The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins

  Olivia hurried into the scullery loo, her socks slipping on the cold flagstones. She bolted the door. She was shaking again, despite the blanket round her shoulders. She didn’t know why she’d told them she was making coffee when she wasn’t. She’d just said it because she didn’t want them to think badly of her for letting Vivian go down to the cellars alone. And it was true that Vivian had asked her to make coffee. But if she went back in and said something about misremembering, and not having actually made the coffee, then all this would start to sound suspicious. She had to leave it. She didn’t know what the detective meant by the ‘circus’, but presumably it meant more people.

  She thought of Vivian lying down there in the basement, with her sticky skull, strangers prodding her and the two immense patrol officers staring down the basement steps. She felt tears pressing against her eyes. Poor Vivian. She wanted to go home. She sat on the loo even though she didn’t need to go. Her teeth were chattering. She felt as if she was sitting in a bath of ice.

  After a while, she flushed and went back to the kitchen, holding the blanket tight around her body. The young constable was standing by the table. The detective sergeant had gone.

  ‘My D.S. says I need to get you to drink the tea.’ He gave her a kind smile, ‘And eat a few biscuits if you can manage it. You’ve had a pretty big shock.’ His voice was deep, surprisingly firm and quite posh. She wondered if he might be a keen graduate trainee, older and smarter than he looked.

  She sat down, picked up the mug and sipped the lukewarm liquid. It tasted disgustingly sweet and strong. She put the mug down again. ‘Look, I wonder if I might be able to come in later and do the statement. I really need to see my children.’

  She noticed then that it was the pheasant mug, Vivian’s favourite. Vivian would hate her to be drinking from it. Her eyes filled with tears again. It was inconceivable that Vivian was gone.

  ‘It’s best to just come in and do it now, while it’s all fresh in your mind.’ The young detective watched her closely as he spoke. ‘It shouldn’t take too long.’ He’d emptied Vivian’s tin of digestives onto a dinner plate and put it on the table. The sweet smell of them, and the tea, made her feel sick again. She tried to breathe. She pressed her back against the radiator, which was warming up now. This was going to be OK. This was just normal police procedure.

  She hadn’t done anything wrong. Had she?

  She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, not really. It was all a bit of a blur. She remembered stepping towards Vivian and the feel of rough wool, Vivian’s cardigan, beneath her fingertips – and the broad, open hand patting the air between them. But Vivian was already slipping then, wasn’t she, because her foot caught on the step? She’d surely reached out to stop her from falling and that’s when she’d touched the cardigan.

  It all felt so confusing, so tangled and surreal. The difference between pushing and pulling was fractional, a sliver of grey. She couldn’t really think about what had happened.

  It didn’t matter. It was over now – for both of them. Vivian couldn’t do or say anything to harm her any more. An autopsy would reveal her poor, twisted, damaged knee. The stairs were definitely perilous down to the cellar – anyone could see that. There was only a rail on one side. The heating system would prove faulty. This was dreadful, a truly dreadful accident, but there was no reason for the police to believe that it was anything other than that, a tragic, unfortunate accident.

  She was going to have to be clear with them. She must talk about Vivian’s knee and nothing else. She must allow no glimmer of ambiguity, no shiver of doubt to enter her voice because she could feel them waiting for that. No matter how understanding they seemed, they were not on her side. It was their job to pretend.

  If they tried to pin the blame on her she could go to prison. She felt a cold wave of sickness roll through her body. What would happen to the children? But they couldn’t arrest her, surely. Not without evidence. They had nothing. They would never be able to prove that she had pushed Vivian.

  She needed to calm down. There would be no reason for the police to suspect anything untoward. There was very little to link the two of them. Nobody else knew the true extent of Vivian’s involvement in Annabel. She’d never admitted the truth about Vivian’s role to Joy or Carol, and even David didn’t know how much Vivian had contributed. Her name wasn’t in the acknowledgements pages. There was no trace of her on the book. Nobody would ever find out what Vivian had done.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the room spin. She wondered if she might actually be sick.

  ‘Are you OK? You’re not going to faint, are you?’ the young detective said, suddenly close and concerned. ‘Here, put your head down if you feel faint.’

  She opened her eyes and tried to smile up at him. He had nice brown eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. I’m just really, really tired …’

  Before he could answer she heard footsteps in the corridor and the female detective came back into the kitchen holding a white notebook. She was still smiling, but there was something else behind her eyes, something more shrewd and perhaps less accommodating.

  ‘I was just having a quick look around and I found this.’ She laid it on the table. The cover was pale and plain, with a brown border and the image of a glorious green beetle, jewelled and iridescent, right in the middle, a gold pin stuck through its body. Olivia had never seen this notebook before but she knew immediately whose it was.

  ‘I’ve had a quick flick through.’ The detective’s Birmingham accent seemed stronger than before. ‘It’s a bit confusing, to be honest, so I thought I’d bring it through for you to have a little look. Maybe you’ve seen this before?’

  ‘What is it?’ Olivia didn’t touch it. She felt as if there was a dangerous dog breathing inches from her and that if she moved, spoke, gave anything away, it would snap and savage her.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. It seems to be a diary of sorts – or maybe some kind of confession?’ The detective sat down next to Olivia and she caught a sweet whiff of perfume. Her mouth felt very dry.

  ‘It seems to be mainly about you, Professor Sweetman. It’s actually quite intense. Something about …’ The detective flicked the pages to and fro. ‘An amber fossil? Your father, Ron Sweetman? Some kind of scientific hoax? Or a personal betrayal? And someone called Bertie, who died. There seems to be a lot about Bertie. Does any of this make any sense to you, Professor?’

  Olivia felt a cold, sharp pain in the middle of her chest as if something metallic was lodged in there. It was difficult to breathe.

  The detective read out a line. ‘“Olivia is a cryptic species.”’

  ‘Bertie was a dog. Vivian’s dog.’ Olivia picked up her mug and looked at the tea. She couldn’t bring herself to drink it, but she pretended to, anyway.

  ‘A dog?’

  She put the pheasant mug back down on the table. ‘Yes. He sadly died a few months ago. She was upset about that, I think.’

  ‘She certainly sounds upset. But the things she’s saying here, she sounds as if she was more than a colleague, would that be right? More like a friend?’ She laid the notebook, open at its first page, in front of Olivia. ‘It all sounds a bit complicated, to be honest.’

  Olivia stared down at it. She recognized Vivian’s orderly grammar school cursive. She scanned the first page. It was crammed with words.

  I have taken to writing things down … I need to make sense of how I come to be in this uncertain position. Writing things down seems to ease the chaos in my mind a little … I cannot just sit here and wait for her. Not again.

  She reached out, slowly, and turned the page. She saw her own name, over and over. Surely – surely – Vivian hadn’t written everything down. Surely she hadn’t produced some sort of confession.

  The cold, sharp feeling in her chest intensified.

  It didn’t matter what this book contained because Vivian wasn’t here to defend it. She had to be very careful now. She had to make them believe that she
was just an acquaintance of Vivian’s, a work colleague who’d popped in to say thank you and share a quick bite to eat. Nothing more. She had to make it clear that this notebook contained nothing but the rantings of an unhinged and lonely housekeeper.

  She made herself look up, then, into the detective’s pale grey eyes. She forced herself not to falter or look away. She shook her head. ‘I’m really sorry, but I have no idea what this is.’

  She looked from one detective to the other and gave what she hoped was a rueful shrug. ‘The thing is, people do get obsessed with you sometimes when you’re on TV. They pursue you and write to you, they latch on and project all sorts of things onto you. It can be quite odd – in fact, really unsettling at times. I’ve actually been stalked in the past.’

  The female detective smiled steadily across the table at her without blinking. Then her mobile phone began to vibrate. She got up, held up a finger, and moved towards the kitchen door. ‘Ma’am,’ she said, in a low voice as she stepped out into the corridor, ‘that’s right, yes. I think we do have enough to … Yes … I’m bringing her in right now.’

  Olivia took a breath and looked into the young male detective’s eyes. She tried to smile, though she could feel the panic rising inside her. She heard a uniformed officer’s radio crackle. One of them must be standing right outside the kitchen door now. ‘Listen, I don’t know what’s in this notebook, but to answer your first question, we were definitely never friends.’

  ‘Never?’ The young man raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Definitely not. Never. No.’ Olivia shook her head. ‘I hardly knew her.’

  She realized, then, that they would find Vivian’s papers. They would see all the work she’d done, the months of meticulous, painstaking research. ‘I mean … We worked together. She was … sort of … my research assistant. My helper.’

  ‘Your helper?’ The female detective stepped back into the room. Something about her posture had changed. She looked larger. Her face was still neutral, but her grey eyes seemed flinty as she walked towards the table. Behind her, the shadow of a uniformed officer blocked the doorway.

  ‘Yes. Kind of. But honestly …’ Olivia gazed up at her. ‘You have to believe me. I hardly knew Vivian Tester.’

  Acknowledgements

  My deepest thanks to Professor Helen Roy for your beetle expertise, patience and kindness, and also to Dr Suzannah Lipscomb, Keith Skinner, Darren Mann of Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Dr Sarah Beynon and Professor Naomi Chayen. Without your generous help I could not have begun to write about history professors, TV presenters, Victorian diaries, female scientists or beetles. Thank you to my brother, Paul Atkins, for all the Sussex nature tips. Thank you also to Hannah Beckerman, Liz Woolley, Helen Parker, Miranda Charlton, Madeleine MacPhail, Noelle Buchan, Mark Butcher, Lucy Billen and Fi Jamieson-Folland for your time, honesty, ideas and insights. Stef Bierwerth, without your superb editing and support I don’t know where I’d be. Also Jon Butler, Cassie Brown, Kathryn Taussig, Hannah Robinson, Bethan Ferguson, Rachel Neely, Julie Fergusson and all the Quercus team, I know how fortunate I am to have you fighting my corner. And of course, thank you, Judith Murray, none of this would have happened without you. Finally, thank you, Izzie Shaw, for your keen editorial eye; my mum, Sue Atkins, for answering all my grammatical queries; John who read this too many times to count and Sam and Ted who put up with me always being in the shed. As Olivia says at her book launch: ‘You’re my world’.

  Note:

  Unlikely as it may sound, I fell in love with dung beetles whilst writing this novel. For those who share my curiosity, this is a great place to start: www.drbeynonsbugfarm.com