‘Eleanor?’ Kathleen’s mind was still on the Ramsay sisters.
‘Alice.’
‘Oh.’ Kathleen’s body began to tremble and she held her right hand tightly in her left. Jackie noted this down. She was like an artist doing a quick sketch, darting looks at her subject before scribbling busily.
‘It’s certain that Alice is dead. I wanted you to be the first to know.’
Why did they always say this? What difference did it make if she were the second person to know?
Kathleen was floating; her feet were sliding out from under her, pulling her down towards the floor. She needed an emergency tablet, but couldn’t move.
Doctor Ramsay had advised her to take care of herself.
Her face had stiffened to a mask, and her skin colour drained to a pasty grey as, in her head, Kathleen called out to Eleanor. She knew why Eleanor had gone. She must go after her. But her feet were lead and with Jackie here, she could not go anywhere.
Jackie Masters drew a perfectly straight line in her notebook and tapped the page peremptorily with her silver pen:
‘I’ve been doing some digging. I know who killed Alice.’
At the same moment, Kathleen realised that so did she.
Twenty-Six
The Judge’s tombstone dwarfed his son’s makeshift cross. The bench was now in shade, but it had not cooled down, the eiderdown air was still and heavy. Eleanor was in the dock, knees together, humble, before the stark lettering.
‘How did you kill her?’ For the moment her anger had gone, leaving a silt of bewilderment. It didn’t even matter who her mother was. These doubts were the luxuries of a lost life. Her mother’s confession had extinguished any glimmer of hope.
‘I can’t remember.’
‘You must remember.’
‘I hid. There was counting. Alice cheated.’
‘She cheated?’ Her Mum was mad, she ought to be kind to her. ‘If you can’t remember anything, how do you know you killed her? Why would you?’
‘She said terrible things.’
‘So you killed her?’ Chris would tame the word. Kill time, kill off the germs, stop it, you’re killing me, kill two birds. She could keep meaning at bay and save her Mum. Last week Chris wouldn’t have thought her Mum could murder anyone. But now…
‘She was an innocent schoolgirl. Always in a good mood, always willing and always top of everything. I worked it out. If Alice was so good, I must be bad because I was the opposite of her. She sneered at me and said everything I cared about was rubbish. She said my Dad didn’t love me.’
‘She said those things?’
‘Maybe I made it all up.’
As she talked Eleanor’s mouth relaxed, her lips were fuller and wider, the lines around them smoothed away; she was no longer Alice. Chris supposed her confession had relieved her of a burden. She forced herself to listen:
After the night of the smashed mirror when her Mum went off in the ambulance, Eleanor had invented a new story. Her real parents were a poor couple living in Friston Forest who had left her on a blanket in the car park when she was a baby. They wanted her to have a better life than they could give her. They took pleasure in seeing her grow up from a distance. They kept watch as she went to the sweet shop to buy bubble gum or played secretly at the Tide Mills. This meant Eleanor was never alone because the kind couple – the woman a spit image of Mrs Jackson – were always there, they would even take her back if things got too much.
After Alice had gone, her parents really were the strangers who had found her on the rug deep in the forest. They became silent and separate and stern except at night when she heard their voices talking long after their bedtime. Then as everyone finally went to sleep there would be the banging and knocking as Alice sneaked back from hiding. But only Eleanor saw her.
One night Eleanor had crept to the window to find Alice on the other side of the pane. She was on the sill trying to shelter from the fine rain, tapping with scratchy nails to be let in. Alice was like the lady in the bit from Wuthering Heights that Gina had once read to her and Lucian to stop them pestering her. It was pitch black outside, but Alice was lit up like the Christmas tree angel with a light bulb stuffed up her skirts.
Alice had menaced Eleanor with secrets that made Eleanor’s eyes prick with tiny needles. She had tried to make Eleanor cry.
That bruise on your mother’s neck is a love-bite. Like a vampire.
Your Dad said I was the daughter he wished you had been.
Still in the dream, Eleanor had been disappointed to see Alice carried in through the front door of the doll’s house in Mr Howland’s hairy arms. She hoped she had gone for good. Eleanor was in the doll’s house. The front was open so that the windows were suspended in mid-air like the fireplace at the Tide Mills. Mr Howland had cuddled Alice like a doll. She had been bath-time-cosy in a rabbit dressing gown and fluffy slippers. Alice was completely dry, which Eleanor thought was strange because it was pouring outside. Eleanor felt a cold draught as Alice sneaked up on to the green sofa beside her. While the grownups were in the kitchen making cocoa, she explained in a fast whisper how she was sorry for cheating. She had learnt her lesson. From now on they could play whatever game Eleanor suggested and she would pretend it was real. Eleanor told her it was too late. Alice had used up her last life.
‘I can’t hear you?’
Alice’s voice had been like a radio, with the volume getting quieter. Yet she was still sitting beside her making Eleanor as cold as ice.
She had nearly gone. Finally, like the Cheshire cat, there was just her mouth, smiling like a good girl.
‘The Mill Owner. You were right about him. I didn’t believe you.’ The Alice-mouth had no voice. Eleanor had to lip read.
‘He doesn’t exist. I made him up. He’s dead in the churchyard. He died of Apo-plex-ey on a train from Seaford.’ Eleanor had yelled, but the ears had faded away long ago.
In the morning, Alice was still missing and Eleanor’s Dad was furious when she told him Alice had come back in the night. She showed him the marks on the bedroom window frame as proof. But he accused her of making them herself. Eleanor had not confessed that when she had tonsillitis last year, she had tried to carve her name in the wood with her penknife. But he had known. She wanted him to understand that the point was Alice had come back. She had thought he would be pleased.
Long days crawled by, stretching into weeks and soon years were laid down like paving slabs with no secret animals or messages scratched in the stone. Alice never returned and after a while she wasn’t mentioned in the Ramsay household.
Aged sixteen, Eleanor was expelled from her expensive central London school for stealing a teacher’s purse. Her last year of education was at a crammer in Kensington where to everyone’s incredulity she got three ‘A’ levels. She was befriended by one of the teachers, a man with corkscrew hair whose boyfriend was an oboist in the Covent Garden Orchestra. She bunked off lessons to go to rehearsals of operas and ballets, lounging in the stalls of the empty auditorium, knees propped up on the seat in front, munching sweets and desultorily revising The Duchess of Malfi with an usher’s torch in the boring bits.
When she was not much older than Chris was now, Eleanor had sex with a boy called Gary on the bathroom floor of a squat in Shepherd’s Bush. He was head mechanic at the local Renault garage and she had fancied him because he looked like Paul Weller. Eleanor told him she was engaged when he asked to see her again. She never told him she was pregnant.