A Wayward Game (11 page)

I smile, a
little bitterly. “You ended up staying.”

“Right. We made
up that evening, and I thought, God, it was just an argument, don’t
be so bloody melodramatic. I think I knew otherwise, though, even
if I didn’t want to admit it. But I stuck around anyway – stuck
around for years, pretending that everything was all right, and
having a couple of kids as if to prove it.”

“You can’t
regret that, surely.”

“No, of course
not,” he says quietly; and then we fall silent for a little
while.

In many ways I
love this quiet, shadowy time more than anything. Neil is at his
ease, I am no longer his Mistress, and the games are forgotten.
Now, we are just a man and a woman, lying down together among these
tangled sheets, and perhaps attempting to forge a deeper connection
than just sex. He’s never spoken so freely before, though, or
hinted at so much, and I don’t know whether to be pleased or
terrified.

What he says
about his marriage reminds me of some of my own past relationships.
That sick feeling that you’ve made a mistake, and hoping that it
isn’t true even though you know that it is. The way you can waste
years pretending that everything is all right. And the way that,
when the grey shadow of normality and respectability steals over
you, you can either submit to it or turn your back on it.
Normality, though, is only a loosely defined set of averages, and
averages are a poor fit for any individual. No average takes
account of an individual’s bumps and irregularities. If you’re
lucky, it’ll fit well enough not to be too uncomfortable; if you’re
unlucky, like Neil and me, it’ll choke the life slowly out of
you.

Perhaps James
Sallow felt something like this while he was watching Diane’s belly
swell, coming home and watching a woman pattering around in his
sterile kitchen and lying down on his bed, a woman who had no
intention of leaving. He always considered himself a case apart, a
member of an elite. It wasn’t for him, the plodding business of
tending to a marriage and raising kids – not when he had the money
to have as much sex, as many women and adventures, as he wanted.
He’d walked blindly into his relationship with Diane, without much
thought for the consequences, and then he saw the prison door
swinging shut on his life. And perhaps that sense of panic and fear
drove him mad, and spurred him to do something he would never
normally have done. If that’s the case, then I can almost –
almost
– understand him. Because I remember times when I
felt imprisoned too, and how I’d have done almost anything to break
free.

I wouldn’t have
killed someone, though. I would never have done that.

By my side,
Neil stirs and sighs, cutting the thread of my thoughts.

“You don’t know
what it means, to be a parent,” he says. “You don’t know what real
love is, until you have a child. You’d die for that person, without
question, without hesitation. If I had to jump off a tall building
or lie down on a railway line for my daughters, I wouldn’t think
twice about it. But, oh God, if there’s just one thing that
does
scare me, it’s the prospect of a slow, living
death.”

“Me too,” I
say. I sit up, and hand him one of the glasses of wine that sit on
the bedside table. Sharing a drink after sex has become one of our
rituals. “What does that mean for you, though?”

“Hard to say,
in general. In particular, though: marriage to a woman I don’t
love; pretending to be somebody I’m not; letting my life slip away
and trying to pretend that I don’t even care.”

“You don’t have
to do it.”

“Perhaps I do.
Perhaps that’s what’s best for my kids.” Neil takes a gulp of wine
– he’s been drinking a lot recently, I suspect – and grimaces. “I
often think, you know, that I’ve been a poor excuse for a father.
Working all the hours that God sends, and then going home to all
those arguments, and now not going home at all. Living in a
different part of the city, and nothing resolved. Not much to feel
proud of, is it?”

“You’ve done
your best,” I say, and then, when he doesn’t respond, I add: “You
and your wife, then – is there any chance of a reconciliation?”

He stares out
of the window – the storm is over, and a weak evening sun has
started to leak out from behind the clouds – and for a moment I
think he’s going to tell me to mind my own business. Then he
shrugs. “There’s a chance, I suppose. If that’s what she
wants.”

“What do
you
want?”

“I really don’t
know.” He takes another savage gulp of wine. “I left home so that I
could think things over. What a joke. I’ve been thinking for
months, and I still haven’t reached any conclusions. I don’t know.
I keep hoping she’ll make the decision for me.”

“You have to
make your own decision.”

He laughs,
utterly without humour. “You might have noticed that I’m the
passive type.”

“You can’t
afford to be passive. Not now. Not in this.”

He gives me a
narrow sideways glance, and for a moment I glimpse a side of him
that I rarely see: the detective, the man who picks at the seams of
human behaviour and human motivations. Suddenly, he is not the
gentle, unresisting man I think I know, but a stranger – a stranger
of great cunning and tremendous insight.

“Really?” he
says, quietly. “If we were together, you and I –
really
together – that’s how you’d want me to be, isn’t it?”

I give him a
long look.

“No,” I say at
last. “No, it isn’t.”

A taut silence
stretches out between us. My heart twitches at the thought of us
being together, and at knowing that he has thought of this too. But
even as these ideas race through my mind, they are overtaken by
cold realism. An impossible fantasy: we’re flying parallel now, but
in the future we’ll follow completely different trajectories. We
have no future together. We don’t even really know each other; we
haven’t even been out on a proper date, still less spent much time
together. No sooner have I imagined this dream scenario than it
disperses like mist, as theoretical and improbable as time travel,
or the sun not rising tomorrow morning.

“God, sorry,”
Neil mumbles. “That was unfair of me. You’ve never told me what to
do outside the bedroom.”

“You’re your
own man. And we’re not together.”

“Not in any
meaningful sense.” He turns to look out of the window again. “So
why even waste time thinking about it?”

His mouth has
turned down at the corners, and suddenly he looks older, and
careworn.

To distract him
and myself, I start to tell him about my visit to Mr Walsh. He
knows, of course, that I continue to nibble, rat-like, at the facts
surrounding Diane’s disappearance; he knows how significant the
case is for me, though he does not yet really know why. He raises
his eyebrows when I tell him about how I found out Mr Walsh’s
address, and how I persuaded him to talk to me by pretending to be
my own dead colleague.

“That’s a very
dubious way to go about getting information, Katherine,” he says.
“It’s deception.”

“It was all in
a good cause, and it didn’t do any harm.”

“That isn’t
really the point, and you know it.”

“I did it for
the best of reasons.”

“Well, maybe.
It didn’t do you much good, though, did it? He didn’t tell you
anything new.”

“He told me
about seeing Sallow at six o’clock on the morning that Diane
disappeared. A very dirty Sallow, who looked like he’d been doing
far more than buying cigarettes.”

“The police
knew about that. They asked Sallow about it, and he gave a
perfectly plausible explanation for it.”

“Mr Walsh
didn’t believe his explanation, and neither do I. Neither do
you.”

“Belief doesn’t
come into it. The point is that it doesn’t constitute proof.” Neil
looks around and frowns at me. “You’ve got to face facts,
Katherine. If the Met couldn’t get to the bottom of this case,
there’s very little chance that you can.”

“You’re
probably right, but I have to keep trying. I owe it to Diane.”

“Why?”

I shrug.
“Someone has to look out for her, even if she is dead. And it might
as well be me.”

I don’t want to
admit the real reason, or say what lies behind my obsession. It’s
not that I’m ashamed of the truth; it’s just that I’ve learned that
the truth, like all valuable things, must sometimes be guarded
well. I rarely lie, but nor am I truthful at all costs. Like Neil,
I have never been a particularly honest person, but I am at least
trying to be honest with myself.

I dream of
Diane that night, as I often do. Her ghost may not walk the earth,
but it flits around ceaselessly in the chambers of my brain. Like
residual light from an extinct star, she can be seen even now, long
after she herself has gone. Is this immortality, or simply an
imitation of it?

There is little
sense or sequence in this dream. In one small splinter of
narrative, I am sitting on the grass in a park on a sunny day,
watching as Diane plays with Goldie, throwing a stick for the dog
to retrieve. She is just metres away from me, yet she seems unaware
of my presence. I do not call out to her, or do anything to alert
her to my being there. Even in my dream, I am aware on some level
that she is dead: if I approach her or speak to her, I fear that
she will crumble in front of my very eyes, as those who stray
between worlds in fairytales are said to do.

In another
fragmentary story, she is sitting opposite me in the living room in
my flat, just down the hallway from where I am sleeping, a place
that she never visited in life. She is holding an empty drinking
glass, turning it around in her hands as though it is an item of
the utmost fascination. She looks up and peers out of the window,
and grey London daylight falls over her sad face. She is pale, as
she always was; her chestnut hair falls to her shoulders in loose
waves, and her face is bare of make-up. Her grey-blue eyes follow a
bird as it flits past the window, and then she turns to me.

“I’m dead,” she
tells me, quite calmly, as if it is a matter of no consequence
whatsoever.

“I know,” I
reply.

“You know it as
a fact, but you don’t know what it really means.”

I awake in the
early hours, feeling both tired and restless, and terribly hot. I
throw off the covers and lie still in the darkness, listening as a
car whooshes past on the road outside and a distant siren blares.
Otherwise, London seems as still and silent as a graveyard. And
that, of course, is precisely what it is: a city built on bones and
tombs, and the decay of centuries. Walk in almost any street, and
you are stepping over the bodies of plague victims and Roman
centurions and infants who died of cholera or smallpox. Sometimes
it seems that there are so many dead people in London that they
might at any time rise up and throw off the yoke of the living,
thus returning their vast crypt to its proper state of serenity and
silence.

Diane, for all
that I know, might be one of them.

I think of her
as she was when we first met. She was eighteen, and I was a year
older. I had recently arrived at the immense college in central
London where I was to study for the next three years, and the noise
and turmoil and sheer importance of the place both thrilled and
intimidated me. I lived in a grimy Hall of Residence south of the
Thames, in a narrow whitewashed room with a hard single bed and a
sink in the corner, a place that I secretly loathed. I was in the
shared kitchen at the end of the corridor one day, making some tea,
when the door creaked open and a girl of about my own age peered
into the room. She hesitated, as if she was considering ducking
back out again, but then gave a shy smile and came in.

“Hi,” she said.
Her voice was soft, with a faint accent that I identified as
Welsh.

“Hi.”

“Are you living
along this corridor, then?”

“Yeah. Room
310.”

“I’m in 316.
The room at the very end.” She stepped closer to me, hesitated for
a moment, and then held out her hand. “I’m Diane. Diane Meath.”

“Katherine
Argyle,” I said, and she smiled at me – a shy but warm smile that
put me at my ease. “Where are you from, then?”

“Wales. Near
Cardiff. You?”

“Lincolnshire.”
I glanced out of the window at the vast London skyline, and thought
of how different it was to the flat, empty landscape I had left
just weeks before. “I feel like the country mouse who’s just
arrived in the city.”

“So do I. I’m
scared to death. What are you studying here?”

“English and
Journalism.”

“History and
French.”

“Like it?”

“So far so
good. If I can only get through three years in London, everything
should be okay.” She smiled again, a little wistfully. “I’m glad
I’m not the only one who’s terrified. Makes me feel less alone, you
know.”

That was where
it began, I suppose. Youngsters who are far from home generally
become friends easily, simply because they have little choice. And
though Diane and I were both shy, and nervous around our peers, we
soon became close. We were
both
scared, after all, which
made it easier. At first, we probably only clung together for
security. We ventured out into London together, intimidated by its
size and energy, and went to see the tourist sites. We caught the
tube to college, and met there in between lectures and tutorials
for drinks in the student bar. We went shopping together, and
stopped off in each other’s rooms in the evenings to talk and drink
coffee. We had much in common, we found: we were both bookish,
withdrawn around strangers, and we both felt like outsiders in the
frenetic, impermanent, down-at-heel student world we now inhabited.
We both had a romantic streak, and were wary of the boys who wanted
to bed us – and who, having done so, would have spent the rest of
their college careers either bragging about it to their friends, or
trying to ignore our very existence.