CHAPTER 1
GAME
The year Peter went missing was the year of the floods. I was on my way home from a meeting in Paris when the call came. It was a Wednesday, late April, and as the train hurtled toward London night was coming on. The heavy clouds were darkest blue and great pools of water lay in the fields like molten silver. I was on my laptop, reading about the latest in a series of leaked financial papers. When I glanced up, the last light slipped away, and my reflection coalesced upon the window as though the darkness was developing fluid.
My phone rang and I rooted violently for it in my handbag, alive with panic, as though I was secretly, desperately hoping for a momentous and life-changing call from someone who would ring only once and withhold their number. In my wildest dreams, I would not have guessed Peter’s mother would be the caller.
“Andrea … are you there? It’s Patricia, Mrs. White.” When I didn’t answer, she went on, “Is that you, Andy? Is it you?”
“Yes, it’s me. How are you?” Had the vicar died? A quick, stabbing pain, deeper than I would have expected.
“We’re both well, dear. You sound … a bit different.” Thinking about it later, I would realize she meant posher. “Peter says you’re doing very well.”
Her voice was trembly. She had always been old, even when we were small. Her eyes were a pale china blue. When I used to knock at the vicarage door, her mouth would purse in disappointment as though she’d been expecting a boy, not a girl, but a nice boy called Rufus or Hugo from a nice home. But there I was with my crew cut and pink plastic earrings, smiling the gap-toothed smile of a master criminal and inviting Peter to throw sticks in the stream, by which I meant trapping a slowworm and posting it through Mrs. East’s letterbox because I’d heard my mother call her a witch. We were always up to something or other. I had a weakness for games, a trait I shared with Peter.
“It’s Peter, dear, I’m worried about him. We haven’t heard from him. Not this past month. Have you spoken to him?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t, Mrs. White.” I imagined her standing in the vicarage front room, staring out toward the yew hedge, the vicar beside her with a crocheted blanket draped over his knees. It seemed wrong, talking to her on an iPhone. She came from a generation that knew rationing and hand-cranked their cars and had uncles who’d died in the trenches. A time of myth, it seemed now, like that of Arthur and his knights.
“It’s been four Sundays now. He always calls us on Sundays after Evensong. I’ve tried calling him but I just get the recording.”
I hesitated. My instinct was to cover for him, only I didn’t know what I was covering for. It had been my birthday, my thirty-eighth, the previous week. Usually Peter remembered and sent a text, but not this time.
“I don’t see Peter very often. We sort of move in different circles. And work is always so busy. I mean mine and Peter’s. Have you tried calling him there? Or his other friends?”
“He told us he changed jobs. I thought I wrote the name of the company down but I can’t find it. It was a foreign name, or names, a sort of string of foreign names. And he hasn’t brought anyone home in … well, in quite a while.”
No, it was unlikely that Peter would have brought anyone home.
“You were always such good friends. You and Peter. And Marcus and Emma, of course. But you and Peter were friends first. I know he always thought of you as his best friend, even after,” she paused, “everything that happened.”
Everything that happened. Peter had wanted to talk about it at the wedding, the wedding I invited him to and after which he’d disappeared, if only from Patricia.
“Have you tried googling him, I mean for his work number?”
“Googling…? No, I was hoping … you will look into it for me, Andy? You’ll find out what he’s up to, won’t you?”
After we hung up, I stared out the window. The train carriage was quiet. We raced past a string of streetlamps on an overpass, lights blurring so the night was stitched with golden thread. I wondered why I’d agreed. It might have been her calling me Andy. For well over a decade, Peter’s mother was pretty much the only person to call me by my full name. But I have been Andrea, or frequently Ms. Carter, for many years now.
Then there was the fact that she had always loved Peter, fervently, protectively; when he was sixteen she was still cutting the crusts off his crab paste sandwiches, unaware that he’d been throwing them to the jackdaws in the graveyard since he was seven and buying chocolate bars for lunch with money he’d come by via the vicar’s trouser pockets. Yes, Patricia loved Peter, and yet I don’t know if she ever really knew him. She and the vicar had had some fairly clear ideas about who he should be, and in the end I think he consented to play pretend with them, to give them what they wanted, which meant, I suppose, that he loved them too.
At King’s Cross I made my way underground. There, the walls were papered with moving, glowing dreams. Descending on the escalators to the Victoria Line, I found myself thinking that if ads were really dreams, the preoccupations of the unconscious, then all we wanted to be was sexy. Because they all said sexy—the women coy, or inviting, or half-naked, the men white of tooth and thick of mane—so that must be what we were buying. Not good, or kind, or honorable, the qualities the vicar had once struggled to impress on us, just sexy.
I forced myself to march the few streets home, wondering how quickly I could get into bed and fall asleep. I was always tired at that time. Doing my job, sleep came at a premium, but even when I did get a chance to catch up, it was a tiredness that sleep could not cure. If I had divided myself into parts—body, brain, heart, soul—I would have been unable to tell you which bit precisely was so exhausted.
Once home, I didn’t immediately go to bed. Instead, I fussed about the flat, making tiny adjustments to things, passing a duster over the surfaces, even though the cleaner had been the day before. The fretfulness in Patricia’s voice had got to me. I wondered what Peter was playing at, which made me think of the wedding, of the last time I had seen Peter. He had wanted to talk about the manor, but I had closed him down.
As I laid out my clothes for the next day, I had no inkling that, in light of Peter’s disappearance, the manor and “everything that happened” there was a subject that was going to be thoroughly reopened. That in pursuit of Peter, I would see and speak to them all again except, of course, for the one who could no longer speak to anyone.
Slipping between the sheets, I checked my emails and scrolled through the news one last time, then turned out the light. In the darkness, I lay listening to the quiet street and distant sirens. In London, no matter where you live there are always sirens at night. I thought of the scenes the police were being called to, the people being raced to the hospital in the backs of ambulances. I thought of all the games no longer being played. Of all the games gone wrong.
All of which should have meant bad dreams, or at least unsettled ones, but in fact my dream was quite the opposite, although in a way that was worse, since waking from it was so painful. I don’t remember all of it, of course, was left only with a few images and a feeling: my bare feet ankle-deep in the wet emerald lawn, the sun falling just so on the manor, and to the left the lake where the wind stirred the reeds and the little white temple cast its dark shadow on the ripples. The whole afternoon lay ahead, spectral in its perfection. The sky would stay its clear, glassy blue, the shadows would creep feline over the grass, and then as the sun sank, the stone of the place would begin to exhale the heat of the whole long day. And in my dream, I knew exactly which day it was. I knew that today was the day of the apocalypse, today was June 20, 1996, the day the four of us first went to the manor, the day we met David. Just before we found out about the diamonds.