The Last Stage

by Louise Voss

  ‘There’s some red,’ said Pete, bolting down into the barge and disappearing for a disproportionately long time, although Meredith had been about to try suggesting a cup of tea again. She felt personally responsible for the loss of the woman Paula had been – the brilliant, creative, scatty, well-groomed person who couldn’t be further from this broken human slumped in the picnic chair in front of her, whose life had been blown apart forever.

  Meredith had to keep remembering that it wasn’t her fault. Ralph’s death wasn’t her fault.

  Pete’s tousled head reappeared, bent to avoid bumping it on the low barge doorway as he came back up the steps holding a half-full bottle of red.

  ‘I’ll buy you some more to replace what we’ve drunk,’ Meredith said, noticing he hadn’t brought out a glass for himself.

  ‘Too right you will,’ he said, with a faint smile.

  ‘Not joining us?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too much invoicing to do,’ he said. ‘If I start drinking now that’ll be the rest of the day blown out.’ He topped up their glasses and retreated.

  ‘He should’ve brought us clean ones,’ Meredith grumbled mildly, although she was feeling more annoyed about having to drink more wine to keep Paula company. White wine and sunshine always gave her a headache, and she could feel one burgeoning behind her ears and across her temples. Adding Merlot to the mix was guaranteed to make it set in for the day. Still, she thought, it was the least she could do.

  On the quayside, Pete’s neighbour Trevor was splitting logs to replenish the communal woodpile, and Meredith idly watched his biceps flex as he swung the axe. Trevor was a nice man. In a civil partnership with Johnny, both of them were from Zimbabwe originally; a lovely couple. Sometimes Meredith envied Pete and Andrea. All the residents of the river boats had formed themselves into a proper, tight little community. They were always having impromptu get-togethers and leaving each other little gifts on deck – homemade lemon curd, bottles of fizz, pot plants. She herself had no neighbours and rarely received any visitors, unless someone she knew decided to have a day out at Minstead House and popped into the shop to say hello.

  Then she reminded herself that solitude and isolation had been her own choice. It would drive her crazy having people just dropping by at all hours.

  ‘Post-mortem was yesterday,’ Paula said tersely, and Meredith felt a tiny jolt of fearful adrenaline, even though she already knew this.

  She forced her thoughts to the possible results, praying that it wouldn’t show that Ralph had recently had sexual intercourse … Surely it wouldn’t, she thought. Not if he’d been in the water for days. ‘Yeah, I heard, but they haven’t had the report in yet.’

  Paula fixed her gaze on her and for a moment Meredith thought, She knows. But then she just said, ‘Maybe it’ll show that he had some sort of terminal illness, and drowned himself rather than facing it.’

  ‘Maybe. Although,’ Meredith added with reluctance, ‘he seemed fine that day. He was on great form.’

  ‘I’ll find out on Monday, I suppose,’ Paula said thickly, looking at her phone. ‘Fun, fun, fun. Not. Oh. I’ve had a text from Jackson, checking where I am. I’d better go.’

  ‘I’ll walk you home.’ Meredith got to her feet.

  ‘No need, it’s only through the village.’ Paula stood up too, swaying slightly, knocking over her empty wine glass. Meredith managed to catch it before it rolled off the boat into the water.

  ‘No, really. I need some fresh air.’

  Pete was sitting at his galley table with reading glasses on the end of his nose and a sheaf of paperwork in front of him. He looked up as they climbed unsteadily down off the roof. Meredith stuck her head through the doorway to tell him where they were going.

  ‘Staying here tonight?’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘As long as I won’t be putting the kibosh on any potential action you might have been contemplating.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘As if. Although I thought I’d invite Andrea over to supper.’

  ‘Well in that case I’d better—’

  ‘No. I want you there,’ he said firmly. ‘Please. I don’t want her to think I’m going to try it on with her.’

  Meredith sighed. ‘Pete. Dude. What’s the matter with you? She’s lovely, and you fancy each other.’

  ‘She’s my neighbour, Mez, and she’s pregnant. It’s far too complicated, and I wouldn’t want to lead her on by letting anything happen.’

  It was Meredith’s turn to roll her eyes, although she did understand. It would be terrible if they slept together and then Pete got cold feet – as he was prone to. Andrea was far too vulnerable to be messed around.

  ‘Well, maybe the time isn’t right now,’ she conceded dully. ‘Right. See you in a bit. Text me if you want me to pick anything up in the shop on the way back.’

  ‘More wine!’ he called after them.

  Paula trudged through the village next to Meredith, several people stopping to hug her, tears in their eyes as they gushed condolences, which Paula accepted as gracefully as she could manage. Meredith could tell that she wanted to tell them all to sod off.

  Paula and Ralph had been a popular couple in the village, and Ralph’s death had been broadcast on the local news the previous night: ‘Death at Minstead,’ the newsreader had intoned, over a backdrop of Minstead House looking particularly glorious. At least they hadn’t shown the actual pond.

  ‘Now it’s really like sodding Midsomer Murders here,’ Paula said savagely after she’d been accosted for the third time. They had often laughed about how Midsomer-ish the village was, with its chocolate-box cottages and petty, complicated village politics. Now they even had a mysterious death to boot.

  Meredith couldn’t muster a smile.

  They reached Paula’s house, a stocky-looking whitewashed 1920s villa on the far edge of the village, wisteria climbing around a front door that was usually flanked by two big stone lions, which Ralph had loved and Paula hated. But as soon as the door came into view, they knew something was wrong.

  Meredith did a double take. The right-hand lion was still there, standing proud, but the left-hand one had been smashed; its head was severed from its body and was lying next to it, staring up at the sky.

  She put her hand on Paula’s arm. ‘Paul … look at that.’

  She waited for Paula to confess that she herself had done it in a fit of grief – although how she’d have had the strength to, without pushing the whole statue over, Meredith couldn’t imagine. But as she watched Paula’s eyes widen with shock and incomprehension, she knew that this was the first Paula had seen of it too.

  ‘It was probably Jackson,’ Paula said uncertainly. ‘He’s been so upset. He never liked those lions either.’

  Meredith wasn’t so sure. She had a very bad feeling in the pit of her belly, and, as Paula opened the front door and dumped her bag in the hallway, she realised she was holding her breath, waiting for Jackson to appear and confirm or deny it.

  ‘Jack?’ called Paula. ‘I’m home. What’s happened to the lion?’

  Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs – a gangly tousled youth, eyes pink-rimmed. He was usually handsome, in an unformed sort of way, but today he looked like a pale facsimile of himself.

  He shrugged. ‘It was like that when I got home. I thought you’d done it. I know you hated them…’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ Paula said, kicking off her shoes and sitting down wearily on the bottom stair, leaning her head again the wall with an expression of utter defeat.

  Meredith’s heart sank. ‘I don’t want to worry you,’ she said, ‘but I think you need to let the police know.’

  22

  Pete

  Once Meredith and Paula had left, Pete located his phone – it was on top of the unlit stove – and texted Andrea to see if she’d come over for fish pie and wine later. He made sure to stress that Meredith would be there too, to assuage his nerves at extending the invi
tation in the first place. He considered Andrea, with her silky black hair and endless legs, to be way out of his league, and the thought that she might assume she was being invited over to be seduced made him grimace with discomfort, despite the fact that there was nothing he’d have liked to do more. If she was interested in him romantically, surely she would have given some sort of signal by now? She was unfailingly smiley and sparkly around him, and quite touchy-feely after a couple of drinks – not that she was drinking, now that she was pregnant. But then, she was like that around everyone else too.

  It seemed odd, if not wrong, to be having what was essentially a dinner party when Meredith could be mixed up in something that may at any moment be deemed to be a murder investigation; but what were they supposed to, if not ‘keep calm and carry on’? He knew it was important to Meredith to do just that, otherwise she’d just sit around and obsess, and become increasingly scared and paranoid. And if the police were to investigate her further, it was essential that it looked as if she was just in her usual routine, untroubled by conscience.

  Plus, to have Andrea over would be good for them both. They wouldn’t be able to discuss Ralph if she was here, and she unfailingly made them feel happier – she was just that sort of person.

  Meredith was always telling him to go for it with Andrea – to be more confident, that he was gorgeous, a catch for any woman, he’d just been unlucky with previous relationships; but he never believed her. She was biased, anyway. Whenever he looked in the mirror all he saw was a gangly, weedy middle-aged bloke losing his hair. And the clothes he favoured – retro tank tops, baggy cords, collarless shirts, brogues – looked fine on Shoreditch hipsters, but, he suspected, on him just made him look like a 1950s throwback or someone who could only afford to shop in charity shops. All he was missing, he’d thought grumpily that morning as he was shaving, was a pipe and a comb-over – the latter wasn’t far off being doable.

  He was just putting some music on – Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell, his favourite choral work; Meredith always gave him shit about it, so when she got back he’d change it to Tom Waits, or Joni or something more likely to meet with her approval – when his phone buzzed in his hand.

  It was a reply from Andrea, saying she’d love to come and she’d bring wine and pudding. He cranked up the volume of Parry’s ‘My Soul There Is a Country’ so loudly that the sound bounced off the barge’s low ceilings and he realised that, for the first time since Meredith had rung him in panic the other day, hope was fluttering in his chest.

  He really didn’t mind that Andrea was pregnant – in fact, it made her more appealing, although he wouldn’t admit that to anyone. He’d love to have children, so why not? It would be like having a ready-made family. Meredith would make a fantastic auntie. Of course, it was too late for her to have kids of her own now.

  Poor Mez, he thought, melting butter in a pan to make a white sauce. Meredith always pushed people away when they got too close. She complained about being single, yet usually dumped whichever bloke she’d been raving about just weeks earlier. He suspected it was really because she couldn’t handle someone in her life full-time after so many years alone. Not to mention her decades-entrenched trust issues. And now this…

  He wasn’t particularly surprised that she’d shagged Ralph. Starved of sexual attention and affection, needing the validation of knowing she was still attractive, whisky-vulnerable, her guard down from already knowing and trusting him as a friend … It was easily done.

  As he stirred flour into the butter, he wondered again what the hell had gone on in that ice house. Could Mez have been mistaken in her conviction that Ralph had really been dead? It almost felt as if Ralph was playing some mean-spirited trick on her. But Pete had met Ralph, and he was the last person Pete could imagine doing that.

  He was peeling potatoes when Meredith returned, empty-handed and sniffing the air.

  ‘Stinks of fish in here.’

  He gestured to the peelings and bubbling pans on the stove. ‘Fish pie! Where’s the wine?’

  ‘Shit, sorry Pete, I forgot. I’ll go now. I can’t concentrate on anything. My head’s still all over the place.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Get two bottles, then. How was Paula, when you left her?’

  ‘Turn this crap down and I’ll tell you.’ She cocked an ear at the speaker. The choir had just sung ‘I know my life’s a pain and but a span’ and she laughed mirthlessly. ‘“I know my life’s a pain”? They’re not kidding. What a dirge! I hope you’re not going to play this later.’

  Usually Pete would have teased her about being a philistine, but he sensed that she was close to tears and so did as she asked.

  ‘OK,’ he said mildly.

  Meredith sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘She’s in a terrible state, Pete,’ she said. ‘Luckily Jackson had arrived, so he’ll look after her. I just don’t even know what to say to her. And … something weird happened. You know their stone lions? Someone smashed one today. Jackson said it was like that when he arrived home, so it must have happened this afternoon while she was here.’

  Pete turned off the gas under the simmering fish and turned to face her. ‘Could’ve been an accident – a delivery man knocked it over, or something?’

  ‘It wasn’t knocked over. It looked like it had been deliberately smashed, just the top half. And, Pete, when she was here earlier she mentioned she thought there was someone in the house last night, when she was on her own.’

  They stared at each other. Pete saw Meredith’s face and knew she was thinking of another time, another big empty house with her in it; just her, and the stranger creeping up the stairs…

  He came to put an arm around her. ‘Has she reported it?’

  ‘She promised she would. Oh God. What if…?’

  Pete held her more tightly. ‘Let the police sort it. We don’t know, it’s almost certainly all just coincidence.’

  He hoped his use of the word ‘all’ didn’t betray his fears that it encompassed that creeping stranger, and now a dead rat, a shop break-in, a body dumped in a pond. He didn’t want to freak her out any more than she already was.

  ‘It’s all shit, that’s for sure. Let’s just try and have a chilled evening tonight and forget about it for a bit, at least till we know the worst. Andrea’s coming, so we’ll have to act normal; we won’t be able to dwell on it.’

  Meredith leaned against him for a moment, then took a deep breath and stood up again. ‘Mm. OK. Normal, right. I’ll go and get more wine. But I’m going to ring that Gemma Whatserhame on the way – the cop – and tell her about Paula’s lion, because I’m not sure that Paula will.’ She left the barge, pulling her mobile out of her pocket.

  Pete watched her stomp away towards the steps, wishing he could make everything right for her.

  Five hours later, they were full of fish pie and apple crumble, and the twins were drunk. Somehow, even though Andrea was on the sparkling water, they seemed to have got through the two bottles Meredith bought earlier, plus the one that Andrea had brought as a gift. Meredith kept wailing that she mustn’t drink any more as she was going for a run in the morning, then topping up her and Pete’s glasses. Her leaden misery of earlier had changed into an alcoholic sort of mania that, Pete knew, was her way of coping. He wondered if Andrea could tell that Meredith was far from her usual self.

  Pete was struggling to take his eyes off his glamorous neighbour. She was wearing some sort of shimmery short dress that emphasised her neat, round bump, full breasts and long bare legs. With her long hair cascading down her back, he thought she looked like a sixties icon; a more beautiful Cher, perhaps. Despite being sober, Andrea had become so giggly that she couldn’t fail to cheer them both up. Pete had put on a playlist of mostly Meredith-approved music – The Cure, Gil Scott-Heron, Tower of Power – but a couple of choral pieces had slipped through, and Meredith had pounced on something.

  ‘Did I just hear them singing about a pelican?’ she’d said. ‘What the actual fuck are we listening to
now?’

  ‘What is a pelican?’ Andrea asked.

  She was on the sofa next to Pete, shoes off, her legs curled up under her, twiddling a strand of hair, her bare arm tantalisingly close to his. Meredith was sitting in the armchair next to the unlit stove, elbow on its arm, her wineglass at a perilous angle.

  ‘You know, that sea bird with the massive double chin for storing fish in,’ Meredith said, sketching a pelican’s bill in the air in front of her own neck.

  ‘Ah, that,’ said Andrea, nodding. ‘Yes, is same in Hungarian. Pelikan.’

  Pete googled the lyrics to the song they’d been listening to. Finzi, ‘Lo, the Full and Final Sacrifice’. ‘Yup. It’s “O soft self-wounding Pelican! Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man”.’

  ‘What the hell is a self-wounding pelican?’ demanded Meredith.

  ‘Is like self-harming penguin perhaps?’ Andrea said.

  ‘Or a self-service parrot?’ Pete suggested, and they laughed, although Meredith’s hoot sounded contrived, like someone had pinched her hard and told her to laugh.

  Andrea glanced first at her then, with raised eyebrow, at him. He shook his head briefly and smiled, touched by her concern.

  He had to declare himself to her. Not now, not when Meredith was in the middle of this crisis, but soon. It was time, surely. Andrea was so beautiful, and if he left it any longer someone else would be braver than him. He’d always been too afraid of the rebuttal, or of it ruining their friendship – but he’d caught her glancing at him, her pupils flaring when he spoke, the way her smile stretched right up to the corners of her eyes when she listened to him. She was touching his arm now, just brushing her fingers against his skin; and she was sober, so it couldn’t be the wine talking. He would. He’d invite her over again, soon, dinner for two this time. He imagined how soft her lips would feel, how gently they would have to make love with the baby between them…

  As if she read his mind, she turned and looked at him again, uncurling her legs and sliding her bare feet into her trainers, crushing the backs down rather than putting them on properly. She grasped his arm to help steady herself as she stood up in the ungainly way that pregnant women did – although in her case, she still managed to look graceful – and Pete stood too, to help her.