Nicci French - The Memory Game

But there were some entries – an argument with Mum, which I represented with sanctimonious lack of imagination, or a visit to a medieval mansion where Catholics hid under the floorboards during the Reformation – that stubbornly refused to yield their treasures. They were like the graves in Highgate Cemetery, grown over with ivy and nettles, unvisited and quite forgotten. Most of our lives lie underground.

The last entry had always been available to my recall – which wasn’t surprising since the day before Natalie’s disappearance had been like the defined rim around a black hole. I could summon up the party preparations without much difficulty: I remembered kissing Theo in the square of mud between the newly laid stone tiles where the last pieces of the barbecue would be built in time for the party and jumping up guiltily as we heard Jim Weston approach.

I shut the diary and rubbed my eyes. A few drops of rain fell heavily on the book’s cover. I felt as if I were staring at something through thick liquid; all the shapes I was trying to make out were distorting and breaking up. Kissing Theo in the earth made ready for the barbecue. The barbecue.

I stood up, stumbling in my haste, and ran in the increasing rain to where Natalie’s body had been found. It was still a livid scar of churned-up mud and rubble and a few shallow-rooting weeds. I jumped down into the mud and sunk my hands into it, digging around messily. I pulled out the leg of a doll, a rusted fork, its tines clogged, a beer bottle with a chipped neck; then a broken tile, a fragment of rusty grating. They were the remains of the barbecue. Natalie had been buried underneath the barbecue.

Heavily, I sat down at the edge of the hole, wiping my muddy hands on my muddy jeans. Rain fell steadily now, obscuring the landscape, and it was as if a curtain was being drawn across the Stead and all its secrets. Something was wrong. I couldn’t think straight; it was like trying to remember a dream but losing it in the process. Natalie was buried under the barbecue but the barbecue was built before she died. I spoke out loud:

‘So that’s why the body was buried there. It was an improbable place because it was an impossible place.’

I buried my face in my hands and stared through my fingers at the muddy hole. Rain slid down the back of my neck. I tried again:

‘Natalie was buried before she died.’

Or:

‘Natalie was buried underneath the barbecue; Natalie died after the barbecue was completed; therefore…’ Therefore what? I kicked a few fragments of tiles back into the hole and stood up. Kim would be wondering where I’d got to.

Kim was lying on her bed in our room when I got back, studying a map. She sat up.

‘You’ve been ages. Christ! Look at your face: have you had a mudbath or something? What’s the matter?’

‘What? Nothing. I don’t know.’ I went into the bathroom, washed the mud off my grubby face and hands. When I returned to the bedroom, Kim was pulling on her boots.

‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asked.

‘No. Go ahead if you want something.’ Then, abruptly: ‘Can we go for a walk?’

‘Of course; I’ve found one of nine miles that starts just down the road from here, so we should be able to finish it before it gets too dark. Lots of hills and valleys. I should think in this weather it’ll be a bit muddy.’

I looked down at my jeans.

‘I think I can cope with that.’

I didn’t say anything for the first couple of miles – and anyway we climbed up the narrow rocky path so swiftly that I probably wouldn’t have had the breath to walk and talk at the same time. Brambles tore at my clothes, and rain dripped from wet leaves. Eventually the path widened out and we reached the top of a rise. In fine weather there would have been a view.

‘It’s all jumbled up in my mind,’ I began.

‘What do you mean, jumbled up?’

‘At first it seemed clear, everything was as I’d expected. I mean of course it was – I know the Stead almost as well as my own house. I just mooched around for a bit; you know, all those old memories.’ Kim nodded but said nothing. ‘Then I went back to where it happened.’ It was strange how I still found it difficult to say baldly ‘where Alan murdered Natalie’. ‘I haven’t been there for nearly twenty-six years.’ I stepped over a tree that lay across the path, and waited for Kim to draw level with me again. ‘I started to walk towards it. But Kim, it was all wrong. I remembered it wrongly.’

‘What’s so surprising about that? You say yourself that you hadn’t been there for years. Of course you didn’t remember it.’

‘No. I remembered it – but I remembered it wrongly. Don’t you understand, Kim, I’ve walked through that landscape so many times in my memory with Alex, but when I actually went there it was all back to front. The wrong way round. Oh shit, I don’t know.’ I took out a damp packet of cigarettes from my jacket, and lit one as I walked along.

‘Let me get this straight, Jane. Are you saying that the walk that you pieced together with Alex was inaccurate?’

‘No, no, I’m not. It was accurate, all the details were there if you see what I mean, just the wrong way round.’

‘I’m a bit confused. What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know. I feel completely bemused, Kim. And that’s not all.’

‘What’s not all?’ Kim’s voice went up one notch more in exasperation.

‘It’s not just that the walk was the wrong way round, I worked something else out – I can’t think why no one’s worked it out before. Now it seems blindingly obvious.’

‘What’s obvious? Come on Jane, don’t be so fucking gnomic with me; spell it out, will you?’

‘Okay. Listen then. You know I’ve been re-reading my diary, the one Claud brought me, which takes us right up to the day before Natalie died?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, in the last entry – which was on the day before Natalie was killed – I wrote about the unfinished barbecue; the barbecue that Jim Weston was getting done in time for the party.’

‘So?’

‘That’s where Natalie was buried, Kim. Under that barbecue.’

I watched as very slowly Kim’s face turned from blankness to bemusement.

‘It’s not possible. It means…’

‘It means that Natalie was buried under bricks that were laid before she died.’

‘But…’

I counted off the points on my fingers.

‘Look, number one: we know that she died the day after the party. She was seen the day after, and by someone trustworthy, who had no involvement with the family. Two: we know that Alan killed her – I remember it and he’s confessed. But Alan didn’t arrive at the Stead until after the barbecue was finished. Three: Natalie was buried under the barbecue.’ I was striding along now, with vigour borne of frustration. Kim had almost to run to catch up with me.

‘If what you say is true, you should go to the police, Jane.’

I stopped dead.

‘What on earth could I say? Why would they accept this new twist to my memory? Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference to the result. Alan killed Natalie and he’s in prison. I just want to know how.’

I kicked a bramble out of my path and dug in my pocket for another cigarette.

‘Oh Christ, Jane, can’t you stop this?’ Kim asked. ‘Why is it so important to know? Think about it. You know the big thing about Natalie’s death – you know who killed her. And now you want to know all the smaller things as well. And then if you find those out, you’ll want to ferret around and fret and smoke dozens more of those cigarettes of yours until you’ve pieced together all the tiny details. But you’ll never know everything about this, Jane. Do you want to hear what I think?’