The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell

thought the doctor wouldn’t come. It might be July but the virus was raging and half the patients in the practice had it. The doctor would tell him to take paracetamol or aspirins, drink plenty and keep warm. This last wasn’t difficult because a heat wave had begun and the temperature outside was approaching Guy’s. But the doctor did come and said she would come again. Guy might have to go to hospital if he didn’t improve.
    Ismay helped Beatrix nurse him. Heather wouldn’t. Ismay carried upstairs jugs of fresh water and glasses of orange juice. Because he soaked the sheets with sweat, Beatrix changed them every day while he sat shivering in a chair, wrapped in blankets. Ismay had another fantasy, that as he got better and his health and strength returned he would hold out his arms to her and as she sank into them, pull her into bed beside him. Her mother, of course, would be out shopping at the time.
    Reflecting on this years later, she thought how little she must really have loved him, for she never worried about him. His illness lasted for a month and in all that time she slept as well as ever, she never thought about him except how he might make love to her. Thinking like that was when she realised she’d never had a realconversation with Guy. They never talked. Apart from Spain and Spanish, marketing (whatever that was) and watching sport on television, she had no idea what his tastes were. She never saw him read a book or listen to music. He had a degree in business studies, so he must know about them but she didn’t know what they were either. Something about keeping accounts, she supposed, or filing things. Making love with him was all she thought about and even then she didn’t know what lovemaking was like or, come to that – though the basic facts had been known to her since she was five – how you went about it. If she had loved him, wouldn’t the possibility have occurred to her that he might die? Wouldn’t she have been so anxious that she couldn’t eat or sleep or do any of the normal things she did?
    He did die, of course. Bathwater, not the virus, killed him. He drowned, his handsome face bleached by long immersion, his dark hair streaming and his long white hands floating just below the surface of the cooling water.

CHAPTER 6
    Seeing Heather’s and Edmund’s happiness, she wondered how she could ever have considered telling him. There was something else as well: how she could never be absolutely irrefutably cast-iron sure Heather was guilty of Guy’s death. No one could be positive Heather had killed Guy. She couldn’t and her mother couldn’t. They had the evidence, of course. Heather coming downstairs with that look on her face and her dress and skirt all wet down the front, Heather never actually denying it, Heather falling in with their plans to say she hadn’t been in the house but out with them. In court, if it had ever come to it, a clever lawyer could have demolished all that.
    But if Heather hadn’t done it, who had? Beatrix had put forward the theory of the mysterious intruder. In spite of the front door being locked and the back door locked and no sign of any break-in. The door to the balcony was open, Beatrix had said. Or she had said it until Ismay pointed out that in order to come into the bathroom through that door, the mysterious intruder would have had to break down the locked side gate into the garden or traverse neighbouring gardens and climb over a six-foot-high wall. Then somehow climb up the sheer back of the house where there were no drainpipes or creeper and haul himself on to the balcony. All this with no one to see him? On a fine summer’s day when people were in their gardens?
    But that was Beatrix’s theory because she so much wanted it to be true. Besides, who but Heather would kill Guy and for what? Nothing had been stolen from the house. Nothing had been disturbed. Perhaps Guy had drowned