A Stranger's House

by Clare Chase

  I tried to work out where to perch. In the end I chose a chair by Emily’s dressing table, removing a pair of jeans and a dressing gown so that I could sit down. ‘She’s cross with you at the moment,’ I said, ‘which does seem desperately unfair, I know. Maybe she really does think being firm is the only approach – to help you fight your way back to normality, I mean. I’m sure she doesn’t really hate you.’ I wasn’t a bit sure in fact. ‘Maybe it was how people treated her when she was young, and it’s the only way she knows.’

  Emily shifted position on her bed and at that moment Fi appeared in the doorway, face mask still intact, carrying a tray with a mug of tea and the plate of shortbread. She picked her way across the room, and attempted to fit the tray onto Emily’s bedside table. I helped her push three dirty mugs and a glass to one side. The glass smelled of stale alcohol.

  ‘I could take those,’ Fi began, but Emily cut across her.

  ‘I don’t want you to take them or do anything. I’m fed up with all the fuss.’

  Fi made her way back to the door, catching my eye for a second as she did so and giving me a wry look.

  Once she’d gone, Emily said, ‘I know you’re trying to make me feel better. Everyone always does. But my mother really does hate me. It’s just one of those things, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. She’s a hardnosed bitch at the best of times, but if you could see how she is with my older brothers you’d know she’s singled me out for unpleasant treatment.’

  Possibly she was one of those women who simply don’t like members of their own sex. Too much competition, perhaps, beginning when Emily was a sweet little girl with big dark eyes and bunches, and accentuated now that her daughter was – or at least had been – blossoming.

  Emily was curled up on the bed now, facing away from me towards the wall. ‘I came along at the wrong time, you see,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Just when she thought she was all done with children. The younger of my older brothers was already six when I was born. And she’d started work again – just a nothingy job, being the PA to the headmaster of some school or other. I don’t even think she enjoyed it that much – but she was more independent. And then she got pregnant with me, and she had to leave, and she went back to being ankle deep in nappies and bottle sterilising equipment.’

  ‘I met your mum briefly,’ I said, ‘and I did get the impression that she had a large house to run, but I imagined she might have had a bit of help with it.’ She was the sort who would.

  ‘Oh, she had lots of help with me,’ Emily said. Her voice was slightly muffled by the pillow. ‘They had a live-in nanny, even though my mother had given up her job by the time I was born. My father was away a lot, and she always said full-time help was essential to enable her to cope with two growing boys who needed ferrying places, as well as a screaming brat.’ She turned her head for a moment, but only enough to look up at the ceiling, not to face me. ‘She often tells me how much I used to scream.’

  ‘So, do you see anything of your dad these days?’ I said.

  ‘Hardly at all since I’ve been here. My family’s house isn’t far off – between here and Ely – but I don’t tend to go home much. And even before I started at Cambridge he was away working more often than not. My mother hates him too.’

  ‘But they stay together.’ I reached for my tea and took a sip. I couldn’t face the idea of the shortbread. I mean, I’m not picky, but it was very much the wrong environment for eating things.

  ‘He buys her a comfortable lifestyle. I’m not quite sure what’s in it for him. I know she sees other men. Did you hear what she said about her and Damien?’

  ‘I did.’ I didn’t admit I’d heard it second-hand, via Paul.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Emily said. ‘They probably did meet, but I think she just said it to get at me.’

  ‘But you still reckon there have been others?’

  ‘Oh for sure,’ Emily said. ‘I was at a party once with my mother and her sister. There was some bloke chatting my mother up. It was revolting. And then later I overheard my aunt say, “You get all the young, good-looking ones.” My mother was grinning like the Cheshire bloody cat. It made me want to puke. And then she said, “Well, not all,” and my aunt said, “You’ve had that gorgeous David at your beck and call for a year now. I don’t know how you do it.”’

  ‘It could have just been a flirtation, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘David came to stay once or twice whilst Daddy was away.’

  Hmm. Pretty damning. ‘Okay. Scratch that idea then.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Emily said. ‘It just means I can’t rely on any support from home, and my mother’s right. I have to get tough, so nothing can hurt me any more. Maybe I have to become like she is. I don’t see her hurting.’

  I suddenly realised that, just like Paul Mathewson, I’d somehow hoped I could talk to her and make a difference. In fact, some vain little part of me had been thinking, maybe I’d be able to help where everyone else had failed. Because I’d written the odd book about social issues. Huh. Well, fat chance. I was already well out of my depth.

  It was a relief when Fi reappeared. ‘Back to normal again,’ she said. Her face was flushed and shiny, now that the mask had gone.

  ‘I suppose if Fi’s out of the bathroom, you could go and treat yourself to a soak,’ I said to Emily. ‘It’d probably make you feel a lot better.’ I could hear myself sounding like a mum. Ironic really.

  Emily turned towards me slowly and dropped her legs over the side of the bed, pushing the upper part of her body to a sitting position using her hands, as though some of her muscles weren’t working properly. ‘Maybe.’

  When she’d fetched some clean clothes to change into she padded down the corridor and I heard the bath taps running.

  ‘Blimey,’ Fi said. ‘I’ve been gently suggesting that all morning, but she’s bitten my head off each time.’

  ‘Probably different coming from me. You automatically expect older people to be a bit bossy, and, because it’s not a shock, you sometimes let them get away with it.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘What about her room? Do you think I could give it a bit of tidy whilst she’s in there, too?’

  ‘That’s territory where angels fear to tread,’ said Fi. ‘Another thing I’ve tried and regretted. But who knows? You could chance your arm. Would you like a hand?’

  I shook my head. ‘No need, but have you got a cloth and some antibacterial spray?’

  She grinned. ‘I’ll go fetch.’ She took a handful of mugs and I followed with the plate of mouldy orange.

  ‘Did you see the news about Maggie Cook?’ Fi said over her shoulder.

  I nodded. ‘On the Internet earlier.’

  ‘What did you make of it?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t look good that she lied to the police – or at least left information out – but I suppose she wasn’t actually seen entering or leaving Damien’s rented cottage, so it doesn’t prove anything.’

  We went into the kitchen and dumped all the crockery next to the dishwasher.

  ‘You reckon she could have lied just because she knew being in the vicinity would look bad?’ Fi said, pausing for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose that makes sense.’

  ‘Realistically, I don’t believe that could have been the first time she’d been over to Little Boxham to find him,’ I said.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  I explained about how Maggie had come by Damien’s contact details in the first place. ‘She was mad as hell when I found her in his study,’ I said, ‘and dead set on finding him and giving him what for. My bet is she caught up with him the very next day, which would have been Sunday; the day after Strawberry Fair. Why wait, after all?’

  ‘You have a point.’ Fi reached into a cupboard under the sink.

  ‘Whether he let her in that first time she went round is another matter,’ I said. ‘If he didn’t, maybe she went back on the Tuesday to ha
ve another go. Maybe he even told her to come back then. Perhaps he was already dead when she turned up and she knocked and got no answer.’

  Fi handed me the cleaning stuff I’d asked for. ‘Only he’d been expecting that other woman, too, hadn’t he? The one who owned the cottage.’

  I nodded. ‘She did say they’d arranged to meet.’ I thought again of Elizabeth Edmunds and her relationship with Samson. ‘Assuming she was telling the truth. Hard to say, with Damien out of the picture. Anyway,’ I walked towards the kitchen door, ‘if Damien had invited both Elizabeth Edmunds and Maggie Cook round to enjoy his company on the same night that wouldn’t surprise me. He seemed to like taunting the women in his life.’

  Fi let out a long breath. ‘Bit of a bugger we ended up living next door to him, really. And all the more reason for Maggie Cook to have killed him, though I agree she might not have. She does seem the type though.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Only because of what happened after Em fell for Damien. Em had had too much to drink one night. She caught up with Maggie outside River House and told her that Damien would rather be with her. There was a bit of a slanging match.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ I dropped my voice low as we reached the hallway. ‘By the way, has Emily been talking about Paul Mathewson at all?’

  Fi rolled her eyes and sighed heavily. ‘Just lately, and more than before? Yes, she has. I suppose it must be knight-in-shining-armour complex. She did mention that she saw you both heading off to the pub together.’

  ‘I thought she might have. Do you think he’s aware of the situation?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so for a minute, to be honest,’ Fi said. ‘He’s too upstanding. He’ll have compartmentalised Emily into “young charge in his care” and won’t have seen her as a woman at all. Men. They never get it right.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  She nodded. ‘Em’s just lurching from one emotional crisis to the next at the moment. I hope she’ll be okay when I go off to the ball. I’m supposed to be leaving early to meet up with my boyfriend.’

  ‘I’d offer to stay, but I’ve got an appointment in town I have to keep later.’ And given that I was seeing a solicitor about how to divide up mine and Luke’s stuff, I wasn’t sure what sort of state I’d be in when I got back.

  Fi shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. I know she’s got to go out in a bit anyway. She’s seeing someone at the counselling service again. Good news that she’s washing first.’

  I got to work in Emily’s room, piling all the dirty laundry up in the doorway, ready to take downstairs, and stacking crockery for dispatch in the same direction. Her bookcase had volumes spilling out of it in all directions, so I began to put them back. It was quite enjoyable, regaining control on someone else’s behalf. So much easier than tackling my own, untidy life. I guessed Emily must be reading English. Arden editions of Shakespeare abounded, along with Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, which nestled against Paradise Lost.

  Gradually more of the leaf-patterned carpet became visible. One or two things had got trodden in – some make-up just under the dressing table, a bit of biscuit – but on the whole it was coming together.

  Fi stomped back in, lugging the vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Perfect. Thanks.’

  As I crouched down to fish out a pair of tights that had been kicked under the bed, something weird caught my eye. A saucer, full of bits of burnt paper and ashes.

  I pulled it out to show Fi, but instead of looking surprised she nodded slightly.

  ‘Oh, yes. The remains of Maggie’s letter.’

  ‘Maggie wrote to Emily?’

  She nodded. ‘After their run-in. It was a horrible note. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Ruby; Em had definitely behaved badly. Telling Maggie she should leave Damien so that they could be together was never going to make her popular. But all the same, I saw the note when it arrived, and it was vicious.’

  I could imagine, having seen both sides of Maggie.

  ‘Made Saskia look like an amateur,’ Fi went on.

  ‘Can you remember what it said?’

  Her eyes drifted away from mine as she thought back. ‘Some of it was similar to what Saskia said: that Damien would never look at a child like her. Then she put that Damien had actually laughed out loud when she’d confronted him about Emily and Damien’s “so-called affair”, and said the very idea was ridiculous.’ She paused, remembering. ‘That was what made Emily say she’d ruined everything. She felt Damien was bound to have said that, to calm Maggie down, whereas if she hadn’t confronted Maggie, Damien would have had a chance to end it with her in his own way.’

  She saw my face. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He never would have. And then Maggie wrote something that Emily took as a personal threat. It was something like, “If you go anywhere near him again I’ll make sure you can never be together.” After Damien was killed, of course, Emily became convinced Maggie had murdered him, carrying out her promise.’

  ‘But she’d already burnt the letter by that time?’

  Fi nodded. ‘She kept it, but there’s no way of reading the full message now.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll just put it back. Doesn’t sound like something I ought to meddle with.’

  I got away with cleaning Emily’s room. When she came back from her bath she just walked straight in as though nothing had changed.

  Back at River House I could hear Nate moving about upstairs, then a few minutes later the sound of him descending to the ground floor and leaving via the front door. He must be off to keep his appointment in Saffron Walden.

  I thought again about his advice earlier. I needed to go and talk to the police about Maggie. I couldn’t leave it forever. But how long would it take? I imagined it would be quite involved, and my solicitor’s appointment was looming. They’d managed to fit me in at five. It was only for an introductory chat, but I couldn’t bring myself to reschedule.

  After agonising for a bit, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t call the police to explain then, in case they insisted I went in straightaway. It would have to wait until later.

  As I walked into town, I ran through what I’d found out that afternoon. I wasn’t really shocked by the story of Maggie’s letter. It seemed to me that Fi had been right: Emily had invited a blast of her fiery temper and got it, big time. I doubted her threats had been serious. Perhaps, after Emily had confronted her about Damien, Maggie had gone straight round to have it out with him. But had he really laughed off the supposed ‘affair’? And if he’d done so convincingly, why had she still chucked a whisky glass at him, assuming that was how the scene had played out? And then why had he gone off and hidden himself away?

  Perhaps he’d actually done the opposite: wound Maggie up about Emily, maybe commenting on her youth and her prettiness, so that she’d lost it with him. And then maybe he’d decided to tie them both in knots by going AWOL.

  By four-forty I was already outside the solicitors’ office, waiting in the street. I glanced up at the sky, which had cleared now. Clouds scudded past the top of the high-rise building and raindrops shook out of the leaves of a beech tree, scattering over my head each time the wind blew.

  ‘The situation’s quite simple in theory,’ Mrs Emerson, the solicitor told me, once I’d got inside. ‘You and your ex-partner are each entitled to keep your own property.’ She leant back in her seat as an assistant brought us cups of coffee. ‘Is your house owned jointly?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And are you both happy to sell?’

  Happy. Hmm. I nodded again.

  ‘In that case it’s relatively straightforward. The trouble starts when there’s disagreement on that issue. As it is, the proceeds of the sale would be divided according to strict property rights. What you also need to do is to go through your other possessions and work out who owns what. It’s helpful if you can gather evidence to show how much you’ve contributed to any given purchase. You’re entitled to take out what you’ve put in.’

  What I’d put
in. Way more than numbers on a credit card bill or a mortgage statement. As I walked back out of town towards the river it made me think of the lyrics of a Beatles tune. Something about the amount of love you give ultimately equalling the love you take. If that was true, I must be owed some.

  By the time I got back to River House it was half-past six. I sent Luke an email, giving him an update and asking again about estate agents, so he knew I meant business. As for going through our stuff, I’d been kidding myself about not returning home when Luke was there. We’d have to look it all over together, whether I liked it or not. Maybe it would still be worth nipping back whilst he was out though. That way I could cast an eye over things and make some notes, so that I could break the back of the work before we met. It would shorten the miserable time we had to spend together. And in reality there wasn’t that much to divide. We weren’t going to be battling for each other’s CDs. It would really just be a case of totting up how much the white goods were worth and arguing the toss about how to split them.

  In spite of everything that was happening in my personal life, my mind strayed to earlier in the day, and Nate’s reaction to Emily’s outburst. And then I thought about Maggie Cook, and the police again. I’d done my jobs for the afternoon, but the idea of tramping over to the station to rat on her was still about as appealing as climbing into a bath filled with pig swill. But I’d already put it off, and time was getting on.

  I decided to have a quick coffee before calling them, and as I filled the kettle I glanced into the garden. I could take my drink out there and sit on the bench. Five minutes’ peace would set me up. It was the first time in a while that I’d liked the idea of having time to draw breath.

  I went to unlock the back door. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and lavender, brought out by the sun, which had made a comeback after the rainstorm ended. The paving stones had dried, and there was a fresh, clean feel to the air. I took a deep breath. At least I was starting to get some control over my own life. Emailing Luke had been horrible, but it was the first step towards moving forward. I suddenly realised that although the whole thing made me tense, it hadn’t made me tearful that day.