A Wayward Game (3 page)

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 some 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 little 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.

Dreamsnatcher
:
KA has sometimes been portrayed as a loose cannon junior reporter
who spun stories from speculation, and without bothering to check
either the facts or the legal ramifications. In fact, Argyle was
one of the brightest and best young journalists in the country. If
you ask me, she got too close to the truth for comfort. Her
punishment is to spend a lifetime writing about cellulite and red
carpet fashion disasters. As you say, Lookwest, it’s a very
effective way of shutting her up, but probably pretty mild compared
to what might have happened.

I click on the
“Reply” button, and begin to type:

Argyle’s bosses were
cowards, and allowed themselves to be threatened – by Sallow and
his lawyers, obviously, but also perhaps by those higher up at
their corporation. Sallow’s web of influence extends across the
media, and few people in that world remain entirely untouched by
it. Sallow’s father is a wealthy businessman, after all, with an
interest in several media groups – including that which owns
Argyle’s former paper. Editorial independence may be cherished and
protected in theory, but in practice editors know that they are,
ultimately, answerable to those who hold the purse strings.

Argyle’s editor was,
I suspect, reluctant to give in to such blatant intimidation, but
in the end felt that he had little choice. He was up against the
kind of money, power and influence that could make a coward of
almost anyone. Argyle herself was a ritual sacrifice of sorts. None
of this is particularly surprising. The question, perhaps, is why
Sallow was so sensitive about an article that took great care not
to
directly
accuse him of any
involvement in Diane’s disappearance.

I click “Post”,
and my comment pops up beneath the others. I wander off into the
kitchen and make some coffee, not really expecting anyone else to
comment so early in the day. But of course, normal hours do not
apply on the internet, and when I come back I find that another
comment has appeared. It has been posted not by one of the
regulars, but by a newcomer who calls himself, simply, Phillip. I
quickly check his stats, and find that this is his first post on
the forum.

First up, apologies if
it seems like I’m butting in here – I’m new, and haven’t even
introduced myself yet. This discussion interested me, though, and I
wanted to take part.

The question of whether
Argyle’s employers were caught up in a conspiracy is an interesting
one. People talk a great deal and at great length about “the
Establishment”, but rarely clarify precisely what they mean by the
term. What is this Establishment, and what aims does it have?

To my mind, the
Establishment consists not of the Monarchy, not the Church, not the
police, and not even politicians. These authorities seem
old-fashioned, almost quaint, by the standards of the modern
powers. Instead, today’s Establishment is comprised of the
money-makers and powerbrokers, namely business and the media. The
views of top businessmen are considered of importance, even when
they relate to topics entirely unconnected with business; their
good opinions and endorsement are avidly sought by politicians. The
backing of a popular newspaper can be the making of a politician;
the implications present in even apparently balanced reporting can
hugely sway public opinion on a given topic. The Sallow family, of
course, is most certainly part of that Establishment. Was Argyle
punished because she was pointing out the inconsistencies and
absurdities of the Establishment’s preferred narrative?