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But unexpectedly Alice made a lunge for the passage and Mark knew she could escape that way. At the end of the passage was another secret door. This only opened from the inside on to the landing. It was cleverly constructed to form part of the wooden panelling. Only Mark Ramsay knew it was there. All Alice would have to do was turn the knob and she would be free. It dawned on Mark what he had done. Alice running away from him was the worst thing she could do. He grappled fiercely with her. He held her. But she slipped away leaving only her cardigan. The whiskey-soaked wool that only last night he had clutched to his face with thoughts of such tenderness spelled his doom. He flew after her and halfway down the passage caught her and dragged her back by her lovely hair into the priest’s hole.

Alice stared up into his face uncomprehending as he smiled weakly at her. Her last impression was that he was trying to ask her a question but she couldn’t speak. As Doctor Ramsay’s hands closed around her neck, it seemed to Alice that the light bulb in the ceiling went out.

Thirty-One

The playroom had become bitterly cold. Wind rustled the trees and bushes in the garden and rattled the window frames. The centre light flickered, in time to these sudden gusts. Far away, downstairs in the hall, the grandfather clock chimed three-quarters of the hour – fifteen minutes to go before midnight.

‘How long have you known?’ Chris cleared her throat.

‘Until tonight, not properly. Or maybe I’ve always known.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘My friends never said anything. But they would giggle or blush if he was near, or far worse, I saw their fear. In the end they didn’t come. So there was only Alice. It was the same for Gina, although we never acknowledged it. In those days there was no word for it. Now I’ve come back they don’t mention I was away.’

‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’

‘Report my own father? For doing what? No one would have believed me. I didn’t believe it.’

‘Couldn’t you tell your Mum, or your brother and sister?’

‘They don’t want the truth. They want just to get through life relatively unscathed. I couldn’t destroy my family’s fragile existence on the basis of vague hints and imaginings. His terrible act had threatened to do that. My mother made sure we all got back to normal. She was a great believer in structure and routine.’

‘You lied to me.’

‘I tried to keep you out of it. Stupid. I had relied on you never finding out. When you did, I said what came into my head. I took the blame like I always had. I had to keep my mother safe too. That’s all we’ve ever done. He did too. Until the end when he couldn’t face her. Isabel’s an old woman now. It’s too late for her.’

‘Do you think she knows?’

‘She doesn’t want to know. But it might explain the headaches.’ Eleanor got off the window seat. ‘Besides if the truth had come out imagine what it would’ve done to Kathleen? She worshipped him. She’s a sick woman.’

‘You know nothing about Kath. How could all of you let her suffer all these years? For the sake of the reputation of the Ramsay family, you let another family be destroyed.’

‘I was a child remember?’ Eleanor went across to the doll’s house and stood beside it in the wavering lamplight, dwarfed by its magnitude.

‘So that lets you off?’

‘No. Of course it doesn’t. That’s why I became Alice. It was all I could think to do. Crazy, I know. But none of this bloody mess is sane.’

Suddenly Chris understood her Mum’s bizarre behaviour. After all she hadn’t gone to the police when her Mum had confessed to a murder. It wasn’t that simple.

‘I knew he had taken her. I saw them through the bushes. Then I glimpsed them way off in the distance on the beach. I tried to catch up. If I had, he wouldn’t have been able to say anything. He would’ve had to take us both home. I could have stopped him.’

‘Probably not. He would have pretended to be furious with you about taking Alice to the Tide Mills. He would have said you couldn’t be trusted and sent you packing. In front of Alice you would have had to do as you were told. He was your Dad.’ Chris found she didn’t hate her Mum any more. Not for being trapped in a flat with fake agoraphobia, not for being Alice; for lying to her daughter. Not for protecting a murderer. All of it made sense. She might have done the same.

‘I couldn’t get down to the beach. The tide was coming in. So I rushed back up the path and through the Tide Mills village. Halfway down the street I collided with an old man. The Bobby Charlton tramp. He caught hold of me and dragged me towards the workman’s cottage: my secret den. He was bleeding from the nose and shouting at me, but it was hard to make him out. Something about being attacked by a madman. I screamed and he let me go and staggered off. No one heard. All I thought was that Alice and my Dad had left me to die. Alice had been happy to leave me there by myself.’

‘She had no choice. If he said it was okay, then how could she argue?’

‘I wanted to have one friend who dared stand up to him.’ Eleanor dragged her foot over the rug, kicking out the wrinkles. ‘When I got back to the house, my Mum was asleep. I belted along the passage to my Dad’s study. The door was open but the room was empty. Dad and Alice were nowhere to be seen. I decided I had made the whole thing up. I couldn’t say about the tramp as I wasn’t supposed to be at the Tide Mills. I wanted to. I still hoped that if my Dad knew what had happened he would have felt guilty for leaving me.’ She turned to the doll’s house and slowly eased open the great frontage. It creaked on its hinges. ‘So I showed the police his handkerchief. I said I had got it off the ironing pile. I had used it to wipe the blood from the bramble scratches on my leg. The handkerchief told Dad that I knew.’

‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’ Chris bent down and addressed the bars:

‘That reporter, Jackie Masters, asked to do an interview with Doctor Ramsay last year. She was drinking, she wasn’t getting any work. She needed money. It was going to be an anniversary piece, looking at where people in the case were now. He told her to get lost. Without him, she wouldn’t have been able to get others to co-operate, especially Kath. She decided to have revenge. She found out he’d never been interviewed by the police. At the time, the press had assumed Doctor Ramsay had an alibi. In fact the police had considered him above suspicion because he was a highly respected doctor. People like him wouldn’t kidnap children. She went through the evidence files and the cuttings. It didn’t take her long to find what she needed.’ Chris shut the window and sat down on the window seat, facing Eleanor:

‘Doctor Ramsay had handed in Alice’s cardigan. He claimed to have found it in the lane near to Eleanor’s den. This played a big part in falsely placing Alice there at the time of her disappearance. It backed up your story.’

‘Alice was convinced I had stolen that cardigan.’

‘Jackie checked the accounts of what Alice was wearing that day. There was no mention of a pink cardigan. It was too hot. She had on a yellow dress. She also knew that Kathleen would never have put pink and yellow together. You had said in one of your interviews that Alice had left her cardigan behind in the dining room after drawing one afternoon. She hadn’t worn it since. Richard Hall didn’t pick up on this. He was focusing on you because he found you weird. No one suspected Doctor Ramsay.’ Chris sighed. ‘If only they had.’

She came over to the doll’s house; both women knelt in front of it, like children solemnly preparing to play.

‘Jackie wasn’t thinking of a good story by this time. She had a better plan. She began to blackmail Doctor Ramsay. He was easy. The cardigan stuff wouldn’t have been enough, but he was guilty and scared. It seems all she had to do was lie and say she had a witness who had seen him with Alice and he caved in. So every week she went to that old shed in the garden at the White House and collected a parcel of money hidden under the ivy at the back. He knew it was the one place the family never went. No one saw her. If they had, it wouldn’t have mattered; they had agreed Jackie would say she worked with him. Nothing he did was questioned. Nothing was questioned. He could at least depend on that. Besides it didn’t matter what Isabel thought. She would never do anything. They forgot the CCTV. Or rather that the only person who watched those films was someone who would recognise Jackie Masters and wonder what she was doing there.’