Meredith always started her day by going into work at 8.00 a.m., an hour before she needed to, and collecting Ceri’s arthritic terrier Dexter. Ceri, who was PA to both the Earl and Ralph, worked 8.00 to 4.00 and couldn’t walk the dog herself, on account of her clinical obesity. Ceri was always trying to pay Meredith for the dog-walking duties and Meredith always refused. It was her routine now, and never failed to clear her head for the day ahead.
She felt a wave of nausea threaten to flood her that morning when she left the cottage and saw Ralph’s car still sitting in the distant corner of the staff car park. She crunched over the gravel towards the Jag, feeling compelled to go and look at it up close. Even though she had been utterly certain that Ralph was stone dead when she ran out of the ice house to ring Pete, the only logical explanation was that he hadn’t really been dead at all. He’d woken up and staggered off somewhere. They should’ve checked inside the car last night, she thought, hope flaring: Ralph could well be snoring on the back seat, sleeping off his funny turn and alcohol stupor.
She approached the car and peered through the window, wishing Pete hadn’t already cycled off to his workshop, so that she could laugh with him at the sheer relief of seeing Ralph alive, after all that drama…
But of course it was empty, its immaculate leather seats gazing blankly back at her. Ralph wouldn’t have spent the night in there anyway; she was kidding herself. He’d definitely have come and knocked on the cottage’s green front door, demanding a sofa or – after the shenanigans in the disabled loo – one side of her bed.
Meredith’s head began to spin, her lack of sleep and hangover combining with the disappointment of the empty seat. Not for the first time, she couldn’t help wondering if this whole thing was some kind of weird revenge Ralph was wreaking – perhaps for ‘making’ him unfaithful to Paula? Although she had hardly forced him, she thought. The opposite. And anyway, it would’ve been ridiculously out of character for him to have done that.
If, for some obscure reason, he was just trying to mess with her head, she would find out soon enough – there was a heads of department meeting that morning, which Meredith, as shop manager, and Ralph, as estate manager, were both required to attend. Her gut clenched at the thought of walking into the conference room and seeing his place empty.
She wearily climbed up the backstairs, thinking of Ralph’s hand on her arse on these same steps less than twelve hours earlier.
Ceri’s office was next to Ralph’s, and her door was always open, both literally and figuratively.
‘Morning Ceri,’ Meredith said, entering. Dexter yelped with delight at the sight of her, and she knelt and tousled his brindled head. Ceri was undoing a new box of Minstead House branded ballpoint pens, ready for the meeting.
‘Morning Meredith! Another lovely day, isn’t it!’ She always said this, unless it was pissing down or snowing.
‘Yeah. Anyone else in yet?’
‘Not yet,’ she trilled, a pile of Minstead House notebooks on the desk next to her. ‘Just me, getting ready for the meeting.’ She paused. ‘Strange, though – Ralph’s car’s here. I thought he’d got in early, but there’s no sign of him.’
The HOD meeting was scheduled for 9.45 a.m. in the board room next door. Ceri had already printed and carefully laid out agendas on the vast, polished oval table.
‘He probably got a taxi home last night,’ Meredith said carefully. ‘He wasn’t half putting them away at the staff lunch.’
Ceri would be devastated when she found out that Ralph was dead – if he was – and, Meredith thought with her heart sinking further, probably out of a job too. Whoever eventually replaced Ralph probably wouldn’t be so tolerant about the undelivered phone messages and the unfranked mail. Ceri loved laying stuff out neatly, but wasn’t so hot on the more responsible elements of the position. But she couldn’t lose her job, it would kill her.
Meredith had a feeling that the ripples of yesterday’s events had only just begun to spread.
‘Meredith, love, are you all right? You look terrible.’ Ceri stared into her face, concern furrowing her brow.
‘I’m OK,’ Meredith said, turning away and clipping Dexter’s lead on. ‘Insomnia, that’s all. It’s my hormones. See you in a bit.’
Their daily circuit always took them past the bell house, up to the main gate to say hello to George, then round through the rough parkland, back into the orchard, through the trees and back up the stairs to the office, where Dexter would climb into his basket under Ceri’s desk and sleep for most of the rest of the day.
‘Looking a bit peaky this morning, Meredith, if you don’t mind my saying,’ George commented, leaning out of his sentry box as he greeted her. He was a large man, much too large for his box. When he was in there, Meredith always thought it looked like a cameraman had zoomed in on him – he filled the frame.
She hadn’t wanted to see him, or anybody but Ralph, that morning, but she wanted to stick to her routine.
Just in case.
There was a splodge of something unidentifiable but disgusting-looking on the front of George’s uniform. She normally would have pointed it out, peeled a wet wipe from the pack she kept in her bag and gone over to scrub it off for him, but all she could manage today was another weak protestation that she was fine.
‘Late night, was it?’
‘My brother came over and we drank too much wine. And I’ve got terrible insomnia,’ she croaked.
George opened his mouth to sympathise, but his attention was taken by a coach arriving, full of Japanese tourists. George made a conspiratorial face at her, baring his small, brownish teeth.
‘Shall I be nice, or shall I tell them the car park doesn’t open till nine? It’s only just gone eight! Reckon they’re on a different time zone.’
‘Be nice,’ Meredith instructed, managing to make her voice sound normal – at least to her own ears. ‘Just make sure they know the shop opens at ten. I don’t want that lot hammering the door down in five minutes’ time.’
He raised the barrier for the coach as Meredith pulled Dexter away from something by the side of the sentry box the dog was sniffing at with great interest, and they set off, back up the narrow driveway through the parkland.
It curved in a graceful arc for half a mile from the gatehouse and public car park until it reached the house itself. It was a view that still took her breath away every morning – the grandeur of the honey-coloured façade with its towers and carvings.
It often occurred to Meredith that Minstead House, somehow more so than anywhere else, was made up of millions of tiny items, not just the quotidian bricks and tiles, but great mounds of minuscule, random things, like novelty pencil-tops and ornamental gravel. She imagined the sum of its parts deconstructed into haystacks sitting on the drive where the house had once sat: separate piles of gilt picture frames, blocks of parquet flooring, individual pats of butter from the restaurant, computer keyboards from the offices, lily pads from the lake, like some kind of giant build-your-own-stately-home kit that would take two hundred years to construct.
If she was able to take the whole house apart and put it back together, would Ralph be there again, sitting in his office, tucking a cigarette behind his ear to smoke as soon as he got out the door?
No he wouldn’t. He was dead.
As Meredith rounded the corner behind the house, she braced herself for a phalanx of flashing lights, police vehicles, ambulances and CSI in paper suits – although of course George would’ve mentioned it had they actually arrived.
She dropped Dexter back with Ceri then went back downstairs, out across the courtyard to the stable block that housed the shop, with her cubbyhole of an office at the back. Swiping herself in, she checked that nothing was broken or moved.
All was normal – she had cleared up the broken china and shelf the previous day after the policeman left, and Ralph had fixed the shelf himself. She shut the door of her cubbyhole office and made herself a coffee with soya milk, which immediately curdled into cheesy clots.
As she stirred it, she thought back to what Pete had suggested the previous night. Could Ralph really have been strangled? His face had been purple, but the light in the ice house had been almost nonexistent. She had been so busy trying to restart his heart that she hadn’t really been looking that closely at the exact hue of his skin. He’d have had marks on his neck if someone had throttled him – but, again, she hadn’t been looking for them.
Her mobile buzzed on her desk, and when she saw who it was, her heart plummeted.
‘Hi Paula,’ she said, trying to keep the shake out of her voice as she answered. ‘What’s up?’