Telling Tales Read Free Page B

so hard to explain. Emma could hardly just say, Well, it’s Sunday afternoon. Although in her mind that was all the explanation needed. Sundays were often tense, all of them in together, trying to be a model family. Nothing much to do after church.
    That Sunday had been worse than usual. Emma had some good memories of family meals at Springhead, occasions when Robert was expansive, telling silly jokes that had them doubled up with laughter, when her mother waxed passionate about some book she was reading. Then it almost seemed that the good times they had enjoyed in York had returned. But those had all been before Abigail died. That Sunday lunch had marked a watershed, a change in atmosphere. Or so it would seem to Emma later. She remembered the meal with unusual clarity: the four of them sitting at the table, Christopher uncommunicative, caught up as usual with some project of his own, Mary dishing out the food with a sort of desperate energy, talking all the time, Robert unusually silent. Emma had taken the silence as a good sign and slipped her request into the conversation, hoping almost that he wouldn’t notice.
    “It is OK if I go round to Abigail’s later?”
    “I’d rather you didn’t.” He’d spoken quite calmly, but she had been furious.
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t think it’s too much to ask you to spend one afternoon with your family, do you?”
    She’d thought that was so unfair! She spent every Sunday cramped in the horrible damp house while her friends were off enjoying themselves. Never before had she made a fuss.
    She’d helped him wash the dishes as usual but all the time her fury had been growing, building like a flooded river behind a dam. Later, when her mother had come in to see how they were getting on, she’d said, “I’m going out now, to see Abigail. I won’t be late.” Speaking to Mary, not to him. And she’d rushed past them, deaf to her mother’s frantic requests.
    All that seemed stupid and trivial once she knew Abigail was dead. The temper tantrum of a two-year-old. And with her mother, sitting beside her, and the smart woman looking at her, waiting, it was even harder to explain her frustration, her need to escape.
    “I was bored,” she said in the end. “You know, Sunday afternoons.”
    The policewoman had nodded, seeming to understand.
    Abigail was the only person I know. It’s miles by the road. There’s a short-cut across the fields.”
    “Did you know Abigail would be in?” the policewoman asked.
    “I saw her at youth club on Friday night. She said she was going to cook her father a special Sunday tea. To say thank you.”
    “What did she want to thank her father for?” Though Emma had the impression that the policewoman already knew the answer, or at least had guessed at it. How could she? Had she had time to find out? Perhaps it was just that she carried round with her an aura of omnipotence.
    “For asking Jeanie Long to leave, so they could have the house to themselves again.”
    And at that the policewoman nodded once more, satisfied, as if she was a teacher and Emma had answered a test question correctly.
    “Who is Jeanie Long?” she asked and once more Emma had the impression that she already knew the answer.
    “She was Mr. Mantel’s girlfriend. She used to live with them.”
    The policewoman made notes in a book but she made no comment.
    “Tell me all you can about Abigail.”
    Emma, no longer the rebellious teenager that had been shocked out of her was eager to please and started talking at once. Once she started there was so much to say.
    “Abigail was my best friend. When we moved here it was hard, different, you know. We were used to the city. Abigail had lived here most of her life but she didn’t really fit in either.”
    It had been something they’d talked about at sleep-overs, how much they had in common. How they were soulmates. But even at the time Emma had known that wasn’t true. They’d both been misfits that was all. Abigail