Midnight Is a Lonely Place

by Barbara Erskine

  ‘Go and ring Alison now.’ She turned on Sue as always, her anger and helplessness directed against her daughter instead of its true target. ‘And get dressed. You look like a slut.’

  To her surprise Sue got up at once, and she saw Joe glance at her surreptitiously from behind the paper. Perhaps she had spoken more forcefully than she had realised.

  ‘I will put marmalade on the list,’ she said calmly. ‘You will have to wait until I go to the shops again. There’s plenty of jam in the pantry.’ She smiled at her husband. ‘Or Marmite.’ She saw him shudder visibly, but to her surprise he said nothing. Meekly he larded his toast with butter and ate it plain. Well, if that was supposed to make her feel guilty it was not going to work. What were another few ounces of butter going to matter after the load of fat he had ladled into his body over the years?

  She turned and looked out of the kitchen window. It was vile outside. The sky was almost dark even though it was after nine. The wind from the east was flattening the trees in the orchard beyond the kitchen garden, and there were thin, melting drifts of snow over the grass. She shivered. It was still sleeting. On the bird table outside the window a flock of small birds fought over the bowl of melted fat and seed she had put out for them. The only thing about Joe’s diet which did please her was the amount of fat which dripped from his food and which she could make into bird pudding. She half smiled as she watched two robins squabbling with some sparrows. On the snowy grass beneath the bird table about fifty small birds foraged about for the seed she had scattered there.

  ‘Mum! Their phone’s out of order.’ A querulous wail came from Sue as she slammed down the receiver. ‘Hell and shit and fuck!’

  Joe looked up. ‘Go to your room, Susan,’ he bellowed.

  ‘But Dad. Allie’s got my notes. I’ve got to speak to her.’

  ‘I don’t care what she’s got.’ Something had at last pierced his lethargy. ‘No child of mine uses language like that in my house.’

  Cissy sipped her coffee, for once uninvolved. Let them work it out. Sue’s friendship with Alison was one she cultivated assiduously. The Lindseys were a pleasant family. Well spoken; well educated. Their lack of money was not their fault – poor Roger was so ill – but still Diana managed to run that house with a grace and style which Cissy envied.

  She turned away from the window and surveyed the thunderous scene at the table. ‘I’ll drive you down to Redall Farmhouse when I’ve put the lunch on,’ she said peaceably. ‘Then you can collect your notes and Allie can come back with us if she wants. In fact, they all can. I’ve got a huge joint this week. As you say, there will be plenty for everyone and it would be nice to have them over. In weather like this it’s not as though anyone can be doing anything outside.’ She smiled at her husband and her daughter, suddenly cheerful. Her depression had lifted as swiftly as it had fallen. The Lindseys would cheer them all up.

  XLVII

  Kate awoke suddenly with a start and lay staring up at the ceiling wondering where she was. Her head was spinning. Nothing about the room was familiar; she could not place it at all. A dull light was filtering through the closed orange curtains. She stared round at the overflowing shelves, the untidy desk with its computer, the posters on every inch of available wall space and then she closed her eyes again, defeated. She hadn’t the energy to sit up, but she knew she must. She lifted her wrist towards her face and squinted at her watch. A quarter past nine. She realised suddenly that under the duvet she was fully dressed. Cautiously she moved on the bed, easing herself nearer the edge, with a view to swinging her legs over the side, but every part of her body ached and for a moment she lay still, trying instead to force her brain into gear. What had happened last night? Why couldn’t she remember?

  She turned her face towards the door as a faint knock sounded. It was Patrick. He grinned. ‘Sorry it’s such a mess in here. I’ve brought you some tea.’

  Of course. Suddenly it was all flooding back. The horror and the fear; the cold and exhaustion. She levered herself up onto her elbow, and pushing the hair out of her eyes reached for the cup. ‘You’re a saint. I didn’t realise how thirsty I was. How is everybody?’

  ‘Alive, I guess.’ Patrick pulled the chair out from his desk and swivelling it round sat astride it, facing her. ‘What’s happening to us? What are we going to do?’

  She sipped at the scalding tea and thought for a moment.

  ‘We’re going to have to get up to the main road. We need help. A doctor; the police.’ She paused, frowning. ‘How is Greg?’

  ‘His foot is all inflamed. Mum says he ought to be in hospital.’

  The wave of anguish which swept over her surprised her. Greg was the only strong one amongst them; the only one who could protect them if … If what? If they were attacked?

  Almost as though he had read her thoughts Patrick shook his head. ‘Whoever murdered Bill must be long gone by now. In our car. It was stolen yesterday. I’m going up to the Farnboroughs’ on foot. It won’t take me more than an hour.’

  She drank some more tea, feeling it flowing through her veins like some kind of elixir of life. ‘You can’t go on your own. I’ll go with you. A quick wash and something to eat –’ she was surprised suddenly to realise just how hungry she was, ‘– and I’ll be ready for anything. What’s the weather like?’

  Patrick stood up. He leaned across his desk and pulled back the curtains, letting in a dim brownish light. ‘Not very nice. It’s still windy and there’s been quite a bit of snow. They are forecasting blizzards –’ He broke off suddenly.

  ‘What is it?’ The lurch of panic in Kate’s stomach told her she was not nearly as calm as she had thought. All her fear was still there, under the surface, waiting to flood back through her.

  ‘The car!’ Patrick’s voice was strangled. Putting down the cup Kate lurched out of bed and went to stand beside him. ‘Where? Damn it, my specs are in my jacket.’ She screwed up her eyes as she looked out across the snow-covered grass towards the edge of the saltings.

  ‘Out there, on the marsh.’ Patrick’s voice was awed.

  The Volvo was standing some hundred yards from the grass and sand at the edge of the salting, balanced on high sections of grass-topped mud. Beneath its wheels, the tide was rippling merrily out of the creek leaving a curtain of weed draped on the car’s bumper.

  ‘Is there anyone in it?’ Kate could only make out the outline from this distance.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Patrick sounded distracted. ‘How could it have got there? No one could have driven it.’

  ‘Not even at low tide?’

  ‘Kate, look at the height of the ground it’s standing on! Those are like little islands. At high tide those grass patches are above sea level. They must be four feet off the ground. There is no way that car could have got there, no way.’

  ‘The tide must have carried it. There was a terrific wind last night – ’

  ‘Blowing this way. Off the sea. That’s a car, Kate. A bloody great Volvo. It’s not a Dinky toy. If it got in the sea it would sink.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ She pushed her hands deep into her pockets, aware that she was shivering. ‘Can we walk out there? When the tide’s gone out a bit?’

  He nodded absently. ‘I’ll have to tell Dad.’

  ‘I’ll come downstairs.’

  She stood back and watched as he headed for the door. He was in a daze. She glanced back at the window. The car was still there, the windscreen glittering in a stray, watery ray of sunshine.

  On her way downstairs she glanced into Alison’s room through the open door. The girl lay unmoving, her hair spread across the pillow. The teddy lay on the floor, a hot water bottle near it. Kate stood for a moment watching her. She had a feeling Alison was not asleep.

  ‘Allie?’ she whispered. ‘Allie are you awake?’

  There was no reply.

  Roger was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, which judging by the skin on the top was cold and unappetising. Di
ana was standing near him watching the toaster.

  ‘Did you manage to sleep?’ She smiled at Kate and indicated the coffee pot on the hob.

  Kate made for it gratefully. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Pour Greg one too, will you Kate, and take it through to him. I think he’d be glad to see you,’ Roger said. He mustered a valiant smile. ‘Then you and I and Paddy will grab a bit of breakfast. By then the tide will be low enough to make our way out to the family barouche. Those bastards. I can’t think how the hell they got it there, but it won’t be worth a tinker’s ha’penny after the tide has been in it.’

  ‘The insurance will pay, Dad.’ Patrick had emerged from the study.

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Roger’s face was grim as he watched Kate make her way across the room with the two mugs of coffee.

  Greg was propped up against a pile of pillows and cushions on the camp bed in the study. Someone had made a makeshift cage across his foot to keep the weight of the bed-clothes off it, and though Kate could see the pain in his face as he grinned at her, he looked immeasurably better than he had the night before.

  ‘How are you?’ She knelt to hand him the coffee, and then sat down on the floor beside him. ‘I hear the foot is not too good.’

  ‘I’ll live.’ He reached out a hand to her. ‘And that fact I owe to you. It hasn’t escaped me that you saved my life about five times last night. That’s some debt I owe you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Embarrassed she looked down into her coffee. It was thick and black and rich.

  ‘I know. Anyone would have done it.’ He was laughing.

  ‘Probably. Yes.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway. If I had been you I would probably have left me there to rot and thought it served me right after the way I’ve buggered you about.’

  She smiled. ‘Poetically put.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Greg reached out to her again. ‘Kate, I had the most peculiar dream while I was asleep. I think we are all still in terrible danger. I’ve told Paddy and now I’m telling you. You’ll think I’m hallucinating; you probably think I was hallucinating last night – ’

  ‘If you were, then we both were,’ she put in softly. ‘We both saw that figure.’

  ‘Was it because we were expecting to?’ He shook his head and releasing her hand, reached for his coffee cup again. ‘When you came here I decided to scare you away. You know that. The joke, if it was a joke, got rapidly out of hand. We all began to imagine things …’ He paused, his attention riveted to the depths of his cup. ‘In that state, maybe, what I saw was dictated by my own mind …’ He paused again. ‘Thomas De Quincey puts it rather neatly, if I remember it right. “If a man who only talks about oxen becomes an opium eater, then he will dream about oxen” – is that right?’ He cast her a quick glance under his eyelashes, and did not miss the look of astonishment in her face. “‘And if a man who is a philosopher has an opium dream then it will be … humani nihil – ”’

  “‘Humani nihil a se alienum putat.”’ Kate finished for him. ‘Well, well, I would never have suspected that you had read The Confessions.’

  He smiled, the look of mischief cutting across the greyness of pain. ‘Well, I used to be quite literate, you know. I even know what it means. “He believes nothing human strange” – yes?’ He waited for her comment. When she said nothing he went on, ‘I even read up my Byron when I heard what Lady Muck was up to in my cottage.’

  ‘Lady Muck?’ She was even more astonished.

  ‘If you’d known I called you that you would have left me to the sharks.’

  ‘Indeed I would.’ Thoughtfully she took a sip of coffee. ‘You haven’t told me yet what you dreamed of. What phantasmagoria haunted you?’

  ‘Marcus.’

  She bit her lip. ‘Who else.’

  ‘He tried to get me, you know, on the beach. He tried to take me over. I fought him …’ He paused. ‘In my dream he was trying to get inside my head again.’ He shifted his weight uncomfortably in the bed. ‘It was the most awful dream I have ever had in my life, and yet I can’t remember more than a few bits.’

  ‘You were awoken perhaps by a stranger from Porlock.’ Kate smiled at him, trying to tease him out of his bleak mood.

  ‘All right, all right. Believe it or not, I know that one too. All I remember is that he was trying to get inside my head, and that if I had let him he would have got into this house. And that was what he wanted. To get to us. Because we know his secret.’

  She was watching him. ‘And what is his secret?’

  He glanced at her looking for signs of disbelief or scorn. ‘That he killed Claudia. But there’s more to it than that. Much more. Otherwise why would he be so angry? And so desperate?’

  The silence in the room grew uncomfortable. There had been no humour in his eyes; no relieving lightness. What she had seen there, behind the narrowed grey-green irises, was fear. She swallowed, plaiting her fingers together nervously.

  ‘Who do you think killed Bill?’ she asked at last. Her voice was husky.

  Greg heaved a sigh. ‘I don’t know what to think. Has Allie said anything, do you know?’

  ‘Patrick told me she said it was Marcus.’

  ‘Did you tell them what Bill said?’

  ‘No.’

  Greg eased himself higher against the pillows. His foot was throbbing painfully, stabs of hot pain shooting up as far as his knee. He had not needed to see the inflamed, discoloured flesh to know it was infected. ‘Has she woken up?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She was fast asleep when I came down. Greg, I think the important thing is to get a doctor here for you – and for her. Patrick and I are going to walk up to the main road.’ She glanced at the window. ‘It doesn’t seem quite so frightening in daylight.’

  He reached out and touched her hand again. ‘I’m so sorry this has all happened, Kate. Poor old Byron.’

  She gave a rueful smile. ‘He’ll wait.’

  ‘You know,’ he hesitated. ‘I think I’m quite glad you came after all.’ Leaning towards her he kissed her forehead gently. He ran a finger down the line of her cheek. ‘You’ve got good bones. When all this is over I’ll paint your portrait.’

  She smiled, surprised at the shiver of excitement which had whispered across her flesh in spite of her exhaustion. ‘Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?’

  ‘Oh, yes. People who know me well would kill for such a compliment.’ The humour in his eyes was hidden very deep – a mere quirk of the eye muscle.

  She studied his face for a moment, then half reluctantly she stood up. ‘We know where the car is.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She laughed. A tight little laugh which hovered for a moment on the edge of hysteria. ‘It’s out on the saltings; in the middle of the water. No one could have driven it there.’

  He said nothing, his gaze holding hers, then he too gave an uncomfortable laugh. ‘Well, well. Perhaps he was only used to driving chariots; a Volvo must be a bit different.’

  ‘You don’t seriously think – ’

  ‘I don’t know what I think.’ His patience snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, what can I do from here? Just be careful. Make Paddy take the gun and watch every step of the way. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. There is someone out there who is out to kill. It seems to me it doesn’t matter much if he’s a real flesh-and-blood homicidal maniac or a ghostly one, the effect seems to be the same.’

  ‘So you don’t think it was Alison.’ She had turned towards the door.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t Alison. She wouldn’t have the strength even if she wanted to kill someone. And she had nothing to do with the car.’ He slumped back, overwhelmed by helplessness and frustration and pain. She looked down at him, hesitating for a moment longer, then silently she opened the door and slipped away.

  Roger pushed a fresh cup of coffee at her across the table as she walked back into the kitchen. ‘Allie is awake. Diana and Paddy are with her.’ He gestured her towards a chair. He l
ooked only slightly more rested than the night before; there was still an alarmingly blue tinge about his lips as Kate sat down opposite him.

  ‘How is she?’

  He shook his head. ‘I thought I’d wait till they came down. She doesn’t want us all up there crowding into her room.’ Besides, I can’t face climbing the stairs again, not yet. The thought, though unspoken, showed clearly in his eyes.

  Kate looked away, painfully aware how sick he was. ‘As soon as Paddy comes down I think we should go for a doctor.’

  ‘And the police have to be informed.’ He looked down into his coffee mug, stirring thoughtfully, watching the movement of the liquid, with its miniaturised reflection of the overhead lamp. ‘I know you all have some crazy idea that there is a ghost out there, Kate. Get real, as Allie would say. Ghosts do not beat large, strong men to death.’ He looked up at her at last. ‘Be careful. Please be careful –’ He broke off, and she saw his face light with a smile which hovered around his mouth for a few seconds and then died. Following his gaze, she swivelled round on her chair. Alison was standing by the staircase door. Wearing her nightshirt, her hair tumbled on her shoulders, she was staring round the room as though she had never seen it before.

  ‘Allie?’ Roger stood up, pushing his chair back over the floor tiles with a scraping sound which tore at the nerves. ‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’

  She moved her head slightly, as though she were having difficulty focussing, and looked towards them vaguely, her body swaying from side to side. Behind her, Patrick appeared in the doorway. His face was white. ‘Allie?’ He dodged round her. ‘Allie, sit down. Sit down and I’ll get you something nice to drink.’ He gestured at Roger and Kate frantically behind his back.

  They glanced at each other. The atmosphere in the room was suddenly electric. Alison took another step forward, placing one foot in front of the other with enormous care as though the floor were swaying like the deck of a ship. As she moved towards them the two cats, who had been asleep near the fire, leaped off the chair where they had been entwined and streaked across the floor. Within seconds they had both disappeared through the cat flap. Kate stared after them, puzzled. Their eyes had been wild; their hackles and tails fluffed up in terror. Frowning, she glanced back at Alison who had stopped again and it struck her suddenly that the girl looked as though she was drunk.