Every Contact Leaves A Trace (35 page)

‘I’m sorry, Alex, really, I am so sorry,’ and he almost jumps back over to the bookcase and as he starts to open and close the files again, sifting through the papers inside, I can see that his hands are shaking also and he is become hunched over, like an old man, and I realise I have upset him and I am ashamed for the cruelty I have shown. Of course, when I read the letter he hands me, I find it contains nothing that is not already known to me, being simply a description of the tiny ceremony we held in the register office, and of Rachel’s dress, of how handsome she thought I looked, and of the menu we chose for the lunch we went for with Richard and Lucinda afterwards. And I understand then that Harry’s reluctance to share these things, the letter and the photographs, is born not from a desire to keep anything back from me, but rather from a fear that I might take away all that remains to him of Rachel. My anger softens and instead, I feel only pity. But while I have calmed down, it seems that he has not. He takes the letter from me and tries to fold it back into its envelope but he can’t make it fit. It drops from his hands and shoots under the sofa and as I lean forward, meaning to retrieve it for him, he flinches, so I sit back and leave him to it. When finally
he
has found it, and put it away on the shelf, he takes his place on the sofa once more and pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and starts to wipe both his eyes with it, over and over, and we sit for some time in silence, neither of us making any mention of the fact that he is weeping.

Eventually he puts his handkerchief back in his pocket and he coughs, once or twice. He stands and pours us some tea and says he will begin again from where we left off, returning to Anthony’s Judd Street kitchen, and as he starts to speak we are there once more, the flies circling above him where he sits and the pictures curling on the walls.

‘Did you really think I’d written them on my own, Harry?’ Anthony said, standing over Harry where he sat at the kitchen table, still attempting to dry his hair with Anthony’s tea towel. ‘I mean, “My Last Duchess”, for god’s sake. Bit of an obvious choice, isn’t it?’ he carried on, pulling up a chair as he spoke and sitting down opposite Harry. ‘And such a girl’s choice. You could have credited me with a slightly more finely honed imagination than that, couldn’t you?’ and Harry thought suddenly about getting up and leaving there and then, unsure he wanted to hear what Anthony was about to tell him. He stayed though, and that was how he found out the letters had been Rachel’s idea, in the beginning.

Just as I am beginning to settle into Harry’s story again, sitting back in my chair and following, in a grim kind of a way, the soft rhythms of his voice, he stops suddenly, almost as soon as he has begun. He says nothing, simply staring into the fire and looking very much as though he is going to cry again. When I ask him if he is alright he looks up and he raises his eyebrows as though he is surprised to see me there, as though he has been thinking about something else entirely.

‘I am quite alright, Alex, yes. It is just that it will be difficult for me to tell you these things, that is all. If I were to be frank, I would have to say that I would rather not be the bearer of any of this tale,
let
alone this particular part of it. But that much, I suppose, is obvious to you by now. As it is I have begun, and I must carry on. I would simply ask that you be patient with me.’

I nodded and he continued, but for the next few hours, as he picked a route back and forth through the events Anthony had related to him during the first part of his visit to Judd Street, it was in so awkward a manner, and by way of a narrative so shot through with digressions and periphrases, and so crowded with ellipses and euphemisms, that I found it difficult to follow what he was saying with any degree of clarity, however hard I tried. It was, I think, both the fact that I’d upset him just before he began, as well as the very obvious ill ease he felt about having to relate events that would not show Rachel in a guise with which I would be familiar, that accounted for his awkwardness. I did my best to follow him, though I suppose I must bear some responsibility for having done so without a great deal of success. Were Harry to have been a client I was preparing for cross-examination I would have been able to interject at will, to question and to challenge. Or, alternatively, were his to have been the voice of an opposition witness, speaking to me from the pages of a written statement, I would have been able to scrawl exclamation marks in the margin, sticking Post-it notes full of questions all over the pages so that someone else more junior than me could take them away and draft a letter seeking further particulars, thus eliciting the information I knew was being kept from me.

But instead I could only wait, storing away the facts as they were parcelled out and hoping to be able to piece them together later on. That I also contributed to the somewhat shoddy quality of the resulting narrative is something I would be the first to acknowledge; my frustration was so intense I sometimes found myself losing concentration altogether and drifting off, filling in the gaps that Harry was leaving, all too aware as I did so of the dangers inherent in such an approach. When he’d finished his attempt, and we had broken once more so that we could each of us change for dinner, I went back to my room and telephoned Evie, just as I had warned her I would. It was during that call that she told me her version of
the
same events, amongst other things, and only afterwards was I able to construct any sort of a cohesive picture for myself from the glimpses Harry had given me of the circumstances in which the letters had been written, the letters purporting to blackmail him for the murder of his wife.

I’d said nothing to Harry about Evie’s email, and nor did I see any reason to tell him it was my intention to speak with her. He’d revealed to me that afternoon that Evie knew at least as much as he did of the events surrounding the writing of the letters, and also that the two of them shared a common source for their knowledge. It seemed that Anthony had contacted her on the day he was sent down. After he’d confessed to Haddon, taking sole responsibility both for writing and sending the letters to Harry, he’d packed up his rooms and gone, leaving behind him the book Harry had given him as a parting gesture. And almost as soon as the wicket door had closed behind him, he’d found a phonebox and made a call to Evie. I knew very little at that stage of what kind of relationship, if any, had existed between Evie and Anthony. I already had a sense that their paths would have crossed on and off, Anthony having been so often a guest at the weekend parties Rachel had apparently thrown in Evie’s house at Chelsea. And then of course, playing at the back of my mind, there was the photograph on the parking ticket, the one that had been taken years later, a few weeks before Rachel’s murder. But it wasn’t until the following day that Harry would explain why Evie and Anthony were still in touch by the time of that photograph, and reveal what lay behind that May morning meeting outside the library where Rachel worked.

When Anthony had spoken with Evie on the afternoon he’d been told to pack his things and go for good, he’d broken down and told her everything, so distraught was he at what had happened over the previous few weeks. Where Harry had been reticent with me in the telling of the tale, Evie, when I telephoned her, had relished it, seeming to take a strange kind of pleasure in conveying the most sordid of its details to me, and doing so with such visceral clarity that it was almost as though I had been there myself.

My call to Tokyo was answered straight away, but it was a man’s voice that greeted me rather than Evie’s. When I asked to speak to her he muttered a few expletives before passing me on and from the drowsiness in her voice I gathered I had woken them up. I apologised to her, saying I’d given no thought to the time difference and asking when I could call back, but she told me that she’d rather get it over and done with there and then. She said she’d thought things through since sending her email and had decided that, while of course it was none of her business how I wanted to spend my time, or to waste it, she wanted to make it clear that if I insisted on staying in Oxford with Harry Gardner I had to understand she had no intention of keeping up a running commentary on whatever else he was going to tell me. She was happy to speak now, briefly, but after that I was on my own. And then she added, reminding me quite how nasty she could be, that she couldn’t help observing that if I’d acquainted myself rather better with my wife than I had done, it perhaps wouldn’t be necessary for me to go around the place bothering people about things that had happened such an awfully long time ago.

‘Evie,’ I said in response, determined not to rise to her goading, ‘shall we talk or are you just going to carry on insulting me?’ and she said right, fine, let’s talk. And then she yawned, slowly, and told me to get on with it.

I said there were a number of things I wanted to ask her about, but that it might perhaps be best to start with the letters that had been inside the document wallet she’d made me courier to her. I said Harry had told me a certain amount about them already, and that he had described for me, in a manner of speaking, the way he understood them to have been written. I explained that whilst he’d clearly given me as full an account as he was able to, I would be grateful if she would tell me a little bit more about it, knowing as I did that she and Anthony had discussed it on the day he’d been sent down. ‘Why of course, Alex, why ever not?’ she said, and I noticed at once that there was no longer any drowsiness in her voice; what I heard there instead was a strange kind of excitement, and an energy that was distinctly vindictive.

She began by saying that she’d warned me in her email about the wisdom of asking too many questions, and that she would proceed only if I was quite certain that was what I wanted. And then, when I said nothing, she told me that the phone call she’d received from Anthony, the one that he’d made immediately after leaving Worcester on the day he’d been sent down, was something she would never forget, such was his distress and his anger about what had happened. The way he’d been later on that same afternoon was no less raw and unrestrained, when she’d met with him in her office and asked him to tell her everything again so that she could be quite clear in her understanding of the part Rachel had played in the events he was describing. And that was an affect that she managed to recreate for me in her retelling, even from such a distance and from such a time removed.

Once she started to talk there was no stopping her, despite the reluctance she’d professed to at the outset, so that by the time we came to the end of our conversation I saw from my watch I had missed dinner altogether. Realising that if I hurried, I might still be able to find Harry at dessert, I jogged across the quad and straight up the steps on the other side. But when I reached the top I slowed my pace and walked back and forth along the terrace a few times, wanting to sort the facts as Evie had described them into some sort of order in my own mind. It was my intention to place them one by one alongside Harry’s, these facts of hers, so that I could test the links between them and find the ones which held most fast, and most true. I placed those of the resulting sequences of images and statements that were sufficiently coincident for my task on top of one another, as though they were drawings sketched on separate pieces of tracing paper, and then I moved them up and down and back and forth, turning them over and over to see if I could find a position whereby they could be aligned with one another closely enough to form what I considered to be a cohesive, single, image. If Harry had given me a page torn from a children’s puzzle book, then Evie had taken a pencil and scored in the lines between each of his dots, so that as I reached the end of the terrace for the last
time
and made my way down the narrow set of steps that led to the room where dessert was being held, something like a composite version was beginning to emerge, and I knew that with a little more time and left to its own devices, what I was looking at would become clear enough for me to feel almost as though I had been a voyeur on the events, if not quite a participant in them.

I opened the low oak door at the end of the corridor and found that dessert had only just begun. All I’d really missed was the procession out of Hall and the stroll along the terrace, each of the guests and Fellows who had been sitting on High Table clutching their linen napkins and following Harry as he would have led them towards the room that I stood looking into. It took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust after the brightness of the lights in the corridor, but eventually I made him out through the glow of the candles that had been placed everywhere, and the soft flickers of the fire he sat beside. As he saw me he stood, gesturing that I should make my way towards the one empty place that remained. It was with some relief that I became aware that the people I would be joining were so deeply engrossed in one another that I’d be unlikely to have to contribute to their conversation. The seats were arranged in little groups of three around the room, loosely forming a large circle, with tiny walnut tables in front of each group, but to describe it thus would be to suggest a greater degree of order than was conveyed by the scene I looked on as I sat and took the plate that Harry handed me. If the layout of the furniture was designed to imply a kind of clumsy chaos, then so was the content of the large table that sat just beyond this gathering. It was covered with silver bowls and plates and platters piled with fruit so ripe that some of it was dripping, a little. Pomegranate seeds spilt deep crimson, landing on peaches that sat in a curious perfection beneath them, the juice running slowly down each yellow globe until it slipped, at the last, onto the tabletop’s sheen and sat in a glistening pool. Everything seemed to glow amber in the half-light of the fire, and the darkness of the panelling, combined with the complete absence of any electric light, made that low-ceilinged room seem crowded, almost suffocating. I loosened
my
tie and took the first of the decanters that was passed to me and poured myself a crystal beaker full of something dark and sweet and I sat back, breathing in its heavy scent as deeply as I could before beginning to drink.