Pete was out of breath, having cycled from his workshop to Minstead House at high speed. His shirt was clinging unpleasantly to his chest. The last few hundred metres of the driveway were up a steep hill, and then he had to cycle around to the back entrance and up the rutted gravel pathway that ran along the side of the estate up to Meredith’s cottage.
Propping his bike against the iron railings boxing in her garden, he hung his helmet by its chin strap over one of the handlebars and ran up to hammer on the front door.
‘Mez, it’s me!’
Meredith unlocked the door, shooting back the heavy Victorian bolt to admit him into the gloomy porchway. He put his arms tight around her, resting his chin on top of her head.
‘Why have you bolted the door? You’re not seriously worried that someone’s done this to him? Any guy his age could have a heart attack; it happens all the time.’
She didn’t move except to bury her face further into his chest.
‘At least you know there’s nothing more you could have done. If the CPR didn’t work, an ambulance crew wouldn’t have revived him either.’
They rocked together. ‘I’m sweaty,’ he added, unnecessarily, although he knew she didn’t mind. She always told him she loved his smell: tobacco and sawdust. He was a whole foot taller than her, and she pressed her face into the right side of his chest, where he could feel his heart beat against her ear. Perhaps they had been that way round in the womb.
It gave him a pang of actual, physical pain when he thought about how they had been estranged for more than ten years when they were younger, until the terrible event that at least had the corollary of bringing her back to him.
What a waste. But then, she had behaved like a complete dick. They’d made up for it since. He used to work for film studios, building sets, but when he moved to the area to be nearer Meredith ten years ago, he’d rented a workshop and shop front, and started taking commissions for tables and cabinets made of slabs of cherry or oak, inlaid with mother of pearl in intricate designs.
Last year he’d moved from his tiny cottage into a beautiful Dutch barge that Meredith insisted on buying for him. It was called the Barton Bee and was moored on the River Wey at a marina just on the outskirts of Minstead Village, a mile from Minstead House. Now he saw Meredith several times a week, without fail.
He often wondered if their mutual adoration was the reason they were both over fifty and single. Nobody else was ever good enough.
‘I keep thinking I should’ve run to get the defibrillator, but it was too far away.’ Meredith’s voice was muffled.
She finally pushed herself away from him and stared up into his face. Hers looked ravaged, a sickly greeny-yellow with huge black shadows under her eyes, like she had the worst possible hangover.
‘Maybe we still should,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s not too late. We need to get back there anyway. I’ve decided I’m going to call the police. We’re going to walk back there as if we’re just having an evening stroll, then I’m going to “notice” that the ice house door’s open, go and investigate, scream, alert night security, et cetera, et cetera.’
‘What if they look at the CCTV recordings from earlier and see that you went in together, but you came out alone?’ Pete asked, doubtfully.
Meredith shook her head. ‘There aren’t any cameras in that part of the grounds. I’m sure there aren’t. We came down from his office the back way. He didn’t want the security guys to see us go in to the loo. Or risk doing it in his office, because they sometime pop in for a chat if he’s working late … We’ll just say you came to meet me and we were having a walk because it’s such a nice evening.’
‘OK … but what about when the police find your DNA on him?’
Something else occurred to him, and he grimaced, pushing his sweaty hair out of his eyes. ‘Um … did you use a condom?’
Meredith hung her head, shamefaced.
‘Mez! That’s terrible! You should know better.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Listen, you might have sex every other day, but I haven’t done it since Alasdair and I split up, and that was about four years ago! I didn’t even get that far with Gary. And Ralph is – was – a sixty-year-old married man. It certainly wasn’t planned, and I really doubt he’s been putting it about. Risking herpes is the least of my problems. It’s a good thing there’s no condom – less evidence to be found.’
‘Well I’m disappointed in you, sis. And I don’t know what you think I get up to when I’m not with you, because I certainly haven’t been at it every other day for quite some time. Promise me you will be safer in future.’
‘Whatever, Pete. It’s irrelevant anyway, because I am never, ever having sex again, as long as I live.’
They walked in silence back towards the ice house. Pete reached out for her hand, as he occasionally had when they were kids.
As they rounded the corner from the rose garden onto the sweeping back lawns, a cheery voice came out of nowhere, and Pete felt them both jerk with shock, as if there would be two more heart attacks in the grounds that night.
‘’Ello! Evening constitutional, is it?’
The owner of the voice was a portly, elderly man in some kind of dark-green uniform, carrying a huge torch, even though it was still light. He was almost as wide as he was tall, with a flat but bulbous nose that spread halfway across his face, like it was trying to escape.
Meredith dropped Pete’s hand fast, but stayed pressed close to his side, hoping, he could tell, that the man hadn’t noticed.
‘Pete, this is Leonard, our night-security guard,’ she said. ‘Leonard, my twin brother, Pete. You must have just come on duty?’
Pete was impressed at how normal she made her voice sound. But then she always had been good at hiding her real feelings from the rest of the world. Too good, often.
Pete remembered Meredith telling him that Leonard had been wearing out shoe leather in the corridors of Minstead House for almost three decades. He recalled the conversation because he never understood how anyone would want to work nights for more than a couple of weeks, let alone over half his lifetime. Thirty years! Even the thought made him want to punch a wall. But then, now he was meeting the man and seeing the look of placid acceptance in his baggy eyes, it made more sense.
‘Evening, Leonard. Nice to meet you.’
‘I can’t believe you two haven’t met before!’ chirped Meredith as if they were all at a cocktail party.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Leonard said, tipping his cap to Pete, who bared his teeth back at him.
‘Just going for a stroll. Such a lovely evening.’ Pete put his arm around Meredith.
‘Aah, that’s sweet. I hated me sister, personally. She used to give me wedgies and Chinese burns.’
‘Meredith wouldn’t do that,’ Pete said, squeezing her arm. ‘Not unless provoked. Well, nice to meet you, Leonard. Have a good night.’
‘Night, Leonard,’ Meredith added.
It was only when Leonard had waddled off back in the direction of the house that Pete realised Meredith was shaking. She had to lean against him to keep herself upright.
‘I need to sit down,’ she whispered.
‘Stay cool, Mez. You’re doing great.’ Pete took her hand again. ‘It’s good that he saw us. Where is this ice house, then?’
‘Just here, behind these bushes,’ Meredith said, as they reached a bank of flowering rhododendrons.
As they rounded the corner she added, loudly and brightly, presumably in case anybody was in the vicinity to overhear, ‘Oh look! Someone’s left the door unlocked.’
This was crazy, Pete thought. She was acting like she’d killed Ralph. She shouldn’t just ring the police and say she’d found him; she should tell them everything. Be honest.
He was about to tell her this, but she spoke first.
‘I will never forgive myself,’ she said, her voice cracking.
‘Mez. Stop it. It’s not helping.’
‘I slept with my friend’s husband.’
Pete turned and grabbed her hands. He’d already changed his mind about persuading her to ring the police. She was right, it was too risky.
‘Listen to me. We’ve all done stuff we know we shouldn’t have. Don’t beat yourself up about it – at least, not right now. If you want to keep your job, your reputation, and not have Paula hating you forever, you have to stop this. She’s going to need you. Be there for her – that’ll help make it up to her, even if she doesn’t know it.’
‘But that’s even more hypocritical!’ she wailed.
Pete shook her shoulders gently. ‘It’s not about you now. Your friend’s husband’s died. She needs you.’
Meredith sniffed hard. ‘Right. Yes, you’re right … OK. Let’s do this.’
She glanced nervously in the direction of the open door. To Pete, it looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, a place so dark that it would inevitably suck the breath from anyone venturing inside. He felt sick at the thought that there really was a dead body behind the door in front of them. He’d never seen one before. They stared mutely at one another, then Pete nodded towards the entrance.
‘You only have to go in for a second, and I’m right here.’ Something occurred to him. He put his hand on her arm and whispered close to her ear. ‘We should just, er, check one thing…’
‘What?’
‘You said he’d either had a heart attack or been strangled, because he looked so purple, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. When you “find” him, we should check his neck … just in case…’
Meredith frowned. ‘Surely nobody would kill Ralph!’ she whispered back. ‘I wasn’t being serious. He always has a red face, and I opened his shirt to do CPR, so I’d have seen if there was anything wrong with his neck.’ She paused. ‘I was only out of the place for a couple of minutes!’
‘Burglars, seeing if there was anything worth nicking?’
‘Oh, come on. In the ice house? Burglars would go straight to the house!’
Pete looked through the bushes and across the empty lawns, worried that Leonard would pop up again at any minute. ‘Well, we can’t stay out here talking about it all day.’ Meredith’s face had gone green again, presumably at the prospect of examining Ralph’s corpse. But she took a deep breath, swallowed hard and pushed open the ice house.
There was nobody there.