by Agatha Frost
Ryan laughed. The diversion of the path gave them more time to laugh about old times, no longer holding it back with only the people on the boats. They reached the turning to cut to the cul-de-sac much quicker than Claire would have liked.
“I can walk the rest on my own,” Claire said, slowing to a halt at the junction. “You’ll get back to the B&B faster if you go back the way you came. Any further and you’re taking yourself in the opposite direction.
“Are you sure?” Ryan checked his watch. “Where does the time go when we’re together?”
“Somewhere.”
“Jeanie said she’d watch the kids for a few hours so I could enjoy a little bit of my day off.” As always, Ryan gave Claire a quick, stiff hug when they parted; they’d done the same as teenagers. “If I know Amelia, she’s probably driving Agnes up the wall right now.”
“Good.” Claire laughed as she pulled away. “Well, I appreciate you wanting to spend those precious hours with me.”
“Who else would I want to spend them with?” Ryan smiled, blood rushing to his milky cheeks as quick as fresh lava; he’d always been sensitive like that. “You’re my best mate.” His eyes drifted past her, further up the path continuing along the canal. “Speaking of mates, your new one is waving at you.”
Claire spun around, surprised to see Em waving from one of the boats a little further up on the other side of the canal in the shade of low-hanging tree branches.
“Em lives on a narrowboat?” Claire muttered to Ryan out the side of her mouth as she waved back. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“You’d only have been disappointed if you found out she lived in a normal semi-detached house with a driveway,” he said as he sent his own wave at Em. “We met this morning for coffee after I dropped the kids at school and before her yoga class. She sang your praises the entire time. You’re helping her look into her mother’s murder?”
“Just until I get the shop back.” Em’s wave turned from a greeting to a beckoning. “I think she wants us to go over.”
“You go.” Ryan gave her another stiff hug. “I promised the kids I’d take them out for burgers for tea if they finished all their homework.”
“Will they have?”
“Probably not.” Ryan shrugged as he set off, walking backwards for the first few steps. “I think I’ll need a strong coffee before we go anywhere. See ya, mate!”
Ryan waved to Em a final time before spinning and heading the way they’d just come. The path curved slightly, and Ryan vanished from view, but not without turning back and waving to Claire one last time.
“Yeah,” she whispered to herself as she waved. “See ya, mate.”
Claire called Sally and Damon ‘mate’ all the time, but she’d never felt for them the way she did for Ryan.
Sighing, she swallowed the lump in her throat and passed her home turning. Instead, she walked down to the bridge just after Em’s boat. She only ever saw boat owners and sightseers going across the bridges; she rarely used them. Unless people wanted to get lost in the dense forest beyond, there was nothing else to see. The canal signalled one of Northash’s borders, although the actual edge was on the other side of the forest that rivalled Starfall Park for size.
“Claire!” Em called, waving for her to hurry inside. “What a surprise! I was hoping I’d see you soon.”
Claire reached the step onto the boat, and before she could protest for the sake of her sea legs, Em pulled her down into the boat and into a hug.
Like Em, her boat stuck out from the rest. Each piece of exterior wood was painted a different colour, all clashing like an acidic rainbow. The inside, however, was painted white, although the colour still continued within. There weren’t any of the sofas or fitted chairs Claire was used to seeing in a boat this size. Aside from a small fitted kitchen area and a cubicle she assumed was the bathroom, the rest of the space was completely open and filled with large, square cushions of every colour and texture. Potted plants sat everywhere, as did piles of tatty paperbacks. A few lidded baskets looked to be bursting with clothes, but Em didn’t seem to have much.
“Come!” Em demanded, pulling Claire to the arrangement of pillows and blankets. “Sit. Make yourself comfortable!” She crawled into the corner and sat cross-legged. “I was just eating my dinner when I saw you. Would you like some?”
Em retrieved a large wooden bowl from the window ledge and showed the leaves and vegetables to Claire. She patted the cushions for Claire to sit down next to her. With about as much grace as she’d displayed while climbing the stairs at Starfall House, Claire half-crawled, half-fell onto the soft pile.
Why had she so stupidly squeezed into the shrunken jeans again?
“Make yourself comfortable,” Em said, continuing to eat her salad using her fingers after Claire politely refused a helping. “Like I said, I’m glad I saw you. It wasn’t until we parted yesterday that I realised I hadn’t given you my address.”
Claire looked around Em’s address as the boat rocked side to side. The water was calm and the movement subtle, but to her stomach, it might as well have been the middle of the Atlantic in a massive storm.
Why three pints of Hesketh Homebrew?
It usually only took half of one to loosen up with Ryan.
“Cool house,” Claire said, trying not to focus on the swaying.
“Thank you!” Em rested the salad bowl back on the ledge before picking up a lighter to light a thin, incense stick on the windowsill. “I gave up the old bricks and mortar a few years ago. I saved and saved so I could finally unshackle myself from renting on the property market. It was either this or a caravan, and this spoke to me the most.”
“It’s certainly unique.”
“And barely costs a thing to run!” Em forced in more salad leaves; there didn’t appear to be any dressing. “I have some updates for you regarding my mother’s death. I’m no sleuth like you, but I’m doing what I can.”
“I have some developments too,” Claire said, her stomach turning as the boat rocked from Em’s constant fidgeting, “and some questions.”
“You go first,” Em muttered through a mouthful of leaves. “Mine’s not much.”
While the spicy scent of the incense filled the small boat, Claire told Em about her mother’s account of seeing Jane at the post office before closing, as well as the connection with Fiona and her accusations through the years.
“I can confirm that,” Em said, licking her lips after putting the empty bowl back on the ledge. She jumped up and switched her legs to cross the other way, her feet pointing in strange positions on her thighs; the boat rocked more. “Fiona and I once called each other step-sisters. We were already fully grown women when our parents married, and we never really had anything in common, but we were friendly enough. She stopped talking to me entirely the day Eric went missing.”
“Can you tell me anything about Eric’s disappearance?” Claire asked. “My father said the case was never closed.”
“The man vanished into thin air.” Em switched from sitting cross-legged to lying on her side, using a pillow to prop her up in front of the trickling incense smoke. “One day, he was here, and the next? He wasn’t! Didn’t take a thing with him, just poof! Gone.”
“And Fiona really resented your mother?”
Em nodded. “Not right away. They worked together for the first week or so, but then my mother suddenly lost interest. That’s when Fiona turned on her and started pointing the finger at my parents. I’m not one to turn my nose up at conspiracy theories –most of them are true – but I never believed Fiona’s theory about their involvement. It didn’t make any sense.”
“The part about your father, Ray, always being in love with your mother?”
“Now, that part is true.” Em smiled fondly. “He’s an old romantic. He never gave up hope that she’d one day take him back.”
Claire wanted to ask if there was more than one Ray Bridges in Northash. A lovesick man pining after his ex-wife didn’t link up with the care
er criminal in her mind. Although, she supposed, perhaps criminals could be romantics too.
“I know what people say about my father.” Em smiled as though she could read Claire’s mind. “He’s done a lot of terrible things in his life, but he calmed down. He was always a big softie at heart. Believe me, between my mother and father, he wasn’t the cold one.”
“Was there tension with your mum?” Claire asked, hoping Em might corroborate the things Janet had told her.
Em switched sides, dragging a cushion with her. She picked up an open paperback – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – and folded a corner before putting it back.
“Tension is one word for it,” Em said as she settled herself. “My mother was never a good communicator. Rather than confront something, she chose to shut down. Now, I’m not one for confrontation – I’m a pacifist to the core – but talking about the hard stuff is important.” She rolled onto her back and tucked her hands behind her head, exposing the skin underneath her arm and a rare island of unmarked flesh in the sea of ink. “I can hardly blame her. She had a terrible model in my grandmother. I’m sorry you had to meet her. I’ve done everything I could to be as little like them as possible.”
Claire looked around the boat again, wondering if she should tell Em she had done a brilliant job of it. Her little narrowboat couldn’t have been further from Starfall House or the rundown flat above the shop. Claire knew which she would pick, despite the seasickness.
“My mother wasn’t a bad woman,” Em said, looking at Claire. “I don’t want to give that impression. I always loved her, but she never understood me. She never tried to, and it caused friction. I would have loved for us to have the relationship we should have, but we were pieces of a jigsaw that belonged to different pictures. We just didn’t fit each other.”
“What was your mother and grandmother’s relationship like?” Claire asked, eager to know more.
“Formal,” Em said with a shrug, “and that’s how they liked it. My mother wasn’t comfortable with even basic emotion, and, well, you’ve met my grandmother. Sentiment of any kind is perceived as weakness. She’s always been like that, and it rubbed off on her daughter. My mother did all the right things. On paper, she ticked all the right boxes, but she couldn’t bring herself to hug me. Of course, I had my father for that, but it’s not the same, is it?”
Claire would have crawled into her father’s lap before her mother’s as a child, but even Janet had hugged her and continued to do so still. Despite her mother’s flaws, she couldn’t imagine them having so stony a relationship as the one Em described.
“Did they see each other often?” Claire clutched the side of the boat, hoping it would settle her stomach; it didn’t.
“Every week, as far as I know.” Em rolled over again, the boat doing its biggest tip yet. “I’ll never know what it’s like to have a mother still alive when you’re eighty yourself. It’s a novelty if ever there was one. We’ve almost lost my grandmother many times over the years, but she springs back somehow. She had breast cancer around the same time Eric went missing. We all thought that was it. People talked about her funeral like it was a done deal. I don’t know how my mother would have coped if she’d died back then, but she didn’t. Grandmother recovered, and her own stubbornness kept her going.”
“And do you see Opal often?”
“Every few months out of respect and because we’re still family, but I never stay long. This last visit was one of the first times in years she hasn’t mentioned her will, but I don’t doubt it would have come up eventually.”
“Her will?”
“Grandmother’s favourite subject.” Em gave a wry smile, rolling over onto her back again. “She inherited Starfall House and its riches from her father, who inherited it from his father. They ran a string of cotton mills and made a grotesque fortune. They built Starfall House and the park, which was just the house’s gardens at the time, to show off their wealth to the village. All of that became my grandmother’s when she turned forty, a fact she often brings up.”
“She brought it up to me.”
“See!” Em sat back in her original position with her legs crossed; Claire wasn’t sure how much more rocking she could take. “And grandmother’s games around her will have been going for years. Her father left the whole family fortune to her, but she was the eldest of four sisters. She chopped and changed the others for years, playing them against each other, bending them to her every demand. Never shared a penny. Not with them or with my mother. Even being the eldest sister, she outlived them all.”
“How old is she?”
“I’m not exactly sure.” Em frowned. “At least one hundred. She has to be. I don’t get invited to the birthday parties, not that she ever makes a fuss about it, locked away in that huge house. Now that my mother is gone, who knows which relation will be lumped with all that. I haven’t been in the will for years, and thank the stars for that!”
“You say it like it’s a curse.”
“Isn’t it?” Em’s stare darkened. “My dad always joked about my grandmother selling her soul to the devil for riches and a long life. While I don’t think my grandmother is a Satanist, her obsession with the Starfall estate stopped her from ever developing a deep connection with another human being.”
“What did you do to get cut out?”
“I had no interest in money.” Em shrugged. “I saw how much it had corrupted her. All that wealth, and yet how lonely she must be with only Diane still loyal to her.”
Claire sat up straight and tried to focus on the trees of the forest through the hazy cloud of smoke. The incense, musky and unusual as it smelled, wasn’t helping with her constantly rolling tummy.
“When did you last see your mother?” Claire asked after letting out a shaky breath. “That’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. I think it would be sensible to create a timeline of Jane’s movements up until the point we know she was supposed to leave. Out of everyone, you knew her best.”
“I saw her the night before she was due to leave.” Em looked down at her hands as they fiddled with the drawstring of her multicoloured fabric trousers. “I didn’t receive an invitation to her leaving party – not that I expected one. By the end, she’d taken this idea that I would suddenly change my mind and take over the tearoom to the next level. The tearoom was everything I didn’t want. Responsibility, taxes, orders . . . I don’t work that way. But she never understood.”
“Where did you see her the night she left?” Claire asked, pulling out her phone to jot down notes in case the pints obscured her memory by morning. “My mother has her in the village around 6 pm on the 14th.”
“Then you can add me around midnight on the 14th,” Em said, pointing at Claire’s phone. “Although it may have crossed over to the 15th. It doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t sure I was going to see her at all before she went. We’d spoken two weeks earlier, and it turned into another argument, so I kept my distance. I couldn’t sleep, so I went into the square. I saw the light on in her flat.”
“And you went up?” Claire asked, her fingers tapping, the words on the screen a blur; she wasn’t sure if it was the homebrew or the rocking at this point.
“First time in years,” she said with a soft smile. “Place hadn’t changed, although it was empty. She sold most of her stuff and donated the rest. All she had were two suitcases she meant to take with her.”
Claire hadn’t seen suitcases in the flat, and the door to the attic hadn’t seemed big enough to shove two cases up there; Claire had only just fit.
“What did you talk about?”
“I tried to say my goodbyes,” Em said, staring at the incense as more smoke fluttered from its glowing amber tip. “I knew I wouldn’t see her again. I wanted things to end peacefully, but she wasn’t interested. Talk turned to the tearoom pretty quickly, as I’d expected it would but hoped it wouldn’t. I don’t think she could help herself by the end. I left.”
“And nothing more happened?”
“Her last words to me were, ‘You’ve always disappointed me, Emma.’” For nearly the first time since they’d met, Em’s face showed no hint of a smile; without it, she looked her fifty years. “I tried telling myself she didn’t believe it and was saying it for effect, but when I never received so much as a letter . . . ” She sucked the air through her teeth. “I suppose I’ll never know now.”
“I’m sure she didn’t mean it.” Claire reached out and rubbed Em’s knee. “Mothers sometimes say things they don’t mean to shock us into living how they want us to live.” She gave a knowing smile and tapped the side of her nose. “Water off a duck’s back, right?”
“Water off a duck’s back,” Em confirmed, returning the smile. “You’re a good listener, Claire.” She gestured towards herself. “I know what I look like. So often I see people’s attention go to my hair or my tattoos, or even just my clothes, but you look me in the eyes. That’s rare around here.”
“I judge people on their character,” Claire said, touched by Em’s words, “and you’re alright to me.”
Their conversation turned to more casual matters, and another thirty minutes passed before Claire finally disembarked, no longer able to take the seasickness.
“One last thing,” Claire said, popping her head back into the boat, glad to have her feet back on solid ground. “Your grandmother mentioned she’d received postcards from your mother, which is impossible, considering Jane never left the country. Do you think there’s any possibility Opal could have been confused?”
“Perhaps,” Em said with a nod, “but if my grandmother said it, I’d believe her. You said I was the person closest to my mother, but you couldn’t have been further off. I don’t even think I made her top five. Meet me here tomorrow at nine in the morning, and I’ll take you to see her closest confidant.”
“Until tomorrow, then.” Claire slapped the roof of the boat. “Your house really is cool.”
