The Way You Look Tonight Read online

  Also by Richard Madeley

  Fathers & Sons

  Some Day I’ll Find You

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Richard Madeley 2014

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Richard Madeley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47111-265-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47111-267-6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For my family

  And after all her furious sound

  The stillness of her face

  The quiet of her sleep, tonight

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  PART TWO

  19

  20

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  PART THREE

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  He looked out across the velvet darkness of the Gulf, the tiny breakers that had begun as confident waves a thousand miles to the west off the coast of Mexico now dying exhaustedly at his feet. Without a hurricane to resurrect them, they were as good as finished once they reached the shallows of the Florida Keys. But to give them their due, he thought, there was more life in these pathetic ripples than in the girl whose body moved slowly back and forward in their gentle sway.

  He reproached himself on only two counts. One was that she had died so quickly; much more quickly than he had intended. He put it down to nerves. She was his first, after all.

  The other – and this surprised him more than anything – was that despite his meticulous planning, the rehearsals and preparations for unexpected outcomes and interruptions, he had overlooked one of the most basic questions of all.

  What to do with the knife afterwards.

  He squatted patiently for a while, considering the matter, humming to himself and untroubled by concern about discovery. No one came out to the mangroves at this, the darkest hour of the night.

  The solution, when it presented itself, was so obvious that he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before.

  He gripped the bone handle of the knife as tightly as he could and thrust its long blade vertically into one of the girl’s eye-sockets. It was seemingly a random choice, but he noted that he had instinctively favoured the left one.

  He washed the blood from his hands in the warm lapping waters of the Gulf and nodded to the dead girl as he stood, ready to leave, her song sung.

  Her last gift to him had been to reveal what his signature would be.

  PART ONE

  1

  She couldn’t believe it. Her plane had taken off forty minutes earlier but only now did she realise she’d left her cigarettes behind in London Airport’s first-class lounge. Her gold lighter, too, a twenty-first birthday present from her grandfather.

  She turned towards the window to her left and deliberately knocked her forehead against it in frustration. She was seated ahead of the airliner’s wings but if she craned her neck and looked behind her she could see two of its massive propellers whirling in shining arcs. They, and their twins on the other side of the plane, were carrying her towards Massachusetts at an impressive 350 mph, but it would still be at least eleven hours before they landed in Boston. She simply had to get hold of some cigarettes before then; she was tense enough as it was. She’d never flown before.

  ‘Is everything all right, madam?’ It was a BOAC stewardess, very young and all lipstick, high heels, nylons, dark-blue uniform and a hat that the girl looking at her decided was somewhere between sweet and silly. She supposed it was a sort of forage cap, an echo of the post-war military-style uniforms the airline had only recently and belatedly moved away from. You could hardly expect the poor girls to carry on dressing up as if they were in the RAF. All four of the stewardesses on board wore them, perched above navy tunics, white blouses and pencil skirts. She thought the overall effect rather chic, despite the eccentric headwear.

  ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘I’ve gone and left my cigarettes behind. I’m gasping for one.’

  The stewardess nodded sympathetically. ‘I’ll bet. I just put one out. Couldn’t do this job without my twenty little friends.’ She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a freshly opened packet. ‘Here, have some of mine.’ She shook out a few. ‘They’re menthol – I hope that’s all right.’

  The other woman gratefully accepted the cigarettes and jammed one of them between her lips. ‘Forgot my lighter, too,’ she said, indistinctly.

  The stewardess laughed. ‘Something tells me this is your first time in the air.’ She produced a petrol lighter and flicked the top back, holding the wavering flame to the cigarette.

  ‘Thanks . . . got it . . . yes, it is my first time. How can you tell?’

  ‘From your face during take-off, mostly. You couldn’t decide if you were thrilled or terrified.’

  The stewardess sank into the empty aisle-seat beside her. ‘These awful stilettos. I forgot my low heels and my feet are killing me already. I’ll have ankles like balloons by the time we get to Boston.’

  She lit a fresh cigarette for herself. ‘I shouldn’t, really. We’re only supposed to smoke in our breaks but there’s hardly anyone in first class today.’ She waved at the rows of wide, mostly empty seats around them. ‘Only a couple of others and they’re asleep already with their eye-masks on. Just little you for us to take care of. You’ll be feeling like the Queen by the time we’re landing. Now, I know from the passe
nger manifest that you’re Miss S. Arnold. What does the “S” stand for?’

  ‘Stella.’

  ‘Ah . . . and I’m Cassandra.’ She extended a slim hand. ‘How d’you do?’

  ‘How do you do yourself . . . Cassandra. Wasn’t she the Greek goddess who knew everything?’

  ‘Sort of. She wasn’t a goddess, she was a prophet, but yes, all her predictions were spot-on. She even predicted the fall of Troy but her curse was that no one ever believed a thing she said. She went mad in the end.’

  ‘You’d better not tell me we’re on our way to America, then – I won’t believe you and you’ll go barmy.’

  The two of them laughed, and smoked side by side in silence for a while. Stella turned to look out of the window at the Welsh valleys slowly rolling underneath them. Up ahead beyond the nose-cone, she thought she could catch a glint of sea.

  ‘You were right – about take-off, I mean,’ she said eventually. ‘What threw me off a bit was all the noise. These planes make an awful racket getting into the air, don’t they?’

  The stewardess nodded. ‘It’s because they’re prop-planes. Funnily enough, the new jets are supposed to be much quieter, as well as a lot faster. Not that I’d know. Not been in one yet.’ She turned to face Stella. ‘So, you’re flying alone, then. What are you up to in Boston?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Stella replied. ‘Not in Boston, I mean. I’m not staying there. I’m going on to Northampton. It’s an hour or so by car.’

  ‘Northampton? They do love their English names over there, don’t they? I hope it’s nicer than our Northampton. I went there once to see a boyfriend. Never again. Complete dump. What’s the Massachusetts version got to offer?’

  Stella smiled. ‘An education. I’m taking my PhD there. At Smith College.’

  The stewardess’s eyes widened. ‘Wow. I’ve heard of Smith, all right. You must be terrifically bright, Stella. Smith is one of the top women’s universities in America, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, it is,’ Stella admitted, ‘along with places like Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, and Vassar down in New York State. But I really wanted to go to Smith; we had an exchange student from there at my university who roomed with me for a term. She made it sound absolutely wonderful. I was incredibly lucky to get in.’

  Cassandra eyed her closely as she drew on her cigarette. ‘Oxbridge girl, are you?’

  ‘Yes, Cambridge; same college as my mother went to. Girton. Actually, she’s Professor of Modern Politics there now. Girton’s rather like Smith – it’s an all-woman stronghold.’

  ‘Where you got a first, I’ll bet.’

  Stella looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Well . . . a double-first, actually. In Psychology.’

  Cassandra threw her hands in the air in mock alarm. ‘Heavens, I should stop talking to you at once, then. You probably know far too much about me already; all my secrets, all my vices. You psychologists can read anyone like a book, can’t you?’

  Stella laughed. ‘No! It’s not like that, honestly! And I’m not a psychologist. I only have a degree in the subject.’

  ‘Hmm . . . yes, well. I shall be on my guard all the same, all the way to Boston.’ She took another draw on her cigarette and looked curiously at the girl next to her.

  ‘So what’s your PhD going to be in, then? Something exciting, I hope. Mad people? Murderers? You know, like that chap in Psycho. The film, a couple of years ago. What was his name?’

  ‘Norman Bates.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Cassandra clapped her hands and ash sprinkled onto the front of her blouse. ‘Dammit . . . So,’ she continued, carefully flicking the debris away, ‘are you studying the kind of stuff that was in that film?’

  Stella nodded reluctantly. ‘Sort of. Well, yes, I suppose. I want to focus on psychopathy. But most psychopaths aren’t anything like Norman Bates, you know, and anyway he had split personality disorder as well. All very muddled. But psychopaths hardly ever kill anyone. They’re defined by . . .’ Stella paused. ‘Sorry, I don’t want to get all technical.’

  Cassandra smiled thinly at her. ‘Don’t worry. I may be a trolley-dolly but I’m quite bright myself, actually.’

  Stella flushed. ‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘Well . . . psychopaths generally find it impossible to empathise – you know, connect with other people, put themselves in their shoes. That’s why they can often seem unfeeling, even cruel.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because they are unfeeling and cruel,’ Cassandra said drily. ‘Sounds a pretty good description of Norman Bates to me. But how did you get interested in this kind of stuff?’

  The thick grey curtain separating the first-class compartment from the rest of the cabin was drawn briskly aside and another stewardess pushed through. She was older than her colleague and looked at her beadily.

  ‘Oh. So you’re in here, Cassandra,’ she said crisply. ‘You’re needed in the galley. The captain says we should try and get dinner served as soon as possible this evening; he’s had reports of turbulence a couple of hours ahead of us.’

  Stella’s eyes widened slightly but the woman smiled down at her and shook her head. ‘Nothing to worry about, madam. Turbulence is perfectly normal. Think of it as a patch of choppy sea. We just don’t want our passengers spilling their gravy all over themselves.’

  Stella’s new friend had already discreetly stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray that was built into the seat’s arm-rest, and now she stood up. ‘Duty calls. Would you like a drink before dinner, madam?’ A touch of formality had returned now a colleague was present. The woman was clearly Cassandra’s senior.

  ‘Definitely. And if it’s going to be a bumpy night on my first flight, you can make it a very large gin and tonic.’

  ‘Certainly, madam.’ Stella thought she caught the ghost of a wink from Cassandra.

  As the two stewardesses left, Stella turned to look back out of the window.

  They were moving out across the sea now.

  She slept after dinner and when she woke again the plane was far out over the Atlantic. It seemed to her to be chasing a setting sun that was almost motionless, a dull-red disc loitering lazily just above the horizon, going down in its own good time and refusing to be hurried. It was the most reluctant sunset she had ever seen.

  So far there was no sign of the predicted turbulence.

  The only other first-class passengers – a middle-aged American businessman with a crew-cut and wearing a loud checked suit, sitting across the aisle from an elderly woman wearing wing-tipped glasses and a hat with artificial cherries pinned to it – were awake now, both writing busily on light-blue airmail paper that, to save weight, was almost transparently thin. Stella reached into her bag and pulled out the last such letter she had received from Boston, only three days before.

  Dearest Stella

  We are so looking forward to meeting you in person on Thursday. We feel we almost know you already from your letters! Naturally your mother told us a great deal about you when she stayed with us during her attachment to Smith last year. She showed us photos of you, of course – you look so alike, you could be sisters!

  Everyone here is very excited about having an English student in our midst and we have so much planned for you after you’ve had a few days to recover from your flight. Jeb says when he last flew back from London his plane had to land in Iceland to refuel because of the headwinds. He says you must be flying on a DC7 or suchlike to be able to make it across the pond in one hop. I told him I wouldn’t know my DC7 from my H2O!

  Anyway, we have a week or two before you start your first semester at Smith. You must stay with us at the house for as long as you want before moving into your rooms on campus. As you’ll discover, our place in Bancroft Road is just a stone’s throw from the college grounds – it’s right across from Elm, not more than two minutes’ walk from our front porch. Maybe you’ll decide to stay with us here permanently. You’d be very welcome.

  I know you want to do some studying before term and that’s fine but y
ou must have some fun too, Stella! Jeb and I kissed our professorships goodbye for the summer weeks ago and have no intention of going anywhere near our departments again until the last possible minute. Jeb keeps saying ‘Smith’s STILL out for summer’ and it is, even though it’s September now. We and Sylvia, who is only a year younger than you, are going to just LOVE showing you round Massachusetts and Maine, and New England generally. We’re holding back the Fall, just for you!

  In fact, this Sunday we plan to drive down to Martha’s Vineyard, which remains full of folks clinging on to their vacation. We’ve all been invited to a barbecue on the beach – a private beach, of course – and I’m told on good authority that among the guests will be—

  For what seemed like the hundredth time since receiving the letter, Stella read the names that followed. Her head swam slightly. The idea that she might see, shake hands with, perhaps even speak to the family her generous hostess in Northampton so casually mentioned here . . . the mere thought made her more nervous and excited than she had been during take-off earlier.

  Cassandra materialised in the seat next to her. ‘Enjoy your dinner? What did you have?’

  ‘The Beef Stroganoff. Yes, it was delicious, thank you.’

  The stewardess nodded towards the blue airmail letter.

  ‘Writing or reading?’

  ‘Reading. It’s from the family I’ll be staying with to begin with, the Rockfairs. They both lecture at Smith. My mother stayed with them last year when she was a visiting professor there.’

  Stella gestured to the letter. ‘This is telling me about their plans for the weekend.’ She hesitated before continuing. ‘It seems we’re going to a private beach barbecue in Martha’s Vineyard this Sunday.’

  Cassandra’s mouth fell open. ‘Martha’s Vineyard? My goodness, you’ll be mixing with America’s crème de la crème, my dear. Martha’s Vineyard is where anyone who’s anyone goes for the summer. It’s a millionaires’ playground. Lucky you! Do you know who else is going? Anyone I might have read about in the newspapers?’

  Stella nodded. ‘Yes, actually, I do know who will be there. In fact you generally see something or other about them in the papers every other day.’