A Dark Devotion

by Clare Francis

  The Deepwell Arms had been painted in garish new colours and sported a large sign that promised hot food all day. Pausing beside it, I considered taking the lane to Wickham Lodge, but Edward had never been an early riser, even as a small boy, and I had spent too many mornings trying unsuccessfully to drag him out of bed to risk disturbing him now. I decided to pass by later, though my chances of catching him were probably slim. On winter weekends, if he wasn’t organizing his own shoots complete with armies of beaters and vast picnics, he seemed to be invited to another estate, to pick off someone else’s birds. For a person who had been antisocial to the point of solitude as a child, my brother had become astonishingly gregarious in his new life.

  I wondered why he hadn’t told me about Grace Dearden’s disappearance on the phone yesterday. He must have known: this was a small place, news travelled fast. Not least of all, Will Dearden was a tenant of the Wickham Estate, which Edward had inherited from Aunt Nella. It was inconceivable that Edward hadn’t known but not, perhaps, inconceivable that he hadn’t bothered to tell me.

  I carried on along the main road to Deepwell Staithe and turned down towards the quay. With an emotional heart, I paused by Sedgecomb House where I had grown up. An eighteenth-century merchant’s house with mellow bricks and white-framed bays lopped by arched windows, like eyes, it stood a narrow and incongruous three storeys tall behind high ornamental railings and a rose-edged lawn. The house was in darkness apart from a porch lights but I caught the glint of a brass plate on the gatepost. My father had run the practice on his own, with the help of an occasional locum, but now there were two or more partners, working from a new and much enlarged surgery in the stables. I’d heard that the main house, occupied by the senior partner, had also been renovated. According to Edward, one wall of the sitting room had been knocked down and the panelling ripped out to create a giant kitchen. With its morning light and view of the garden, the sitting room had been my mother’s favourite room while she could still move about the house. It was disturbing to imagine it entirely gone.

  I drove slowly down towards the water, following the lane as it curved to the right along the edge of the hard-standing that flanked the creek, an area known as the quay, though the stonework, such as it might have been, had crumbled long before anyone could remember. At the far end, on a slope overlooking the salt-marshes, I came to a large pink-washed farmhouse set at the end of a stone-walled garden: Marsh House, the home of Will and Grace Dear-den. A battered Range Rover was parked in front of the gate behind a small Citroen, while a Volvo estate stood in the drive, which led up the right side of the house to a garage hidden among the outbuildings at the rear. For all these cars, the house itself might have been deserted. A single lamp shone in the porch but the windows were dark, and, to the left side of the house, the garden wall reflected no light from the kitchen. As a kid I had always run straight up to the side door and into the kitchen unannounced. But that was long before Will and Grace took the place over, in the days when this had been Maggie’s house and her kitchen my second home.

  I parked behind the Range Rover, walked down to the water and sat huddled in my coat on the bank of the creek. The smell of salt and mud was pungent, like the sea and the earth rolled into one. At my feet, the stillness was alive with soft plops and faint murmuring, as the water stole gently between the mud banks; ebbing or flooding, I couldn’t tell. As the grey dawn seeped slowly over the landscape, I could make out the smudge of the horizon and a trickle of reflected light on the distant dunes, and felt a tremor of excitement at the view to come. When I was young I had thought this the most beautiful place on earthy I had been sure I would live all my life here. I had believed nothing could ever take me away.

  I heard a tractor somewhere up in the village and the first muted calls of the geese far out on the salt-marsh, and climbed stiffly to my feet. A light had appeared in a lower window of the Deardens’ house. I took my bag from the car and ran a comb through my hair before climbing the path to the front door.

  My knock brought the sound of an inner door and light footsteps on flagstones. A bolt slid back, the door swung open and Maggie stood before me in the unlit hall, a shadowy figure in a pale wrap. ‘I knew it would be you,’ she said, and held her arms out to me.

  Embracing her, I found myself grasping a woman smaller and slighter than the Maggie of my memory. There was no flesh on her, no weight or substance.

  ‘Alex,’ she murmured in her low throaty voice. She gestured me into the house and down the dark passageway to the kitchen. ‘Will is not here,’ she offered. ‘I’m not sure where he is gone.’

  ‘Is there any news?’

  ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Nothing.’

  In the kitchen I took a proper look at her and it was an effort to keep the surprise out of my face. Maggie, who had always appeared so vigorous, so invincible, so incapable of change, had become thinner, with a complexion the colour of grey stone, a web of harsh lines around her eyes and skin that seemed to have been sucked against her cheekbones. Before I could stop myself, I gasped, ‘Have you been all right, Maggie?’

  ‘Me?’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Oh, Alex, I’m just older. We all get older. It comes as a surprise, but there is no escape. Arthritis, gallstones…such very dull things. Sit down, my darling girl, sit down.’

  She turned away to fill a kettle. Her black hair was dry and wiry and peppered with grey, while her wrap did nothing to disguise the gauntness of her body. She looked as if she’d been neglecting her health for some time, not eating properly or smoking too much.

  I sat down at the table and glanced at a room I barely recognized. Gone were the rough walls, the stand-up furniture and posters of Italy, gone the old pine table burnished with splashes of olive oil, gone the rickety chairs and the tall dresser with the delphinium-blue china. The kitchen had been stripped out and refitted with lime-washed units by Smallbond, a shiny new Aga in racing green, a slate floor and a blaze of low-voltage star-lights across the ceiling. Everything was pale polished wood and green chintz and immaculate taste; nothing was remotely cheap. It was as if every trace of Maggie’s occupation had been erased in favour of a complete package from House & Garden, and, though I had no claims on the place, I felt a pinch of indignation anal loss, as though I had been denied a small segment of my past.

  ‘I was sorry about your father,’ Maggie said, pausing behind a chair. ‘He was a good man.’ I couldn’t help noticing her hands as they rested on the chair-back: bony, almost clawed, with prominent bumpy veins. I looked back to her face and met a gaze that was both fierce and exhausted. ‘The end—it wasn’t too bad for him?’

  ‘Well, it was quick,’ I told her.

  ‘He was at peace?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. In so far as anyone’s at peace when they’re stuffed full of morphine. The only thing that really got him down was the local consultant, who never stopped smiling and telling him he’d be fine.’

  I didn’t have to explain the irony of this to Maggie, who’d always understood people’s contradictions. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that would have annoyed him, being the same sort of doctor himself, always so bright and full of hope.’ Her voice was still beautiful, with its lilting accent, its deep melodious tones. ‘And his last years, Alex, the time after your mother died—were they happy?’

  ‘I think so. Though it was hard to be sure, living so far away.’

  ‘Cornwall,’ Maggie murmured, with one of those eloquent shrugs I had always admired so much, somewhere between a question mark and an expression of surprise.

  ‘It was Mum who wanted to live there. I always thought it was mad myself, going so far from their roots and all their friends. Especially when she was so ill.’

  ‘Yes…to leave so much.’ With a single shake of her head, Maggie went to make tea, moving across the kitchen with echoes of her old feline grace, all flow and continuity. ‘It’s been so long, Alex. So long. I meant to ask you to come and visit us—and your husband, of course. So many times I meant to
ask you, Alex, but somehow…’ She made a pure Maggie gesture, a long Italian lift of one hand, palm upturned, as if to indicate fate and its inexplicable mastery of events. ‘And then, with your brother so close, I thought you would be visiting him, I thought you would drop by when you were near us. I looked for you at the fete.’

  I’ve had no time, Maggie. Not recently. Too much work. I don’t seem to get anywhere or do anything very much. And Edward—well, he’s so busy with his country pursuits. Somehow we don’t get to see each other.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she nodded. ‘Yes…So different, you two.’

  Inadequate though my explanation had been, she let it pass. She didn’t ask about the early years, why on my six-monthly visits to Aunt Nella Id never dropped in on her, why our meetings had been restricted to occasional lunches in London, lunches that had finally petered out when Maggie had stopped going to town. If she’d guessed the reason I had avoided coming to see her here, if she’d realized how difficult I had found the idea of seeing Will again, then she’d never mentioned it.

  Placing the tea on the table, Maggie went on purposefully, as if to postpone discussion of Grace for a little longer, ‘But tell me, Alex, are you well? Are you happy? I want to know all about your life. You kook so fine, so…’ Sitting down, she made a show of considering me afresh. ‘Yes…you look as I always knew you would look when you became a little older—

  yes, serene. And lovely. And elegant.’

  ‘Maggie.’ I smiled a denial, though the plump unlovely adolescent that I had been for much of my teens was quietly pleased at everything she had said. ‘I don’t know about the serenity—you should see me in the office sometimes.’

  She reached out a hand and grasped mine briefly. ‘But you are happy?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I said it too quickly, smiling and blinking at the same time, and compounded the mixed message by reaching too hastily for my tea.

  A small silence, a slight shift in the atmosphere as we came to the matter in hand.

  I said, ‘So tell me, has no one any idea what might have happened to Grace?’

  ‘No.’ A pause and she added, ‘But I think it is not good.’

  The apparent indifference with which she said this took me by surprise. Always a passionate person, full of feeling, Maggie seemed to have suppressed all emotion.

  I asked, ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Many things. Small things. Things that I feel.’ And she touched her fingertips against her stomach. ‘Of course, I can say such a thing to you, Alex. To no one else. You understand this? William…well, he still hopes. He thinks somehow that she will come back.’

  ‘But she won’t?’

  She lifted a dismissive shoulder, she stirred her tea. ‘Grace was not a person to go away into the blue, to say nothing about where she was going.’

  ‘And there was no reason for her to leave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There weren’t any problems, Maggie?’

  She gave me a close look to be sure she had understood my meaning. ‘No,’ she stated. ‘Grace did not have problems. Grace had her life as she wished it. Grace was not a person to…’ She took a moment to find the expression. ‘…to be defeated in any way.’

  It was a strange choice of words. ‘So she was happy?’

  ‘Grace was always…How can I say it? Grace did not find it possible to be unhappy.’

  How rare, how lucky. How awe-inspiring. ‘Why does Will think she might be in London?’

  ‘He has to believe something.’

  ‘Did any of the neighbours see anything on the day she disappeared? Anything out of the ordinary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There was no sign of forced entry to the house, or violence of any sort—’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘And her car?’

  ‘Still here.’ She tilted her head towards the side of the house, and I remembered the Volvo estate.

  ‘When was she missed, Maggie?’

  ‘On the Thursday morning, when Will got back. He had been up most of the night. He

  …’ She faltered and stared at the teapot in an intense unfocused way. This was a Maggie I did not know, a Maggie absorbed and troubled and uncertain of how to proceed. She looked up suddenly, establishing contact again, a flicker of recognition and affection in her gaze. ‘He was mending a sluice. He didn’t get back until the next morning,’ she resumed. ‘When Grace was not here and there was no note—well, he was too tired to think. You understand this? He just thought she had gone to London as she planned. It wasn’t until the evening that he realized…When she did not come back, when she did not phone.’

  ‘I see. So—have I got it right?—Will was out all night?’

  ‘Most of the nighty yes. He came and made himself some coffee, he slept an hour on the sofa—’

  ‘On the sofa?’

  She frowned momentarily, ‘At Reed Cottage, with me. He had coffee and a short sleep at my house. He had to wait for the tide, you understand. To close the sluice again.’

  I didn’t understand entirely; in fact, I was baffled as to why a sluice should need so much attention, but I didn’t feel I could press her for complicated explanations.

  ‘Tell me about the police, Maggie. What have they done so far?’

  ‘Ha!’ Showing signs of her old fire, she blew out her lips. ‘They came, they asked questions.

  They came often to begin with. All day, then twice a day. But now, not so much.’ She looked away towards the window, and her mouth was tight, her eyes dark with harsh emotion.

  ‘But they did mount a search?’

  ‘A search? I suppose.’ A lift of both shoulders. ‘They sent a helicopter’—she swept a hand through the air—‘something that can see things with heat, something which finds people. Then they looked around here, in all the gardens’—she described another circle—‘and in the meadows—our meadows—and the creek. And the salt-marsh—well, some of it, but…’ She indicated the impossibility of searching the entire marshy then, tightening her lips, got up suddenly and went to the worktop where she picked up a packet of cigarettes and tapped one out. She had given up smoking when I had last seen her.

  I felt my way cautiously forward. ‘They’re not mounting any more searches?’

  Lighting her cigarette, Maggie came back to the table. ‘It appears not,’ she said, and her hands were trembling. ‘They think they will do better by talking to Will.’ She drew hard on her cigarette and sat down again.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ she said angrily, ‘they think Grace met a violent end and that Will can tell them about it.’

  Many thoughts went through my mind, most of them alarming, before I asked calmly, ‘Are you saying they’re treating Will as a suspect in some crime? Is that what they’ve told him?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘But that is what they think.’ She cut the air with the edge of her hand. ‘That is what they think.’

  ‘Why do you say that, Maggie?’

  She took a long pull on her cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘There’s this policeman, an inspector or whatever,’ she said through a wall of smoke. ‘I can see it in his mind. Look to the husband! Look to the marriage! He comes back every day, he has these cold eyes, Alex, and he looks at Will and I can see what he is thinking. He wants to know if Will is really upset or if he is secretly happy. He is looking to blame Will. Oh, Alex,’ she said with despair, ‘I see it all!’

  ‘But the police always seem like that, Maggie. They always look suspicious about absolutely everything. It’s just their way. It doesn’t necessarily mean very much.’

  ‘You say that, but I know, I know. And,’ she added in a tone that would have been frivolous if it weren’t so full of indignation, ‘I have no doubt that they have asked around to find out if there is another woman!’

  ‘But no one’s said they have? You don’t know for sure?’

  She shrugged.

  I put on my most reassuring v
oice. ‘Maggie, I honestly wouldn’t fret too much about the police at this stage.’

  ‘But I am full of bad feeling, on this, Alex. I am—’ Something distracted her, she raised her head and listened, as still as a painting, and in that moment, with the light full on her upturned face, she was almost the Maggie of old, sleek-haired and smooth-skinned, dark and vivid, a lustrous sun-warmed creature from another land.

  Hearing nothing, she turned her ravaged face back to mine and sucked in another lungful of smoke. I must have let the concern show in my face because, catching my eye, her expression flickered with understanding, she turned the cigarette round and regarded the end with mild curiosity before reaching for an ashtray and stubbing it out.

  I asked, ‘And Grace reported nothing unusual in the days before she disappeared? She didn’t see anything, or hear anything out of the ordinary?’

  Losing heart or energy, Maggie gave a weary shake of her head.

  ‘And she didn’t seem—I don’t know—different in any way?’

  A silence while Maggie appeared to gather her thoughts with difficulty. Finally she said, ‘She was very busy with the festival.’

  ‘The festival?’

  ‘The music festival ‘

  ‘Oh. What’s that? A local event?’

  ‘Yes. Grace, she started it, with Anne Hampton. She had—’ She broke off as a floorboard creaked above our heads. ‘Charlie,’ she whispered with pride.

  I followed her glance upwards and when I looked back Maggie’s face was transformed by the same magical collusive smile that she had kept for me and Will when we were children. ‘I was about to wake him anyway,’ she declared happily. ‘I won’t be long.’

  I tried to think how old the boy must be. Ten. No, more like eleven. I wondered how much he’d been told about his mother’s disappearance.

  On her way out, Maggie paused at the door. ‘There is a diary for you to look at.’

  ‘A diary?’

  ‘William left it out for you. On the desk in the drawing room. The trip to London.’