The Darkness and the Deep Read Online Free PDF Page B

anything except Ashley.
    He wasn’t often unsure of himself, but then he’d never had a woman like Ashley, so cool, so self-possessed. She could just be using him, as he had used half a dozen other women, to add a little spice to married life. This was the first time he’d ever seriously considered the hideous and expensive business of divorce; Ashley might turn him down flat, of course, but even so it probably wasn’t too soon to sound out a competent lawyer.
    He took the stairs to his bedroom two at a time. A swim last thing at night was a useful habit he’d developed over his unfaithful years, and he changed into swimming trunks, put on a towelling robe and padded downstairs and along to the pool area.
    Joanna was, indeed, on the treadmill when he came in. These last few weeks, she’d seemed to live on it. She was wearing turquoise shorts and a white T-shirt, her Nikes thudding away on the moving belt. She was sweating profusely, her neat-featured face contorted in what looked like extreme agony. She raised her hand in greeting as he came in, then flicked a switch to allow her to slow down. ‘Eleven miles,’ she gasped as she stopped, labouring for breath.
    Ritchie picked up a towel from a chair and threw it at her. ‘You’re sweating like a pig,’ he said brutally, then walked past her to execute a competent shallow dive into the pool and began ploughing up and down in an elegant, economical crawl.
    Watching her husband, Joanna Elder rubbed her face, her neck, her shoulders and under her arms. She had punished her body – her pathetic, treacherous body – for its failures to the point where conceiving would have been beyond it anyway.
    Ritchie thought her problem was not having children to mother; he was wrong. She needed children, for security. Without children, she was only Ritchie Elder’s wife – his present wife. Hardly an assured position. Oh, she had always known about his infidelities, but equally she knew that until now none of them had been serious. She could still look in the mirror in the morning and see Mrs Ritchie Elder looking back at her.
    Her parents had a newsagent’s shop in Dumfries where she’d helped, not very enthusiastically, and she’d done a bit of local modelling though she wasn’t tall enough for the real stuff. She’d never had a proper job, the sort that gave you status of your own, and she’d never been very good at friendship either, somehow. It all seemed like awfully hard work, listening to the boring problems girlfriends always had. So marrying Ritchie had been the perfect answer: it provided money, position, a social life, everything she’d ever wanted – as long as she was his wife. If Ritchie divorced her, it wasn’t just the money, though of course she’d be doing her best to take care of that; it would be like falling into a vacuum that would suck the breath from her body.
    There were rumours which even she had been hearing, for ages now. And she was scared. She was terribly, terribly scared.
    It was five o’clock in the morning when the crying started. It began softly, whimpers at first, but soon it was anguished, heart-wrenching.
    She’d tried to ignore it when it woke her at first, shut her eyes, tried to sink back into sleep again. She pulled the pillow over her head to try to blot out the sound, reminded herself of what she’d been advised – no, instructed to do.
    It was hopeless. Completely impossible. Laura Harvey switched on the light, blinking blearily at the clock. She got up, shoving her feet into the slippers by the side of her bed, and grabbed a dressing gown; there were the first hints of cold weather ahead in the chill of the night air.
    The sound of her movement seemed to provoke even more distress. The cries rose in pitch and intensity as she opened the door of the kitchen in her rented cottage and switched on the light.
    One corner of the kitchen, the one nearest the radiator, had been barricaded off with a deep wooden plank. Over the