The Night Book

by Richard Madeley

  ‘No, Seb went . . .’

  There was a long silence.

  It was the station manager who broke it.

  ‘Meriel, it’s OK. We all know about you and Seb. If he’s helping you to cope during such a difficult time, well, that’s all to the good, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s no one’s business but yours.’

  She felt a wave of gratitude wash over her.

  ‘Peter, that means so much. And you must be wondering . . . you must all be wondering . . . about the way things were with Cameron and me. I—’

  Her boss interrupted her.

  ‘Meriel, that’s no one else’s business either.’

  ‘But you must . . . you must be thinking . . .’

  ‘All right. Given what’s happened with you and Seb it’s fairly obvious things can’t have been exactly perfect between you and Cameron, and I’m very sorry about that. But all anyone wants is for you to be happy, Meriel – your colleagues, your friends and your listeners. So you mustn’t worry. Take all the time you need to recover your balance. And I want you to feel you can ring me or come and see me at any time you like.’

  She sensed he was bringing the conversation to a close.

  ‘I will. Thank you, Peter. I feel better already after speaking with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. Bye, Meriel. Take care.’

  But she was still feeling jarred and deeply unsettled. She dressed in T-shirt, jeans and walking boots, before going downstairs into the kitchen where she put the kettle on. She found a jotting pad and scribbled a note for Seb.

  S,

  Woke up feeling in bits. Delayed reaction, I think, now that it’s all over. Have gone out for a walk on the fells. Don’t worry about me – I’m fine, just need to clear my head.

  Peter (Cox) called, was lovely. Knows all about us – you were right about that. Tell you what he said later but v. reassuring and non-judgemental.

  See you later. I love you. M.

  Five minutes later she had filled a Thermos with instant coffee and made herself a peanut-butter sandwich, wrapping it in tinfoil. Putting both into a small backpack, Meriel left the house by the kitchen door and joined the footpath that ran from east to west at the bottom of the garden.

  She turned west, and almost at once the track began to rise.

  For the first time since moving to Cathedral Crag, she was going to climb the mountain that gave the house its name.

  When she reached the top, there was something she knew she had to do. Something she had been instinctively avoiding since the very moment she had tossed Cameron’s watch into the water, deliberately beyond his reach.

  She was going to try and work out what sort of person would do a thing like that.

  And she was dreading the answer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  For almost the first time that summer, Meriel actually felt cool. She was sitting on a rock, perched on the very top of the Derwent Fells. Up here the southern breeze was beautifully fresh; a wonderful contrast to the stale, almost fetid air of the valleys more than two thousand feet below.

  As always when she climbed the fells, Meriel wondered why she didn’t do so more often. On a day like this, under spotless skies and with the rarefied air allowing astonishingly clear views for dozens of miles, the senses were heightened, sharpened somehow. There was an almost primeval, instinctive awareness of what her father called the bigger picture.

  She looked around her. From here, Derwent Water looked like a little blue puddle. Down there to her right was Borrowdale, and straight in front, six miles away to the east, brooded one of the highest mountains in England, Helvellyn.

  Meriel shivered slightly, and not because of the breeze. She had witnessed one of her closest school friends die on Helvellyn, fifteen years earlier.

  Beth Portman had inexplicably fallen from Striding Edge, the razorback ridge that approached the summit. There were twenty of them in the party, sixth-formers on a school-sponsored walking tour of the Lakes. Beth had been bringing up the rear of the group. The girls weren’t roped together; although Striding Edge was described in their nearby youth hostel’s guidebook as a ‘soaring tightrope walk’, it was deemed more dramatic than dangerous.

  But Beth had joined the register of those who fell from it to their deaths – one person a year, on average – when she somehow missed her footing and tumbled in a grotesque and seemingly endless cartwheel down the vertiginous slope. She had come to rest five hundred feet below the others, her neck and back broken.

  No one had seen how she went over; they were only aware that she had gone when she screamed, just once, as her hip slammed into the mountainside at the beginning of her long fall.

  The other girls had spun around, but Meriel had been one of the few not to immediately turn away again in horror. Many clung sobbing to their nearest companion, unable to watch as Beth performed her whirling, descending gavotte.

  ‘Death by misadventure’ had been the coroner’s verdict. Just like yesterday’s on Cameron. A tragic accident. No one to blame.

  And of course Beth Portman’s death had been an accident. What else could it have been? It wasn’t as if someone had pushed her.

  But hang on, Meriel thought, staring at Helvellyn’s peak. Just hang on a moment. It was exactly as if someone had pushed her, wasn’t it? You just had to look at it from a different perspective. Suppose the girl walking in front of Beth had hated her, suppose she was psychotic? Suppose, when everyone else in the single file of hikers was looking ahead and concentrating on keeping their balance, Little Miss Psycho had turned around, placed her hands on Beth’s shoulders and silently thrust the girl over the edge?

  Nobody would have known or suspected a thing, would they? Not if the killer kept her head, and her mouth shut.

  Meriel had no serious doubts that poor Beth died because she lost her footing, but that wasn’t the point. There was a measurable possibility – however small – of a different, sinister explanation.

  It must be a statistical certainty that a proportion of so-called accidental deaths were nothing of the kind. Someone engineered them and escaped the consequences.

  Like Meriel.

  She took strange comfort now in the thought that she was not alone. She couldn’t be. Out there, in the wide world that stretched on all sides below, there must be people like her. Those who had managed to disguise a wilful killing as a capricious stroke of chance; a fateful, fatal mishap.

  She supposed some were consumed by remorse, or suffered some kind of breakdown, but others would surely be quietly getting on with their lives.

  Exactly as she intended.

  Meriel reached into her bag for the coffee and sandwich. She hadn’t planned to kill Cameron. She couldn’t say it had never entered her head – there was The Night Book to consider – but that had all been an elaborate fantasy.

  It had never crossed her mind to orchestrate her husband’s drowning. She hadn’t inveigled him into the water that Sunday, had she? She hadn’t shoved him under with the bloody boat-hook. She hadn’t—

  ‘Oh, come off it, Meriel. You KNEW he’d go after the watch.’

  Meriel looked around her, startled, before she realised that the voice she’d heard was her own.

  ‘First sign of madness,’ she muttered, pouring the coffee into the plastic cap of the Thermos before taking a bite of her sandwich. ‘Get a grip, woman.’

  She stared out across the fells, thinking hard.

  She’d loathed her husband. What would she have done if, during their evening meal together, Cameron had started to choke? Would she have tried to help him? Or would she have just sat and watched as he lost consciousness and died?

  Surely there must be other women, trapped in abusive relationships, who had done that? Or perhaps seen their husbands keel over with a heart attack and left them to their fate. She vaguely remembered a newspaper story about the wife chided by a coroner for not calling an ambulance after her husband had collapsed when mowing the lawn. A neighbour had seen the whole
thing – the man toppling to the ground, clutching his chest, the wife staring and staring and staring from her kitchen window, standing stock-still.

  The woman had subsequently claimed to be incapacitated; frozen to the spot by shock. No charges had ever been brought.

  No. She, Meriel, could not possibly be alone. There must be dozens – no, hundreds – of women out there who had quietly connived in the death of a husband.

  Yes, but you set the process in motion, didn’t you, Meriel?

  At least she hadn’t spoken aloud this time, she thought. But it was true. There was all the difference in the world between passively observing someone dying from natural causes, and deliberately bringing those causes about.

  Cameron hadn’t just started to drown all by himself. She had deliberately engineered it, hadn’t she? If she hadn’t thrown his watch into the water, he would be alive today.

  And yet, and yet . . . Meriel’s reasoning became defensive again as she told herself she hadn’t forced him to go after his Rolex. It had been his decision. He could have let it sink, claimed on the insurance. Anyway, he knew all about that summer’s drownings and the underlying cause for them, literally the underlying cause; the freezing water that he was well aware lay beneath him.

  So he’d been stupid to do it. He’d made his choice and suffered the consequences. She hadn’t killed Cameron; he’d managed that all by himself.

  Meriel tried her hardest to hold on to this elegantly composed, neatly logical conclusion, but it was no good. She was too intelligent and too honest with herself. The comforting rationale quietly slipped from her grasp like a wet rope.

  She sighed. She was right back to square one; the brutal truth that she’d acknowledged to herself at the end of the very day she’d killed her husband. Yes, killed him. She’d told herself then that at least it wasn’t murder but manslaughter, and she reminded herself now of its definition.

  ‘The unlawful killing of one human being by another without malice aforethought.’

  Meriel finished her coffee and stood up, ready to set out on the long trek back down the mountain.

  She wasn’t even sure about that, now. There’d been plenty of malice aforethought, all right. She’d written it all down.

  If only she could find those bloody photocopies.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Next morning Seb was out early again to get the Sunday papers. By the time he got back to Cathedral Crag with them, Meriel had prepared breakfast and set it up outside on the sunny terrace overlooking Derwent Water.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, emerging from the French windows to join her. ‘Five-star service.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Not quite. This is the first time we’ve had a chance to eat a proper breakfast together and I suddenly realised I haven’t a clue what you like.’ She gestured towards the Japanese bamboo table with its plates and covers. ‘So I’ve done a bit of everything. Boiled eggs, two each, scrambled eggs – this means we’re out of eggs, by the way – bacon, toast, tea, fresh coffee, and orange juice. Is that OK?’

  He laughed. ‘Not quite up to my Warwick Road standard of a bowl of Frosties and a mug of Nescafé, but I suppose it’ll do.’ He kissed her. ‘Seriously, this is quite something. Breakfast with the most beautiful woman in England, cooked by the most beautiful woman in England, and looking out over one of the most beautiful views in England.’

  He flopped down into a chair. ‘I know we both want to move somewhere else as soon as we can, make a fresh start and all that, but good God, Meriel, we’ll be lucky to find somewhere with an outlook as stunning as this.’

  Meriel buttered a slice of toast.

  ‘Mmm. I was thinking about that, actually, a bit earlier on.’

  He cocked a finger at her.

  ‘Aha. By “earlier on” I take it you mean around four o’clock this morning. I wondered where you’d got to. I came down to find you but I could see the kitchen light was on and heard the kettle boiling. I figured maybe you wanted to be left alone. Were you thinking about what to do with this place?’

  She nodded. ‘Amongst other things . . . I do want to put Cathedral Crag on the market as soon as possible. There’s no mortgage on it and it’ll fetch a great deal of money. Which means we’ll really be able to pick our spot, especially as we won’t need a great big rambling place like this. In fact, I reckon we could well end up with a view even better than this one.’

  Seb looked slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘Meriel . . . there’s a lot of things we haven’t had the chance to talk about yet. You know, the nuts-and-bolts, practical stuff.’ He poured himself a glass of orange juice before continuing.

  ‘You’ve been under enormous pressure, and obviously and totally understandably preoccupied with the funeral and the inquest and everything . . . but perhaps the time’s now right for me to tell you that . . . well, I have very little money, I’m afraid. I barely earn enough on a reporter’s salary to rent my flat and run my car. I have no savings at all. I’m basically a jobbing journo on the make. So when it comes to where we next live . . . well, I’m pretty much entirely in your obligation. That makes me feel bad, but I don’t see what I can do about it.’

  Meriel leaned forward and was about to speak but Seb motioned her to remain silent.

  ‘There’s something else I need to get off my chest while I’m at it. Bear with me.’

  She sank back in her chair. ‘Go on.’

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s just that I can’t get it out of my head that we’ll be using his money to start our new lives. When you and I planned our future together that incredible night at the String of Horses – a night I’ll never forget, Meriel – we never thought for a moment that things would turn out like this, did we? That in the weirdest way possible, he – dammit, I must start saying his name: Cameron – would be sort of, well, subsidising us. There’s a part of me that’s finding that really hard to accept.’

  Meriel took her time in replying. She stood up and walked to the edge of the raised terrace, looking down on the neatly trimmed lawn beneath. Her eye was caught by a little black and white bird, running up and down the grass. She knew it at once: a pied wagtail. It was searching for insects to feed on. As far as she knew, wagtails mated for life. And she wanted to spend the rest of hers with the man behind her.

  She turned to face him.

  ‘All of that does you great credit, but I want you to listen to me very carefully. What I have to say to you is extraordinarily simple.

  ‘First. When it comes to buying our next home, when it comes to buying or owning anything at all – what’s mine is yours. Cameron used to say that to me and at first I was foolish enough to believe him. What he really meant was that he wanted to suck me so deep into his world that I’d never get out again.

  ‘But I mean it the way it ought to be meant, Seb. We should share everything we have, everything – just as we already share our love for and commitment to each other. No, don’t speak, I haven’t finished, either.’

  She spread both arms wide, as if embracing the house in front of her, and then she turned to do the same towards the garden.

  ‘Second. All this isn’t some sort of subsidy, Seb. None of it belongs to Cameron. Not any more. It belongs to me now. It’s my inheritance, and it’s mine, mine to do with exactly as I choose. And I choose to share it with you. There’s no shame or burden in that, none at all. Come here.’

  He went to her side. She took both his hands in her own.

  ‘You have nothing to feel even a particle of guilt over. Not now, not in the future, not ever. And neither do I – and believe me, Seb, I’ve thought about this. But I’m at peace with it now – and so should you be.’

  She kissed his forehead.

  ‘So, sit down and tell me about the papers. What are they saying?’

  The Sundays, in fact, had barely touched the story of the inquest. One tabloid idly speculated when Meriel Kidd might return to her radio show. Another carried a photo-fashion pie
ce which was in excruciatingly poor taste, headlined: MOURNING CHIC: HOW MINXY MERIEL WOWED THEM IN WIDOW’S WEEDS.

  An upmarket broadsheet ran a feature on women who had been bereaved young, including an interview with a famous actress who had lost her own husband when she was the same age as Meriel. The banner read: MY MESSAGE TO MERIEL – YOU’LL FIND LOVE AGAIN.

  And that was it, apart from a couple of stories in the business pages discussing the fate of Cameron Bruton’s various business enterprises. The consensus was that his widow would sell the profitable ones and wind the rest up.

  ‘They’re right about that,’ Meriel told Seb. ‘I’m no entrepreneur. I have my own career. And, on that note . . .’

  She stood up.

  Seb stared at her. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘The office. Lake District FM. It’s Sunday so there’ll be no one in. I want to have a look at my correspondence, see what needs dealing with right away and what can be put off. Also, today’s papers have given me a couple of ideas for phone-ins. I want to flesh them out a bit.’

  ‘But I thought Peter told you to take as much time off as you wanted. I thought—’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘I know, and when he said it yesterday I still thought I needed it. But then I took myself up onto the mountain and gave myself a good talking to. And I realised early this morning that it’ll do me no good at all mooching around here. I need to get back to work. It’s been weeks now since I made a programme.’

  ‘So . . . when do you plan to go back? On air, I mean.’

  Meriel considered. ‘Well, let’s see. Glenda will have this week’s show all prepared, so I suppose it’ll be next week. I’ll leave notes for Peter and my producer later today telling them, and I can call them tomorrow.’