A Wayward Game Read online

  “And so we plodded on for years,” Neil once told me. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to admit that we’d made a mistake, even though I think we both knew it on some level. And, you know, love doesn’t just die; it fades so slowly and inexorably that you don’t even notice. Then one night – God, I remember it perfectly, even now – we had a row, and it all came out into the open. We ended up staying up all night, talking – about the past, the future, everything. We finally admitted that something was wrong, but we still didn’t have a clue what we could do about it. If I close my eyes, I’m there again: sitting on the sofa in our living room, listening to the clock ticking in the hallway, listening to us both saying things we’d never dared to say before. It was one of those moments when you know that everything has changed, and you can never go back to how things were.”

  The next week, he moved out and went to live in a small rented flat near the Archway tube station. They didn’t necessarily see this as a permanent change; the idea was that they’d try to live apart and see what happened. It would give them time to think things over and come to a decision – or so they thought, at least. Twelve months later, and six months into the affair that has distracted him, Neil remains as uncertain as ever. So, uncharacteristically, does his wife. I think she must love him, at least to some extent, and this makes me feel no more charitably toward her.

  The messy business of divorce is made messier still when there are children involved. Children are the perpetual victims, forever condemned to be dragged through the mud that their elders have churned up. Neil knows this all too well, given the harrowing cases of child abuse and neglect that he has dealt with in a professional capacity. His own children, of course, are spared such brutality, but he wonders whether he is, unintentionally, only inflicting other, more subtle, cruelties on them.

  “I just don’t know what to do for the best,” he told me once. “Will they be better off living with unhappily married parents, or being shunted from one house to another until they grow up and can get away and make their own lives? Who can say which of those options is better?”

  Marital tensions notwithstanding, I think that Neil has a good relationship with his children – insofar, that is, as two teenagers could be said to have a good relationship with anyone. He speaks of them sometimes. Their names are Karen and Amy: soft, conventional names that speak of ordinariness and simplicity. He talks to them several times a week by telephone, spends every other weekend with them, and tries to take an interest in their lives, their schoolwork, and their incomprehensible and short-lived passions for singers and film stars. During the school holidays he takes them away on trips to the coast or abroad.

  These facts read like someone’s biography, but they tell little of the real story. Beyond this handful of truths, I actually know little of his life. I resent this hidden part of his existence because I cannot share it, and cannot compete with it. No matter how much distance has crept between Neil and his wife, she is still his wife. He may no longer live in the same household as his daughters, but they remain his primary concern. The intricacies of his job are largely unknown to me. All of these things are as permanent, as solid and comforting, as the ground beneath his feet, and every bit as homely. I, on the other hand, am as gaudy and alluring, and ultimately as transient, as a rainbow or shooting star. And so I torture and restrain and pleasure him, because in the end that is the only thing that I, and I alone, can give.

  The games we play are deceptive, though. While they are happening, nothing could be more real: what, after all, could be more true and certain than pleasure or pain? But they are as ephemeral as a wave on the shore, and as inconsequential. The memory they leave behind is but a ghost of the thing itself. Pain and pleasure, existing so thoroughly in the moment in which they are experienced, force one to live in that moment; when the moment is over, they are dead. I have never left a permanent mark on his body, and I fear that I will never leave a permanent mark on his heart.

  I turn away from the burning, choking city and catch sight of my face reflected in the window pane. It is a strained, haunted face, with panicky eyes and a mouth that seems forever poised to ask a question. It is frightened and uncertain, not at all like the face of a Domina. Yet that is how Neil thinks of me: as his Mistress, his tormenter, his shameful and pleasurable secret, as fleeting as the sensations I bring.

  For him, I am sure, the things that we do together in these stolen hours have nothing to do with love. We have never even mentioned the word. After so much time it should not be hard for me to accept this fact, but it is. It is more difficult than I ever believed possible.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Today is June 16th. For the family and friends of Diane Meath-Jones, it is the darkest day of the year. Later today, close relatives will go to a local church to light candles and pray for her. It will not be a memorial service, exactly; they cannot even be sure that she is actually dead. But eight years after she apparently vanished off the face of the earth, what other outcome could they reasonably hope for?

  To have a clear overview of this extraordinary case, we might do well to start at the beginning.

  Eight years ago, Diane – Honours Graduate in History and French, Research Assistant for a well-known broadcaster – had a seemingly charmed life. She was young, just twenty-five years old, and pretty. She had money, and a successful career ahead of her. In her personal life, too, she seemed blessed. She had, for just over a year, been in a relationship with a City Headhunter and Oxford graduate called James Sallow. She was, in addition, six months pregnant, and had recently moved into her boyfriend’s comfortable home in Greenwich, an ultra-modern open-plan apartment on the tenth floor of an exclusive riverside development. On clear days, she could look out of her windows and see as far as the distant hills of Hertfordshire; at night, she could see the lights of London spread out before her like a dream.

  So far, this seems like another version of the lifestyle that is sold to us in a million advertisements, TV programmes, and magazine articles. Diane seemed to embody wealth, career, youth, beauty, family and love: all the things that we are conditioned to respect and taught to crave. What happened next, perhaps, is a salutary lesson in not being deceived by appearances. One warm day in mid-June the perfect structure of Diane’s life was shattered, leaving nothing but misery and a lingering question mark.

  This, as far as anyone knows, is what happened.

  Late on the evening of Sunday June 15th, Diane and James Sallow returned to London after a weekend spent in a rented holiday cottage in Dorset. Arriving at their Greenwich home, they had a light meal before going to bed. The next morning, at about eight o’clock, Sallow said goodbye to Diane before leaving for work. She mentioned to him, in passing, that she was going to take their dog for a walk in Bucklock Wood, a wooded area on the easternmost fringes of London. He told her to be careful, left the flat, and headed off to his office in the City.

  Shortly afterwards, Diane made her way down to the underground garage beneath the apartment complex and collected her car, a black Lexus sedan, which Sallow had given to her for her last birthday. She drove out to Bucklock Wood, with the dog, a blond Labrador called Goldie, on the back seat. The traffic was heavy that morning, and it probably took her a while to get clear of London’s clogged arterial roads, but shortly before ten o’clock she arrived, and left her car on the irregular patch of gravel that served as a car park.

  Bucklock is a popular retreat for stressed Londoners who crave a taste of the countryside, but at that hour on a Monday morning it was quiet, almost deserted. Only one other visitor, another dog walker called Martin Stevenson, saw her there. He reported that he glimpsed her for a few seconds, and from a distance, as she turned onto the path that would take her through the woods and to a small circular lake called Waken Mere. The time was about ten o’clock, he believes. Diane seemed to be unharmed and alone, walking easily and contentedly, with Goldie trotting at her heels. He saw her for a matter of moments before she disappeared behind so
me trees and was lost to view.

  Nobody ever saw Diane again. At around half-past ten, another walker saw Goldie running along a woodland path, unaccompanied, with her lead trailing after her. Of Diane, however, there was not a trace.

  The previous week, Diane had arranged to meet a friend for lunch near her home in London. When she didn’t turn up, her friend was puzzled but not alarmed; she simply assumed that Diane had forgotten, or had been held up. It was unlike her, though, and her friend called first Diane’s mobile phone and then her landline. There was no reply, and it was not long before her friend’s bafflement turned to apprehension. It was the first time that anyone had an idea that something might be wrong.

  At four o’clock, James Sallow, now in his office in the City, called Diane at home. When there was no reply, he tried her mobile, but again the phone simply rang and rang. After the tenth such attempt, he called Diane’s mother, friends, and neighbours. Nobody knew where she was. Sallow, feeling alarmed by now, left work and went back to Greenwich, where he found the apartment empty and still: the breakfast dishes left on the draining board to dry, Diane’s jacket missing from the coat stand, and the eerie atmosphere that empty homes everywhere have. He called the police, who began a search of Bucklock Wood. Goldie was found there, wandering sadly along the empty pathways, and was returned home; Diane, on the other hand, was never seen again. Her Lexus, still in the car park, was searched, and found to contain no more than an umbrella, a jacket, a mobile phone, and some loose change. Sniffer dogs could find no trail in the surrounding woods. The lake, Waken Mere, was dragged and searched by divers, but nothing other than a discarded shopping trolley and an old boot was found. Diane, it seemed, had simply vanished.

  In the absence of hard facts, it is perhaps inevitable that theories should spring up to fill the void. According to some people, Diane had simply left of her own free will. James Sallow later admitted, after all, that she had been weepy and depressed in the months before her disappearance, seemingly overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood. If she ran away, however, she took nothing with her: she had made no large withdrawals from her bank account prior to her disappearance, and had not even been carrying her passport or a change of clothes.

  Other, darker theories have arisen. According to one, Diane was either abducted or killed by someone she encountered in the woods. The problem with this scenario is that there is no evidence to support it. There was no indication of a struggle, no traces of blood or torn clothing in the woods. None of the joggers and walkers who had been in the area had seen anyone being attacked, or heard screams. Besides, if Diane was abducted, how had her attacker managed to get her into a waiting car without being seen or heard? If she was killed, had her body been dumped or buried in one of the wood’s darker corners? If so, it was never found.

  Inevitably, too, there are some altogether more outlandish theories. According to some, Diane was abducted by aliens, or stumbled into another dimension, or was kidnapped by a Satanic cult for use as a human sacrifice. None of these hypotheses, needless to say, are supported by a shred of evidence, but they have all helped to stoke the speculation surrounding the case.

  In the days and weeks that followed, Diane’s disappearance became a media sensation. It had all the right ingredients, after all: a pretty young woman, an attractive man, suggestions of money and privilege, and a seemingly inscrutable mystery. Journalists and camera crews descended on Bucklock Wood. Appeals were made for witnesses to come forward, and a tearful Sallow appeared at a hastily-organised press conference, where he pleaded with Diane to come home and begged the public to contact the police with any helpful information.

  It was inevitable, of course, that the finger of suspicion should eventually begin to point at Sallow himself. There were whispers that his relationship with Diane had been volatile, and reports from neighbours about frequent and bitter arguments. Yet when police questioned him, he seemed to have an impregnable alibi. Mobile phone records and the testimony of colleagues both indicated that he had been in the City at ten o’clock that morning, at around the time that the dog walker in Bucklock reported seeing Diane there.

  Sometimes there is no resolution, no neat ending. To date, Diane’s disappearance is unsolved. There are no official suspects, and little evidence other than the simple, stark fact that Diane is gone. Every lead has come to a dead end, and the case is now cold. The Metropolitan Police occasionally review the files, in the hope that some new evidence or investigative technique will have come to light since their last assessment, but so far there have been no new developments. And so Diane has been reduced to another number, another dusty file in the archives – and another blot on the Met’s copybook, though not one that is large enough to cause them any lasting damage. This is how things are, sometimes. Files are closed, people are forgotten, and the world can shrug its shoulders and go back to whatever it was doing.

  For Diane’s friends and family, of course, there can be no such resignation. The thought that she may be dead is agony, the thought that she might be alive, but lost and alone, barely less so. Every day brings questions, and every night brings horror. They imagine different scenarios, weighing them as carefully as a jeweller weighs tiny pieces of gold, trying to calibrate their value. They walk through the woods where Diane disappeared, and try to imagine her last movements. They seek any small hint as to what might have happened to her, and find nothing but the sighing of the wind in the trees, the distant bark of a dog, and a place that refuses to give up its secrets.

  This is what loss can be like. It is not the presence of something, but the absence of something else. They say that men who have had a limb amputated sometimes continue to feel pain or sensation in that limb. It is the same with grief. That which you’ve lost continues to itch and throb, and yet when you reach for it your fingers close upon thin air, and you know that you’ll be incomplete for the rest of your life. This is what grief can feel like.

  ~

  After eight years, the case has slipped down the news agenda, but Diane is not entirely forgotten. The internet is, after all, populated by ghosts. The living raise spectres of themselves, in the form of the doppelgangers who haunt dating sites and chat rooms. The dead, when invoked by the web, are granted a strange, shadowy afterlife. And Diane’s disappearance continues to fascinate; documentaries about her may be viewed on YouTube, along with amateur videos by armchair detectives. There are websites and forums where people discuss the case and put forward their own theories. One such site is www.whathappenedtodiane.org, where new hypotheses are propounded with startling regularity.

  I am one of the regular posters here, one of those spectral people who are spellbound by this case. In another feature of the internet age, we have become something of a community. Geographically, we are widely dispersed, and we have little else in common, and yet we have come together in a bizarre simulacrum of unity. We have our community leaders, those unofficial chiefs who gain their positions through a process of natural selection, almost; we have the vast body of the people, from nobles to peasants. We have occasional visitors, who pass through and spend time with us; we have those who fly through without stopping, on their way to somewhere else. We both know one another and are complete strangers. It is a strange echo of intimacy, a reminder of village mentality for the twenty-first century.

  I wake early this morning, as I often do. As another grey dawn breaks over London, I sit down at the computer and sign into the forum with my username, Kittyminx. It has been a busy night, I find, as might be expected on the anniversary of Diane’s disappearance, and there are dozens of new posts. I notice the names and avatars of my fellow posters: Matryoshka, Valley Girl, Lovelornlass, Northern Boy, Dreamsnatcher, Lookwest. I methodically click on each new thread, anxious not to overlook any fresh information or opinions. For the most part, though, there is nothing very interesting, only the rehashing of the same old ideas and arguments. There’s a news article, copied from the website of a national newspaper, which says very l
ittle of any substance and contains no new facts. There’s a discussion about the geography of Bucklock Wood, involving speculation about its possible use by occult groups after dark.

  Scrolling down the page, I find a new thread about an incident that took place two years or so after Diane’s disappearance, when a young journalist, Katherine Argyle, wrote a story about the case. The article, which obliquely cast doubt on Sallow’s version of events, was duly published by her paper, a national broadsheet. There the matter might have rested, had not Sallow’s lawyers judged the article to be libellous and threatened Argyle’s editor with legal action. Shortly thereafter, coincidentally or not, Argyle was made redundant. Those who believe in Sallow’s guilt – of whom there are many on this forum – have always been quick to point to this as evidence of a conspiracy theory. I read the comments.

  Valley Girl: Does anyone know what Katherine Argyle is doing these days? Is she still working in journalism, even? It seems odd that someone who was once judged to be a promising young reporter, employed by a major broadsheet, should have flown off the radar so completely.

  Dreamsnatcher: Frankly, I’m amazed that she hasn’t disappeared altogether.

  Lookwest: She’s still around, but in a professional sense she’s in limbo. She writes articles about celebrity diets and reality TV shows these days. That’s probably a very effective way of shutting her up – just deny her the chance to say anything meaningful, and portray her as another vacuous tabloid hack.