The Night Book (3 page)
Authors: Richard Madeley
That very night Meriel made her first entry in her diary, while Cameron slept upstairs.
It was an extraordinarily vicious fantasy. When she’d finished, Meriel could scarcely credit herself with writing it. It was practically pornographic; an outpouring of graphic, almost
maniacal violence.
And it was utterly, wonderfully cathartic; a calming effect that lingered for weeks.
She wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if Cameron ever caught her making one of her entries. He’d certainly snatch the black, leather-bound book from her grasp and read its
explosively angry pages.
He’d realise immediately that it was about him, his wife’s secret outlet for her fantasy revenges on him.
And what revenges they were.
Would he strike her? She doubted it. He’d never actually hit her; she’d go straight to the police if he did. In fact, she sometimes found herself perversely wishing that he’d
punch her in the face, kick her kidneys, tear out her hair, try to throttle her. Because then she’d have him. By God, she’d have the bastard. It would be her ticket out of the impasse
she’d got herself into. Worth a few cuts and bruises to see Cameron hauled off by the scruff of his neck to a police cell, and later hanging his head in the dock.
‘It came as a total shock,’ she’d tell her earnestly sympathetic TV hosts as she did the obligatory round of talk shows. ‘Of course, I divorced him on the spot. No woman
should
ever
put up with abuse, be it mental or physical. I just hope that my experience acts as a positive example to others.’ There might even be a book deal in it.
But Cameron was clever. He never hit her. He had far too much to lose, a man of his public status, the brilliant businessman with the younger, foxy wife.
The only book she looked like writing any time soon was a diary that no one would ever be allowed to read.
I take the breadknife from the drawer and hone it one last time on the whetstone that hangs from a hook above the sink. The knife’s keen edge is
already glitteringly sharp but I want to be absolutely sure. One stroke must be enough. I don’t want him to wake in time to fight me off before I open his throat with a single, deadly
slash.
I make a few final light, upward strokes, unconcerned by the squeal of metal on stone. He’s asleep up in our bedroom at the back of the cottage. Even if he were
awake, he couldn’t hear this.
I climb the stairs quietly as I can, taking care to keep close to the side of each tread, next to the wall, so they don’t creak. I oiled the hinges of the bedroom
door this morning so when I gently push at it now, it slowly swings open in complete silence.
There he is. He insists on a nightlight, the big baby, so I can see him quite clearly, snoring on his back, duvet pushed down all the way to his horrible, hairless
knees, his revolting potbelly sticking up towards the ceiling. Beneath the swollen stomach the penis is shrivelled and shrunken. It looks like a button mushroom. It only ever feeds and grows
on his cruelty; he can never manage it unless he declares all my perceived faults and failures, aloud, to my face, which he holds between his fat, sausage-like fingers. The exact opposite of
a love song.
I tiptoe to his side of the bed. I can’t believe how calm I am feeling. I steady myself, allowing him to take his last breath. His last breath. What a wonderful
thought.
And then I do it. I bend down, cup his stubbly, fat-folded chin in my left hand and force his head up and across to one side. He starts to mutter something but I’m
much too quick for him. The knife is ready in my right hand and I press the hilt hard against his throat, just below the Adam’s apple, and then pull it back and down as fast as I can
and with all the strength I have.
A fountain of blood – it looks black in this dim light – explodes from the scimitar-shaped, gaping incision I have just made and he makes exactly the same
kind of stupid gargling noise I hear coming from our bathroom every morning when he brushes his teeth. I step back, trying not to laugh; this is incredibly funny. I wasn’t prepared for
that.
Now he’s thrashing about with his arms and legs, and the gargling turns to gurgling, along with a weird, high-pitched whistling noise. I never hear that when he
brushes his teeth. Then he abruptly goes into convulsions – proper, full-body convulsions – before giving a long, tip-to-toe shudder which goes on for a surprisingly long time.
Eventually it subsides, and at last my wonderful husband lies utterly still.
I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually wake up before he died.
Pity.
The coroner’s clerk moved grumpily down the windowed side of the impossibly stuffy little courtroom, methodically opening each top panel with the long-handled winding rod
that his own father had used half a century before.
He cursed under his breath as the small hinged Victorian rectangles of glass crowning each bay grudgingly squeaked open by their regulation few inches. Call this ventilation? The inquest about
to begin into that poor girl drowning in Buttermere had better be an open-and-shut case, or the next one would be about a mass suffocation right here in this room. He half-hoped the old boy would
adjourn the hearing to a later date when this ruddy heatwave had passed, if it was ever going to.
A side door opened behind him and several men in shiny suits, and one woman with a shiny face, sauntered in, talking and laughing. Bloody press. No respect. Ghouls, the lot of them. What if it
was their kid what drowned? They wouldn’t be so bloody pleased with themselves then.
He turned his back on them in disgust and walked over to the old boy’s raised desk to make sure the case notes were in order. They’d be starting soon.
Dr Timothy Young was probably over-qualified to be the Kendal Coroner. He’d got a first in medicine from Bristol and went on to qualify as a consultant neurologist,
practising in one of the big London teaching hospitals.
But to his surprise, he found he was slightly bored there. Of course, the job was demanding, sometimes exceptionally so, but still, still . . . He missed the intellectual rigour of the
university’s union debates, and the semantic arguments that sometimes carried on well into the night long after the official jousting had ended. He was naturally opinionated, even
disputatious, and enjoyed a good wrangle.
He began to realise that he’d taken the wrong career path, and when he was in his mid-thirties he made his decision. Ignoring his father’s warnings about ‘changing horses in
mid-stream, Timothy’, he quit his post at the hospital and went back to university, this time to study law.
He qualified as a barrister in time for his forty-first birthday and moved back home to his beloved Lakes. The work in Carlisle Crown Court wasn’t as high-profile as the Bailey (where
during his pupillage he’d been quietly told he was assuredly destined) but he didn’t care. A good argument was a good argument whichever court you were in, and when his cases adjourned
for the day he could be at his beautiful wood-framed house overlooking the lapping waters of Bassenthwaite in less than an hour, in time for dinner with his wife.
Now in his early sixties, Dr Young had been happy to slow the pace down a notch or two. He wanted to spend more time sailing his boat on Windermere, so he’d gladly accepted the local
council’s offer the previous year to take over as Kendal Coroner.
Thus far, there had been nothing particularly complicated or unusual about the deaths he’d examined. A couple of shotgun suicides, one case of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty
farmhouse boiler, a dairyman crushed to death by an ill-tempered heifer. Routine stuff for a country coroner.
Until this morning.
There was something about this one he didn’t like.
‘. . . and therefore my conclusion is that Miss Winterton suffered death due to cardiac arrest caused by the inhalation of water.’
‘In other words, she drowned,’ Dr Young prompted the nervous young pathologist giving evidence.
‘Er, yes, sir,’ the young man replied, going rather pink. ‘She drowned.’
‘Hmm.’ The coroner tapped his desk lightly with a pencil. ‘Doesn’t that surprise you somewhat, doctor? We’ve heard that Miss Winterton was a physically fit young
woman of twenty-four, an experienced swimmer. Indeed her father has told us that his daughter had swum in Buttermere almost daily since childhood. We also know that conditions on the lake on the
day in question were flat calm. Do you have any theories as to how she could have inhaled enough water to incapacitate and kill her?’
The pathologist looked slightly hunted.
‘Er . . . no, I’m afraid I don’t, your honour.’
The older man suppressed a smile. ‘I’m not a judge, Dr Bullen. “Sir” will do.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘That’s quite all right.’ The coroner paused for a moment before continuing: ‘Am I correct in thinking you appeared before me earlier this month to give evidence in
another case of drowning? That of a middle-aged man? He was swimming in Bassenthwaite Lake, as I recall.’
The pathologist appeared surprised, but nodded. ‘That’s correct, your hon— . . . sir.’
‘I thought so. Could you refresh my memory of that particular case? I can adjourn if necessary.’
The man opposite relaxed a little. ‘There’s no need for that, sir. I believe I may have my notes on it here with me. Bear with me a moment, please.’
He bent to pick up his briefcase and rummaged briefly through it before removing a slim brown file. ‘Yes, I thought so. Here we are. What exactly do you wish to know, sir?’
‘The cause of death, please.’
The pathologist relaxed even more. ‘Oh, I can remember that easily enough. It was cardiac arrest.’
‘Caused by inhalation of water?’
‘No. There was no water in the deceased’s lungs. It was straightforward cardiac arrest – a heart attack.’
‘Ah, so I was wrong just now. It wasn’t a drowning.’
‘No, sir, technically it wasn’t, although death did occur whilst swimming.’
Timothy Young thought for a moment before leaning forward slightly. His instincts were telling him he was close to the edge of something.
‘If memory serves, Dr Bullen, your autopsy found no signs of associated heart disease.’
The pathologist examined his file and then looked up. ‘That’s correct, sir. My examination of this . . .’ he paused again, looking back down at the papers, ‘yes, this
forty-four-year-old male, showed the heart and surrounding arteries to be in excellent condition.’
‘Can you pass any conjecture, then, as to why this gentleman should suffer a fatal coronary whilst swimming in Bassenthwaite?’
‘I’m not a heart specialist, sir. I’m afraid you’d have to consult one of them.’
The coroner nodded. ‘Of course. You have been most helpful, doctor. You may stand down.’ He glanced up at the clock on the opposite wall.
‘I see it is approaching half past twelve. I’ll take an adjournment for lunch and this hearing will reconvene at two o’clock. Mr Armstrong?’
His clerk looked up from the desk below. ‘Sir?’
‘I would like to see you in my room. Now, if that’s convenient.’
‘Sir.’
‘Thank you. This hearing is adjourned.’
Back in his cramped office directly behind the courtroom, Timothy Young poured himself and his clerk a glass of chilled water from a jug kept in a little fridge.
‘Bloody hot in there this morning, eh, John?’
‘Too right, sir,’ Armstrong replied, before gratefully gulping down the water in one long swallow. ‘I’ll bet my old man never experienced one like it in all his days
here. I was with the Eighth Army in North Africa during the last lot and this is almost as bad. For the heat, I mean.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What did you want
to see me about, sir?’
Young drained his own glass before replying.
‘It concerns the period I was on holiday last month – towards the end of June. Didn’t I read in the paper that you’d had an inquest into another drowning? It was a young
mother, wasn’t it? She got into difficulties in Thirlmere.’
Armstrong nodded. ‘Absolutely right, sir. It was very sad. The woman had two kiddies and the poor little blighters saw the whole thing happen from the shore with their grandmother. Quite
dreadful. The visiting coroner recorded it as accidental death.’
‘Was it actual drowning or an unrelated cardiac arrest? Can you remember?’
His clerk looked faintly offended.
‘Course I can remember, sir. It was just like the poor young lady we’ve been hearing about today. Lungs full of water. She drowned.’
Timothy Young steepled his fingers and closed his eyes, thinking hard. After a minute he opened them again.
‘John, how long have you been clerk here?’
‘Thirty-one years, sir.’
‘Do you ever remember so many deaths in the water happening in such a short space of time?’
The clerk shook his head. ‘Not separately, no. We had a ferry go down once, September 1948, I think it was. Five souls lost that afternoon. But I don’t recall three unconnected
fatalities in as many weeks, no.’
‘And neither of us recalls a summer as fierce as this one, do we?’ The coroner began tapping with his pencil again. ‘I think there
is
a connection here, John.
‘In fact, I think we may have a problem.’
AUGUST
Seb Richmond hadn’t been sacked, but he was still on thin ice. His interview with Margaret Thatcher, thanks to skilful editing by Jess, had been just enough to win him a
grudging extension to his probation at Lake District FM – three more months, one last chance to prove himself.
‘It’s like living under the fucking Sword of Damocles,’ Seb grumbled on the phone to his girlfriend in London. ‘Honestly, Sarah, if I didn’t have you to talk to, I
don’t know how I’d stand it. When can you next come up here?’
The line crackled.
‘Sarah? You still there? Sarah?’
