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.
The memory that surfaces is an old one, but none the less vivid for it. It is so vivid in fact that when I close my eyes and watch as Richard and I walk up the steps on to the terrace in front of Hall on a winter morning in our second year, knowing as I sit there in front of my computer what it is that I am about to see next, I experience the sensation that someone has walked into the room behind me and emptied a bucket of ice down my back.
We’re on our way to the Old Library to work for a couple of hours before breakfast, there being only ten days left until the mock-exams Haddon has insisted on setting us. We reach the alcove by the porter’s lodge and are met by the sight of the Men’s Eight, huddled in a pack, their breath steaming against the cold and all of them jumping up and down in preparation for the training run they’re about to go on. Richard steps into the lodge to get something and I hear a couple of them mouthing off about the fact that their bloody cox has demanded they get there at six a.m. only to be late herself. Then one of them who has been hovering on the edge of the group keeping a lookout says, ‘Here she is, the lovely lady herself, at long bloody last,’ and they turn, and so do I, and we all see Cissy Craig running improbably fast up the side of the quad, the hood of her jogging top pulled forward and down, tight around her head, her figure so small she might be a teenage boy. And as they start to sing, ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes!’ their slow hand-clap keeping time with their voices, she picks up her pace even more and hurtles towards us at an extraordinary speed, her torso thrown so far forward she looks like a sprinter just off the blocks. She is moving so fast she reaches the top of the quad in an instant and takes the whole of the steps in no more than a couple of strides. Reaching the men waiting in the alcove, she runs straight in amongst them, barely pausing, and the group moves off as one, slipping out through the wicket door to begin their run around the city. I step forward and hold the door open for the last of them and I see them jogging across the road to Gloucester Green, the height of the pack and the proximity to one another with which they’re running meaning that the hooded figure seems no longer to be among them.
And then the memory has run its course and I remember watching the CCTV playbacks the police had shown me on the day after Rachel’s murder. They’d recited to me, again and again, the precise details of Harry’s description of the figure he’d seen hurtling up the side of the quad, the one that I insisted I hadn’t seen. And then, when still I said I hadn’t, they’d shown me, over and over, the images of the figure slipping out of the door and losing itself among the group of students who were gathered outside. As I turn back to Richard’s email once more, I realise that when I’d sat there in the police station, listening to them repeating what Harry had said, and watching the images flicker on the screen in front of me, the reason I’d had the sense throughout the whole experience that I had seen it all before, at some other time, and in some other place, was that, in fact, I had.
And as soon as I realise it was Cissy who Harry saw running up the side of the quad in the minutes after Rachel was murdered, I realise also, from what Richard has said in his email, that because she is alive and well somewhere, it will be possible to find her. I get up from my desk intending to leave for Oxford straight away and to go directly to the police station when I get there, trying to remember as I walk across the room what time the first train leaves from Paddington. But then I decide that I should speak to Richard before I go and find out what else Cissy’s father told him during the conversation in which he’d said he’d been stood up at the airport by her and her boyfriend, and what was so odd about the ‘oddest story’ that the man had told Richard in his drunkenness.
I go back to my desk and pick up my phone and dial Richard’s number, but it’s Lucinda who answers and when I ask to speak to him she says for god’s sake Alex, I mean, hello and it’s lovely to hear you and everything, but it’s the middle of the night here I thought you were coming tomorrow can’t you wait till then? And when I say I’m sorry but it’s urgent she holds the phone away from herself and I can hear her soothing one of the twins. When she speaks again she says alright, if you really have to, I’ll go and wake him up but I’ll have to finish the feed first so can I get him to ring you back?
While I wait I google Cissy Craig, thinking Harry must either have been as gullible as Evie thought he was if he believed Anthony when he said he’d been able to find virtually nothing on her when he’d begun to stalk Rachel online from Arizona, or alternatively, he was simply so ignorant of how the internet worked that he wouldn’t have realised how improbable this claim was. And I am angry with myself for not having thought there was something suspicious about this when Harry told me, and for not having realised it was such an obvious lie that it must have meant Anthony was hiding something, something about Cissy. When my search comes back with precisely nothing beyond a few references to some Worcester Boat Club results dating back to the early nineties, I am no longer angry with myself, and instead I am confused, but then Richard calls, and he explains immediately why my search was unsuccessful.
‘Yes yes yes. Cissy. Of course. You’re right. That’s what she was called. Her dad called her something different that’s all. By the way can I just say it’s bloody the middle of the bloody night Alex? Lu’s pretty pissed off actually, and, well, I mean, I’m pretty knackered myself. This is the first night in the last fortnight I’ve got to sleep before three.’
‘Are you sure it’s the same person though? It’s Cissy you’re talking about? Are you sure he’s her dad?’
‘Alex you’re not even listening to me are you? Are you alright?’
‘Please just answer my question. Do you really think I’d be asking you if it didn’t matter? Are you sure she’s the same person? Rachel’s friend? The cox? Why was her dad calling her something different?’
‘Yes, Alex, it’s the same person, but that isn’t what she’s called now and the man should know he is her bloody father. Can you please get a grip and let me get back to bed and we can talk about it tomorrow. Oh god. They’ve both woken up now. Hold on,’ and he goes away and I can hear a high-pitched wailing in the background and it sounds as though Richard and Lucinda are having an argument as well.
When he comes back he tells me he has to go and do I have any idea how hard it is for them both, the sleepless nights, the feeding?
‘Well no,’ I say, ‘I don’t suppose I do. And I don’t suppose I ever will, Richard, will I? Not now.’
‘Oh god, Alex, I’m sorry. Can we not talk about this tomorrow though? Are you sure you’re alright? Have you been drinking?’
‘I’m alright, Richard. And no I haven’t been drinking. I just need your help that’s all. And I need it now, not tomorrow. I can’t explain, sorry. It’s just too complicated. I’d be very grateful if you would just do this one thing for me, OK?’
‘What one thing?’
‘Trust me. That’s what. Just trust me. I’m going to ask you some questions. And I want you to believe me when I say it’s very, very, important that you try as hard as possible to remember everything this man said to you. In an hour or so I’ll be passing it all on to the police. They’ll contact him themselves but I need to make sure they know where to start when they get to him.’
Richard doesn’t say anything and I think perhaps I have been cut off, but then he is there again.
‘Alex, you do realise you’re actually being an idiot don’t you? A complete idiot. I’m sorry but I’m actually beginning to wonder why I asked you to come. You do know I pretty much staked my reputation on you when I vouched for you being ready for this?’
‘And? What? Are you saying you don’t want me to come any more?’
‘For god’s sake. You just don’t seem to have made any improvement, psychologically speaking. Listen to yourself. What the hell does Cissy Craig have to do with any of it?’
‘It’s your call, Richard. Trust me or don’t trust me. But make up your mind soon will you? I’ve got a train to catch. Practically speaking.’
And that was when he gave in, saying that he wouldn’t be able to tell me much but that that was hardly surprising, given the conversation had no significance for him whatsoever beyond the quirk of the coincidence that a contemporary from our Oxford days came up. What little he could tell me was enough though, once I’d asked him question after question and he’d drawn on the deepest reserves of his barrister’s memory for his answers.
He told me Cissy’s father had come back disappointed from the airport having gone there to meet her and her boyfriend. He’d been looking forward to seeing them, and he’d even texted her on his way and told her he’d met up with an old chum of hers from Oxford and he was sure that he could fix it that they could all get together at some point while she was in town. But when he got there the flight had already landed and they were nowhere to be seen, so he came back to the party and carried on drinking. So disappointed was he, Richard said, that he’d drunk a lot more than he should have done and became quite emotional about the whole thing. And when I stopped him then and asked about this boyfriend of Cissy’s, and whether he’d said anything about him, anything at all, Richard said oh yes, now he came to think of it, he’d said something about the boyfriend being English, and that he couldn’t remember for certain but that he might have said his name was Edward, or Ted, or Benjamin or something, yes, that was it, Ben, no no, wait. Benedict. Benedict Wilson or something. No, not Wilson, some kind of Italian sounding surname. But yes, he’d definitely said he was English.
And when I asked him whether the man had said anything about where the flight had been coming in from he said ‘Jesus, Alex, the man was drunk, we both were, and I was knackered. And I’m even more knackered now.’ But then he said, ‘Oh. Hang on, OK. I remember.’ And when I said ‘Well for god’s sake, Richard, where?’ he said Tucson, Arizona, and it was by way of this last detail that he confirmed for me that Cissy had been there on the night of Rachel’s murder, and that Anthony had been there with her.
I asked him why Cissy’s father had been quite so upset about them having cancelled on him and he said that that was where things had become slightly odd, and that he was sorry to say that the two of them really had got quite drunk and he wasn’t all that happy to go on the record with it, given what I was intending to do with the information, and why didn’t I bloody well ring him myself if I had so many questions and did I want the man’s number in Washington DC, which was where he’d gone back to? And then, straight away, he said he was sorry, he was tired, and that the man had said something about having been estranged from his daughter for years, and that she’d come back from Oxford in the nineties and dropped out completely, and that there might have been some drugs involved, and that the next thing she’d done was to take herself off to some kind of a commune in Arizona and do what Richard called ‘the whole healing thing’. She’d apparently refused to speak to her father for the entire time that she was there, blaming him for the fact that things had gone so badly wrong for her. Richard said he’d got the impression that the meeting at the airport had been one of many failed attempts at reconciliation, and her father had said he’d be trying again as soon as she decided to start speaking to him. And then he remembered, at the last, that the man had also said something about having been so cut up about the whole thing, and so worried about her being sucked in by some kind of a cult, that he’d had her trailed by a private detective while she was in Arizona. And that when the detective had told him some things about the English boyfriend she was hanging around with, things he wished he’d never known, he’d sent his daughter a letter telling her these things and begging her to come home but she’d written back saying that was the last straw and he should forget the idea of seeing her again, ever.
And then Richard said he really couldn’t tell me anything else, and that he was too tired to even think about where I was heading with it but that I should go to the police if that was what I wanted to do and let them take it from there. He told me to think things through very carefully, given who Cissy’s father was and what it would do to my career if I got it wrong. I said thank you, and I’d explain everything when I got there, and that of course I’d think things through, what the f*ck else did he think I had been doing for every minute of every day since I’d got back from Oxford. Alright, he said, alright, and I asked him to apologise to Lucinda for me and he said he would, and not to worry too much about her. She was just like that these days, she’d get over it.
As soon as we’d finished speaking I got dressed and made a half-hearted attempt to mop up the bathwater that had spread across my bedroom, and then I stuffed all my papers and charts and timelines and diagrams and notes into a bag, along with a few things from the boxes that the police had returned, and I went downstairs and out on to the New North Road and caught a cab to Paddington.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with answers to all of the questions I’d be asked in Oxford when I got there, and nor would I be able to give them the name of Rachel’s killer, not for sure. But I felt fairly certain that what I could tell them would lead to their being able to solve the mystery of her death. And as the train pulled out of the station, I found a table to myself and did as Richard had felt it necessary to suggest I do, and I thought things through very carefully indeed.
I decided at the beginning of the journey that I would work still on the premise that Evie’s alibi would hold fast, and that despite this new information that had come to light about Cissy, and the impact I considered it to have on almost every aspect of Anthony’s story, I would assume also that Harry had told me the truth about his own involvement in the meeting he had persuaded Rachel to attend. I knew that the police would have to set those assumptions aside for the purposes of their investigation, and that they would in all likelihood start from scratch with both Evie and Harry, given the fact that they had lied so comprehensively in their statements. Where the police would be able to revisit both Evie’s alibi, and the whole of Harry’s version of events as he had described them to me, I could do no such thing. I turned my thoughts instead to Anthony and Cissy, being certain that they had been there, the two of them, and being almost certain also that they had met with Rachel beside the lake, and that this meeting had resulted in her death.
It was clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to work out precisely what their respective roles might have been on the night of the murder, and that I wouldn’t be able to answer the question of whether Cissy had run up the side of the quad with her hood pulled tight about her face as the piece’s primary villain, or merely as an accomplice in Anthony’s grand plan. Nor, I realised, would I be able to say with any certainty whatsoever whether the crime they had committed that night was premeditated. I was aware, of course, that it was entirely possible they’d gone to the lake in search of the apology that Anthony said he had so badly needed, and that Cissy had wanted one just as much as he had. And I could see how, in the circumstances and in light of the considerable tension that would have surrounded such a meeting, something could easily have gone wrong, and that Rachel might have said something that could have provoked either one of them into attacking her.
I couldn’t think of any concrete suggestions to put to the police as to when it was that Anthony and Cissy had met one another again after they’d both left Oxford; whether perhaps Anthony had moved to Arizona and found Cissy there by chance, bumping into her in a Tucson bar one night, or whether they might even have kept in touch ever since the night of the Casablanca Ball, so that it was because she was living in Tucson that he’d moved there in the first place, theirs being a friendship that was only disrupted, rather than broken, by the events of that summer term. Either of these things seemed possible, now I knew that the tale Anthony had told Harry was a tapestry woven from half-truths, picked clean of any thread by which she might be glimpsed.
My thoughts came next to the question of Cissy’s name, and the fact that Richard was so certain her father had called her something else, which tied in with my being unable to find any trace of her online. Whilst I thought it more than likely that of all the questions the police would face, this would be the easiest to answer, and that it would take no more than a phone call to her father to do so, it bothered me to think that I didn’t know. I wondered if she’d had another name at Worcester, a nickname I should have been able to remember, but I couldn’t recall one, and I decided instead that unless she’d simply changed her name altogether and the one she used now had no connection whatsoever to her past, the most obvious explanation was that the name ‘Cissy’ itself had been the nickname, being short for Cecilia, or Alice, or something, and that on leaving Worcester she had reverted to the use of that name, whatever it might be.
I laid out my notes of Harry’s story across the train table in front of me, as well as my charts and my diagrams, and I looked at them again, wondering what it was that Cissy would turn out to have been doing since she left Oxford, and what would be discovered, eventually, about how her life tied in with Anthony’s. Having read all of these things a couple of times, my mind was flooded with such a multiplicity of options that I was unable to process them in any measured way and turned my thoughts instead to whether I was able to draw any conclusions as to what her motives could have been for killing Rachel, intentionally or otherwise, or, if she’d acted only as Anthony’s accomplice, for having condoned what he had done. And if, on the other hand, they had each of them gone to the lake in search of an apology, only for things to go horribly wrong, then why, I wondered further, would she have felt such a need in the first place to have held Rachel to account in that way?
What Richard had told me about Cissy’s father hiring a private detective to trail his own daughter reminded me of the story she’d told Towneley about how she’d got her scar, and I thought then about the two of them, alone together for weeks on the ocean, her wound becoming infected under her bandages, and I wondered what kind of a man he was. And then I remembered her dressing up for him when he came to visit her in Oxford, and how she’d taken him everywhere with her that week, even to her lectures, and how I had read his presence there as a manifestation of the pride he took in his daughter’s achievements, and the affection that he felt for her. And I tried to imagine how he might have reacted when she came home from Oxford that June and told him she wouldn’t be going back. It made perfect sense to me that she should bear a grudge against Rachel that was equal to the one Anthony had carried with him for so much of his life. Cissy also had lost her degree that Midsummer Night when she had walked out of Haddon’s room and caught the plane home to the US, going back to this father who she’d said would kill her if he found out she’d been involved in the writing of the letters, and she also had lost a future that might otherwise have been hers. But still I couldn’t quite see how this, without more, would have made her able to lay claim to the same strength of motive as Anthony had had, given the nature of his obsession with Rachel and the strength of his feelings for her.
I began then to look again at what I had brought with me from the boxes of Rachel’s things and as I did so, moving them about on the table in front of me, something Evie had said when we last spoke came back to me. I’d barely registered it at the time, it striking me only as a throwaway comment, and one buried in amongst others of the sort I’d come to block out, so derogatory were they about Rachel, and so obviously expressions of the fanciful notions Evie entertained about her on account of the jealousy she still so clearly felt towards her. She’d said something fairly nasty about my being mistaken if I thought my wife had been some kind of a saint, and didn’t I realise that she was, in fact, only capable of thinking of herself, and that she’d hurt plenty of people in her time. And that was when she’d said it: ‘That poor little American girl was actually in love with her, Alex, you do know that don’t you?’ and I’d said nothing in reply.
Of course, I had always known that Rachel and Cissy had shared some physical intimacy; I’d seen them kiss one another on the night of the Ball, on stage in Rick’s Bar. But apart from that moment, which was after all part of the cabaret, I had only rumours to go on, and largely those I’d picked up from Richard, via Towneley, about the so-called weekend parties Rachel might or might not have given at the Chelsea house. And then there were the scenes that had been described with varying degrees of specificity by Harry and Evie in their piecemeal retellings of what had only ever been Anthony’s version of the ‘lost afternoons’ that the three of them had apparently spent together. I thought again about what Evie had said, and then, my thoughts returning to Towneley carrying Rachel across the lawns and taking her to hospital, I thought again about Rachel and Cissy on stage in Rick’s Bar that night, and other images began to come into my mind. It was when I recalled their presence in the black and white photograph that hung on Harry’s wall, Cissy’s arm draped lazily across Rachel’s shoulders, that I began to look with more urgency through the things I had brought from the boxes the police had returned, and I found the envelope I’d grabbed before running out of the apartment, stuffing it full of as many photos as I could fit in it. I searched among them thinking I might have forgotten it, but there it was all of a sudden, the picture of Rachel standing on the deck of a boat in Turkey, the photo she had cut in two before reconsidering and taping it back together again and keeping it locked away in her desk. And it was only as I sat on the train yesterday and looked more closely at the woman who stood beside her, her head resting on Rachel’s shoulder and her arms wrapped around her waist, that I recognised Cissy smiling out at me from underneath her sun hat. As I began to think that there might, after all, have been more to this relationship than I had realised, I put the photograph down and took up instead the love letter, the one the police had brought to me twice in London and asked me to help them with.
It is only a copy that I have, and I recall as I look at it again that the original had been written on airmail paper, and that there had been neither an envelope bearing a postmark, nor a date, an address, or a signature. But I find when I read it this time that I need none of those things to see, clearly, that it could only have been written by Cissy.
We spoke of love once, you and I, when we fell on the grass and held each other. And I really thought you meant it when you told me that you cared for me.
I found out last night just how wrong I was.
Like I said, I’ll never forget you, whatever happens, and I don’t think you’ll forget me either, not for a long time anyway. You might think now that you will one day, but this much I know for sure: you won’t be able to, however hard you try.
So long then. I’m going this afternoon and I won’t be coming back. I guess that’s the way you wanted it.
The clues in the letter are slight, and will take some explaining to the police, but there is enough for me to be quite certain of its authorship. It is by her use of language that she reveals herself to me, and these glimpses of her that I catch in the text are visible to my eye only because of the particular attention which Harry, in the telling of his tale, paid to words, and the ways people use them. ‘Whatever happens’ is the phrase that gives me my first hint of Cissy’s voice, and as I hear her say it I picture her on one of the earliest of those lost afternoons, making the other two repeat it back to her again and again, this boy-scout mantra with which they sealed their membership of their secret clique.
‘Like I said’ is what she breathes to me next, her voice lifting from the page just loudly enough for me to hear it above the hum of the train as it hurtles, and I remember Harry having told me that Rachel said these words to him in the hospital, on the night of the Casablanca Ball. He said then that he had been struck by her use of the phrase, recalling it to have been a favourite of Cissy’s and observing that Rachel’s reproduction of it had indicated to him how close the two of them must have been to have absorbed one another’s language in this way. And then I hear Cissy saying it also, her voice echoing to me from across the years in the hour or so after she’d been found behind the Pavilion fighting with Anthony, Rachel having informed Haddon of their presence there. I picture again the scene that took place in the aftermath, and I can almost sense the anger with which Cissy used this phrase that night in Haddon’s drawing room when she realised it was all over for her. I remember Harry describing her response to the last of Haddon’s threats: ‘Like I said, you’re a jerk,’ she’d said, before carrying on, in her American way, ‘So long then,’ and walking out of his cottage. And then I recall Harry telling me that Haddon had found a letter from her in his pigeonhole the next morning informing him that she was leaving Oxford and wouldn’t be coming back, and as I read again the last two sentences of Cissy’s letter, ‘So long then. I’m going this afternoon and I won’t be coming back. I guess that’s the way you wanted it’, I realise that she would have written this letter on the same morning that she’d written to Haddon, leaving it in Rachel’s pigeonhole and going from Oxford for good.
As the fields shot by and the train neared Oxford, I read the whole of the letter one more time, using a wider lens and going back over the opening once or twice:
We spoke of love once, you and I, when we fell on the grass and held each other. And I really thought you meant it when you told me that you cared for me.
I found out last night just how wrong I was.
I thought about what Cissy’s experience might have been of the events she referred to as having taken place ‘last night’, and I remembered Harry’s description of what she’d said to Rachel, and then to Anthony, behind the Pavilion, and the way she and Anthony had fought that night. I turned over this idea of her having been in love with Rachel, really in love, as I had been, and I wondered whether she might have come to hate her enough to have killed her, or to have been an accomplice to her murder, such was the intensity of her passion, and such was the pain she felt, perceiving herself to have been rejected, or wronged, by this woman she had loved, this woman who she thought had loved her back.
I closed my eyes and I saw Anthony hit Cissy to the ground and climb on top of her, and I saw Cissy struggle and bite Anthony’s hand and I saw her use the only opportunity that was afforded to her for speech by crying out Rachel’s name, and I saw Rachel, standing there watching Cissy being assaulted and calling out her name, and I saw her smile and say through her tears, ‘Go for it Ciss. It’s only a f*ck after all, isn’t that what you said?’ And I saw what Cissy would have seen from where she lay, Anthony’s hand clamped back over her mouth again: I saw Rachel walking from the clearing and leaving Cissy to her fate, and I felt what Cissy would have felt then, on realising she had been abandoned by her lover.
For my own part, that was enough. Of course I didn’t know whether Cissy had actually been in love with Rachel as much as it seemed she might have been, and nor did I have any sense whether Rachel had ever loved her back, remembering only the awkwardness with which Rachel had responded to my questions in the summer about whether she had kept in touch with Cissy at all since she had left Worcester, and how strange it seemed to me at the time that she had broken off contact altogether in the way that she had. What I did know though was that their relationship had been an unusually intense one, and that there had been anger there in Cissy, and that if what her father had told Richard was true, it was an anger from which she hadn’t yet found release. It seemed quite possible to me, therefore, that she might be someone who was still likely, so many years later, to have been able to give that anger a voice only through violence, whether intentionally or otherwise.
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.
I have no real sense of what they will discover when they come in to land and turn to their respective tasks, those detectives in their aeroplanes. I was aware even as I’d started to speak to the police yesterday that I was simply passing on a version of events, and that mine was no more authorised than Harry’s. I was able to provide only traces and imaginings, after all, having nothing better to offer. And now, as I can only stand and wait, I am becoming yet more aware, horribly so in fact, that there is a chance that what they will learn when they arrive at their destinations, if indeed they learn anything at all, may add precisely nothing of any significance to that which they know already. I cannot avoid confronting the prospect that despite my journey to visit Harry, and my note-taking, and my sorting of facts and ordering of narratives, carried out so painstakingly and so late into the night as I sat on my own at Rachel’s desk in the evenings after I returned to London, looking out at the heron and breaking only to walk on to the balcony and see the moon falling on the water; that despite all this, I will, on their return, be no further on than I was when the snow began to fall and I took the train to Oxford. I cannot but think of the possibility that I will, for all my learning, be found wanting; that I will have failed Rachel, and wholly so. It might well be the case that what I have provided by way of a theory, or a collection of possible theories, about her death, will prove to be nothing more than a house built of surmises and resting on a foundation made entirely of coincidence, the only concrete shred of evidence, such as it is, being the tiny spot of what might or might not be blood on the corner of a page in a book of poetry.
It was, I think, one afternoon on our honeymoon in Florence that Rachel told me, throwing down a novel in despair so that I asked her why she’d done so, that a tale whose resolution rests only on coincidence is one that is hardly worth the telling. Despite the cold, we were sitting at an outside table of a café, if I remember correctly, in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, each of us wrapped in blankets and holding our tea while we read, in the hope that our hands wouldn’t freeze. I questioned her conviction, asking her to explain exactly what she meant, and how exactly she was using the term coincidence, suggesting in return that every piece of knowledge in the whole of the history of time had been acquired by way of a coincidence, to some extent, if one went back far enough in searching for its provenance. We argued the idea back and forth for a while, in an easy kind of a way, until eventually I observed that what she was saying was absurd, and that any number of cases in any number of courtrooms across England were being won or lost on an almost daily basis by virtue of facts gleaned by coincidence of one sort or another, and that surely, that was how the most interesting denouements came about. ‘Not in fiction darling,’ she said, smiling. ‘In life, yes. It happens all the time, of course it does. I know all about that. But there are rules when it comes to literature. Hard and fast ones, to be broken at an author’s peril.’ And she laughed then, and looked in her bag for another book and said she’d run out and why didn’t we go across the piazza to the market stalls that were strung along the other side and see if she couldn’t find something to read next. ‘Of course,’ I said, glad to be moving, and we set off towards the piles of second-hand books we’d passed when we arrived.
‘But what else is there?’ I asked her in the middle of the night just passed, as I lay in the darkness of my room wishing she was there to help me slow my thoughts enough to fall asleep again. ‘What else do any of us have to go on, when it comes down to it, other than coincidence?’
I listened for a time to the wake of her silence, imagining what she might have answered, before I carried on.
‘Can it not be said,’ I asked, ‘that we none of us know anything by any other route, really?’
And then, for the first time in all these months, she spoke.
‘Hush now, Alex.’ She put her hand up to my face and placed a finger on my lips. ‘We’ve talked about that already, haven’t we?’
‘But I can’t—’
‘You can’t what, Alex?’
‘I don’t—’
‘You don’t what? Alex, come on. It’s OK come on, come here.’
She moved her hand up and stroked my head, and then she ran the back of her fingers down my cheek, wiping away my tears and licking them from her skin.
‘Rachel.’
‘Stop talking,’ she said. ‘Stop thinking even. You’re thinking about it all too much, Alex,’ and she came closer and stretched her body out beside me, the length of it, rubbing my toes with hers. ‘You try so hard always, to work things out. To make things right. Perhaps that’s why you’re a lawyer, not a writer of novels.’ Then she laughed a little, softly, and brought her face to mine and murmured in my ear, ‘And perhaps that’s why I love you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, hardly able to breathe for the ache in my heart. ‘I’m so sorry, Rachel.’
‘Sorry for what?’ and she reached her hand up and stroked my head again. ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s not talk any more.’
She folded herself into me.
‘Just love me, Alex. That’s all I want.’
And so I held her, reminding myself of how the clefts and hollows of our bodies fitted together so well, and as our breathing settled into one rhythm, something in me let go and I was able at last to fall asleep.
Harry said to me that I could do with his story what I would. And I am conscious that I can be no more proprietorial about the one I told the police yesterday. They will do with it whatever they see fit, and that is something over which I can have no further control. It’s not my story any more, and whilst I am not sure that it ever was, I feel better, somehow, for having given it away to someone else. And just now, as I hear my telephone ringing to tell me my car has arrived, and as I close the balcony door for the last time and go through to the hallway to pick up my suitcase and lock the front door and post the keys back through the letterbox, I am only glad that I no longer have the burden of it.