‘Then what?’
He looked around, checking again that they were alone. When he spoke, his voice was barely a murmur. ‘I think she might have killed someone.’
The world went silent. The snow on the field, the avenue, the expanse of white sky over her head – everything was still. Inside Rowan’s head, though, the blood started to roar.
Cory was staring at her, she understood; his face loomed and receded, loomed again.
‘That’s . . . insane,’ she said.
‘It sounds it. Yes, I know. But I think it’s what happened.’
‘Why? Why would that even cross your . . . ?’
‘In my early twenties,’ he cut her off, ‘I had a girlfriend who committed suicide. Greta. I know what it’s like, despair, because I’ve seen it. Marianne, when she was talking, it was different.’
‘How?’
‘It was like she was exploring the idea. Sometimes it felt intellectual, philosophical, but other times it didn’t – there was a point to it, in the real world. I told you she talked about finality? She talked about “crossing the line”, doing something that can never be undone. Black and white, dead and alive.’
The ground pitched under Rowan’s feet, and the snow, coming down obliquely, added to the impression of a world that was tilting, shifting on its axis.
‘Marianne was painting – spending a lot of time with – women who were very ill,’ she said. ‘Mortally ill, I think, some of them – the last one, almost definitely.’
‘No, it wasn’t that.’ Snow was starting to settle on the shoulders of Cory’s coat, frosting the wool. ‘Listen to me. She talked about guilt.’
‘Guilt?’
‘How it crushed you – how you could never get away from it. She was eaten up with it – that’s what I meant by consumed. I felt like she was fighting with her conscience – fighting to the death, as it happened. She couldn’t talk about whatever it was so she was talking around it, as if that would help take even a little of the pressure off.’
‘Peter Turk – you’ve met him – he was a mutual friend, mine and Marianne’s.’
Cory looked at her: And?
‘You know her father killed someone else when he crashed, a woman in another car? Turk says Mazz took on that guilt – felt it like it was hers – as a way of staying close to him. Emotionally. She paid for the woman’s son to go to university; he said she . . .’
‘I know, I know. She told me – we talked about that. That wasn’t it.’
The frustration was almost overwhelming. ‘Who, then? Who did she kill?’ The words echoed among the trees, too loud.
‘Be quiet,’ Cory hissed, glancing back up the avenue. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know yet.’
Eighteen
Rowan walked until he was out of sight then broke into a run. Down the avenue towards the river, the wet snow hitting her face, her feet scratching the muddy gravel. Gloom gathered under the trees, and lights came on in a houseboat against the opposite bank as the low cloud brought the evening in much too early. The wide river path was deserted.
At the end, where it turned away from the Thames, a steep wooden bridge led to the university boathouses. The bank was deserted here, too, the boathouses locked and dark between the strip of grey river and the fringe of leafless trees behind. When she reached one with tiered balconies, she took the concrete stairs on the outside wall and found a sheltered spot on the first floor. Huddled into the corner, she hugged her knees so hard she felt her pulse in her arms. Cory knew. While she’d been running, it was all she could think, the magnitude of it drowning out any other thought or interpretation. He knew – he knew.
And Marianne had told him, more or less. Into Rowan’s head came a picture of Jacqueline’s face at the crematorium and rage surged through her again. Typical Marianne – so preoccupied with how she felt, her apparently unbearable guilt, that she hadn’t thought about how it might affect anyone else.
Is that why you needed to talk to me, Marianne? To tell me you couldn’t hack it any more? You couldn’t live with it? For Christ’s sake! Did you even think about what it would do to your mother?
But what exactly had Marianne told him? How much did Cory have to go on? Rowan took a breath and tried to think clearly. If he still only thought she’d done it, it couldn’t be much. The small comfort of that idea was erased at once, however, by a memory of his older woman in New York, the relentlessness with which she said he’d gone after the secrets of her psyche. Deeper and deeper, like Theseus in the labyrinth.