But Vera had already leaped to her feet, almost tripping in her haste. ‘And that’s where you took Connie and the child. God, I have been such a fool! But why? Couldn’t you stand seeing them happy together?’ Then she fell silent and was still, her body twisted towards the woman, like a massive granite sculpture, and when she did speak it was quietly and to herself. ‘No, of course that wasn’t it at all.’
Ashworth was standing too. He wasn’t sure what Vera expected from him. To follow her? To arrest Veronica Eliot? After her final words the inspector had moved surprisingly quickly. She was already in the hall close to the front door, the keys to the Land Rover in her hand.
‘I would never hurt them,’ Veronica called after her. ‘I would never hurt a child.’ But her voice was thin and unconvincing.
Ashworth left her sitting where she was.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Connie lay awake all night, thinking she’d been a fool. How had she allowed herself to be trapped like this? At first she’d thought she’d been so clever. She’d panicked, of course, when she first got the phone call. It had come early in the morning, threatening, insinuating, demanding. The voice disguised, she’d been sure of that. She’d had threatening phone calls following the publicity of Elias’s death. They’d been malicious and mindless, but not like this. Not terrifying. There’d been letters then too. In the end she’d burned them without reading them. The police had said to give the letters to them: it might be possible to prosecute the writers. But Connie hadn’t been able to bear the thought of a stranger seeing them. They might believe the dreadful accusations. This phone call had been more horrible than the letters, and Connie had taken it seriously. She’d known she had to leave Mallow Cottage. She had to take Alice and get away. She couldn’t be seen to be talking to the police.
Then Veronica had arrived. Connie hadn’t been able to tell her the truth, of course. That would have been unthinkable. She could hardly tell this respectable woman that she was running away from the police! She’d said the press were on her back and she needed to disappear for a while. They’d tracked her down, connected her to Jenny Lister’s murder. And Veronica – who had been so hostile, who had poisoned the village women with her stories – had suddenly become helpful. She’d understood the need for utter secrecy. Of course the tabloid press were ruthless and devious. Veronica had read how they searched dustbins and put taps on mobile phones. Veronica said she had a holiday home, not far away. Connie and Alice could stay there for a little while until the police had found the real murderer. It was basic and it had been empty over the winter, but she thought it would do. There was a Calor gas stove and they could stock up on supplies. She’d camped out there when she was a child and had always loved it.
They’d taken Connie’s car to the supermarket to buy food. They couldn’t use Veronica’s because it had no child seat for Alice. Then they’d driven down a grassy track and had arrived at the boathouse. Alice had been enchanted. Any child would be.
‘You’ll have to be very careful close to the water, dear,’ Veronica had said to the little girl, kneeling down so that her face was very close to Alice’s. ‘It’s very deep here, even so near to the shore.’
Then they’d gone inside and thrown open the windows to let in the air, because at that point it still hadn’t started raining. Veronica had found linen in a painted white cupboard and they’d hung the sheets over the deck rail to air.
Inside there was one big room, with two sets of bunks built into the wall. At the end without windows there was a wood-panelled cubicle with a sink and toilet and a candle on a saucer standing on a shelf. Veronica had shown them how the stove worked and they’d cooked sausages for lunch. It had been Veronica’s idea to phone Joe Ashworth, when Connie had shown her how often he’d called.
‘You don’t want them thinking you’ve got something to hide! Really, I would phone him, dear, or they’ll be looking for you all over the county.’
Then she’d driven away in Connie’s car, saying she’d leave it where no reporter would find it. She’d come back in two days’ time with more food. Though by then, of course, the murderer might have been arrested and it would be safe for Connie to move back home.
That first afternoon, after they’d watched Veronica drive away, they’d gone for a walk in the wood and Alice had loved it, balancing on the fallen logs and picking flowers that later they’d put on the windowsill in a chipped enamel mug. They’d come across a cairn made of small white pebbles that looked like a shrine, a small bunch of primroses laid carefully on top. In the evening Alice had fallen asleep immediately in the bottom bunk and Connie had read by the light of a tilley lamp, listening to the rain and imagining herself in her father’s shed at home.
The next day it had been raining and Alice had been fractious and bad-tempered. There was no television to distract her. Connie would have phoned Veronica, but the battery on her phone was flat. She’d brought the charger with her, but of course there was no electricity in the boathouse. There was a box of games on the table and they played Snakes and Ladders and Snap. The rain battered on the roof and Alice put her hands over her ears.
‘I want to go home! I hate it here!’
‘Tomorrow,’ Connie had said. ‘Tomorrow Auntie Veronica will come and we can go home. Then perhaps you could visit Daddy for a couple of days.’
There was no fridge in the hut and the fresh food had all been eaten. She cooked pasta and mixed it with a tin of tuna. Afterwards she let Alice have a whole bar of chocolate for pudding. As soon as the girl was asleep, Connie climbed into the bunk and lay flat on her back, awake for most of the night. She thought this must be what it would feel like to be in prison. Though she supposed there would be odd and frightening noises in prison. Here there was complete silence. Eventually she slept.
She woke the next morning at dawn, gritty-eyed and still tired. The curtains at the windows were very thin and it seemed, even lying in her bunk, that there was something strange about the light. It was the same light as waking up to snow, brighter than it should have been. She got up quietly, pulling the blanket from her bed around her shoulders, and looked outside. The water level of the lake had risen in the night and the house was surrounded. Little waves lapped against the decking. Everything was still, and the trees on the opposite bank were perfectly replicated in the water.
She saw at once that they were in no immediate danger of drowning, but still she felt panic rise in her stomach and almost turn into a scream. She could see how beautiful everything was – the reflected light that had made her think of snow, the composition of trees and hills in the water – but that didn’t stop her being frightened. The notion of imprisonment had become a reality. She understood how people caught in a burning building could become so desperate that they would jump to almost certain death. It wasn’t a fear of the flames, she thought, but of being trapped. She could hardly swim, but the temptation to let herself out of the door to slide into the water was almost irresistible.
She heard a noise behind her and then she did give a little whimper of fear. Perhaps it was a rat. She’d heard that rats were pushed out of their natural homes during floods. Could rats swim? But of course it was Alice, who’d climbed out of her bunk and was standing shivering beside her. And then Connie had to turn their plight into an adventure.
‘Isn’t this fun! It’s just like being on a boat. Where shall we imagine we’ll sail away to this morning?’
Even to her own ears her voice sounded desperate. Alice climbed into her arms and began to cry.