A Wayward Game (6 page)

“There’s no
record of anyone else having died in that house.”

“Maybe not, but
that still doesn’t prove that
Diane
died there.” He gazes up
at the ceiling, and I see that his face is at peace. I love him
like this – this is the real man, I think, the person behind all
the pretence and facades. “One thing that I really don’t understand
is why Sallow would kill his pregnant girlfriend. Even if he
thought he could get away with it, why would he be so cruel? If she
was getting on his nerves, why didn’t he just give her some money
and send her on her way? Pay for the kid’s upkeep, and hand over
some extra cash so she’d keep her mouth shut? That’s a hell of a
lot less risky, and he’s certainly rich enough.”

“I’m not saying
it was premeditated. I think he acted on the spur of the moment.
And if you don’t understand it’s because you’re a decent man, and
you couldn’t kill someone if your life depended on it. Not everyone
is like that.” Suddenly, years of bitterness and disappointment
rise to the surface in my voice. “Men think of sex as a game, a
game that they’re entitled to win. They forget what it’s like to
lose. Women know all about it. Unwanted pregnancies, reputations in
tatters, broken hearts and tears – it’s not so much fun when you’re
on the losing side, believe me.”

“What?” Neil
raises his head and looks at me, his expression startled. “I’ve
never thought of myself as being entitled to anything when it comes
to sex. And
you’re
the one who’s always referred to what
we’re doing here as a game. And if you’re talking about James
Sallow specifically, didn’t he actually stand by Diane? He didn’t
abandon her. He allowed her to move in with him when she found out
she was expecting, for Heaven’s sake. That’s hardly the act of a
man who might have killed her, is it?”

“Isn’t it?
Nobody’s that simple, Neil.” I sigh, and close my eyes. “Perhaps he
felt trapped. He didn’t want to be tied down with a live-in
girlfriend and a baby. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to be
seen as heartless, as the kind of man who’d abandon his own lover
and child. He was considering running for Parliament, remember. Can
you imagine the kind of scandal that might blow up if word got out?
‘Parliamentary candidate ditched pregnant girlfriend’? He’d be
finished.”

“So he decided
to kill her? That’s a pretty high-risk strategy, don’t you
think?”

“Like I said,
I’m not sure it was necessarily a rational decision. Perhaps they
had a row, and he acted without thinking – you know, all the
resentment and stress just blew up, something like that. In any
case, he’s arrogant enough to think he could get away with it. And,
let’s face it, he did.” I feel a smile crossing my face – a sour,
ugly smile that speaks not of humour but of corrosive anger. “It’s
not over, though. What people sometimes forget is that the internet
has changed everything. It’s not so easy to control what people
see, read and hear anymore. There’s a lot of material out there
about Sallow, and he can’t stop people accessing it.”

Neil closes his
eyes for a moment, and frowns; and then he moves away from me,
stands up, and steps out of the bathtub. Water pours off his body,
and soapsuds slide over his skin. He takes a towel, quickly dries
himself, and then wraps it around his waist. He sits down on the
toilet seat, not looking at me, and I close my eyes, pretending not
to care.

“What if Sallow
isn’t guilty after all?” he asks quietly after a moment. I open my
eyes and glance across at him, and he’s looking at me in a shrewd,
measured way. “Have you ever thought about that, Katherine? Do you
ever wonder what it might be like for him? He has to listen to
people saying all kinds of things about him, and there’s nothing he
can do to counter it. You say the internet changed everything.
Well, you’re right about that. It’s given people a platform to say
exactly what they like about anyone, to make the wildest
accusations – all from behind the anonymity of a username, of
course. And how can anyone defend themselves from that kind of
attack? How can they challenge what’s being said, when they don’t
even know who’s speaking? Do you ever think about
that
?”

“Of course I
do.”

“Do you?” He
looks at me closely, steadily. “You really should, you know.
Because whatever happened to Diane, it doesn’t justify hounding a
man who is legally innocent.”

“Really? The
police
hound
people, as you put it, all the time.”

“There’s a
world of difference between a focussed, reasoned investigation and
an internet lynch mob. You know that as well as I do.” He sighs.
“God, all this passion. I think if the Diane Meath-Jones case is
remembered in years to come, it will be for the absurd amount of
interest it generated amongst people who had absolutely no personal
involvement with it at all. After all, why Diane? There was nothing
so very special about her. She was really just an ordinary woman.
And if she disappeared in extraordinary circumstances, she wasn’t
the only one.”

I close my eyes
again, because I’ve nothing to say to that. I too have wondered why
Diane should have haunted millions of people, and why her image in
particular should have been the one to stare out of a thousand
newspaper front pages, a thousand TV programmes. What is this
mysterious quality, that makes one person more noticeable than
others? It makes little sense even to me, and to Neil it is
probably unfathomable. He deals on a daily basis with all the live
cases that require urgent attention, a city’s roll call of
robberies, assaults and murders. He can little afford to pay
attention to a case that went cold eight years ago.

“Diane’s gone,”
Neil says at last, in a gentler voice. He gets up, walks back
across the room, and sits down on the side of the bathtub. “Whether
she was killed or abducted, or whether she left of her own free
will, she’s gone. You can’t bring her back. You can’t turn back
time. I’m not saying that that’s a reason to forget about her, but
there are so many other things in this world. Why focus on just one
person?”

And I have no
answer to that, because there’s a sense in which I recognise that
he is right. Nothing can change what has happened. There are so
many other things, many of them far more important than what
happened to one woman eight years ago. Why this relentless probing,
these endless questions? I might as well run after the wind, for
all the good that will come of it.

It’s such an
easy thing to think, and such a hard thing to do.

Later, after
Neil has slipped away into the night, I log on to
www.whathappenedtodiane.org. I look at the “Welcome” page first,
and re-read the newbie Phillip’s post. Several other members of the
community have left comments welcoming him. Apart from this,
though, he appears to have contributed to no other discussions yet.
Of course, forums like this can appear inscrutable, tribal places
to outsiders, who generally feel awkward and nervous until,
gradually, they become part of the community.

I read and
re-read the various threads until the early hours, but there is
nothing new, nothing of note. For once, the internet seems to have
exhausted its possibilities. I close the page, turn off the
computer, and go to bed. Outside, the dark sky turns silver and
then red, and another summer day begins.

I awake early,
just a few hours later. The flat is empty, apart from me; Neil
never spends the night here, never does anything here apart from
play our games. But this is how things are between us: when he
walks out of the door, he walks back into his reality, where the
things that occur here are as sweet and meaningless as a dream.

I sit up in bed
and glance across at my alarm clock. Seven o’clock. I’ve nothing in
particular to get up for this morning – I work freelance, and can
usually choose my own hours – but there’s little chance of my
sleeping again. I get up, shower, drink some coffee, and go to
glance at the room where Neil and I played our games last night.
It’s a mess. Handcuffs gleam dully on the floor, and there’s a torn
condom packet and flakes of dried wax on the chaise longue. The air
is thick with sex, and I open the window. It’s depressing, as it
often is afterwards; when lust dissipates, I find, it often leaves
you feeling sorry, and besmirched. I can’t face cleaning the room
just yet, and close the door on it.

I live in a
flat on the top floor of a Victorian house near Spitalfields
Market. There is another flat beneath me, which belongs to the
owners of the antiques shop on the ground floor. They spend the
night there occasionally, when they’re too tired to travel back to
their family home in Surrey, but I usually have the building to
myself after dark – a rare luxury, in London. The flat itself is
almost Spartan in its simplicity. I horde few possessions, and
prefer clean, plain spaces. Belongings, far from giving me a sense
of security as they do other people, make me feel trapped and
panicky. Only the room in which Neil and I play our games is
lavish. There, the walls are red, the floor paved in dark parquet.
Thick blackout curtains shield it from the eyes of the world. There
is a bondage bed, a St Andrew’s Cross, and various other toys and
implements. It is a fantasy space, where reality shrivels to the
smallest point and dreams become the dominant force in the
Universe.

When I’ve
dressed, I walk out into the grey London morning and over to
Liverpool Street Station, where I go down into the tube station.
It’s the middle of the rush hour, and at first even squeezing into
the train carriage amongst the other commuters is almost
impossible. This is one of the things I love about London: the
sense of being in the middle of such movement and life that your
own existence, your own progress or the lack of it, becomes almost
immaterial. They say that London is the place where people come to
chase their dreams, and that is often true. But it’s also, and just
as often, the preferred destination of those who want to give up
and let go. We live in the age of ambition, of course, and London
is a monument to aspiration. But if you look beneath the surface
you see something else: a city so large and so powerful that its
component parts are virtually interchangeable, and individually
unimportant. What could be more seductive than a place that allows
you to stop, to be insignificant, to embrace your own smallness and
mortality? Perhaps this is an echo of the consolation that Neil
finds in our games: they allow him to stop trying, to surrender
control.

I change lines,
and the crowds grow thinner as the train emerges from Central
London. Eventually it rattles out of a maze of underground tunnels,
and daylight floods the carriage. We begin to cut through
Limehouse, and I glance out of the window at the towers of Canary
Wharf rearing up on the horizon. I sit down and surreptitiously
study my fellow passengers. A middle-aged woman in a business suit
is immersed in a book; her face betrays the nagging, low-level
anxiety so common in London. An elderly gentleman stares out of the
window with eyes that seem to have seen everything and understood
it all, too much. A young Asian man slouches in a corner seat, long
legs stretched out, listening to music on an iPod. His face is
melancholy and curiously tender; I like the gloom of his downturned
mouth, the kindness in his eyes. He looks up, sees me watching him,
and gives me a faint, wary smile. When he gets off the train at the
next station, I feel a dim sense of loss.

I stay on the
train until it reaches Greenwich. The world into which I emerge is
a quieter, almost genteel part of London. This area has something
of a village atmosphere, complete with a country-style pub and a
parish church. I see these things without really noticing them,
though; they are like the backdrop on a stage, significant only
insofar as they give context to the human drama that is played out
in the foreground.

I walk to the
gates of Greenwich Park. Inside, away from the noise and traffic of
the street, I break into a light run. This is an almost daily
ritual for me; even on raw winter mornings I make an effort to run
at least a short distance. I rarely come here, of course, to
Greenwich. Usually I stay in Spitalfields, pounding through streets
lined with off licenses and curry houses. The surroundings are less
important than the activity itself. Running improves both my
physical condition and my mood, providing me with that precious
endorphin rush so beloved of athletes – and masochists.

I’ve worked
hard on my body since I became a Domina, not so much for aesthetic
reasons as for the illusion it gives me of being in control.
Besides, a strong and supple body is a great advantage when you
play my kind of games. I put myself through a daily routine of
running, stretching, yoga and weights, toning and trimming my body
so that it now bears little resemblance to that of the chubby,
clumsy teenager I once was. That frightened, lonely girl, however,
has not disappeared; she lives on within, looking out at the world
through my eyes, questioning, not quite comprehending.

I pound
onwards, beginning to sweat and breathe heavily as the distance
behind me mounts up, driving my body through discomfort and aches,
willing it to reach the profound state of acceptance and inner calm
that lies beyond. The park is quiet at this hour, apart from
dog-walkers and a few fellow runners. I prefer it like this; it
enables me to still my mind, and see the place in a new light.

To see it,
perhaps, as Diane Meath-Jones might once have seen it.

Diane did not
always go to Bucklock Wood for her morning walk; often, she came
here, just a short distance from the apartment that she and James
Sallow shared. I imagine her walking slowly along these paths and
through the clumps of trees, with the dog trotting at her side. I
picture her pausing as something – a flower in bloom, birds
erupting from the treetops in a flurry of beating wings – catches
her attention. I think of her blue eyes gazing out over the grass
and trees, as though she is searching these things for some
meaning. I think of her wavy brown hair blowing in the wind. In the
months before her disappearance she often wore it like that,
flowing down to her shoulders in an artless, unaffected way: a
natural, earthy style that suited her mood as she faced motherhood.
She forgot money and ambition in those months. James Sallow, I feel
sure, never did.