The Night Book (7 page)

Seb had made a brief list of bullet points on the back of a hotel beermat, but he didn’t really need them. The story virtually told itself.

He took a deep breath.

‘Thanks, Graham. Shock and grief are the dominant emotions here in Windermere this evening as the community struggles to come to terms with yet another tragedy. As you say, this time
not one but two lives have been simultaneously lost to this summer’s extraordinarily treacherous waters – seemingly so inviting, and yet proving to be so deadly.

‘This afternoon Cumbria police confirmed the deceased as Keswick teacher Mrs Brenda Whately and her nine-year-old daughter, Karen. Details are still being established but it appears
that the little girl had ventured some distance from the shoreline and was being summoned back by her mother when she, Karen, got into difficulties and disappeared beneath the surface. Mrs Whately,
who police say was a strong swimmer, went to her daughter’s rescue and made an attempt to dive down to find her, but then also got into trouble. A boat launched from a nearby pier eventually
located both mother and daughter, but all attempts to revive them were unsuccessful.’

The presenter’s voice broke in again.

‘I appreciate that it’s very early to speculate, Seb, but is the feeling there that this is another case of people being lured into water that may feel invitingly warm on the
surface, but remains dangerously cold just a little way down?’

Seb considered his answer.

‘Well, it’s hard to avoid that thinking, isn’t it? The specific warnings to the public about the treacherous state of the lakes this summer – this unprecedented
summer – were only issued yesterday and perhaps Mrs Whately and her daughter were unaware of them. Cumbria Police say hazard signs will shortly be erected along stretches of shoreline popular
with swimmers, and they have requested that the media play its part by giving regular reminders of the dangers. I understand that Lake District FM will itself be broadcasting explicit warnings
after every hourly news bulletin until conditions in the lakes are judged to have returned to normal. However, with long-range weather forecasts predicting no let-up in the heatwave conditions,
that’s unlikely to be any time soon.’

‘Seb Richmond in Windermere, thank you.’

Meriel loathed her marriage, but she loved her house.

It was built as a rectory in the late 1880s by a Church of England priest, who lived comfortably on a substantial private income from his family trust.

The building was beautifully placed. It nestled like a bird beneath its mother’s wing, tucked as it was under a giant shoulder of ivy-clad rock, one of a series of ascending outcrops that
stacked their way upwards like a towering natural cathedral. Indeed, the mountain had been known locally as Cathedral Fell long before the clergyman chose to build his home there, naming it
Cathedral Crag.

The Reverend Thomas Bolton had sired a large family. Three sons and five daughters grew up in the rambling rectory. There were ten bedrooms – twelve, if you counted the servants’
quarters at the back of the house – and three enormous reception rooms. The largest of these looked directly east across Derwent Water and towards the distant rooftops and spires of Keswick,
which lay to the north.

When Cameron Bruton had bought the house it was in an extremely run-down condition. He planned to convert it into a hotel, but had never quite got around to it. Soon after he married Meriel he
brought her to Cathedral Crag to show her the place. She fell in love with it on the spot.

‘Oh darling, can we live here?’

So for six months builders and decorators had swarmed over the rectory, transforming it into a luxury home. Windows were subtly heightened and widened to make the most of the stunning views over
mountains and lake; ceilings were raised and their ornate plaster cornices and mouldings restored to past glories. The woodwormed oak banisters running up both sides of the wide stairway that
climbed all the way to the top of the house were ripped out and replaced with expensive teak. The decaying cellar was transformed into a gymnasium and swimming pool and, outside, the mossed and
lichened brickwork was sandblasted so that the front of the house glowed rosy red in the rays of the rising sun, just as it had nearly a century earlier when the rector and his family had lived
there.

Meriel adored it.

She’d been sunbathing on the elevated terrace to the southern side of the house when she realised it was approaching five o’clock in the afternoon, and the breaking story that had
robbed her of lunch with Seb Richmond was about to air.

Meriel was curious. She went inside, switching on the expensive sound system as she passed through the kitchen. Immediately, discreetly hidden wall speakers popped and crackled into life, and
she heard the voice of the man she’d been talking to – no, come on now, Meriel, be honest with yourself,
flirting with –
just a few hours earlier.

He communicated an unfolding sense of tragedy and she found herself genuinely moved. Mother and daughter. Dear God. How awful.

When Seb’s report was finished she poured herself a gin and tonic from the drinks tray on the sideboard, added ice from the huge crimson American fridge-freezer in the kitchen, and went
back outside to enjoy the last of the sun. Cameron would disapprove of her drinking so early, but he was up in Edinburgh negotiating a property deal so she could do as she pleased.

As she sank back in the recliner, her thoughts flickered around a triangle formed by three men – David Weir, Cameron, and Seb Richmond.

She mentally replayed her agent’s acid analysis of the consequences if people discovered she’d been lying through her teeth about her marriage. David had been absolutely right, of
course, but he’d merely confirmed what she already knew. If she wanted to keep her career – and the increasingly bright prospects that were now coming into view – the charade of
her relationship with Cameron must continue.

So, for now, her secret diary would remain a work in progress. Although she was beginning to understand that it was not simply a release for her humiliation and anger.

It was more; it was wish-fulfilment, if in a distorted form. Of
course
she didn’t want Cameron to die in the grotesque ways she graphically described. She wasn’t a
monster.

But she was coming to realise that deep down, in her secret heart, she
did
want him gone. She really, really did. It would solve everything. The quicker and cleaner the better. A heart
attack, say.

Actually, that wasn’t entirely out of the question.

Cameron’s father had succumbed to a fatal coronary some years before, as had an uncle and a first cousin. Heart disease was known to be embedded in the family genes; it was one of the
reasons Cameron had installed the gymnasium and pool. That hadn’t prevented him developing a potbelly, but otherwise he was generally fit and healthy. He didn’t smoke and rarely drank
spirits. The only occasion Meriel had seen him drunk was that ghastly Christmas the year before.

She felt ashamed of holding this death-wish over her husband. Keeping a diary was one thing, but picturing him having a heart attack was different – that was something she actually,
literally wanted to happen.

She imagined various scenarios. Finding him dead in bed one morning, or slumped behind the wheel of his car in the drive, or floating in the bath.

She knew it was wrong of her, but she couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she was frightened of Cameron – he had never struck her – but he was just such an odious person to
be married to. The very antithesis of a man like . . .

Well, a man like Seb.

Meriel slowly sipped her gin and wondered exactly what was happening to her. She’d been thinking about the young reporter before she’d even set eyes on him, hadn’t she?
Entirely because of some silly office gossip. Then, when she’d realised she was finally going to see him in the flesh, she’d gone into the bathroom to get herself all prettified. Why?
What exactly did she think was going to happen?

But actually something
had
happened, hadn’t it? Seb had, in the nicest possible way, come on to her in the car park. And she’d encouraged him. Oh yes, she’d most
certainly encouraged him. Indeed she was the one who’d made their date for next week.

She’d been thinking about him on and off ever since.

Meriel stretched out her long legs in the hot sunshine. They were good legs, one of her most attractive features. They looked their best in heels, which was why she’d slipped on a pair
earlier. If she was honest she’d been slightly disappointed that Seb could only see her from the waist up when she was sitting behind her studio desk. She’d been glad when he joined her
in the lift, and then walked with her outside. She couldn’t help noticing him covertly admiring her figure, and failing to disguise it. He was sweet.

She found herself thinking about their age difference. Meriel reckoned it was around three years. Nothing, really. A fraction of the gap between her and Cameron; her husband was over a quarter
of a century older than her. He’d be sixty in a few months. The difference hadn’t bothered her at first; when she married him he was a still vigorous-looking man in his late forties.
She’d lost her father to cancer several years before and, looking back, she was in no doubt now that she had been craving a paternal substitute.

She’d met Cameron at a glittering charity ball in London’s Dorchester Hotel. Meriel was working as features writer for a women’s magazine and was covering the event for them.
She found herself seated next to Cameron and he’d been a charming dinner companion, talking very little about himself but asking her what seemed to be genuinely interested questions about her
background and emerging career.

When he led the bidding at the charity auction that followed dinner, she realised just how wealthy he was. He paid thousands for a diamond ring donated by a minor member of royalty and, to her
utter astonishment and against all her protests, insisted on presenting it to her.

‘I was dreading this evening, quite frankly,’ he confided. ‘But sharing it with such a beautiful woman transformed my expectations. I’m afraid there
is
a
condition attached to this little gift, though; you must agree to have dinner with me tomorrow. I won’t take no for an answer.’

And so the courtship had begun. Meriel had been won over by Cameron’s old-fashioned charm and attentiveness (‘I feel like I’m going out with Cary Grant,’ she told a
friend) and, if she was honest with herself, she couldn’t help but be attracted by the security the rich Scotsman represented.

When the same friend teased her – ‘It’s obvious, Mel. You’re looking for a sugar daddy’ – she hadn’t troubled to deny it.

‘What if I am? Lots of women have a bit of a thing for the older man. I’m not ashamed of it. Cameron makes me feel safe and secure and, yes, his money is part of that. I’m
wouldn’t say I’m
in love
with him, exactly – but I definitely love him. If he asks me to marry him, I’ll say yes.’

He had, and she did.

But it gradually became clear to Meriel that if she had been looking for a sugar daddy, Cameron had been hunting for a trophy wife. Now he’d acquired one his inner character, so well
hidden from her to begin with, had slowly emerged into view. His delight in tormenting and humiliating her was now so fully formed that she wondered whether, even as he assiduously wooed her, he
had been fantasising about the time he would harrow and persecute her.

She vividly remembered one of the early warning signs. She’d been sitting at her dressing table, making herself up prior to joining Cameron at a large business supper, when he approached
her from behind in his dinner suit and placed his hands lightly on her bare shoulders. He stared at her in the mirror for several long seconds before she laughed, a little nervously.

‘What is it, Cameron? Why are you looking at me like that?’

He squeezed her a little harder. ‘I was just thinking . . . you’re so beautiful . . . Sometimes I want to hurt you.’

She couldn’t say he hadn’t warned her.

Ten years on, Cameron was not ageing well. There was that potbelly, which she hated, and it seemed his hair was becoming sparser by the week. But worst of all was the way his face had changed.
‘Character will out,’ her mother used to say, and Cameron’s was now written plainly across his features. His mouth was habitually turned down in a sardonic twist, and his eyes
seemed to have become sunken and narrowed in a kind of permanently suspicious, hostile stare.

She had come to realise, early in the marriage, that he had few friends. His business contacts gave him a spurious cloak of sociability – Cameron brokered many a deal on the golf course
– but there was no warmth between him and his fellow man. Two Christmases ago Lake District FM had serialised a reading of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
and Meriel, listening to
the opening chapter as she drove home from the studios, found herself muttering aloud: ‘My God, I’ve married bloody Ebenezer Scrooge.’

But she wasn’t thinking about her husband now. She was thinking about Seb. As she did so she began to realise that when she told her agent that she had lost any interest in sex,
she’d been deceiving herself as well as him.

Because she
was
thinking about it. She was imagining Seb holding her in his arms, kissing her, that dirty-blond fringe brushing against her forehead. She pictured herself running her
fingers through his hair, and pressing herself against him as she kissed him back.

She closed her eyes and squirmed slightly. She hadn’t felt like this in years. What was happening to her?

Suddenly she opened her eyes again and sat upright. This had to stop. Now. An affair with a work colleague? It was a ridiculous, stupid idea. If they got caught out – and
everyone
got caught out, didn’t they, in the end; how often had she told her listeners and readers that? – the scandal would be huge. Meriel Kidd, the happily married agony aunt, screwing a
young – make that
younger –
radio reporter.