He pressed on though, alone, the wind blowing a chorus through the gardens, the bare branches of the trees forming dancing shadows where the streetlights caught them. About halfway along the street he stopped and walked out into the road. There was nothing to mark the place in his memory but he guessed this had to be about where it had happened.
He looked on, imagining the car stopped up ahead, the interior light on, passenger door open, a trail of exhaust drifting into the cold air. He thought of her, too, lying on the tarmac, and somewhere along here was the point from which she’d darted out in front of them.
He moved back to the edge of the road now and tried to imagine how they hadn’t seen her. There were a few cars parked on the street tonight whereas there hadn’t been ten years before. The trees were big though, forming a complex backdrop of shadows with the overgrown gardens that lay just behind them.
And the truth was, Matt’s reactions had undoubtedly been slower than they should have been, what with the drinks he’d had, the mood in the car, the quietness of the early hours. Even if he’d been concentrating fully she could still have surprised him from those shadows. She’d come at them quickly too, he remembered that, or at least, that’s how it had seemed.
He looked at the houses again, wondering whether she’d come out of one of them. Unlike Will, he’d always tried to avoid the press coverage and the speculation, but he’d heard enough to know that it had been a mystery what she’d been doing there. None of her friends had known of anyone she might have visited in the street.
That meant nothing though. The whole nature of student society was meeting new people, going to new places. She could easily have met someone and visited them without telling her friends. If anything, the thing that had always troubled Alex was that she’d been alone, that her friends hadn’t been with her, that whomever she’d been with had seen fit to let her walk home alone.
Will had always been obsessed with the idea that she’d been running away from someone, that the five of them had simply provided the last act of an evening that had already been a nightmare for her. The truth was probably more mundane, that her judgement had been as subtly skewed by alcohol as theirs had.
He looked around, the wild dark feel of the street. Possibly she’d simply been walking along it and, spooked, had started to run, chased by shadows into the road. There was an irony there if that was the truth, Alex himself chased by the same shadows ever since, maybe the others too.
He heard a car engine and turned. A large black car came slowly along the street, not a student car. He couldn’t see into it but the car slowed further as it reached him, as if the driver wanted to see who was there by the edge of the road. Alex stared back, holding his nerve, and the car accelerated again.
For a moment he imagined the driver being the person who’d found her that night, someone equally haunted, drawn back to the same location in the hope of making sense of it. It had never occurred to him before, that somewhere out there was the person who’d found her, another curse they’d handed down.
He started to walk back himself, following the fading tail lights of the car. He didn’t really want to go back to the house but there was nothing else to see here and no further to walk without looking suspicious. Maybe even here he looked suspicious, the reason the car had slowed.
He was almost back to the centre of town when he saw a couple of students on the road ahead and then a taxi pulling up for them. He didn’t want to go back to the house and seizing the opportunity, he ran a little to get there before they got into the cab. The two young guys looked nervous at first that someone was running towards them, then quietly hostile.
He was out of breath but smiled as he got there, saying, ‘Are you on your way to campus?’
They were reluctant to answer but the taxi driver looked out of the window, assuming perhaps that Alex was talking to him, and said, ‘That’s right, campus, name of Barnetson.’
Alex smiled again, more broadly now, realizing how these two kids really didn’t want to share their taxi; it reminded him of the way he and the others had been as students.
‘Don’t mind if I share your cab, do you? I’ll get the fare.’
They looked at each other, their minds too slow in coming up with an excuse or answer. Alex didn’t wait anyway, getting in the front next to the driver.
‘Whereabouts?’
Alex looked at him and said, ‘It’s their cab. I want the Psychology Department but I’ll walk from wherever they’re going.’
The driver looked in the rear-view and one of them said quietly, ‘Balmer College, please.’
The driver nodded and pulled away.
Alex turned slightly in his seat and said, ‘That used to be my college.’ They nodded, unfriendly, not saying anything. He smiled anyway, exhilarated for some reason, a sense that he was escaping, doing something.