Every Contact Leaves A Trace (11 page)

The balcony walls are made of a kind of Perspex. I had a line of apple trees espaliered low against the south-west end. Honeysuckle climbs among their branches and lavender runs along beneath them. Jasmine grows on a trellised arch that straddles the balcony and a series of troughs is strung out between the apple trees and the kitchen, raised up from the ground and filled with the herbs and flowers that my mother and I used to grow in the garden in Hampshire, so that in the summer months, when the panels are left open, the scent of all these things sweeps in with the breeze.

I told the architect that I envisaged a glass box placed over a series of rooms and open spaces, so that I could walk unimpeded around its periphery and look out at the city on one side and the greener reaches of north London on the other. And that is what Rachel used to do sometimes, walking round and round reciting the landmarks she could see and watching the planes passing. She told me that on nights when I was due back from one of my trips abroad, if she knew the time of my flight, she would sit on the sofa at the south-west end watching for me and checking the clock and staring and staring to see if she could guess which plane I was on. I remember calling from the airport one evening to say that I had landed and she said she was quite sure she’d worked it out, so sure that she’d actually jumped up and run to the glass and pulled the panel across and stood on the balcony and leaned out into the night and stared and stared to see if she could see my face at one of the windows of the plane, knowing all the time that such a thing would have been impossible. When I arrived back at the apartment she was standing just inside the door smiling and she said I saw you I saw you I’m sure I did and I had hardly put my bags down on the floor before she was tugging at my coat and kissing me and taking my hand and walking me through to the bedroom saying fuck me fuck
me
right this minute and don’t ever go away again I hate it when you’re gone.

I have a very clear memory of the first night I ever spent here. I didn’t sleep at all. It was only a week after it had been finished and the smell of paint was fresh in the air. I slid the panels in my bedroom wall right back so I could see out to the space beyond and on through the glass, right across the night. I lay with my head propped up on the pillows and I thought about the fact that there was nothing above me apart from endless sky. And as I lay I had a sense that there was nothing beneath me either. It was as though I was floating in mid-air, my bed a Zeppelin cut loose from its mooring. The feeling I had then, that the whole apartment might take off at any moment and drift wherever the breeze sent it, is one that has never quite left me in all the time I have lived here.

Now that Rachel has gone and it is only me again, I will sometimes spend a night sitting on the sofa at the south-west end, wrapped in my duvet and looking out at the lights of the planes passing. I will follow the paths they trace across the blackness of the sky and I will wonder where they are going, or where they have been, and I will imagine the people sitting up there full of the anticipation of homecoming.

A few weeks after that first morning, when Rachel moved her things in and came to live with me, she asked if she could put her desk up against the glass where she’d seen the heron. I offered to share my study with her, or even to have it partitioned so she could have a room of her own, somewhere she could be alone, but she said she wanted to be closer to the outside, and to sit and watch the heron when it came. And this is where I am sitting now at the close of the day while the evening settles outside and everything becomes still. There is no sound apart from the occasional wail of the buses as they pass along the New North Road, like dinosaurs roaring, Rachel used to say, or whales turning in the ocean.

When she wasn’t in the library, or teaching at the university, she
would
work here at her desk most days, looking out at the canal with her books on the shelves behind her. She slotted them into the spaces that she found amongst my own so that now, when I am searching for an old textbook or browsing for one of my mother’s gardening books to read in the silence of my weekday breakfasts, I am from time to time surprised by a volume of Shelley, or Keats, or by a run of novels. And sometimes I will open one of those instead and see an inscription, ‘To Rachel, My Love’, without a signature, and I will begin to read and find myself rushing through an open weir, carried away by a current that is strange to me and new. And when I am halfway through and utterly lost to myself, no longer in London but far away in Italy, a fifth person in an abandoned hillside villa lit only by candlelight and now and then the light from a storm, I will turn a page and come across a postcard covered in a script too faded to read, or a photograph of Rachel with someone I do not recognise, and I will remember what she used to say about the sort of person who went to the trouble of using an actual bookmark to keep their place.

‘Are you really sure you don’t want a space for yourself?’ I asked her one evening as I lay on the sofa marking up a contract and she sat typing, and she said no thank you, honestly, she’d already told me it was fine. It was enough that she could lock the drawers of her desk and know that I’d never be able to look in them. Sometimes when she was out, or asleep, I would walk past her desk and look at the drawers and wonder whether she’d been joking when she’d said that, or whether they were actually locked, and if they were, where she kept the key. I never thought of trying them, not until the Tuesday after she died when I got home from Oxford to find a message on the machine from Evie. She wanted me to look for a document wallet of Rachel’s and courier it to her at her house in Chelsea the next morning. It was black, she said, black leather, zipped up around its sides. And if I didn’t find it straight away, she said, I should carry on looking until I did because she absolutely had to have it. I couldn’t see it immediately and I noticed that the desk drawers were probably big enough for it to be in one of them. They
were
locked after all, every single one, but then I looked on the shelves again and found it so there was no need to force them. That was something the police did when they came the following afternoon. The search they had done on the night of Rachel’s murder was only a brief one; they had come back again, they said, to look more thoroughly, and to take some things away with them.

After they had finished, and a couple of officers had bagged up Rachel’s things and carried them downstairs, the detective came and sat with me on the balcony. He explained that they’d found very little of interest when going through the emails in her Hotmail account, and none to speak of in her university account. There didn’t seem to be much that was particularly personal, hardly anything at all in fact; the only emails she’d kept were ones relating to research, or holiday or theatre bookings. They weren’t particularly surprised by the lack of personal correspondence in her university account, but when it came to her Hotmail they had to assume one of two explanations: either she was someone who deleted almost everything she received, and everything she sent, as a matter of course, or someone else had hacked into her account and done it for her, knowing that the content would be incriminatory. I told him she would never have been so fastidious, describing the state of her desk in her department office the few times I’d visited her there, and her tendency to leave her post unopened for days. In that case, the detective said, did I think she might have printed off her correspondence and kept it somewhere, and could I think of anywhere they hadn’t looked yet, since nothing much seemed to have emerged from their search that afternoon? No, I said. No I couldn’t. And I explained then that although we’d been careful with our boundaries, Rachel and I, and that I’d respected hers to the extent that there may well have been personal correspondences she’d kept from me, I was sure she would have said if anything had been troubling her. He asked one or two more questions about my relationship with Rachel then and I told him I’d had that conversation already, in the police station, and that we’d been very much in love, and if he was suggesting that there might have been someone else he was mistaken. He made a note of
our
conversation and said they’d carry on looking, and that something would be bound to show up, it usually did. If anything occurred to me, though, I must let them know immediately, and I should expect another visit in the next week or so, once they’d looked through everything properly.

They took several of Rachel’s things away with them that day, including the contents of her desk, and it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that it all arrived back, packed into two cardboard boxes labelled ‘CARDANINE – DEC’D. DESK DRAWERS’. They were delivered in person by the woman who has been appointed as what is called my Family Liaison Officer, a woman I have met no more than a few times. Because I can never remember her name, I have come to think of her as Flo, reverting to the lawyerly habit I have of thinking of things in acronyms wherever possible. Flo seemed extremely upset when she came to the apartment this time. I made her a cup of tea and she sat on the sofa at the south-west end and recited pretty much the same script as she had the first time I’d met her, all about Rachel, and about how sorry she was. When I didn’t respond she raised her eyebrows and grimaced and said, ‘Let’s get down to business then Mr Petersen.’ She turned to the boxes I’d helped her bring in from her car. The first thing she handed me was a smaller box marked ‘CARDANINE – DEC’D. PERSONAL EFFECTS’. She explained that it really only contained Rachel’s wedding ring and her engagement ring, and the necklace she had been wearing that night. She carried on, biting her lip and closing her eyes in between each sentence for longer than was really necessary, telling me they’d never been able to find the bag I’d told them Rachel was carrying when she went down to the lake, and nor did they think they’d be able to trace it now. She told me that certain things would have to be kept, and then she gave me a letter explaining what had and hadn’t been returned and informing me that the reason the two larger boxes contained a number of photocopies was because the originals of Rachel’s papers and documents had to be retained for the remainder of the investigation. When I asked her how long she thought that might be, she made quite a lengthy attempt to
answer
me until she realised my question had been sarcastic. After that she got up to leave, saying, ‘I’m very sorry for you but I’m only doing my job, surely you can see that.’

It was several days before I felt able to open them, those larger boxes. I was hesitant about discovering what it was that Rachel had wanted to keep from me, and I felt that it would constitute such a very great intrusion on her privacy, even in her absence. When eventually I did, one evening last week, it was almost too much to bear, looking through the things that I found there. There was no one thing in particular that was worse than any other for the way it made me feel, and nor was there anything of any great significance, or at least, not that I could fathom; it was, instead, by way of their accumulation that they made their assault upon me and left a pain across my chest that was so real I thought I should have to gouge at it with something sharp to make it go away. I had pulled the boxes through to the north-east end of the apartment and I sat beside them on the floor in front of the piano and emptied the things out, one by one. I didn’t look at any of them until everything was sitting in little piles like tiny sandcastles springing up across the floorboards, spreading out towards the glass and the night sky beyond. And only then did I kneel and crawl among them, lifting them and holding them, reading them and looking, slowly, at everything I found there, before placing them all in turn back in the boxes they had come from.

How does one describe a life?

Hers was there that night, in bits across my floor: in swimming pool membership cards bearing images of her face; in letters from libraries fining her for overdue books; in examination certificates and ancient school reports; in scribbled phone numbers and postcards from friends of hers I’d never met or even knew existed; in loyalty cards from coffee shops; in dry-cleaning tickets and bank statements and insurance policies and ISA printouts and booklets listing her vaccinations and in a letter summoning her for cervical surgery she’d never so much as mentioned.

And then there were the photographs. One of them showed her
and
Lucinda holding hockey sticks and standing in a line with their teammates, so young as to be almost boyish. There were other photographs also, and some of them were of me, gardening on the balcony, or walking on the Heath, or sitting reading at the other end of the apartment, caught in an evening sun. The first thing that struck me about the next few I came to, the ones of Rachel as a child, was how like her adult self she looked in all of them. And the second was the fact that not a single one of them showed her smiling. There were other photos in which she was smiling, though she was older in all of those. They must have been taken at around the time we were students together, she looked so similar in them to the way I remembered her looking then.

Most of the ones of her smiling had been taken on a holiday, somewhere sunny. Evie is there too in some of them, standing next to Rachel on a tiny jetty, and I wonder who took them, these shots of the two of them together. The boat they are standing in front of looks similar to some Rachel had shown me once on the internet. It was in the early spring of this year, when we were talking about where we might go in her summer vacation, and she’d shown me the website and told me about a holiday she’d taken a long time ago in Turkey, when she’d spent a fortnight on a boat she called a gulet, and she’d said that she would like the two of us to do the same.

I carry on through the pile, finding more pictures of Rachel at school jumbled in with a sheet of passport photos and one she’d asked me to take for her profile on the department website. The last few are of the boat again and I see that they weren’t alone on this holiday that they took, Rachel and Evie. Some of their group seem familiar to me. I look more closely and I think I recognise them as people from Worcester, people who Rachel had known but I had not, but because they are either slightly out of focus or have been taken from so far away that their faces are too small for me to make out clearly, I can’t be entirely sure. I linger over the last of them. The photographer must have been right in front of Rachel and the woman who stands beside her. They are caught from the waist up. Each of them is wearing a bikini and Rachel is smiling, though less
broadly
than her companion, who has her arms wrapped around Rachel’s waist. This woman is wearing a sunhat, and because of the way she is resting her head on Rachel’s shoulder, the brim of it covers part of her face. My attention is drawn to this photograph not by the image itself, as such, but rather because of the fact that it has been cut in two down the middle, separating the women from one another. It has been taped back together again, and I am curious as to why Rachel would have done such a thing.