Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

I let them get on with it, but actually I was as glad as anyone that he was home. It’s not impossible to murder someone who’s living miles away in an Oxford college, but it’s difficult.

Murder’s a strange thing. There’s no way of learning how to commit it. You can read accounts of famous murderers – even their own accounts, in some cases – but those are the ones who got caught. The successful ones don’t write about it. So you learn as you go along, quietly and unobtrusively. But one of the things the books don’t tell you is how overwhelmingly exciting it is. To hide in the dark and wait for your victim, knowing all the while you’re going to kill him, is an extraordinary feeling. It’s better than being in bed with a woman – and let’s be honest here, I’ve been with enough women that I’m qualified to say that. Each murder attempt I made on Crispian – and there were several – caused that throbbing excitement.

The first serious attempt was during a big Christmas house party at Cadence Manor. I’ve always hated the place, although that’s not something I’ve ever said, because the family love going there. They’re quite clannish, the Cadences – that’s the Italian ancestry, I suppose – and they’ve always liked to gather there: all the men from Cadences Bank with their beautifully dressed wives and daughters, and all the glossy young men with their complacent smiles and clever eyes, discussing their investments and decrying the foreign money markets. Local people generally came in to help cook and clean and wait at table; there would be dinners for thirty and forty people, elaborate shooting parties for nearly as many. I always thought it practically feudal, but Crispian shone at all those events. He could light up an entire room simply by walking into it, and he talked so easily with the guests, even the most distinguished: joining in the masculine laughter, but somehow keeping an edge of deference; flirting gently with elderly aunts, never once stepping over the line of what was acceptable. Crispian always knew to a hair’s breadth where the line was, and he never once got it wrong.

‘It’s a trick easily acquired,’ he said once when I mentioned it, just casually.

It was a trick I knew I could never acquire, not if I lived to be a hundred. Which, of course, I won’t, not now. (There are six days left to me. That accursed ticking clock counts the seconds away all the time.)

On that Christmas night I got Crispian drunk, hoping it would fuddle his wits. It didn’t. All that happened was that his eyes became brilliant, and his hair was slightly dishevelled. In the end, I was the one who crept away to be sick because I had tried to match him glass for glass and my stomach gave way before my head. No one noticed I left the party. No one noticed either when, much later, I crept along the corridor and went into Crispian’s room.

I had worked it all out beforehand, when I was sober, and being drunk made no difference to the details. In any case, being sick got rid of most of the alcohol in my body and cleared my mind.

My plan was very simple – that’s always best with murder. I was going to tell him I had heard an intruder downstairs and get him to creep along the upstairs landing with me to see if we could catch the burglar in the act. Then I was going to push him down the stairs. Cadence Manor has a wide stairway at its centre, lined with marble and alabaster. It’s a touch pretentious, but people usually admired it. Pretentious or not, a tumble all the way down that stairway onto the unforgiving marble floor below and Crispian would never light up any room again.

He was asleep, but he came fully awake when I touched his shoulder – infuriatingly there was no befuddlement or bewilderment on waking. He opened his eyes, stared at me for a moment.

‘What on earth’s wrong?’

‘I think someone’s broken in downstairs – I heard a window being smashed. I don’t want to rouse the house in case I’m wrong, but I think we should take a look. Would you come down there with me?’

‘Oh Lord, you do pick your time,’ he said, glancing at the clock, which showed it to be just before 1 a.m. ‘But we’d better see what’s happening.’ He reached for a dark blue silk robe lying at the foot of his bed. He tied the cord, slid his feet into leather moccasins, and led the way onto the wide landing outside his room.

That was when the excitement began for me. It coursed through my body like a flame and, as we went stealthily towards the main landing, I felt as if I was on fire with the power. We stole along the dark landings and I let him get a little ahead. Once I stopped, because I had the strong impression that someone was watching, but of course no one was there. Even so, as we went towards the big gallery at the centre of the house, I felt as if the shadows shivered and flinched from me as if I was already marked as a killer. The mark of Cain. All nerves, of course.

My heart was pounding and my hands kept clenching and unclenching. In just a few minutes he would be dead.

But he was not. I fumbled it, as anyone reading this will realize. As we stood at the head of the stairs, listening for the non-existent burglar, Crispian still a little in front of me, I made a lunge towards him – intending to push him in the small of the back, then stand away as he fell to his death. But at the very last second he spun round, startled at the sudden movement, and my hands missed him entirely. In fact I had to grab the banister to stop myself going headlong down the stairs.

I covered it up quite well – I can think quickly when I have to. I said, ‘He’s there!’ pointing into the deep dark blackness of the hall, making it seem that I had been bounding forward to catch the intruder. We went downstairs and searched, but found nothing, of course. And after half an hour, Crispian went back to bed, making some joke about me hearing things.

I didn’t dare try again that night, but I knew I would in the future. It might be a long time before a suitable opportunity presented itself, but I knew it would do so one day. Every time I thought about it, that fiery excitement burned up and I found my fingers curling into claws again.

Almost as soon as he returned to London from Oxford, Crispian spent a long time closeted with that old fool Dr. Martlet. He thought I was unaware what he was doing, but I knew, all right. I didn’t need to listen at doors or open letters to know what was afoot. And more than once I laughed at his deviousness and the machinations.

But I’d still like it understood that I’m not and never was mad. What I did was nothing to do with madness. It was because of the decision Crispian made in the summer of 1912.

London, 1912

Crispian hated the decision he had made, but he could not see any other course of action.

‘My father is dangerous,’ he said, facing Gillespie Martlet in the small downstairs room that had always been regarded as Julius Cadence’s study. It was lined with books Crispian did not think anyone had ever read, and there was a musty, unused smell about it. ‘He somehow got hold of a key to that hellish room you’ve put him in, and attacked my mother last night.’

‘Is she all right?’ asked Martlet quickly.

‘I think so. She’s doing what she nearly always does with any unpleasantness – pretending nothing happened,’ said Crispian caustically.

‘How did he get a key?’

‘I’ve questioned Flagg, but his own key never leaves his key-ring,’ said Crispian. ‘It’s my guess that my father got an extra one from the locksmith when the work was being done.’

‘Yes, that’s possible. He could have gone up there and engaged the workmen in conversation,’ said Martlet. ‘They wouldn’t have seen anything wrong. For long stretches he’s been perfectly all right, you know. Completely lucid and normal. He might simply have asked for an extra key and they’d have given it to him.’ He paused, then said, ‘But I have to say, these spells of… confusion are becoming more frequent. And they’re lasting for much longer.’