A Dark Devotion

by Clare Francis

  And then the voice which took me helplessly back to my past.

  ‘This is a message for Alex O’Neill…’

  I reached for the chair and began to pull it out from the desk.

  ‘This is Will Dearden, Alex, from Deepwell It’s been a long time…can’t think how long. Though I thought I saw you in the village not so long ago. With your brother, was it? Anyway…Look, this is a bit out of the blue, you may not be interested, but something’s happened and I thought you might be able to help. The thing is—’ A pause and he exhaled, as if suddenly disheartened at having to speak to an answering machine. I sat down on the chair and reached for pen and paper. ‘The thing is, Grace is missing. She, er…, A sigh now, or a gasp of suppressed emotion. ‘She, er, disappeared over a week ago. They,re looking, but—well, she might have gone to London. I mean, she was due to go to London that morning, and…well, we were not satisfied that they’ve covered that end of things. They say they have, but it seems to me that they’ve been…’ An exclamation of open impatience. ‘But look, it’s no good on the phone. If you could call…’ There was haste in his voice now, as if he suspected the whole conversation would prove to be a complete waste of time. He rattled off his number so quickly that I had to replay the tape to make sure I had it down correctly. ‘So, er…if you could call me back as soon as possible. As you can imagine we’re fairly desperate.’

  As the machine bleeped and rewound, a vivid image flashed into my mind, of Will and Grace in the garden at Wickham Lodge. It was just before their wedding, in that last brief summer before my parents moved to the West Country. It was the day of the fete, there was quite a throng, and it was a while before I glimpsed them in the distance, standing by the homemade jam stall: Grace, in a pale peach dress and large cream hat, looking as if she had floated out of a Beaton photography Will wearing a cream linen jacket, pale slacks and white collarless shirt, an outfit so urbane, so artfully put together that I couldn’t imagine he had chosen it himself. It suited him, though. It emphasized his height and dark looks. It made him a perfect adjunct to Grace, with her pale ethereal beauty.

  There is a fascination in seeing two such people together, a strikingly good-looking couple on the brink of marriage. You feel curiosity, and something like awe, but also a sense of exclusion, of looking through glass at a miraculous aspect of life which, in your youth and uncertainty, you fear may be for ever out of your reach.

  I couldn’t get to the wedding, and in the years that followed I didn’t see them again. In the beginning I stayed away more or less deliberately: the idea of seeing Will was simply too painful. Later I was bound up in work, married to a man who didn’t like country weekends.

  Dialling Will Dearden’s number now, my stomach tightened with half-forgotten memories. As the number began to ring, I saw the pink-washed house above the creek and the wide sweep of the marshes and the distant line of the sea.

  The number went on ringing for a long time before it finally answered.

  A woman’s voice said a composed, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Maggie?’ I had always called Will’s mother by her first name, even when I was a small child, the only adult for whom it had seemed perfectly natural.

  She barely hesitated. ‘Alex.’

  My throat constricted suddenly. ‘Yes,’ I said, with a rush of emotion. ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Alex,’ And there was pleasure in her voice. ‘How are you, dear Alex? It has been so, so long.’ The exotic accent was still there, the long Rs, the elongated vowels, the upturn in midsentence that betrayed her first language.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, Maggie. But I got a message from Will, about Grace.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice seemed to fade a little. ‘Yes, he told me he had called you.’

  ‘He said she was missing. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘God, Maggie, I’m so terribly sorry. You’ve no idea what might have happened?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘But when was she last seen?’

  ‘Wednesday, last week.’

  This was nine days ago. ‘I see. What are the police doing? Have they mounted a proper search?’

  ‘Oh, they have searched. But they seem to have stopped now.’ Her voice was steady, without discernible emotion.

  ‘Who’s the officer in charge?’

  ‘I may have been told but…No, you must ask Will about that.’

  ‘Is he there? Can I speak to him?’ My nerves tautened at the thought.

  ‘He’s just gone out. To the police in King’s Lynn.’

  The professional in me had to ask, ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘He went with photographs, I think. And to ask if there’s any news.’

  ‘And are there no clues at all as to what might have happened, Maggie? Is anything missing? Clothes? Money? Passport?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘What about credit cards? Bank accounts? Have they been used?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’ This didn’t bode well. ‘Maggie, there’s not a lot I can do tonight, not if Will’s not there, so I’ll come down first thing in the morning, if that’s all right. I’ll be with you by ten, earlier if I can.’

  ‘I’ll tell Will.’ And then, with echoes of her old warmth, ‘I look forward to seeing you so much, Alex.’

  ‘Me too, Maggie.’

  For several minutes after we had said goodbye I sat in the silence, trying to absorb this news with some semblance of calm, but the force of the past was very strong. Memories kept crowding in at random, sudden visions and abrupt emotions which overturned my thoughts and got in the way. It was only with an effort that I imposed some sort of order.

  Grace Dearden was missing. Suicide, abduction, intentional disappearance…Even with such sparse information I found myself starting to sift through the possibilities. Part of me thrilled to the challenge; I knew I could do this task well. I was thorough, I rarely missed a detail: that was my strength. With some of the more tragic cases I had also been known to get emotionally involved; Paul would say that this was my weakness and he would probably be right.

  Thoroughness and detail. Normally, I would start by ringing the police and trying to establish what they were doing, what their thoughts were—if any—and how they intended to proceed. However, if Will was there at the station it wouldn’t be appropriate to interrupt, and it struck me that I had no mandate to do so anyway. Will might not wish me to act for him in any official capacity at all. For me, used to clients who were in deep and unequivocal trouble, this was altogether more delicate territory.

  This did not stop me from taking a sheet of paper and making detailed notes of the areas to be investigated if I were instructed.

  A sound at the door and Paul put his head round. ‘Don’t forget we’re going out.’

  I looked at my watch and stood up hastily. ‘On my way.’

  ‘We’re meant to be there in ten minutes.’ He said it without any sense of urgency; we were often late.

  ‘I won’t be long.’ Climbing the stairs ahead of him, I said, ‘I have to go to Norfolk tomorrow.’

  ‘Norfolk. Why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘An old friend.’ It was strange to describe Will this way. ‘His wife’s missing. He’s not entirely happy with the police response. He’s asked me to help.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he do better with someone locals, someone who’s on the spot?’

  ‘But he’s asked me.’ Saying this, I felt a burst of feeling, a jumble of pride and rekindled emotion that seemed to fill my chest. ‘I can’t say no.’

  ‘But you could point out that you’re not well placed to help. Can’t you deal with it on the phone?’

  I paused in the bathroom doorway. ‘Not really. It sounds serious.’

  ‘You complain about work spilling over into the weekends, about us never having time off, and you’re the worst offender.’

  ‘This is an old friend.’

  Paul blinked at me through a haze of wine and rueful af
fection. ‘Ah, and you’re a loyal friend, that’s for sure. That’s one reason I fell for you, if I remember.’

  A moment of regret passed between us. I put my arms around him and, though we embraced with tenderness, it seemed to me that our difficulties and tensions had the tighter grasp, that our years of happiness already belonged to another more distant time.

  I showered firsts then Paul. Meeting again in front of the bathroom mirror he said, ‘So who’s this friend?’

  ‘Someone I grew up with.’

  ‘Called?’

  ‘Will Dearden.’

  He wove his tie through the last loop and pulled it into shape. ‘Have you ever told me about him?’

  In answering I realized I’d rarely spoken of him to anyone, and that it was an effort to do so now, even after all these years. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Friend of Edward’s?’

  ‘No.’ I knew very little of my brother’s life since he’d moved back to Deepwell, but of one thing I could be sure, he wouldn’t be a friend of Will’s.

  ‘Wait…’ Paul frowned as he searched his memory. ‘Dearden. Didn’t your pa tell me about him? Yes, yes—wasn’t he the fella who saved the girl from the flood, saved her life, only to go and sweep her off her feet himself?’

  ‘It wasn’t a flood, it was a ditch.’

  ‘Well…ditch, flood. A lovely romantic story all the same.’ He made another search of his memory. ‘She was trapped in a car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the point of drowning? Yes, I remember your pa telling me.’ He flattened his hair with alternate passes of the comb and the palm of his hand.

  ‘It wasn’t that dramatic. She wasn’t in any danger.’

  ‘No? But the drowning makes for a better story, doesn’t it?’

  The village had thought so. I remembered the way the tale had grown more sensational with each telling.

  ‘She hasn’t just waltzed off with another fella?’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘Well, don’t be so sure. There’s usually a fella somewhere. Was she pretty?’

  I saw her at the fete again, under the cream-coloured hat. ‘Beautiful.’

  Something in the way I said this made Paul cast me a curious glance in the mirror. ‘Ah, then money might be a factor too.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be anything like that. These are country people. Money isn’t that important to them.’

  Leaning towards my reflection as though to impart a great confidence, he gave me a sardonic smile. ‘Money’s always important!’

  I said sharply, ‘You don’t understand—the police are searching for her. She might be dead.’

  He looked unimpressed.

  Pulling on my dress, abandoning earrings and lipstick, I went down to the study and took out my old photograph album.

  I flipped past snaps of my parents when they were first married, of my mother holding me as a baby, of the family on holiday in Cornwall when Edward was a podgy toddler and I, at ten, was hardly less plump. Then came the pictures where my mother was always sitting in a chair or on a garden seat because she hated to be photographed in her wheelchair. The two pictures in the garden at Deepwell were my favourites from this era. Mother was still relatively free of pain then, she was smiling in both pictures, while Father was wearing that rather mischievous grin of his. Apart from Edward, who had always pulled a grumpy face at the sight of a camera, we all looked relatively happy and, despite Mother’s illness, we had been for much of the time.

  I paused two pages on, at a picture of Maggie standing in the shaded kitchen doorway of Marsh House on a summer afternoon—in these pictures it was always summer. She wore a pale cotton dress in fresh mint green, her dark hair haphazardly pulled back to the nape of her neck. In the reflected light, with her smooth Mediterranean skin, her large expressive eyes, she looked no more than thirty, still young, but middleaged to me then. Her kitchen, visible over her shoulder, was an exotic place to an untravelled child like me, with its jars of rices, pastas and wild mushrooms, its pervasive scent of garlic and herbs, and, tacked to the walls, the posters of misty landscapes and hill villages in Lombardy and Piedmont.

  While my mother lay at home for long hours, losing the slow battle with her illness, Maggie had become my surrogate mother, the mother of my happiest sunlit days. The photograph captured all that drew me to her, the generosity of her affections, the vitality of her mind, the enthusiasm she used to find for the simplest things.

  On the opposite page was a picture from another summer, taken against the same doorway but from a little further away: Maggie and Will together, two handsome people with the same dark eyes, thick lustrous hair and wide expressive mouths, a testament to the power of genes; mother and son in the flesh, and in the spirit too, though in those days Will’s eyes did not meet the lens with quite his mother’s gaiety and overt confidence.

  I was looking for a photograph Maggie had sent me some years ago with her regular Christmas card, a picture of Grace and Will and their child, but if it was here I couldn’t seem to find it.

  Leafing back through the album I came across a shot of Will, aged about sixteen, sitting against the side of his dinghy. The boat, a small green pram called Pod, was pulled up on the edge of a salt-marsh, next to dense reeds lit a brilliant gold by the afternoon sun. The oars weren’t shipped properly: they sat in the rowlocks with the blades angled up like small wings. Will was reclining lazily, with an arm hanging over his raised knee, looking away towards some distant horizon. I was planning to become a famous photographer then: I’d thought the composition very artistic.

  A last search through the bundle of loose snapshots tucked inside the album’s back cover, but I couldn’t find a picture of Grace from this or any other Christmas.

  Hearing Paul on the stairs, I shut the album and slipped it back into the cupboard.

  We were the last to arrive at the dinner party but our hosts seemed in no hurry to get the food onto the table. I watched with creeping anxiety as Paul drank steadily on an empty stomach. When we finally sat down to dinner just before ten, he had no appetite and hardly touched his plate. After the main course he started arguing with a girl in magazine publishing about the pernicious influence of anorexic models on the impressionable young. His eyes were like slits, his voice took on a heavy hectoring note, he repeated himself continuously. For once there was no question of the drink not showing, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was the beginning of another stage, where the last bastion of restraint was going to be thrown away. When he gestured clumsily and knocked a glass of wine over, I said, rather too quickly, ‘Paul had a great win today,’ and everyone cheered, except Paul who glared at me resentfully across the table.

  At midnight I pleaded a headache and managed to get us away half an hour later, though not before Paul had downed another glass of wine and a large brandy. He slept most of the way home and I had to shake him hard before he would get out of the car. He went unsteadily upstairs, humming what might have been an Irish ballad, and undressed with heavy dignity before keeling over on top of the duvet, his feet on the floor. Filling a glass with water, I took it to the bedside and shook him again. When I had persuaded him to sit up, I placed his hand around the glass and helped him raise it to his mouth. Suddenly, with an angry gesture that almost caught me round the face, he sent glass and water onto the carpet. ‘Muck! Filthy muck!’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ I breathed, brushing the water off my dress. ‘Poison.’

  ‘Oh, Lexxy,’ he moaned.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Sleep time.’

  As I helped him into bed he muttered thickly, ‘The hell with it.’

  I lay awake for a long time, listening to his breathing, looking into the darkness and seeing a path of unhappiness that seemed to stretch out before us without end. I felt our relationship was slipping further and further beyond our grasp and, in my present mood, it seemed to me that neither of us was capable of stopping it. Our periodic attempts at shoring it up, our b
rief moments of tenderness and communication, seemed to get swept away with each tide.

  It would have been easy to blame Paul’s drinking or the pressures of our work, or myself for not having given up more time to our marriage, but blame was an empty road and I didn’t want to go that way. All I knew was that both of us had changed. At some point Paul’s aims and mine, our priorities and ambitions, had diverged, and each small crisis, far from pulling us together, only seemed to emphasize the growing divide.

  Then I thought of Will Dearden, and my worries seemed a small thing by comparison. I tried to imagine what it must be like to love someone and to have no idea what had happened to them, to live in a state of agonizing uncertainty, caught between dread and hope, and it seemed to me that it must be unendurable.

  I slept restlessly until four. At four thirty I gave up hope of getting back to sleep and, pulling on some thick country clothes, left a note for Paul and made my way out into the night.

  Chapter Two

  The rain had vanished with the wind and the night was sharp with sudden cold. There was little traffic and, encircled by sparkling hoarfrost and a canopy of country-bright stars, I felt as though I were in some sort of time machine, flying through a silvery firmament towards the kingdom of my childhood. For the last ten miles I took the back lanes because I had time to spare and it was completely deserted that way. I paused on the crown of the last hill to look for the view, but it was too early, the dawn was still some way off, and beyond the beads of light that marked the coast road the marshes and the sea were just another stretch of blackness in the night.

  Descending the winding hill to a junction lit by a single sodium lights I turned east along the coast road and after half a mile slowly entered Deepwell. It was nearly seven but few people were about. Passing almost the whole length of the village, reaching the shadowy walls at the ancient round-towered church and, beyond it, the dark windows of the village school, I saw just two cars.