A Wayward Game (14 page)

“Nine o’clock,
meeting at Scotland Yard. Nothing new’ll be said, so it’ll be over
in half-an-hour or so. I’ll meet you outside at ten, just to be on
the safe side. Then we’ll go out to Bucklock Wood. I’ll try not to
get upset again.” She frowns. “You know what’s funny? After Diane
disappeared, a few months afterwards, I thought: I’m not going to
cry anymore. Don’t you dare cry, you stupid bloody woman. You can
cry when justice is done, and then they’ll be tears of joy. But
those tears just keep on falling. I can’t seem to keep them
in.”

“Let them out,
Frieda. It might help.”

“It doesn’t.
Anyway, I’m telling you this now, and I mean it: this time, there
really
won’t
be any more tears. Crying won’t bring her back,
or put things to rights. Only action can do that. And I swear I
won’t stop, and I won’t rest, until Diane can rest too.” We stop
outside her hotel, and she gives a sudden smile that transforms
her, taking years off her. “Of course, I have to sleep sometimes.
It’ll be an early night for me tonight. See you tomorrow,
Katherine. Be on time.”

We hug, and I
watch as she drags her suitcase up the steps and into the grimy
lobby. Brave words; a brave woman, for all her tears. But I wonder
if she can stay true to those promises. Everyone, I think, gives up
eventually. Sometimes, you aren’t left with a great deal of
choice.

But for
tonight, Frieda will take refuge in her dreams. She’ll lie down on
her lumpy hotel bed and close her eyes, and in her mind she’ll be
with Diane, in that comforting imaginary world where time means
nothing and death is but a deception. I know a great deal about
that world, too. In fact, I’d say I was almost a permanent resident
there.

I make my way
back to Spitalfields. It’s late, and I undress quickly and get into
bed, taking refuge in the darkness and silence. At these quiet
times, I can almost imagine that Diane never died at all, or that
time never moved on from when we were together. In this nebulous
otherworld, she is lying beside me still. Her soft arms slide
around me, and I feel her lips upon mine. I remember how
passionately she made love, even as she feared what the world would
think of that passion.

Becoming lovers
was easy, as simple and natural as breathing or sleeping. Drunken
nights, loneliness, a longing for company and affection and
excitement – the simple alchemy behind a thousand student flings, a
thousand nights of reckless delight in narrow student beds. Diane’s
lips felt soft and gentle against mine, her hands searching as they
slid up my back and to my shoulders before slipping down to my
breasts. We explored each other’s bodies with the curiosity of
teenagers who had only recently become used to our own flesh. It
was almost innocent; we had, as yet, little knowledge of the
curious twists and turns that sexuality can take, and what we did
in that narrow bed was the simple expression of an instinct. And
yet it gave us greater joy than we had ever felt before. The
feeling of Diane’s hands and lips on my body took me into a world
of pure pleasure, a glorious place where only the present exists,
and there is no room for either fear or regret. I knew that this
was what I did for her, too, when I saw how she reacted to my
inexpert caresses. We stroked and kissed and pleasured each other
until we both came, and then we fell asleep like children, our
bodies crammed together in the single bed.

The next
morning there was not regret, exactly, but anxiety.

“I don’t know
what my mother would say about this,” Diane told me, turning her
head to one side on the pillow. Her hair was messy from sleep or
the lack of it, and her face bare of make-up. I remember thinking
how beautiful she looked, and how young.

“You don’t have
to tell her,” I said.

“Someday I’ll
have to. At least, I will if this actually means something, if it
isn’t just fun.”

“It isn’t. Not
for me, anyway.”

“I know.” She
bit her lip. “I’m not a lesbian, you know. I never even thought I
was bisexual or anything.”

“Neither did I,
until I met you.”

“Why should we
have this effect on each other, then?”

“Why does
anyone have an effect on anyone?” I slipped my arms around her, and
kissed her. “You can’t really analyse it, Diane. Sometimes, someone
just gets to you like that, and that’s all there is to it. I don’t
think gender has much to do with it. I don’t think that past
experiences or some assumed sexual identity have much to do with
it, either. It’s just the way it is. That’s the way I see it,
anyway.”

“Not everyone
will see it that way, Katherine.”

“We can’t help
the way people see us. There’s no point worrying about it.”

“That’s one of
the things I admire about you. You just don’t care what people
think of you.” She kissed me again, and her hand slipped over my
hip. “When I’m with you, I don’t really care either.” Her hand
moved lower, between my legs, and she began to stroke me there,
softly. “At the moment, I don’t care at all. All I care about is
this
.”

I lie awake,
remembering, for a long time. I remember her as she was, and all
the things we did together, and how I dared to think that it would
last forever. At last, with midnight past and sleep impossible, my
hand slides down my body and my fingers begin to caress my
clitoris. At first my body feels numb, as numb as emotions can
sometimes be. But gradually my senses reawaken and begin to tingle,
and I imagine lying here in this bed with Diane, or with Neil, or
with both or neither of them, until I cry out into the night as I
come, and dreams and reality alike are swept away on a tide of
sensation.

Going back to
places you once knew can be a haunting experience. The place
itself, you find, has changed in a thousand small ways: shops have
closed and others have opened, buildings have been demolished and
others constructed, and trees have been planted or cut down. Other
things have changed little, or not at all. And so you wander
through this known and unknown landscape like a ghost, belonging to
it and yet cut off from it entirely.

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.