There was another flood when I was sixteen. The storm wasn’t as bad as the one in ’53, but it was bad enough to seek out two weak spots in the dunes off Deepwell, to punch holes in them in the night and send a wall of water across the marshes. The sea had poured over the grass-covered bank I was walking along now and sought out the five cottages once more, flooding them to a height of three feet. I knew it was three feet because Will and I had helped to carry the cottagers’ possessions to the upper rooms, and the two of us had measured the tidemark on the wall when the last of the mud and silt had dribbled away.
After these catastrophes, the most important sea-defences—those protecting homes and villages—had been raised and fortified, but wide tracts of reclaimed land and freshwater marsh had been abandoned to the tide and the wildlife organizations for ever. The first storm had deprived Will’s grandfather of a quarter of his marshland grazing, while the second flood had reduced the size of the tenancy held in trust for Will by almost a fifth again. The landowner had looked into the possibility of saving the land but the cost was prohibitive. It wasn’t just the expense of rebuilding the defences and the redraining of the meadows, it was the lack of yield for up to three years while the rain cleansed the earth of the corrosive brine. I knew this because the landowner had been my aunt Nella, who, vague though she was in many ways, had always been fiercely protective of the land and felt its loss keenly.
Some hundred yards beyond Reed Cottage was a major sea-defence built by indomitable optimists two centuries earlier to protect a large swathe of drained meadowland, an embankment which had proved high and wide enough to withstand the worst of both floods. The path divided here: one path followed the ridge of the embankment as it ran in a straight line towards the dunes and the sea half a mile away, while the other continued along the bank at the edge of the land that rose towards the coast road. I could see no one on either path, nor on the further reaches of the flatlands, though without binoculars it was hard to be sure.
I decided to take the embankment path because it was higher and I would be able to see further from there. Setting off, the reclaimed land lay to my right: first an area of brackish marsh then an expanse of freshwater reedbeds, and beyond that, land that was farmed by Will, most of it used for grazing, with one distant rectangle ploughed for spring planting.
After fifty yards I came to a sluice, and wondered if this was the one that had needed so much of Will’s attention. Resembling a squat guillotine, it sat above a brick-walled canal, its heavy wooden frame supporting a metal gate raised and lowered by means of a vertical screw-threaded shaft and worm gear. There was no sign of any damage. Rather the opposite: the mechanism was well greased, the metal of the gate, what I could see of it, good and solid. The gate was fully lowered, the operating handle removed, as was the custom.
I walked on, though not without the growing feeling that I had made a mistake in coming this way. At one point a matchlike figure appeared on the switchback of dunes far away to the east, only to be joined by three more hikers, backs ridged by rucksacks. After another ten minutes without another soul in sight I was almost ready to give up. The salt-creeks to my left were cut deeply into the mud and scoured regularly by the tides and I caught myself thinking: No possibility of a body there. The meadowland to my right was flat and open, the rather muddy grassland broken only by an occasional stand of reeds or a line of taller vegetation which marked a drainage ditch or freshwater brook.
I paused regularly to make a complete sweep of the horizon but saw only redshank and a delta of pinkfoot geese flying inland to raid the winter wheat. After half a mile I reached the second and last sluice, as well greased and sturdy as the first. With only the dunes and sea ahead, I finally made the decision to turn back. I retraced my steps for a short distance then, changing course, scrambled down the bank and set off across the meadows at an angle that would take me back to the coastal path a mile or so from the village.
The ground was soft and wet underfoot, as though there had been persistent and heavy rain, and at one point I had to make a wide detour to avoid a particularly boggy patch. Reaching a drainage ditch, I found my way to a crossing point—two planks of wood retained by stakes—but at the next ditch either I had forgotten where to find the planks or they had been moved, and I was reduced to leaping the water at a narrow point and landing in a squelch of heavy mud.
Water seeped into my shoes, I could see more boggy ground ahead and, cutting my losses, abandoning the diagonal route, I headed straight for higher ground. I was negotiating another mire when I became aware of a figure standing on the far edge of the meadows. My heart leapt painfully. He was a long way off but I could see the height of him, and the pale disc of his face as he looked towards me, and the frame of his dark hair. He was motionless for a while, then he began to lope slowly along the path as if to cut me off. Picking up speed, he ran raggedly, stumbling a little as he kept looking my way, before veering down onto the meadow and heading towards me.
I stopped and waved, trying to suppress the memory of the last time Will had run towards me like this, when I had been sixteen and lightheaded with love.
He was quite close before he recognized me. Then, with a cry of realization, he came to an abrupt halt and threw his head back, as if in disbelief.
I continued uncertainly towards him.
‘God,’ he panted as I got closer, ‘I thought for a moment…God.’ His face contorted into a harsh grimace. ‘I thought…’ But he was beyond words and, while he regained his breath and some measure of self-control, he turned away from me and shook his head.
When he finally turned back, he was still white-faced. ‘God, Alex, you looked just like—just like Grace, for heaven’s sake.’
I stammered, ‘Grace?’
‘God,’ he muttered again, running a savage hand over the top of his head and down his face. ‘God.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ I couldn’t imagine how he could have mistaken me for Grace, we looked so utterly different.
We stood silently for a moment before Will, with a last shake of his head, faced me properly. ‘It’s good of you to come,’ he said.
‘I’m glad to help in any way I can.’ The well-used expression sounded trite in my ears.
He smiled suddenly and, reaching out, pulled me into an all-enveloping hug. The gesture was so intense, so spontaneous that the emotion surged into my throat, I couldn’t breathe and for a moment I clung to him, overcome by a rush of compassion and feeling, not only for him and everything he was going through, but also, in another part of my heart, for myself.
He pulled back and kissed me firmly on both cheeks, Italian style. Holding me at arm’s length, he said, ‘You look well, Alex.’
Somehow I managed a wide smile, a short laugh. ‘Oh, I’m okay.’
He dropped his hands. ‘How long is it?’
‘Twelve years, I think.’
‘Twelve,’ he murmured. ‘God.’
The time had been good to him, better than to me. There were lines around his eyes and beside his mouth and between his eyebrows where he had frowned against the lights but he still had the vivid dark eyes, the thick unruly hair of the corsair. Only his skin, denied the southern sun, seemed too white, so that it accentuated the dark stubble on his cheeks and the strain in his eyes.
We began to walk slowly in the direction of the village.
‘You’ve seen Maggie?’ he said.
‘She told me that the police didn’t seem to be making much progress.’
‘I’d say that about sums it up at the moment!’ he declared with a trace of bitterness.
‘What are they doing exactly, Will? What lines are they following?’
‘You may well ask! That’s the one thing they don’t seem to tell me.’
‘But why on earth not? What reason?’
‘Oh, they don’t give reasons.’
‘But that’s ridiculous!’ I exclaimed. My vehemence surprised him, and he shot me a quick glance.
&n
bsp; We reached a patch of mire. Negotiating my way across the more solid tussocks, I said, ‘They should always tell you. That’s one of their main duties, to keep the family informed. I can get on to them for you, get them to tell us what they’re doing, find out if they’ve covered everything.’
He looked doubtful. ‘Well…’
‘Believe me, in cases like this it pays to put steady pressure on the police, it keeps them on the ball. But I can take care of that for you, give you one less thing to worry about.’
He had begun to shake his head long before I’d finished. ‘No. You see, I’m glad to speak to the police. At least I feel I’m doing something that way. No—it’s just the London end of things…if you would. I thought you might be able to help with that.’
Evidently I had sold myself badly, or too hard. ‘If that’s what you want. Of course. I’ll get someone on to it straight away.’
He stopped and turned his gave on to me. His eyes were achingly familiar and I felt a fresh lurch of emotion.
‘You can do that?’
‘We have an ex-inspector who does our inquiry work. He’s very thorough, very professional.’
Accepting this, relaxing a little. Will immediately grew tense again, as if poised on the edge of some question too difficult to ask.
I said, ‘I looked through Grace’s diary.’
‘You did? You can see, then,’ he argued with sudden vigour, ‘that she could easily have gone to London that day.’
I saw only that I would have to go cautiously if I wasn’t to destroy his hopes too unkindly. I asked, in a neutral tone, ‘Do the police know if she got as far as London?’
‘No.’ He plunged into a momentary gloom. Watching this rapid transformation, I remembered the way his face had always done this, reflected each passing thought like a mirror to his mind.
‘But, then, they haven’t looked properly,’ he retorted, regaining his fire, ‘so it’s not surprising, is it? They haven’t checked some of the most obvious places.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well—’ He struggled with this. ‘I don’t know—shops, hairdressers.’
I went more carefully still. ‘What about getting to the station? Her car’s still at the house, I gather.’
‘She could have got a lift.’
‘A lift. You mean, with a friend?’
‘It’s possible! She might have got a lift all the way to London.’
‘Has anyone come forward to say they drove her?’
‘No. But, then, why should they?’ Turning on his heel, he started off again at a brisker pace.
I tried to work out what, if anything, I was meant to glean from this remark. Sometimes anxiety made people angry, and anger made them irrational, and it wasn’t always possible to know how much weight to give to their wilder statements.
Marching briskly to keep up, I said, ‘Do you have any thoughts on what might—or could—have happened to Grace?’
He threw me a desperate look. ‘Thoughts? I have no thoughts! None!’
‘But what makers you think someone might have given Grace a lift without coming forward? Have you a particular reason to think that?’
‘No! No reason.’ He stopped once more. I noticed his eyes again, I saw the frustration in them, and the pain. ‘But every possibility should be looked into, surely. Investigated. Otherwise…’ He threw up an outspread palm in a gesture that was almost pure Maggie. ‘What I can’t stand is all this waiting around doing nothing. This waiting for…what? Tell me—what?’ He thrust his hand in his pocket. ‘The London thing…She was planning to go there, that’s all. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose she might have arrived. That’s all!’ He glared at me, daring me to disagree, yet at the same time half expecting me to.
‘She didn’t turn up to any of her appointments?’
‘But something might have happened as soon as she got there. She might have changed her mind and gone somewhere else.’ His voice cracked. ‘I don’t know!’
‘Well,’ I offered calmly, ‘it seems to me that, first and foremost, you need to find out what the police have done so far, then take it on from there.’
The exasperation fell away, his expression softened a little. We trudged on at a companionable pace.
I said, ‘Maggie told me you had trouble with the sluices on the Wednesday night.’
He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did his tone was vague. ‘Trouble? One of the gates was leaking, yes.’
‘And you had to stay up all nighty she said?’
‘Well…Some of it.’
‘And you didn’t get home at all that night?’
‘It was easier to grab some sleep on Maggie’s sofa. I didn’t get back till breakfast time.’
‘Would Grace—’ I stopped abruptly, aware that I was ploughing on relentlessly, as though Will were one of my regular clients born and raised on police interviews. ‘I’m sorry—you don’t mind my asking all this?’
‘No. Go ahead.’
‘It’ll help me to get the full picture—’
‘I understand.’
‘It’s essential with disappearances—’
He gave me a curious look. ‘It’s all right, Alex. Ask whatever you like!’
Feeling I had let myself down in some way, I nodded rapidly and glanced away. ‘Okay…’ I put on my professional voice, quiet and low and detached, the one I had acquired in the early days to impress people who had thought I was too young and inexperienced. ‘Would Grace have locked the house while you were out that night?’
‘I always told her to. But she might have left the kitchen door open. We often did.’
‘Was it open when you got back in the morning?’
A slight hesitation. ‘Yes.’
‘But you’re saying there wasn’t anything unusual in that?’
‘No.’
‘And Grace wasn’t there?’
‘I thought she’d gone to catch her train.’
‘And Charlie? He was on his own, was he, when you got back?’
‘No, no. He was with Mum. He was always going to be with Maggie that night.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Because Grace was leaving so early in the morning. And because Charlie always goes to stay with Mum at least once a week.’
‘I see. So once you’d gone out to mend the sluice that evening, Grace was alone in the house?’
‘No.’ He cancelled this with a gesture. ‘What I mean is, I don’t know. I don’t know if she was there. You see, I didn’t get back to the house at all that day,’ he explained in the tone of someone going over a much-repeated story. ‘I went into Norwich in the morning to do some business. I was there all day. I was on my way back home when Mum called me in the car and told me about the sluice. I drove straight there. I never went home at all.’
‘What time did you get there, to the sluice?’
He searched a rapidly tiring brain. ‘About six thirty, I suppose.’
‘Dark, then?’ I murmured.
He shrugged, ‘Yes.’
‘So who was the last person to see Grace before she disappeared?’
‘We don’t know.’ His voice rose again in agitation. ‘Well, the police aren’t sure, which amounts to the same thing. After Charlie got back from school Grace took him over to Mum’s—’
‘She drove?’
‘Yes. She stayed for a while, then drove back home.’
‘At what time?’
‘About four, I think.’
‘So after Maggie, no one else seems to have seen her?’
‘Well, no one so far. But someone might well have seen her driving back or parking the car or going into the house. Or…’
I thought he was being rather optimistic. Marsh House stood alone at the end of the quay some distance from the nearest house. It was perfectly possible that she had returned home—or travelled elsewhere—unseen.
We reached the edge of the meadows and the promise of drier ground.
‘Well,
it seems to me that there are at least three areas worth looking into,’ I announced, following close behind Will as he advanced up the slope in long strides. ‘The first is to check out the London end, which I’ll arrange. The second is to make sure that no local information has been missed—make sure the police have made sufficient house-to-house enquiries, asked the neighbours if they saw anything odd, that sort of thing. Sometimes neighbours don’t realize the value of what they’ve seen, don’t think of telling anyone about it until they’re actually asked. The third…’ Will, listening hard, slowed down and I almost bumped into him. ‘…is to decide if the police search was adequate, to make sure they haven’t missed any obvious places that Grace might have gone to or’—it had to be said—‘been taken to. I would add a fourth area—forensic testing, fingerprints and so on—but if it wasn’t done almost immediately…’
‘It wasn’t,’ he reported darkly.
‘And you didn’t notice anything when you got back that morning—or since? Tyre marks, smears of dirt, footprints, things like that?’
‘No!’
The agitation had come back into his face and I added hastily, ‘It was only a thought. It’s very rare to find anything like that.’
Reaching the path. Will paused. ‘Look…perhaps it might be best if you did go and talk to the police,’ he said awkwardly. ‘You know which questions to ask.’
I said, in a rush, ‘Of course.’
‘I always get so angry when I see them! I feel they’re being so bloody useless! And the way they look at me, Alex! I know what they’re thinking—they make it so bloody obvious!’ He gave a short bitter laugh before shooting me a quick glance to see if I could guess what was coming. ‘They think I’m responsible! They think I must have done away with her.’
‘They’re bound to think that.’
He wasn’t quite sure how to take this remark.
‘The great majority of disappearances are linked to family situations,’ I explained. ‘To stress or money worries. Or violence within the family. It’s a statistic that gets drummed into the police, I’m afraid. They’re apt to get tunnel vision.’
A Dark Devotion Page 6