The Pull of the Moon (35 page)

My eye fell on Trudie’s library book, still sitting on the bedside table waiting to be taken downstairs. I recalled Trudie’s words on the night of the seance – how she had
described the laughing, happy victim entering the woods and the man with the dark hair and beard, of whom she had been unafraid because he was her friend: ‘She’s on her own – dark
all around – he’s coming up behind her. She has my face.’

THIRTY-THREE

Once Danny had gone downstairs there was nothing to be heard except the steady patter of rain. The bedroom window had been left open and one or two spots fell inside, where
they sat isolated from one another on the window sill, as if each was waiting for one of the others to make a friendly move.

A whole medley of thoughts passed through my mind and I followed them like a child stumbling through a maze, never quite catching up with the rest of the group, unable to see the way out. The
most obvious idea was to put on my anorak, grab my rucksack and attempt to put as much distance as possible between myself and the other occupants of the house before my absence was spotted. I only
had to get down the stairs, across the hall and out of the front door. It sounded simple but my legs refused to move. Moreover I had to gamble on the key being left in the front door and my ability
to negotiate the stairs without setting up a racket. Danny’s recently acquired habit of appearing as if from nowhere was an added difficulty. Then it occurred to me that Simon ought to be on
my side. Perhaps we could run away together – that way we’d have the advantage of the car.

Another internal voice questioned where I thought I could run to. Wherever I went, there was no escaping from what I knew. The stuff in your head comes with you wherever you go. You can’t
leave it behind.

I waited a long time for inspiration, but it didn’t bother to show up. After a while I heard footsteps on the landing – but it was only someone using the bathroom. I wondered if it
was Simon and considered calling out to him, but I dithered about it so long that the footsteps went away again. After that there was another long silence.

Eventually I moved my chair away from the door and opened it a crack. I decided it would be better to do a recce before I risked being caught in the hall, laden with my rucksack. I stepped out
of my sandals and crept across to the banisters, where I paused to listen. There was no sound from anywhere else in the house, but as soon as I ventured down a couple of stairs they immediately
sprang into full orchestral mode, providing a loud overture to herald my appearance. I stopped dead, clinging to the banister and holding my breath. At that moment I heard the kitchen door opening,
but I managed to conquer the urge to race back into the bedroom, because I knew that anyone coming out of the kitchen would have to walk right along the hall before they could see me standing on
the topmost stairs.

‘Suit yourself, man.’ It was Danny’s voice. He didn’t sound angry; just ordinary – his everyday self.

Simon’s reply was no more than a brief mumble: his words failed to reach me.

‘Well, you know where I am,’ said Danny. He sounded ridiculously breezy.

I was poised for a speedy retreat but he didn’t approach the stairs. He must have gone into the drawing room. Damn. If he left the drawing-room door open there was no way I could get past
it and into the kitchen without him seeing me. Then I had another idea. If I could slip downstairs and out of the front door, I could go round the other side of the house and back in at the kitchen
door, without having to pass the drawing room at all. Simon and I could use the kitchen door to get away via the same route, without Danny realizing that anything was afoot until he heard the sound
of Simon’s car – and by then it would be too late for him to do anything about it.

It took me an age to bring myself to make a move, after which I took the stairs one at a time, leaving long intervals between any which uttered so much as a squeak. When I finally reached the
bottom I padded across to try the front door, but the big mortice lock was secured and there was no sign of the key. Where had Simon last put the keys? Why had we never bothered to establish a hard
and fast rule for this sort of thing?

A noise from the drawing room sent me diving through the nearest door – into the room we called the library. I listened for a moment, but there was no sound to indicate that anyone was
approaching along the hall. A new idea struck me. The library occupied the front right-hand corner of the house and had windows to two sides, each with top lights and side openers. There was gravel
under the front window and a flower bed under the one at the side, neither of which presented an ideal landing for someone with bare feet – but at least they weren’t too high off the
ground. I tried them all and every one was painted shut. What kind of decorators did Simon’s uncle employ? It was probably the same story as the garden – get in some half-baked family
member who was short of cash and let them make a mess of the job.

Just then the quiet was shattered by two or three guitar chords. I turned around in double quick time but then I realized that Danny was still safely in the drawing room, where he had begun to
strum a familiar tune. At least this covered any slight noises I might make. I had completely exhausted my small store of ideas and I felt dangerously exposed downstairs so I edged cautiously out
of the library door and crept back to my room, slightly reassured by the fact that while ex-altar boy Danny was playing ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’ he was unlikely to
come out of the drawing room and see me. Then again, so long as he was in the drawing room, there was no way I could reach Simon in the kitchen.

Perhaps he had forgotten his promise to come up for another chat. I kept my door open a crack, monitoring his position by the music. Every so often there would be a pause in the programme
– but then he would begin again, working his way through that extensive familiar repertoire, every song of which would be forever tainted with its own particular horror from now on.

I was hungry by then and dreadfully thirsty. I addressed the latter problem by rinsing out the tooth glass I had used for Danny’s rose, and drinking water from the bathroom. I threw the
white rose out of the window.

The playing had become more sporadic – he must be getting tired. That was it, of course. Danny always slept like a baby. He could be absolutely relied upon to fall asleep sooner or later.
I only had to wait him out. Then I could go down and solicit help from Simon. It would have been useful if Simon himself had come up to bed – but, now I stopped to consider it, I didn’t
think he’d spent a night in his room since Trudie died – or the first night maybe – but not since.

Down in the drawing room Danny was attempting ‘Moonshadow’ – attempting it but missing loads of notes. He was either very drunk or very sleepy – possibly both. The guitar
eventually fell silent. When the silence had lasted for several minutes I sensed my chance and stole down the stairs. No one had bothered to extinguish the hall lights since I switched them on that
afternoon. I got as far as I safely could, then very slowly inched my head sideways until I could see into the drawing room. Danny had his back to the door. Good – and also drat –
because if he’d been sitting like that all along, I could probably have got past him ages ago.

I slid along to the furthest end of the hall, turning the knob on the kitchen door as quietly as I could, while holding a finger to my lips ready to shush Simon until I was safely inside. I
needn’t have bothered. Simon was slumped forward at the kitchen table where he had fallen asleep, with his head resting on one arm. He was facing away from me and beyond his head I could see
the neck of the whisky bottle. I was shocked to note that the hands of the clock were recording half past eleven. I had been skulking upstairs for hours and hours.

I made a wide detour round the table, not wanting to startle Simon into shouting out. I saw the fallen glass first, then the aspirin bottle open on the table. His long fair hair had fallen
across his face.

‘Simon, Simon.’ I grabbed at him urgently, entirely forgetting the need for stealth. The arm lying closest to me slid off the table, thudding against my thigh before it fell useless
at his side. I drew back his hair, the ends of which were sticky with the vomit which had choked him. His eyes were closed.

‘Simon – Simon.’

I took up the fallen arm and tried to find a pulse. I didn’t know much about first aid, but maybe if I could clear his airway . . . Even as I thought of this I knew it was pointless. The
flesh of his arm felt unnaturally cool.

I stood beside him taking in foolish details: the puddle of whisky which had escaped from the glass when it fell, knocked over accidentally by Simon no doubt. The whisky bottle next to it was
the same one Danny had opened two nights before: I recognized it by a small tear in the side of the label. There was still about an inch in the bottom, so Simon couldn’t have drunk very much.
He hadn’t bothered to replace the cap on the aspirin bottle. I automatically rectified this, noting that the bottle was still three parts full.

It came to me that until a few days ago I had never seen a dead body. Now I had seen two. Simon’s neither frightened nor repelled me. The pyrotechnics failed to make their usual explosive
entrance. Instead I experienced a strange sensation of calm. It arrived in waves, rolling steadily across my consciousness, and with it came a submerged current of anger: a surging rip tide which
infused me with a powerful sense of strength and purpose. It seemed to me as if the very creatures of the night were aware of my presence and trembled before it.

I walked calmly from the kitchen to the drawing room, taking a route which brought me in front of the sofa where Danny was slouched with his guitar in front of him, held upright between his
knees. He appeared to have been dozing, but as he registered my arrival he gave a lazy smile.

‘Katy.’ His voice was slurred. The other bottle of whisky was standing at his feet and told its own story. He patted the sofa beside him, enjoining me to take a seat.

‘Are you okay, Danny?’ I asked. He began to fumble the guitar out of the way and I bent to help him, propping it against an arm of the sofa.

‘Thirsty.’ He grinned at me stupidly, still patting the vacant cushion at his side.

‘Wait there,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you something to drink.’

‘Had something to drink.’ He winked and nodded in the direction of the bottle on the floor.

I picked it up. ‘You’re going to have an awful hangover in the morning; but I can cure that. Hang on – I’ll be back in a minute.’

I returned to the kitchen where I placed the whisky bottle with its fellow on the table, before reaching a clean half-pint glass from the cupboard. I filled it with water, unscrewed the cap on
the aspirin bottle and upended it over the glass, only righting it after perhaps a dozen or more pills had splashed their way to the bottom, where they began to effervesce like an experiment in a
chemistry class. There were so many of them that they needed some help, so I got a spoon out of the drawer and stirred the mixture vigorously, but a lot of undissolved residue still kept falling to
the bottom. The cloudy liquid looked extremely unappetizing, so I hunted out a bottle of Ribena from the pantry, some of which I trickled in. Then I went back to the drawing room, with the glass in
one hand and four aspirin tablets in the other.

Danny’s face lit up when he saw me. I don’t suppose the Reverend Roger Webb Wilkins-Staunton gave his executioner such an enthusiastic welcome. This time I accepted the invitation to
sit down and submitted to a lengthy kiss. He tasted vile. I suppose it was the result of an excess of alcohol in a stale mouth, but in my mind it represented a breath of evil escaping from
somewhere deep inside him. I steeled myself not to recoil: told myself that I could endure much more than this, for Simon and for Trudie – and for that Rachel girl too, although I had never
known her.

‘Come on now,’ I said, affecting a motherly bossiness. ‘Take these aspirin and have your anti-hangover medicine.’

He was surprisingly biddable. He took the first couple of aspirin – Big Man, you see, taking them two at a time – placed them in his mouth and washed them down with a slug of my
concoction. This made him grimace and emit a noise of distaste but I ignored this, impassively handing him the second pair of pills, which went down the same way. Only after this second gulp did he
hold up the glass, eyeing the opaque purplish-pink liquid.

‘This stuffs disgusting,’ he said. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘Hangover cure,’ I said. ‘Secret recipe. It’s got Ribena in it for vitamin C. Come on, drink up.’

He didn’t comply; instead he cradled the glass in both hands, smiling at me foolishly. ‘You’re not angry with me any more?’

‘No,’ I said, maintaining my fixed smile. It was the truth. I was beyond anger. I had moved further than that, into uncharted extremes of emotion, for which there were no familiar
labels. ‘Look out, Danny. You’re going to spill it.’

This reminded him to take another drink – two or three sips which didn’t reduce the level in the glass by very much.

‘It’s horrible,’ he protested. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘You’ll be sorry in the morning,’ I said playfully. ‘Go on – be a man, drink it all down.’

The challenge to his masculinity won the day. He drained the glass, coughing and spluttering but getting it down. I relieved him of it before he had the opportunity to get interested in the
gritty residue which hung on the sides of the glass and coated the bottom.

‘It’s foul,’ he complained.

‘Well done,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you something to take the taste away.’

‘Kiss me first.’ He made a half-hearted lunge in my direction but I was too quick.

‘No thanks,’ I laughed the moment off. ‘I don’t want the taste of that stuff in my mouth.’ I was no Juliet, to kiss his lips in the hope of sharing her
Romeo’s fate.

I went back into the kitchen and put together another aspirin and Ribena cocktail. I counted the pills this time – ten of them: the mix wasn’t so dense as before. This only left a
handful of tablets in the bottle. There must have been more pills in the first dose than I thought.