The Memory Game

‘I don’t know. It was obviously a terrible shock to us all. But that’s just a tragic external event. I don’t see what there is to talk about there.’

Alex was calm and unwavering. ‘I’m interested by the words you use. It was a shock to “us all”. Yet it was an “external” event. Was it really external? You know, I sometimes think that the areas that people don’t want to talk about are often the best places to start. Your divorce is a matter of opinion, emotion, attitude. Natalie’s death was a fact. Her discovery and disinterment are facts. I think that is where we should begin.’

I had always distrusted the therapeutic talk about emotion, its distrust for the reality of events and I was very impressed by Alex’s practicality. I was won over by it.

‘Yes, I agree. I think you’re right.’

‘Good, Jane. Talk to me about when Natalie disappeared.’

I settled myself back down on the couch. I pondered where to begin. ‘It’s awful but even though it was a terrible tragedy and every detail should be unforgettable, so much of it seems vague and long-ago. It was a quarter of a century ago, after all, in the summer of 1969. Natalie disappeared just after a big party out at the Stead – the Martello house in Shropshire. The party was to celebrate Alan’s and his wife Martha’s twentieth anniversary. Perhaps it was that there was nothing like a sudden event, the discovery of a body or something, which would have crystallised it all in my mind. What I vividly remember is that the last time Natalie was seen was on the day after the party, by a man from the village.’ I paused. ‘The odd thing is that I was there.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, I wasn’t exactly there, of course, but I was just near. I must have been the closest person to her, apart from the man who saw her, and then, maybe, the person who… well, you know.’

‘The person who killed Natalie.’

‘Yes. Maybe I should describe the place to you. Is that all right?’

‘Of course.’

‘Natalie was last seen by the Col, which is a small river or a large stream that runs along one boundary of the Martellos’ land. There’s a little path from Westbury, the local village, that crosses the Col and then goes through Alan’s and Martha’s land, and passes by the house. The man was walking along the path to deliver something to the Stead, or collect something, I can’t remember, and he saw Natalie standing on the track by the water at the bottom of the slope of Cree’s Top. He even waved at her, but she didn’t notice him. That was the last time anybody saw Natalie alive.’

‘Where were you?’

‘On the other side of Cree’s Top. It sounds like the summit of a mountain, or something, but really it’s just a bit of raised ground that the stream winds around.’

I closed my eyes.

‘I haven’t been back there since that day, I could never bear the idea of it, I never even walk in that part of the grounds, but I can picture every detail. If Natalie had walked away from the bridge, along the track that goes beside the south side of the Col, Alan’s and Martha’s side, it would have taken her up the pebbly path through a few trees on the top and then she would have been able to look down at me. We were no more than two or three minutes’ walk away from each other.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘That is the one thing I do remember clearly. Every detail. I was a moody sixteen-year-old girl. I don’t think you would have liked me much. I was a bit in love and a bit forlorn and during that summer I was either with Natalie, though not so much as I had been, for various reasons; or with Theo; or on my own. That day, it was early afternoon, I was feeling particularly gloomy. So I took the sole existing manuscript copy of the love poems that I had been writing during the summer and I went down to the Col and lay there, right on the edge of the stream, against a boulder down at the beginning of the slope of Cree’s Top. I sat there for a couple of hours reading through these poems and writing another one. Then, on an impulse, I tore the poems out of the book one by one, and screwed each one up so that it looked like a little white carnation and threw it into the stream and as I sat there I watched them float down the stream away from me until they were carried out of sight. Look, I don’t think there’s any point in going on about this.’

‘Please, Jane, humour me.’

‘If you say so. The problem I have with this process, what I distrust about it, is that I feel I’m being encouraged to indulge, maybe even increase, emotions that aren’t particularly valid or positive.’

‘What emotions?’

‘I didn’t mean any emotions in particular. But to take the situation I’ve just been describing. For years I felt this intense guilt that I could have done something to prevent what happened. I was so close and if things had been just a tiny bit different, if I had decided to walk over Cree’s Top, it might never have happened, I might have been able to save Natalie. At the same time I always knew that that was ridiculous and that you could reason like that about almost anything.’

‘You felt an intense guilt.’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, I think we’ll stop there.’

Alex helped me up off the couch. ‘I think you’ve done wonderfully,’ he said.

I felt myself blush, the way I used to when I was singled out for praise at school and I felt a little cross at my own susceptibility.

Nine

There were bones among the bones. Natalie had been pregnant when she was strangled. The police told Alan and Martha, Alan called his sons, and Claud called me the day before the funeral. At first, I couldn’t take in what his soothing voice was telling me. As always when Claud assumed his professionally calm manner, I became babblingly irrational. I could only think in unordered questions.

‘How could she have been pregnant?’

‘This is difficult for all of us, Jane.’

‘Who could the father have been?’

Claud began to sound weary and impatient. ‘Jane, I’ve only this minute heard, I know nothing more than you do.’

‘The funeral isn’t going ahead now, is it?’

‘Yes, it is. The police have released the remains to us.’

‘But aren’t there examinations they can carry out? Couldn’t they find out who the father is with DNA tests and things like that? You’re a doctor, you must know.’

This was Claud’s cue to assume his pedagogic tone. ‘I’m sure the forensic scientists have retained specimens, Jane. But as far as I understand it, DNA profiling won’t be possible. I believe that samples of blood or bodily fluid are required.’

‘Can’t you get DNA from bones?’

‘Is this really the time, Jane? Bone cells have nuclei, so of course they contain DNA, but so far as I know it degrades in skeletons and if it has been buried in soil, the DNA strands don’t just crumble, they also get contaminated. But this isn’t my area. You must address your enquiries about this to the proper authorities, as they say.’

‘It sounds hopeless,’ I said.

‘The situation is not good.’

Pregnant. I felt sick, and the feeling of foreboding that had been closing in on me felt like a fist around my pounding heart.