4
I WAS RELEASED from custody the following evening on the condition that I would return for a further interview in a fortnight’s time, and that I would inform the police if I was planning to leave the country. I know now that my release was delayed by the lack of security cameras around the lake. That, and the absence of the porter from his lodge when I decided to come out from the shadows of the library steps. Until Harry Gardner had been tracked down, the police had been unable to find anyone who had seen me leave. Nobody could confirm the time at which I had done so nor whether it was before, or after, the screaming. The camera trained on the inside of the college doors had caught Rachel and me making as if to leave after saying our goodbyes to Harry. In a slightly later frame we are seen kissing each other before she disappears in one direction and I move out of sight in the other. The porter had pinpointed the moment he heard the scream to exactly midnight, and I had no way of proving that I had been sitting on the library steps when I also heard it and began to run towards Rachel’s body. There would easily have been time, apparently, for me to have left my hiding place, as one of the policemen insisted on calling it, and run down to the lake to kill her, all before the porter found us under the tree.
After I was arrested, after I’d been checked in at the station and had everything taken from me, I was allowed to make a phone call. Godmother Evie wasn’t at home and when I tried her mobile it was switched off, so I decided to wait and try again the following morning. I lay on the bed in my cell wishing very much that Rachel was with me. I felt half certain she might be shown in at any moment, all apologies and explanations, telling me it was someone else’s blood that had stained the shirt the police had taken from me, that it was someone else’s head I had cradled in my hands, rather than her own. And I was sure that my being held there was little more than a formality, that there was no question of my being seriously considered a suspect for more than a few hours. When the duty lawyer had been to see me and we had discussed what I would and wouldn’t say in my interview, they told me I should try to get some sleep. There was no hurry, the police said, and there were things that had to be attended to before they spoke to me properly. Even with the brightness of the light from the corridor and the faces looking in on me every ten minutes, I managed eventually to do as they said: when they called me at eight and gave me something to eat, they told me I’d been asleep for hours.
I wasn’t especially troubled by the first interview, despite its length and the resigned manner in which the detectives were asking their questions, their conclusions obviously drawn before they entered the room and read out their caution again. Nor was I concerned by the youthfulness of the duty lawyer who sat beside me in a shiny suit, his face flushed from sleep and, presumably, excitement. I remembered enough from law school to know that the police were, in all likelihood, still only at the stage of gathering information, of collecting stories, and that mine would be one of many that was being told. It was clear that what they actually knew amounted to very little, and I was quite certain that in the hours to come, as the facts settled into some kind of order, something would emerge to make them question the assumptions they had made about me.
Throughout the whole experience of telling and retelling my tale, of sidestepping their tricks and their feints, I felt nothing but the coldness which had seeped into my chest and my stomach at the moment I’d first realised there was something odd about the position of Rachel’s body. I remember having a sense somehow, as we sat around the table talking into the tape recorder, that what was happening was not in fact happening. It was as though we were all pretending; as though we were playing a game and performing our roles and marking out time until someone opened the door to tell us we could stop, she had been found, it was over. In fact, looking back and thinking through the days I spent in Oxford after her death, my overriding memory is of feeling that I was elsewhere, or that elements of my cognitive functioning had been frozen, so that I couldn’t keep up with what was happening around me, and nor could I see or hear or understand it properly.
What seems to be happening now, particularly over the last few days and nights, is that my perspective is growing clearer. Something, or someone, is twisting the lens on the camera that is my memory, so that as the focus sharpens, questions are beginning to occur to me that did not then and should have done. I realise now that it wasn’t until the second interview that I began to feel uncomfortable, the one that took place in the late afternoon of the same day. It quickly became apparent that someone had provided me with an alibi, and that if I gave the right answers, I would be released for the time being. There were certain things about it that didn’t feel quite right, and something in the approach the police were taking that didn’t strike me as being entirely sensible. I can’t pretend that I was aware of anything more than a vague sense of unease or confusion. And perhaps that is what anyone would have felt in such a situation; I’m sure it’s possible that another man might even have felt it much sooner than I did. But the more I think about Rachel’s murder and the days that followed, what was then no more than a hazy sense of disquiet is growing into something more troublesome than that.
I was aware from the start of that second interview that there were stories circulating in the room which were not my own. I knew that these stories would already have been divided into parts and shared out between people all over the building who would have been busy all night and all day checking facts and calculating timings. I knew also that the college, shut down to the outside world from the moment the police had arrived, would have been full of people knocking on doors and asking questions, or moving slowly across the lawns on their hands and knees, or swimming across the bottom of the lake looking for something, anything. Whatever they had discovered, I realised, would have been woven together with whatever had been found in our hotel room and whatever had been taken from our apartment in London, and the stories flying around the room would have been made from all of these things. I was aware also that the men interviewing me were throwing their theories like fishing nets and testing my responses against them, and that in so doing, they were inviting me to incriminate myself. So I answered their questions as fully as I could, whilst trying to relate only the sequence of events that I intended to, despite what seemed like several attempts to persuade me I was mistaken in my recollection.
For my part, I received very few answers to the questions I asked in return. They said they couldn’t tell me who they’d spoken to during the night, or who they would be speaking to in the coming hours or days, or even if they had arrested anyone else. Nor would they tell me what had happened to Rachel’s body; where she had been taken or whether any part of her was injured apart from her head. I didn’t realise how badly I wanted to know these things until it became obvious that I wouldn’t find out, however I framed my enquiries. ‘I just want to know if there is somebody with her, that’s all,’ I said. ‘I just want to know where she is. Has she been left on her own? Did someone stay with her, through the night?’ I’ve learned since that as I lay in my cell waiting for my second interview, she was also lying in a small room, somewhere on the other side of the city, waiting on a gurney to be sliced into pieces and weighed and measured and photographed, and that parts of her had already been sent away in unmarked vans to be measured all over again.
Whilst they would say nothing directly, it was clear by the end of the afternoon, after they had gone away and discussed my answers and come back again, that their stance towards me had shifted. Only slightly, but enough for me to realise that they considered it likely, or at least possible, that by the end of my fortnight on bail I would become their chief witness rather than their prime suspect.
From what my lawyer was able to gather, and from what Harry himself told me the following morning, I discovered it was Harry I had to thank for my release. After he had said goodbye to Rachel and me the night before, we’d turned to let ourselves out of the wicket door. At the same time, or so we’d thought, he’d set off in the other direction to go back to his rooms. He’d told us he had to collect something, and that otherwise he’d have come with us and crossed over the road to catch a taxi to his house on the Woodstock Road, leaving us to walk back to our hotel on St Giles. However, instead of returning to his rooms immediately, he had changed his mind and, out of sight behind us, taken the steps up to the Old Library. It seems that Rachel had asked him a question over dinner that he hadn’t been able to answer, and that her obvious surprise at finding him without a response had irked him somewhat. Not being entirely insensitive to the assumptions he thought people were making as he approached his retirement, quite unfounded assumptions about his memory not being what it had once so famously been, he had wanted to look up the answer to her question straight away, thinking that he might write out his findings on a card and drop it into our hotel first thing in the morning so she could read it over breakfast. A poet, my lawyer told me. Something to do with a poet. I hadn’t heard the exchange Harry was referring to, the one in which Rachel had asked him a question he couldn’t answer, occupied as I was with the woman on my other side who spent the evening telling me about where I should go when I was next in New York, or what I should have seen when I’d been there last. Whatever Rachel’s question was, it had so perturbed Harry that by the time she had finished persuading me to wait for her while she went to look at the lake, he was already standing in front of one of the window tables in the library directly above me, the volume he needed lying open in his hands.
As Harry stood there puzzling out his answer and switching his gaze between the pages in front of him and the view of the quad from the library window, he saw two things. First, a woman who looked like Rachel, although he told the police that it hadn’t occurred to him at the time that the likeness was anything other than a coincidence, walked quickly down the steps from Hall and on along the path running in front of the cottages on the south side of the quad.
The last in this line of cottages, their grey and rose-clad exteriors little changed since the sixteenth century but for the chalked and rechalked boating ephemera etched above their doorways, was where Haddon had taught Richard and me every Friday afternoon. Our tutorials took place in his study on the ground floor and he lived in a small flat laid out above. It was in what he referred to as the drawing room of this flat that he hosted his welcome tea every year for newly arrived undergraduates; the tea that had been the occasion of my first meeting with Richard. French doors opened from the drawing room on to what everyone in College called the secret garden. Sitting as it did at the height of the first floor, this tiny garden was suspended on top of an arched passageway, the inside walls of which were lined with doors opening into a series of sheds where the gardeners stored their mowers and their tools, so that the only access to the garden was either from the drawing room or by way of a tiny set of steps built into the wall and running up from the flower bed beneath. The path that ran down the side of the quad passed in front of Haddon’s cottage, at which point one could choose either to turn to the right and continue walking around the quad, or sharply to the left, passing into the passageway that ran beneath the secret garden.
Harry, watching from the library window, saw the woman he’d thought looked like Rachel pass in front of Haddon’s cottage and duck left into the passageway. Had she turned right from the other end of it and continued walking, she would soon have found herself looking on the lake in the moonlight.
The second thing that Harry saw was the porter emerging from the alcove beneath the library. The man stood on the north terrace of the quad looking about himself, sniffing the air as if for a scent before glancing back up at the clock which sat on the wall immediately beneath where Harry was standing. This, Harry said, made him think of pulling his own watch from his pocket. It was 11.42 precisely. He turned back to his reading for a few moments. When he looked up again he saw the man disappearing into staircase number 6, exactly as he had described his route to the police. This would have taken him through to the orchards and down towards the student blocks at the northern end of the lake.
At what Harry notices is 11.55, he finds the answer to Rachel’s question about the poet and leaves the library. He passes me, sitting on the staircase with my head in my hands, and, hearing me snore, realises I have fallen asleep whilst, he presumes, waiting for Rachel to come back from wherever she has gone. Choosing not to disturb me, he leaves the alcove and follows in the porter’s footsteps, intending at last to collect whatever it was that he had left in his rooms on staircase number 5.
Harry is halfway along the north terrace when he hears the scream. He turns to face the direction the sound has come from and looks across the quad towards the lake. He stands stock still on hearing it; he makes no attempt to move. And then he sees me, running like a wild thing from the alcove and virtually throwing myself down the steps. He sees me stumble, sees my glasses fall from my face, and sees me fall forwards and fumble about before jumping up again and dragging myself through the passageway at the top of the south side of the quad. At the moment at which I drop my glasses and retrieve them, which I do, he says, in a single slow-motion movement, a sort of a balletic dive followed almost immediately by my leaping back up again, so that it is as though I don’t really stop, as such, he notices a movement in the right of his peripheral vision. He turns to see a figure running up the path from the passageway underneath Haddon’s secret garden. It is a small figure, perhaps that of a woman, or a teenage boy. It wears dark clothing, a hood pulled forward and down, tight around its head. Because of the hood, and because it is hurtling towards me at an extraordinary speed, its torso thrown so far in front of itself that it looks like a sprinter just off the blocks, he doesn’t see any part of the face and is unable to provide a description. He says that this little figure dressed in black is moving so fast that it reaches the top of the quad in an instant and passes me as I stumble and fall, and that by the time I have picked myself up and carried on, it has gained the top of the steps behind me and is away. The police have told my lawyer that if my glasses hadn’t fallen from my face when they did, I would undoubtedly have seen this running figure, just as Harry had done. As things turned out, I was entirely unaware of its presence.
Partway through my second interview the detectives began to focus with some intensity on the figure Harry had seen. I remember thinking at the time that it had caught their attention in a way that seemed to be somewhat disproportionate. Had I been more alert, or more engaged with what was going on around me, I think it likely I would have suggested there was perhaps a danger in the approach they appeared to be taking, in that it might prevent them from seeing other strands emerging. As it turned out I made no such comment, and in the weeks that followed I allowed myself to be reassured by my lawyer that this was merely one of many lines of enquiry that were being pursued, and that, in any event, it was possible they had not been misguided by their instincts. It seemed that they had been able to eliminate from their enquiries almost everyone who had been recorded as entering or leaving the college during the forty-eight hours before and after Rachel’s murder. Every entrance and every exit was covered by CCTV, and the tapes had been scrutinised and a list of individuals compiled and worked through exhaustively. There were, my lawyer said, only one or two points on the tapes that were proving to be problematic. The end of the academic year was a busier than usual time in the porter’s lodge and there were a couple of moments, each of them lasting no more than a minute or two, when the number of people gathering in such a small space meant, inevitably, that some of them remained, as yet, unidentified. The police were comfortable though that they had all that they needed on those tapes, and they were comfortable also that there was very little chance that anyone could have got in, or out, by any other route. Following a major rebuilding programme five years ago, my lawyer told me, the college had been made impenetrable apart from these entrances, the height of the walls having been raised and the levels of deterrent increased. Metal spikes and pieces of broken glass were everywhere, and anyone exiting by an unofficial route would have left some trace of their presence. The only weak point, apparently, was the path that ran alongside the south-west side of the lake and followed the line of the canal, the boundary there being formed only by a border of trees and hedges, at the back of which was a low brick wall. However, anyone running that way from Rachel’s body would, first, have passed the porter coming in the opposite direction and, second, have had to jump down from the wall directly into the canal.
I wonder now at my inertia that afternoon, and am coming to think of it as a very serious error on my part. Despite the months that have passed, the police have been unable to track down the person Harry saw that night, and, despite their repeated assurances that it is only a matter of time, I am beginning to doubt their chances of doing so. I don’t think of myself as someone who is of a mindset capable of accepting this kind of uncertainty. Indeed I have begun, in recent weeks, to find it very difficult to accommodate. It has occurred to me once or twice that if I had only said something that afternoon, things might be quite different. But I have been told that to think such things is entirely normal, given the situation in which I find myself, and that I should not allow myself to follow such trains of thought too frequently, for fear of indulging what is no more than the forlorn but inevitable fantasy of a man who has lost his wife.
Towards the end of the interview, when it became apparent that I was sticking to my story that I hadn’t seen anyone running past me on the steps, I was taken to another room and shown the CCTV playbacks. The footage from the camera trained on the inside of the college doors shows the figure with its hood still pulled down and its head bowed low. It reaches out its hand and opens the wicket door at exactly the same time as the camera on the street outside captures a group of students arriving. Some of this group change their minds at the last moment and go back the way they have come. Apparently drunk as well as indecisive, they appear not to notice the diminutive figure that is new to their number and huddles among them as they stand in the full glare of the street lights. They provided nothing in the way of assistance in their interviews, their memories of the incident being blurred by alcohol and their thoughts being only of the exams that had ended and the summer that was beginning. The group was recorded again five minutes later by the camera positioned at the north-west corner of Gloucester Green, the square lying diagonally opposite the college entrance. The hooded figure is no longer among them.
I watched those sequences of grainy images several times that afternoon, but still it does not sit well with me, the idea that this figure ever really existed. After they had been played to me once or twice, I began to have the strangest of senses that I’d seen it all before somewhere; the whole of Harry’s description of the running figure, and the footage of it slipping out of college, began to seem to me an echo, as it were, of something I had already experienced. I set the thought aside, realising it was probable that anyone in my position would have felt the same, it being a well-documented phenomenon that a person without any recollection of a certain sequence of events, if they are told enough times that it has happened, and shown some visual record of it, will come to believe not only that it did, but also that they have actually experienced it, or witnessed it, for themselves. And in any case, there was never any real doubt in my mind. Not only had I not seen anyone run past me on the steps, but nor had I even so much as sensed them. Of course I can’t think of a reason why Harry should have fabricated such a story, but nevertheless, I am uneasy about it. He said that the entire episode had lasted no more than twenty or thirty seconds, and the police have established from their repeated reconstructions that it is entirely possible for someone to have run from the passageway under the secret garden to the top of the quad and on up the steps within that time frame.
My undergraduate knowledge of the law of evidence was at best rudimentary and is now no more than sketchy, but that which I have retained is sufficiently clear to mean that I must accept, in principle, the fallibility of the human eye. And I know that even a person of sound mind who claims to have observed a sequence of events from a reasonable distance in daylight hours can have their statement entirely undermined by a competent advocate who elicits the apparently unremarkable fact that the witness occasionally wears reading glasses, albeit only after a particularly long day and only when they find themselves to be unusually tired. The doubt he needs to establish has been introduced; his long assault is safely underway.
Were I to take to a stand and swear to a jury that I had been alone in the quad as I ran to find Rachel’s body that night, and to swear that there had been no running figure, I am quite aware that a barrister would have no difficulty in persuading that jury to discount my evidence in its entirety on account of my glasses having fallen from my face as I stumbled down the steps, and of my mind having been so firmly focused on the path ahead and on my desire to run faster than I had ever run in my life.
The police have staged their reconstructions so carefully I cannot fault them. As well as the ones they carried out for themselves the morning after Rachel’s death, the ones with runners and clocks and watchers at the library windows and tapes marking off sight lines, they staged more lifelike versions later in the summer, with actors playing the parts, in case there were memories already buried that could be jogged. They have made this story as true as it can be. My lawyer has told me that they have even gone so far as to visit my opticians to verify my prescription. Yet despite all this, despite knowing that I could not ask for more in the way of reasons for believing it, I find that I am unable even now to accept the narrative that has been presented to me.
Reflecting this evening on my reluctance in this regard I was reminded of my father experiencing a similar difficulty one summer in Cornwall. For a moment I was almost entertained by the memory, but only for a moment, realising as soon as it began to surface that it must have taken place on one of the last of the summer holidays that we took together as a family, perhaps even the very last one before my father stopped coming with us, my mother and me.
And as it flits now across the inside of my mind I am there again, cold at the end of the day, so cold that the tips of my fingers are starting to turn dark blue and I am hoping in my eight-year-old way that somebody will tell me it is time for Final Swims before we head back to the cottage for tea and a bath, at the same time as hoping this announcement will never be made, so that instead we will stay out into the evening, all night even, and build a fire on the clifftop to keep us warm as we sleep. My friend Robbie has come on holiday with us, my parents giving in to my badgering and seeing that I needed someone to play with, and to talk nonsense with, and that his coming would give them more time to themselves. And although Robbie, who is almost a year younger than me and far smaller, has noticed that his fingers also are turning blue, we keep our mutual blue-fingeredness to ourselves, knowing that to share this extraordinary phenomenon would make my mother shriek with horror and be certain to bring the day to a close immediately. But because we are beginning to feel quite uncomfortable in our coldness, when the call does eventually come for Final Swims we demur, claiming that we would prefer instead to remain on the side and watch my father take his. And so we stand with the children from the other cottages who have dried and dressed themselves and are ready to climb back up the cliff path for their tea but have persuaded their parents to let them stay just to watch Dr Petersen’s final swim.
My father, delighted by his audience, stands as a prizefighter might, draping his towel around his neck and clenching his hands into fists and raising and lowering each arm in turn as if flexing his muscles, and as he does so we all jump up and down and clap our hands and my mother tries to take a photograph but she’s laughing too hard to keep the camera still for long enough. At last he drops his towel and strides to the place we have dived from all day long. It stands at the edge of a tidal pool formed by a perfect ring of rock which protrudes high enough to mean that the water never drains from it. The tide is come back in again now and the ring of rocks is submerged, the water deep and dark and churning and the boundaries between pool and sea blurred in a way that we children find exciting and terrifying at the same time. My father is everyone’s hero as he swings his arms round and round before launching himself into a perfect arc and slipping into the sea. He rises up again almost immediately to holler and shout and say My God Georgie it’s cold and to laugh as my mother shouts Oh Love don’t swear, the children. And then suddenly he is swimming hard and fast and straight and this is when it happens, this extraordinary occurrence that he would never believe had taken place, even though we all saw it, all of us children and all of our mothers.
He has struck out from the side and has reached the pool’s halfway point when two things happen simultaneously that make us children stop mid-jump and thud back down to the ground our hands clasped over our mouths our laughs and whoops and cries silenced so that we all hear my mother shout Oh Jesus Oh Jesus as the body of a bull seal, all eight feet of its length and all three feet of its girth trembling, rears up from the water and towers above my father’s head which is half-submerged in his front-crawl endeavour. At precisely the moment at which the bull seal emerges my father executes a perfect underwater turn and starts the swim back to the diving place, moving twice as fast as he had been. He drags himself up on the side and we run towards him, expecting him perhaps to fall to the ground in terror. Instead, he only reaches for his towel and bends over to rub his hair before looking up and smiling. His smile becomes a frown as he sees that our faces are white and realises that we are jumping up and down screaming and that my mother is in tears. When we are calm enough to tell him what we saw he laughs again and says don’t be silly, there was nothing there. But why did you turn and swim back when you did, we all ask, incredulous. I’d had enough, that’s all, he says, shaking the water from his ears. I’d had enough, and so have you two, it’s time for your tea you’re turning blue. But why did you swim twice as fast on your way back, my mother asks, it was because you’d seen the seal, it must have been. It was because I was hungry, he replies, pulling on his clothes. I would have seen it, there was nothing there, I would have seen it, and he says this all the way back up the cliff path to anyone who tries to talk to him about it.
The only fact the crowd of witnesses to this extraordinary event came to debate in their telling and retelling of the tale, the only strand of the story over which there was any doubt, was as to whether the bull seal had roared as it rose from the water. We were unanimous in our verdict that it had thrown its head back and opened its jaws wide before looking down on my swimming father, and that it had snapped its jaws shut as it did so, but we were almost evenly divided among our number as to whether this action had been accompanied by any kind of a roar. As to the tale in its entirety being a fabrication, my father was resolute. You’re liars the lot of you, he said eventually, on the last night of our holiday. My mother and Robbie and I had re-enacted the event for him again in front of the fire after supper, Robbie and I taking it in turns to play my father, and my mother playing the seal and adding, or so I objected after my father had gone up to bed early and left the three of us watching the last of the embers die in the grate, the emission of a roar from the mouth of her seal as it towered above me where I lay face-down, my head pressed into the carpet as my father’s had been under the water. I thought at the time that this was a little unkind of him and so did my mother and so did she say to him, pointing out that to call his own wife and son liars wasn’t a nice thing to do, not when they were telling the same story as everyone else and they’d seen it with their very own eyes.
On the journey home though, when we’d been driving for hours and both of them thought I was asleep, I heard my father say to my mother that he supposed he might have sensed something, maybe just the water becoming darker for a second, and maybe it was because of that that he’d turned and swum back so much faster than he’d swum out. But he changed his mind a moment later and said he didn’t want to talk about it any more, he’d had enough, and then I moved and he looked at me and saw that I was awake and they never spoke of it again in front of me.
And then the memory has run its course and I am left with the hollowness that comes when I think of what happened to Robbie at the end of that summer, and the fact that my father never came to Cornwall with us again, my mother and me.
I turn my thoughts back to my second interview with the police. It is on my mind now as the evening draws in about me, largely because it was that which kept me awake last night. I had fallen asleep with relative ease, despite feeling more than a little unsettled by the events that had taken place during the day, and by the letter that had come from Harry and lay beside me on the bedside table. I must have slept quite heavily for several hours before waking suddenly, convinced I had heard a noise in the apartment, or from the balcony, or on the roof. My heart was pounding in quite a ridiculous way, and when eventually my breathing began to relax I found I was thinking of the moment in the interview when I realised it was Harry whose story was emerging from the detective’s questions and offering me a way out. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the thudding in my chest, which was becoming less rapid, and I replayed for myself the CCTV footage I had seen. And then I remembered telephoning the college from my hotel the morning after I had been released, and asking to be put through to Harry’s room.
I hadn’t really expected him to be there, it being a Saturday, but it was the only number I had for him. I told myself I was calling because I wanted to hear his story in his own words, but as soon as I heard his voice I realised that my desire had another motivation: this was the man who had shared with me the final hours of Rachel’s life and I needed to see him.
He answered straight away, his hello ringing out loud as if to say, ‘At last! I thought you’d never call.’ When he realised who he was speaking to, he sounded a little shocked and apologised profusely for the exuberance of his tone, telling me that of course, he had heard the terrible news, and whilst he couldn’t find words that were in any way appropriate to express the depths of his sadness, he wanted me to know how deeply sorry he was for my loss. He said in explanation of the way in which he had greeted my call that he’d been expecting someone to phone. The lodge had told him only that I’d said I was a former student and had declined to give my name. When I asked if I could meet with him he hesitated before saying, in a tone of voice that implied he was surprised by my suggestion, and not entirely pleased, ‘Yes, of course. I’ve time on my hands, as it happens. The person I mistook you for was due here an hour ago and has obviously thought better of it. I imagine you’d prefer it if I came to you though?’ And so he did and, wanting to avoid the press who were gathering in the lobby downstairs, we sat in the bay window of my hotel room, drinking coffee and talking of the events of Thursday evening.
As I lay awake last night running through what I remembered of the night Rachel died, and what I knew of Harry’s story, and what my lawyer had told me in the weeks that followed, a fact that had never occurred to me before somehow worked its way out of my memory and into the front of my mind and as it did I felt my stomach tense and I became aware of something rising cold in my throat and feeling as though it was running across the inside of my chest.
It was only a tiny detail that occurred to me, but it was one which had never made itself apparent before last night. Harry had told the police that he’d heard the scream from the lake as he was walking along the north terrace of the quad on the way back to his rooms from the library, and that he’d stood entirely still on hearing it, making no attempt to run towards the sound as I had done. This had come up in our conversation in my hotel room, but only in passing. I didn’t specifically ask him about it, and we moved on to other things too quickly for me to wonder about it then in any precise way. But as I thought through our conversation last night, his words came back to me as clearly as though he’d been lying beside me with his head on Rachel’s pillow. He told me that he froze on hearing the scream because he was afraid. ‘Scared out of my wits,’ he said in response to my telling him about the way I had known it was Rachel, without a doubt, despite never having heard her scream before. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t want to move,’ he said. ‘You see I couldn’t. I was quite paralysed by fear.’
One might suppose such a sound to be a not infrequent occurrence late at night in a college situated in a city centre. I am quite prepared to accept that a man of a certain sensitivity might feel curiosity, or even alarm, on hearing it. But unless there was some particular feature about this scream, or about the circumstances in which he came to hear it, I cannot understand Harry’s reaction. He professed at the time to have had no idea that Rachel was down by the lake, no idea whatsoever. Unless, like me, he had recognised the scream as having been voiced by someone in particular, by someone known to him, or unless it had signalled to him the occurrence of an event which he had already entertained in his consciousness as a possibility, why should it have made him so very afraid?