The Crooked House by Christobel Kent Page B

was how she sounded: for a moment Alison lost the thread.
    ‘Are you all right?’ she managed eventually. ‘Polly?’
    ‘Do you need something, Alison?’ And the old angry Polly was back.
    ‘I need a name.’ There was no point hedging. She didn’t say,
I know you went on talking to the police. I know there must have been things you kept from me. I know.
It was how Alison had wanted it, after all. Someone had to do it, to take Alison to the inquest, to hold her gaze in the cleared coroner’s courtroom while she recounted her evidence. Someone had had to shield her as she climbed into the black car afterwards and someone had to go on shielding her until she could walk away from it all on her own. Polly might not have had all the right skills but she had done her best. And she’d been all there was.
    ‘She was called Sarah Rutherford.’ The answer was immediate: Polly didn’t even need to think. But her voice was stiff and strange. ‘Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford. Why do you want to know? Now, I mean. After all this time?’ Panicky.
    ‘It’sall right, Polly,’ said Alison. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid.’
    Polly had always known when Alison was lying, and she probably knew now.
    ‘Where are you?’ she said, swift and afraid.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ said Alison. Then, ‘I’m at home.’ And it almost wasn’t a lie.
    They put Alison in a room with no windows bar an internal one, high up. She had sat in the reception for a bit but then the desk officer had gone off and she’d heard a door bang and some voices and he’d reappeared and taken her further inside the police station.
    Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford was at an incident but she was expected back in the station within the hour.
    ‘You want a coffee?’ The man who’d led Alison in there was no more than five years older than her, wearing a shirt and tie but the tie was loosened. She didn’t know what it meant about rank, if they didn’t wear uniforms: the uniformed officer at the front desk had mumbled some introduction but she hadn’t registered any of it.
    Alison shook her head, imagining the plastic cup, and thought of Paul, working quietly in the hotel, turning up his nose at their coffee. The policeman hesitated a moment, then he was gone.
    The room’s chairs were battered and the table scarred. An interview room. She hoped they hadn’t brought Gina somewhere like this, after. Her dread grew, like darkness. Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford knew things she didn’t. And knew things about her no one else did.
    The door banged open: the tall woman in the doorway was looking back over her shoulder. ‘Not yet, Jennings,’ she said, and Alison glimpsed the young officer with his loosened tie, peering past her from the corridor. When he saw her hestepped back, out of sight. ‘I’ll give you a buzz if I need you.’ And the door closed and she was there. Alison’s heart was suddenly in her mouth, it was like seeing someone you’d thought was dead.
    Sarah Rutherford wasn’t wearing uniform, but close to it: trousers and a jacket shiny at the elbows. Older. Broader in the beam. Her skin was duller, but Alison’s heart still leapt to see her. Found her wide-set blue eyes the same, the fringe unchanged, the strong nose. Sad. Was that beauty? To Esme it had been. She sat down at the desk, then stood up again, her hands – bare of rings, Alison noticed, but perhaps that was just because she was at work – on the table. She came around it and sat next to Alison: she smelled of hospitals, some kind of antiseptic.
    ‘I’d have recognised you,’ she said, and frowned. ‘Even with that hair.’ She put a hand to her own, and Alison saw the grey in it. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’
    ‘Where were you?’ said Alison, thinking even as she said it that Sarah Rutherford probably wouldn’t be able to tell her.
    But she did. She sighed. ‘Pile-up,’ she said, and Alison had a picture in her head of debris spread,