Every Contact Leaves A Trace (44 page)

That was his understanding of events when finally he managed to drift off to sleep that night, hoping he’d be able to make more sense of things in the morning. He felt so tired that he set his alarm a little later than usual, but he’d only been asleep for a few hours when he was woken by the sound of a loud and repeated banging and his bell being rung over and over. He fell from his bed and wrapped his dressing gown around him and staggered across to his bedroom window and when he looked out and saw the police car that was parked in his drive he knew that Rachel had been hurt. There was a pain behind his eyes suddenly, as though the brightest
of
lights was being shone in them, and his stomach felt as though it was dropping to the floor, all in a piece. As he walked slowly from his bedroom and made his way down the stairs he realised that he had to make up his mind what he would and wouldn’t say in the statement he was about to give, and that in so deciding, he would be formulating a version of events that he would have to stick to for good, whatever happened.

He couldn’t understand why the officers wouldn’t tell him exactly what had happened to Rachel. When he asked, they would say only that she’d been involved in an incident, and when he asked again, they said nothing. And so he began, resolving as he answered the first of their questions that he’d give them only the barest of facts as they might have presented themselves to him had he actually known nothing of Rachel’s plan to meet Anthony beside the lake, or of Evie’s presence in the secret garden, or any of the details of the histories the four of them shared. He closed his eyes slightly against the brightness of the lights in his kitchen and tried to imagine it was me he was talking to, rather than the tape recorder the police had brought with them, and that he was choosing his words as carefully as he was only in order to keep the promise he’d made to Rachel that I should know nothing of what had passed between her and Anthony, rather than through any desire to mislead. And he said that of course, at that stage, he had no reason to think that Rachel had come to any serious harm, supposing instead that she and Anthony had had, at the worst, some sort of a fight.

It is difficult to portray with any accuracy how I felt as Harry described the little ways in which he’d attempted to justify his decisions. It was revulsion, I think, that I sensed most strongly in myself; a revulsion born of anger, and shock, and dismay, and sadness. And those things seared through me almost physically, so that once or twice the room seemed to swim about us and there was a moment when Harry’s words became distorted, as though I was listening to him underwater, his voice booming and warped and looping in my
head
before everything settled again and his speech returned to normal and I heard him saying he’d had little difficulty in giving his statement, in that the police were just asking a series of straightforward questions, and it struck me then that he had no idea at all of the impact that his words were having on me, so wrapped up was he in this narrative he had constructed, and so intent was he on the telling of it, having found at last a listener.

He continued to describe, coldly and calmly, the night he’d spent sitting in his kitchen committing perjury, and he finished by telling me that because they’d accepted his answers so readily, he’d become quite comfortable by the end of it and offered them a cup of tea, saying they must be even more exhausted than he was. They said no thank you though, and when he saw one of them making a note of the fact he’d offered, it occurred to him he probably shouldn’t have done.

Where the giving of that initial statement had been easy enough, he said, the interview he’d been required to attend later that morning had been a more difficult affair altogether. A couple of officers had called at his house at about eight o’clock and asked him to come down to the station, saying it wouldn’t take long, they just had a few routine questions. And it was on the way there that they had announced, almost in passing, that Rachel had been murdered.

22

THEY BEGAN HIS
interview by reading his statement back to him and he sat, silent and hardly breathing, unable to believe what was happening. He was horrified by the series of untruths he found himself listening to, but even in his confusion he knew his brief and knew he had to stick to it, whatever happened. He got through it in the end, but not without experiencing considerable problems in dealing with one or two things in particular. The first real challenge was with regard to the question of why he’d changed his mind about going back to his rooms to collect his things, and why he’d gone up to the library instead. ‘A poet, you say?’ the first policeman asked him. ‘And which poet might that be?’ And of course, Harry said, he’d answered without thinking, wishing immediately that he hadn’t referred to Browning, feeling he’d given something away just by saying that. And then, when they pressed him further about why he’d felt it necessary to look up the answer to Rachel’s question at nearly midnight, rather than leaving it until the morning, he really did get in a bit of a mess. Thinking on his feet and feeling a sudden sweat breaking out across his chest and under his arms, hoping it wasn’t also appearing on his forehead, he told them he’d been quite irked by Rachel’s apparent surprise at his not having had the answer to her question at his fingertips, and that they’d had a little spat about it actually, over dinner, and she’d laughed at him for it, even though she knew how sensitive he was to the assumptions people were making, quite unfounded assumptions, about his memory not being as sharp as it might be. He almost came unstuck again when it came to thinking of a response to their enquiries as to what Rachel’s question about Browning had been, and he really didn’t know what to say when they asked, several times, about this spat with Rachel, and
whether
he could suggest who else on the dinner table might have heard it, since they hadn’t managed to find anyone.

And then, of course, there was the postcard he’d said he was going to write and drop in to our hotel in the morning. ‘We’ve got one of our officers up at your house looking for it now, Mr Gardner,’ they said, after someone had interrupted the interview and put a note on the table. ‘Only thing is, they can’t find it. Any chance you could tell us where it is, this postcard?’ Harry said he felt quite sick at that point, considering for a moment whether to say he’d written a note instead, on some paper that he’d found in the library, and that he’d dropped it round to our hotel on the way home. But he realised immediately how pointless that would be, given that they’d have searched there also, so he simply said he’d been too tired in the end and had left it until the morning, but that he hadn’t thought there was much point when it came to it, not after the police had been to see him. ‘But you found your answer, Mr Gardner, did you?’ they asked him next, and when Harry wavered, they pulled out the tape of his previous interview and played it back to him, and he heard his own voice speaking to him from the early hours saying yes, he had found his answer. And when they had turned off the tape and looked at him, he had to say no, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t for the life of him recall what it had been.

And as if those things hadn’t been difficult enough, there was the question to be dealt with of why, on hearing the scream and seeing me stumble down the steps and seeing the figure running past me as I’d fallen, he’d decided to go home. Why hadn’t he gone to his rooms, or to the lake to see what was happening? He got through it by telling them that Rachel and I were no longer students, and whatever we might or might not have been doing after dinner, running around the college or not running around the college, had not been his business. He said he’d decided it was entirely possible at that stage that the running figure had simply been a late-night jogger, and that the scream had come from outside the college walls rather than in, but that it had been sufficiently distracting for him to have forgotten what it was he’d been going to his rooms to collect,
and
because of that he had just decided to go home, and that was all there was to it.

They’d let him go in the end and he’d had no more trouble from them, supposing to himself that if they’d seemed a little aggressive in their questioning, and if they’d been a little sceptical of his story, they’d only treated him in the way they treated everyone they interviewed, finding it a successful method for filtering those who had committed a crime from those who had not.

By the time the interview was over, he’d begun to feel extremely unwell; he was unsteady on his legs and faint with exhaustion, appalled by what was happening. Such had been the need to focus his mind on the questions he was being asked, it was his body that reacted instead and registered the shock he’d felt when the police told him Rachel was dead. At that moment, he said, everything had slowed down suddenly, as if the car they were in was sliding by on thick grease, unable properly to move, even though he could see from the speed at which things were passing by outside the window that they had not, and they were not. Having been shown out of the interview room, he left the police station feeling so disturbed that he wondered, just briefly, whether he was dreaming, trapped in some kind of suspended nightmare, and when he got back to his rooms in College he was unable to do anything other than sit without moving in his armchair, clinging to the hope that Anthony would stick to their arrangement to meet for coffee that morning.

In the end there was no knock on his door, and no telephone call either, and when the clock struck noon he telephoned Evie again. He got through this time and asked if they could meet, saying he thought it best they didn’t speak on the phone. She told him to come to her office at the Ashmolean and as he walked over he felt a certain sense of relief at the thought that he was about to find out what had actually happened, and what she’d seen from the secret garden. Only, Evie told him when he arrived, she hadn’t seen anything at all, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been there.

Harry said she was barely able to string a coherent sentence together at first. When he told her he’d seen her running back up the quad
from
the secret garden, and when he asked why she hadn’t at least telephoned him afterwards to tell him what had happened, she said she had no idea what he was talking about.

‘But you know about Rachel?’ he asked, feeling totally confused by what he was hearing.

‘Of course I fucking know,’ she replied, almost shouting at him. ‘Alex phoned me from the police station. That was bad enough, having to hear it from Alex fucking Petersen, but you do realise what I had to do afterwards don’t you?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘No I don’t.’

‘Who do you fucking think identified her fucking body, Harry? Do you have any idea what that was like for me?’

‘Evie. I’m so—’

‘I don’t suppose you know either that the last time I had to identify a body was twenty-five fucking years ago and it was Rachel’s fucking mother. Christ, Harry. You shouldn’t be bothering me with your stupid questions, not now.’

‘Right,’ Harry said, his breathing shallow and his heart racing in his chest. But still she hadn’t finished.

‘So unless you’ve got something useful to tell me like where the hell that little shit Anthony is I’d be grateful if you could just piss off and leave me alone.’

‘Right,’ he said again. ‘That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.’

And then he listened, stunned, as she claimed never to have found the note he’d put under her office door, and said that at no point during the previous evening, nor during the night, had she realised he’d been trying to contact her. She’d either been in the bath, she said, or she’d had her phone switched to silent, for example during the speeches at the fund-raiser.

‘Quite frankly,’ she said, ‘I’d had enough of the whole thing by the time the party started and I decided to leave the lot of you to your own devices, come what may.’

‘Come what may?’ Harry repeated back at her, hardly believing what he was hearing.

‘Fuck you Harry Gardner. Don’t even think about trying to make me feel responsible for what’s happened. Alright? It was out of my hands. Wasn’t ever in them as a matter of fact, so you can drop the bullshit. God knows I’m feeling bad enough already, can’t you see that?’ And when he said yes, of course he could see that, but he still didn’t understand how she’d spent the rest of the evening, and what she’d been doing later on when she hadn’t answered the phone call he’d made from his taxi home, she really did shout.

‘For christ’s sake Harry. It’s none of your fucking business.’

‘Alright,’ Harry said, ‘Alright. But what are we going to do about Anthony?’

She calmed down a bit then, and told him she hadn’t tried Anthony’s phone, and she didn’t think it was such a clever idea to do so now, and nor had he tried to call hers. She was going to just wait, that was all, and in her opinion, Harry should do the same. Harry told her in response that he’d arranged to meet Anthony that morning but he hadn’t shown up, and that he really didn’t know what to do next.

‘Nothing, Harry,’ she said. ‘You do nothing at all. We wait, and we see. That’s all we can do.’ And then she stood and walked to the door and held it open, turning back to him and saying, ‘I’m sorry to have to say this to you, Harry, but I’d like you to leave now, and I mean right now. She’s dead, and nothing you or I can do will change that. We stand only to lose by sticking our necks out any further than we have done already. I think we both know what’s happened, and as far as I’m concerned, there really is nothing else to say. You have my email address I think. If you have any real need to contact me, use it.’