The Night Book (14 page)

No doubt that Cameron had discovered her diary. No doubt at all. That quote had been word-perfect. And his summary of the various chapters (including the one involving shower curtains) . . .
Well, he’d obviously read every
fucking
page, hadn’t he?

So why go to the trouble of replacing the book exactly as he’d found it, only to confront her with the fact of it barely hours later?

She sighed. It was obvious. So that she wouldn’t see what was coming. He’d enjoyed his
coup de théâtre
on the boat just now. Controlling Cameron strikes again,
Meriel thought bleakly. Nothing new there, eh?

So what now?

One thing was immediately plain to her. There was no question of staying at Cathedral Crag, not for one night, not even for one hour. The mere thought of surrendering herself to one of
Cameron’s sadistic games made her feel physically sick. In fact, she was having difficulty holding down what little she’d managed to eat for lunch.

Meriel forced herself to take long, deep breaths until her nausea subsided. Suddenly she didn’t want her cigarette and she tossed it overboard. It fell, hissing, into the water.

She would leave Cameron, just as she had planned. But that would involve calling his bluff. Would he really take her vile scribblings to a lawyer? See them used against her in a horribly public
divorce?

She looked out at her husband as he paddled in slow circles around the boat. He caught her glance and lifted one dripping arm out of the water in an ironic wave.

God, she wouldn’t put it past him, the shit. Cameron was accustomed to winning, and he wasn’t too fussy about how he did it. It was one of the reasons he had no real friends: he had
a reputation for sacrificing anyone in a business deal in order to come out on top. Why would he behave any differently with her? He was indomitable. He’d obviously gone to a great deal of
time and trouble to find a diary that he couldn’t possibly have known even existed.

Winner’s instinct, again.

Meriel ground her teeth.
Christ.
If only she’d destroyed the bloody thing sooner. Even a
day
sooner.

Too late for ‘if only’ now. She forced herself to sketch out the likely coming chain of events.

One: she’d leave Cameron. Two: he’d divorce her, citing the diary. Three – and ‘three’ was the biggie – there’d be a sensation: screaming front-page
headlines, personal profiles in the features sections, weeks of lurid speculation and comment pretty much everywhere.

It would be a freak show. But was Cameron right? Would it swamp and sink her career?

She simply didn’t know. At one level, she wasn’t even sure she cared.

But she cared about Seb. What about him? What would
he
make of the diaries, never mind the sick carnival triggered by their publication? Would he even want to be with someone capable of
harbouring such sick fantasies? Let alone a person who painstakingly wrote them down in such grisly detail?

‘Oh God, what have I done?’ Meriel whispered to herself, rocking slowly back and forth on her haunches. ‘What am I going to
do
?’

Cameron’s voice cut through her thoughts and she started. He had paddled close to the boat and was treading water only a yard or so away from her.

‘I said, what time is it? Didn’t you hear me? Why are you talking to yourself like that?’

She looked at him with loathing.

‘If you wore your watch you’d know what time it is. You’ve got a fucking Rolex, for Christ’s sake. They’re waterproof for hundreds of feet. Why do you always take
it off before you swim? It’s stupid.’

‘Yeah, so’s realising the damn thing’s slipped off your wrist and gone straight to the bottom. I’m not risking that. Just tell me the bloody time, will you?’

‘Bloody well tell it to yourself, Cameron.’ She reached down to sweep up his watch from the deck.

As Meriel bent her head, a door in her inner universe silently swung open.

Her breath caught in her throat. She could see into an alternative reality. It shimmered on the other side of the threshold that had suddenly materialised directly before her.

She knew exactly what she had to do to cross over and enter it: it was so clear; so obvious.

And it was completely up to her. Only she had the power to decide whether to stay, or go.

But either way, it had to be now.

Right now.

She looked at the watch dangling from her fingers. Its delicate second hand seemed to her to be motionless, as if time had, for an incredible moment, reached a frozen full stop. Infinitely
slowly, she switched her gaze to her husband in the water below. He seemed caught in the same freeze-frame, his expression freakishly preserved in one of petulance and exasperation.

All Meriel’s senses were singing to her now. She knew, without having to move her head, that there were no other boats near. Theirs was drifting on the blind side of the headland that hid
them from the villages of Glenridding and Patterdale. Her back was to the main road that ran along the lake’s northern edge so that Cameron, bobbing on the far side of the boat, would be
perfectly invisible to anyone walking or driving along the shore.

A voice whispered inside her head.

‘Now or never, Meriel. One shot.’

‘Father?’ She spoke his name aloud.

‘One shot, my darling.’

‘Father?!’

Then everything was juddering back into motion, like a train suddenly jolting away from the platform.

Meriel could feel the moment slipping away.

NOW. Do it
NOW.

She flexed her arm.

‘Here. Catch, Cameron.’

Meriel tossed the Rolex into the air towards her husband. The timepiece moved in a glittering arc, winking and flashing in the sunlight as it ascended and then descended.

Cameron bellowed with rage.

‘What the
fuck
are you doing?! That’s a five-thousand-pound watch, you stupid bitch! You – oh,
Christ
!’

The Rolex had splashed into the water a couple of feet ahead of him. It briefly flashed greenish-gold, then began to sink.

‘Oops. Missed, sorry. Quick, Cameron, you can still get it.’

‘I don’t
fucking
believe this!
Shit!
’

Cameron arced his body into the air before snapping his head and arms forwards and down, plunging under the surface. A moment later, Meriel could see the white soles of his feet kicking hard,
and then he had disappeared entirely.

The boat rocked slightly in his boiling, descending wake, and then settled again.

Meriel looked around her. The only other vessel she could see was one of the passenger steamers, on its way back from Pooley Bridge. It was easily a mile away. She dismissed it from her mind and
turned back to the water below her. There was no sign that anyone had been swimming there moments before.

She was finding it difficult to breathe. God knows what he was experiencing. How long had he been under now? Fifteen seconds? Twenty? She chewed at the knuckle of a forefinger. It must be at
least twenty.

Thirty, now. Still no sign of him.

And then, suddenly, there he was. Movement, far below. A vague brown-green swirl at first, quickly resolving into the head and shoulders of a man, rising swiftly through the water. Meriel
instinctively took a step back.

Cameron broke surface, threshing wildly. He wasn’t swimming: this was a convulsive, reflex series of completely unco-ordinated movements. He looked to Meriel as if he was having a fit.

‘Cameron?
Cameron?
Can you hear me? What’s wrong?’

His eyes were tightly shut and she could see a ghastly greenish-white froth bubbling from his mouth and nostrils.

‘Hold on! I’ll get the lifebelt!’

It was on the other side of the deck, next to the little ladder from which he’d climbed down into the water.

Meriel ran across, yanked the ring from its snap-fastenings and turned around, breathing hard.

And remained exactly where she was.

She couldn’t see Cameron from here, but dear Christ she could hear him. He’d started making a bizarre honking noise; he sounded like one of Ullswater’s geese when they flew
south for the winter. Presently it faded to a rasping gurgle and, almost exactly one minute after he’d dived down after his watch, he fell completely silent.

Meriel didn’t move. One hand gripped the guard-rail behind her, the other held the lifebelt. She stood motionless while she tried as calmly as she could to count another sixty seconds.
Then, very slowly, she crossed back to the other side of the boat, and looked down at the water.

He was completely still. Face down, head haloed by the greenish foam that had boiled and erupted from his lungs.

His legs floated wide apart and his arms and shoulders were hunched forward in an oddly obscene, crab-like pose.

Cameron Bruton was very dead.

His wife calmly considered him a while longer.

Then she leaned out over the railing, and carefully tossed the lifebelt into the water to land beside him.

Seb had been uneasy ever since his phone conversation with Meriel that morning.

An experienced reporter, he had learned over the years that if something didn’t seem quite right, it usually wasn’t. One of his favourite movie lines was from Hitchcock’s
Psycho
, when private investigator Milton Arbogast tells the killer, Norman Bates: ‘See, if something doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic . . . and this ain’t
gellin’.’

Cameron’s reaction to Meriel’s return after a night’s unexplained absence wasn’t, as Arbogast might have said, ‘gellin’.’ It was most odd, to say the
least. No histrionics, no interrogation of any kind. Just a suggestion that the two of them go out on their boat for a picnic.

Seb didn’t like it. It bore all the hallmarks of a manipulative personality, and Cameron Bruton was certainly possessed of one of those. Some of Meriel’s stories about him last night
had almost defied belief.

So what was the man up to now? Could Meriel be in danger out there on the lake?

On balance, Seb decided not, although he had to struggle hard against the impulse to jump in his Spitfire and race down to Ullswater. There was no point in that, of course. There would be boats
of all descriptions out on the water this beautiful Sunday afternoon. He didn’t even know what Cameron’s was called, let alone looked like.

No, best to stay here by the phone and wait for Meriel’s next call.

Seb had prepared himself for a lengthy wait. He’d gone out and bought most of the Sunday papers, and his own picnic of bread, ham and wine. Now he sat in a tatty garden chair on the tiny
rear terrace of his rented ground-floor flat in Carlisle’s Warwick Road, soaking up the afternoon sunshine in shorts and T-shirt and waiting for the phone in the communal entrance hall behind
him to ring. Sometimes the girl who rented the flat above his came downstairs to make a call, and Seb had to resist the urge to go and tell her to keep it brief. What if Meriel was trying to get
through?

By seven o’clock the sun was losing its strength and half an hour later it had dipped behind a cluster of horse-chestnut trees that grew in the much larger garden backing on to his.

The great heat remained, but at least the days were beginning to get a little shorter.

Seb went inside. His disquiet was growing. She
must
be home by now. Surely she could have made an excuse to get away for a few minutes and ring him from a call box? Or if not, just use
the house phone and talk in simple code to him so Cameron wouldn’t suspect anything. Pretend she was talking to her producer, or something. Say she was looking forward to next week’s
show, and she’d be in tomorrow to talk about it. At least then he’d know she was all right.

When the phone rang at last it was almost nine o’clock and getting dark. Seb reached the receiver halfway through the second ring.

‘Meriel?’

There was a faint buzzing on the line before a hesitant voice replied: ‘Er . . . no. Chris in the newsroom, actually. Is that you, Seb?’

Seb silently cursed himself.

‘Yeah . . . sorry, Chris, I’m expecting a call from . . . from my cousin Muriel in London. What’s up? Shouldn’t you be home this time on a Sunday? No more bulletins now
until the breakfast show, surely?’

‘Yup, but it’s all hands to the pumps tonight, mate. I was just packing up after the eight o’clock bully when I got a call from our stringer down in Keswick. There’s been
another of these drownings – this afternoon, on Ullswater. No false alarm this time; the cops have just confirmed it. Merryman wants you to ring him at home right away.’

Seb’s bowels turned to liquid, but he managed to keep his voice steady. ‘Ullswater? Is there any ID on the victim, Chris?’

‘Not a lot, other than it’s a bloke, just like the last one there. That retired engineer.’

Seb sagged against the wall in relief. ‘Not a woman, then? You’re quite sure about that?’

His colleague sounded nettled. ‘I just bloody told you – it’s a bloke, Seb. As in man – you know, fella, geezer, chap, proud possessor of one X and one Y chromosome. Male
of the species, just like you and me. Clear?’

Seb smiled faintly. ‘Sorry, Chris, I downed the best part of a bottle of wine sitting in the sun this afternoon. I’m a bit muzzy. Anything else? You know, like age or
profession?’

‘Nope, nowt else yet. They’re not even saying exactly how it played out, other than it was a drowning. But there’s a press conference first thing at Glenridding, close to where
it happened. That’s what Bob wants to talk to you about. I reckon it’s gonna be an early night for you tonight, mate.’

‘I’m on it.’

Seb felt a little calmer as he went to bed after speaking with Merryman.

Meriel’s failure to call him, he decided, was almost certainly explained by this new drowning. The police would have taken witness statements from anyone who’d been out on the water,
and there were probably checkpoints on the road that bordered the lake, in case some passing motorist had seen something. Meriel might have been delayed for hours. By the time she got home it would
simply have been too late to make a plausible excuse to leave the house again.