Every Contact Leaves A Trace (49 page)

‘But why?’ I asked her then. Why hadn’t she told the police about any of it, about Anthony and Rachel, and Harry and his plan? How could she just have walked away from the whole situation as though it was nothing to do with her, when surely she must have realised what Anthony had done? She’d stopped me and said it wasn’t so simple, really it wasn’t. And then, in a calmer, tireder voice, all stridency gone, she explained that when it came to giving her statement, she had panicked. She’d thought only of herself, and of her alibi, and it wasn’t until she came through to my cell and saw me sitting across from her on the bed looking, she said, just like a little boy, that she realised she’d made the wrong choice, and that she should have told the police everything.

In the days that followed, Harry had told her the precise details of the plan he said Anthony had kept from her, and she had reached her own conclusions about what must have happened. Having done so, she found herself unable to go back on her decision: nothing would change the fact that Rachel was dead, and however many times she thought about giving another statement, and from whichever angle she considered the idea of telling the truth, she could see only what she stood to lose. She was aware that Anthony was more than capable of turning the story around to frame her, and that was what she described as her sticking point. Of course, she had always suspected what kind of a man he was, but even though she’d known throughout their relationship that to prolong her association with him was at best foolish, and at worst idiotic, at no point had she imagined him to be in any way dangerous, or violent. As I heard
her
say this, I did consider telling her what Harry said Anthony had done at the Casablanca Ball; about him forging Towneley’s signature and about him assaulting Cissy, but I decided instead to see what she had to say, wondering whether she’d known about it all along. It seemed so amazing to me that she could have been involved with Anthony over such a long period of time, and in such an intimate way, without his having disclosed it all to her, or without her having wheedled it out of him. On the other hand, I could see that it was entirely in line with Harry’s portrayal of Anthony’s character that he could have withheld it, and I could see also that someone as self-serving as Evie would have been able to remain almost wilfully ignorant. In the end it was apparent from what she said that she really had never known and so I held my silence, being unable to see any purpose that could be served by breaking it.

In any case, Evie had realised eventually that she’d been very wrong in her assessment of what Anthony could be capable of. She saw how easy it would be for him to say that she had manipulated and pressurised him from the moment he’d been sent down from Oxford and she’d begun to intervene in his life. She thought it quite possible that he would have had little, if any, hesitation in going so far as to portray her as having controlled him even to the point of murdering Rachel, and so she had held back, saying nothing further to anyone.

She couldn’t claim to be happy with the way she’d behaved, but as she saw it, happiness didn’t come into it. She’d been uncertain about her decision for some time, and was still considering the possibility of rethinking it, of trying to overcome her fear, but then the post in Tokyo had come up. She told me a little more then about the summer that Rachel’s mother had died, saying there had been nothing in the coroner’s report to suggest that she had not taken her own life that September afternoon on Oxford Street, and that it was her belief that she’d done so. When she read the letter she’d left asking Evie to take care of Rachel, she knew she had no choice but to pull out of the Junior Research Fellowship she’d just been given at Oxford and to put her career on hold for at least a year or two until Rachel was settled, and until they had established a closer rapport. And so, never having
wanted
children of her own but finding herself suddenly in sole charge of an eight-year-old orphan, she’d gone ahead and given it up, having no idea whatsoever how difficult it would prove to be for her to rebuild the professional relationships she’d abandoned for the sake of the emotional well-being of a child not even her own.

‘When Anthony telephoned me that day in June,’ she said, ‘crying his eyes out because he’d been sent down, and when he told me what she’d done that summer term at Oxford, how carelessly she’d behaved with regard to her own place there, something she’d been lucky enough to have access to only because I’d made those sacrifices for her, I was furious, Alex, I won’t pretend otherwise.’ And that wasn’t even to begin to take into account what Rachel had done to the other two, to Anthony and Cissy, by walking away and leaving them to their fate without owning up to the fact that it had been her idea to write the letters in the first place. When a post as prestigious as the one in Tokyo came up, Evie had no intention of letting Rachel hold her career back in the way she’d done as a child, and so, having been offered the chance of a new life she’d taken it, making pragmatism her virtue and trying to have as few regrets as possible.

I wasn’t surprised by what Evie told me; not about her decision to back out of Harry’s plan on the night of the murder, nor about her having remained silent when she could have spoken. Those were exactly the sort of things I would have expected of her. Nor was I surprised to discover she had apparently taken no active part in Rachel’s death. There was something sinister about her, in that she had at her core a kind of a steeliness which I distrusted instinctively, but I had seen her face at the police station when she came to my cell with my holdall, and I had seen her eyes when she’d taken off her sunglasses, and I recognised what I saw there as grief, having known it myself before then. At the same time as knowing she was looking across the room at me with suspicion, I knew there was something else there also: there was compassion for me in my sadness, and some kind of a desire to communicate to me the fact that she knew what it was that I had lost in losing Rachel.

Until the moment I read Richard’s email yesterday morning and
realised
I had no choice but to go forward, it was Rachel herself who was causing me the most difficulty in my deliberations about what to do. I could see only that the damage that would be done to her memory would be immense, and given the likelihood that so little, if anything, would be gained by going to the police, the trail having grown so cold, I didn’t feel at all sure I could bear the responsibility of making public the things I had discovered about her, things that would otherwise remain entirely private. Whilst the regard in which I held her had altered not, I was very aware that there were those who, unlike me, were they to hear of the events that lay behind her death, would be unable to resist the urge to allow their good opinion of her to be undermined, and that by making these events known to them, I would be tarnishing the image she had chosen to present to the world.

There are no two ways about it: I am simply unable to articulate how devastated I am by the things Harry told me, and by the fact she hid them from me. I am so very sorry that when it came to it, and she found herself pushed from all sides into such an intolerable situation by Evie, and by Harry, and by Anthony, she seemed to have been so overwhelmed by her fear of what my response would be if I found out, that she doubted her own belief in me and questioned the constancy of my love for her.

My regret that she kept her silence is something I feel only in the sense that I am quite sure I could have helped her to resolve things, and offered her my protection, if only she had told me what was happening. I have not come to judge her yet, and I don’t suppose I ever shall. Although it is quite another Rachel who has emerged from Harry’s story, I am, if anything, more certain, rather than less, of how deeply she loved me. And that is more important than anything Harry might have told me.

It was not only the depth of her love of which I became more aware as he told me his tale, but also some idea of what had lain behind the intensity with which she had felt it. This is something which, if I forget it even for an instant, I have only to read again the letter that Evie gave me at the police station to be reminded. I took that letter with me to Oxford on my winter visit, and I read
it
more than once in the pauses that arose between the chapters of Harry’s tale. It will come with me to New York also, despite my having the words by heart, and I suppose it will be something I keep with me always, in this way.
Dear Evie
, she wrote, and I picture her sitting at her desk and I wonder what I was doing as she picked up her pen to begin; whether I was there in the room with her, having no idea that it was me she was writing about, or whether instead I was out here on the balcony, cutting some herbs for supper, so that if she had glanced up she would have seen me here before she lowered her head and continued with her letter.

There is a point, in loving, where want becomes need. Where to have possessed that which one desires is no longer enough, and when one realises that one will never have one’s fill of this person, however much one is given
.

This is what has happened to me, Evie, and, in response to your question last week, this is why I am marrying Alex Petersen. It is because we have come to need one another, he and I, and it is my belief that we always shall. I don’t expect you to understand this, knowing that you don’t concern yourself with the idea of love, or with the notion that such a thing as a constancy of affection between two people might be possible
.

You taught me nothing of these things; what I know of them I have learned entirely from Alex, and from the kindness he shows me. At the same time as freeing me from the person I was before I knew him, he has allowed me to become entirely myself, and because of that I am amazed by this new life I am living
.

Alex is gentle, and quiet, and strong, and steady. He is to me all of the things that no one else has ever been, and his love for me is unconditional. He doesn’t question me, and he doesn’t doubt me, and there is a certainty in the way he behaves towards me which I have come to think of as devotion
.

I’m not trying to change your mind about my choice. When I tell you that we love one another, Alex and I, I do so only because that is how it is with us, and how it always will be
.

25

I WOKE YESTERDAY
morning at around five a.m., as I usually do, but instead of trying to go back to sleep I got straight up, knowing I was going to be hard pushed to do everything before leaving today. I put some coffee on while my bath was running and I switched on my computer in a sleepy kind of a way, expecting to find very little of any interest waiting for me. In the last few days I’ve been receiving regular updates from Richard charting the progress that’s been made on the deals I’ll be working on when I arrive. He told me he’s doing this so I can hit the ground running, as he describes it, but I’m aware he does it also because it provides him with a channel for his excitement about bringing me over, and it allows him to show me what a success he’s made of himself already.

When my inbox appeared on the screen I saw he’d made no exception to his daily habit, and nor did there appear to be any seismic shift in the nature of its content. The first two emails I read summarised new terms that had been agreed in the previous few hours, attaching a transaction memo for another deal that had just begun. Because I heard the coffee running over on the hob I didn’t open the rest of them straight away, not until I’d made some toast and checked on my bath and had come back through with my breakfast.

What I see when finally I open the very last of them is set out in the most throwaway of postscripts and typed in the hasty breathless style that Richard always uses when he has an anecdote but doesn’t really have the time to tell it. As I begin to read it the first time I freeze, unable to process what it is that he has written but knowing that it is somehow of enormous significance.

PS been meaning to tell you sorry kept forgetting, you’ll never guess who I met last week – you’ll get used to this, it’s a small world over here … so the old Yank on the other side of the table says he can’t come for closing drinks, has to meet his daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, blah blah blah, rushes off to the airport, shows up again an hour or so after the drinks’ve started – pissed off as hell – she’s stood him up. Anyhow, proceeds to get very drunk and tells me the oddest story. Dammit got to run, Lucinda’s malfunctioning about the screaming wonders that are MY SONS (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!!!) – I’ll save it for when you get here – turned out his daughter was at Worcester with us that’s all, do you remember her, that slightly peculiar American woman who coxed us to victory and promptly disappeared back to the US? Craig, chap’s surname was. Can’t remember her name though. Something Craig. Safe journey eh? Cheers.

It isn’t until I read it a second time that the dominoes of facts I have laid out in lines in my mind over the course of the previous week begin to topple this way and that and something I have known all along without having realised it, so deeply buried has it been, reveals itself to me, rising up from among the rubble I am contemplating. And it is because this memory surfaces when it does, rather than lying dormant forever, that not only do I scald my leg by letting my mug of coffee slip slowly from my hands, my whole body becoming slack with shock, but also that the bath is left to run, so that when I remember it later on, the water has flooded right across my bedroom floor and out into the corridor.