Every Contact Leaves A Trace (46 page)

He made a show of going over to the bookshelves and selecting a few volumes, browsing quite calmly as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and then he walked over to the desk and said to the policeman, with what he hoped was just the right degree of nonchalance in his voice, ‘Ah. Robert Browning. One of my all-time favourites,’ before picking it up and adding it to the ones he had taken from the shelves.

It wasn’t until he was on the train home that evening that he’d taken the book from his bag. It fell open at ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, and he held it closer and saw what he thought was the tiniest trace of
blood
on the corner of the page, putting it away again almost immediately, such was his sorrow, and his fear, and his confusion about what he should do next.

By then it was mid-November, and the tale he was soon to tell me was beginning to take shape more clearly in his mind. Over the following fortnight he’d thought hard about whether to contact me, or whether to go straight to the police, but in the end he had decided to invite me to Oxford and tell me his story, using the feint of having found some things of Rachel’s that he thought I might like to have.

‘So, Alex,’ he said, getting up out of his chair and walking over to the window. ‘There it is. We have talked and talked and I think I have told you everything I know. I would like now to begin to draw some conclusions, if I may.’

Before he started he made more tea and fetched crumpets from the fridge, and as he put them on skewers on the fire I thought of Rachel, and of her interview, and I wished very much that she was there with us, to hear what it was that Harry was about to tell me.

He began by saying that although at times he still felt completely bewildered by the picture he was looking at, seeing only ill-formed shapes emerging from shadows and disappearing again, he had been aware from the start that the truth most probably lay in what was the simplest explanation for the murder: that Anthony had lost his temper with Rachel that night and had bludgeoned her to death and escaped from College somehow, and that Evie, watching from the secret garden, had run away and denied all knowledge of the whole thing, feeling herself to be culpable in some way. The only variation which he thought possible was that Anthony had intended to kill her all along, and that Evie had assisted him somehow, and was equally guilty, which was why she was still denying her presence in the secret garden that night. That she had been there, despite her protestations to the contrary, was a fact that had been elevated almost to the status of an objective truth for Harry when he’d overheard Haddon’s report of seeing her leaving the Ashmolean party in the company of a young man. His visit to Judd Street a couple of weeks ago, when he’d found the book of Browning that he was sure Rachel
had
been carrying with her when she’d gone down to the lake, had confirmed his suspicions; it was clear to him that Anthony must have found it in her bag and taken it back to London with him, and that by leaving the letter where the police would be sure to find it and contact Harry, he was somehow seeking to taunt him with the fact he had been her killer, knowing what the consequences would be for Harry were he to reveal his suspicions to the police, having kept them to himself for so long.

He said he’d only ever really faced one barrier in his attempt to prove this hypothesis, given his certainty that the figure running past me on the steps had been Evie, and that was the question of how Anthony had made his escape from the college gardens immediately after he had killed Rachel. That Anthony had been in College at some point that day was something Harry and I both knew, or could at least be almost certain of, having seen his pseudonym in the Visitors Book. Harry had presumed its cryptic nature had confounded the police and that they must have attributed it to a prankster and neglected to consider it further. But as to how he had got away from the scene of his crime that night, that had bothered Harry quite considerably. The police had made much of the security cordon that the college had put in place five years previously, and he hadn’t been able to understand how Anthony’s departure could have gone unnoticed. I recalled as Harry said this that my suggestions to the detectives that they should perhaps widen their search beyond the running figure had been met each time with the response that all the other exits had been covered by CCTV, that they had eliminated from their enquiries almost everyone who’d been recorded entering or leaving the college by those routes during the forty-eight hours preceding and following Rachel’s murder, and that there was no other way out. And they were right, Harry said: given the height of the walls, and the spikes and broken glass that had been placed along the tops of them, apart from the one low wall that ran beside the south-west side of the lake and followed the line of the canal, there was really no other way. He had been several times to look at the route that Anthony would have had to have taken to get out via the canal. He had seen how
far
he would have had to fall before hitting the water, and, having considered the dangers that would have been involved in attempting such a thing in darkness, he’d decided that it just wasn’t probable he would have risked it, even if he’d been able to push through the trees and bushes forming a natural barrier between the path and the wall.

That left open the possibility that Anthony had not in fact been there at all, Harry said, and that it had actually been Evie who had waited by the lake and murdered Rachel. But then, at the end of our second tea together, when I told him about what the porter had said about the old gate at the back of the playing fields, he’d thought he had his answer at last. Having resolved to investigate it further he had sent me away for the day on my long walk across Boars Hill and through Wytham Woods, and my visit to the Ashmolean. His story about being in London all day had been a ruse, nothing more than that. He said that what the porter had told me was correct; it had been twenty years or more since the gate had been closed off, and although it had still been in use when Harry had arrived at the college to take up his Fellowship, it wasn’t long afterwards that the paths had been rerouted. Because he had given no thought to it since then, and wasn’t able to recall its exact location, the first thing he had done, having ascertained from the porter that I had set off on my walk as he’d told me to, was to go up to the Old Library and look at the plans of the college from that time.

When it came to it, Harry said, it had been almost impossible to get to, and apparently the porter had been absolutely right when he’d told me that unless one knew what one was looking for, one simply would never have found it. Harry had made his way down to the playing fields and walked across to their far side. He’d paced back and forth for some time, he said, and had decided on what he thought might be the right spot, but he could see no way through the undergrowth, none whatsoever. He’d been about to give up and was wondering whether he should go and let himself into one of the gardeners’ sheds and borrow an axe and simply start hacking his way through the bushes at random, such was his frustration, when suddenly he’d seen a gap in the branches and stepped into it, covering his face with his hands as best he could
and
pushing and pushing until his foot made contact with something hard and he lowered his hands from his face to see that he was staring at a brick wall. He’d edged along to his left, branches sticking into his back and tearing at his coat, until finally he came to the gate. Standing with his face jammed up against the wood in front of him and a cluster of rusted-up old chains and padlocks pressing uncomfortably into his stomach, he realised how irrational he had been to think Anthony could have done this thing, and quite how absurd his expedition was: all the police would have had to do was walk the boundary from the outside in order to see the gate from the street. His endeavour had been nothing but the wildest of goose chases, he said, and on returning to his rooms and taking the debris from his hair and seeing that he had torn his coat in a couple of places, he felt more than a little foolish for having thought he could succeed where others had failed. Regardless of this unanswered question, Harry said, the fact that Anthony really did seem to have gone missing was, in his opinion, yet further confirmation of his guilt. Whether he had absconded abroad, or whether he had done as Harry thought possible and killed himself, was neither here nor there in terms of Harry’s suspicions. As for Evie, he said, he still hadn’t got to the bottom of why she was denying that she’d been there, unless it was the case that she had assisted in Rachel’s murder. He said he’d heard nothing from her since she’d sent him away from her office in the Ashmolean the day after Rachel was killed, until one day shortly before her departure for Tokyo when she’d telephoned him and said she was leaving and had something she wanted to give him and could he come and collect it from the museum since it wasn’t really something she could leave in the porter’s lodge.

He’d gone over straight away, thinking they might speak and he might ask her whether she’d heard from Anthony. But when he got there he found her secretary waiting for him instead. She’d handed him a parcel and said no, Evie had left no message. He’d walked back to his rooms and opened it to see the document wallet full of the Browning essays, and the letters. He said that as far as he’d been able to work out, Anthony had given it to Evie on the day of the Casablanca Ball and she’d kept it. I was able to tell Harry then that I believed I had
had
my own part to play in his story, in a way that had escaped his knowledge, describing for him how I had followed Evie’s instructions on the night I’d got back to London and found the document wallet and couriered it to her, and we worked out together that there could have been any number of occasions on which Evie might have given the letters and the essays to Rachel in the years that had passed since the Casablanca Ball, and that they could well have been on the shelves of my apartment ever since the day she’d moved in. We talked a little more about this question, and Harry suggested in the end that he thought the letters may have been the route by which Evie had finally persuaded Rachel to acquiesce to the idea of meeting Anthony, by giving Rachel this folder and by making her feel so guilty about what she’d done that she’d given in.

Either way, Harry said, his experience of opening the document wallet and reading its contents had been an extremely painful one, as he imagined it had been for me also, and he thought it best that I dispose of it now, depending of course on what I decided to do with the information he was giving me.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘What do you mean, depending on what I decide to do?’

And then Harry rubbed his eyes and, stretching his arms above his head, laid himself out on the sofa. He said nothing for a minute or two, just lying there, and I was beginning to think he’d fallen asleep when he swung his legs up and over onto the floor and sat back up and looked at me, saying, ‘This is what I mean, Alex. What I have told you is only a version of events, nothing more than that. And I have not been able, on my own, to decide whether to disclose that version, or to continue to conceal it—’

‘You really think there’s any question?’ I broke in, finding it impossible to believe he was persisting in the idea that there was room for doubt. ‘You do realise what you’re proposing? You understand—’

‘Alex,’ he said, standing up. ‘Don’t mistake me for a fool. Of course I understand. And of course I know that even by my proposition I am made criminal. I just don’t think the decision is a straightforward one, not at this stage.’

‘In what way, Harry? In what way exactly is it not straightforward?’

‘A condemnation as ready as the one you seem to be suggesting would be ill-conceived, Alex, in my opinion, that is all. To leap so quickly to judgement would, I think, be to deny something of the complexity of the situation. You have the luxury of choice here, don’t you see?’

‘No, Harry, I don’t as a matter of fact. There’s nothing complicated about it. You’ve lied to me all along. Even your letter was full of lies. Why should I listen to you now?’

‘I have lied, you are right. I can’t dispute that charge, and nor have I tried to. There were reasons at the time for my doing as I did, and I’ve explained them to you. I lied having been lied to, and I am asking you now to see beyond that. I’m not proud of the decision I took when the police came and knocked on my door. On the contrary, these last few days we’ve spent together, I have shown you my deepest shame. Until I invited you here, until you came and let me tell you the whole of it, it has sat heavily with me, this secret I have kept. I promised Rachel I would keep her story to myself, and that is what I did,’ he said, taking a step towards me and carrying on, beginning to rush his words together as though struggling to keep up with what he was trying to say. ‘That moment on the river when she turned to me, right at the end of our conversation, she was crying, Alex. She had tears running down her face and she begged me, do you see? She begged me to make sure you didn’t find out. It was the only thing she cared about by that stage. None of the rest of us really mattered to her any more, I don’t think. Not really. Not Evie, not me. Not even Anthony. She was angry with him, of course. She was angry with all of us. But you could see it in her face, quite apart from what she was saying. You could see that there was only you.’

And then he slowed down again, stepping back away from me and speaking more quietly.

‘She told me you loved her. She told me you’d made her happy, and you’d given her something she thought she’d never find. And she asked me to let that be, that love there was between the two of
you
, and to protect it, so that it could grow undisturbed in its innocence, just as it had been. And that is what I tried to do, Alex. That was my aim when first I lied. That was all she asked of me that afternoon, do you see, nothing more. In doing as I did from that point on, my thoughts were only of protecting her, Alex, and protecting you also. I took the path I took that night in my interview with the best of intentions, you must see that.’