The Night Book (15 page)

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.

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 emotionally 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.

So, what next in her husband’s aquatic
danse macabre
? Considering how vigorously she’d seen him kicking downwards, it could only have been two or three seconds before his
head and neck and shoulders, and then the rest of him, plunged into the icy water that lay just beneath the freakishly warm mantle above.

The shock must have been overwhelming and, judging by all that ghastly foam she’d seen coming from his mouth and nostrils when he eventually surfaced, Cameron must have immediately and
deeply inhaled; a reflex gasp.

Would that have rendered him unconscious? Probably not straight away. The sensation of sucking ice-cold liquid into his lungs must have been excruciating. Cameron had remained underwater and
beyond sight for many more seconds. God knows what torments he had suffered during that time.

Perhaps, Meriel thought, such extreme and desperate corners of the human zoo were better kept beyond witness.

She took a deep swallow from the tumbler and threw her head back.

Well, there. She’d done her best to face up to the reality of Cameron’s last moments. She hadn’t tried to fool herself by minimising his agony. Indeed, she accepted that what
she had put him through was probably more dreadful than anything she or anyone else could possibly imagine.

And it
was
she who’d put him through it. She was completely responsible. She’d made it all happen. She’d set a snare and encouraged him to throw the noose around his
own neck.

Then she’d calmly stood back and let him die.

But she didn’t feel a shred of guilt or remorse about any of it, did she? Not a crumb of compassion. No empathy, no regret. Meriel had to admit it to herself: her conscience was entirely
undisturbed.

She suddenly sat up and addressed the shimmering lake opposite.

‘Perhaps I’m a psychopath.’

She swirled the thought around her half-empty glass, considering the question for a few more moments. Then she stood up.

‘All right, then. Let’s go and see, shall we?’

She crossed the passage that led into the library – it had been a library back in the rector’s day and still housed some of his original books – and found her weighty
new-edition
English Dictionary and Thesaurus
.

Meriel ran a forefinger down the margin of the page that was helpfully headed ‘
psycho
’.

‘Psychometry, psychomotor,’ she muttered. ‘Here we are.
Psychopath
.

A person with a personality disorder characterised by a tendency to commit antisocial and sometimes violent acts without feeling guilt.

Meriel was thoughtful. This was interesting. She hadn’t been actually
violent
, had she? She’d only chucked his stupid watch into the water. Lots of people in bad
relationships did crazy things like that.

And none of what she’d done could be described as a
tendency
, could it? Nothing like it had ever happened before in her life. As for antisocial . . . well, society was hardly
worse off for a vile, cruel man’s passing, was it?

That part of the definition regarding absence of guilt was spot-on, obviously. She was bang to rights there. But only in relation to Cameron’s death. She was perfectly capable of
experiencing guilt about lots of other things, wasn’t she? She had morals. She wasn’t some sort of unfeeling, killer robot.

On impulse, she searched the pages until she found the exposition of ‘killer’.

Person or animal that kills, habitually.

Habitually?
Meriel snorted. Not guilty.

She flipped forward again, this time to ‘murder’.

Unlawful premeditated intended killing of one human being by another.

Not guilty again. There was absolutely nothing premeditated about what had happened on the lake this afternoon. As far as intent went, all she’d intended when the boat left the jetty was
to ask Cameron for a trial separation.

So . . . what exactly
had
taken place between her and Cameron out there on the water? Could it even be defined in a single word?

Perhaps. A suspicion of what that word might be had been slowly forming in the back of Meriel’s mind.

She turned the dictionary’s pages again. She knew what she was looking for.

There it was; three syllables.

Manslaughter.

The definition beneath perfectly summarised what she’d done that day.

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

She drained off what was left of her whisky in one steady swallow.

‘Without malice aforethought.’ Meriel spoke the words aloud.

Definitely manslaughter, then.

She reckoned she could live with that.

Especially if no one ever found out.

It was a little before quarter to eight when Seb dialled Bob Merryman’s personal hotline. The news editor not only had his own extension, but a completely separate
landline too, dedicated to his exclusive use. Lake District FM’s accountants had grumbled at the expense, but Merryman had insisted on it when he’d been poached to join the station.

‘I’m fucked if I’ll fight for switchboard space with my reporters during a breaking story,’ he said bluntly during discussions over his contract. ‘It’s part
of my package. No line, no deal. Non-negotiable.’

Today, he’d come in especially early to co-ordinate coverage of the latest Lakeland drowning. It was going to be a big story and not just locally. There was a general sense that a tipping
point had been reached. Two deaths in Ullswater in a week. Eleven in the Lake District inside two months. There were rumours that a special government inquiry was about to be announced.

The news editor was on his third coffee and his fourth cigarette when his personal phone rang. He didn’t rush to answer, giving himself time to take a gulp and then a drag before picking
up.

‘Merryman.’

‘Bob, it’s Seb. I’m calling from the Glenridding Hotel. The press conference starts in fifteen minutes.’

‘I know. Morning, Seb. Good holding work on the six and seven o’clock headlines; you managed to make some half-decent bricks without straw. But I’m assuming we’ll
definitely get victim ID and a lot more background during the conference. Network’s been nagging me.’