He considered this intently, as though he himself had been giving it deep thought. He said, ‘You know, I’m still not entirely sure.’
The silence stretched out unbearably. I said at last, ‘You hadn’t thought of looking there before?’
‘Well, yes, but…’ He amended this with a lift of one hand. ‘I’d got so fixed on the idea of the salt-marsh…the creeks…the idea that she’d got swept towards the sea…that I couldn’t think of anything else. But then—that sighting. It was the sighting, the fact that she’d gone back towards the Gun. Gone back and not been seen by Mum or Charlie. I began to thinks Where could she have got to? Where could she be?’
Listening to this, I realized that a still more daunting question loomed ahead. I heard myself ask, ‘How could she have got under the sluice, Will? How could she have got under the gate?’
He pressed a knuckle against his mouth. ‘They didn’t ask that, did they?’
‘No,’ I whispered.
‘I don’t think they grasped…’
‘No.’
‘I think they thought…’
‘Yes.’
They thought the body had been swept against the gate by the force of the water.
He gasped, ‘Alex, the awful thing is she must have been there…’ His voice became desperate. ‘She must have been there all the time.’
I waited. Somewhere outside a car engine drew closer and stopped. A moment later a car door slammed. I said urgently, ‘You mean, she was there from the very beginning?’ I knew the answer, but I needed to hear it from him.
His eyes glittered violently. ‘Ever since I closed the gate…’
He meant: on top of her.
And still I needed to be absolutely clear. ‘That gate—the second gate—you opened it that night?’
‘To drain the marsh quicker. To get the water out.’
‘How long was it open?’
‘Five hours. Six…’
‘And what time did you close it?’
‘Four in the morning. Just after.’ He thrust his head into his hands. ‘God…’
Going to him, I dropped onto my knees and put an arm round his shoulder. ‘She was dead,’ I pointed out. ‘She was already dead.’ Somewhere outside I heard what might have been the latch on the garden gate.
‘But she was there! Whatever I felt about her, whatever bad things happened between us, I can’t bear to think…’
‘You weren’t to know she was there.’
‘But I should have looked. I should have looked.’ His back bowed further, his head sank deeper into his hands.
Tightening my grip on his shoulders, I said what I could to reassure him and, when the words ran out, leant my cheek against the head of wild dark hair.
The sound behind me was tiny but distinct. I twisted around.
Anne Hampton stood in the doorway. ‘Sorry/
she said in a voice that was unusually sharp and low. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb anyone. I did knock.’
Will dropped his hands hastily from his face and straightened up. I let go of his shoulder and stood up.
‘Charlie!’ Will exclaimed abruptly. ‘I must go.’ He scrambled to his feet and, with the briefest glance at Anne, hurried out of the room.
‘What’s happened?’ Anne asked, pink cheeks flaming.
‘Nothing.’
‘But he’s so upset.’ It was almost an accusation.
‘It wasn’t anything in particular.’
‘Not Charlie?’
‘No.’
‘Not the police?’
‘No.’
‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if something had happened?’
‘It wouldn’t really be for me to say.’
‘Yes, of course. Of course,’ she said hurriedly, as if she had given herself away. ‘I just thought…’ She smiled awkwardly. ‘It would be dreadful if he was alone—you know, when there was bad news.’
I wondered what sort of bad news she had in mind. I said, ‘I’ll do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.’
Perhaps I let something show in my voice, perhaps I had sounded a warning, but she gave a nervous smile.
‘He’s lucky to have you,’ she said, and I wasn’t absolutely sure of the spirit in which this was intended.
Two days’ post had accumulated in the hall. As soon as Anne Hampton had left, I carried it into the drawing room and opened it at Grace’s desk. More than twenty letters of condolence, three letters from crazies, which I tore up and put in the bin, an offer of counselling and support from a bereavement support organization, five bills, and a letter from a solicitor in King’s Lynn, headlined ‘The Gun Marsh Tenancy’, informing Will that the other side were threatening to sue for breach of contract but he advised no action until and unless they looked serious about going to court.
No call breakdown from the telephone company yet. I cursed them; they had promised it for today.
I put the mail aside and contemplated Grace’s desk. I had already located her will, which was lodged with a solicitor in London. I had pointed the police towards her desk diary and the kitchen address book, which they had dutifully removed. Now I wanted to look beneath the carefully polished image.
Once, when I was first qualified, I’d represented a retired army officer on a shoplifting charge. He was a sad dignified man with a drink problem and no friends. It was his first arrest,
the result, he swore, of a complete misunderstanding. Held in custody overnight, frantic about his dog, he’d begged me to go and see to the animal which, he assured me, was small and docile. I was young then, I believed what people told me. As I’d faced the growling Alsatian-cross and tried to edge my way towards the dog food, I couldn’t help noticing that the one-roomed flat was stuffed from floor to ceiling with shirts by the hundred, sweaters and trousers by the dozen, coats, jackets, underclothes, all new, most in cellophane wrapping: a magpie’s nest, an old man’s cry for help. Once the dog had been fed and aired on the tiny balcony, I’d locked the door and rushed away.
Facing Grace’s desk, I had the sense of entering another secret world, of searching for things she had not intended anyone to find.
I started with the upper drawer. In one comer lay a bundle of used chequebooks held together by an elastic band. In a rush of memory I saw Paul’s knowing face in the mirror: Money’s always important. I saw his mouth shaping the words with cynical relish, I heard my own vehement argument: These are country people. Money isn’t that important to them. It had been an absurd thing to say of course, no one was above money, and some would say that farmers understood that better than anyone, but I’d resented the way Paul had swept the whole population into the same greedy boat, the way he’d thrown in the people from my past, as if to
diminish them in my memory.
The cheques had been issued against a joint account in the names of W.R. & G.S. Dearden. The stubs showed a stream of household payments: heating oil and newspaper deliveries and Peter Jones and Barclaycard. Nothing out of the ordinary. I went back through six sets of stubs until I reached the previous February. The outflow of cash had been much heavier then: for three months running the Barclaycard payments had come in at around two thousand pounds, and one month the bill had been more than three thousand.
I found the Barclaycard statements in the lower drawer, stored in a small clip file. Most of the payments in the high-spending months seemed to have gone to fabric suppliers and interior design shops whose names I vaguely recognized, as well as Harvey Nichols and a variety of expensive clothes shops in Sloane Street. Up until the previous July there had been regular restaurant bills too, all in London, though none at the Brasserie.
I did a rough calculation: the Barclaycard payments alone came to over fifteen thousand for the year. A legal secretary’s salary; a rich man’s expense account.
I searched the rest of the lower drawer and found a folder of fabric and carpet samples, estimates and quotations. Another folder contained a thick batch of brochures
for fitted kitchens, kitchen appliances and heavy-duty chrome bathroom fittings. A file labelled Garden had leaflets for conservatories, summer houses and gazebos of every shape and style.
Much of the upper drawer was taken up by the music festival: a file of financial projections, costings and estimates; a second with contractors’ correspondence and estimates; and one marked Sponsors. I put this last file on the flap of the desk and drew out a thick sheaf of papers.
Large numbers of requests for sponsorship had gone out over Grace’s name, perhaps two hundred in all, to national companies, international companies, local companies. Her success rate had been about one in ten, which I imagined was quite good. There were fifteen offers of free products and four of cash, including the one thousand pounds and loan of three cars from the Volvo dealer.
Flicking through the duplicate requests for sponsorship my eye was caught by a large cross in fluorescent pink highlighter at the top of one sheet.
The name Barry Holland swam out from the page, above a company called Clawfoot Productions of London WL.
The letter began: Dear Barry, Herewith the formal proposal as promised! The rest followed the usual format, describing the festival, extolling the benefits of sponsorship, asking for, in this case, five thousand pounds.
I looked for a reply, but either it hadn’t been filed in date order or Barry had never answered.
I went back through the earlier correspondence in case it had been misfiled, but there was nothing there either. Presumably they had used the phone.
I moved on to the pigeonholes.
Unusually—but significantly, perhaps—Grace had stored the bank statements in less than immaculate order. Each sheet had been roughly folded and jammed into a pigeonhole which was already overflowing. The statements revealed an overdraft, which six months ago had been as high as £15,000 but more recently had settled around the £10,000 mark, with hefty associated interest and bank charges.
In the next pigeonhole I found more bank statements, as well as banking correspondence, stockbroker accounts and building-society statements. I had never grasped the subtleties of finance—VAT and fraud cases always went to Paul—but for once my failure to make sense of these statements had nothing to do with the figures and everything to do with my having failed to take note of the account numbers and account titles at the top of each sheet. Once I got these straight I realized that Will and Grace had a second joint account at the same bank, also with an overdraft, though this one wasn’t so large as the first, at around the £5,000 mark.
There was a year-end statement from the building society, summarizing the monthly payments for a mortgage which, going by the interest charges, had to be in the region of £125,000.
At the same building society there was a high-interest savings account with a credit of £32,000. However, while the mortgage was in joint names, I noticed that the savings account was in Grace’s name alone. Will hadn’t mentioned this to the police, but then high-interest accounts were usually difficult to access, any withdrawals requiring something like a week’s notice.
The stockbroker’s account was also in Grace’s name. I couldn’t find a portfolio valuation, but going by the trading statements, the broker had in the last three months alone purchased Grace shares worth over £50,000, against sales of only £15,000. So, if I had this right, Grace and Will had joint liabilities of at least £135,000, while Grace, in her own name, had assets of at least £65,000, probably more. Will had hinted at this situation, it was more or less what I’d expected, yet something bothered me all the same, a sense that I’d seen something and missed its significance. I went through the statements again, but couldn’t find whatever it was that I was looking for.
Grace was no letter writer. She had kept clusters of thank-you notes from dinner guests, but only four newsy letters from friends, and the women who had written—old schoolfriends, it seemed, or former flatmates—made no mention of having received any sort of written communication from Grace.
Grace may not have written letters, but she most certainly used the phone. But though there
were various household bills in the desk, I could find no phone bills, and it occurred to me that they might be entered as a farm expense and kept in Will’s office across the yard.
In the miniature drawers under the pigeonholes I came across bundles of redundant diary sheets from a Filofax; three years’ worthy each year held together with its own miniature bulldog clip. Looking through the last year, I saw that Grace had used these pages solely to record engagements and meetings; no tradesmen got a mention, nor any lists. The entries were in the same neat hand. Times, places, initials or first names. Dinner parties, drinks, visits to London. No sign of AWP. And only one lunch at the Brasserie early in the year, though she had lunched elsewhere in Knightsbridge regularly, as well as places around Covent Garden, Belgravia and Chelsea. I noticed immediately that she had put first names or full names next to each and every lunch date—mostly female, none met with too regularly—until roughly six months ago, when she had suddenly consigned her lunch companion to anonymity.
I looked at this from a variety of angles, I tried to think why she might have done this, but I always came to the same conclusion. It had to be the same person she was seeing every time, it had to be someone whose name she wouldn’t even entrust to her private diary.
I realized, too, that once the companion had become nameless, she went to London more
often, every week instead of every ten or fourteen days, and that the restaurants got closer to Knightsbridge and began to repeat themselves until, ultimately, the Brasserie triumphed.
It could only be Mr Gordon of Hans Place.
I went back to July, the last month in which Grace had named her lunch companions. There was a Sarah, a Diana R, and, for the first time in her diary, a person identified not by name but a single initial: T.
Mr T. Gordon? Tony, Tom, Tim.
It was immediately after T appeared that, excluding time off for a short holiday in France, Grace had begun to make weekly visits to London and to have afternoons which were marked ‘shopping’ or simply left empty, without plans or appointments.
After Christmas, she had started going to London less often again, had lunched at the Brasserie only three times in six weeks. Love cooling? Or love interrupted in some way?
I put the diary pages into my bag for safekeeping. Safekeeping was, in this instance, a relative term. Should the police decide to treat Grace’s death as suspicious and issue a search warranty I wouldn’t withhold the diaries, but short of that happening I wouldn’t offer them up either.
Will’s office was locked. Returning to the kitchen, I hunted through the key rack above the phone, but none of the key tags said ‘office’. Then, remembering the favourite justification offered by house-breaker clients—but the key was therefore the taking—I went back across the yard and upturned stones and drain-lids and ran a hand along the underside of the outhouse eaves and over the window frames until I found the key secreted on the ledge of a ventilation brick high up on the side wall.
Will’s desk had accumulated even more detritus than before, in an even greater state of disorder. Avoiding this, I went to a shelf lined with lever-arch files and found the phone bills in a binder marked: Receipts—Office Expenditure. There were two telephone lines, it seemed, one for the office and one for the house, both paid through the farm. The back-up sheets with the itemized long-distance calls were missing, however. I went back through the last year, but in every instance only the summary sheets had been filed.
Returning to the desk, I faced the undulating landscape of paper. Trying not to disturb whatever order might lurk within the chaos, I peered under letters, read corners of bills, leafed through stacks where stacks existed. After a while I began to make out a pattern of sorts. The top leaf-fall of paper had no pattern to it at all, as though Will had chucked the incoming mail onto the desk at random, but the piles of paper beneath were arranged more or less according to subject.
Suppliers’ catalogues; Ministry of Agriculture bumf; orders and invoices; correspondence. Finding the bills, I had a clean sweep: not just
one but two bills from British Telecom, one for each line, as well as a Cellnet bill for Will’s mobile; and with the list of itemized calls still attached.
Within a couple of minutes my excitement had evaporated. No calls to the Hans Place number. No single number, in fact, that she’d called long distance with any regularity. Not even, I noticed, her mother. In the three months covered by the bill there were just two calls to Veronica, and they were several weeks apart. With a growing sense of futility, I made a note of the other three long-distance numbers that Grace—or Will—had called more than once from the house line.
The office line was even less revealing, with few long-distance calls and only two to London numbers, which I didn’t recognize.
I wasn’t sure which was worse, the suspicion that I had missed something, or the suspicion that there was nothing to miss, and that Grace had no secrets after all.
With a curiosity that wasn’t solely professionals I glanced through Will’s Cellnet bill. The majority of the calls had been made to Marsh House, with Reed Cottage a close second. Five or six calls had been made to a place in Norwich, with the remainder scattered over a variety of mainly local numbers. Combing through the list, I realized there was only one local number he’d called with any regularity: a number I had seen or used recently but couldn’t place.
There was a phone book beside the desk. I leafed through it with a sting of anticipation. Hammond, Hampson…Hampton Dr J, surgery was listed but, following modern practice, no home number.
I hovered over the phone, then, wishing I didn’t feel driven to such measures, incapable, it seemed, of stopping myself, dialled quickly. The number rang for what seemed a long time, until a female voice answered, a voice with a hint of a local accent.
I’m sorry,’ I said, I’m not sure who I’m speaking to.’
A Dark Devotion Page 26
