22
THEY BEGAN HIS interview by reading his statement back to him and he sat, silent and hardly breathing, unable to believe what was happening. He was horrified by the series of untruths he found himself listening to, but even in his confusion he knew his brief and knew he had to stick to it, whatever happened. He got through it in the end, but not without experiencing considerable problems in dealing with one or two things in particular. The first real challenge was with regard to the question of why he’d changed his mind about going back to his rooms to collect his things, and why he’d gone up to the library instead. ‘A poet, you say?’ the first policeman asked him. ‘And which poet might that be?’ And of course, Harry said, he’d answered without thinking, wishing immediately that he hadn’t referred to Browning, feeling he’d given something away just by saying that. And then, when they pressed him further about why he’d felt it necessary to look up the answer to Rachel’s question at nearly midnight, rather than leaving it until the morning, he really did get in a bit of a mess. Thinking on his feet and feeling a sudden sweat breaking out across his chest and under his arms, hoping it wasn’t also appearing on his forehead, he told them he’d been quite irked by Rachel’s apparent surprise at his not having had the answer to her question at his fingertips, and that they’d had a little spat about it actually, over dinner, and she’d laughed at him for it, even though she knew how sensitive he was to the assumptions people were making, quite unfounded assumptions, about his memory not being as sharp as it might be. He almost came unstuck again when it came to thinking of a response to their enquiries as to what Rachel’s question about Browning had been, and he really didn’t know what to say when they asked, several times, about this spat with Rachel, and whether he could suggest who else on the dinner table might have heard it, since they hadn’t managed to find anyone.
And then, of course, there was the postcard he’d said he was going to write and drop in to our hotel in the morning. ‘We’ve got one of our officers up at your house looking for it now, Mr Gardner,’ they said, after someone had interrupted the interview and put a note on the table. ‘Only thing is, they can’t find it. Any chance you could tell us where it is, this postcard?’ Harry said he felt quite sick at that point, considering for a moment whether to say he’d written a note instead, on some paper that he’d found in the library, and that he’d dropped it round to our hotel on the way home. But he realised immediately how pointless that would be, given that they’d have searched there also, so he simply said he’d been too tired in the end and had left it until the morning, but that he hadn’t thought there was much point when it came to it, not after the police had been to see him. ‘But you found your answer, Mr Gardner, did you?’ they asked him next, and when Harry wavered, they pulled out the tape of his previous interview and played it back to him, and he heard his own voice speaking to him from the early hours saying yes, he had found his answer. And when they had turned off the tape and looked at him, he had to say no, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t for the life of him recall what it had been.
And as if those things hadn’t been difficult enough, there was the question to be dealt with of why, on hearing the scream and seeing me stumble down the steps and seeing the figure running past me as I’d fallen, he’d decided to go home. Why hadn’t he gone to his rooms, or to the lake to see what was happening? He got through it by telling them that Rachel and I were no longer students, and whatever we might or might not have been doing after dinner, running around the college or not running around the college, had not been his business. He said he’d decided it was entirely possible at that stage that the running figure had simply been a late-night jogger, and that the scream had come from outside the college walls rather than in, but that it had been sufficiently distracting for him to have forgotten what it was he’d been going to his rooms to collect, and because of that he had just decided to go home, and that was all there was to it.
They’d let him go in the end and he’d had no more trouble from them, supposing to himself that if they’d seemed a little aggressive in their questioning, and if they’d been a little sceptical of his story, they’d only treated him in the way they treated everyone they interviewed, finding it a successful method for filtering those who had committed a crime from those who had not.
By the time the interview was over, he’d begun to feel extremely unwell; he was unsteady on his legs and faint with exhaustion, appalled by what was happening. Such had been the need to focus his mind on the questions he was being asked, it was his body that reacted instead and registered the shock he’d felt when the police told him Rachel was dead. At that moment, he said, everything had slowed down suddenly, as if the car they were in was sliding by on thick grease, unable properly to move, even though he could see from the speed at which things were passing by outside the window that they had not, and they were not. Having been shown out of the interview room, he left the police station feeling so disturbed that he wondered, just briefly, whether he was dreaming, trapped in some kind of suspended nightmare, and when he got back to his rooms in College he was unable to do anything other than sit without moving in his armchair, clinging to the hope that Anthony would stick to their arrangement to meet for coffee that morning.
In the end there was no knock on his door, and no telephone call either, and when the clock struck noon he telephoned Evie again. He got through this time and asked if they could meet, saying he thought it best they didn’t speak on the phone. She told him to come to her office at the Ashmolean and as he walked over he felt a certain sense of relief at the thought that he was about to find out what had actually happened, and what she’d seen from the secret garden. Only, Evie told him when he arrived, she hadn’t seen anything at all, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been there.
Harry said she was barely able to string a coherent sentence together at first. When he told her he’d seen her running back up the quad from the secret garden, and when he asked why she hadn’t at least telephoned him afterwards to tell him what had happened, she said she had no idea what he was talking about.
‘But you know about Rachel?’ he asked, feeling totally confused by what he was hearing.
‘Of course I f*cking know,’ she replied, almost shouting at him. ‘Alex phoned me from the police station. That was bad enough, having to hear it from Alex f*cking Petersen, but you do realise what I had to do afterwards don’t you?’
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘No I don’t.’
‘Who do you f*cking think identified her f*cking body, Harry? Do you have any idea what that was like for me?’
‘Evie. I’m so—’
‘I don’t suppose you know either that the last time I had to identify a body was twenty-five f*cking years ago and it was Rachel’s f*cking mother. Christ, Harry. You shouldn’t be bothering me with your stupid questions, not now.’
‘Right,’ Harry said, his breathing shallow and his heart racing in his chest. But still she hadn’t finished.
‘So unless you’ve got something useful to tell me like where the hell that little shit Anthony is I’d be grateful if you could just piss off and leave me alone.’
‘Right,’ he said again. ‘That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.’
And then he listened, stunned, as she claimed never to have found the note he’d put under her office door, and said that at no point during the previous evening, nor during the night, had she realised he’d been trying to contact her. She’d either been in the bath, she said, or she’d had her phone switched to silent, for example during the speeches at the fund-raiser.
‘Quite frankly,’ she said, ‘I’d had enough of the whole thing by the time the party started and I decided to leave the lot of you to your own devices, come what may.’
‘Come what may?’ Harry repeated back at her, hardly believing what he was hearing.
‘F*ck you Harry Gardner. Don’t even think about trying to make me feel responsible for what’s happened. Alright? It was out of my hands. Wasn’t ever in them as a matter of fact, so you can drop the bullshit. God knows I’m feeling bad enough already, can’t you see that?’ And when he said yes, of course he could see that, but he still didn’t understand how she’d spent the rest of the evening, and what she’d been doing later on when she hadn’t answered the phone call he’d made from his taxi home, she really did shout.
‘For christ’s sake Harry. It’s none of your f*cking business.’
‘Alright,’ Harry said, ‘Alright. But what are we going to do about Anthony?’
She calmed down a bit then, and told him she hadn’t tried Anthony’s phone, and she didn’t think it was such a clever idea to do so now, and nor had he tried to call hers. She was going to just wait, that was all, and in her opinion, Harry should do the same. Harry told her in response that he’d arranged to meet Anthony that morning but he hadn’t shown up, and that he really didn’t know what to do next.
‘Nothing, Harry,’ she said. ‘You do nothing at all. We wait, and we see. That’s all we can do.’ And then she stood and walked to the door and held it open, turning back to him and saying, ‘I’m sorry to have to say this to you, Harry, but I’d like you to leave now, and I mean right now. She’s dead, and nothing you or I can do will change that. We stand only to lose by sticking our necks out any further than we have done already. I think we both know what’s happened, and as far as I’m concerned, there really is nothing else to say. You have my email address I think. If you have any real need to contact me, use it.’
It was as he walked back over to Worcester from the Ashmolean trying to digest what Evie had told him that things felt as though they were really beginning to unravel. He went back to his rooms and spent the rest of the day in a daze, sitting in his armchair looking down on the quad and hoping in a vague sort of a way that Anthony might yet turn up, listening for his tread on the staircase at the same time as knowing he wouldn’t hear it. And then he went home and slept, returning the next morning to wait. He said he hadn’t really admitted that that was what he was doing at first, convincing himself that despite it being a Saturday, when he would normally have gone to the farmers’ market, or walked out to a pub for lunch, it was better to go to his rooms and start to sort through his things for the summer vacation, discarding the papers he no longer required and perhaps even marking a few of the Finals scripts that had come. It was only when my call was put through that he realised he’d been hoping Anthony would make an appearance, his heart jumping and a wave of adrenalin running across the inside of his chest as he realised he had no idea what to say to him, or where he should begin.
The porter told him that the caller he was about to put through was a former student who hadn’t given their name, and when Harry heard my voice on the line instead of Anthony’s, he was shocked, and completely thrown by my proposal that we should meet. It was a meeting he found excruciating in the extreme, he said, and one of the most difficult conversations he’d ever had in his life. Still, as far as he could tell, it passed without incident. Wearied by the anxiety it gave rise to, he left my hotel and went back to College and almost fell into the Senior Common Room for his lunch, taking a seat on his own and staring into space. Before long the table was filling up, and he looked across to see Haddon sitting down opposite him. He nodded, and made it clear he wasn’t interested in having a conversation. The two of them had already spoken earlier that morning, having bumped into one another in the quad, and he hadn’t been particularly surprised by the line Haddon seemed to be taking. The tone in which he’d spoken, Harry said, bordered almost on the sensationalist, as though he was discussing an episode of a murder mystery series for the television rather than the death of a former student.
As he waited for his next course to arrive, Harry listened on and off to the conversation Haddon was having with the junior colleague beside him, feeling fairly irritated by the fact he seemed to be continuing in the same vein. He’d been about to lean across the table and tell Haddon that the way he was talking about Rachel was disrespectful, and reprehensible, when he heard Evie’s name mentioned and kept quiet. He’d missed the very beginning of the conversation but from what he could make out, it seemed that Haddon had just come from coffee with a colleague, the History of Art Fellow, who’d been at the Ashmolean fund-raiser the previous evening and had reported seeing Evie there.
‘Oh yes,’ he heard Haddon say, ‘had my own run-ins with her in my time. Bit of a vixen if you get my drift,’ he said to the junior colleague, whose eyes, Harry said, widened at the thought of whatever it was that she might be about to hear. And then it was Harry’s eyes that widened, as Haddon went on to say that Evie had apparently been at the party at the Ashmolean, and had listened to the speeches and stayed for a short while afterwards, but that just when Haddon’s informant had been on the point of approaching her, she’d left the room suddenly, and in the company of a man rather younger than herself. ‘Poor show really,’ Haddon said, smiling back at the junior colleague and luxuriating in the attention she was paying him. ‘Someone in her position. Should have stayed on in my opinion. Talked to the other donors, pressed a bit of flesh. Had other things on her mind though, what?’
And that was the point at which Harry began to realise he was facing the situation very much on his own. Not only had Anthony disappeared without trace, but if Haddon’s report was to be believed, Evie and Anthony had been at the party at the Ashmolean but had left well before the end, which meant they would both have had plenty of time to change and be in College before midnight. Given those things, his realisation that she very probably had been in the secret garden after all, and that it had been her he’d seen running up the side of the quad, left him without a great deal in the way of options when it came to answering the question of why it was that she was lying to him, and what it was that she was trying to hide.
Harry asked himself that question again and again in the months that followed. He thought once or twice during the summer that he might be going insane. He passed his time largely alone, in Oxford, spending day after day in his college rooms ruminating obsessively on what had happened and failing to come up with any kind of idea of what he could do about it. He’d thought of contacting me right from the start, but however many times he considered it he simply couldn’t imagine how he would begin to tell me what he knew. And he assumed that my reaction would be to go straight to the police, which was something he wanted very much to avoid given that it would inevitably result in his being treated as a suspect and charged with having given false evidence. His certainty of his own innocence had provided him with the justification for deciding against that course of action, but even that was something he had come to doubt, in a slightly fantastical way. When the police had begun their reconstructions he’d watched each one from the window of his rooms overlooking the quad. They would wait until the sky was as clear as it had been on the night of Rachel’s murder, and then, when the moon was just at the right height, a team of actors would take to the stage and it would begin. He said he couldn’t help but stay and look, and that at first he’d found it uncanny, how perfectly it was done each time, how little deviation there was from the events as he remembered them. But then one night as he’d stood at his window watching, he’d realised the scene that was being played out was essentially one of which he was the only scriptwriter, and from that point on he’d started to wonder, on and off, whether he had perhaps made the whole thing up, or imagined the events altogether.
He’d taken to travelling to London only when the air cooled again and he realised it was mid-September, forcing himself to go back to the British Library despite what had happened, recognising the need to stabilise his life in some way and thinking that the resumption of his once familiar routine might be the best approach to take. He had, of course, found his first visit overwhelmingly difficult, and had taken to using another reading room, being unable to feel comfortable in the one in which he and Rachel had so often worked together. And he had, on a couple of occasions, found himself crossing over the Euston Road to stand outside Anthony’s Judd Street flat, just on the other side of the street. He did this for no more than half an hour or so at a time, perhaps longer, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. But he saw nothing, and had no word from him either, until the telephone calls began.
It was at the very end of September that they started. To his growing sense of unease a pattern quickly developed whereby, at about the same time each afternoon, the lodge would put through a call to his room, telling him that the caller had declined to give their name. He would take the call only to hear the sound of a busy street for a minute or two before a series of pips signalled that the caller’s money had run out. And then there was nothing until the same time the following day. He had felt certain, he said, that it was Anthony, and he found himself almost longing for the next call to come, thinking that perhaps that would be the occasion on which Anthony would actually speak to him. He’d thought once or twice about asking the police to trace these calls, but had realised that if he was going to do that, he may as well tell them everything, and, this being a course he had already decided against, he could see no way of asking for their assistance.
He told me that the preparations for Rachel’s memorial service in October had provided a certain solace, in that he was able at least to feel that he was of some use to me. And as the date we had fixed for the service drew closer, and Anthony still hadn’t replied to the invitation, he’d somehow known then that he’d never see him again. He’d allowed himself to hope that Anthony might just show up unannounced, but as far as he was aware, he hadn’t. When I’d mentioned early on during my visit that I thought I’d seen someone who looked like him slipping in at the back of Chapel after the start of the service, he’d wondered at first whether I might have been right, but had decided on balance it was unlikely even he would have done something quite so brazen.
In any case, after that, the phone calls stopped altogether. He missed them, he said, these little silences, and after a couple of weeks he started to worry, and to fear that something awful might have happened. It was a thought he’d entertained right from the start in a non-specific sort of a way: the possibility that Anthony might be so filled with remorse for whatever it was that he’d done on the night that Rachel died that he would no longer have been able to live with himself, and that that might explain his disappearance. His fears were confirmed, he said, in as much as they could be, when he received a telephone call from the Metropolitan Police in mid-November asking him to attend Holborn Police Station for an interview about a missing person. He had panicked at first, of course, thinking that the police had caught up with him and had spotted some kind of a link between Anthony and Rachel, but to his amazement, after the first ten minutes of the interview had passed, it became apparent that the Metropolitan Police and the police in Oxford had made no connection whatsoever between the two cases, and he had stopped panicking.
The officer told him that one of Anthony’s neighbours had alerted the police to the fact that there was a strong and unpleasant smell coming from his Judd Street flat, and that he hadn’t been seen entering or leaving the property for some time. As was normally the first step that was taken in such cases, they’d forced an entry. Finding the place empty and obviously unused for some time, and that the smell was caused by nothing more sinister than festering refuse in the unemptied kitchen bin, they’d filed the case as non-urgent and started a series of routine checks. His employers told them he’d handed in his notice in early June. His colleagues had thought nothing of the fact that they hadn’t heard from him; Anthony had never been particularly sociable with any of them, and had mentioned that he was taking some time off to go travelling. Checks on his passport had revealed that it hadn’t been used at all in the previous six months and they had assumed he was simply elsewhere in the country, preparing for his travels. But when they had contacted his mother a couple of weeks later, she’d told them that she hadn’t heard from him since July and that she was becoming more and more concerned about him. He’d written her a letter saying he needed some time alone, and that she knew how much he loved her but he hoped she would understand that he would appreciate it very much if she didn’t try to contact him, or to find him, and that she mustn’t worry about him and nor should she let anyone know that she’d heard from him. She was beside herself, she said, and had been on the point of contacting the police when they had called anyway, and so she’d told them about Anthony’s letter, despite him having asked her not to.
And then the policeman had smiled at Harry across the table and said, ‘Quite a little letter-writer this Anthony was, by the looks of things,’ and he handed Harry an envelope. It seemed that Anthony had left it on the kitchen table in his flat. It was addressed to Harry at Worcester and had a first-class stamp on it. They’d opened it at the time but had filed it away, finding there was nothing particularly remarkable about it. But in recent weeks, he said, Anthony’s mother had started to give them what he described as ‘a bit of gyp’, so they’d reopened the investigation. They’d found the letter to Harry on the file and thought they may as well get him in for a chat to see if he could help them before they put the matter away again.
The officer said that at this stage they were ruling nothing in, and nor were they ruling anything out. Anthony had closed all his bank accounts and no trace of him could be found in the UK, or at least not without further expenditure of a kind that wasn’t being contemplated. The decision had been taken to draw a line under things for now, there being no reason to treat his disappearance as anything other than what the policeman called ‘a voluntary’. Harry said that it had struck him as odd, this missing-persons terminology, making him think only of summer evenings when he’d left Chapel after Evensong to the sounds of the organist’s improvisation soaring around the quad, and for a moment he had thought he was close to tears at the sadness of it all. Realising that to expose his emotion at that point would be more than a little unwise, he had bitten his tongue to stop himself, before looking down to read the letter.
He was relieved and disappointed in equal measure to see that it provided nothing by way of explanation. It contained not a single clue, being simply an invitation to Harry to come to the flat and take whatever books he’d like to have, since Anthony was going travelling for some time and didn’t know when he would return. The policeman said that it was clear that Anthony had simply forgotten to post it, and once Harry had told him that he was sorry but he really couldn’t help him, the man had offered to walk him round to the flat so that he could take some of the books before Anthony’s mother came down to collect everything the following week. ‘Only if it’s no trouble,’ Harry said, and so they walked over to Judd Street to see what they could find.
The flat, Harry said, was cleaner than he’d expected it to be, and there was none of the fetid smell the policeman had described. ‘Had it done professionally,’ the man explained. ‘The neighbours, you know.’ But there were still a couple of flies circling in the kitchen, and when the policeman opened the door through to Anthony’s study, saying that that was where the bookshelves were, Harry said that they were met with a sight that disgusted him. A couple of flies had obviously been trapped in that room also, and had multiplied, so that there were thirty or forty of them circling in a cloud in the middle of the room and the floor was littered with tiny blue-black bodies. ‘Like a scene from a Hitchcock film,’ Harry said to me. ‘It really was grotesque.’ And then, as the policeman started to swat at the cloud above his head, and to open the windows and waft as many of them outside as possible before going back to the kitchen to fetch a dustpan and brush, Harry looked across the room and saw the little book of Browning sitting in the middle of Anthony’s otherwise empty desk. He realised then that the whole thing had been planned to happen in exactly this way, and that Anthony had intended for him to come here in the company of a policeman and to find this book, the book that Harry had seen fall from Rachel’s bag in his rooms on the night of her murder.
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.’
‘And then?’
‘And then, having done so, I continued on it, but only because I had been left there all alone, and could find no other route. Don’t think I haven’t dwelt on how I could have done things differently. Don’t think I haven’t lain awake at night these last months thinking through every step I took, even from the moment the three of them walked through my door for the first time, so many years ago. And don’t think I didn’t see, for every step, the other I might have taken instead.
‘I have made a series of errors of judgement. I was kind where I should have been firm, and harsh where I should have shown only compassion. I tried always to be fair, Alex. But I did not ask questions where I should have done, and I listened to others where I should have heard only Rachel, and what she was trying to tell me that day on the South Bank: that she was afraid of Anthony, and had good reason to be. And when, at the last, I hesitated about the plan that had been put in place, and I woke one day in a panic, thinking I might be mistaken about Anthony after all, I failed her again by seeking counsel in Evie about what had been planned, rather than keeping my own and confronting my doubts. And then suddenly it was Midsummer Night, and there you both were, knocking on my door. I’d had a sense that afternoon that things were slipping from my grasp, and that people were beginning to withdraw, and to withhold things from me. But events began to move too fast, and in directions I could not fathom. I tried, Alex. I tried to keep hold of it all, to stay in control. I did what I could. But then—’
‘But then what?’
And, when he said nothing,
‘Well, what?’
‘But then it was too late,’ he said, quietly, and as he spoke the words he was unable even to look at me.
‘And that was when you began to tell your lies, to cover up what you had done. And now, what? You’re asking me to tell them with you?’
‘I lied to the police that night in the belief that Rachel was alive, Alex. Injured, perhaps, yes. But alive. And in the belief also that I had made her a promise, and that by staying silent, I was keeping it.’
‘And then? When they told you what had happened?’
Harry paused then and didn’t answer. He sat down again, hunching forwards on the sofa and wrapping his arms around himself as though he was cold, and when he did speak again, the pauses he left between his sentences were so long I kept thinking he had finished.
‘Alex,’ he began, and he sat back up, keeping his arms wrapped around himself even more tightly than before. ‘I am asking you to forgive me, and to help me. The project I embarked upon when I agreed to Anthony’s request has failed, and it has done so catastrophically. I am left with the worst kind of despair. I have passed my story on to you in the hope that you will share with me the burden of deciding what to do with it. It is, in many ways, more yours than it is mine. You’re hardly even a character in it for large swathes of the narrative, but you and Rachel loved one another a great deal, and of that I am very conscious. You are now in possession of what may be the key to the mystery of her death, and I don’t seek to stand in your way if you choose to divulge it to those who may be able to solve that mystery. I am simply proposing that you think a little longer, at least, before you reach your decision.’
I said nothing, my head spinning, not at all sure how to respond. And then I told him, as calmly as I could, ‘I’m afraid I don’t see it like you do, Harry. I just don’t.’
‘Of course, Alex. And you have every right not to. That was the risk I took when I invited you here.’
He stood again and walked over to the window and leaned against the frame, with his back towards me. I thought he was looking down on the quad, but then the light changed and fell differently for a moment and I caught his reflection in the glass and saw that he had caught mine also and was looking right at me. ‘As I said when I began, the question of whether the tale is to have a conclusion is one that you must answer. It is for you to decide whether we shall remain as innocents, Evie and Anthony and I, or whether we shall each in our own way be condemned for whatever parts we have played in Rachel’s murder. We can, I think, be almost sure that Anthony killed her, and for myself, I believe there is little to be gained by a further telling of the tale. The scent of a hare is fresh and strong when you put her up, but the longer she runs the more it fades. I can see no great advantage in the protracted and painful exercise that would have to be undertaken to establish his guilt, if indeed it is possible to do so conclusively, given his absence.’
And then he was silent for a time, and the light changed again and I could no longer see the image of his face.
‘There is this need in us always, isn’t there, Alex, to find everything out, and to judge, so that there may be some final atonement for what has passed. The mistake we can so easily make, all of us, is to assume that if we achieve those things, then we will have our solace. All I am asking you to do is to be quite sure, before you reach a decision, that this need cannot be met some other way. That we cannot seek expiation by another route. When you have thought further on it, you may come to agree with me that we can close the book and let things lie. Alternatively, you may wish to see it published, in order that others may read it, and in order that its villains might be punished.’
He turned from the window and walked across the room towards me. ‘I would suggest, if I may, that you go and get some rest, or perhaps take a walk and think things through. I will do the same, and would be grateful if you could come back later on this afternoon, at half past three or thereabouts, and let me know what you have decided. Alternatively, should you find you need longer to make up your mind, you might be so kind as to tell me what point you have reached in your deliberations. Goodbye, Alex,’ he said, holding the door open for me. ‘And thank you for keeping to your agreement to hear me out. I am grateful.’