The Crime Writer Read online

  Also by Jill Dawson

  Trick of the Light

  Magpie

  Fred and Edie

  Wild Boy

  Watch Me Disappear

  The Great Lover

  Lucky Bunny

  The Tell-Tale Heart

  The Crime Writer

  Jill Dawson

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Sceptre

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Jill Dawson 2016

  The right of Jill Dawson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 73115 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  For Kathryn Heyman, with love

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Acknowledgements

  Something pursued her. Dreams – phantoms – woke her in the small hours, driving her from her bed to walk the darkness of the strange English village. She’d thrown a coat over striped pyjamas – what was the likelihood of meeting another person at this late hour on a Thursday night? – and pushed bare feet into the cold men’s brogues she kept by the door for the purpose of these night-time prowls. There was no light in Bridge House, the house behind hers, Bridge Cottage, which meant that the old hag, Mrs Ingham, was not awake at any rate. High, bristling hedges hid her, lining the long road that she now stepped onto, there being no sidewalk here – or, pavement, as the British would call it. This road sliced through the village in a ‘nice bit of straight’, encouraging a fellow to drive on through. Down towards the Victoria bar or up toward the cemetery? A quick glance assured her there was a hunter’s moon and a clean sheet of stars. She chose the cemetery.

  A car approached: a soft sound like a waterfall. She quickened her steps in their tap-tapping shiny shoes, and pulled closer to the hedges, tugging her coat collar up to hide her face: was someone following her? The car released her from its beam and slid past, and her thoughts returned to Sam and the Problem. The situation was this: Sam was married. Sam had been married since the age of twenty: for fifteen years. Sam had a child, a girl called Araminta – Minty. Sam would never leave. Love was a kind of madness, not very logical.

  The smell of woodsmoke and onions told her that someone was awake, even at this hour, perhaps enjoying a cosy fireside meal. Her stomach contracted. That reminded her: she must chop some wood – perhaps she should offer to chop a pile for Mrs Ingham too. Fall was almost here, the season turning. And Sam was coming to visit for the first time this weekend.

  As she reached the cemetery another car appeared, illuminating the gravestones, each with their shock of mossy hair: malevolent trolls. She tensed: two cars in one late evening in a place like this was unusual, she was sure. An inner voice started up immediately: Don’t be silly, he couldn’t possibly find you here, no one knows this place . . . She had barely been at Bridge Cottage a week, half of her boxes were still packed, but she was already sure that for most of the obedient people of Earl Soham, chosen for its anonymity and its proximity to London and to Sam, not much happened after the local bars closed. And in this second car – a white car, she’d noticed, in the moonlight – it wasn’t a man but a young woman. Even so, it had been a woman she’d thought she recognised. Red hair? No, not really possible to see the hair colour, she’d concede that much; she was being dumb. But the shape of the head then, the familiar silhouette made by that particular hairstyle. Something of a Jackie Kennedy swing to it, that image seen over and over on TV screens at the end of last year. Bouffant on top; flicks at the end.

  The car rolled out of sight and she realised she was breathing hard, although the walk was short and not uphill. She felt in her coat pockets for the gold Dunhill lighter and the cigarettes she’d brought with her from Paris. The fat white moon looked about ready to pop. There was easily enough light to see the bench, so she sat down and breathed out noisily. It’s all in your head, it’s all in your head. Then, as she flicked the lighter on, she was startled by a noise, a noise as if someone was standing close behind her angrily sucking in their cheeks. She sprang up and crashed down again, her hand trembling as she slipped the lighter back in her pocket and put the cigarette to her lips. Just a branch, rubbing against another. This place had some impressive, old, old trees, well established, like everything here. A rope swinging, squeaking in the breeze. She longed for a bottle of Scotch to go with the cigarettes – why had she not thought to bring that out too?

  Tomorrow – Friday – would be the visit from the lousy journalist, at 10 a.m., which didn’t help her mood any. She ought to telephone from the booth outside the cottage and call the whole thing off. Jesus – how could she be anonymous, safe, if people wrote about her and named Bridge Cottage? The earlier conversation, making the arrangement for the interview, had been awkward and no doubt offered a foretaste of how it would be. ‘Matter of fact, I was rather hoping to keep my stay here private, as I’m having a hard time getting to finish a couple of books,’ she had begun, only to be cut off with ‘But it’s sooooo exciting to have a famous crime writer in Earl Soham . . .’

  She’d had to explain, for possibly the hundredth time in her career, that she didn’t write crime novels; she wasn’t a crime writer. The damn fool girl had protested by naming some of the best-known novels, as if Pat didn’t know her own work, to which she’d patiently explained: ‘Would you call Dostoevsky a crime writer for writing Crime and Punishment? Edgar Allan Poe? Theodore Dreiser? I don’t happen to care for the label “crime writer”. There is not much detection in my novels. There’s rarely any police involvement at all . . .’

  She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out under her shoe. She thought she heard sounds of car tyres popping on gravel near the village hall beside the church. And then she gave in to a powerful compulsion to bend forward and scuff out signs of her smoking with her hand, picking up the cigarette butt and stuffing it into the pocket of her coat, then looking left and right up the street, as if she was in a bad movie, covering up the evidence. She felt as if she watched herself doing this, carefully. She’d had that feeling from childhood. Narrating herself, was how she thought of it. Pat did this, Pat did that: a running commentary that she couldn’t tune out.

  As her hand dug into the pocket, she discovered a tiny snail she’d snuck in there yesterday, meaning to return it to its home. She held it close to her face, to examine it in the moonlight. A less-experienced observer might believe the baby snail to have vacated the shell but she knew it was in there, hiding. She had torn off a piece of lettuce and felt the crumpled pieces of it now, inside her pocket, along with the little snail, bouncing in there as she walked, like a lucky pebble.

  Her mood lifted as she pictured herself showing the snail – with its beautiful stippled brown and cream shell, its tiny body cautiously extending, its horns flailing inquisitively – to Sam. She picked up speed, striding back towards Bridge Cottage in her brogues, finding her way without a flashligh
t because the moon drenched everything in milky light – the telephone booth, the allotments, the gas pumps on the little forecourt next to her cottage. Rain threatened, and she didn’t want to get the shiny brogues muddy. The smell of woodsmoke had evaporated. This time no cars passed her. Not one single house in that dull, pleasant place had a light on. She’d forgotten to lock the front door, she realised, as she grabbed the handle, brushing aside a dried-up rose that trailed near her face; another tense moment. What if someone had managed to sneak inside while she was out?

  The door gave its customary jerk as she opened it and stepped inside: the living room in darkness, a faded Turkish mat, sludge colours, which had once been red and blue. She sniffed, relaxing her shoulders. No one was here. No one had been following her. Maybe she was half cracked. Ready for the booby hatch. The cottage smelt just as it had when she’d left it: damp, English and ridiculous. Sure, it was exactly as she’d said to herself. Earl Soham wasn’t much of a place. Once again, she’d ended up in the middle of nowhere. It was a lonely neighbourhood. She was hidden, invisible; she wasn’t being watched. It was perfect.

  In the morning, she fixed herself the breakfast she always had, the one that made her feel terribly British: hardboiled eggs doused in salt. She knew the English actually ate them soft with a spoon in a little cup but she drew the line at that. She drank from the bottle most of the creamy milk she’d found at the front door, which the milkman had left with a note saying that if she wanted more she was to leave him her request along with the empty bottle. The mail arrived – she had not written to Mother since Paris, she remembered – and this bunch was only a letter about a new bank account, a letter from Peggy in London, and one she wasn’t yet ready to read from her agent. She went out back to check the garden before the journalist arrived, taking the walk she did in every new property she rented in whatever country; the one where she imagined the prowler. (‘Having a prowler or being a prowler?’ Sam had teased her.)

  The garden was large, wet with dew and unkempt. At the front, trees protected it from the road, and there was also a ghastly, oversized hedge that Pat rather admired for its unruliness. She wouldn’t trim it, she thought. The front lawn was pretty bad. The back lawn was in better shape, and a murky green ribbon of water ran along the bottom. The colours in the garden, in the entire village, were the limited palette of an English autumn. A russet apple. Brown, rusty red, green: the water pulsed with these colours. Upstairs she had her easel set up already and her watercolours and she knew the lozenges of colour that would soon be wet and mucky; knew the exact shade the water would turn in the jam jar, and knew whose portrait was the only one she wanted to paint – Sam’s.

  Well, now that she was standing in the back garden – shaking off a damp leaf that had stuck to the toe of one shoe – she wondered whether this little strip of soupy water would more properly be described as a stream or a brook. She imagined the prowler hatless, young, damp hair, tufty like the patchy lawn, face down in the cold water, where she had pushed him, after finding him crouching in the garden casing Bridge Cottage. A bloodied stone lay beside his head where she’d clouted him and pressed his face into the sluggish stream. Brook. A man can drown in a couple of inches of bath water, every schoolchild knows that. Then she remembered that she had no tea; the English journalist could probably use a cup of tea.

  It wasn’t that she minded a brisk walk to the village store – putting her coat on over her pyjamas for the second time in twenty-four hours – but that crank Mr Fremlin (Mr Gremlin in her mind) would so want to yak, as if it wasn’t bad enough that she had to gird herself for the intense conversation she was undoubtedly about to have at 10 a.m. with Miss Virginia Smythson-Balby. As a precaution against this, she stuffed some wads of cotton-wool into one cheek, preparing to pantomime and point to her swollen face, implying that she couldn’t talk to the grocer on account of toothache. Matter of fact, now she came to remember it, this was dimly true. She did have some residual aching in one tooth; probably why the idea had suggested itself to her. Perhaps the Earl Soham store stocked tincture of myrrh or clove oil.

  It didn’t. It sold Fry’s Chocolate Cream and Gold Cup Jaffa Juice and Limmits cookies and a brand new newspaper, the Sun, which she bought too when the old Gremlin pressed it on her, though privately she thought it looked about as goddamn awful as one might expect. ‘Election soon,’ he’d said. ‘Wilson’s the man for me. We do it differently to you Yanks. Quieter, you know.’

  She almost replied, ‘I’m hardly a Yank. I’ve lived in Europe most of my life,’ but the cotton-wool in her cheek prevented it. Infuriating. Of course everyone knew who she was. Hadn’t he even greeted her, as she’d entered, by name? She glanced down at the headline, read its bouncy ‘Good morning! Yes, it’s time for a new newspaper . . .’ swallowed the protest and shook her head, as if in pain. At any rate, one oughtn’t to need to explain that one didn’t think of oneself as American, not really; more of a wandering European. She also picked up a packet of Limmits, orange flavour, as the idea of cookies ‘medically tested and approved’, cookies you could ‘eat to help you slim’ amused her. Perhaps the Smythson-Balby girl would be fat and she could offer her one. Once outside the little store she glanced up and down the street but there was only a man trundling an empty wheelbarrow and whistling; he tipped his cloth cap to her as if they were at a tea-dance. Her stuffed-cheek ruse did the trick and, with one hand cradling the aching jaw, she managed not to speak at all, only to point and wave.

  On the walk home she thought of the portrait she’d begun, from memory, of Sam. Fall colours – muted, soft – apricots and greens – building up to the blonde, the bedazzling blonde of Sam’s hair. It was naturalistic in style and she knew – suspected – Sam would despise that. Realism was something unfashionable these days. But no matter – soon she would be able to work on it again, with the live model.

  Just as she reached her own front door, there was Ronnie, leaning on his bike. She registered with mild annoyance the fresh white sports shirt, rolled-up sleeves, the bleached hairs on his forearms; the sense of glowing health and cheer that always emanated from Ronnie. Yesterday he had arrived at the same time, insisting he showed her the great elm at Nayland, which had escaped the plague. Today she was armed against such enthusiasms. She removed the soaked wad of cotton-wool from inside her cheek. ‘I don’t care to sightsee today. I’ve barely unpacked. She’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been snooping around and it seems it’s not just a piece for the Ipswich Star or whatever codswallop she told you. She’s a biographer.’

  Ronnie leaned his bike against the dead roses and crisped camellias still lingering at the back door of Bridge Cottage – several shrivelled leaves crumbled to the ground – and followed her into the kitchen. He glanced around the smoky, dark little room: red-tiled floor, low ceiling beams, some old flower-sprig curtains; a faintly fishy smell as if an aquarium bubbled there. On the table there were mugs still wrapped in their newspaper, a shoebox of packed cutlery. He found the kettle inside a cooking pot in one of the packing cases and filled it with water from a spluttering faucet. Taking matches from his back pocket, he lit the stove, began busying himself with unwrapping things for her with the proprietary ease of long familiarity, opening the packages from Mr Fremlin’s and spooning tea into the tea-pot.

  ‘I brought you more bits of painted boat and driftwood,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ve popped it in the shed. My dear, there are some excellent pieces of Southwold pier in that little lot. They’ll make a splendid salty blue blaze.’

  ‘I don’t care to have you here when she arrives,’ she told him. ‘It will look funny. It will find its way into the article. “Miss Highsmith’s gentleman friend, renowned local poet . . .”’

  ‘I’ll slip out the back. She’ll think I was the grocer’s boy, delivering.’

  The kettle screamed at them and Ronnie poured water over the tea-leaves.

  ‘I’d better put something else on,’ she muttered, and went
upstairs to change from the coat and pyjamas into Levi’s and a pressed white shirt.

  ‘Quit trying to help me,’ she said, buckling her braided lizard-skin belt, when she reappeared.

  ‘So secretive! Don’t worry, I’m leaving. I’m sure our journalist – did you know she was the Right Honourable Virginia Smythson-Balby? – will assume that a single gentleman like me, living alone and writing all that nature poetry, must be a fairy, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Fix me a Scotch before you go,’ she said, handing him the bottle.

  ‘And how did you find this charming place?’ asked Virginia Smythson-Balby, legs awkwardly crossed, mug of tea perching on the uppermost knee in its pantyhose. The living room was cold; Pat had not fixed the fire. It was dark too, and unfurnished apart from the sofa, a red leather chair that Pat sat on, the boxes, the Turkish rug, and a lamp at such a strange angle that it looked like someone with their head thrown back, laughing. Smythson-Balby – was she really titled or had Ronnie been teasing? – had arrived in such a breathless, over-excited state that Pat had feared the girl was about to have an asthma attack. She had been shaking, as she came in through the kitchen door, and looked horribly as if she had wanted to hug her. Fans! Ghastly. She had worn bright yellow patent knee-high boots, and when Pat suggested she took them off, they were unzipped and abandoned, like peeled banana skins. As the girl stood up, she seemed at last to compose herself.

  Good legs, Pat noted. Calves not too muscled, but well-formed. Lacrosse player, she reckoned, or whatever it was that English schoolgirls took seriously, these days. Smythson-Balby had given up on the pen and notebook for the moment. They lay menacingly beside her on the sofa.