A Wayward Game (12 page)

People say that
your student days should be amongst the happiest of your life, and
in many ways they are. But they are also a difficult time, a time
of transition. You are officially an adult, and expected to take
care of yourself. But you are also, under the skin, still just an
insecure, frightened teenager, beset by a thousand doubts and
worries, and unsure of your place in the world. I suppose that
everyone feels like that, but at the time I thought it was just me.
Then I met Diane, and found someone who understood.

On Bonfire
Night that year, we sat together in my room in the dark, drinking
cherry brandy from the bottle and watching fireworks burst in the
smoky London sky. My room had a view across the city, up into North
London, and we could just make out the distant hump of Hampstead
Heath, and an enormous bonfire blazing up there. It signified a
world that both attracted and alienated, a distant world that I
both wanted and feared.

“It’s a family
occasion, isn’t it?” Diane asked suddenly. A blast of red and gold
in the sky lit up her features, and I could see that she was
looking at me.

“It’s a very
silly occasion, if you ask me,” I said, affecting a cynicism I did
not truly feel. “A jingoistic celebration of stupidity. But then I
was raised a Catholic, so I would say that.”

Diane laughed.
“That isn’t the point. It’s one of those things that marks the
passing of time, the passing of the seasons. I think people need
these occasions. They help them to connect. For me, it’s all about
the ongoing cycle of life. One generation gives rise to another,
and then fades away. It’s all quite beautiful when you think about
it. Do you want children, Katherine?”

“God, no.”

“Aren’t they
the reason for our existence?”

“So our lives
have no meaning apart from procreation, do they?”

“It’s just that
they’re the part of us that goes on. They’re a reason to hope. A
reason to do good.”

“There are
plenty of reasons to do that anyway. And I don’t see having kids as
a pathway to some kind of spurious immortality.”

My tone was
sharp, sharper than I had intended, and we fell silent for a
moment. Beautiful, bright explosions ripped through the squalor of
the London night, lighting my miserable room with flashes of green,
gold, red, and electric blue.

“I’ve always
admired people like you, you know,” Diane said at last, in a small
voice. “You have this ability to look right into the darkness and
not flinch in the slightest. I’m not like that. I’m not some
cynical sophisticate. I want love, children, a home. I want to
preserve the little part of the world that’s mine. I want money,
insofar as it will help me to do that. Why should anyone sneer at
those things, when they’re so fundamental?”

“I don’t sneer
at them. It’s just that I don’t think they’re the only things of
importance, either.” I smiled, and touched her shoulder in the
darkness. “But why should you care what I think? It’s your life.
You have to live it the way you want.”

“I will,” she
said, and then added, a little sadly: “I hope.”

She didn’t. She
was deprived on any kind of life, however ordinary or
extraordinary. Deprived of every possible triumph or disaster, of
any chance to screw up, or be stupid, or be fragile and human and
flawed. All of it taken away, one summer day eight years ago. No
children, no love, no immortality, and no little piece of the world
that she could call her own. Not even a proper resting place, or an
answer for those left behind. Just another question, another
shadowy smudge that is neither one thing nor the other and remains
forever inscrutable.

I do not sleep
again. I get up in the early hours, drink some coffee, and try to
read, but I can’t concentrate on the words in front of me. At last
I get dressed and head out into the cool dawn for a run, jogging
the short distance from Spitalfields to the City, where the first
office workers are just beginning to arrive. They spill out of tube
stations and taxis, fresh and groomed despite the early hour,
calmly accepting the daily drudgery of paid work. I slow down to a
walk as I enter Lombard Street, and then slip into a coffee shop
halfway along its length. It’s quiet at this hour, and after
ordering a double espresso at the counter I pick up a newspaper
from the rack and take a seat next to the window. A large white
building, almost surgical in its sterility, rears up on the other
side of the road, and I stare at the polished sign next to the
door.
Morgan Clearey, Recruitment Consultants
, it reads. The
company that James Sallow works for, the place where he has worked
for almost ten years.

I sit sipping
my coffee, with the newspaper open on my lap, but with my eyes
trained on the building. Half an hour passes, forty-five minutes.
The stream of people passing by in the street, and crowding into
the coffee shop for their morning shot of caffeine, increases. I
glance at them, and then look away. There is only one face, one
person, in whom I have any interest.

He arrives at
half-past eight, immaculately dressed as always, his curly brown
hair neatly trimmed. He walks with a quick, impatient stride, face
utterly devoid of expression. He is the kind of man a woman might
think handsome, but a man without any obvious character – something
of a blank screen, in fact, upon which the observer can project
their own needs and desires. That must be a great advantage to a
man such as him; he is able to reflect an onlooker’s dreams, and
indeed to magnify them. Perhaps this was why he appealed to Diane:
she saw in him a dazzling likeness of all the things she desired
and valued most. She took his overweening ambition for a simple
yearning for worldly comfort. She saw his arrogance as the
self-assurance of a man who knew his place in the world. She saw in
him a decent, dependable man who could give her the security and
self-confidence she craved. Like many lovers, she saw not the real
person, but the fantasy. She was not seduced; she seduced herself.
And perhaps that, too, was why she appealed to
him
. She
flattered him, and inflated his sense of his own importance.

Sallow swipes a
card through the electronic lock at the entrance, and pushes the
glass door open. I watch as he walks through a vast, immaculate
foyer to the lifts, and then disappears into the building’s tangled
entrails. Just another worker, just another day at the office – but
this worker has left a world of pain and grief outside the
doors.

I think of the
two of them together, and how it must have been. I think of him
touching Diane, of them fucking together in the darkness, and of
the new life that that gave rise to – a life that would be
squandered before it even began. God, what a waste. I feel sick,
despairing. I finish the cold dregs of my coffee, put the cup back
down on the table, and push my way out of the now-crowded shop.
Outside, I draw in a lungful of cool, if not exactly fresh, air,
and then begin to run back to Spitalfields. Vigorous exercise, I
tell myself, that’s the ticket. Like physical pain, it takes the
edge off mental and emotional pain. I wonder why I came here, why I
chase after things that can only hurt me. I am as masochistic as
Neil is, perhaps; but mine is a predilection that I dare not
admit.

I spend much of
that day hunched over my laptop, working. But I am easily
distracted: the ping of new emails arriving in my inbox, and the
ever-present parallel Universe of the internet, makes it difficult
to concentrate. I finish writing one article about a fashion show,
and begin another about a new design hotel in Belgravia. I find it
impossible to care much for any of these things, though: they are
glittering baubles for grown children, a testament to a
civilisation that has become senile. I can only hope that my lack
of enthusiasm will not be evident to editors or readers. Whatever
else happens, I have to make a living.

At lunchtime, I
log on to www.whathappenedtodiane.org, and read the most recent
posts. Not much has happened since my previous visit, which is
unsurprising: with no news or recent developments, I sense that
people’s interest in the case is beginning to run dry. Even the
curious afterlife bestowed by the internet has its limits, it would
seem. I check who is online, and see a few familiar names: Valley
Girl, Lovelornlass, Northern Boy, Lurker, Dreamsnatcher – and
Phillip, the newbie. A disparate group of strangers, brought
together for the sole purpose of chasing ghosts.

I scan the new
posts for a few minutes, and am surprised when a personal message
pings up on the screen: even given the ersatz intimacy of the
forum, direct contact is rare. I open it, and find that it’s from
Lurker. This surprises me even more: we’ve never spoken to each
other specifically on the forum, or been on especially friendly
terms.

Hi Kittyminx, hope you
don’t mind me sending a PM. I wondered if you might be able to help
me. I’m currently studying journalism part-time, and I’m writing an
article on Diane Meath-Jones’s disappearance and how it has been
covered on the internet. I’m hoping to focus not just on online
news sites, but on forums, YouTube films, and chat rooms. The
article will not be about her disappearance per se, but about how
it has been reported and reflected on the web. I’m also hoping to
talk about the effect it has had on people who never knew her (I’m
assuming you didn’t know her personally), but feel strongly enough
about her to make her the focus of their lives, almost.

If you have time, could
you tell me why Diane means so much to you? Does she fill a void in
your life? Do you think it’s healthy to be preoccupied with someone
in this way? As one of the regular posters on the forum, you might
be able to provide some particular insights into this.

I might make use of
direct quotes in the article, if that is okay.

There’s
something challenging about the tone of the message, with its
slightly aggressive questioning, and the suggestion that there’s a
void in my life and that I’m unhealthy. I wonder why he should
adopt such an attitude, if all he wants is material for an article;
in my own career, I’ve always found that it’s much better to keep
your feelings to yourself, and just let your subjects speak. At the
same time, it really isn’t so surprising. On the few occasions when
Lurker has posted on the forum, he has always stated that, in his
opinion, Diane went missing of her own free will and that no crime
was committed that day eight years ago. He probably regards me as a
slightly unbalanced conspiracy theorist, I realise, as a desperate
woman subsisting on fantasy. I open a Word document, so that I can
organise my thoughts properly as I write, and begin to type.

Hi Lurker, no probs
about the PM. Since I’m a freelance writer and journalist, I was
actually quite interested to hear that you’re studying journalism.
I hope it’s going well. What kind of course are you following?

For many of the people
on the forum, it isn’t a question of whether we knew Diane
personally. Most of us, obviously, did not. It’s ultimately a
question of justice, and of finding a resolution to a case that has
dragged on for eight years. Diane is missing; many of us believe
that she was murdered. In any case, she shouldn’t be forgotten. She
was a person, not a statistic. Not another cold case file gathering
dust in New Scotland Yard.

I know all the
objections to this, believe me. I’ve heard them a thousand times
before. Why are we so fixated on this one woman, when there are
plenty of people who have gone missing in unexplained or suspicious
circumstances? Why are we so concerned about this one cold case,
when there are plenty of live cases that also need to be resolved?
Don’t we understand that the police have to prioritise? Why, above
all, do we feel so much for Diane, when there are other people
equally, if not more, deserving of our sympathy?

I don’t have an answer
to these questions, and they trouble me deeply. I think that
perhaps in an ideal world we would be more balanced and less
obsessive. But Diane has that mysterious quality that fascinates –
charisma, I suppose. Her image stares at us from a thousand
websites and news articles. Watch any of the documentaries about
her disappearance on YouTube, and she seems so vivid and real that
you can almost believe that she is still there. Yet she isn’t, and
it is this, above all, which captivates us. In life, she might not
have been special. Now that she is gone, she enthrals.

This, of course, is the
age of celebrity, and Diane has become a celebrity of sorts. She is
a symbol of loss, of innocence betrayed; and yet, in a curious way,
she is also an emblem of hope. Dream and nightmare come together in
the mystery of her disappearance. Her life has come to be equated
with aspiration, with overcoming one’s limitations. Here was a very
ordinary young woman, from a rather deprived background, who had
not only succeeded academically and begun to forge a promising
career, but who was living with a wealthy, successful man in a
penthouse overlooking the Thames. There is a tendency, rightly or
wrongly, to see the manner of the life she was leading as an ideal.
And her disappearance, far from shattering that ideal, seems only
to have cemented it.

And then, of course,
there is the sheer mystery of the case. Study it for just five
minutes and all manner of questions will begin to occur: Who? When?
Where? How? Why? There is enough in this one case to keep armchair
detectives guessing for years to come.

If you read the forum
regularly, you’ll know my opinion about what happened to Diane.
There is no evidence of abduction, and nothing to suggest that she
either killed herself or simply walked away of her own volition.
There is only evidence for one conclusion, and you will of course
be perfectly aware which conclusion I’m referring to.