Free The Crooked House by Christobel Kent Page A

up against the light.
    It was silent – or almost. She had passed no more than a handful of houses when she heard it, a sound you never heard in London. The whine and clink of a milk float. It appeared now, swaying in the turning to a little close as she crossed the road, jerking to a halt to let her past and she turned her head to examine the milkman. He yawned, a stranger, twenty or so, but he still wore the old-fashioned white coat with the dairy’s insignia.
    The boy who’d died in a hit-and-run had been found beside the road by another milkman coming in to the village at dawn, pulling his float to a halt on the verge. The man had gone himself to tell the boy’s mother, taking off his cap at her back door, the float still loaded with undelivered milk. Not the first time the boy had stayed out all night, only this time not drunk in a hedge but dead. His brother had told Esme about the milkman, days later when he reappeared at school, black rings under his eyes and his breath sour with sleeplessness. A friend of Joe’s. The name was there in some recess of her memory along with those of his brothers, but Alison didn’t pursue them, not now. Her boys had been all the woman had, she remembered that: three sons, her husband had drowned in a storm just after the youngest’s birth.
    Leaving him behind her, Alison heard the sound of the milk float recede. As she headed down, the village street narrowing to the occasional glimpse of marshland, her breath burned in her chest. She’d never been much of a runner: bad at pacing, reluctant to take instruction. She had a tendency to speed up, and to let her heart beat too fast. She’d bought the trainers to get herself through a bad patch a year or so earlier, the time the boy wouldn’t stop calling. Exercise resets the body, the counsellor had said. Even if it’s just to fill the time, just to get out of the house. Just to stop yourself thinking.
    Shebounced, slowing herself down. The shoes were perished with underuse and she could feel the tarmac through them. She dodged to the left and down between tall brick villas put up by the same Victorian developer as had built the crooked house out on the edge of the marsh, back when Saltleigh must have looked like a prospect, the wind off the estuary healthful and full of ozone, and not a muddy backwater. Names like Avonlea and Camelot and Burnside on weathered stone lintels and built in pairs, propping each other up where Creek House had been left to slip and tilt alone. Some were double-glazed, with rows of china birds and artificial flowers in the windows and polished cars out front, but there were others still tatty as she remembered, with overgrown front gardens and bicycles rusting in the salt air.
    She felt the road surface grow uneven as the houses thinned and the village petered out. At the end of the road there should be fields with a path between them that ended on the sea wall, but instead she saw new brick, link fencing, some kind of development. Alison felt her breathing turn erratic. She kept on, all the same. It was all right, she saw as she got closer, there were no more than a handful of houses, and unfinished at that, with churned mud between the buildings. She slowed to negotiate the fence. She didn’t stop altogether: some superstitious ticking in her head set up when she had started to run told her, Not till you get there. Don’t stop till you’re there.
    And there it was, at the last minute, a lopsided arthritic tree she recognised, and a gap in the undergrowth she knew of old. Still there. She darted down it. The foliage closed around her. The air trapped between the hedges smelled of dusty dogshit, and Alison felt the sweat prickle between her shoulder blades, her eyes stung and she squeezed them shut.
    This had been their route up into the village, she and Joe on errands to the post office or the cluttered village mini-market or the baker’s with its cottage window half full of plainloaves and iced buns