Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

Nothing seemed to be out of place in the dining room. That left the kitchen window to be looked through, and the kitchen, it had to be said, was the likeliest place for Clem to be. Ella stepped back and looked up at the bedroom windows, and again she looked at her watch in case anyone was in sight. Then, taking a deep breath, she stepped up to the small kitchen window with its looped and swagged blind and the row of African violets in pots on the sill.

For a moment she thought there was nothing to see, and the possibility that Clem had got himself to bed last night and died or was lying helplessly ill in his bedroom rose up. He might not even have eaten the food at all, although Ella did not think that was very likely. She leaned closer to the window, trying to see the entire room.

Oh God, he was there all right. He was lying on the floor by the kitchen table, and there were all kinds of mess round him: crockery that had crashed to the floor, the results of sickness… Ella found herself gripping the window ledge. Stupid, she said. You know what you’ve got to do. Everything’s worked out.

She went quickly to the patio window and, taking off one of her shoes, smashed it as hard as she could against the glass, as close to the latch as possible. The tough double-glazed glass splintered, and several splinters showered out and stuck in the leather driving gloves Ella had been careful to wear. She brushed them off and dealt a second blow, then a third. At the third blow, a large section of the glass fell inwards, smashing onto the floor, and she was able to knock out several more and step through.

She walked warily across the dining room and opened the door into the kitchen. The first thing to strike her was the stench. Dreadful. She snatched a tissue from her pocket and clapped it over her mouth, and, trying to remain calm, leaned over to feel for a pulse in Clem’s wrist. There was a bad moment when she thought something fluttered under his skin, then she realized it was her own pulse, skittering like a trapped bird. He was lying half on his front, hunched over. Should she move him to check for a heartbeat? But his skin was cold and flaccid, and when Ella lifted his wrist there was a board-like stiffness to his arm. Rigor mortis? She was annoyed to realize she had not thought of that, and it was not the kind of thing one knew about instinctively. But she had the impression that it generally set in six or eight hours after death. She had left Clem shortly after half-past eight. If he had eaten the poisoned food soon after she left, he had presumably died around nine or a bit after. That seemed to fit.

Ella straightened up, and looked round the kitchen. In a minute she would phone for an ambulance but first she must find the diaries, Clem’s stupid self-indulgent journals with God knew what damning content. She was still not entirely sure if they existed, but she went systematically through the house, opening cupboards and wardrobes, peering under the beds. She was starting to panic. Supposing after all he had put them on a computer? But when she went into the little boxroom, there they were, potential dynamite, neatly stacked inside a small cupboard. Ella’s first reaction was relief and then shock that there were so many. Had he written one a year, for pity’s sake? No, there looked to be about twenty or twenty-five of them – one book would cover roughly two years.

They were not diaries in the strict sense, but leather-bound notebooks. Ella took several out at random and sat on the edge of a chair, looking at them. Morning sunshine streamed into the bedroom and dust motes danced in the light. There were faint sounds from the street – the slam of a car door, somebody calling out a greeting, the bark of a dog in a neighbouring garden.

Ella only half heard these noises, because her whole attention was on the notebooks. ‘My Jottings’ Clem had called them. Sometimes, if he had had a drink, he would call them ‘chronicles’. Whatever they were called, Ella supposed you might, if you were of a romantic disposition, consider that fragments of the past were captured inside these books, although having murdered the author twelve hours earlier, romantic was the last thing she was feeling.

She opened the topmost book and saw at once that Clem had not made an entry every day; he had simply written accounts of events that seemed to him interesting, a couple of pages here, an odd sentence there, all with a date heading at the top. Sometimes he had not written anything for several weeks. Ella turned the pages, realizing that even though she would be able to find Clem’s original account of the man’s death at Cadence Manor, removing that one book would not be enough, because it looked as if Clem had sprinkled references to it through the whole of his journals.

Even on his fiftieth birthday he had harked back to it. ‘A landmark birthday this one,’ he had written.

A time for retrospection, for taking stock. Writing this, I look back over the things I’ve done and wonder if decisions were made rightly and if actions taken were correct. That last day when we were all in Priors Bramley, for instance… Could we have acted differently when that man chased us…? And how much were we to blame for his death? That’s an uncomfortable thought, but it’s one that sticks in my mind. The past is always distorted when one views it from the present – and memory spins its own illusions – but as I grow older I find myself wondering if we fought that man too hard – if one of us gave him one push too many…

One of us gave him one push too many…

I’ve even wondered at times if his purpose was not as sinister as we believed. What if he was simply some poor soul whose wits were not entirely sound – some remnant of the Cadence family, even – trying to be clumsily friendly, maybe trying to tell us to get out before the Geranos bomb was dropped?

Ella closed the book with a snap. Clem’s notes were absolute rubbish; that man had been evil and malevolent, and even though Clem could not have known that, Ella had certainly known it. She had no qualms at all about having killed him.

She had no qualms about having killed Clem, either, particularly now she had read this. And she was deeply relieved she had found these notebooks because if Clem had been able to hand them to the police, the truth of that day would certainly have come out. There would have been probings into the past – into Ella’s childhood. The never-forgotten image of Serena Cadence, dead and terrible in the dim over-sweet room, rose up. It should have faded with the years, that ghost, but it never had.

All these notebooks would have to be destroyed. Ella had been prepared for this and had brought two folded-up plastic carriers in her handbag. The diaries would make a fairly bulky package, but anyone seeing the bags would assume, if they thought about it at all, that it was shopping.

The first diary had been written shortly before Clem’s ninth birthday, and had ended when he was eleven. Ella thought Clem had probably got bored with it at times, only returning to it when something of real interest had happened. There was an account of the school play – that had been the year that Veronica played the princess and Ella got to know Derek. She frowned, closed the book, and began to put the whole lot into the carrier, checking the dates as she did so to make sure they were complete.

But they were not. The diaries ended with an entry dated last year and the book was written to the last page. So unless Clem had suddenly stopped writing, which seemed unlikely, there must be another one somewhere. He would surely have described recent events: the opening up of the village and the finding of the bodies. Ella frowned and rechecked, but there was definitely not a current one. The possibility that it might be in his desk at the library or that he had, after all, begun using a computer occurred to her. She would search again, but first, she moved a pile of magazines onto the empty shelf of the cupboard so it would not look as if anything had been removed.