A sheet of newspaper flapped across the ground by my feet.
That story was three weeks old. For the people who made the papers it was already over.
When I looked back down the hill the Jack Russell man was still there but the girl was gone.
What she’d said, though, that preyed on my mind. I knew children made up stories constantly but I knew also that these rarely came out of nowhere and I wondered if there might be some truth in it. If she had not known where I lived when she first spoke to me, why would she invent things about my house?
No one had said anything about a murder when we first bought the place, but it’s hardly the kind of thing an estate agent is likely to advertise. I felt a flicker of something, a stir of interest, like a piece of string uncoiling deep in my gut.
I thought I might finally have found my next book.
Roy was out when I got home, as he so often was. When he wasn’t staring at his photographs in the front bedroom he was on one of his walks, endless, meandering rambles along the roads and country lanes that skirted the town. On those days it was as if he was afraid to be inside, as if our house had become a symbol of confinement and oppression. I had worried about this at first, concerned he might cause or become the victim of an accident. Now I was simply relieved to find him gone.
I booted up the computer and googled our address. I was amazed by how many results there were. The usual estate agents’ adverts and map references, but the majority of hits seemed to relate to a woman named Allison Rand. I had never heard of her before, but a few quick searches found me the information I needed. She was forty-five years old, and had taught history at one of the local secondary schools. She had been convicted of the murder of her two infant daughters.
There was a verdict of cot death on the first child, but when the second had died eighteen months later and in identical circumstances Allison Rand was arrested and charged. Steven Rand, her husband and a teacher at the same school, divorced her and sold the house. Allison Rand protested her innocence throughout.
The case had an air of desperate tragedy about it but Allison Rand seemed more like victim than villain, and in any case it didn’t feel right. The girl on the allotments had said the murder had happened a long time ago, yet the Rand case was in the relatively recent past. My first reaction was of disappointment, but the more I read, the more I wondered if there wasn’t an article in it at least, something I could sell to a magazine on the back of my last novel.
“How I Came to Live with a Murderess”, that kind of thing.
It was a cheap trick but at least it was something. It might even help me break out of my block.
If Allison Rand would talk to me, that was. The idea of making contact with her was strangely exciting, and once again I felt that stirring, that sense I was on to something. I felt better than I had done in weeks.
I wrote to Allison Rand, care of the governor of the secure mental hospital where she was being treated, and asked if I could come and see her. There was no reply so I wrote again. After about a week I received a terse reply from the governor’s office, informing me of the visiting hours and that I was free to put in a formal request. I had the feeling I was in for a long wait, so I took a chance and wrote to Allison Rand personally. As an afterthought I enclosed a copy of my latest novel. Not long afterwards I received a brief note from her, telling me she had added my name to the list of approved visitors. I sent her a postcard by return, informing her that I would come the following week.
I didn’t tell Roy what I was doing. He was due to return to his unit in a couple of days. On the day I confirmed my appointment with Allison Rand, he returned to the house after dark, stinking of beer and cigarettes. He looked sheepish, almost guilty, and for the first time since he’d come home he seemed eager to talk.
“I’m sorry, Marian,” he said. “I’ve been acting like an arsehole. I don’t know who I am any more.”
He was always conciliatory when he wanted sex. I had come off the pill while he was away, and felt a rush of annoyance with him for his thoughtlessness, for the selfish way he assumed I would be ready to patch things up the moment he felt he needed a little comfort. Where had he been when I needed comfort? I didn’t refuse him, though. I told myself it was because I couldn’t face another row, and that was true. But mainly it was because I still loved him. I supposed I always would.
“We should have kids,” he said before he fell asleep. His arm lay across my shoulders and for the first time in many months he seemed fully relaxed. “Wouldn’t that be great? A house like this needs kids in it.”
I had been on the verge of sleep myself, but his words had me wide awake again. For some reason I found it disturbing, shocking even, that he should make a connection between the house and having children. For a moment I considered waking him, telling him about the Rand case, but I didn’t do it. I knew how crazy it would sound if I did, and Roy had enough craziness in him for the two of us.
I thought instead of the girl on the allotments, her baggy cardigan and too-big skirt. I wondered if her mother knew she was skipping school.
“You write about murder, then? That’s what you do?”
We were in the hospital visitors’ lounge, a large, light, square room overlooking open countryside. We had been talking for about half an hour, the usual introductory pleasantries followed by my own vague questions about hospital routine. It was all basic stuff, background material at best, and I found the constant presence of the male security staff disconcerting. Yet in spite of these restrictions I found myself enjoying the conversation. The newspapers had portrayed Allison Rand as a plain-faced, mousy little woman, the archetypical dried-up blue stocking. In reality she was much more attractive, with small hands and firm cheeks, her grey eyes articulate and clear. She was like a bird, I thought. A wren perhaps, or a hedge sparrow. She was dressed simply, in clean faded jeans and a check cotton shirt. If I hadn’t recognized her at once from her photograph, I would have assumed she was an off-duty nurse.
She was clearly an intelligent woman. Her question about murder came completely out of the blue.
“I write crime novels,” I said. “I don’t suppose I can tape this?” I had been obliged to leave my phone at reception, along with my purse and my car keys, but I still had my iPod, which also had a Dictaphone function. Rand glanced furtively in the direction of one of the uniformed male nurses and then raised an eyebrow. I lifted my hand to push back my hair and, as I lowered it again, I brushed my fingers against the iPod’s tiny ‘on’ switch. Rand’s neat, lipstickless mouth curled in a half-smile.
“I don’t mind what you do,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll be much use to you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I haven’t committed a crime. I’ve never even stolen stationery from the school supply cupboard.” She gave a harsh laugh, and for the first time I saw the brittleness beneath her apparent composure. “I enjoyed your book, though I didn’t expect to. Perhaps it’s true what they say, that deep down we’re all in love with violence.” She folded her hands in her lap and clenched them together. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I’m going to anyway. I didn’t want children. I don’t mean I actively disliked them, but I enjoyed my studies and I enjoyed my job and later on I enjoyed being married. I didn’t want children to change things, as I knew they would. But Steven was keen, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. We didn’t conceive, though. Years went by and nothing happened and in the end I stopped thinking about it. Then suddenly there Sophie was.
“I loved her from the moment I knew I was pregnant. One day there was my old life, and the next there was this new one, something I had never guessed at, something that swallowed the entire world as I had known it, but I didn’t care. What I cared about was Sophie, and when she died I stopped caring about anything. Even when I got pregnant again with Alana I didn’t care, because I knew already that I would lose her too. Perhaps there’s a writer out there somewhere who can convey what that feels like, but I doubt it.”
She took off her glasses. The round, wire-framed lenses reflected the red Formica surface of the table, twin versions of Mars. Without them she looked both younger and more desperate.
“What do you mean, you knew you would lose her, too?” I said. I felt she was holding something back, either because she felt guilty or because she didn’t judge me worthy of knowing. I wondered if it was this way she had of acting superior even when she didn’t mean to that had turned the jury against her. I knew the actual evidence had always been minimal.
“It was the house,” she said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?” She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and began polishing her glasses. It crossed my mind then that she was guilty after all. That she had killed her two baby girls, and doing it had driven her insane.
“Noticed what?” I said. In the whole of the hour I’d spent with her she had not made a single reference to the fact that I was living in what had once been her home. Now it seemed it had been at the forefront of her mind
