Every Contact Leaves A Trace (45 page)

It was as he walked back over to Worcester from the Ashmolean trying to digest what Evie had told him that things felt as though they were really beginning to unravel. He went back to his rooms and spent the rest of the day in a daze, sitting in his armchair looking down on the quad and hoping in a vague sort of a way that Anthony might yet turn up, listening for his tread on the staircase at the same time as knowing he wouldn’t hear it. And then he went home and slept, returning the next morning to wait. He said he hadn’t really
admitted
that that was what he was doing at first, convincing himself that despite it being a Saturday, when he would normally have gone to the farmers’ market, or walked out to a pub for lunch, it was better to go to his rooms and start to sort through his things for the summer vacation, discarding the papers he no longer required and perhaps even marking a few of the Finals scripts that had come. It was only when my call was put through that he realised he’d been hoping Anthony would make an appearance, his heart jumping and a wave of adrenalin running across the inside of his chest as he realised he had no idea what to say to him, or where he should begin.

The porter told him that the caller he was about to put through was a former student who hadn’t given their name, and when Harry heard my voice on the line instead of Anthony’s, he was shocked, and completely thrown by my proposal that we should meet. It was a meeting he found excruciating in the extreme, he said, and one of the most difficult conversations he’d ever had in his life. Still, as far as he could tell, it passed without incident. Wearied by the anxiety it gave rise to, he left my hotel and went back to College and almost fell into the Senior Common Room for his lunch, taking a seat on his own and staring into space. Before long the table was filling up, and he looked across to see Haddon sitting down opposite him. He nodded, and made it clear he wasn’t interested in having a conversation. The two of them had already spoken earlier that morning, having bumped into one another in the quad, and he hadn’t been particularly surprised by the line Haddon seemed to be taking. The tone in which he’d spoken, Harry said, bordered almost on the sensationalist, as though he was discussing an episode of a murder mystery series for the television rather than the death of a former student.

As he waited for his next course to arrive, Harry listened on and off to the conversation Haddon was having with the junior colleague beside him, feeling fairly irritated by the fact he seemed to be continuing in the same vein. He’d been about to lean across the table and tell Haddon that the way he was talking about Rachel was disrespectful, and reprehensible, when he heard Evie’s name mentioned and kept quiet. He’d missed the very beginning of the
conversation
but from what he could make out, it seemed that Haddon had just come from coffee with a colleague, the History of Art Fellow, who’d been at the Ashmolean fund-raiser the previous evening and had reported seeing Evie there.

‘Oh yes,’ he heard Haddon say, ‘had my own run-ins with her in my time. Bit of a vixen if you get my drift,’ he said to the junior colleague, whose eyes, Harry said, widened at the thought of whatever it was that she might be about to hear. And then it was Harry’s eyes that widened, as Haddon went on to say that Evie had apparently been at the party at the Ashmolean, and had listened to the speeches and stayed for a short while afterwards, but that just when Haddon’s informant had been on the point of approaching her, she’d left the room suddenly, and in the company of a man rather younger than herself. ‘Poor show really,’ Haddon said, smiling back at the junior colleague and luxuriating in the attention she was paying him. ‘Someone in her position. Should have stayed on in my opinion. Talked to the other donors, pressed a bit of flesh. Had other things on her mind though, what?’

And that was the point at which Harry began to realise he was facing the situation very much on his own. Not only had Anthony disappeared without trace, but if Haddon’s report was to be believed, Evie and Anthony had been at the party at the Ashmolean but had left well before the end, which meant they would both have had plenty of time to change and be in College before midnight. Given those things, his realisation that she very probably had been in the secret garden after all, and that it had been her he’d seen running up the side of the quad, left him without a great deal in the way of options when it came to answering the question of why it was that she was lying to him, and what it was that she was trying to hide.

Harry asked himself that question again and again in the months that followed. He thought once or twice during the summer that he might be going insane. He passed his time largely alone, in Oxford, spending day after day in his college rooms ruminating obsessively on what
had
happened and failing to come up with any kind of idea of what he could do about it. He’d thought of contacting me right from the start, but however many times he considered it he simply couldn’t imagine how he would begin to tell me what he knew. And he assumed that my reaction would be to go straight to the police, which was something he wanted very much to avoid given that it would inevitably result in his being treated as a suspect and charged with having given false evidence. His certainty of his own innocence had provided him with the justification for deciding against that course of action, but even that was something he had come to doubt, in a slightly fantastical way. When the police had begun their reconstructions he’d watched each one from the window of his rooms overlooking the quad. They would wait until the sky was as clear as it had been on the night of Rachel’s murder, and then, when the moon was just at the right height, a team of actors would take to the stage and it would begin. He said he couldn’t help but stay and look, and that at first he’d found it uncanny, how perfectly it was done each time, how little deviation there was from the events as he remembered them. But then one night as he’d stood at his window watching, he’d realised the scene that was being played out was essentially one of which he was the only scriptwriter, and from that point on he’d started to wonder, on and off, whether he had perhaps made the whole thing up, or imagined the events altogether.

He’d taken to travelling to London only when the air cooled again and he realised it was mid-September, forcing himself to go back to the British Library despite what had happened, recognising the need to stabilise his life in some way and thinking that the resumption of his once familiar routine might be the best approach to take. He had, of course, found his first visit overwhelmingly difficult, and had taken to using another reading room, being unable to feel comfortable in the one in which he and Rachel had so often worked together. And he had, on a couple of occasions, found himself crossing over the Euston Road to stand outside Anthony’s Judd Street flat, just on the other side of the street. He did this for no more than half an hour or so at a time, perhaps longer, hoping to catch a glimpse of
him
. But he saw nothing, and had no word from him either, until the telephone calls began.

It was at the very end of September that they started. To his growing sense of unease a pattern quickly developed whereby, at about the same time each afternoon, the lodge would put through a call to his room, telling him that the caller had declined to give their name. He would take the call only to hear the sound of a busy street for a minute or two before a series of pips signalled that the caller’s money had run out. And then there was nothing until the same time the following day. He had felt certain, he said, that it was Anthony, and he found himself almost longing for the next call to come, thinking that perhaps that would be the occasion on which Anthony would actually speak to him. He’d thought once or twice about asking the police to trace these calls, but had realised that if he was going to do that, he may as well tell them everything, and, this being a course he had already decided against, he could see no way of asking for their assistance.

He told me that the preparations for Rachel’s memorial service in October had provided a certain solace, in that he was able at least to feel that he was of some use to me. And as the date we had fixed for the service drew closer, and Anthony still hadn’t replied to the invitation, he’d somehow known then that he’d never see him again. He’d allowed himself to hope that Anthony might just show up unannounced, but as far as he was aware, he hadn’t. When I’d mentioned early on during my visit that I thought I’d seen someone who looked like him slipping in at the back of Chapel after the start of the service, he’d wondered at first whether I might have been right, but had decided on balance it was unlikely even he would have done something quite so brazen.

In any case, after that, the phone calls stopped altogether. He missed them, he said, these little silences, and after a couple of weeks he started to worry, and to fear that something awful might have happened. It was a thought he’d entertained right from the start in a non-specific sort of a way: the possibility that Anthony might be so filled with remorse for whatever it was that he’d done on the
night
that Rachel died that he would no longer have been able to live with himself, and that that might explain his disappearance. His fears were confirmed, he said, in as much as they could be, when he received a telephone call from the Metropolitan Police in mid-November asking him to attend Holborn Police Station for an interview about a missing person. He had panicked at first, of course, thinking that the police had caught up with him and had spotted some kind of a link between Anthony and Rachel, but to his amazement, after the first ten minutes of the interview had passed, it became apparent that the Metropolitan Police and the police in Oxford had made no connection whatsoever between the two cases, and he had stopped panicking.

The officer told him that one of Anthony’s neighbours had alerted the police to the fact that there was a strong and unpleasant smell coming from his Judd Street flat, and that he hadn’t been seen entering or leaving the property for some time. As was normally the first step that was taken in such cases, they’d forced an entry. Finding the place empty and obviously unused for some time, and that the smell was caused by nothing more sinister than festering refuse in the unemptied kitchen bin, they’d filed the case as non-urgent and started a series of routine checks. His employers told them he’d handed in his notice in early June. His colleagues had thought nothing of the fact that they hadn’t heard from him; Anthony had never been particularly sociable with any of them, and had mentioned that he was taking some time off to go travelling. Checks on his passport had revealed that it hadn’t been used at all in the previous six months and they had assumed he was simply elsewhere in the country, preparing for his travels. But when they had contacted his mother a couple of weeks later, she’d told them that she hadn’t heard from him since July and that she was becoming more and more concerned about him. He’d written her a letter saying he needed some time alone, and that she knew how much he loved her but he hoped she would understand that he would appreciate it very much if she didn’t try to contact him, or to find him, and that she mustn’t worry about him and nor should she let anyone know that she’d heard from him. She was beside
herself
, she said, and had been on the point of contacting the police when they had called anyway, and so she’d told them about Anthony’s letter, despite him having asked her not to.

And then the policeman had smiled at Harry across the table and said, ‘Quite a little letter-writer this Anthony was, by the looks of things,’ and he handed Harry an envelope. It seemed that Anthony had left it on the kitchen table in his flat. It was addressed to Harry at Worcester and had a first-class stamp on it. They’d opened it at the time but had filed it away, finding there was nothing particularly remarkable about it. But in recent weeks, he said, Anthony’s mother had started to give them what he described as ‘a bit of gyp’, so they’d reopened the investigation. They’d found the letter to Harry on the file and thought they may as well get him in for a chat to see if he could help them before they put the matter away again.

The officer said that at this stage they were ruling nothing in, and nor were they ruling anything out. Anthony had closed all his bank accounts and no trace of him could be found in the UK, or at least not without further expenditure of a kind that wasn’t being contemplated. The decision had been taken to draw a line under things for now, there being no reason to treat his disappearance as anything other than what the policeman called ‘a voluntary’. Harry said that it had struck him as odd, this missing-persons terminology, making him think only of summer evenings when he’d left Chapel after Evensong to the sounds of the organist’s improvisation soaring around the quad, and for a moment he had thought he was close to tears at the sadness of it all. Realising that to expose his emotion at that point would be more than a little unwise, he had bitten his tongue to stop himself, before looking down to read the letter.

He was relieved and disappointed in equal measure to see that it provided nothing by way of explanation. It contained not a single clue, being simply an invitation to Harry to come to the flat and take whatever books he’d like to have, since Anthony was going travelling for some time and didn’t know when he would return. The policeman said that it was clear that Anthony had simply forgotten to post it, and once Harry had told him that he was sorry
but
he really couldn’t help him, the man had offered to walk him round to the flat so that he could take some of the books before Anthony’s mother came down to collect everything the following week. ‘Only if it’s no trouble,’ Harry said, and so they walked over to Judd Street to see what they could find.

The flat, Harry said, was cleaner than he’d expected it to be, and there was none of the fetid smell the policeman had described. ‘Had it done professionally,’ the man explained. ‘The neighbours, you know.’ But there were still a couple of flies circling in the kitchen, and when the policeman opened the door through to Anthony’s study, saying that that was where the bookshelves were, Harry said that they were met with a sight that disgusted him. A couple of flies had obviously been trapped in that room also, and had multiplied, so that there were thirty or forty of them circling in a cloud in the middle of the room and the floor was littered with tiny blue-black bodies. ‘Like a scene from a Hitchcock film,’ Harry said to me. ‘It really was grotesque.’ And then, as the policeman started to swat at the cloud above his head, and to open the windows and waft as many of them outside as possible before going back to the kitchen to fetch a dustpan and brush, Harry looked across the room and saw the little book of Browning sitting in the middle of Anthony’s otherwise empty desk. He realised then that the whole thing had been planned to happen in exactly this way, and that Anthony had intended for him to come here in the company of a policeman and to find this book, the book that Harry had seen fall from Rachel’s bag in his rooms on the night of her murder.