Thirty-Seven

After dinner, at which I eat little and Joanna even less, we spend a silent evening which for me is further jaundiced by Joanna’s silent recriminations. I do not complain and know that I have no cause to. Joanna’s cross is weightier than mine and at least some of the resentment that she shows towards me is justifiable. I sit in my armchair next to the fireplace; she, on the sofa. I am idling with my mobile phone, tapping away at messages that are less urgent than I am making them seem; she is pretending to read a magazine. Her head lolls forward every few minutes before it jerks upright again and she carries on her charade of being engrossed in some frothy trash that I am certain lies a million miles distant from her true thoughts. I know she’s exhausted. I lean across to touch her knee. I have to summon all my restraint not to burst into tears when she flinches away from me. I move my hand from her knee and grip the side of her hand, which is still clutching at a page of the magazine.

“You should be in bed,” I say. “Let me take you up.”

She shakes her head.

“I’m not ready yet,” she says in a distant voice. “It’s too early. Let me hang on to some semblance of normality while I’m able to.”

“It’s half-past nine,” I point out, “and you haven’t slept properly since you landed. When I came home on Monday, I slept for most of the afternoon. You’re tougher than I am, but you don’t have to prove anything to yourself. Or to me.”

She does not reply, but gives me a withering look and returns to the trash. She has only turned the page once all evening. I wish she would let me in, to tell me what she is thinking, but I know that there’s no point in asking. I’ll probably never be close to her again. Once more, I have to fight back the tears, despising my own self-pity as I do so.

It occurs to me that she won’t go to bed because she doesn’t want me to join her there. The thought fills me with such an intense sorrow that I feel my heart constrict with pain. Her well-being is my paramount concern and I know that I must find a way of making her take rest. I say with a brightness that sounds false even to my own ears:

“Well, I think that I’ll turn in myself, anyway. I’ve found today pretty tough and no doubt we’ll be hearing from our policemen friends again tomorrow. I’ve got to take a call from India in the early hours, so I’ll sleep in the guest room. Then I won’t disturb you.”

She doesn’t look up as I leave the room. I hope against hope that she’ll go to bed herself as soon as I’m out of the way, now that I’ve removed her concern about sleeping with me. I make a brief sortie into the kitchen to pour myself a large glass of Scotch, then lumber upstairs with it, exaggerating my footsteps so that Joanna can hear. I leave the hall and landing lights switched on.

The guest room, which has blue wallpaper and a shimmering blue satin eiderdown, has always struck me as a cold and cheerless place. It has an en-suite bathroom which I enter as soon as I’ve placed the Scotch on the bedside cabinet. I take a pee, then clean my teeth, using one of the new toothbrushes that are always stacked in the bathroom cabinet for the use of forgetful guests. I return to the bedroom, strip off to my shirt and pants and haul myself into the queen-sized bed. As I suspect, it is unwelcomingly cold; the smooth white sheets envelop me and inflict the kind of freezing shock that you experience when jumping into an outdoor swimming pool. I prop myself on one elbow and knock back the Scotch as rapidly as I can. It scalds the back of my throat and, after a minute or so, brings me out in a sweat. I switch off the lamp on the cabinet and lie down, drawing the bedcovers up around my ears. I thrash around for a while, trying to get comfortable, and eventually curl into the foetal position, facing the window. I fall into a doze. I can hear the cars passing on the Boston road. I think I hear one of them slowing, followed by the crunch of the gravel in the drive, but I’m sure that by this time I’m dreaming. I feel my bones relax as I sink deeper into sleep.

I’m awakened by a crashing noise and a sharp cry or scream. I sit bolt upright in bed and fumble for the lamp, knocking the whisky glass to the floor as I do so. I slide my legs to the floor and stand, swaying, for a few seconds, listening, as I pull myself from sleep and get my bearings. I look at my watch. It is 2.30 a.m. I hear no further sounds, but I don’t find this reassuring. I seize the guest dressing-gown from the back of the door, wrap it around me and hurry out to the landing. The lights are still burning on the stairs and in the hall.

I turn back from the top of the stairs and hasten to our bedroom, tripping on the ties of the dressing gown as I go, my heart filled with dread. When I reach the door, I am about to burst in when I remember that if Joanna is sleeping there I must not alarm her. I knock gingerly on the door, then a little louder. When there is no reply, I inch it open carefully and creep across to the bed. It is empty and immaculate, still pristine with the clean sheets with which Mrs Briggs insisted on making it yesterday morning.

“Joanna?” I whisper, inanely. Obviously she is not there and therefore will not reply, yet somehow I feel I owe it to her to call her name, to let her know that I am intruding on territory that I have ceded to her. I think about checking the master-bedroom en-suite, then realise that it would be futile. Joanna has not come to bed. I hope against hope that when I go downstairs I will find that she has fallen asleep on the sofa.

I know I should be racing down the stairs, but instead I step slowly and with reluctance. Inside my head, I’m silently screaming that I can’t bear it if . . . anything has happened: that cowardly platitude that I’ve heard people use for every kind of unpleasant experience, but especially death . . . death, not ‘passed away’ or ‘passed on’ or ‘sadly, has left us’, I gibber to myself.

When I reach the foot of the stairs, I see that the cellar door is swinging open, the police tape that had been stretched across it drifting free. For some reason I slam it shut with a loud bang, as if this is of no significance. I stride on, now no longer trying to be quiet.

The lights in the drawing-room have been switched off. I snap them on quickly. Joanna is no longer here. Her magazine lies on the hearthrug, tossed into a pyramid as if it had accidentally fallen from her knee when she stood up. The cushions on the sofa have been rearranged: two are balanced one on top of the other on the sofa’s padded arm, as if placed there to form a pillow. The other two are lying on the floor, next to the magazine. I remember that Joanna has always hated the over-abundance of pillows and cushions found on the beds in hotel rooms and deduce that she intended to spend the night here. There is no time for me to grieve over this: I know I must find her quickly. I pray that she hasn’t gone out into the night on her own. I wrench back one of the heavy curtains and see that her car is still standing in the drive. Surely she wouldn’t attempt to leave the house on foot?

I return to the hall and for the first time take in the significance of the severed tape. Joanna and I promised Superintendent Thornton that we would not attempt to enter the cellar if he would leave us without a police guard for the evening and I see no reason why Joanna would have gone back on her word. The cellar has for a long time given her the creeps, in any case – she made that clear when we were travelling back from Sleaford in the car – and I’m certain that she wouldn’t venture down there now that she knows about the skeletons. Not of her own free will. That thought grips me.

I open the cellar door and see for the first time that the light suspended over the stone staircase has been switched on. I tell myself that the police forgot it. I look over my shoulder, suddenly fearful that the noise I thought I heard when roused from sleep was not part of a dream, but the sound of an intruder. I push the door back as flat against the hall wall as its hinges allow and secure it with the kitchen doorstop. I edge on to the first step of the cellar stairs and look over the banister. Although I shout out with the shock of it and for several seconds what I see dances in a black and yellow dizzy haze before my eyes, within the deeper reaches of my mind I know I knew as soon as I awoke that this was what I was going to find.

Joanna is lying spread-eagled to one side of the foot of the staircase, face down, her neck resting at an unnatural angle, her arms and legs splayed. Of course, although I rush down the steps, kneel beside her, raise her into my arms and cradle her head while trying to find a pulse in her neck, I have realised from first seeing her that she is dead.