Free The Crooked House by Christobel Kent

big boat glide up the brown river, a windsurfer dipping and swerving in its path. The big boat silent under sail, unable to slow or stop, a woman lifting her hand to her mouth as the windsurfer tipped and flattened and was under. A horrified laugh soon stifled as they all watch and wait for the bright triangle to reappear, the big boat’s master stepping leisurely out from behind his wheel to look. They wait, and wait.
    A boy’s body in a ditch.
    A young girl walking in the street hairless from chemotherapy, alone as if she’d escaped a bomb blast.
    Not statistically unusual. Cells mutate; accidents happen. Every place had those tragedies, London must have a hundred million of them, people die wherever you go, for reasons just like this. No such thing as a cursed place.
    She didn’t sleep, and then she did. As the sky lightened she sank like a stone drifting soundless into deep water and she was blessed by unconsciousness for a bare half-hour. And then it was over and she was jackknifing back to the surface, gasping for breath. Steadying herself she reached for her glasses, careful to lift them off the side table without a clatter. Beside her on the bed Paul didn’t stir, his face pale and still in the early light. This man. How could she think it would work? A man who could sit and work through historical matter for hours at a time, patient and unmoving, a man who never raised his voice. And her? He thought she was the same, with her glasses and her quiet facility with numbers and her refusal to need him – he thought her cool and in control.
    But there was the gun, buried away in its stained cloth. Alison watched, remembering the thing’s cold weight in her hand, and his eyelids fluttered as something played out behind them. Did he dream of chaos, of battle scenes? She thought of him stroking her, stroking until she was calmed. She imagined the gun as some historical artefact to him, a totem, atouchstone. Perhaps he brought order to chaos in his sleep and the gun served as a warning from a violent past.
    Six o’clock. She slid out of bed.
    Outside there was a wind. Alison put her face between the curtains and saw the heavy cypresses being buffeted but the sky was a clear bright blue, a couple of clouds scudding fast and high. She opened her suitcase silently and extracted her trainers, the old shorts, the sports bra she hadn’t worn in months; Paul wasn’t to know she’d run barely a handful of times in the previous year. Pausing in her scruffy disguise she went back to the suitcase and took her mother’s scarf, twisting it into a bandana around her head. She hadn’t known how exposed the cropped hair would make her feel.
    Six ten as she closed the door carefully behind her. She calculated she had an hour, maybe two, before it started looking weird. She’d left a scribbled note,
Back soon!!
The exclamation marks would give it away, she realised, even as she started downstairs – not her style, or Paul’s. Too late.
    Downstairs there was some life, she heard kitchen sounds and a voice raised but mercifully the reception desk itself was empty. She could imagine Jan looking at her curiously, storing the information for later, for Paul.
She’s an early bird.
The hotel’s door was on the latch and she slid it open and was out, tiptoeing over the gravel and on to the road, alone.
    The wind was warm and blustery, the sound of it in the trees exhilarated her as she headed down towards the sea, a cleansing rush inside her skull. It had been high summer when they’d come here first, the start of the holidays spent unloading the van in a green twilight and she and Joe skipping and running and getting in the way and the next morning a rinsed blue morning just like this. A new start.
    She began to run: making herself go slow, and breathe, down the blustery lane between hedges. The village appeared ahead of her, bleached and empty in the morning sun and she thoughtof the dingy little pub down on the waterfront shuttered