A Dark Devotion

by Clare Francis

  His mention of musical events prompted me to ask if he was involved in the music festival.

  He was briefly amused. ‘No. Wouldn’t know what to do with classical stuff. I’m strictly mass-market—anything that fills a big space. No, in fact I didn’t hear about the festival until a couple of months ago, not until Grace nobbled me for some sponsorship.’ He tempered this immediately with a lift of one hand. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, I went willingly. More than glad to help.’

  ‘She came to see you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was suitably sombre. ‘Very impressive she was, too.’

  He signalled the end of the conversation with a dip of his head, like a small bow, and I was struck once again by his composure and the old-fashioned, almost formal, courtesy.

  ‘Well, Maggie,’ he called softly. He went over to where she was sitting on the arm of a sofa, and, taking her hand, held it gently between his own, with the paternalistic solicitude of a priest comforting a parishioner. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Maggie threw him a glare which took me by surprise, it was so full of antagonism.

  He said to me, ‘Goodbye, Alex.’ And his still, calm eyes were very self-possessed.

  As soon as he had gone, I said to Maggie, ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘No.’ She turned her head away, but not before I had seen the tightness of her lips, the fierce glint in her eyes.

  ‘But he upset you?’

  ‘No. It’s nothing. No…’

  ‘Can I get you anything? A drink?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m all right, really. Just—tired of it all. Tired.’

  But even as she said this I sensed she was keeping something back, and it struck me that, for all her openness and warmth, she had always kept a part of herself concealed from us. Looking back, I realized that in all the years I had known her she had rarely referred to Will’s father or her feelings about his deaths she had never talked about the difficulties of life as a widow. She must have been lonely, I saw now, and, since she was forced to sublet the farm for some years, probably under financial strain too. Yet she had never given any sign of this, had never mentioned anything that might have been remotely unsettling to us as children, electing instead to create a world of unremitting confidence and happiness. I had barely understood the nature of this achievement when I was young, yet instinctively I had loved her for it.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Will said you’d been to the hospital.’

  She appeared to recall this with effort. ‘Oh…yes, these gallstones.’ Seeing that I expected more detail, she added, ‘They take a look to see if they are still there. They want to cut them out—you know how they are. Always—’

  A car sounded outside and she murmured, ‘Charlie.’ This time the prospect of seeing him did not succeed in lightening her mood.

  Following her to the door, I saw Will getting out of the Range Rover, while Charlie, his head just visible in the passenger seat, appeared to be struggling unsuccessfully with his seatbelt. Will went round to the passenger door and, flinging it open, leant inside to deal with the recalcitrant belt. He stood back to let Charlie out, yet for some reason Charlie still didn’t emerge, and Will was forced to lean into the car again. Then—a moment which sent shock surging into my throat—Will grabbed him by the arm and hauled him out. There was a shouts my stomach seized; fearing the witnessing of something deeply disturbing, I almost looked away.

  More sounds, wildly incongruous. It was an instant before I understood: they were shrieking with laughter. I stared with relief and a sense of foolishness. So delighted were the two of them with whatever had just happened that they were clutching each other in glee, the boy reaching his arms around his father’s waist and pressing his head against his chest, Will bending down to rest his cheek briefly against the pale hair.

  They walked happily towards us and at that moment they mightn’t have had a care in the world.

  I said, ‘Hello, Charlie.’

  He looked up with the incurious glance of a child and it was impossible to tell if he remembered me or not.

  Handing him over to his grandmother, Will stood in the doorway and wagged his finger at him. ‘Remember what I said.’

  Charlie giggled. Will narrowed his eyes in mock reproof and turned away, only to change his mind and turn back in the same movement. Throwing his arms around Charlie, he embraced him with such feeling that he might have been going away for days not hours. ‘Take care of Granny,’ he said.

  Waving to Maggie, I followed Will outside. As soon as Maggie had closed the door, Will’s smile was overtaken by a frown. ‘Do we really have to go through with this? National TV’s so public’

  ‘It has a way of getting people’s attention.’

  ‘Why can’t we just do local TV?’

  ‘Because Grace’s photograph has already been shown on local TV.’

  He stopped by the car and, like a man press-ganged into donning some sort of fancy dress, pulled open both flaps of his quilted jacket and demanded crossly, ‘Too formal? Too dark? Wrong image?’

  He was wearing a beautifully tailored grey suit, pale blue shirt and dark tie.

  ‘No, you look just right,’ I lied. In fact, even allowing for the wildness of his hair, he looked far too good, far too neat, the suit too classy. I guessed immediately that these clothes had been bought for him by Grace. When we reached Norwich I would have to find a tactful way of toning down his appearance: husbands of missing women were meant to look harassed and unkempt or people’s minds began to turn in the wrong direction.

  He made no argument when I suggested we use my car and, absorbed as he was, did not notice when, halting at the junction with the main road, I stared after Jilly’s Golf as it swept past us on its way to Burnham.

  ‘My jacket?’

  I thought he was going to refuse outright, but then, giving in abruptly with a short sigh, he removed it and abandoned it to a chair. A moment later, as we prepared to go into the conference room, I touched his tie as if to straighten it and managed both to loosen it slightly and to push the knot a little off-centre. With his windblown hair and dark frowning eyes, his image was now a little closer to the agonized husband who’d been far too preoccupied to dress with any attention.

  Agnew and Ramsey, wearing nondescript blue suits and blank expressions, led the way into a room that blazed with artificial lights targeted on a long green-baize table at the near end, with four chairs arranged behind it. Two clusters of microphones had accumulated on the green baize; Will sat before one, with me at his elbow, Ramsey before the other, with Agnew on his flank.

  There was a good turnout. All the major TV channels seemed to be there, and I counted more than ten reporters, some of whom would be stringers for the nationals, as well as six photographers. All eyes were fastened on Will. I had no illusions about what they were looking for. The great majority of public appeals by relatives were completely genuine, but in a couple of famous cases in the recent past the police had asked husbands of murdered wives to make TV appeals purely as a means of gaining time and evidence against them. The press, who always reckoned on being sharper than most, liked to think they could suss out these situations at fifty yards. They would be looking for the smallest slip from Will, the slightest display of over-confidence or over-played grief. They would be looking to Ramsey, too, for coded signals, for signs of a double game. I had known there was a risk in setting this up; meeting the cold appraising eyes of the men and women before me, I began to wonder if I hadn’t misjudged it.

  Ramsey introduced himself in his monotonous voice and outlined the case and the problems his team were up against. The fact that, despite an extensive search, Grace Dearden seemed to have vanished into thin air, the police’s concern for her safety, the lack of sightings, the need for help from the public, his promise that all information would be treated in the strictest confidence. He referred the audience to the ten-by-eight photograph of Grace in their information packs, and reminded them that she had last been
seen two weeks back, at four thirty p.m. on 18 February, on her way home from her mother-in-law’s in Deepwell, the village in which she, Grace, also lived.

  Then it was Will’s turn. I had prepared simple notes for him, but either he’d forgotten about them or preferred to do without. To the whir of camera shutters, he looked out at the audience and spoke directly, from the heart. He said he was desperately worried for Grace, that she would never have left of her own accord, he begged anyone with any information at all to come forward. He stammered once or twice, he stalled near the end and bit hard on his lip, he appeared deeply upset. My concerns rapidly evaporated: his sincerity made him utterly believable.

  One reporter put a number of questions to Ramsey, run-of-the-mill stuff about search procedures, about the possibilities which could be excluded at this stage—‘None,’ Ramsey announced crisply—then a young woman asked Will how he would describe Grace as a person.

  Looking down at the table, clasping his hands tightly in front of him, Will took his time to respond. Once started, he seemed to force the words out, as though he were finding it painful to talk about Grace. ‘I would describe her as outgoing. And…’ He stalled awkwardly. ‘Umm…generous. Positive.’

  ‘What were her interests?’

  Another pause, another battle to speak. ‘She was very involved in the local community. She was…organizing a small music festival.’

  ‘And how would you describe her as a wife?’

  He stared into the sea of faces for several seconds, he opened his mouth to speak, only to look down abruptly. Eventually, he said, ‘She was, umm…the perfect wife.’ An instant later he half glanced at me, as though in panic, before adding, ‘Well—that’s the way it seemed to me.’ Making a gesture as if to withdraw this, realizing that further comment would probably be a mistake, he clamped his mouth shut and stared at his hands.

  I sat forward and tried to catch Ramsey’s eye but he was looking out into the room. I whispered to Will, ‘Shall we call it a day?’ Before he could reply, the young woman was putting another question. ‘And how would you describe her as a mother?’

  The pause that followed was unlike anything that had gone before. There was a new tension about Will, a dark hesitation, and I had a sudden foreboding.

  ‘She was…umm…’ He appeared to hold his breath, sweat glistened at his temple. ‘Umm…’ He moved his mouth but no words came.

  I leant over and whispered, ‘Are you unwell? We can stop this now if you like.’

  The sweat had erupted in beads over his forehead, his hands were clenched so tightly that the veins stood proud of the skin, and still he couldn’t speak.

  I grasped his arm and whispered, ‘I’ll stop it.’

  When he didn’t reply I said to Ramsey, but mainly to the room, ‘We’re going to have to call a halt at this point. Mr Dearden’s not feeling well. As you can imagine he’s been under great strain over the past two weeks.’

  I stood up. There was a respectful closing of notebooks, a lowering of cameras. Grasping Will’s shoulder, I said, ‘Let’s go.’ Still caught up in his strange panic, it was a moment before he got clumsily to his feet and allowed me to shepherd him out of the room.

  I found a chair for him in a quiet comer and a moment later Ramsey appeared with a glass of water.

  ‘You all right, Mr Dearden?’

  Will leant forward in his seat and buried his head in his hands.

  Ramsey waited a moment, then retreated.

  I put the water into Will’s hand.

  ‘I knew it was a mistake!’ he hissed.

  ‘But it went well.’

  Still hunched over, he shook his head inconsolably.

  ‘Really,’ I insisted. ‘I wouldn’t say so if it wasn’t true.’

  He kept shaking his head and I kept offering reassurances until, lifting his head at last, he murmured, ‘Just give me a minute or two, will you, Alex?’

  The urge to comfort him was very strong. Confining myself to a touch of his shoulder, I walked away.

  Ramsey was waiting at a distance.

  ‘All right?’ he asked, without any visible show of concern.

  ‘The stress…’

  Ramsey gazed at Will’s slumped figure and narrowed his little lips. ‘The first broadcast goes out at five. We’ve got four extra phone lines set up in the incident room, but I have to say I’m not holding out a great deal of hope.’

  ‘Oh? Any particular reason?’

  Above the fat cheeks his small eyes regarded me steadily. ‘It was dusk running into nighty the area is thinly populated. Not likely to have been many witnesses about.’

  ‘Assuming she wasn’t abducted. Assuming she wasn’t put into a car and taken to the other side of the country. Assuming she didn’t go to London the next morning.’ I would have stopped there but his attitude annoyed me. ‘Assuming she didn’t go to the airport and take a plane to the other side of the world.’ Gesturing an end to this game, I said placatingly, ‘I take your pointy but don’t let’s give up before we’ve even started.’

  ‘A good start would be a little more truth from your client.’

  I kept the curiosity out of my face. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I mean that when we next talk, you might persuade Mr Dearden that it would be in his interest to be a little more frank with us.’

  ‘Is this to do with Grace Dearden’s mother, Inspector? Because if it is, I can tell you that it would be wise to treat everything she says with extreme caution. Mrs Bailey has what is politely known as an alcohol problem. She also has a totally unreasonable grievance against her son-in-law, which has coloured her judgement—and that’s putting it mildly. According to her highly biased viewpoint, Grace’s hopes of fame and fortune were dashed when she married Will Dearden. She’s never got over the fact that Grace ended up as a normal housewife and mother, and not some famous society figure in London. She blames Will, but I can assure you that none of her comments can be substantiated in any respect. In fact, quite the reverse.’

  Ramsey straightened his plump shoulders. ‘We are aware of what Mrs Bailey had to say.’

  Reading all too slowly between the lines, I asked, ‘This isn’t about Mrs Bailey, then?’

  His silence, the droop of his eyelids, were an affirmation.

  ‘Well, I’m sure that my client can offer a perfectly good explanation for anything else you might wish to put to him, Inspector.’

  ‘He agrees to an interview, then?’

  ‘Well…If absolutely necessary.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Here at nine?’

  ‘Not here. Mr Dearden’s exhausted. And he has a farm to run.’

  We settled on Marsh House at ten.

  A fierce wind had sprung up, buffeting the car whenever it emerged onto exposed ground. In the headlights the branches looked as though they would tear themselves from the trees, and the surface of the road danced with skittering twigs and dried leaves.

  ‘This gale’s very sudden,’ I said.

  ‘It was forecast,’ Will murmured, and it was the first comment he had volunteered since leaving Norwich. ‘Worse tomorrow.’

  ‘How much worse?’

  ‘A storm.’ His head was pressed back against the seat-rest, his profile unreadable in the darkness. ‘Northerly,’ he continued dully. ‘And it’s coming up to extra-high spring tides.’

  ‘Is that going to be a worry?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  As if to contradict him, the wind slammed into the side of the car and I had to correct the veer of the steering. ‘You’re sure you’re okay to see Ramsey at ten? You’re not too busy on the farm?’

  ‘Busy?’ He was still very preoccupied. ‘No.’

  ‘He’s got something he wants to talk to you about. I’m not sure what it is.’ I glanced across at him. ‘You wouldn’t have any ideas?’

  It seemed to me that there was a tension in his stillness.

  ‘There isn’t anything that Ramsey might have got hold of—I don’t know, an area that might have
been overlooked?’

  Again, the stillness, as though something were weighing heavily with him. ‘No…I don’t think so. Unless…’ I caught the glint of his eye as he glanced towards me. ‘Lawyers have to keep things confidential, don’t they?’

  ‘Absolutely. Anything you say to me as a client will always remain absolutely confidential.’

  ‘No, I meant…another lawyer. Another matter.’

  My mind raced over the possibilities. The Gun Marsh sale? The fact that he might be broke? Something else? Something about Grace? I said, ‘Any lawyer, any matter. It’s a fundamental principle.’

  ‘In that case, no idea then.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  Maybe I imagined a tiny hesitation before he said, ‘Sure.’

  Suppressing a slight unease, I negotiated a wide roundabout and took the road to the north.

  As we left the sodium lights behind and entered the dark country lanes, Will muttered again, ‘I knew it’d be a mistake.’

  ‘But Will…’ I had run out of reassurances. ‘What do you feel went so wrong about it?’

  ‘Those questions about Grace…I knew I’d foul up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to answer them.’

  ‘That didn’t matter. In fact, it made it more natural More—well, I hate to say it—more moving. That may sound cynical—sorry—but I’m afraid that’s what the media go for. Visible emotion. Sincerity.’

  ‘Sincerity.’ He gave an ugly chuckle. ‘Is that what it looked like?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Another harsh sound. ‘God . . /

  I caught it then, the underlying irony and self-disgust. I looked across at him, I slowed the car.

  He cried, ‘Sometimes I don’t know how much longer I can go on with it, Ali! Sometimes I feel like shouting at them!’

  ‘It must be hard, I know…’

  ‘Hard!’ He gave a caustic laugh. ‘Yes—hard. To go on saying the right things, to go along with the myth.’