At Dead of Night Read online

  At Dead of Night

  TONY WHELPTON

  Also by Tony Whelpton

  Before the Swallow Dares

  The Heat of the Kitchen

  Billy’s War

  There’s No Pride in Prejudice

  A Change of Mind

  High Time

  Text Copyright © 2019 Tony Whelpton

  Cover Design: Rachel Lawston, lawstondesign.com

  The author asserts his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to

  Liz Freeman

  who, having heard me tell the story of

  something which had really happened to me,

  challenged me to turn it into a novel

  Contents

  #Chapter One

  #Chapter Two

  #Chapter Three

  #Chapter Four

  #Chapter Five

  #Chapter Six

  #Chapter Seven

  #Chapter Eight

  #Chapter Nine

  #The Author

  Chapter One

  ‘Are you listening?’ said the voice.

  David Sumner grunted. More a stifled yawn than an answer. The next movement was from his eyes, which he was vainly trying to open, in an attempt to ascertain who was addressing him. At length he succeeded in forcing them open, but could see no one; in fact he was unable to see anything at all, which should have been less surprising than it was, given that it was the middle of the night. He turned his head to the right, and perceived only the faintest glimmer of light filtering through the heavy bedroom curtains; he turned his head to the left, and found that all was black.

  ‘Are you listening?’ the voice asked again.

  The true answer, if David had been in any way capable of judging exactly what was true and what was false at that precise moment, would almost certainly have been, ‘No, I’m not!’, but his brain, deadened by the darkness of the night and the depth of the sleep from which he had just been awakened, allowed him merely to hear, not to listen; and all he was able to hear was the disembodied voice of a person whom he believed to be his own daughter. But in reality he was too confused to make any answer at all; he was just vaguely aware that it was dark, that he had been in a deep sleep, that he had been awoken by the ringing of the telephone, and that his daughter was asking if he was listening.

  ‘Are you listening?’ Susan’s voice again, this time betraying a degree of impatience.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, still in a state of confusion, his answer being less of a true statement, more of a reflex action in response to Susan’s commanding tone; he had learned over a period of many years that it was, without exception, always prudent to listen to what a daughter said, because a failure to listen would nearly always catch a father out, whether the daughter was an infant, an adolescent, or, as in the case of Susan, an adult with children of her own. But why on earth was she calling in the middle of the night?

  The digital display on the clock-radio beside his bed, adjacent to the telephone, showed that it was 2.15 in the morning. His head was pounding, as was his heart; he had gone to bed early because he was suffering from a heavy cold. The effect of the paracetamol tablets he had taken had already worn off, and the last thing he needed at this time of night was a phone conversation of any kind, no matter who might be at the other end of the line, even a well-loved daughter.

  With what seemed to him a more than superhuman effort, he managed to sit up in bed; he saw the time change from 02:15 to 02:16. Once more he directed his glance towards the window on his right, and, even as he watched, the glimmer which he had previously observed suddenly evaporated: it must have come from the neighbour’s security light, he thought, probably triggered by nothing more than a visiting cat or possibly a fox.

  It was only then that it began to dawn on him that in his right hand he was holding the handset of his bedside telephone. He had no more than a faint recollection of hearing the phone ring while he was asleep; he therefore assumed that he must have reached out with his hand on hearing the telephone ring, and removed the handset from its cradle. But how long ago had that happened? He could not have said with any exactitude, but it seemed a long time ago. Whoever his caller was would undoubtedly have rung off by now, he thought, but he strained to raise the handset to his ear none the less. Once more he heard the insistent voice of his daughter Susan: ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied instantly, but the sound of his own voice seemed strangely blurred to his ears, as if he were in an echo chamber.

  ‘Are you listening?’ said the voice again.

  ‘Yes, I am listening,’ he assured the caller.

  ‘This is very important,’ said his daughter again, very slowly, deliberately, even gravely, enunciating each word as if to ensure it would not be missed. ‘I did not call the police. It was your family who called the police.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about…’

  But his daughter’s voice had disappeared; she had rung off.

  A sudden thirst overtook him, so David mechanically took a drink of water from the glass which was always by his bed at night, then glanced in the direction of his wife Margaret, who lay beside him, still in a deep sleep. How on earth had she managed to stay asleep in spite of the ringing of the phone, his speaking, and Susan’s persistent tone? No, forget the last point, he thought, she wouldn’t have been able to hear what Susan said, would she, even if she had been fully awake? At last his brain was slowly beginning to clear, although it was still far from returning to its normal, alert, waking state. He tried to go over and over in his mind what had happened since he had been awakened by the phone, but, no matter how many times he confirmed to himself the details of what had occurred, he was no nearer understanding the significance of what his daughter had said. What could she possibly have meant? ‘I did not call the police,’ she had said. The meaning of that was clear enough, even if the necessity for saying it was totally unclear. Why might she have needed to call the police? Why should anybody have called the police? But someone clearly had done. ‘It was your family that called the police’: the words were still reverberating inside his head. ‘Your family’, she had said. ‘Your family. Your family…’

  So who had called the police? If what Susan said was true, the number of people potentially responsible was limited: it could in fact only be one of two people, either his son Eddie, or Eddie’s brother Matthew, who were Susan’s step-brothers, for Susan was David’s step-daughter – although David often forgot she was not his own child, for she had been in her teens when he had married her mother, and that was over thirty years previously. Nor was it a topic that was ever referred to by any of them, for in whatever permutation one chose, the relationship between David, Margaret, Eddie, Matthew, Susan – and Susan’s husband James too – was as stable as any; hence it was very curious, and, the more David thought about it, utterly mystifying, that she should have made such a distinction: ‘I did not call the police. It was your family that called the police.’ For anybody to suggest that there was
a difference between my family and your family would have been to fly in the face of reality.

  So what should he do now? Go back to sleep? Not possible. The only certainty of which he was aware was that he was too wide awake now to be able to go back to sleep. He looked again in Margaret’s direction and saw that she was still in the arms of Morpheus, sleeping the sleep of the just, so there was no possibility of discussing it with her at the moment. He, on the other hand, felt restless, and was aware of a pressing need to reflect deeply on what was going on.

  David slipped out of bed, felt for his slippers and then crept downstairs to the kitchen. He switched on the kitchen light and at last he began to wake up properly: at least the act of switching on the light had apparently also had the effect of switching on his brain, and he was finally able to start thinking rationally about the mysterious phone call he had received from his daughter.

  ‘The obvious thing to do is to call her back straight away, I know that,’ he said to himself. ‘I wouldn’t normally call anyone in the middle of the night, but she couldn’t really complain about that, because it was the middle of the night when she called me, wasn’t it! In any case, she can’t possibly have gone back to sleep – it’s only five minutes since I was talking to her, and she sounded much more awake than I did!’

  So he dialled the number and waited. He heard it ring out once, twice, three times. Then he heard a voice at the other end; not the voice of his daughter however, but the weary-sounding voice of a man.

  ‘Hello, James, it’s David,’ he said to his son-in-law. ‘Is Susan all right?’

  ‘Yes, she’s fine. Why?’

  ‘Because I’m totally confused by her phone call. What was all that about?’

  ‘What phone call?’

  ‘The one she made to us about ten minutes ago.’

  ‘I think you must have dreamt it, David,’ said James. ‘Susan is fast asleep beside me. She had an early night, and she went to sleep straight away.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course I’m sure. I’ve only just come to bed myself, because I had some work to do, and I would certainly have known if she’d made any calls. What was the call about?’

  So David related to James all that had happened; James listened, and then said: ‘I should go to sleep and forget about it. It obviously wasn’t Susan, or I would have known about it. I would have heard her. It must have been somebody else. It was probably a wrong number.’

  ‘But I couldn’t possibly have mistaken somebody else’s voice for Susan’s. It couldn’t possibly have been somebody else.’

  ‘But I can assure you that it definitely wasn’t her, or I would have known.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ replied David, unconvinced. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Good night.’

  David switched off the kitchen light, made his way upstairs and returned to the bedroom, where, as he was getting back into bed, he heard a muffled voice from somewhere under the bedclothes.

  ‘Are you all right, David?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘Oh yes, I can sleep, don’t worry!’

  ‘So why did you get up?’

  ‘I was woken by the phone ringing, that’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t hear the phone! Who was it?’

  David felt unwilling to recount every detail of the last half-hour at that stage, so he took what he thought was going to be a shortcut. ‘Oh, it was only James, don’t worry, Margaret. Go back to sleep.’

  Margaret sat up in bed. ‘James? What did he want? Is there something wrong? Why did he call? Is there something wrong with one of the children?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He didn’t call. I called him.’

  ‘Why did you call him in the middle of the night?’

  So David found himself once more trying to describe the phone call he had received, but by the time he had completed his narrative, his audience was no longer sufficiently awake to hear his words. He, on the contrary, was more awake than he had been at any point of the night, and he lay there pondering over what had happened, what his reactions had been, and, in particular, what else he could have done and what he should do now. His son-in-law had been adamant that the call had not come from Susan, but if it had not been Susan speaking, why had he been so convinced that it was? It is true that she was not using her normal tone of voice; rather it was clipped, terse, calmly insistent, belligerent even. But there had been occasions in the past when he had heard his daughter speaking in such a tone, if she was very upset, for instance, or angry.

  But if it wasn’t Susan, who was it? He was almost on the point of deciding that he would never know who it was when a thought crossed his mind: why had he not dialled 1471, to find out where the phone call had originated? It was something that he very often did as a matter of course, something which he would undoubtedly have done automatically if the call had come in the middle of the day.

  He got out of bed once more and went down to the kitchen, to avoid disturbing Margaret again. He picked up the kitchen telephone. As his fingers were about to touch the key pad, he hesitated; suppose the number he was about to hear did turn out to be Susan and James’s, what then? He dismissed the idea at once; it was more likely that the message which awaited him would say, ‘We do not have the caller’s number to return the call’, or ‘The last call was from a network which cannot transmit numbers’. If that were the case, then that would be the end of it: he would never know.

  He dialled the four digits, then heard a recorded voice read out a number: a local number, but it was not Susan and James’s. So James had been right; he had been mistaken, and it was not Susan’s voice he had heard. He put the phone down and thought a little more. It may not have been Susan, but it was clearly somebody, and somebody to whom the message was important, and who, it would seem, was under the impression that she had delivered the message to the right person. But she had not, had she? He decided that he would return the call the following morning; he could hardly ring at this unearthly hour. But wait a minute – why not? She had called him in the middle of the night, and if the matter was as urgent as she had made it appear, she was unlikely to have just gone to bed and forgotten about it. Yes, he would call her back now. But wait a minute – what was the number? He had only listened with a view to verifying that the call had not been from Susan’s number, and, apart from noticing that it was a local land-line number, he had not taken too much notice. He picked up a pencil and a note-pad and dialled again, this time ensuring that he wrote the number down as soon as he heard it. That done, he dialled the number, and waited.

  He heard the ringing tone, and found himself counting the rings: one, two, three, four, five… By the time he reached twenty-five he decided that no one was going to answer, so he replaced the receiver and started thinking once more. Feeling less than confident that he had dialled the correct number, he tried again: this time he heard the ‘Number unobtainable’ tone. He tried again, and again, but still with the same result, so he sat thinking again. Eventually, after some considerable time during which his mind seemed to be going round in circles, he came to the conclusion that there was nothing more he could do tonight, so he went back to bed. As he climbed into bed he glanced at the still sleeping Margaret, then closed his eyes.

  The next thing he knew, it was morning; sunlight was streaming through the bedroom curtains, he could hear the voices of John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie coming from the radio, for he and his wife woke up every day to the sound of Radio Four’s Today programme, and then, a few seconds later, there was Margaret’s voice informing him that she had just put a cup of tea on his bedside table.

  While they were sitting up in bed having their early morning tea, David related to Margaret what had happened during the night, adding to the narration his ultimate conclusion that, since it seemed unlikely that the call had in fact been made by Susan, the call was clearly not intended for him and he had come to the decision that he should not c
oncern himself with the matter any more.

  Once Margaret had got over her amazement that she could have slept through not only the ringing of the telephone but also David’s speaking to the caller and subsequently getting up and coming back to bed a quarter of an hour or so later, she dismissed in a summary manner the notion that he should wash his hands of the whole thing. ‘Unless you were imagining the whole episode,’ she reasoned, ‘the matter was clearly of great importance to the person who made the call, and also, I assume, to the person she thought she was calling. If I had made that sort of call, and had made a mistake in dialling the number and got connected to the wrong person, I would be very unhappy at the thought that the person who took the call had decided not to bother doing anything about it at all!’

  ‘But I did do something about it!’ her husband protested.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I tried to call back, but that number clearly doesn’t exist!’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because I found out which number the call was coming from, and tried to ring back, and every time I got the line unobtainable tone.’

  ‘Was it a local number?’

  ‘Yes, it was. At least I know that! Well, it wasn’t actually a Cheltenham number, it was a Bishop’s Cleeve number, because the area code wasn’t 01242, it was 0124267.’

  ‘Well, that at least confirms that it couldn’t have been a call from Susan!’

  ‘Why does it?’

  ‘Because Susan doesn’t live in Bishop’s Cleeve, silly!’

  ‘Oh, I know that! But anyway, I could have told you the call wasn’t from Susan’s number even if it had been a simple 01242 number. After all, I do know Susan’s number, silly!’

  Margaret ignored David’s attempt to take revenge, then said, ‘But I wonder why the number was unobtainable when you tried to call back.’

  A thought suddenly struck David. ‘Oh, wait a minute, something just occurred to me!’ replied David. ‘Actually I didn’t get the number unobtainable tone the first time, in fact it rang for quite a long time. Then I put the phone down and tried again, and that was when I got number unobtainable. And then I tried again, and again, and it was still unavailable every time. Perhaps the line developed a fault after I called back, do you think?’