Eleanor loped over the loose shingle and flopped down at the foot of the cliff. She had been sure she could bring Chris round if she would agree to meet her. Today’s journey had not been wasted. She shut her eyes and listened to the ceaseless whoosh and hush of the incoming tide. That sound had come through the open windows in the evenings as, tucked in by Lizzie and waiting for her Mum to come upstairs and kiss her good night, Eleanor would drift off to sleep lulled by its rhythm. It would still be there when they had all gone home after the holidays. It was there the day Alice went missing.
Isabel hadn’t come. When her Dad crept into the room, Eleanor had pretended to be asleep.
‘I brought you here when you were a baby. Isabel persuaded me to.’
‘What, right here on the beach?’
‘Yes, you and me and my mother. An odd little party. Then my Dad turned up. Isabel had said he was in London. Now I think she was telling the truth. She was as appalled as me. He carried you down to the shoreline to show you the sea.’
‘Did we come by train?’ Did you walk with me in your arms down the quiet road to the church?
‘Yes. Then we left. They didn’t stop me. It was you they wanted. To be touched by innocence.’
‘Was that the last time you saw him?’ Chris went cold. Eleanor was crying. Not in her usual way with sobs and loud sniffs, but silently, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand like a kid. If Chris ran now, she’d have a head start.
But Eleanor would know where to find her. There would be no more hiding.
‘I saw him in London about ten years ago. He was following me. I dodged down an alleyway. He came into the alley, but I was behind a dustbin. He could easily have found me, but he’d never have thought I was hiding from him. So he went away. I didn’t come out of that stinking passage for an hour. After that I never went out.’
‘Did you think he was going to hand you over to the police? After all, he didn’t at the time.’
Eleanor sat up and dried her face with the flat of her hands. She looked tired and beleaguered, yet there was more life in her features than Chris had seen before. She could imagine Eleanor as a young girl rampaging through the countryside bareback on an imaginary horse. Except that she was frightened of horses.
In another life Chris could have been happy here too.
‘As each day went by, you and I were building up a new past.’
‘How could you be so stupid?’ Chris was angry with herself for still wanting to soothe her and stop her crying. ‘I’ve never been real. Even today you only wanted me here to listen to your stories and let you off the hook.’
‘That’s not true.’ But it was. Eleanor had never bothered to find out the second name of the boy in the bathroom, because he meant nothing to her. Yet he was Chris’s father. Now he too had vanished and with him the Renault garage where he had worked, demolished to make way for executive flats while Chris was still a baby. Eleanor had robbed Chris of her own story and substituted only fantasies and phantoms.
‘I have always been me with you.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘I always loved you.’
‘You don’t know what love is. You’re off your head!’
‘Don’t be like this.’ Eleanor got up and came towards her.
Chris backed away and rushed back up the hill. At the top she looked back and saw the silver roof of Sainsbury’s twinkling in the wintery sunshine where the Tide Mills had once been. For a moment Chris thought it possible Eleanor had been real with her. Then she dismissed the idea. Tomorrow she would worm her way into the Ramsay family. Eleanor wasn’t the only one who could play spies.
Chris would do what Eleanor had avoided doing.
She would find Alice.
Twenty-Nine
Chris had stumbled on to the scene of a murder. The body had been removed, but all around the room were signs of a fierce fight for life before it was snuffed out. There were broken toys, half a chair on its side, books flung across the room to land in sprawling heaps, some with torn covers and twisted spines. The contents of a board game were strewn across the floorboards. Then she pulled herself together – two glasses of wine had got the better of her – it was only the rough and tumble of a long abandoned playroom.
The doll’s house was in the centre of the room.
It loomed now, as it had dominated the stories her Mum told her long ago, quietly thrilling with concealed knowledge of past events and vanished inhabitants. Lingering in the doorway, the chatter of her mother’s ‘gas-fire-voices’ jogged Chris’s memory with broken sentences and stifled cries. She felt nauseous, and to recover herself fixed her attention on the two tall chimneys at each end of the roof of the house.
Images from her deserted life swapped in and out like lenses in an eyesight test. Chris saw in quick succession her bedroom window, the shadow of the light shade on the ceiling like a static sundial, the dips and folds of her mother’s duvet, and the hawkish lace-curtain birds that, like everything else, her mother had given names to. When Chris was small, the bedtime stories were punctual, each night at six-thirty, because Eleanor believed structure and routine were all. This had become an enchanted time they both had loved.
Whose memories were they?
Each new lens brought the doll’s house into sharper focus so that it became obvious to Chris that this was the room where she was meant to end up. Her diligent detective work of the last five weeks would end here tonight.
It was 31st December 1999, the last night of the twentieth century, and many months since Chris had discovered the truth about Eleanor and had met her real family, the Ramsays. She was living with Kathleen Howland, sleeping in the room that was once Alice’s but was now hers. Having passed her ‘A’ levels, she had begun a forensic science degree at Sussex University. Doctor Ramsay’s grand-daughter was at her calmest when staying late at the lab examining the different types of insects that feed on corpses. Eleanor was still in their flat, but she would have to move out because she was now a wealthy woman and the housing estate was for tenants on little or no incomes. Besides the flat was no longer home.
Without any explanation, Mark Ramsay had left his youngest child the White House, which Isabel was to hold in trust for her, as well as a share of his estate. He had left Chris the doll’s house; a pecuniary legacy, again with no explanation, to the grand-daughter he had only once held in his arms. Chris was glad he was dead and she didn’t have to deal with him along with the other Ramsays. She wasn’t grateful for his gift. She was suspicious. There must be strings attached that would one day become clear. This was confirmed by the lack of surprise expressed by any of the family, who had been horrified when Eleanor had offered to make the White House over to all of them or pass it to her mother. No one wanted either house. Chris thought her mother might as well have been offering to share blood money with them and, intrigued, stepped up her visits. Eleanor thought Chris was becoming reconciled to her new family after all. This in turn encouraged Eleanor to soften towards them too.
Eleanor spent little time in the flat. After years of being cooped up like a prisoner she could not bear to stay indoors longer than was necessary. She had to be out and she had to keep moving. She left early each morning to tramp miles through London, never returning until the evening. She would cross and re-cross the Thames, pausing on Hammersmith Bridge by a plaque in memory of a man drowned one Christmas in the freezing waters below while rescuing another man. She would climb the steps of Hungerford Bridge and wait in the gloom for a smile without a face that she now saw only in her dreams. Often she veered impulsively down side streets, hurrying as if chased, down alleyways, into subways, cutting corners off palatial Victorian squares to emerge on to busy rushing streets. She strode along the Euston Road, and faltered on Eversholt Street at the point where one day a woman would be killed trying to stop thieves stealing her handbag. She stayed at the kerbside through several traffic light changes on a corner of Wood Lane, where a woman cyclist had been crushed by an articulated lorry. She trudged through the oozing green river mud that slimed the shoreline at the Bell Steps in Hammersmith, where on Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding day a young mother had been murdered and her killer not found. Eleanor stepped on pavements trodden yesterday by people who were dead today or would die tomorrow in a distracted bid to join up the dots and become whole.