The Night Book Read online

  But the put-downs gradually grew more frequent and the apologies less so. Then the dominating behaviour began to emerge. Especially over money.

  Cameron was not only much older than her – she was thirty-one, he was fifty-nine – he was wealthier, too. A lot wealthier. By the time he was forty he’d made his first million and he was worth many times that today after making a series of killings on the stock market. As soon as they married, in what seemed to her at the time to be a sincere and generous act, he’d insisted on adding her name to all three of his private bank accounts.

  ‘But I earn a fraction of what you do,’ she protested. ‘It doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘What’s mine is yours,’ he told her firmly and, with a mixture of guilt and gratitude, she had agreed.

  Now, the joint accounts were joint in name only. Cameron had slowly asserted complete control over every aspect of their financial affairs. What had begun as the occasional good-natured question from him at the breakfast table when he opened their bank statement (‘Hello, what’s this about? I don’t remember taking out a hundred pounds from the cashpoint in Kendal last Thursday. That must have been you, darling. What did you need it for?’) had become a forensic weekly inquisition.

  He went through their statements line-by-line, using a clear Perspex ruler, peering over rimless reading glasses at each entry as he moved remorselessly down the page. He insisted she account for everything. Last year she’d made a short local speaking tour around the Lakes and the Scottish borders and had quietly asked the organisers to pay her expenses in cash. The fees weren’t much more than token payments but at least, she thought, she’d have a few pounds of her own to spend how she liked without being grilled.

  But Cameron had found the money – he went through her purse one evening when she was in the bath – and there’d been a terrible row. ‘You can’t have it both ways, you deceitful bitch!’ he’d roared, waving the pathetic handful of banknotes in her face. ‘If what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. I’m putting this straight in the bank tomorrow. Actually, I’m not. You’re going to. And I’ve bloody counted it so you’d better not keep any of it back. I’ll know if you do.’

  Belatedly she’d realised that Cameron’s insistence on adding her name (and of course her income) to his bank accounts had nothing whatsoever to do with generosity of spirit. From the start his motive had been to keep her under constant observation, supervision and constraint. It begged the question she knew would mystify any dispassionate observer: why on earth was a strong, self-confident woman like Meriel Kidd sticking with her marriage to a total shit like Cameron Bruton?

  She knew the answer and it shamed her. She was doing it to preserve her career. There was no lie she wouldn’t tell to preserve the public fiction that she enjoyed the happiest of marriages. ‘I’m very lucky,’ she’d told Woman’s Own only last month. ‘I know it sounds like a terrible old cliché, but Cameron and I were quite simply made for each other.’

  Perhaps if she had left him years ago, as soon as she realised the kind of man he really was, it would have been all right. More than all right; it would have demonstrated that she practised what she preached.

  But divorce him now? It was simply too much for her to risk. Her career gave her self-worth and public standing and respect. It was the only thing she had left (Cameron had made it clear he had no interest in becoming a father) and she was damned if she was going to risk losing it. She’d just have to carry on, chin up, smile firmly in place.

  For now.

  Always that caveat at the back of her mind. For now. One day, she knew she’d find a way out. It was that quiet certainty, unsupported by any actual plan of action, which kept her going.

  That, and the secret diary.

  She’d bought it on impulse years before from a second-hand bookshop in Windermere. God knows who it had originally belonged to, but whoever it was, they hadn’t written a single word on the thick white pages that were bound inside an expensive-looking supple black leather jacket. A red silk ribbon was attached to the spine to mark entries and, just beneath it, a hollow leather tube, a sort of holster, to hold a pen.

  There were no lines on the pages, no margins, no dates. The diary was perfectly blank. Meriel couldn’t help thinking that it had been waiting for her, and her alone, to buy it. She couldn’t really understand her compulsion to do so, but it was absolute and not to be denied.

  Her marriage to Cameron had yet to descend into the abyss; she was still relatively happy on the day she bought the diary.

  But for some reason, she didn’t tell him about it. She hid it from her husband right from the start.

  Cameron never listened to Meriel’s show – he made a point of telling her that, pleasantly describing it as ‘your brainless apology for a programme’ – but if he had, how he would have laughed. ‘Healer, heal thyself,’ he would surely mock when she arrived home (Cameron was fond of Biblical aphorisms). He knew exactly how unhappy she was with him. Of course he did. Her misery was his hobby.

  Her hobby was her secret.

  She’d begun writing the diary five years earlier, when she’d finally admitted to herself her catastrophic mistake in marrying Cameron. The first entry was inspired by a letter from one of her listeners, a woman who had poured her heart out to Meriel in half a dozen anguished pages that described the emotional abuse she was suffering at her husband’s hands.

  Meriel had identified with the woman’s wretchedness, but it was what was scribbled below the signature that had caught her imagination.

  PS. Thank you for reading this. Even if you are unable to reply, I can’t tell you what a difference it has made just to write all of it down. I feel so much better for it. I think I might start keeping some sort of a diary. I believe it could help, whatever I eventually decide to do.

  That very night Meriel made her first entry in her diary, while Cameron slept upstairs.

  It was an extraordinarily vicious fantasy. When she’d finished, Meriel could scarcely credit herself with writing it. It was practically pornographic; an outpouring of graphic, almost maniacal violence.

  And it was utterly, wonderfully cathartic; a calming effect that lingered for weeks.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if Cameron ever caught her making one of her entries. He’d certainly snatch the black, leather-bound book from her grasp and read its explosively angry pages.

  He’d realise immediately that it was about him, his wife’s secret outlet for her fantasy revenges on him.

  And what revenges they were.

  Would he strike her? She doubted it. He’d never actually hit her; she’d go straight to the police if he did. In fact, she sometimes found herself perversely wishing that he’d punch her in the face, kick her kidneys, tear out her hair, try to throttle her. Because then she’d have him. By God, she’d have the bastard. It would be her ticket out of the impasse she’d got herself into. Worth a few cuts and bruises to see Cameron hauled off by the scruff of his neck to a police cell, and later hanging his head in the dock.

  ‘It came as a total shock,’ she’d tell her earnestly sympathetic TV hosts as she did the obligatory round of talk shows. ‘Of course, I divorced him on the spot. No woman should ever put up with abuse, be it mental or physical. I just hope that my experience acts as a positive example to others.’ There might even be a book deal in it.

  But Cameron was clever. He never hit her. He had far too much to lose, a man of his public status, the brilliant businessman with the younger, foxy wife.

  The only book she looked like writing any time soon was a diary that no one would ever be allowed to read.

  I take the breadknife from the drawer and hone it one last time on the whetstone that hangs from a hook above the sink. The knife’s keen edge is already glitteringly sharp but I want to be absolutely sure. One stroke must be enough. I don’t want him to wake in time to fight me off before I open his throat with a single, deadly slash.

  I make a few final light, upward
strokes, unconcerned by the squeal of metal on stone. He’s asleep up in our bedroom at the back of the cottage. Even if he were awake, he couldn’t hear this.

  I climb the stairs quietly as I can, taking care to keep close to the side of each tread, next to the wall, so they don’t creak. I oiled the hinges of the bedroom door this morning so when I gently push at it now, it slowly swings open in complete silence.

  There he is. He insists on a nightlight, the big baby, so I can see him quite clearly, snoring on his back, duvet pushed down all the way to his horrible, hairless knees, his revolting potbelly sticking up towards the ceiling. Beneath the swollen stomach the penis is shrivelled and shrunken. It looks like a button mushroom. It only ever feeds and grows on his cruelty; he can never manage it unless he declares all my perceived faults and failures, aloud, to my face, which he holds between his fat, sausage-like fingers. The exact opposite of a love song.

  I tiptoe to his side of the bed. I can’t believe how calm I am feeling. I steady myself, allowing him to take his last breath. His last breath. What a wonderful thought.

  And then I do it. I bend down, cup his stubbly, fat-folded chin in my left hand and force his head up and across to one side. He starts to mutter something but I’m much too quick for him. The knife is ready in my right hand and I press the hilt hard against his throat, just below the Adam’s apple, and then pull it back and down as fast as I can and with all the strength I have.

  A fountain of blood – it looks black in this dim light – explodes from the scimitar-shaped, gaping incision I have just made and he makes exactly the same kind of stupid gargling noise I hear coming from our bathroom every morning when he brushes his teeth. I step back, trying not to laugh; this is incredibly funny. I wasn’t prepared for that.

  Now he’s thrashing about with his arms and legs, and the gargling turns to gurgling, along with a weird, high-pitched whistling noise. I never hear that when he brushes his teeth. Then he abruptly goes into convulsions – proper, full-body convulsions – before giving a long, tip-to-toe shudder which goes on for a surprisingly long time. Eventually it subsides, and at last my wonderful husband lies utterly still.

  I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually wake up before he died.

  Pity.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The coroner’s clerk moved grumpily down the windowed side of the impossibly stuffy little courtroom, methodically opening each top panel with the long-handled winding rod that his own father had used half a century before.

  He cursed under his breath as the small hinged Victorian rectangles of glass crowning each bay grudgingly squeaked open by their regulation few inches. Call this ventilation? The inquest about to begin into that poor girl drowning in Buttermere had better be an open-and-shut case, or the next one would be about a mass suffocation right here in this room. He half-hoped the old boy would adjourn the hearing to a later date when this ruddy heatwave had passed, if it was ever going to.

  A side door opened behind him and several men in shiny suits, and one woman with a shiny face, sauntered in, talking and laughing. Bloody press. No respect. Ghouls, the lot of them. What if it was their kid what drowned? They wouldn’t be so bloody pleased with themselves then.

  He turned his back on them in disgust and walked over to the old boy’s raised desk to make sure the case notes were in order. They’d be starting soon.

  Dr Timothy Young was probably over-qualified to be the Kendal Coroner. He’d got a first in medicine from Bristol and went on to qualify as a consultant neurologist, practising in one of the big London teaching hospitals.

  But to his surprise, he found he was slightly bored there. Of course, the job was demanding, sometimes exceptionally so, but still, still . . . He missed the intellectual rigour of the university’s union debates, and the semantic arguments that sometimes carried on well into the night long after the official jousting had ended. He was naturally opinionated, even disputatious, and enjoyed a good wrangle.

  He began to realise that he’d taken the wrong career path, and when he was in his mid-thirties he made his decision. Ignoring his father’s warnings about ‘changing horses in mid-stream, Timothy’, he quit his post at the hospital and went back to university, this time to study law.

  He qualified as a barrister in time for his forty-first birthday and moved back home to his beloved Lakes. The work in Carlisle Crown Court wasn’t as high-profile as the Bailey (where during his pupillage he’d been quietly told he was assuredly destined) but he didn’t care. A good argument was a good argument whichever court you were in, and when his cases adjourned for the day he could be at his beautiful wood-framed house overlooking the lapping waters of Bassenthwaite in less than an hour, in time for dinner with his wife.

  Now in his early sixties, Dr Young had been happy to slow the pace down a notch or two. He wanted to spend more time sailing his boat on Windermere, so he’d gladly accepted the local council’s offer the previous year to take over as Kendal Coroner.

  Thus far, there had been nothing particularly complicated or unusual about the deaths he’d examined. A couple of shotgun suicides, one case of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty farmhouse boiler, a dairyman crushed to death by an ill-tempered heifer. Routine stuff for a country coroner.

  Until this morning.

  There was something about this one he didn’t like.

  ‘. . . and therefore my conclusion is that Miss Winterton suffered death due to cardiac arrest caused by the inhalation of water.’

  ‘In other words, she drowned,’ Dr Young prompted the nervous young pathologist giving evidence.

  ‘Er, yes, sir,’ the young man replied, going rather pink. ‘She drowned.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The coroner tapped his desk lightly with a pencil. ‘Doesn’t that surprise you somewhat, doctor? We’ve heard that Miss Winterton was a physically fit young woman of twenty-four, an experienced swimmer. Indeed her father has told us that his daughter had swum in Buttermere almost daily since childhood. We also know that conditions on the lake on the day in question were flat calm. Do you have any theories as to how she could have inhaled enough water to incapacitate and kill her?’

  The pathologist looked slightly hunted.

  ‘Er . . . no, I’m afraid I don’t, your honour.’

  The older man suppressed a smile. ‘I’m not a judge, Dr Bullen. “Sir” will do.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’ The coroner paused for a moment before continuing: ‘Am I correct in thinking you appeared before me earlier this month to give evidence in another case of drowning? That of a middle-aged man? He was swimming in Bassenthwaite Lake, as I recall.’

  The pathologist appeared surprised, but nodded. ‘That’s correct, your hon— . . . sir.’

  ‘I thought so. Could you refresh my memory of that particular case? I can adjourn if necessary.’

  The man opposite relaxed a little. ‘There’s no need for that, sir. I believe I may have my notes on it here with me. Bear with me a moment, please.’

  He bent to pick up his briefcase and rummaged briefly through it before removing a slim brown file. ‘Yes, I thought so. Here we are. What exactly do you wish to know, sir?’

  ‘The cause of death, please.’

  The pathologist relaxed even more. ‘Oh, I can remember that easily enough. It was cardiac arrest.’

  ‘Caused by inhalation of water?’

  ‘No. There was no water in the deceased’s lungs. It was straightforward cardiac arrest – a heart attack.’

  ‘Ah, so I was wrong just now. It wasn’t a drowning.’

  ‘No, sir, technically it wasn’t, although death did occur whilst swimming.’

  Timothy Young thought for a moment before leaning forward slightly. His instincts were telling him he was close to the edge of something.

  ‘If memory serves, Dr Bullen, your autopsy found no signs of associated heart disease.’

  The pathologist examined his file and then looked up. ‘That’s c
orrect, sir. My examination of this . . .’ he paused again, looking back down at the papers, ‘yes, this forty-four-year-old male, showed the heart and surrounding arteries to be in excellent condition.’

  ‘Can you pass any conjecture, then, as to why this gentleman should suffer a fatal coronary whilst swimming in Bassenthwaite?’

  ‘I’m not a heart specialist, sir. I’m afraid you’d have to consult one of them.’

  The coroner nodded. ‘Of course. You have been most helpful, doctor. You may stand down.’ He glanced up at the clock on the opposite wall.

  ‘I see it is approaching half past twelve. I’ll take an adjournment for lunch and this hearing will reconvene at two o’clock. Mr Armstrong?’

  His clerk looked up from the desk below. ‘Sir?’

  ‘I would like to see you in my room. Now, if that’s convenient.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Thank you. This hearing is adjourned.’

  Back in his cramped office directly behind the courtroom, Timothy Young poured himself and his clerk a glass of chilled water from a jug kept in a little fridge.

  ‘Bloody hot in there this morning, eh, John?’

  ‘Too right, sir,’ Armstrong replied, before gratefully gulping down the water in one long swallow. ‘I’ll bet my old man never experienced one like it in all his days here. I was with the Eighth Army in North Africa during the last lot and this is almost as bad. For the heat, I mean.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What did you want to see me about, sir?’

  Young drained his own glass before replying.

  ‘It concerns the period I was on holiday last month – towards the end of June. Didn’t I read in the paper that you’d had an inquest into another drowning? It was a young mother, wasn’t it? She got into difficulties in Thirlmere.’

  Armstrong nodded. ‘Absolutely right, sir. It was very sad. The woman had two kiddies and the poor little blighters saw the whole thing happen from the shore with their grandmother. Quite dreadful. The visiting coroner recorded it as accidental death.’