“Okay, so what you’re telling me, Angela, is that despite a cushy life, you have an acute, at times paralyzing, fear of humanity’s vulnerability. Without HP, you felt less able to cope with your own perception of a world full of liars. You needed his input to balance you out. Am I getting it?”
Surprisingly, he is.
He stands suddenly. “Wait here, I want to show you something.” He returns carrying a small transparent bag, like the ones used for freezer food. He tosses it onto the table; I can see the tidy print of its label, the numerical code and a name. “Take a look.”
I reach forwards and pull the bag towards me. There in the corner of the bag, hugged by the tight furrow of plastic, is a delicate silver necklace. Sitting above the folds of silver is a pendant, shaped like a tiny elephant, intricately patterned and colored in shades of festival blue. I feel my stomach hollow inward again, and struggle to breathe out.
chapter
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8
“So, honestly, do you find the necklace upsetting? Is it Saskia’s?”
I turn the bag over and look at the contents from the underside. There’s a thickness in my throat that rises high before I can swallow it.
“You don’t seem to be that concerned about this woman’s disappearance. This is a missing woman from your town. You’ve talked and talked and talked. About yourself. You know Saskia, know her well, in fact—you’ve already admitted to that—and yet nothing you’ve said so far relates to her. Isn’t that interesting?”
Nothing I say is understood. The man is a fool. I run a fingertip over the outline of the silvery-blue pendant.
He’s watching my finger trace the shape. “There is something sad about that elephant, no?”
I shiver involuntarily and back away from the table. “Where did you find it?”
“Where do you think we found it?”
I shrug. Then he folds his hands neatly in his lap. “Why don’t you tell me what happened at Oxford? Would you like that?”
“I would.”
Do you know about Freddy Montgomery, Novak? Is he in my file? You must have stumbled across him during your investigation. There’s no telling anything about Saskia unless I first tell you about Freddy. Freddy from Oxford. He knew the city by heart and he handed it over to me like a gift.
In the very center of the city there’s a building called the Radcliffe Camera. It’s pretty famous—you should Google it when you get home tonight. It’s round and domed and inside is a library. On Saturday mornings I liked to go there, open a musty novel and settle against the curve of the wall while I looked out the window at the cobbled courtyard.
Everything outside that window is made of stone. An old church, silvered by centuries, looms over the entire square, and underfoot are slabs worn smooth by a million journeys. The Radcliffe Camera is set back a street from the commercial zone, but sometimes shoppers carrying bags filled with clothing and Apple products wander into the square as if arriving from the future.
It’s quiet in the Rad Cam courtyard. There are a hundred rusty bikes, most with wicker baskets, parked against the black fence, and nobody steals them. And the Bodleian Library, one of the oldest libraries in the world, stands at the north end of the square facing Hertford College and the Bridge of Sighs, a windowed walkway that links two pale buildings in an upwards lilt unnoticeable to those drifting across it.
Hertford was my college. I hadn’t expected to feel so at home in a new place, but when I arrived there mid-September and saw the gargoyles and statuesque heads along the top of the Bodleian wall and the numerous old bookshops, the blood in my body started to surge.
I’m sorry to hurt your true-blue Vermonter feelings, Detective Novak, but you must know by now I didn’t feel any affinity with Cove. Oxford, though, oh, we clicked the minute I set foot in the place.
That day was the first time I walked through a door in a door. All the colleges have huge wooden gates that remain permanently closed, but the smaller doorways within them open and close, and can be locked with keys made from medieval iron. I’d never seen a door in a door before: it felt like a kid’s book, where mice live in the baseboards. I rumbled my suitcase through the flagstone hallway of the porter’s office and onto the hushed lawn of the quad, and there I stopped and sat down on my bag for a minute. Jet-lagged and out on my own, it struck me that I had never before been anywhere so perfect. Even the placards on the two benches bordering the lawn had been polished. Little windows to tutors’ rooms sat just above the hedge line, fringed at the top by ivy, and to my left a winding stone stairwell led up to what I would discover to be the wood-paneled dining rooms of the college.
At first I didn’t notice the young man standing in the archway across from me. It was only when he snapped his copy of Crime and Punishment closed that I looked over. He was leaning against the wall by the arches in studied contemplation, his dress shirt buttoned all the way to the tie that bulged at his neck.
“Hello there, good afternoon,” he said, walking over and offering a moist hand. “I have to deduce that you’re new to the college, judging by the size of your valise.”
He was round and slightly pink.
“Can I help?” He pushed a signet ring around the base of his little finger. “It doesn’t do to struggle up the stairs on one’s own with a case twice the size of you.”
I didn’t consider myself that puny, and was about to reply when he spoke again.
“I’m Freddy. I’m sorry, do you actually speak English?”
“Do you always talk so much?”
“Gosh, no.” He crossed his arms against his shirt, the stripes of which distorted at the midriff. His hair was cropped very close to his head, as if to preempt premature balding. “I rarely talk to newcomers. So you’re American. What a relief. I was starting to think you were Eastern Bloc.”
“I’m only half American. My grandfather was something European.”
“Oh, crossbreeding—well played. Those Americans are everywhere, especially since we ship them in by droves to beat the bloody Cambridge lot in the boat race.” He paused. I stared at him blankly. “The rowing? Gosh, you are a new girl.”
Freddy never left my side the whole eight months I spent in Oxford. He was a third-year biochemist who’d also been to Magdalen College boarding school. That first day he took me to the Turf Tavern, a pub hidden away down a skinny alley I’d never have found on my own. The thirteenth-century beams over the bar were so low that even he had to bend at the knee while he ordered us half-pints of Speckled Hen.
“Some Australian prime minister set a Guinness world record right where you’re standing for quaffing a yard of ale.” He passed a glass of swirling liquid back to me and prodded at the coins in his palm. “And that’s all you need to know about that country.”