The Night Book

by Richard Madeley

  ‘Yeah, so’s realising the damn thing’s slipped off your wrist and gone straight to the bottom. I’m not risking that. Just tell me the bloody time, will you?’

  ‘Bloody well tell it to yourself, Cameron.’ She reached down to sweep up his watch from the deck.

  As Meriel bent her head, a door in her inner universe silently swung open.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She could see into an alternative reality. It shimmered on the other side of the threshold that had suddenly materialised directly before her.

  She knew exactly what she had to do to cross over and enter it: it was so clear; so obvious.

  And it was completely up to her. Only she had the power to decide whether to stay, or go.

  But either way, it had to be now.

  Right now.

  She looked at the watch dangling from her fingers. Its delicate second hand seemed to her to be motionless, as if time had, for an incredible moment, reached a frozen full stop. Infinitely slowly, she switched her gaze to her husband in the water below. He seemed caught in the same freeze-frame, his expression freakishly preserved in one of petulance and exasperation.

  All Meriel’s senses were singing to her now. She knew, without having to move her head, that there were no other boats near. Theirs was drifting on the blind side of the headland that hid them from the villages of Glenridding and Patterdale. Her back was to the main road that ran along the lake’s northern edge so that Cameron, bobbing on the far side of the boat, would be perfectly invisible to anyone walking or driving along the shore.

  A voice whispered inside her head.

  ‘Now or never, Meriel. One shot.’

  ‘Father?’ She spoke his name aloud.

  ‘One shot, my darling.’

  ‘Father?!’

  Then everything was juddering back into motion, like a train suddenly jolting away from the platform.

  Meriel could feel the moment slipping away.

  NOW. Do it NOW.

  She flexed her arm.

  ‘Here. Catch, Cameron.’

  Meriel tossed the Rolex into the air towards her husband. The timepiece moved in a glittering arc, winking and flashing in the sunlight as it ascended and then descended.

  Cameron bellowed with rage.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?! That’s a five-thousand-pound watch, you stupid bitch! You – oh, Christ!’

  The Rolex had splashed into the water a couple of feet ahead of him. It briefly flashed greenish-gold, then began to sink.

  ‘Oops. Missed, sorry. Quick, Cameron, you can still get it.’

  ‘I don’t fucking believe this! Shit!’

  Cameron arced his body into the air before snapping his head and arms forwards and down, plunging under the surface. A moment later, Meriel could see the white soles of his feet kicking hard, and then he had disappeared entirely.

  The boat rocked slightly in his boiling, descending wake, and then settled again.

  Meriel looked around her. The only other vessel she could see was one of the passenger steamers, on its way back from Pooley Bridge. It was easily a mile away. She dismissed it from her mind and turned back to the water below her. There was no sign that anyone had been swimming there moments before.

  She was finding it difficult to breathe. God knows what he was experiencing. How long had he been under now? Fifteen seconds? Twenty? She chewed at the knuckle of a forefinger. It must be at least twenty.

  Thirty, now. Still no sign of him.

  And then, suddenly, there he was. Movement, far below. A vague brown-green swirl at first, quickly resolving into the head and shoulders of a man, rising swiftly through the water. Meriel instinctively took a step back.

  Cameron broke surface, threshing wildly. He wasn’t swimming: this was a convulsive, reflex series of completely unco-ordinated movements. He looked to Meriel as if he was having a fit.

  ‘Cameron? Cameron? Can you hear me? What’s wrong?’

  His eyes were tightly shut and she could see a ghastly greenish-white froth bubbling from his mouth and nostrils.

  ‘Hold on! I’ll get the lifebelt!’

  It was on the other side of the deck, next to the little ladder from which he’d climbed down into the water.

  Meriel ran across, yanked the ring from its snap-fastenings and turned around, breathing hard.

  And remained exactly where she was.

  She couldn’t see Cameron from here, but dear Christ she could hear him. He’d started making a bizarre honking noise; he sounded like one of Ullswater’s geese when they flew south for the winter. Presently it faded to a rasping gurgle and, almost exactly one minute after he’d dived down after his watch, he fell completely silent.

  Meriel didn’t move. One hand gripped the guard-rail behind her, the other held the lifebelt. She stood motionless while she tried as calmly as she could to count another sixty seconds. Then, very slowly, she crossed back to the other side of the boat, and looked down at the water.

  He was completely still. Face down, head haloed by the greenish foam that had boiled and erupted from his lungs.

  His legs floated wide apart and his arms and shoulders were hunched forward in an oddly obscene, crab-like pose.

  Cameron Bruton was very dead.

  His wife calmly considered him a while longer.

  Then she leaned out over the railing, and carefully tossed the lifebelt into the water to land beside him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Seb had been uneasy ever since his phone conversation with Meriel that morning.

  An experienced reporter, he had learned over the years that if something didn’t seem quite right, it usually wasn’t. One of his favourite movie lines was from Hitchcock’s Psycho, when private investigator Milton Arbogast tells the killer, Norman Bates: ‘See, if something doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic . . . and this ain’t gellin’.’

  Cameron’s reaction to Meriel’s return after a night’s unexplained absence wasn’t, as Arbogast might have said, ‘gellin’.’ It was most odd, to say the least. No histrionics, no interrogation of any kind. Just a suggestion that the two of them go out on their boat for a picnic.

  Seb didn’t like it. It bore all the hallmarks of a manipulative personality, and Cameron Bruton was certainly possessed of one of those. Some of Meriel’s stories about him last night had almost defied belief.

  So what was the man up to now? Could Meriel be in danger out there on the lake?

  On balance, Seb decided not, although he had to struggle hard against the impulse to jump in his Spitfire and race down to Ullswater. There was no point in that, of course. There would be boats of all descriptions out on the water this beautiful Sunday afternoon. He didn’t even know what Cameron’s was called, let alone looked like.

  No, best to stay here by the phone and wait for Meriel’s next call.

  Seb had prepared himself for a lengthy wait. He’d gone out and bought most of the Sunday papers, and his own picnic of bread, ham and wine. Now he sat in a tatty garden chair on the tiny rear terrace of his rented ground-floor flat in Carlisle’s Warwick Road, soaking up the afternoon sunshine in shorts and T-shirt and waiting for the phone in the communal entrance hall behind him to ring. Sometimes the girl who rented the flat above his came downstairs to make a call, and Seb had to resist the urge to go and tell her to keep it brief. What if Meriel was trying to get through?

  By seven o’clock the sun was losing its strength and half an hour later it had dipped behind a cluster of horse-chestnut trees that grew in the much larger garden backing on to his.

  The great heat remained, but at least the days were beginning to get a little shorter.

  Seb went inside. His disquiet was growing. She must be home by now. Surely she could have made an excuse to get away for a few minutes and ring him from a call box? Or if not, just use the house phone and talk in simple code to him so Cameron wouldn’t suspect anything. Pretend she was talking to her producer, or something. Say she was looking forward to next week’s show, a
nd she’d be in tomorrow to talk about it. At least then he’d know she was all right.

  When the phone rang at last it was almost nine o’clock and getting dark. Seb reached the receiver halfway through the second ring.

  ‘Meriel?’

  There was a faint buzzing on the line before a hesitant voice replied: ‘Er . . . no. Chris in the newsroom, actually. Is that you, Seb?’

  Seb silently cursed himself.

  ‘Yeah . . . sorry, Chris, I’m expecting a call from . . . from my cousin Muriel in London. What’s up? Shouldn’t you be home this time on a Sunday? No more bulletins now until the breakfast show, surely?’

  ‘Yup, but it’s all hands to the pumps tonight, mate. I was just packing up after the eight o’clock bully when I got a call from our stringer down in Keswick. There’s been another of these drownings – this afternoon, on Ullswater. No false alarm this time; the cops have just confirmed it. Merryman wants you to ring him at home right away.’

  Seb’s bowels turned to liquid, but he managed to keep his voice steady. ‘Ullswater? Is there any ID on the victim, Chris?’

  ‘Not a lot, other than it’s a bloke, just like the last one there. That retired engineer.’

  Seb sagged against the wall in relief. ‘Not a woman, then? You’re quite sure about that?’

  His colleague sounded nettled. ‘I just bloody told you – it’s a bloke, Seb. As in man – you know, fella, geezer, chap, proud possessor of one X and one Y chromosome. Male of the species, just like you and me. Clear?’

  Seb smiled faintly. ‘Sorry, Chris, I downed the best part of a bottle of wine sitting in the sun this afternoon. I’m a bit muzzy. Anything else? You know, like age or profession?’

  ‘Nope, nowt else yet. They’re not even saying exactly how it played out, other than it was a drowning. But there’s a press conference first thing at Glenridding, close to where it happened. That’s what Bob wants to talk to you about. I reckon it’s gonna be an early night for you tonight, mate.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  Seb felt a little calmer as he went to bed after speaking with Merryman.

  Meriel’s failure to call him, he decided, was almost certainly explained by this new drowning. The police would have taken witness statements from anyone who’d been out on the water, and there were probably checkpoints on the road that bordered the lake, in case some passing motorist had seen something. Meriel might have been delayed for hours. By the time she got home it would simply have been too late to make a plausible excuse to leave the house again.

  Seb set his alarm for four-thirty and snapped out the bedside light. He was going to rendezvous with Jess at the radio car in Glenridding in time to broadcast live into the first bulletin of the day at six. Details of the death would probably still be sketchy and he’d have to pad his report out with background stuff on the earlier drownings, and do much the same on the seven o’clock bulletin, too.

  But the police press conference was scheduled for eight o’clock right down by the water’s edge and he’d have a lot more to sink his teeth into there. With any luck the cops would produce some witnesses for interviews.

  His news editor told him that once again the network was going to take his report live.

  ‘This is your story, mate,’ Merryman had finished, wrapping up their conversation. ‘I don’t want anyone else fronting it. The listeners associate you with it and they trust you to get it right and get it first. The way things are going either you or the station are going to pick up an award for the coverage. Maybe both. Now get some sleep – you’ve got a busy day ahead of you. I’m hitting the hay myself. We’ll talk first thing via the radio car.’

  But it was a long time before Seb was able to drift off.

  He wasn’t thinking about the story.

  He was thinking about Meriel.

  Partly about what might have transpired between her and Cameron on the boat today.

  But mostly, he was thinking about making love to her.

  Over and over again.

  As Seb was falling asleep, an exhausted Meriel was being courteously shown into the back of the squad car that would chauffeur her home to Cathedral Crag.

  The officers who had interviewed her at Keswick police station throughout the late afternoon and into the evening had been gentle and forbearing, but even so she was utterly drained. Perhaps she should have accepted their kindly meant suggestions that she call her solicitor; have a lawyer present to metaphorically hold her hand and help bear the load of their polite but insistent questioning.

  But Meriel had instinctively felt that asking for a legal representative to sit with her might convey the wrong message, make her look defensive, or worse, somehow guilty of something.

  In any case, her account of what had happened could hardly be more straightforward. She knew that if she stuck to it, refused to embellish or alter it in any way, there was nothing for her to fear. The brutal facts were simple enough.

  Cameron had gone for a swim.

  Cameron had vanished.

  Cameron had reappeared.

  Cameron had been in the grip of some sort of seizure.

  Cameron had been unable to grasp the lifebelt she had thrown him.

  Cameron had stopped moving.

  The rest of it – her repeated screams for help (even now, she was still quite hoarse), the eventual response from a passing tourist hire boat, the arrival of the police launch – all were events that others would bear witness to and corroborate.

  But as to the drowning itself, that was testimony she and she alone could give. There was no one to contradict or correct her. Certainly not Cameron. He was lying naked on a refrigerated slab in the county mortuary thirty miles away, awaiting the scalpels and clamps and gently sucking drains of a postmortem examination the following day.

  Meriel had steadfastly resisted the temptation to extemporise. She kept her answers short and to the point and repetitive. Neither did she make any attempt to feign emotion; there was no need. She was genuinely in shock.

  No, she didn’t know why her husband had gone beneath the surface of the lake. No, it wasn’t something he usually did. No, she had no idea whether it was deliberate or involuntary; she’d been reading the Sunday papers on deck and hadn’t been looking at him at that precise moment. She could only say that one second he was there, and the next he wasn’t. No, she couldn’t estimate precisely how long he was underwater for, but it couldn’t have been for more than two minutes at the very most.

  No, she’d never learned to swim. She’d always been extremely apprehensive of going into water. That was why she’d thrown her husband the lifebelt rather than make her way over to him with it and help him put it on. She would feel guilty about this for the rest of her life.

  Yes, she would be willing to formally identify his body next morning before the postmortem took place.

  Yes, she would very much appreciate being driven home now. Her husband’s car was still parked where they’d both left it by the lake. Yes, she would be extremely grateful if another officer drove it back to Cathedral Fell. She had the keys here in her bag.

  No, she didn’t need a doctor and no, there was no one she wanted them to call to come and be with her. She would manage by herself tonight.

  Yes, she would be dressed and ready to be driven to Kendal at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

  No, she really didn’t need a doctor. But they had all been very kind.

  She just wanted to go home.

  Meriel decided not to mention that she needed to find some papers there that belonged to her husband.

  Her late husband.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She changed her mind about looking for the photocopies even before the car reached Cathedral Crag. There was no great urgency; she was the only person who knew of their existence, after all. There’d be plenty of time to find them later. Anyway, she needed a clear head to think of all the obscure places Cameron might have chosen to secrete them. Right now she was so emotionall
y expended she could barely remember her own name.

  Once the red tail-lights of the departing police Rover saloon had disappeared down the drive, Meriel walked straight into the study and poured herself an enormous Scotch from the decanter on the oak sideboard. She didn’t normally drink spirits this late in the day but there was a time for everything and this was a moment for whisky.

  She tentatively touched the liquid with the tip of her tongue, and grimaced. As she’d suspected, the Scotch was lukewarm. When would this bloody heatwave break?

  She checked herself. Without the heatwave and its consequences, she might have found herself in Cameron’s bed tonight, enduring God knows what humiliations.

  She went into the kitchen to get ice from their American fridge.

  Their American fridge?

  Her American fridge.

  This house and everything in it belonged to her now.

  Meriel thoughtfully made her way back into the study, ice cubes gently clinking from side to side in the heavy crystal tumbler. She sank down in one of the armchairs that looked out across the lake. A quartermoon was rising above the fells opposite, its faint silver light silently skipping and dancing across Derwent Water’s gently rising and falling undulations. It was as if the lake was asleep.

  Two mountains separated her from Ullswater, High Seat and then the giant, Helvellyn, which brooded above the lake in which her husband had perished that very afternoon.

  It had been a horrible death. Horrible. Meriel took a couple of swallows from her glass and closed her eyes. Then, for the first time since it happened, she forced herself to consider exactly what Cameron must have gone through, emotionally and physically.

  Undiluted rage, of course, at the very beginning. Undoubtedly one of Cameron’s last emotions on earth had been blind fury with her for tossing his precious watch into the water.

  Had he realised she had deliberately thrown it a fraction beyond his reach? Meriel didn’t think so. He hadn’t had time to reflect on anything as subtle as that. He’d just been desperate to retrieve the thing, perhaps egged on by her ‘Quick, Cameron, you can still get it!’ and down he’d gone. Anyway, the question of whether he’d suspected anything was immaterial now, wasn’t it? He was lying demi-frozen in some mortician’s fridge. Cameron wouldn’t be sharing any thoughts with anyone about anything, ever again.