A Wayward Game Page 11

  Frieda is silent as we drive past the shopping centres and industrial estates that gnaw at the edge of Bucklock Wood. This is London’s unlovely tail end: a windswept plain dotted with used car salesrooms, supermarkets and factories. Strange, Diane used to say, that such a miserable place should guard the entrance to such a beautiful place as Bucklock. We came out to the woods often when we were students, whenever life in London became too much or we wanted some peace and privacy, and it was a place we grew to love. Was that why she returned, even in the final weeks of her life? Did it remind her of happy times? Or was it just an ingrained habit, like the side of the bed she slept on, or the way she took tea?

  Gradually concrete gives way to farmland, and I catch sight of some low green-grey hills: the heart of England, the heart of a mystery. We turn onto a lonely, tree-lined road and then into a small car park, really just a patch of gravel. I park in the corner, beneath the spreading branches of an elm tree. There aren’t many cars here today: the weather’s grey and dank, and it’s a midweek morning. We get out of the car. Bucklock Wood, a sign nearby informs us. No hunting, no camping, no fires. Please keep dogs on a lead. That’s one thing that has changed, anyway; Diane used to let Goldie run freely here. I squint around at the dark, dripping woods, feeling strangely nervous, slightly out of synch. I know this place, and yet I don’t know it at all. I’ve avoided coming here since Diane disappeared.

  Frieda, creeping up to my side, looks around with an almost fierce stare. True to her word, she remains dry-eyed.

  “I always like to come back to places where she’s been,” she says. “Always, even if it hurts. Perhaps she stood here, where I’m standing now. Perhaps she parked her car just in this space. Makes me feel closer to her, at least for a bit.” She stuffs her hands into her pockets. “All right. Let’s take a look around, shall we?”

  We set off through the woods, our shoes tapping eerily against the rough stone path. Nobody else seems to be here; there’s no sound of dogs barking or cars on the nearby road. Water drips from the leaves and branches onto our heads. Bucklock Wood, a small leftover of a once great and extensive Royal Forest. A beautiful place, and also a sinister place. Neil tells me that it is notorious in police circles, a sort of overspill sewer for London’s ills. Drug deals are negotiated in its clearings. Occult groups meet here after dark, most of them bored kids playing at being Satanists. Murder victims are lured, or buried, out here. Some of them are found, but most, it’s safe to assume, are not. I think of tree roots growing through human bones, flesh slowly being reclaimed by the soil. Diane is just one of Bucklock’s mysteries, albeit one of the more famous ones.

  Eventually we reach Waken Mere. The water is the colour of steel, and utterly still. Ducks quack, seemingly in panic, as we approach, and paddle away. We sit down on a damp wooden bench, and Frieda stares out across the water.

  “She loved this place, didn’t she?” she asks quietly.

  “Yes, she did.”

  “It’s not a bad place,” she says, surprisingly. “Not for me, anyway. You know what I think, Katherine? I don’t believe for a minute that anything happened to Diane here. I don’t think she’s buried out here – God, if I did, I’d tear the place up with my bare hands to find her. So this is a good place for me. This is a place where she came to be happy, to be at peace.”

  “You don’t think she even came back to London that Sunday night, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. I think she died out in Dorset that weekend, probably in the cottage. That would account for the cadaver dogs’ reactions.” She pauses, and leans forward, elbows on her knees. “You’ve been out there, to that cottage. What is it like?”

  I shrug. “In and of itself? Just a nice little holiday cottage, on the outskirts of a little village, a short distance from the sea. Thatched roof. Inside, all the mod cons, all very comfortable. But anonymous, like all these places. Not stamped too definitely with anyone’s personality. It’s the kind of place you’d enjoy staying in – well, normally, at least. I rented the place for an entire weekend and was scared to death half the time, looking over my shoulder, jumping every time a floorboard creaked. I just kept thinking of what might have happened there. But there was nothing tangible there, no clues or anything.”

  “You talked to the owners. What did they say?”

  I remember the farmer and his wife, who owned all the land thereabouts, and how they looked at me with guarded eyes.

  “They didn’t want to say much at all. They didn’t want the kind of notoriety that Diane bestowed. They’d already had a few people – misery tourists, they called them – who went out there just to be in the place where Diane had been. They thought I was one of them, and I suppose I was. They didn’t say much, anyway. Just that they’d seen Diane on the Friday evening, when they arrived, and she seemed all right. On Sunday afternoon, Sallow came to the farmhouse to return the keys, and Diane wasn’t with him, but they assumed that she was waiting in the car. Which is exactly what Sallow later said she was doing.”

  Frieda nods, her eyes fixed on the water. “This is what I think happened, Katherine, that weekend. She died either on the Saturday evening or on Sunday – there was a fight, if you ask me. Old tensions, old resentments, fears about the future – it all came out. Di could be a smart aleck sometimes, and perhaps she goaded him. Perhaps they’d had a bit too much to drink. We’ll never know. But at some point that weekend, he lost it and lashed out at her. Now, he probably didn’t intend to kill her, I grant you that. But, oh God, what a shitty, cowardly thing to do to a pregnant woman.

  “Perhaps Di fell and hit her head, and that spot of her blood on the cottage floor came from her wound. Sallow leans over her, and checks for any sign of life, but there’s nothing – no breathing, no heartbeat, nothing. So now what? Here he is, alone in this rented cottage with the body of his dead, pregnant girlfriend, and he doesn’t know what to do. He probably ran through all the possibilities in his mind. Do I tell them what happened, and hope that a good lawyer will be able to get me off the hook? Do I take that chance? Or do I try to cover up what’s happened? I bet that decision didn’t cost him much in the way of thought or worry. It was only ever going to go one way. He had a career, a reputation, to protect.

  “So instead of calling an ambulance or the police, he sits down and thinks. What’s the first thing he’s got to do? Well, he’ll have to get rid of the body, for a start. And he realises he’s lucky, in a way, because here he is in a little village in Dorset, not in London. There are lots of places where he can hide a body: in the woods, in the sea. So he bundles the body into his car, and drives it off somewhere, and either dumps or buries it. We’ll probably never know exactly where, but somewhere remote, and lonely, where there’s less chance of her ever being found.

  “He gets back to the cottage at last, and by now it’s probably some time on Sunday: the weekend’s almost over, he’ll be expected at work tomorrow morning as usual. So he gets in the car and begins to drive back to London, and as he drives he thinks about how he’s going to explain Di’s absence. He concocts this story about her coming out here, to Bucklock, on Monday morning to walk the dog – not a very good story, but he hasn’t got time to think of anything better, and it does have some advantages. While people are searching around near Bucklock Wood, they’re not going to be looking back in Dorset or thereabouts. So when he gets back to London, he leaves his own car at the apartment garages, and then takes Diane’s and comes out here, with the dog in the back. Let’s say that it’s either late on Sunday or early on Monday morning by this time. He gets out here in the dark, when there’s nobody else around, lets the dog go, and then gets the hell away. Walks back towards the main road, gets on a bus, walks to the nearest train station, whatever. It’s an anonymous kind of place – people drive through all the time, but they don’t pay much attention to what they’re seeing – and nobody notices him, or cares. Besides, he probably looks a mess now, not like himself; nobody would have looked twice. Anyway, he gets back
to London and tries to sneak up to his flat, but that’s where something goes wrong for him: the concierge sees him, and he has to think of a story to account for that.

  “Anyway, to complete the pretence, he has to get to work, and quickly. So he has a shower, changes, and goes off to the office. People said he looked tired and dishevelled that day. He said he hadn’t slept well. Damn right he hadn’t, the bastard. He pretends to call Di later that day, pretends to be concerned when she doesn’t answer, and then goes home early. That gives him a bit of extra time – to clear up any loose odds and ends, to make sure everything hangs together. God.” She gives a low, humourless laugh. “He’s one cool customer, you’ve got to say that for the bastard.”

  “Very cool. He never slipped up when the police questioned him. Not even after the cadaver dogs alerted.”

  “Arrogant as fuck. Knew that with all his wealth and connections, they wouldn’t dare touch him. He knew he’d get away with it. I tell you when I remember first thinking he was guilty, Katherine. It was when he hired that PR consultant, ten days after Di vanished. Why hire a PR consultant, for Christ’s sake? You’re girlfriend’s just gone missing. How’s a PR consultant going to help?”

  Frieda is referring to Sallow’s hiring of Larry Mortimer, one of the foremost PR consultants in the country. For years, Mortimer has planted good headlines and buried bad news for a roster of starry clients, from fading film stars to disgraced MPs. If anyone can make you look good in the public eye, it’s Mortimer. Needless to say, his services don’t come cheap. Sallow could afford him, of course. The question, perhaps, is why he needed to.

  “One of the best PR consultants going,” I say. “If you ask me, Sallow realised from early on that a media storm was coming, and he needed someone to help him weather it. Don’t forget, Frieda, Sallow can afford the best: the best legal advice, the best spokesmen, everything.”

  “David against Goliath, isn’t it?” Frieda says. “He’s got everything, and we’ve got nothing. Only memories and love. But perhaps they’ll be enough, in spite of everything.” She turns to me with an almost pleading look. “Tell me what you remember, Katherine.”

  She often asks me this, though I’ve already told her everything I can remember, a hundred times or more.

  “I can’t tell you any more than I already have, Frieda,” I say, as gently as I can.

  “You think so, but you don’t know. Perhaps there’s something else, something so small that you’ve overlooked it before, but when you tell me it’ll somehow slot into place, and I’ll see it: some new possibility, anything. Just one little thing could blow the entire case wide open, and you – you could be the one to do that, Katherine.” She grabs my arm and squeezes it, rather hard. “Look, I’m not going to lie. You know I never thought much of what you two were doing together, what you were. I’m not going to be a hypocrite and pretend otherwise. I blamed you for leading Di astray, and I hated the idea of you two together. But that doesn’t matter now. You knew Di, and you loved her, and you can help.”

  “There are so many things. I don’t know where to start.”

  “Well, all right then, tell me this – did she ever talk to you about Sallow?”

  “Yes. When she started seeing him.”

  “And you two – were you still together at that time?”

  “No. Our relationship was in the past, and that was where she wanted it to stay.” I shrug, trying to ignore the pain the memory brings. “She tried to pretend it had never even happened, that I’d never been anything but her friend. I think she’d even managed to convince herself of that.”

  “Why would she have done that?”

  “It had never been easy for her, you know. She’d always been worried about what people would think – worried about what you would think, certainly. I think she was afraid of her own feelings. At first I thought that maybe what she felt for me would be stronger than fear, but in the end it wasn’t. Everything that had happened between us became a secret, but how can you live with so many secrets?” I swallow, and look down at my clasped hands. “Besides, there were so many things that I just couldn’t offer her. Part of her just wanted a normal, conventional life – you know, a nice house, a husband, a couple of kids. She wouldn’t have got that with me.”

  “And then she met James Sallow.” Frieda’s voice is thick with pain. “What the hell did she see in that bastard?”

  “Well, he never seemed like a bastard. He could be pleasant, charming even. He was good-looking and well-off. And those things meant a lot to Diane.”

  “I know. God, I could see the discontentment in her when she was still just a kid – the way she used to stare around her, at our little house, our little town, and think about how she wanted more. More money, more things, more respect, more everything. She wanted it, and she started working for it, early – frighteningly early. Worked hard at school, got a scholarship to a private school, started trying to speak posh, dress and act a certain way. Got so good at it that you’d never think she’d ever been any different. Started calling herself Diane Meath-Jones, because she thought that sounded more classy than plain Diane Meath. Told her friends at school that her father was dead, because that sounded better than saying that he’d just walked out; said that he was the last of an old aristocratic family, related to royalty, no less. Of course, she could never actually invite anyone back home; they’d see straight away what a load of shit her stories were. I often thought that she was the loneliest person I’d ever met. Not belonging in the place where you are, and having nowhere else to go – God, she must have felt so alone sometimes.”

  Frieda falls silent for a moment. Her bleak eyes sweep across the lake, the trees. A crow takes off from a dripping branch, cawing, black wings beating at the sky.

  “I’ll tell you this, though,” she says at last. “She might have been ambitious, but she didn’t abandon everything. She had decency, a heart. Not like Sallow. I think she saw what she wanted to see when she met him, and fell for that. She fell in love with a fantasy. For him, I think she started off as a diversion, a bit of fun. But Di wasn’t anyone’s bit of fun. She wouldn’t let go, and she wouldn’t turn away and pretend it had never happened. She’d have thought, Well, I’ve been to bed with this man, I’m carrying his child, he owes me something. The problem was that he didn’t see it that way.”

  “No.” I close my eyes, remembering. “When she told him that she was pregnant, he told her to get rid of it. But Diane wouldn’t. She couldn’t; all her life she’d dreamed of becoming a mother. I suppose she cried and pleaded and tried to reason with him, and maybe she even tried a bit of blackmail – think how bad it’ll look if you abandon me while I’m expecting your child, that kind of thing. So he gave in and let her move in, but he felt trapped. He must have resented her.”

  “She must have known that, though. She must have seen it.”

  “Yes, I think she did. But she didn’t want to acknowledge it, not even to herself.” I look out over the grey water. “We’re sometimes very good at choosing not to see something if we don’t want to. We’re like children, aren’t we? We think that if we close our eyes, maybe it’ll go away. But it doesn’t. And of course there were the arguments, the accounts of Diane being seen in tears. The whole thing began to fall apart, but how could she face up to that? She loved Sallow. And even if she hadn’t, she was pregnant. She needed stability, a home.”

  “She could have come home to me.” Frieda’s voice is quiet, pained. “She could have got on the next train, the next bus, anything. Jumped into that bloody great car and raced down the M4. She must have known that.”

  “I’m sure she did. But she didn’t want to admit that it had all gone so badly wrong. It hurt her pride.” I shake my head. “You know, there are so many people who’d have helped her, if she’d only asked. I would have, in an instant. But she’d put so much faith in Sallow and the baby, and she just couldn’t bear to admit that it had all gone so wrong. And it’s so easy to kid yourself, isn’t it?” I
close my eyes and think, not just of Diane, but of Neil and his wife. “Sometimes, even after you know you’ve made a mistake, you refuse to face up to it. You just keep stumbling on, hoping that you’re wrong, or that somehow things will change. You can get used to these things, so much so that you don’t even realise that anything is wrong. I can imagine that’s how it was. She went about her day-to-day routine – doing housework, walking the dog – and perhaps she managed to convince herself that everything was all right.”

  We fall silent for a moment. I sense that Frieda is turning my words over in her mind, sifting them for some glimmer of additional meaning or importance. Eventually she looks away from the lake, and turns to me.

  “That daily routine of hers,” she says. “What was it like?”

  “I can only guess. She was on maternity leave, so she had a lot of time to herself. I suppose she got up early with Sallow, had breakfast with him, walked the dog, and then spent the rest of the day at home. Sometimes she went to the doctor or met up with friends. There was a maid who went to the flat every other day, so she didn’t have to do much housework.”

  “Did the maid go there on the day Di was reported missing?”

  “No. That was one of her days off.”

  “Pity,” Frieda says. “She might have seen something. I can’t help thinking, you know, that if we could only find out what happened that day, we’d unlock this whole thing. Let’s run through the timeline again.”

  “According to Sallow – and really, his is the only account we have – he woke up early, before six, and left Diane in bed while he went out to get some cigarettes. Diane got up as normal at seven, and they had some breakfast together. He left for work at around eight, and as he said goodbye to her she mentioned that she was going to take Goldie out to Bucklock Wood. He told her to be careful, kissed her, and left, and that was that. Or so he says. The problem from our point of view is that his version of events does have some support. There was another dog-walker in Bucklock who saw Diane that morning.”