The Rain Before it Falls Read Free Page B

albums – some recent, some almost antique – along with three or four plastic boxes containing transparencies and a small battery-powered device for viewing them. There was something else, too, which gave Gill a jolt of recognition when she noticed it leaning up against the chair: an unframed oil painting, a portrait of the young Imogen, which she had certainly seen somewhere before. (Perhaps – though she could not be sure of this – at Rosamond’s house in London, at the fiftieth birthday party?) On the little table next to the chair was a tape recorder, a small microphone – the connecting wire now neatly coiled up and tied around itself – and four cassette jewel cases, standing in an orderly pile. Gill examined these curiously. There were no inlay cards describing the contents, and there was nothing written on the tapes themselves: all she could see were the numbers one to four, which Rosamond appeared to have cut out of cardboard, and then glued, in sequence, to the plastic cases. Furthermore, one of the cases was empty: or rather, instead of housing a tape, all it contained was a sheet of A5 airmail paper, folded up tightly, upon which Rosamond had scrawled the words:
    Gill —
    These are for Imogen.
    If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.
    Where, then, was the fourth tape to be found? In the machine itself, probably. She pressed the eject button and, sure enough, there was another cassette inside. It appeared to match the others, so Gill slipped it into the empty case and took all four of them over to a writing desk which stood in the corner of the room. She wanted to put these tapes out of temptation’s way, immediately. In the writing desk she found a large manila envelope; she dropped the tapes into it, sealed the envelope with a couple of quick, decisive licks, and wrote ‘Imogen’ on the front in capital letters.
    Next, Gill went over to the record player, which sat on top of a stained and weathered rosewood cabinet. Again, just as Dr May had told her, there was a record still resting on the turntable. She raised the perspex lid, carefully lifted the record – taking care not to touch the surface – and examined the label. Songs of the Auvergne, it said: arranged by Joseph Canteloube, sung by Victoria de los Angeles. Looking around, Gill saw both the sleeve and the inner sleeve lying on a nearby shelf. She put the album back in its sleeve and knelt down to open the cabinet, guessing that Rosamond would have kept her records there. There were about a hundred of them, neatly alphabetized. No CDs, however: the digital revolution seemed to have passed her by. But there were also, on the top shelf of the cabinet, a few dozen more cassettes, some blank and some pre-recorded, and standing next to them, something else, something quite unexpected – enough to make Gill draw in her breath sharply, so that her gasp rang out in that silent house like a scream of distress.
    A glass tumbler: just a few drops of liquid at the bottom, giving off the unmistakably peaty smell of an Islay malt whisky. And next to it, a small brown bottle, the contents of which were spelled out on a label in feeble dot-matrix printing: Diazepam. The bottle was empty.
    ∗
    At three o’clock in the afternoon, Gill phoned her brother.
    ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, cheerfully.
    ‘It’s miserable here. I can’t stand it. How did she stand it, for heaven’s sake? I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m going to spend the night in this place.’
    ‘So what are you going to do? Drive home?’
    ‘I can’t face it. It’s too far. Stephen’s away in Germany till Friday anyway. I…’ (she hesitated) ‘… I was wondering if I could stay the night at yours.’
    ‘Of course you could.’
    ∗
    No, she would not tell anyone. She had made up her mind about that, now. What she had seen in that cupboard was not conclusive, after all. Perhaps that bottle had been there for months, years. Dr May had expressed herself satisfied