Six days of limbo passed. Nothing else strange happened; everything just carried on, as if Ralph had been beamed up by aliens. He was officially a missing person, and the staff at Minstead spoke about it in huddles, with hushed anxious whispers.
‘I’m just going for lunch, OK?’ Meredith told Doris, who was sitting precariously on the high stool behind the cash register, polishing stained-glass window decorations. Her bald skull shone disconcertingly under the shop’s halogen spotlights, barely covered by a few remaining strands of candyfloss grey hair.
At eighty-three, Doris was by far the oldest and most doddery of the volunteers, but Meredith couldn’t let her go. She’d been volunteering a day a week since her husband died thirty years before and, like Ceri, would probably lose the will to live herself if she no longer had the anchor of Minstead House tethering her to this mortal coil.
Meredith felt another pang of sorrow at the thought of Ceri, who was out of her mind with worry that Ralph was missing. Since last Friday, she’d been mostly sitting at her desk outside his office, twisting rosary beads between her fingers and staring vacantly at her telephone.
‘Be careful on that stool. You know I worry about you up there,’ Meredith said.
Doris looked over her glasses at her. ‘I haven’t fallen off it yet,’ she said. ‘See you in half an hour. Have you got a hat? It’s sweltering out there.’
‘Good point.’ Meredith borrowed a branded baseball cap from the rack of merchandised apparel, and stuffed it in the bag with her foil-wrapped sandwich. ‘Call me if you need me.’
Doris wasn’t wrong. Opening the side door into the sunshine felt like walking into an oven, after the cool flagstone floors and air-conditioned shop. But the sun’s soft fingers stroking her face felt good. She strolled away from the house, through the wrought-iron arbour arch and into the rose garden, which was in full, insanely colourful bloom, an explosion of scent and pastel shades.
There weren’t many visitors about in the grounds – it was too hot, probably. They’d all be inside, their gazes sliding across boring oil paintings by minor eighteenth-century artists, and marquetry cabinets. It made Meredith smile that the words she heard most frequently when she walked through the public areas of the house were from children: ‘I’m bored. Can we go now?’
At the end of the rose garden, she turned left into the vegetable patch, a regimented riot of tomatoes, marrows, netted strawberries and courgettes, then out through the gate marked STAFF ONLY, heading in the opposite direction from her cottage. This took her to her favourite part of the grounds, a once-ornamental pond with a low crumbling wall around it, closed off to the public while awaiting restoration. The pond was surrounded by a scramble of rhododendrons and bulrushes, and Meredith loved it because it was completely private, with a view to die for. The rest of the staff rarely bothered to walk this far from the house, so she almost always had it to herself.
She headed straight for ‘her’ bench, greedily taking in the view over the ha-ha, across the woods and to the Surrey Hills beyond, now shimmering in hazy layers under the cloudless cerulean sky. It soothed her without fail, particularly after a morning spent with the colourful busyness of all the shop’s offerings in her eyeline. A blackbird chirped sweetly in the huge oak on the lawn a few feet away. For the first time since Ralph’s body vanished a week ago, she felt the distant echo of a sense of peace. It wasn’t back yet, but there was the hope that it might be.
Meredith pulled the borrowed baseball cap out of her bag and rammed it on her head to shade her eyes from the sun’s dazzle, moving the label to one side so that it didn’t dangle in her face. She unwrapped the cheese and pickle sandwich she’d made the night before and took a bite. As she chewed, she took the top off her juice and was about to take a swig, when something caught her eye.
The surface of the pond was usually still and bottle green, the only movement the stilted skedaddle of the water bugs. It had been many years since the curly-haired stone cherub in the centre had spat any water through his patinated trumpet. But something looked different today. There was something in the water, a lumpish mass breaking the surface, hidden in the rushes to the far side of the cherub.
Meredith wrapped her sandwich back up in its warm foil so that the wasps wouldn’t get to it and went over to investigate. It was a huge, dark object. She stepped carefully round the pond on the chipped and uneven crazy paving.
At first she thought it was a duvet, or maybe some large coats that someone had, for some unfathomable reason, dumped in there. Her heart was in her throat as she climbed onto the low wall to try and get a better look, still refusing to allow herself the thought that it was anything other than a discarded sleeping bag or suchlike. But she still couldn’t see properly because of the thickness of the unkempt reeds. She needed something to part them with; a stick or branch. There was no way she was getting into the pond herself – she didn’t even know how deep it was. She jumped off the wall and searched around, but there were no sticks on the ground. Then she ran back into the kitchen garden and yanked a cane out of the raspberry bushes, the effort in the hot sunshine making her hands slippery with sweat and fear.
She approached the pond more slowly this time. Should she call security now, save her having to look herself?
No – that would be stupid, she thought. It still might turn out to be nothing. Small insects hummed and buzzed around her head, intensifying the white noise inside it. She got back onto the wall, already feeling unsteady. She focussed intently on the sight of a bee bouncing into a foxglove to help her keep her balance.
She reached forwards with the cane. Parted the rushes, touched the floating lump. Then prodded it, to try and push it out into more open water. It moved, turning slowly.
Later she thought that was the point she knew, deep down. Even though it just couldn’t be … Even though he was unrecognisable.
The body floated free, breaking the surface of the pond, pushing aside the waterlilies in a way that gave Meredith the grim, fleeting thought: pushing up daisies. It rolled slowly over onto its back, an actual dead bug in the water. She glanced at his bloated, greeny-grey face, the skin already beginning to slide off the skull. Then looked away, nausea rising fast.
It was impossible, surely? But from the faded sodden pattern of his shirt, the same shirt she’d ripped most of the buttons off, she knew it was Ralph.