When he’d had his accident, Marianne had blamed her. She’d never explicitly said it – she hadn’t talked to Rowan for a month by that point other than to tell her to get lost whenever she went to Fyfield Road to try and sort things out – but she hadn’t needed to. The afternoon that Rowan had gone to the house and found the police car on the drive, the door open, she’d felt it in the air before she’d even seen Marianne’s face. It wasn’t my fault, she’d wanted to say to her, I didn’t make him drink, I didn’t force him to get in the car, he was weak, he didn’t deserve all this – you – he brought it on himself. But she knew it would have been pointless. By then, Marianne had stopped listening. She’d tried that one final time, the day Mazz had made Turk choose between them, when she’d shrunk from Rowan as if she were a monster, and that was it, the last time they’d seen each other.
The nostalgia, the painful yearning, was gone now, replaced by frustration and anger again: it had all been so unnecessary – such a waste. Carefully, Rowan reached into the basin and lifted the drawing out by its edges. It was damp in places and the water had caused the orange and yellow of the flames to run here and there but to destroy it would have been a mistake. If the nightmare happened and the whole thing came out, Cory reaching back through Marianne to Lorna, she would need this. Whatever Mazz said, killing her father’s lover had been her idea; here was the proof.
She took the last one of Marianne’s Ambien tablets but as she’d feared, she lay awake for a long time. She could almost feel it, the hypnotic drift of the pill battling the frantic activity of her brain. Up and dressed, doing what she could to make everything water-tight, she’d managed to control the anxiety but lying in the dark, she thought of all the things she was powerless to influence, any one of which might be the thread that brought the police to her door. Down by the river, with so much else to think about, she’d managed to contain her alarm at J Spelman’s text but now the thought of it made her almost sick with fear. She hadn’t been able to look him or her up – if the police ever suspected her, they would almost certainly take her computer – but she’d remembered the American friend at Imperial whom Cory had mentioned. Was she J Spelman, and if so, what else had he told her? When the police got hold of Cory’s phone records, that text would be sure to raise eyebrows.
But J Spelman was just one person – whom else had he spoken to? With another access of alarm, Rowan remembered his research at the library, the woman who’d shown him how to use the microfiche. She would remember him, the sophisticated American, the hours he’d spent there. What if he’d made notes? When the police searched his room at the Old Parsonage, would they find a notebook with his ideas and suspicions? He hadn’t had one on him; when she’d gone through his pockets, she’d found just his phone, his wallet and the car key.
Eyes wide in the darkness, she remembered the sketch he’d made of her books. He hadn’t given her that one but it wasn’t here – while she’d been getting ready to go round to Benson Place, he must have folded it up and slipped it into his pocket. Where was it? Had he had suspicions about her studies? Was that why he’d asked J Spelman about her? It wasn’t really a lie, her doctorate: she was applying – she’d even applied to Queen Mary. Anyway, she didn’t need to worry about that: if and when Jacqueline or Adam found out, she’d just tell them the truth: that she’d been too embarrassed to admit she was between jobs.
So many little threads but there were bigger ones, too. Was it credible that Cory could have given himself that head wound by slipping and falling? It seemed unlikely that frogmen would find the stone but then, she had no idea what the riverbed there was like. If it was just mud, a single large sharp-edged stone would be immediately apparent. Perhaps she should have left it on the bank – perhaps by throwing it away, she’d made it look suspicious when it needn’t have been.
Lorna’s accident had been neat, self-contained, but this felt sprawling, messy. Rowan pushed away the idea that she’d worked better with Marianne; that without her – like Seb without Jacqueline – she just wasn’t as good. And the police hadn’t given up easily last time; they’d had their suspicions. As Turk had said that day in his kitchen, they weren’t idiots.
And on top of it all, she thought, the sheets tightening round her chest as she turned in the bed again, the question of how and why Marianne had died was still unanswered. With Cory’s death, the immediate urgency had gone, but without him, her chances of finding out what had happened had withered almost to nothing. Her own ideas were exhausted. As the clock by the bed ticked on, she clung to the idea that Mazz had jumped because, having thought better of telling Cory about Lorna, she’d realised she’d told him too much to be able to backtrack. Much as she wanted that to be true, however, Rowan knew it was a fragile straw at which to clutch. Time and again as she writhed beneath the blankets, she had to shut down the voice that whispered in her ear that nothing Cory ever said had given her reason to believe it, either.
Thirty-two