Into the Water 20 страница

Kindness was her new project. She hoped it might be gentler on the soul than anger. And in any case, while she knew that she could never forgive Lena – for her dissembling, for her secret-keeping, for simply existing where her own daughter did not – she couldn’t hate her either. Because if anything was clear, anything at all, if anything in this horror was without doubt, it was Lena’s love for Katie.

DECEMBER

Nickie

NICKIE’S BAGS WERE packed.

Things were quieter in the town. It was always like that with winter coming, but lots of people had moved on, too. Patrick Townsend was rotting in his cell (ha! ) and his son had run away to find some peace. Good luck to him with that. The Mill House was empty, Lena Abbott and her aunt off to London. The Whittakers had left, too – the house was on the market for less than a week, it seemed, before some people with a Range Rover and three children and a dog turned up.

Things were quieter in her head, too. Jeannie wasn’t talking as loudly as she used to, and when she did, it was more of a chat, less of a tirade. These days, Nickie found she spent less time sitting at the window looking out and more time in bed. She felt very tired and her legs ached more than ever.

In the morning, she was going to Spain, for two weeks in the sunshine. Rest and recreation, that was what she needed. The money came as a surprise: ten thousand pounds from Nel Abbott’s estate, left to one Nicola Sage of Marsh Street, Beckford. Whoever would have thought it? But then perhaps Nickie shouldn’t have been surprised, because Nel was really the only one who’d ever listened. Poor soul! Much good it did her.

Erin

I WENT BACK just before Christmas. I can’t really say why, except that I’d dreamed about the river almost every night, and I thought a trip to Beckford might exorcize the demon.

I left the car by the church and walked north from the pool, up the cliff, past a few bunches of flowers dying in cellophane. I walked all the way to the cottage. It was hunched and miserable, with its curtains drawn and red paint splashed on the door. I tried the handle, but it was locked, so I turned and crunched down over the frosted grass to the river, which was pale blue and silent, mist rising off it like a ghost. My breath hung white in the air in front of me, my ears ached with the cold. Should have worn a hat.

I came to the river because there was nowhere else to go, and no one to talk to. The person I really wanted to speak to was Sean, but I couldn’t find him. I was told he’d moved to a place called Pity Me in County Durham – it sounds made up, but it isn’t. The town is there, but he wasn’t. The address I was given turned out to be an empty house with a TO LET sign outside. I even contacted HMP Frankland, which is where Patrick will see out the rest of his days, but they said the old man hadn’t had a single visitor since his arrival.

I wanted to ask Sean for the truth. I thought he might tell me, now he’s no longer with the police. I thought he might be able to explain how he’d lived the life he did and whether, when he was supposedly investigating Nel’s death, he’d known about his father all along. It wouldn’t be such a stretch. He’d been protecting his father all his life, after all.

The river itself offered no answers. When, a month back, a fisherman dug a mobile phone out of the mud in which his wellington boots were planted, I had hope. But Nel Abbott’s phone told us nothing we hadn’t already gleaned from her phone records. If there were damning photographs, images that would explain all that was left unexplained, we had no way of accessing them – the phone wouldn’t even turn on, it was dead, its insides clogged and corroded by silt and water.

After Sean left, there was a mountain of paperwork to get through, an inquiry, questions asked and left unanswered over what Sean knew and when, and why the fuck the whole thing had been handled as badly as it had. And not just Nel’s case, but Henderson’s, too: how was it that he was able to disappear without trace from under our noses?

As for me, I just went over and over that last interview with Patrick, the story he told. Nel’s bracelet torn from her wrist, Patrick grabbing her arm. The struggle they’d had up there on the cliff before he pushed her. But there had been no bruises in the places where he said he had grabbed her, no marks on her wrist where he’d torn off that bracelet, no signs of any struggle whatsoever. And the clasp on the bracelet was unbroken.

I did point all of this out at the time, but after everything that had happened, after Patrick’s confession and Sean’s resignation and all the general arse-covering and buck-passing, no one was really in the mood to listen.

I sat by the river and I felt as I’d been feeling for a while: that all this, Nel’s story and Lauren’s and Katie’s too, it was all incomplete, unfinished. I never really saw all there was to see.

Helen

HELEN HAD AN aunt who lived outside Pity Me, just north of Durham. She had a farm, and Helen could remember visiting one summer, feeding donkeys with bits of carrot and picking blackberries in the hedgerows. The aunt was no longer there; Helen wasn’t sure about the farm. The town was shabbier and poorer than she’d remembered and there were no donkeys to be seen, but it was small and anonymous and no one paid her any mind.

She’d found herself a job for which she was overqualified, and a small ground-floor flat with a patio at the back. It got the sun in the afternoon. When they first got to the town, they rented a house, but that only lasted a matter of weeks and then she woke up one morning and Sean was gone, so she gave the keys back to the landlord and started looking again.

She hadn’t tried to call him. She knew he wasn’t coming back. Their family was broken, it was always going to break without Patrick, he was the glue that held them together.

Her heart, too, was shattered in ways she didn’t like to think about. She hadn’t been to visit Patrick. She knew she shouldn’t even feel sorry for him – he had admitted killing his wife, murdering Nel Abbott in cold blood.

Not cold blood, no. That’s not right. Helen understood that Patrick saw things in very black and white terms, and that he believed, genuinely believed, that Nel Abbott was a threat to their family, to their togetherness. She was. And so he acted. He did it for Sean, and he did it for her. That’s not so cold-blooded, is it?

But every night she had the same nightmare: Patrick holding her tabby under the water. In the dream, his eyes were sealed shut but the cat’s were open, and when the struggling animal twisted its heard around towards her, she saw that its eyes were bright green, just like Nel Abbott’s.

She slept badly, and she was lonely. A few days previously she had driven twenty miles to the nearest garden centre to purchase a rosemary bush. And later that day she was driving to the animal-rescue centre over in Chester-le-Street, to select a suitable cat.

JANUARY

Jules

IT’S AN ODD thing, to sit across the breakfast table every morning from fifteen-year-old you. She has your same bad table manners, and rolls her eyes as hard as you did when this is pointed out. She sits at the table with her feet tucked up underneath her on the chair, bony knees sticking out to either side, exactly the way that you used to do. She adopts the same dreamlike expression when she is lost in music, or thought. She doesn’t listen. She is wilful and annoying. She sings, constantly and tunelessly, just like Mum did. She has our father’s laugh. She kisses me on the cheek every morning before she goes to school.

I cannot make up to you the things I did wrong – my refusal to listen to you, my eagerness to think the worst of you, my failure to help you when you were desperate, my failure to even try to love you. Because there is nothing I can do for you, my atonement will have to be an act of motherhood. Many acts of motherhood. I could not be a sister to you, but I will try to be a mother to your child.

In my tiny, ordered Stoke Newington flat, she wreaks havoc on a daily basis. It takes an enormous effort of will not to become anxious and panicked by the chaos. But I’m trying. I remember the fearless version of myself who surfaced the day I confronted Lena’s father; I would like that woman to return. I would like to have more of that woman in me, more of you in me, more of Lena. (When Sean Townsend dropped me home on the day of your funeral, he told me I was like you, and I denied it, I said I was the anti-Nel. I used to be proud of that. Not any more. )

I try to take pleasure in the life I have with your daughter, since she’s the only family I have, or will ever have now. I take pleasure in her, and comfort in this: the man who killed you will die in jail, not too long from now. He is paying for what he did to his wife, and to his son, and to you.

Patrick

PATRICK NO LONGER dreamed of his wife. Nowadays, he had a different dream, in which that day at the house played out differently. Instead of confessing to the detective, he took the paring knife from the table and put it into her heart, and when he was done with her he started on Nel Abbott’s sister. The excitement of it built and built until, finally sated, he pulled the knife from the sister’s chest and looked up, and there was Helen, watching, tears coursing down her cheeks and blood dripping from her hands.

‘Dad, don’t, ’ she said. ‘You’re scaring her. ’

When he woke, it was always Helen’s face he thought of, her stricken expression when he told them what he’d done. He was grateful that he did not have to witness Sean’s reaction. By the time his son returned to Beckford that evening, Patrick’s confession had been made in full. Sean came to visit him once, on remand. Patrick doubted he would come again, which broke his heart, because everything he had done, the stories he had told and the life he had constructed, it had all been for Sean.

Sean

I AM NOT what I think I am.

I was not who I thought I was.

When things started to fracture, when I started to fracture, with Nel saying things she shouldn’t have said, I held the world together by repeating: Things are the way they are, the way they’ve always been. They cannot be different.

I was the child of a suicided mother and a good man. When I was the child of a suicided mother and a good man, I became a police officer; I married a decent and responsible woman and lived a decent and responsible life. It was simple, and it was clear.

There were doubts, of course. My father told me that after my mother died, I didn’t speak for three days. But I had a memory – what I thought was a memory – of speaking to kind, sweet Jeannie Sage. She drove me back to her house that night, didn’t she? Didn’t we sit, eating cheese on toast? Didn’t I tell her how we’d gone to the river in the car together. Together? she asked me. All three of you? I thought it best not to speak at all then, because I didn’t want to get things wrong.

I thought I remembered all three of us being in the car, but my father told me that was a nightmare.

In the nightmare, it wasn’t the storm that woke me, it was my father shouting. My mother, too, they were saying ugly things to one another. Her: failure, brute; him: slut, whore, not fit to be a mother. I heard a sharp sound, a slap. And then some other noises. And then no noise at all.

Just the rain, the storm.

Then a chair scraping across the floor, the back door opening. In the nightmare, I crept down the stairs and stood outside the kitchen, holding my breath. I heard my father’s voice again, lower, muttering. Something else: a dog, whimpering. But we didn’t have a dog. (In the nightmare, I wondered if my parents were arguing because my mother had brought a stray dog home. It was the sort of thing she’d do. )

In the nightmare, when I realized I was alone in the house, I ran outside, and both my parents were there, they were getting into the car. They were leaving me, abandoning me. I panicked, I ran screaming to the car and clambered into the back seat. My father dragged me out, yelling and cursing. I clung to the door handle, I kicked and spat and bit my father’s hand.

In the nightmare, there were three of us in the car: my father driving, me in the back, and my mother in the passenger seat, not sitting up properly but slumped against the door. When we rounded a sharp bend, she moved, her head lolling over to the right so that I could see her, I could see the blood on her head and on the side of her face. I could see that she was trying to speak, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, her words sounded strange as though she were talking in a language I didn’t understand. Her face looked strange, too, lopsided, her mouth twisted, her eyes were white as they rolled back into her head. Her tongue lolled from her mouth like a dog’s; pink, frothy saliva oozed from the side of her mouth. In the nightmare, she reached for me and touched my hand and I was terrified, I cowered back in my seat and clung to the door, trying to get as far away from her as I could.

My father said, Your mother reaching for you, that was a nightmare, Sean. That wasn’t real. It’s like that time you said you could remember having kippers at Craster with your mum and me, but you were only three months old then. You said you remembered the smokehouse, but it was only because you’d seen a picture. It was like that.

That made sense. It didn’t feel right, but at least it made sense.

When I was twelve, I remembered something else: I remembered the storm, running out into the rain, but this time, my father wasn’t getting into the car, he was putting my mother into it. Helping her into the passenger seat. That came to me very clearly, it didn’t seem to be part of the nightmare, the quality of the memory seemed different. In it, I was afraid, but it was a different sort of terror, less visceral than the one I felt when my mother reached for me. It troubled me, that memory, so I asked Dad about it.

He dislocated my shoulder knocking me against the wall, but it was what happened afterwards that stuck. He said he needed to teach me a lesson, so he took a filleting knife and cut cleanly across my wrist. It was a warning. ‘This is so you remember, ’ he said. ‘So you never forget. If you do, it’ll be different next time. I’ll cut the other way. ’ He placed the tip of the blade on my right wrist, at the base of my palm, and dragged its point slowly towards my elbow. ‘Like that. I don’t want to discuss this again, Sean. You know that. We’ve talked about it quite enough. We don’t mention your mother. What she did was shameful. ’

He told me about the seventh circle of hell, where suicides are turned to thorny bushes and fed upon by Harpies. I asked him what a Harpy was and he said, your mother was one. It was confusing: was she the thorny bush, or was she the Harpy? I thought of the nightmare, of her in the car, reaching out to me, her mouth open and bloody drool dripping from her lips. I didn’t want her to feed upon me.

When my wrist healed, I found the scar very sensitive and quite useful. Whenever I found myself drifting, I would touch it, and most times, it brought me back to myself.

There was always a fault line there, in me, between my understanding of what I knew had happened, what I knew myself to be and my father to be, and the strange, slippery sense of wrongness. Like dinosaurs not being in the Bible, it was something that made no sense and yet I knew it had to be. It had to be, because I had been told these things were true, both Adam and Eve and brontosaurus. Over the years there were occasional shifts, and I felt the tremor of earth above the fault line, but the quake didn’t come until I met Nel.

Not at the beginning. At the beginning it was about her, about us together. She accepted, with some disappointment, the story I told her, the story I knew to be true. But after Katie died, Nel changed. Katie’s death made her different. She started talking to Nickie Sage more and more, and she no longer believed what I’d told her. Nickie’s story fitted so much better with Nel’s view of the Drowning Pool, the place she had conjured up, a place of persecuted women, outsiders and misfits fallen foul of patriarchal edicts, and my father was the embodiment of all that. She told me that she believed my father had killed my mother and the fault line widened; everything shifted, and the more it shifted, the more odd visions returned to me, as nightmares at first and then as memories.

She’ll bring you low, my father said when he found out about Nel and me. She did more than that. She unmade me. If I listened to her, if I believed her story, I was no longer the tragic son of a suicided mother and a decent family man, I was the son of a monster. More than that, worse than that: I was the boy who watched his mother die and said nothing. I was the boy, the teenager, the man who protected her killer, lived with her killer, and loved him.

I found that man a difficult man to be.

The night she died, we met at the cottage, as we had before. I lost myself. She wanted so much for me to get to the truth, she said it would release me from myself, from a life I didn’t want. But she was thinking of herself, too, of the things she had discovered and what it would mean for her, her work, her life, her place. That, more than anything: her place was no longer a suicide spot. It was a place to get rid of troublesome women.

We walked back towards the town together. We’d done it often before – since my father had discovered us at the cottage, I no longer parked the car outside, I left it in town instead. She was dizzy with drink and sex and renewed purpose. You need to remember it, she told me. You need to stand there and look at it and remember it, Sean. The way it happened. Now. At night.

It was raining, I told her. When she died, it was raining. It wasn’t clear like tonight. We should wait for the rain.

She didn’t want to wait.

We stood at the top of the cliff looking down. I didn’t see it from here, Nel, I said. I wasn’t here. I was in the trees below, I couldn’t see anything. She was on the edge of the cliff, her back to me.

Did she cry out? she asked me. When she fell, did you hear anything?

I closed my eyes and I saw her in the car, reaching out for me, and I wanted to get away from her. I shrank back, but she kept coming at me and I tried to push her away. With my hands in the small of Nel’s back, I pushed her away.

Acknowledgements

The source of this particular river is not all that easy to find, but my first thanks must go to Lizzy Kremer and Harriet Moore, providers of strange ideas and strong opinions, challenging reading lists and inexhaustible support.

Finding the source was one thing, following the river’s course quite another: thank you to my exceptional editors, Sarah Adams and Sarah McGrath, for helping me find my way. Thank you also to Frankie Gray, Kate Samano and Danya Kukafka for all their editorial support.

Thank you to Alison Barrow, without whose friendship and advice I might never have made it through the past couple of years.

For their support and encouragement, reading recommendations and brilliant ideas, thank you to Simon Lipskar, Larry Finlay, Geoff Kloske, Kristin Cochrane, Amy Black, Bill Scott-Kerr, Liz Hohenadel, Jynne Martin, Tracey Turriff, Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt and Mary Stone.

For their striking and beautiful jacket designs, thank you to Richard Ogle, Jaya Miceli and Helen Yentus.

Thank you to Alice Howe, Emma Jamison, Emily Randle, Camilla Dubini and Margaux Vialleron for all their work to ensure this book can be read in dozens of different languages.

Thank you to Markus Dohle, Madeleine McIntosh and Tom Weldon.

For professional insights, thank you to James Ellson, formerly of Greater Manchester Police, and Professor Sharon Cowan of the Edinburgh Law School – needless to say that any legal or procedural errors are entirely of my own making.

Thanks to the Rooke sisters of Windsor Close for a lifetime of friendship and inspiration.

Thanks to Mr Rigsby for all his advice and constructive criticism.

Thank you to Ben Maiden for keeping me grounded.

Thank you to my parents, Glynne and Tony, and to my brother Richard.

Thank you to each and every one of my long-suffering friends.

And thank you to Simon Davis, for everything.

About the Author

Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has been a global phenomenon, selling almost 20 million copies worldwide. Published in over forty languages, it has been a No. 1 bestseller around the world and was a No. 1 box-office-hit film starring Emily Blunt.

Into the Water is her second stand-alone thriller.

#intothewater

Also by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Doubleday

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