‘Whatever, bro,’ he says, then turns and walks up the hallway, grabbing the wall twice as he goes to make sure neither it nor him falls down.
I take a couple of steps inside, figuring Stud-face here is happy for me to do so but simply forgot to extend the invite. It’s colder inside than out — probably an all-year-round feature of these houses. The air is damp, and the carpet, wallpaper and furniture could do with a permanent dehumidifier. There are posters on the walls but no photographs of friends or family. I can hear mumbling from the other end of the house but can’t decipher it.
It sounds like hangover talk.
I keep walking. The hallway takes me into a kitchen straight out of the start of last century, and with rotting food lying around that could be from the same era. The kitchen bench has a Formica top patterned with yellow flowers and strewn with the remnants of fast-food packets. The coffee plunger is hot. I pour a cup just as Studly comes through. He doesn’t seem surprised at all that I’ve invaded his house and made myself at home. I figure it’s a student thing.
‘He’s tired,’ Studly says, summing up the hangover in an ambitious lie.
‘He’s this way?’ I ask, heading out of the kitchen and back into the hallway.
‘Dude, I said he’s tired. He doesn’t want to talk.’
I turn around and stare at him, and there’s something in the way I look at him that makes him decide he doesn’t seem to mind any more whether I go and wake David or not, as long as I’m not bugging him. He shrugs and goes about riffling through the fridge for something that could be food.
David Harding’s bedroom is dark and smells worse than the rest of the house. I turn the light on, but it doesn’t really help much. On the floor is a double mattress with no base. It looks like it’s had a dozen people jumping up and down on it. David doesn’t look up. He has his head buried in a pillow.
I crouch down next to him.
‘David.’
‘Go away’
“I need to ask you some questions.’
“I don’t care.’
There are clothes scattered across the floor, pages from work assignments and text books piled on the desk and chair. Food wrappers and crumbs cover the carpet. I open the curtains and let in some light. He groans a little. I roll him over, and for the first time he takes a look at me. His hair is sticking straight up around the back and the left-hand side from where the pillow has crushed it. There are gunks of sleep in the corners of his eyes.
His skin is pale, suggesting he doesn’t get out much. There is something that looks familiar about him, and I put it down to the possibility I might have seen his picture in the papers when Rachel disappeared. He looks lost, the kind of lost only somebody in their twenties looks when they’re still at university racking up the degrees with no idea of what they really want to do in life.
‘Drink this.’
‘Go away’
‘It’s hot,’ I say, ‘and you don’t want to risk me spilling it all over you.’
He sits up and I hand him the mug.
‘What the hell do you want?’
‘To talk to you about Rachel.’
‘Let me guess — her mum asked you to come here, right? She still thinks I killed her.’
‘I’m working for Rachel, not for her mother. Did you kill her?’
‘Fuck you, man. And get the hell out of my room.’
“I found her body’
He sits up straighter and tightens his grip on the coffee mug.
‘She’s dead?’
It’s such a simple question. There is no emotion there, just a look of complete surprise, his mouth slightly open and his eyes slightly wider. No tears, no anger, no frustration. Just acceptance.
Acceptance of a question I think he’s been asking himself over and over — the big ‘what if. And finally the answer. What if she’s still alive? What if she isn’t?
‘She was found yesterday.’
Are you sure?’
I hand him the ring. He sits the coffee on the floor so he can look at it. He turns it over and reads the inscription. Then he slips it onto the tip of his finger and slowly spins it around.
“I gave her this,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t long before she disappeared.
I promised her that when we graduated I’d take her away from here and we’d never come back.’
‘She hated it here? Why?’
“I don’t think she really did. I guess that’s the thing about this city, right? You can love and hate it at the same time. I think she just felt claustrophobic here, you know? She wanted to see the rest of the world, and I was going to show it to her. Where did you find her?’
‘She was buried in a cemetery’
‘Huh?’
‘She had been put into somebody else’s coffin.’
“I don’t get what you’re saying. She was buried?’
The emotion is coming now. His hands are shaking a little, and his eyes are starting to glisten over, just as I’ve seen it dozens of other times in those who have lost loved ones.
‘We were exhuming a body’ I say. ‘The person we thought we were digging up was missing. Rachel was there instead.’
‘Who were you digging up?’
A guy called Henry Martins. Ring a bell?’