A Dark Devotion

by Clare Francis

  He lifted his head a little.

  ‘It was a day school, the school this boy went to,’ I continued lamely. ‘And he was happy there. Terribly happy.’ I was making no ground. Giving up, I touched his arm lightly and said, ‘Shall we go and see if there’re any more cushions?’

  He didn’t need a second invitation to hurry from the room.

  ‘There you are!’ Maggie cried from the hall below, looking first at Charlie as he swung past her, then at me as I followed down the stairs. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Cushion removals.’

  She was watching me closely and when Charlie had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen she whispered urgently, ‘You didn’t say anything to Charlie, did you?’

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘About his mother. About…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s just that…he cannot talk about it. You understand? He cannot hear about it!’

  ‘Maggie, I wouldn’t say anything, I promise you.’

  Her face cleared a little, only to cloud again. ‘I worry about him, you see,’ she explained unnecessarily. ‘He is so…’ But she couldn’t find the words and finished with a gesture of deep feeling, a fist pressed against her heart.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He is the one who matters,’ she said. ‘He is the one we have to protect.’

  I would have said something more to reassure her but we were interrupted by the boom of voices as Frank and John emerged from the kitchen and took their leave.

  ‘You don’t have to stay,’ Will said, and there was a note of challenge in his voice, as though he were testing me in some way.

  ‘Can’t I be of use here?’

  ‘You might get wet.’

  ‘I’ve run the risk before.’

  But Will was too preoccupied to catch the allusion, and I was too shy to spell it out.

  I said, ‘I’ll be quite happy to sleep on some cushions.’

  He nodded vaguely, then, with an urgency that bordered on brusqueness: ‘But we should eat before it gets too late.’

  Maggie was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a story to Charlie in the monotonous voice of deep exhaustion. She barely glanced up as I opened the fridge, and nodded rapidly when I held up eggs and ham and salad.

  No one ate much. No one talked much either. Maggie had no appetite at all and, though she spoke to Charlie now and again, cajoling him to eat, fussing generally over his health, the conversations soon foundered. The moment we had abandoned the meal, she lit a cigarette, the first of several, and drew on it fiercely.

  Will stared grimly at his plate, emerging from his thoughts only to squint into the darkness beyond the window. Once I glanced up to find him gazing at me with unfocused absorption and slight puzzlement, as though he were trying to work something out and at some point along the way his thought processes had led him to me. Coming to, he smiled slightly, and a look of fellowship passed between us.

  As I cleared the plates. Will stood up and announced that he was going outside to have a look around.

  Charlie’s cry was so sudden, so shrill, that I jumped, the plates slithered out of my hands and across the draining board.

  Charlie screamed, ‘Don’t go. Please don’t go, Daddy!’ His panic was as overwhelming as it was absolute. For an instant Will stood immobile with astonishment, then, reaching out towards Charlie, he dropped onto one knee by his chair and said soothingly, ‘It’s only for a minute, Charlie, I’ll be back in no time—’

  ‘Don’t go! Please don’t go!’ Charlie sobbed, his dread inconsolable.

  Scrambling to her feet, Maggie threw her arm around Charlie’s shoulders and shook him slightly. ‘Charlie, listen—it’s all right! It’s all right! You hear me?’

  ‘Please don’t go…please…’ The child’s face contorted into agonies of unhappiness, his cheeks ran with tears, he kept crying, ‘Don’t go…don’t go…’ over and over again. Nothing that Will or Maggie could say seemed to have any effect; Charlie refused to be contained or placated. His body stiffened, he twisted his head from side to side, he tried to wrench himself free of their hold.

  Temporarily defeated, looking stunned, Will dropped his arms and fell back.

  I said to him, ‘I could go and have a look around for you, while you stay here.’

  ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’

  I said again, ‘,’ could go, Will. Let me go!’

  Will shook his head and, coming to some sort of decision, stood up and tried to draw Maggie away from Charlie. ‘Mum, go next door for a minute, would you?’

  ‘What?’ She clutched Charlie’s shoulder tighter. ‘No, no.’

  Gripping her arm, he said in his firmest voice, ‘Maggie—go next door.’

  She glared at him. ‘No!’

  His eyes flashed with exasperation. He pulled her bodily away and growled, ‘Do as I say!’

  Maggie’s face crumpled. She repeated, ‘No,’ but now it was a cry of capitulation rather than defiance, and, eyes lowered, she followed me out of the room and down the passage. There were no seats left on the ground floor, the sofa frames had been upended against the walls, so we sat on the stairs.

  It was colder here and, taking off the long wool cardigan I was wearing, I draped it round her shoulders. ‘He’ll be okay, Maggie.’

  But she turned away and, leaning her forehead against the wall, sat with one hand over her face.

  And still we could hear Charlie sobbing in the kitchen.

  I remembered a corner cupboard in the sitting room with drinks and glasses. There was whisky and brandy and a fearsome-looking Italian liqueur. I poured a small brandy then added another half-inch for good measure.

  Maggie accepted the glass wordlessly and took a sip.

  ‘Perhaps Charlie needed to talk,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he needed to talk to his father.’

  Maggie shivered with fresh anger and retorted in a sharp voice, ‘No! No.’

  I kept quiet after that. Fetching a brandy for myself, I sat silently on the bottom stair, at Maggie’s knee.

  In the kitchen the sobbing trailed off at last, and, though we listened for a long time, it didn’t start again. The only sound was the buffeting of the wind and, somewhere in the sitting room, the insistent scratching of a branch against a window.

  Finally Maggie gave a long sigh, which seemed to contain all the sadness of her life. ‘Tell me…’ she began in a low voice. ‘Tell me about the people who come to you, Alex.’ She was leaning back against the wall, eyes half closed.

  ‘My clients?’

  ‘What is the worst they do? Are they robbers? Murderers? Tell me how they get caught, tell me what happens to them.’

  I floundered for a moment—where to begin? what to cover?—before explaining that the bulk of my work was petty crime, with a bit of assault, a smattering of robbery and the occasional murder thrown in. I told her about the increasing use of knives by young men, and how a knife could kill far more easily than the kids ever imagined, and how, when they found out, it was always too late and someone, often a kid of their own age, had died. I told her about the professional criminals, the ones for whom burglary was a career and prison a way of life. I told her about the real villains, what made them different from the rest, and immediately thought of Ronnie Buck.

  I wouldn’t have known Maggie was listening but for the occasional murmured question. When I told her that it was the petty thieves and the hardened criminals who were most likely to get off, she asked: ‘And you help in this, Alex?’

  ‘Most of the time they simply don’t get caught, let alone charged. But when they do—yes, I do my best to get them off.’

  ‘The bad ones too?’ she asked in a low drifting voice. ‘You get them off?’

  A moment of truth. A moment in which I acknowledged the extent of my self-doubt. ‘Yes. The bad ones too.’

  ‘But usually…?’ She lifted her fingers in the beginnings of a gesture.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said�
��usually the bad ones don’t get caught.’

  ‘That’s right. The people around them get too frightened to talk. Witnesses get bought off.’

  ‘They never get caught?’ she asked in the distracted tone of someone filling time.

  ‘Oh, in the end. They make a mistake. They get careless, leave evidence. Or someone talks—a partner, an employee, a girlfriend, someone who’s gone sour on them. Even then…’ I sighed openly. ‘Even then they can get off with the help of a smart defence.’ And I recounted the story of Ronnie Buck and the policeman half killed in his garden. I told her about the plea of self-defence, and how it would never have succeeded without the crucial witness, the witness who was in all likelihood bought and paid for.

  I paused there. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the unknown investigator Paul had hired to find the crucial witness, or to voice my worries about Paul’s involvement with Ronnie Buck.

  The silence drew out. I glanced up to find Maggie staring into a distance of her own making.

  The kitchen door sounded. Shoving her brandy into my hand, Maggie clambered rapidly to her feet.

  Will came down the passage. ‘He’s okay,’ he said briskly.

  Maggie slid past him towards the kitchen.

  Will continued to the front door and began to pull on a warm jacket.

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’ I asked.

  It was a moment before he took in what I had said. ‘No…If you could keep an eye on things here.’

  ‘Are you going to be long?’

  ‘Twenty minutes. Less, probably.’

  ‘You’ve got the phone with you?’

  He patted his pockets absentmindedly, then, pulling on boots and an old woollen hat, finally found the phone in the inner compartment of his jacket and held it up to me. As he opened the door he glanced back over his shoulder as though to speak, only to change his mind and turn away without a word.

  Soon afterwards, Maggie led a subdued Charlie up to bed, whispering, ‘I am tired, Alex. I will see you in the morning.’

  I waited in the kitchen, drinking coffee, sitting at the scrubbed pine table that had been the centre of life at Marsh House, remembering the meals I had eaten there, the heavily laden pizzas, the meatballs in spicy sauce, the tomato and basil salad, dishes that stood three Michelin stars above the sludgy stodge that Mrs Hill was giving us at home. The sun had seemed to shine more often then, too—a trick of childhood memory; just as the hand-painted china on the dresser in front of me had seemed a more brilliant blue. Even the winter storms had been washed with a romantic light.

  Listening to the storm now as it drummed against the cottage, I thought I heard the sea again, and went to the window a couple of times to peer out into the darkness.

  Will had been gone ten minutes. To help pass the time, I fetched my notebook from my bag and brought my notes up to date.

  I wrote down Barry Holland’s name and the time he claimed to have seen Grace: six p.m. And added: Mistaken ID? Wrong day? Wrong time? Wrong car? Bad vis/dark?

  Under this I wrote: If not mistaken, where was Grace going?

  Turning to a fresh page, I began to draw a rough map, with a long straight line across the page, west to east, for the marsh edge—though in reality it was far from straight—and another straight line running parallel to it some distance below, for the main coast road. I drew Quay Lane as an inverted U standing on the coast road, its top marking the extent of the quay. Off the right-hand corner of the quay I added a small blob for Marsh House.

  Going back to the main road, I went east and drew another line leaving the road at right angles to go due north, a line that did not loop anywhere but petered out near the marsh edge. This was Salterns Lane. I marked Reed Cottage at the end of this lane, and the Salterns cottages away to the left, and, back at the beginning of the lane, just short of the junction with the main road, Barry Holland’s house.

  I stared at the map for a while, then for want of anything better to do I drew a line showing the Gun Marsh embankment where it left the marsh edge just to the east of Reed Cottage and headed out towards the dunes. Drawn like this, it could almost have been an extension to Salterns Lane. To the left of the embankment I sketched a suggestion of creeks and wrote ‘salt-marsh, and to the right ‘Gun Marshy though strict logic should have demanded ‘fresh-water marsh’. A short way up the Gun embankment I also marked the position of the first sluice with a cross, while along the marsh edge I indicated the footpaths with dotted lines.

  It was tempting to go on doodling, but none of it was going to get me any closer to guessing where Grace might have been going at five forty that evening. Salterns Lane was a dead-end road. She had already said goodbye to Charlie. She wasn’t on particularly friendly terms with any of Maggie’s neighbours, excepting Barry Holland. She hadn’t been coming to help with the sluice because, according to Will, she never went near the marshes.

  It seemed strange to me that anyone could live in this part of the world and not go near the marshes. A fear of water, perhaps. Or—I pictured Grace’s photographs, the immaculate face and hair—a dislike of wind and winter cold and muddy feet and blazing summer sun.

  I paused. I had missed something. And only just now, one or two thoughts ago. I retraced my steps, and still I missed it. Back again, more slowly this time.

  I got there at last. What had Grace been told about the sluice? And who might have told her? It couldn’t have been Will—he’d got no reply from Marsh House when he’d called. That left Maggie. Maggie, who might have sounded pan-icky, who might have led Grace to believe that the trouble was far more serious than it actually was, might have made Grace feel duty-bound to drive back to Reed Cottage and offer support, however ineffectual.

  I ran through this scenario several times and found a succession of problems, not least the fact that, having been seen to enter Salterns Lane, which was neither long nor hazardous, Grace had failed to reach Reed Cottage.

  The latch of the front door sounded, a draught chilled the air. I went into the hall to find Will pulling off his jacket.

  ‘How’s it looking?’ I asked.

  He wore one of his darker expressions. ‘Can’t be sure for a while. The tide could be late. There could be a surge.’

  He went upstairs to check on Charlie. When he came down again I offered him a brandy, which he accepted vaguely but didn’t immediately touch.

  ‘Charlie all right?’

  Sliding his elbows onto the kitchen table, he propped his head in his hands and closed his eyes tightly for a moment. ‘Well…he’s asleep.’

  ‘I think I put my foot in it earlier,’ I confessed. ‘I said something about special schools for dyslexics.’

  Will squinted at me. ‘Why on earth did you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just sort of…came out. Had you considered it, in fact, a special school?’

  ‘Not me! Grace.’ His tone was sharp, his look too. ‘Charlie hated the idea. He didn’t want to go. And he was dead right. It was an absolute dump.’

  ‘A boarding school?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That was part of the attraction for Grace. She wanted him shaped up. That’s what she called it—shaped up. Meaning she wanted him to be more manageable, more obedient.’ He gave a harsh sigh, and I saw again the barely suppressed fury of his feelings for Grace.

  ‘This was recently?’

  ‘A year or so ago.’

  He rubbed his eyelids energetically, then straightening up, focused on his drink for the first time, and, swilling the brandy round the glass, drained it in one. The worries chased across his face, he almost spoke several times. Finally he said tightly, ‘This sighting of Grace—I just can’t work it out, Ali. There was no reason for her to come back.’

  ‘Could it have been the sluice? Could she have thought the problem was far more serious than it really was, that the cottage was in danger? Felt she had to come back and help Maggie and Charlie?’

  He nodded at me, and kept nodding. ‘I can’t th
ink of anything else.’

  ‘The only problem with that is that Maggie and Charlie would have seen her, and they didn’t.’

  He threw me a meditative glance. ‘Yes…yes…Unless Grace thought they were out on the marsh and went straight there…’ But almost as soon as he’d said this, he waved the idea firmly aside. ‘No, no…’ He leant forward and, jabbing his fingertips against his forehead, gave a great shudder, as if to clear his mind.

  I said, ‘But don’t forget, there’s always the chance that Barry Holland was mistaken—’

  His head shot up. ‘Barry Holland?’

  ‘I thought you—Yes, that’s who it was, apparently.’

  Understanding spread slowly over his face. He exclaimed ironically, ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why of course?’

  ‘Well, it had to be him, didn’t it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because—’ He shrugged impatiently. ‘Oh, because Grace was after him for sponsorship money. Cultivated him. Chatted him up. I think he was a bit smitten by her. What am I saying? I know he was smitten by her. Under her spell, just like the rest of the world.’ He lowered his voice, and added more reflectively, ‘It’s amazing, you know, how she could work her trick on people. I’ve never understood how they couldn’t see through it.’

  ‘What was her trick?’

  ‘Oh, fixing them with an admiring gaze, hanging on their every word, searching them out all the time, making them think they were dead special to her. And then the moment they were out of her sight she’d forget about them. I mean, instantly. Go back to making her plans. That was the only time she’d ever think of them again, when she was planning how they could be useful to her.’ He lowered his voice still further, as if aware of Charlie asleep above our heads. ‘So cold, Ali. So bloody cold.’

  ‘She’s been seeing quite a lot of Barry Holland then?’

  ‘A lot? No. Just enough to charm the pants off him. To get the money.’

  ‘So not a lover, then?’

  He laughed drily. ‘What, Barry? No—not Grace’s style. Rich enough, sure, he’s absolutely rolling in money, but far too rough around the edges. A criminal record in the family? God, no, she wouldn’t have liked that at all!’