Page 122 of Worse Than Murder

‘I may have been in the police too long, because the first thing that came to my mind was a dead body.’

‘The first thing I thought of was buried treasure.’

‘Which makes you childish and me ghoulish.’

‘Where do we go from here?’ Philip asks after a long silence.

‘Looking for a hammer and chisel.’

Iain Pemberton is a creature of habit. He has set times for doing set jobs. One of his regular jobs is popping along to the stables mid-evening to check the horses one final time. Alison uses this knowledge, waits until he’s far enough way, so it doesn’t look as if she’s waiting for him to leave the house before approaching the front door and knocking.

‘Oh, hello. I didn’t expect you,’ Lynne says, stepping back and allowing her daughter to enter.

Alison gives her mother a succinct smile. She has spent the day thinking about her past, her childhood, since talking to Matilda Darke, and everything she thought about she needed to have clarified by her mother. Is it possible she had been drugged on the night her father disappeared? If so, why? The only explanation she could come up with was that she’d been drugged so she could be sexually abused by someone. The only people she remembered seeing that day were her mother, father and grandmother. Had her father drugged and raped her? Had he hated himself for what he’d done to her, to her sisters, and then walked away, never to be seen again?

The sofa is back in the living room, the floorboards having dried out. There are various carpet swatches on the coffee table. Lynne explains that she’s decided to have the entire ground floor redecorated and wants to have a radical change rather than stick to the safe variations of beige and cream that she’s had in the past. Unfortunately, she and Iain can’t yet come to a decision on a colour scheme.

‘I get the feeling decorating the living room is going to have the same intensity of debate as theStrictlyfinal,’ she laughs. ‘Is everything all right? You look… I don’t know, you look like you’re in pain,’ she says, noticing her daughter’s discomfort.

‘I want to ask you something, Mum. It’s not easy.’

‘Oh,’ is all Lynne can say. ‘You can say anything to me, Alison, you know that.’

‘I know. It’s just… It’s not a nice subject to talk about.’

‘Is there something wrong? Is it work?’

‘No. Mum, let me get there in my own time, please,’ she says, struggling to find the words, and the tone.

‘Sorry. Of course. You… go ahead.’

The atmosphere in the room plummets as Lynne sits on a knife edge, glaring at her daughter, taking in the pale face, the uncomfortable position, refusing to make eye contact with her mother, and the look as if she’s about to be sick.

‘I was talking to Matilda Darke this morning,’ she begins. ‘We spoke about Travis and Celia and Jennifer and, well, things have been uncovered that are shocking, to say the least. It’s got me thinking and I’ve spent all day asking myself all kinds of questions, but I don’t have the answers.’ A tear falls which she quickly wipes away. ‘I’ve been looking online, and it’s possible to go through a traumatic event and not even remember it. I mean, I don’t even remember the night Dad went missing, and I was there with him in the car?—’

‘You were only five, Alison,’ Lynne interrupts.

‘I know. But he was my dad. You and him were the most important people in my life. I relied on you. You’d think I’d remember the last time I saw him.’ She wipes away more tears, reaches forward and whips a tissue out of the box on the coffee table.

‘Alison, I’ve told you…’

‘No, Mum, please, let me speak.’

‘Okay.’

Alison takes a breath and composes herself. She looks up at her mother. ‘Mum, was I sexually abused as a child?’

‘Oh my God!’ Lynne says. She starts to cry.

Alison leaps up and goes over to her. She sits on the arm of the chair and puts her arms around her, holding her tight.

‘Mum, I don’t mean to upset you with all this. It’s just… if Celia and Jennifer were abused, was I abused, too? That’s what I need to know, Mum.’

It’s a while before Lynne speaks.

‘Sweetheart,’ she says, holding onto Alison’s hands tightly. ‘I’ve been asking myself the same things for the last thirty years. I always knew that, if Celia and Jennifer had been kidnapped, it was by someone who wanted to do them harm. I mean, why else would you take them? When you said Celia waved at you from the back of the car and was smiling, I knew that it had to have been someone they knew, someone I knew. Alison, I can’t answer your questions. I don’t know if you were abused. I pray to God that you weren’t. I just… I just don’t know.’

‘I’ve remembered something,’ Alison says. ‘Well, I think I’ve remembered something. We left Gran’s because of the storm, but when we left it was daylight. The next thing I remember is being picked up out of the car and it was pitch-dark.’