Every Contact Leaves A Trace (52 page)

I stared out of the window, thinking about Rachel, and about Cissy, and then I thought some more about what would have happened after Rachel had walked away from the Pavilion and been seen by Towneley and Haddon collapsing onto the grass, her body convulsing. And I wondered about how Cissy and Anthony would have felt when Haddon had appeared at the back of the Pavilion, and at what point exactly the two of them would have become fully aware that it was Rachel who had told him of their presence there. That would have been the moment, I realised, that the spell which Rachel had cast on them would have been broken once and for all, and the mystique that it seemed she had held for them would have been shattered beyond repair. For if Cissy and Anthony were in love with Rachel, and if so many of the things that they each of them had done in the two years that they spent together had been done in the hope, if not quite the expectation, that she might love them back, that must have been the point at which they would finally have realised how foolish they’d been to have nursed such hopes in their hearts.

I thought of them going to the tobacconist on The High and asking for the gold-tipped cigarettes she had told them to buy, and of Rachel coming up with the idea of the Browning letters and the other two playing along so readily at first, until only Anthony was left in the game. I thought again of Cissy draping her arm around an unresponsive Rachel on the steps before the Ball, and doing the same on the deck of the boat in Turkey, and I thought once more of Rachel’s trusty servant Anthony, fighting in the Buttery bar to protect her honour by punching Richard in the side of the head. And I saw then that there was no other way of looking at it: when Haddon had gone to the Pavilion that Midsummer Night so many years ago, on Rachel’s instructions, he had not only broken up the fight that was taking place between Anthony and Cissy, but he had also released them from the thrall in which Rachel had held them.

As I thought about Rachel walking away from them and collapsing
on
the grass, I thought also about Haddon and Towneley seeing her there, and Towneley running to her rescue. I wondered then about what Harry had said about the way her body had been convulsing, and that it had been either because she was vomiting, or crying. It seemed obvious, suddenly, that the latter was the case, and that the reason she was sobbing so hard was because she knew that the part she’d been acting out was finally over, and that something she had only ever thought of as a joke had been taken literally, so that all of them in their little group of four, as Harry had come to think of it, were being hurt because of her, and in ways she had never intended. And it was then that I saw things clearly, and realised she’d played the games that she played without meaning to, and only in order to keep her orphaned self apart from the world she saw around her, being too much a prisoner of her own mind, and of her own past, to believe that any of what she encountered there was real. And I saw then also that this love that Cissy, and Anthony, and Harry, had had for her, was of their own invention, and that she had not sought it from them, being a waif who cared for no one, thinking no one would care for her.

I knew even as I thought these things that none of the pieces of information I had collected, nor the ways in which I had attempted to read them and draw them together, could go as far as enabling me to work out what had really taken place beside the lake on the night she was murdered. My role in these proceedings was restricted to that of a gatherer of facts, only listening and observing, collating and transmitting, so that I might enable others to begin to investigate. But regardless of my awareness of the restrictions within which I was operating, I nevertheless found myself imagining what might actually have happened that night beside the lake. And so it was that as we crossed the last of Oxfordshire, I sketched out a story for myself, and this is how it went: Cissy might have been waiting by the lake behind the plane tree, and Anthony might have been in the secret garden watching for Rachel, and the two flashing lights that Harry had seen from the Old Library window might have been the two of them signalling to one another that Rachel was on her way,
so
that Anthony would then have slipped down the steps from the secret garden and stood waiting for Rachel to emerge from the passageway beneath. I thought it all through again and again, and I imagined him greeting her, and I imagined the two of them walking across the lawns together, talking, Rachel having no idea that Cissy was there. I saw them reach the plane tree, and I saw Anthony kneeling on the grass and Rachel kneeling beside him, and then I saw Cissy step from the shadows and lift a stone into the air, silently, before bringing it down on Rachel’s head for the first time. And then I heard Rachel scream, and I saw Cissy bring down the stone again and again until, at perhaps the fourth blow, I saw Rachel give in and sink forward, her face falling down until it met the grass, and I saw Cissy drop the stone and run back across the lawns and through the passageway and up the side of the quad, the hood of her jogging top pulled down tight on her head, passing me on the steps where I had fallen. I saw Harry standing in shock on the terrace opposite and I saw Anthony, having picked up Rachel’s bag and run across the bridge to the Provost’s garden and cut through to the playing fields, waiting in the bushes until he could see the porter bending down over me where I knelt with Rachel’s head in my hands, and then I saw him tracking his way around the edge of the fields and creeping along to the boundary with the canal and pushing through the bushes before slipping over the wall into the water, leaving no trace by which he might be found.

The train stopped then and we were at Oxford, and I stepped on to the platform into a morning colder than the one I had left behind. I walked quickly from the station concourse and began to make my way up towards the castle mound, heading for St Aldates. I have often found over the years, largely in the context of my work and particularly when I am engaged with a piece of litigation, that when I am faced with events of enormous significance, or with a factual matrix so dense and complex as to seem almost impenetrable, I focus instead, and completely unintentionally, on some minute detail that apparently carries no great weight whatsoever. And I have always supposed that this tendency stems from no other cause than the fact
that
to do so is manageable, and reassuring, and comforting, in the face of other, more troubling difficulties.

Yesterday, as it turned out, I made no exception to this habit of mine, for as I started my walk up towards the castle, I began again to think through what Richard had said in his email about Cissy not being called Cissy any more, and her father referring to her by a different name. I had crossed Rewley Road and had walked along Hythe Bridge Street as far as the canal when I saw on my left the trees of the Worcester playing fields, following the line of the towpath, and I wondered whether Harry was in his rooms, sitting alone by his fireside, and whether he was worrying about what I would decide to do. And then I wondered, if he wasn’t there, where he was instead, and who he might be with, and I thought that perhaps I should have telephoned him to let him know I was coming.

I had just begun to hope that I wouldn’t bump into him by chance when I reached the right-hand turn leading to the castle mound and took it, leaving the environs of Worcester behind me altogether. I knew I’d be able to explain myself quite easily if I did see him, given the suddenness of the discovery that was the catalyst for my journey, but still, I wanted to avoid it, having no desire to speak with him, and knowing how awkward I’d feel if I had to. I reflected then on how that was a sensation I’d felt on more than a couple of occasions during my visit, and I began to wonder whether I’d made myself feel like that each time, or whether it was something in Harry’s manner that had brought it about. But then I remembered the night I’d drunk too much at dessert and I felt my cheeks flush slightly just from thinking about him walking me back across the quad, his hand under my elbow. When I recalled how I’d tried to sober myself up by reading the writing on the wall in the Pump Quad, I realised that not only had this feeling been, on that occasion, one completely of my own making, but also that it was entirely appropriate I should have felt it.

I suppose it was the surfacing of this latent memory of what I had seen there, written on the wall, that made me think again of Richard’s email, and of how, not being able to recall Cissy’s name,
he
had referred to her as ‘that slightly peculiar American woman who coxed us to victory’. And it was at that moment, just as I was making for the castle mound, that I stopped and turned in my tracks and retraced my steps and walked back up Worcester Street instead, heading for Worcester itself. It wasn’t that I’d worked out the name she would have been using instead of Cissy, only that I knew how I could find it out, my mind having been cast back suddenly to the afternoon that Richard and I had stood beside the Isis cheering along with everyone else as she was carried from her boat on the shoulders of her crew. The reason I turned from my course yesterday was because I’d seen her even as I walked, rising into the air above us all, seemingly lifted higher still by the noise of the shouts that rang out over the water and across the fields beyond, the whole of College having shown up to chant the nickname she’d been given by her crew, the name that was printed in block capitals across the back of the T-shirt she was wearing that day, in recognition of the debt she was owed for the skill with which she’d manipulated and harried her men along the river.

Again, I knew this was the kind of detail the police could very well find out for themselves without the slightest trouble, but having felt the hint of satisfaction that came when I realised it was within my grasp, I wanted to be able to present them with what I considered to be the final piece of my jigsaw. And that was why I skirted the college walls one more time, half running up Worcester Street with the intention of jogging along the terrace once I was inside and following the steps down into the Pump Quad. When I got there, I thought to myself, I would be able to scan the palimpsest that was its walls and find what I had missed in my drunkenness: I would read the display of the nicknames of her crew that summer, knowing that hers would be written there also, right across the top.

But when I rounded the corner where Worcester Street meets Beaumont Street, with the muffled remembered sounds of those riverside chants ringing just too faintly in my ears for me to be able to make them out, I found that it was not to be. Because it was Midwinter Night, the iron gates had been locked shut, so that I
couldn’t
even make my way up the flagstone path that lay beyond them to bang on the huge wooden doors.

It was, I suppose, entirely understandable that this blow would strike me as hard as it did. Things had seemed to be so nearly at an end, and I had thrown myself at the mark that day, fighting to keep inside what wanted to come out. Determined to see things through to a conclusion, I had been determined also to staunch my grieving until my work was over. But I was defeated then, facing those locked gates and the wooden doors that lay beyond them, and that is why I raised one hand and held it against the coldness of the iron and I wept, wishing very much that I might have gone inside and grasped at the thread I knew was waiting for me, tying it to the others I had brought from London, so that I had done my best for Rachel.

I don’t know how long I stayed there in front of the gates yesterday. I only know that I realised, eventually, that I wasn’t standing up any more but sitting on the ground, slumped against them, and that my hands and my feet were numb with cold. I pulled myself up and began slowly to retrace my steps, making my way up past the castle and turning right at the top of Cornmarket. I headed down the hill to the police station and when I got there I went with a couple of detectives into an interview room and began to talk. After an hour or so, calls were made to London, and later on, more officers arrived. When I’d finished telling them Harry’s story, and my own, I answered as many of their questions as I was able to. And when they’d read all the documents I gave them and looked at the severed photograph also, other calls were made to other people in other countries, and to the Provost of Worcester College to request the opening of his gates, despite it being Midwinter.

And because of the tales that I told, seats on other flights were booked last night, in addition to my own. There is a plane that has taken off already for Tucson, with men and women on board who will be looking for Anthony, and for Cissy, and for the man Cissy’s father hired to watch his daughter, on and off, over the years. And
there
is another that will be on its way to Tokyo, where Evie will be invited to discuss in greater depth the part she played in the drama of her god-daughter’s life, and death, and to tell them a little more about her relationship with the young man who, along with the staff of his hotel, had so obligingly given her her alibi. Among the passengers that will, about now, be boarding the flight that is due to land later on today in Washington DC, are those who will question Cissy’s father, and in a few hours from now, a train will pull out of Euston bound for Manchester, and for Anthony’s mother. At around the same time, a couple of officers will be let in through the gates at Worcester to take some photographs of the names written on the wall in the Pump Quad, and to look through the college archive for the Boat Club reports heralding Cissy as its hero, and to begin again to tread out tracks around the lake and to measure sightlines from the Old Library. And, slightly further north, at the top of the Woodstock Road, a plain-clothed policeman will knock on the door of Harry’s house, as happened once before when the leaves were still on the trees and he slept with the contentment of someone who knows not what it is to have the death of another man’s wife on his hands.