The Night Book
THE
NIGHT
BOOK
Also by Richard Madeley
Fathers & Sons
Someday I’ll Find You
The Way You Look Tonight
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Richard Madeley, 2016
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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The right of Richard Madeley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-4058-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-4059-4
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.
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To Judy, for tolerating my near-incommunicado state over the four months it took me to create this story, and also to my wonderful colleagues in newsrooms, on papers, television and especially at BBC local radio in Cumbria. And, of course, to the lakes and fells themselves; a stunning revelation of natural beauty to a young city boy. Salad days, and happy times.
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
JULY 1976
It was still early but the lake was warm. Unnaturally warm, she thought, as she walked steadily into its shallows, her bare feet casting the first disturbance of the day across the glassy surface. In all her solitary visits here over the years, she had never known the water to be as smooth and balmy and as welcoming as this.
Beyond the immediate shimmering ripples she had created, the reflection of the parched, sun-baked hills surrounding the lake had extraordinary clarity. She could have been looking into a vast, perfectly polished mirror. The sky, waiting for the sun to make its entrance from behind a brooding shoulder of scorched mountain to the east, was the same vivid blue in these still waters as in the cloudless bowl above her.
But there was something wrong with the lake this year.
It was shrunken; diminished; humbled by the pitiless sun.
She had to hobble across unfamiliar flat rocks that were normally hidden beneath the surface, before at last reaching a strange new shoreline. She considered it for a few moments and then quickly undressed.
There was no one else in sight; it was the lake in the next valley that was attracting curious visitors this extraordinary, stretched, unprecedented summer. The waters there had now receded so far that the roofs and walls of a long-drowned village were beginning to emerge. She hadn’t driven over yet to see it herself, but those who had reported that it looked eerie, like the bones of a corpse slowly rising, dripping, to the surface. Some said that the crooked medieval church steeple, which had been the first ruined fragment to silently reappear, resembled a witch’s hat. The place was oddly unsettling and almost everyone drawn to the banks of the dark, shrinking waters found themselves increasingly uneasy. Few loitered there.
She waded further out into the lake so that it began to rise above her thighs. It remained tepid, even this far from the shore. Today, swimming naked would be an uncomplicated pleasure and not the physical challenge it usually was; one that, if she was honest, she only enjoyed afterwards as she towelled herself dry, glowing with puritanical pleasure.
She flexed her knees slightly and stood on tiptoe, pushing her body forward and down. The lake caressed and upheld her. Slowly she swam, breaststroke, moving further and further away from the shore, revelling in the Mediterranean warmth. She dipped deeper beneath the surface.
Ten seconds later, she began to drown.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Bugger . . . oh, shit.’
Seb Richmond stabbed helplessly at the pause button on the big steel tape deck and watched in dismay as the twin spools of recording tape twirled and bunched into a glistening cat’s cradle.
The machine juddered to a halt with an ear-splitting metallic shriek and the radio station’s technical engineer put his head around the editing suite’s door. ‘Problems, Seb? Again?’
The younger man sighed. ‘How do you always bloody know when I screw up, Jess? I thought this studio was meant to be soundproof.’
‘Thirty years at the BBC gives you an ear for trouble, son. Especially where new boys like you’re concerned, and it’s no different here in commercial radio. Not exactly suited to the life of a radio reporter, are you? Should have stayed on that London paper of yours.’
‘Yeah, tell me about it.’ Seb hesitated. ‘Between you and me I phoned up my old editor yesterday, asked if they’d have me back. Not a chance. They haven’t even replaced me – cost-cutting. I’m stuck up here on Lake District FM. Well, until I get the chop, that is; my three months’ probation’s almost up. Even I wouldn’t keep me on.’ He tugged ineffectually at the tangle in front of him. ‘Jesus, Jess – look at this mess.’
‘Wow, and he’s a poet, too. What was on it?’
‘Only my bloody interview with Thatcher at the Cumbria Conservative fete earlier. The network’s meant to be taking it down the line on the news feed at midnight. It’s for Good
Morning UK tomorrow. Fat chance now. I could untie the Gordian knot quicker.’ He kicked back his chair on its castors and rubbed at his eyes with both fists. ‘Never mind probation – it’ll be the sack for Seb this time.’
The technician eased himself further into the tiny room and looked calmly over the reporter’s shoulder, trying to conceal his natural sympathy. The new boy was young enough to be his son. ‘Yup, it’s a grade-A foul-up,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Looks like one of my kids’ fishing lines when they’d cocked up a cast on Windermere. Tell you what – you go get me a coffee – milk, one sugar – while I straighten it out. How many edits does it need?’
Seb stared at him in disbelief. ‘You mean you can actually save this? Jess, you’re a walking miracle.’ He scrambled out of his chair and stood for a moment, considering.
‘Let’s see . . . about three cuts, that should do it. Lose my opening question to her completely – I was all nervous gabble. I’ll write the sense of it into the presenter’s live studio cue. Start with her first answer.’ He scratched his chin.
‘Then take out the whole bit about whether she thinks she’ll be our next PM,’ he continued, as the engineer began to untangle the mangled tape with practised deftness. ‘She completely stonewalled me. Eyes like bloody chips of ice. Oh, and cut the end part completely: Maggie wouldn’t talk about her husband Denis or the kids or how she really got to be Tory leader. I come across as whiney and desperate and she just sounds irritated. I don’t blame her.’
Seb sighed. ‘I thought that this radio lark would be easy, but I just can’t do it. I was fine with my notebook and pen, but stick a mic in my hand and I completely lose the plot . . . Christ, Jess, how are you doing that?’
The tape had been efficiently re-spooled and was winding smoothly back to the start on fast return.
‘Your problem is that you’re too impatient, Seb. I’ve been watching you. You busk everything, don’t take time to learn. Now . . . let’s have us a listen.’ Jess punched play and after some hissing white noise, a nervy, breathy voice could be heard, stammering the opening question to the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
The reporter closed his eyes. ‘Christ, listen to me . . . see what I mean? I sound about seventeen.’
‘You are about seventeen.’
‘I was twenty-eight last week.’
‘If you say so, punk . . . actually, forget that coffee; go nick us both a cold drink from the station manager’s fridge while I edit this. It’s stifling in here.’
‘And out here,’ Seb said as he moved into the corridor. He paused. ‘I thought it was supposed to be cooler up in the frozen north. Since I got here it’s felt more like Greece. Thirty-two degrees again tomorrow.’
‘Yup. Ninety in old money.’ The engineer nodded and reached for a razor blade to start slicing the tape. ‘I’ve never known a summer like it. Haven’t seen a cloud in weeks, have you? My lawn looks like a piece of toast. Still, not as hot up here as your precious London, eh? They’re dropping like flies on the pavements down there. At least that’s something to make you glad you quit Fleet Street for us hicks in the sticks, eh?’
Seb gave a short laugh.
‘You have to be bloody joking, Jess. I wish I’d never left.’
CHAPTER TWO
No one could remember a heatwave like it. People old enough to have lived through the legendary Spitfire Summer of thirty-six years earlier, when snarling British and German fighter planes left their gleaming white contrails twisting against endless china-blue skies, agreed that 1976 was in a league of its own. Weeks of uninterrupted sunshine had blazed unbroken from sunrise to sunset and still there was no sign of the great heat breaking.
Cloudless day followed cloudless day. There hadn’t been even a single thunderstorm to break the pattern. True, once in a while a scattering of mackerel-shaped clouds would appear high overhead, like a sparse shoal of fish moving slowly through a barren ocean. Far below them the brilliant sunlight dimmed a little, briefly filtered and denied its full strength. But soon, always, the skies became spotless again and the faint promise of relief quietly evaporated.
It was hot, hot, hot.
To begin with, almost everyone was ecstatic that a Mediterranean summer had banished Britain’s Atlantic depressions far from its shores. Roads to the coast around the country were jammed, especially at weekends. Car dealers couldn’t lay their hands on enough convertibles. Barbecue sales rocketed. Air-conditioning units, long seen as a pointless extravagance on a mostly rainy, cloudy island, were suddenly in demand for the first time and quickly sold out. Fresh units were hastily flown in from America and went for absurd prices.
Ancient shibboleths and customs melted away like an iceberg drifting on a summer sea. In the City, gentlemen’s clubs relaxed their ‘jacket at all times’ code. During a celebrated trial at the Old Bailey, the judge allowed barristers to remove their horse-hair wigs, from under which perspiration had been dripping steadily onto their case notes. His Lordship, too, gave himself permission to hear the case bare-headed.
In the countryside, dust-devils danced like tiny tornadoes across the parched wheat fields. Trees seemed to pray for rain and for some reason the birds fell strangely silent. Perhaps it was just too hot for them to sing. Pig farmers reported that their stock was suffering from severe cases of sunburn; if the animals could not be kept indoors, their backs were slathered in sunscreen bought in bulk from the nearest chemist. One Fleet Street wag dubbed it ‘swine-tan lotion’.
Out in the meadows, the shallow horse ponds shrank and dwindled and eventually evaporated completely. Dry, cracked mud greeted thirsty cattle desperate to drink; they bellowed and stamped the ground in frustration. Farmers rigged up metal drinking troughs, filling them with water from milk churns dragged clanking across the parched fields by tractor.
All this – the discomfort, the inconvenience, the sleepless nights with windows flung open onto airless streets and gardens – was at first, in that peculiarly British way, almost perversely celebrated. But after weeks of Roman-hot days and nights, the mood began to shift, subtly, but distinctly. This endless, glorious sunshine was all well and good, but . . . it wasn’t natural, was it? A decent fine spell was one thing: this was starting to feel like something far more profound, an endless gavotte with the sun and the moon and the stars that meant . . . well, what, exactly? A fundamental shift in the planet’s weather patterns? Why not? It had happened before, hadn’t it? Look at the Ice Age, or even the mini-ice age of a few centuries earlier, when winter fairs were held on a frozen Thames.
Such speculation, idle at first, gradually took on an unmistakable edge of seriousness, even panic. Science writers aired increasingly crackpot theories in the newspapers. Perhaps the Earth had somehow deviated from its usual course through the heavens. Could it have wobbled on its axis, effecting a small but crucial shift in the planet’s aspect to the sun?
In other words, was this thing going to be permanent?
It had certainly become lethal. Deaths from sunstroke were multiplying, which was to be expected. That was a problem mainly affecting the south.
But hundreds of miles north, in the beautiful shining waters that lapped scorched screes and sparkled under bone-dry mountain tops, there was another penalty to be paid for such implacable, sweltering heat.
The drownings had started.
CHAPTER THREE
She didn’t mean a word of it, of course. Not a word. God, she wasn’t some kind of homicidal maniac. Far from it – she even had trouble killing flies; if she could shoo them out of a door or window instead, she would. She was terrified of wasps but it troubled her conscience whenever she swatted one. Which was stupid, really; she’d once read that wasps serve no useful function whatsoever in the chain of life. Nature would be quite undisturbed if the horrible things became extinct overnight.
But if anyone ever found her diary – the secret one; the one she wrote every few months, always late at night when her husband was asleep, and which she kept hidden u
nder an old towel at the back of the airing cupboard – well, God knows what they’d think. They’d assume that either she was a frustrated horror writer, a sort of Stephen King manqué, or a total psycho.
She was neither. She was just . . . what, exactly? Bloody miserable, obviously, in her fucked-up, god-awful marriage to Cameron. Even after eleven years she still couldn’t quite believe the levels of psychological cruelty the man was capable of. My God, how well he hid all that during their courtship and early days of marriage. And from her, of all people! Meriel Kidd, the famous, award-winning, feminist agony aunt, with her own weekly radio show and a column in one of the more upmarket Sunday tabloids. The expert on standing up to abusive men and cutting control freaks and bullies down to size – or efficiently out of your life.
It would be almost funny if it wasn’t so tragic. But her listeners and readers must never, ever know the truth about Cameron and what she routinely had to put up with from him. Her credibility would evaporate overnight and she would become a national figure of pity, perhaps even contempt. Because how many times over the airwaves or in print had she counselled women in marriages exactly like hers – tied to abusive, mean-spirited, boorish and supremely selfish men like Cameron? Her advice to them was always firm, always unambiguous.
You give him one ultimatum to change his ways. ONE. If he doesn’t? LEAVE. HIM. Get out from under and start again. You’re worth much more than this. You can do it. You know you can. You’re a lot stronger than you think.
Her public would demand to know why she couldn’t follow her own counsel.
In her defence, it had been a gradual descent into the nightmare with Cameron. She hadn’t woken up one morning in their sprawling Victorian house at the foot of the Cumbrian fells to find that her husband had metamorphosed overnight into a controlling monster. It wasn’t as if a bad fairy had hovered over their bed as they slept and cast an evil spell over the union.
No, the depredations had been subtle, almost unnoticeable to begin with. The occasional sneering comment directed at something she had just said or done, swiftly followed by a contrite apology.