Every Contact Leaves A Trace (7 page)

The only fact the crowd of witnesses to this extraordinary event came to debate in their telling and retelling of the tale, the only strand of the story over which there was any doubt, was as to whether the bull seal had roared as it rose from the water. We were unanimous in our verdict that it had thrown its head back and opened its jaws
wide
before looking down on my swimming father, and that it had snapped its jaws shut as it did so, but we were almost evenly divided among our number as to whether this action had been accompanied by any kind of a roar. As to the tale in its entirety being a fabrication, my father was resolute. You’re liars the lot of you, he said eventually, on the last night of our holiday. My mother and Robbie and I had re-enacted the event for him again in front of the fire after supper, Robbie and I taking it in turns to play my father, and my mother playing the seal and adding, or so I objected after my father had gone up to bed early and left the three of us watching the last of the embers die in the grate, the emission of a roar from the mouth of her seal as it towered above me where I lay face-down, my head pressed into the carpet as my father’s had been under the water. I thought at the time that this was a little unkind of him and so did my mother and so did she say to him, pointing out that to call his own wife and son liars wasn’t a nice thing to do, not when they were telling the same story as everyone else and they’d seen it with their very own eyes.

On the journey home though, when we’d been driving for hours and both of them thought I was asleep, I heard my father say to my mother that he supposed he might have sensed something, maybe just the water becoming darker for a second, and maybe it was because of that that he’d turned and swum back so much faster than he’d swum out. But he changed his mind a moment later and said he didn’t want to talk about it any more, he’d had enough, and then I moved and he looked at me and saw that I was awake and they never spoke of it again in front of me.

And then the memory has run its course and I am left with the hollowness that comes when I think of what happened to Robbie at the end of that summer, and the fact that my father never came to Cornwall with us again, my mother and me.

I turn my thoughts back to my second interview with the police. It is on my mind now as the evening draws in about me, largely because
it
was that which kept me awake last night. I had fallen asleep with relative ease, despite feeling more than a little unsettled by the events that had taken place during the day, and by the letter that had come from Harry and lay beside me on the bedside table. I must have slept quite heavily for several hours before waking suddenly, convinced I had heard a noise in the apartment, or from the balcony, or on the roof. My heart was pounding in quite a ridiculous way, and when eventually my breathing began to relax I found I was thinking of the moment in the interview when I realised it was Harry whose story was emerging from the detective’s questions and offering me a way out. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the thudding in my chest, which was becoming less rapid, and I replayed for myself the CCTV footage I had seen. And then I remembered telephoning the college from my hotel the morning after I had been released, and asking to be put through to Harry’s room.

I hadn’t really expected him to be there, it being a Saturday, but it was the only number I had for him. I told myself I was calling because I wanted to hear his story in his own words, but as soon as I heard his voice I realised that my desire had another motivation: this was the man who had shared with me the final hours of Rachel’s life and I needed to see him.

He answered straight away, his hello ringing out loud as if to say, ‘At last! I thought you’d never call.’ When he realised who he was speaking to, he sounded a little shocked and apologised profusely for the exuberance of his tone, telling me that of course, he had heard the terrible news, and whilst he couldn’t find words that were in any way appropriate to express the depths of his sadness, he wanted me to know how deeply sorry he was for my loss. He said in explanation of the way in which he had greeted my call that he’d been expecting someone to phone. The lodge had told him only that I’d said I was a former student and had declined to give my name. When I asked if I could meet with him he hesitated before saying, in a tone of voice that implied he was surprised by my suggestion, and not entirely pleased, ‘Yes, of course. I’ve time on my hands, as it happens. The person I mistook you for was due here an hour ago and has
obviously
thought better of it. I imagine you’d prefer it if I came to you though?’ And so he did and, wanting to avoid the press who were gathering in the lobby downstairs, we sat in the bay window of my hotel room, drinking coffee and talking of the events of Thursday evening.

As I lay awake last night running through what I remembered of the night Rachel died, and what I knew of Harry’s story, and what my lawyer had told me in the weeks that followed, a fact that had never occurred to me before somehow worked its way out of my memory and into the front of my mind and as it did I felt my stomach tense and I became aware of something rising cold in my throat and feeling as though it was running across the inside of my chest.

It was only a tiny detail that occurred to me, but it was one which had never made itself apparent before last night. Harry had told the police that he’d heard the scream from the lake as he was walking along the north terrace of the quad on the way back to his rooms from the library, and that he’d stood entirely still on hearing it, making no attempt to run towards the sound as I had done. This had come up in our conversation in my hotel room, but only in passing. I didn’t specifically ask him about it, and we moved on to other things too quickly for me to wonder about it then in any precise way. But as I thought through our conversation last night, his words came back to me as clearly as though he’d been lying beside me with his head on Rachel’s pillow. He told me that he froze on hearing the scream because he was afraid. ‘Scared out of my wits,’ he said in response to my telling him about the way I had known it was Rachel, without a doubt, despite never having heard her scream before. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t want to move,’ he said. ‘You see I couldn’t. I was quite paralysed by fear.’

One might suppose such a sound to be a not infrequent occurrence late at night in a college situated in a city centre. I am quite prepared to accept that a man of a certain sensitivity might feel curiosity, or even alarm, on hearing it. But unless there was some particular feature about this scream, or about the circumstances in which he came to hear it, I cannot understand Harry’s reaction. He professed at the
time
to have had no idea that Rachel was down by the lake, no idea whatsoever. Unless, like me, he had recognised the scream as having been voiced by someone in particular, by someone known to him, or unless it had signalled to him the occurrence of an event which he had already entertained in his consciousness as a possibility, why should it have made him so very afraid?

5

IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE
that I have attributed an undue significance to the realisation that occurred to me last night, and to my wakefulness. It was unrealistic of me to have expected to sleep at all. I’d been aware when I went to work in the morning that the day would not be uneventful, but even so, I was surprised by how things turned out.

I could very well be said to have brought the situation on myself, in that it was the decision I made two days ago that led to my having to take a taxi home yesterday, burdened as I was with the box of things I’d cleared from my office. Even as I made it, I knew it was the sort of decision Haddon would have described as one unlikely to be without consequences: I was, for the first time in my career, acting against the wishes of my partners at the firm.

In the months after Rachel died I found in my job a kind of a refuge; a forum in which I was required not to think, but simply to function. I didn’t go back straight away of course, although on the first morning after I got home I did try to. I’d rung and cleared it with my senior partner before setting off from Oxford on the Tuesday lunchtime. He insisted that there should be no client contact initially, and certainly not while I was still on bail. I agreed to this eventually, saying I was content to work only with my colleagues for a period of time, at least until the press interest had died down. There was no question in my mind: I needed to be there, to be doing something, in whatever capacity they would have me. I needed to be busy.

I remember getting ready that Wednesday morning. I put on my suit and tie, picked up my keys and my wallet and my phone, and I went to open the front door of the apartment. As I let myself out I felt suddenly sick. My legs became completely hollow, and I sat on the floor and lowered my head into my hands and stayed like
that
for some time until I realised the feeling wasn’t going to pass and I couldn’t face seeing anyone.

For the rest of the following fortnight I stayed at home, waiting out the days until I could go back to Oxford for my third interview, the one in which I found out I was being released from bail without charge. There was the occasional visit from a detective, coming with queries about Rachel, or bringing letters to see if I could shed any light on them, or photos, to see if I could identify faces, and situations. But apart from that, nobody came to the apartment; I had told everyone who asked that I would rather, for the time being, keep myself to myself. I tried to go out once or twice but I found it difficult. It wasn’t just the lack of any sense of purpose or structure to my day, but also that I felt a strange and horrible sense of vulnerability. My grief at that time was a very violent one, so that, for example, when I walked along the canal on the first afternoon, I could feel an almost real physical sensation that someone was kicking and beating me as I walked. On the second day I tried again, and while the precise sensation of being beaten was no longer there, it had been replaced by a fear of being attacked, so that when I reached the point where the towpath passed underneath the first bridge I had to turn back, feeling sure there was someone waiting at the other end ready to assault me.

On abandoning my walk I went back and spent hours on the balcony, digging furiously and repotting plants, weeding the raised beds, tying back the jasmine and sweeping the boards clean of the mess I had created. When there was nothing left to do, I crawled into bed and gave in to an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. In the days that followed I did little more than sleep. In the evenings, when I woke, I wrapped myself in my duvet and crept out on to the balcony and sat watching the sky and thinking of Rachel and the times that we’d spent out there, until it grew too cold, or too dark, and I had to get back into bed. I lay awake most nights thinking of her, and of how the police would be taking her life to pieces, and mine, and lining up what they found and examining it, and how it was very likely that by the end of it, they would know far more
about
Rachel than I had ever done, or ever would. I longed for her to be there those nights, so that she could lie beside me and listen while I told her these things as they occurred to me, and so that she could hold me as I cried myself back to sleep.

Returning to work was an escape, of a sort. The tension and suspense of managing the kind of deals we were doing then, the value of which ran to sums so excessive as to be almost absurd, was sufficient to shut me off from what had been so difficult in the fortnight I’d spent in the apartment. I had let it be known beforehand that I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had happened. I was grateful for the cards and letters that I’d found when I arrived back from Oxford, I said, but I didn’t feel able to discuss it in person. And, of course, my colleagues were more than happy to respect this wish, their relief being almost palpable from the minute I’d walked into the office on the first morning. Their silence on the subject made it possible, almost, to forget that anything unusual had happened while I’d been away. I hadn’t watched the news or read a paper whilst I’d been at home, and the information I needed to know in order to keep up with the commercial world was, as it always had been, filtered for me each day by my secretary and lay waiting on my desk when I got in. Those small things that did seep through were so slight, and so remote, as to make me feel rather like an Arctic explorer, striding across an icy wilderness hundreds of thousands of miles away from the newspapers that were reporting on my journey. For the hours I was at work I functioned almost as a machine, feeling very little in the way of emotion, apart from anger or frustration if things went wrong or if people fell short of my expectations.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that thoughts of her death would eventually start to encroach upon that territory, and that I would come to operate less successfully as they did so. I was surprised though by the sort of mistakes I began to make. There were enough people around me whose desire to create a good impression meant that not only did they pick up on what became a series of little omissions, but also that they were able to reclassify these episodes
of
inattentiveness as nothing more than calculated tests of their own competence.

And then one day in August, in the week following Rachel’s funeral, I made a mistake that couldn’t be disguised in such a way. When it was drawn to my attention, I was more than a little sceptical that I would have missed such a thing as that. But there, in the client file, was the copy of the letter that had gone out, printed on green paper with my signature in the top left-hand corner, and there was the relief on the face of the lawyer presenting me with this evidence of my approval of her work. The comparatively minor scale of the transaction concerned, combined with the relative slimness of the client’s contribution to the previous year’s turnover, meant that I was able to convince myself that what had occurred demanded no more than a letter of apology and a waiving of my fee on the file for the foreseeable future. Until a month ago, that is, when I was asked, as I am every year, to fill in a form for the purposes of notifying our insurers of potential liabilities arising by way of third parties seeking redress against the firm. The letter accompanying the form invites me to declare any errors or omissions that I have made, or that I think I might have made, or that I suspect might have been made by others, and it was as I sat at my desk staring at the line on which I was about to write my signature that I realised I had to make a confession. The error itself was a small one, but I could no longer pretend that the potential ramifications were anything other than enormous.