken aloud like that – my vague, amorphous suspicions given concrete shape and edges hard enough to wound.
‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. My voice is croaky. ‘I’m asking … I’m asking if there’s something else we should know before we go into that police interview.’
‘There is nothing else you need to know.’ Her voice is stony.
‘There’s nothing else we need to know, or there’s nothing else full stop?’
‘There’s nothing else you need to know.’
‘So there is something else? You’re just not telling me what?’
‘For fuck’s sake, please stop asking me, Isa!’ Her face is anguished, and she paces to the window, Shadow feeling her distress and pacing with her. ‘There’s nothing else I can tell you – please, please believe me.’
‘Thea said –’ I start, and then feel my courage almost fail, but I have to ask it. I have to know. ‘Kate, Thea said Ambrose was sending you away. Is that true? Why? Why would he do that?’
For a minute Kate stares at me, frozen, her face white.
And then she makes a noise like a sob and turns away, snatching up her coat and slinging it on over her pyjamas, shoving her feet into the mud-spattered wellingtons that stand beside the doorway. She grabs Shadow’s lead, the dog anxiously following at her heels, its gaze turned up to Kate’s trying to understand her distress – and then she’s gone, the door slamming behind her.
The noise sounds like a gunshot, echoing in the rafters and making the cups on the dresser chink with indignation. Freya, playing happily on the rug at my feet, jumps at the noise, her small face crumpling with shock as she begins to wail.
I want to pursue Kate, pin her down for answers. But I can’t, I have to comfort my child.