The Chandelier Ballroom (7 page)

The man was trying to cover his own lower parts with his hands. His skin too was glistening. He’d had her and she in turn had lain across him, spreading their lovemaking over both their bodies. A wave of disgust swept through Race for a second before he realised the girl was Celia. Instantly rage seemed to leap from the very core of him like a shaft of red hot metal.

Celia gave a cry but he didn’t hear as in one leap he launched himself at the man, she racing past him for the still open door. Race hardly saw her go as he caught her cowering lover a single hefty blow, all the weight of fury and pain behind it. He went down like a felled animal but Race wasn’t done. Hauling the half-stunned man to his feet, whom he now knew to be the one Celia had brought with her to his party, he punched that face again and again before dragging the now unresisting Ronny towards the door.

He stood no chance with Race’s hands about his throat, his skull repeatedly bashed against the door jamb, powerless to retaliate or defend himself. Eventually his yells of pain subsided, but in red rage Race continued to beat the now limply jerking head against the wood until his strength finally gave out.

Letting the body fall to the floor, he stood back, breathing hard. The man lay quite still, limp and unnatural, and Race knew he had to be dead. He’d beaten up many a man but had never killed before. Yet he felt no remorse, only this continuing slow, simmering fury. Cee – where was she?

Turning, he walked at a steady pace to the main staircase, along the upstairs passage to their bedroom, his face set cold. She’d said she loved him. Liar! He’d been used, played for a fool, wanted only for his money and what he could give her. How long had she been deceiving him? His mind whirling, he burst into the bedroom, looking about for her. She had locked herself in the adjoining bathroom. He could hear her sobbing. How dare she sob? The sight of those two springing apart still raged in his head.

Without calling her name, a name he could no longer say, he began to wrench at the bathroom door, and when it did not yield, to throw himself at it, feeling it give a little under his weight. Again and again he lunged, hearing her shriek at each blow, but the effort was making his rage mount more and more until it was consuming him, adding to his weight against the wood.

Finally it burst inward and there she was, crouched on the tiled floor, still naked but for a thin towel across her body as a flimsy protection.

‘Don’t hurt me!’ she was begging, but he hardly heard her as he stood over her, she cringing from the blind rage on his face. ‘He made me … don’t hurt me, please. I …’

Her plea broke off to a sharp shriek of terror, like that of a rabbit he’d heard caught by a fox as he whipped the towel from her grasp, taking one end in each hand to encircle her half-raised head with it, the ends wrapping around her neck to drag them together and pull with all his might.

How long he pulled he had no idea, but coming finally to his senses he saw that her body had gone limp. Her beautiful grey eyes were bulging. The delicate skin of her face was suffused and swollen – her beautiful face. Slowly he let go the towel as if fearing to hurt her more, saw the head flop lifeless.

He heard his own cry of agony as he fell to his knees to shake her awake. ‘Cee! Oh God! Cee, wake up! Cee, please, please wake up!’

How long he called for her to wake up he didn’t know, kneeling beside the limp body, clasping it to his chest, rocking it back and forth. It was like holding a piece of foam.

How long he remained there he had no idea, but slowly came the realisation that he had lost her, and then that he could not leave her there. It took a long time for any real thought to come into his head as to what to do next.

Crying, choking, he began dragging her from the bathroom into the bedroom. There he lifted her up and laid her on the bed. Her limbs flopped as he laid her down. Not knowing what to do next, her lifted her into his arms again and went out into the hallway, going down the main stairs as if in a dream, a nightmare of a dream that seemed to move so slowly, like someone sleepwalking. Soon he would wake up. Somehow he found himself in that place he had once so happily called the ballroom, the light still on and there the body of the man he had pummelled, as still as death.

Kneeling by the sofa he lay Cee on the floor, all the while blubbering, ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to do it. Please forgive me, my beautiful darling, I didn’t mean this to happen,’ over and over.

Slowly insanity began to wane, a seed of reality returning and with it renewed hurt. And anger. Played for a fool, the woman he’d stupidly thought had given her whole heart to him had proved herself to be no more than a damned cheap gold digger and he, fucking idiot, had fallen for it, had had the piss taken out of him. It was that more than finding her with some other man that now got him; robbed of his self-esteem, knowing himself to have been made a fool of, damn them to bloody hell, the pair of them!

His tears evaporating, he felt her wrist. Nothing. She was dead, the only one he’d ever really loved in his life. He truly believed that. Pushing away a new wave of remorse, he rose to his feet to check the man’s pulse. He half expected him to groan, but there wasn’t a flicker. He felt a satisfaction in this death, wishing he’d taken it slower, killing the bastard, seeing him suffer, begging pathetically for mercy …

The grandfather clock in the passage struck, making him start.

Three o’clock! Was that all it was? Something had to be done about these two, and quick. His mind raced now with the thought of where to dispose of the bodies. In the grounds somewhere … but they could be found there.

This Ronny Peckham, what if he would be missed, traced here? It came to him that there’d been no friend called Sylvia. They’d made it all up and he’d let himself believe it. To trump up the tale of a friend with cancer – it was despicable.

And Cee, she had no family, but any curious acquaintance might look for her, enquiries made, police suspecting foul play, digging up the grounds, questioning. He could already see his world falling apart.

The frantic debate ceased abruptly when he remembered that hidden door behind the back stairs of the older part of the house with steps down to the tiny, windowless cellar, undiscovered by all except him. It had probably been used by the butler for keeping wine cool. But that was way back. No butlers these days. He could bury the bodies there, and as people began to wonder about Cee, he would put on a show of hurt and dejection, saying she’d left him for this Ronny chap with no idea where they were, had maybe even gone abroad.

People would be sorry for him, but after a while he would have to pull himself together, maybe even ask Millie back. But first there was a job to be done.

A rose pink sunrise that had not yet penetrated the low-lit passage saw Race emerging from the tiny cellar. It had been a night he wanted to forget.

Working solidly with a pickaxe and shovel he’d brought from one of the outbuildings to help penetrate the thin cement floor, each dull stroke was a blow to his own heart, each impact wrenching a sob from him. Not for the man – he couldn’t have cared less for the man whose name he refused to let enter his head – but for what he himself had done to the girl he’d loved with such trust and devotion.

He hadn’t meant to harm her. Dear God, he’d never have done such a thing had he not been so incensed by events. He hadn’t been himself, out of his mind with grief and that blinding overwhelming knowledge of having been so grossly wronged by the woman he had allowed to become his life. Yet try as he might to heap recriminations solely on the man, he could only blame himself as he toiled in the faint light from the passage above to dig Celia’s grave respectfully deep enough to cradle her lovely body, now wrapped in a large, soft, pure white tablecloth he’d found in the kitchen.

He’d not realised how hard it would be digging her pitiful grave, the ground beneath the thin cement floor hard, dry clay, needing the pickaxe and all his strength to penetrate. It seemed to take hours until, his arms aching, he was forced to give up, bury her as best he could, all the time spluttering a frantic prayer over and over between choking paroxysms of tears: ‘Please, my darling, my only love, forgive me. Please, dear God, forgive me. Punish me if you must, but I did love her, dear God forgive me, I truly loved her,’ as he replaced the bone dry soil with as much reverence as it allowed.

With hardly enough strength left to dig little more than a shallow hole for the man, the unwrapped corpse kicked in without ceremony and with just enough earth to hide it, he concluded the burial with a hefty aim of spittle, an earlier aim having already defiled the now covered body.

Paying the untidy mound no more attention, he moved back to kneel beside the grave of his darling, and between each grieving convulsion he forgave her, now convinced that she had been led astray against her will.

All the time he’d been digging that grave, visions had crowded his shattered mind: the great following of mourners there would have been had this been a natural death of his beloved, all sadly paying homage to a lovely, tragic girl, taken in the prime of her life; the horse-drawn hearse, black plumes nodding on the heads of two jet black horses, coffin and hearse smothered with flowers; the church crowded, the music subdued; at the graveside the stifled sobs as her body in its casket was lowered gently into its resting place. Such were the scrambled abstractions of his grieving mind.

By the time he climbed back up the few stairs, both bodies safely hidden, he felt all in, yet still his mind whirled, trying to block out what he’d done to her. Before lowering her into her poor grave he’d kissed her tenderly. He would never kiss her again.

Tomorrow he would have liked to go down there just once more to put lilies on the place where she lay. But that would have afforded no purpose. What he needed to do now was to securely nail up the door, never again to open it, leave her to sleep. First thing tomorrow he would hire workmen to entirely redecorate the passage with pine cladding, he would say to brighten it up a bit. Once that was done, no one would ever guess a small door lay behind it. The men would not care; unsuspecting, they’d do what they were ordered to do, happy to take the money he would pay them.

A moment of cold rationality was stealing over him. He needed to hide all trace of what had happened. Returning to the ballroom, he was surprised to find less blood than expected. Very few spots on the floor and though the flat paintwork of the doorjamb had extensive smears, it took only moments to clean off with wet cloths from the kitchen. That done, he gathered up the scattered clothing, taking it all upstairs to cram into the overnight bag Cee’s lover had brought with him, together with everything he’d been using – soap, shaving gear, comb and hairbrush, down to the very last collar stud.

He did the same with Celia’s stuff, packing every last thing away in two large suitcases, then surveying both rooms for anything that could have been overlooked, but wardrobes were bare and looking somewhat forlorn, their doors left open, bedclothes tidy. Lugging it all down the back stairs, dry eyed and calculating, he unceremoniously flung everything into the tiny wine cellar, the act instantly flooding his eyes anew, constricting his throat.

Nailing up the door was like nailing up his past, that love he had so fondly cherished, lost forever. Convulsive spasms of anguish almost choking him, he gathered up his tools and let himself out of the back door to stand there watching the sky growing lighter. It promised to be a fine day but one she would never see. Drawing in a deep breath to gulp back a renewed onslaught of tears, he returned the tools to the shed where he’d got them from.

The job was finished but she would always be here, walking through the house, through the ballroom, the faint sound of dance music following her. He wanted that. But the place itself would no longer hold any joy for him. He’d be better getting rid of it, yet he knew he’d never bring himself to do so, so long as she lay here. He
wanted
her to walk these rooms,
wanted
her to haunt him, forever. Memories of
Wuthering Heights
, of Cathy and Heathcliff, prompted more tears and a need to hurry back indoors away from this bright, cheerful sunrise. In there he would be nearer to her.

With that poor comfort he strove to get through the next few days. To help, he was drinking, yet each day saw his heart grow heavier, his world emptier. He had told Mrs Dunhill that Celia had left him, had run off with a young man she had brought to his party, that he had no idea where they’d gone, maybe even abroad. Trying to commiserate, she said as to how she’d always thought the girl very nice on the face of it, but now having heard the truth, felt she wasn’t worth grieving over. Assuming she had helped settle her employer’s mind to some extent, she cheerfully busied herself getting his breakfast, a little hurt that nothing got touched.

In utter despair, knowing he’d lost his only love forever, he watched the innocent workmen finish the job they’d been paid to do. Lost and bewildered, the emptiness inside him growing, he would find himself weeping in the empty silence of his echoing house, bursting into tears in the loneliness of his bedroom.

Sleepless, he was getting through half a bottle of whisky a night to try and help him sleep, but by the early hours, still awake, he’d take himself out of the house to blearily stare at the tennis court he’d built some time ago for him and Cee to enjoy and for his hordes of guests to use, or gaze down at the swimming pool seeing again her lithe body cutting the blue water.

Sometimes he’d walk unsteadily among the trees to hover by the small lake he’d had made, where they would feed the fish he’d stocked it with. Staring down into the nine-foot depths of water, he would conjure up the reflection of her beautiful face on the still surface.

It was on such a night, some five or six nights later, that he could stand it no longer. Having finished the last half of yet another bottle of whisky, he staggered outside in the early hours to find himself again by the lake. With a three-quarter moon lighting up the quiet night of his estate, he gazed down into its depths for a moment then, with no other thoughts entering his mind, let himself fall effortlessly forward with such longing in his heart to join his beloved Celia that he hardly heard or felt the splash as the water closed over his head.