by Louise Voss
‘But that’s even more hypocritical!’ she wailed.
Pete shook her shoulders gently. ‘It’s not about you now. Your friend’s husband’s died. She needs you.’
Meredith sniffed hard. ‘Right. Yes, you’re right … OK. Let’s do this.’
She glanced nervously in the direction of the open door. To Pete, it looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, a place so dark that it would inevitably suck the breath from anyone venturing inside. He felt sick at the thought that there really was a dead body behind the door in front of them. He’d never seen one before. They stared mutely at one another, then Pete nodded towards the entrance.
‘You only have to go in for a second, and I’m right here.’ Something occurred to him. He put his hand on her arm and whispered close to her ear. ‘We should just, er, check one thing…’
‘What?’
‘You said he’d either had a heart attack or been strangled, because he looked so purple, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. When you “find” him, we should check his neck … just in case…’
Meredith frowned. ‘Surely nobody would kill Ralph!’ she whispered back. ‘I wasn’t being serious. He always has a red face, and I opened his shirt to do CPR, so I’d have seen if there was anything wrong with his neck.’ She paused. ‘I was only out of the place for a couple of minutes!’
‘Burglars, seeing if there was anything worth nicking?’
‘Oh, come on. In the ice house? Burglars would go straight to the house!’
Pete looked through the bushes and across the empty lawns, worried that Leonard would pop up again at any minute. ‘Well, we can’t stay out here talking about it all day.’ Meredith’s face had gone green again, presumably at the prospect of examining Ralph’s corpse. But she took a deep breath, swallowed hard and pushed open the ice house.
There was nobody there.
8
Meredith
Meredith stared in disbelief at the earth floor. The only signs that Ralph had ever been there were the buttons she had ripped off his shirt to perform CPR – unnecessarily, but she hadn’t been thinking straight. Some part of her brain must have been blindly assuming that someone would be arriving with the defibrillator, and had made her follow her first aid training. But of course you didn’t need bare flesh to do CPR. And there had been no-one to bring a defibrillator.
Pete looked over her shoulder, his breath hot in her ear, his fingers digging into her shoulder with the shock. ‘What the hell? Have you got the right place?’
‘Of course I bloody well have,’ she snapped. ‘How many ice houses do you think there are? He’s gone!’
‘All right, all right,’ he said, trying to placate her by rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb, but she jerked away from him, her heart pounding with fear. ‘He must have just been unconscious, and woken up,’ he said. ‘This is good news, it means he’s alive! Ring him.’
‘But he was dead,’ Meredith said with bewilderment, clutching the door frame to hold herself up. ‘No question.’
‘He can’t have been. This isn’t the frigging Resurrection! Ring him,’ he insisted.
She took her mobile out of her pocket and scrolled to his name. ‘I’m phoning a dead man,’ she muttered. ‘This is insane.’
‘And lo! The stone was rolled away,’ Pete added, without a smile.
They both held their breath as the phone rang once, twice, three times … then the voicemail kicked in. The sound of Ralph’s cheerful, booming voice instructing her to leave a message nearly broke Meredith. She killed the call and dropped to her hands and knees to pick up all the buttons scattered on the damp floor.
‘Someone’s moved his body.’ She stared up over her shoulder at Pete, who was leaning against the doorjamb, scratching his stubble, his forehead furrowed.
‘You think I’m losing my marbles, or having a breakdown or something,’ she said. ‘I can see it in your eyes. But I haven’t made it up. What do you think these are doing here, then?’
She held out her hand to show him the four buttons she’d collected, stuck to her palm by the cold sweat she had burst out in. She peeled them off and put them in her skirt pocket. She was pretty sure there hadn’t been more than four, although she kept scanning the floor in case.
‘I don’t, Mez, honestly. Obviously something happened, Ralph passed out, but—’
‘Pete! How many times do I have to say it? He hadn’t passed out; he had no pulse. HE WASN’T BREATHING AT ALL. I’d know. I’ve done a first-aid course once a year for the last decade … Can we get out of here? And – look at that.’
There were marks on the earth floor leading out of the door, like something heavy had been dragged through it.
Pete shook his head. ‘This is mental. Let’s go back to your place and have a drink.’
They left the ice house in silence and started to cross the lawn again. Meredith concentrated on taking deep breaths and focussing on the roses as they walked through the walled garden and then the vegetable patches, trying to find equilibrium in the deep-green leaves of kale and the frilly-edged cabbages.
She had always said she would never want to live anywhere else, but now she wasn’t sure if she would ever feel the same, not after this. If something really had happened to Ralph, everything would be different from then on. Until now, Meredith had always felt safer here than in a town, because nobody apart from Pete knew who she really was. Nobody had ever recognised her, not once in the many years she’d been working at Minstead.
Over all those years she had gradually become less scared that her attacker would find her and finish what – for reasons totally unknown to anybody apart from himself – he had started that night when he took her from her London home.
These fears had waned, but they were never far from the surface. A part of her, she knew, would never stop worrying. The nightmares would never completely leave her alone – in fact they’d flared up again recently, since the break-in; the severed dahlias. It didn’t take much.
And it was pretty isolated here – a five-minute drive to the nearest inhabited houses and, if the house was closed, apart from the security guards she was the only person on the whole fifteen-hundred-acre estate. Conversely, of course, during summer opening hours she could literally be pushing her way through the crowds of people admiring the vegetable gardens to get to her front gate.
The staff car park was just visible behind her cottage, up a small flight of stone steps.
‘Let’s just check if his car’s still here.’
They ascended the steps. The car park was almost empty, just Meredith’s car, Leonard’s – and Ralph’s, in the far corner. Meredith pointed at it. ‘There it is. Shit. That’s not a good sign.’
‘Come on,’ Pete said, seeing her face. ‘No point in panicking till we know what’s going on.’
He held out his hand and she took it gratefully.
She felt detached, as if she was looking down on herself and Pete as they walked back down the steps and opened the creaky front gate of the cottage. Of all the extraordinary, freaky things that had happened in her life, this had to be the worst.
The second worst.
She handed Pete the front-door key, not trusting herself with even the simple task of fitting it in the lock. As he jiggled it, he kept asking her over and over if she was sure Ralph really had been dead, until she felt like kicking him in the shin out of frustration and confusion, like she used to when they were kids.
‘Stop it Pete! He was dead as a frigging dodo. I told you, I did CPR on him for ages – ten minutes at least. He had no pulse, before or after. I don’t know how else to say it. Someone must have moved him. Just get the sodding door open.’
Stress was making her scratchy.
‘All right, all right! Chill out.’
Meredith scowled at him and jammed her hands in her skirt pockets. The door finally yielded and they crowded into the cool, dark flagstoned porch. She breathed in its familiar scent of lavender wax polish, dusty
old cushions, mouldy umbrellas and the permanent faint whiff of woodsmoke, desperate for the combination to soothe her.
She probed her fingers around the bottom of her left pocket for the buttons. They felt like grim trophies, pearls of teeth, and she shuddered as her fingers came in contact with them. She pulled them out and threw them out of the still-open front door, one by one, in different directions into the overflowing flowerbeds.
Pete looked at her as if she had gone crazy.
‘Best to get rid of them, don’t you think? Nobody’s going to search the garden.’
‘Hopefully not,’ he said, darkly. ‘Go and sit down, I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘Wine for me. There’s a bottle in the fridge.’
She went through to the front room, kicked off her shoes and lay down on her back on the sofa, staring at the nicotine-yellow ceiling, thick wooden beams running along its length.
‘We should still call the police,’ she said as Pete came in with a full glass of wine for her and an open bottle of IPA for him.
‘I changed my mind about wanting tea … Well, maybe – but to say what? We don’t know for sure that any crime’s been committed. You’re going to feel daft if he turns up tomorrow.’
Meredith sat up and swigged the wine as Pete took a tobacco tin and cigarette papers out of his jacket pocket. Something caught her eye: a dark, bulky shape she hadn’t noticed in the hearth when she first came into the room. She screamed, jumping up so violently that the wine sloshed out of the glass and onto the carpet. ‘Holy SHIT!’
Pete followed her horrified gaze, and when he saw what she was looking at, he made a disgusted sound in his throat. It was a huge, fat, dead brown rat, lying belly up by the grate, its yellow teeth bared in a final grimace, its thick, hairless tail stretched out behind it.
‘Oh my God!’ Meredith felt panic rise, a tidal wave of emotion. She was shaking so violently, her legs wouldn’t hold her and she collapsed back onto the sofa. ‘Someone’s left it there! Someone’s been in the house! Pete, get rid of it, please!’
He took her glass out of her hand and set it gently on the coffee table, while she buried her face in her palms so she no longer had to see the abominable rodent.
‘Shhh, it’s OK. It probably just fell down the chimney. Nobody’s been in the house. It’s just a coincidence.’
‘Fell down the chimney? Since when does that happen? I can’t cope with all this. I feel like my head’s going to explode,’ she said. ‘The shop break-in. Flowers beheaded in my garden. Lovely Ralph is dead, and someone’s moved his body. Now this fucking thing … How can it be all coincidence? He’s back, Pete. It’s got to be him. What the fuck am I going to do? I’m a dead woman. It’ll be me next. He’s not going to let me get away this time … Oh God, I can’t even tell the police because they’ll think I killed Ralph.’
Pete knelt at her feet and wrapped his arms tightly around her again. ‘Shhh. Stop. Deep breaths. You’re reading far too much into all this. Like I said, it’s all coincidence, I’m sure it is. Nobody’s after you. Nothing else is going to happen. I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you.’
‘Ralph…’ Meredith sobbed. ‘Poor Ralph, and Paula…’
‘I know… it’s just horrific, and you’re in shock. The rat’s nothing. Nobody’s been here. I’ll get rid of it.’
He released her and began to roll a cigarette, his hands shaking.
‘Do me one of those, would you?’ Meredith asked.
Pete looked up at her, his tongue stilling as it worked along the edge of the Rizla. ‘Seriously? You haven’t smoked for years.’
‘Whatever.’
He finished the roll-up and handed it to her, along with his lighter. As she lit it, she saw Ralph on the earth floor again, as lifeless as the rat, and nausea rose in her throat.
Paula didn’t even know yet, she thought.
They moved into the kitchen so as not to have to look at the rat, and sat at the table in silence for a few minutes, smoking. Meredith usually loved the silence in her cottage, after all the visitors had left the grounds for the day, just the backdrop of birdsong and the occasional plane high overhead, but now it felt oppressive and ominous.
‘Um, you don’t really think it’s anything to do with…?’ Pete suddenly asked, his voice loud in the dusky gloom. He stubbed out his roll-up in the ashtray that Meredith reserved for him alone, and stared at her intently with his big green eyes.
Meredith knew what he was going to say and felt panic rise again even before he said it. She needed him to keep reassuring her, not to suggest she might be right when she suggested it. ‘Oh Pete … don’t even think it. I know I did, but it can’t be. It was twenty-four years ago! But … all this stuff. What if he has found me?’
She stood up on weak legs, finishing her wine.
‘Would you mind getting rid of that … thing before you go? I’m going to have a bath and take a sleeping pill. I need to sleep. God knows what tomorrow’s going to bring. You don’t have lights on your bike so you should go now.’
Pete laughed mirthlessly. ‘Are you crazy? There is no way I’m leaving you on your own in this state … Not because I think you’ve got anything to fear, of course,’ he added hastily. ‘This is a completely different situation.’
Meredith was going to protest, but she knew she absolutely didn’t want to be on her own, not tonight.
‘OK,’ she said, reaching down to hug him where he sat in the armchair. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Thanks bro.’
Meredith ran a bath and lay very still in it for a long time, watching a small spider abseil from one of the ceiling beams down towards the toilet lid. It was a long way down for such a tiny creature. She thought of Pete’s words. Was it a completely different situation? The police had never caught anyone last time – not even had any viable suspects, once they’d ruled out Iain. They’d written it off as a break-in that had gone very wrong, and that was probably what it had been. It had been almost a quarter of a century ago. Surely it couldn’t have anything to do with Ralph’s death now?
9
Meredith
Meredith always started her day by going into work at 8.00 a.m., an hour before she needed to, and collecting Ceri’s arthritic terrier Dexter. Ceri, who was PA to both the Earl and Ralph, worked 8.00 to 4.00 and couldn’t walk the dog herself, on account of her clinical obesity. Ceri was always trying to pay Meredith for the dog-walking duties and Meredith always refused. It was her routine now, and never failed to clear her head for the day ahead.
She felt a wave of nausea threaten to flood her that morning when she left the cottage and saw Ralph’s car still sitting in the distant corner of the staff car park. She crunched over the gravel towards the Jag, feeling compelled to go and look at it up close. Even though she had been utterly certain that Ralph was stone dead when she ran out of the ice house to ring Pete, the only logical explanation was that he hadn’t really been dead at all. He’d woken up and staggered off somewhere. They should’ve checked inside the car last night, she thought, hope flaring: Ralph could well be snoring on the back seat, sleeping off his funny turn and alcohol stupor.
She approached the car and peered through the window, wishing Pete hadn’t already cycled off to his workshop, so that she could laugh with him at the sheer relief of seeing Ralph alive, after all that drama…
But of course it was empty, its immaculate leather seats gazing blankly back at her. Ralph wouldn’t have spent the night in there anyway; she was kidding herself. He’d definitely have come and knocked on the cottage’s green front door, demanding a sofa or – after the shenanigans in the disabled loo – one side of her bed.
Meredith’s head began to spin, her lack of sleep and hangover combining with the disappointment of the empty seat. Not for the first time, she couldn’t help wondering if this whole thing was some kind of weird revenge Ralph was wreaking – perhaps for ‘making’ him unfaithful to Paula? Although she had hardly forced him, she thought. The opposite. And anyway, it w
ould’ve been ridiculously out of character for him to have done that.
If, for some obscure reason, he was just trying to mess with her head, she would find out soon enough – there was a heads of department meeting that morning, which Meredith, as shop manager, and Ralph, as estate manager, were both required to attend. Her gut clenched at the thought of walking into the conference room and seeing his place empty.
She wearily climbed up the backstairs, thinking of Ralph’s hand on her arse on these same steps less than twelve hours earlier.
Ceri’s office was next to Ralph’s, and her door was always open, both literally and figuratively.
‘Morning Ceri,’ Meredith said, entering. Dexter yelped with delight at the sight of her, and she knelt and tousled his brindled head. Ceri was undoing a new box of Minstead House branded ballpoint pens, ready for the meeting.
‘Morning Meredith! Another lovely day, isn’t it!’ She always said this, unless it was pissing down or snowing.
‘Yeah. Anyone else in yet?’
‘Not yet,’ she trilled, a pile of Minstead House notebooks on the desk next to her. ‘Just me, getting ready for the meeting.’ She paused. ‘Strange, though – Ralph’s car’s here. I thought he’d got in early, but there’s no sign of him.’
The HOD meeting was scheduled for 9.45 a.m. in the board room next door. Ceri had already printed and carefully laid out agendas on the vast, polished oval table.
‘He probably got a taxi home last night,’ Meredith said carefully. ‘He wasn’t half putting them away at the staff lunch.’
Ceri would be devastated when she found out that Ralph was dead – if he was – and, Meredith thought with her heart sinking further, probably out of a job too. Whoever eventually replaced Ralph probably wouldn’t be so tolerant about the undelivered phone messages and the unfranked mail. Ceri loved laying stuff out neatly, but wasn’t so hot on the more responsible elements of the position. But she couldn’t lose her job, it would kill her.
