The Finishing School

“Well, that was the point.”


“It’s not easy to disappear these days, is it?” he says, laughing awkwardly. “Bloody LinkedIn.”

“Not everyone wants to disappear.” She looks around. “You seem to have done very well. This place is magical.”

“I’ve been very lucky.”

“Yes,” she says. “You have.”

He rocks back on his heels, watching her. He has a nervous energy, like an animal in a trap. Maybe he thinks she’s here to blackmail him.

“Can I ask you something?” she says.

“I imagine that’s why you’re here.”

“Did you ever really love her?”

He exhales a long breath. “I was young,” he says. “I married too young and too hastily. I was a kid myself—”

“You were almost thirty. Cressida was sixteen.”

“She was no ordinary sixteen. But that’s not the point, obviously. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake, one I shall never be able to undo or make amends for.”

“You never went to see her.”

“I hardly think that would have been appropriate,” he says, running a hand through what’s left of his thinning hair. “I was busy sorting out the mess I’d made of my marriage, my job. I’d hurt enough people, ruined enough lives. I wasn’t about to go to America and inflict more pain on poor Cressida and her family.”

“You never answered my question. Did you love her?”

“I thought I did. I really did.”

“Mrs. Fithern told me you thought Cressida jumped.”

“Mrs. Fithern?”

“Your ex. Mrs. Brains-Chowne.”

“You spoke to Annie?”

Kersti nods, watching his pupils spread into black pools.

“She said you thought Cressida tried to kill herself,” Kersti says. “To punish you because you didn’t want the baby.”

Mr. Fithern turns gray, the color draining so quickly from his skin he looks like a cadaver. He glances nervously out to the field, making sure no players are straggling around within earshot.

“What do you want from me, Kersti?” he says. “It was a lifetime ago. I fucked up, I was young and I fucked up. I hurt people. But I’ve tried to move on and be a better man—”

“Cressida doesn’t get to move on.”

“I didn’t push her off that balcony!”

“Do you think your ex-wife might have?”

He takes a step back, flabbergasted. “That’s what you’re here for?” he says. “Oh, good God, no. Of course not. Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Annie?” he cries. “Annie? Really? Never.”

“So you really do think Cressida jumped?”

“I thought it was possible at the time, yes. She was a little . . . she was a very troubled girl, you had to have known that. She had a drinking problem. I wasn’t the first one to come along and cause damage. I found her like that.”

“But Mrs. Fithern had to be angry,” Kersti says. “You humiliated her at the school where she was adored by everyone! We both know how much she adored Cressida, and she was the housemother on duty. How could she not have gone to her room to confront her? You do know that Magnus Foley told her about your affair that night?”

“Yes, but Annie already knew. She knew. The way a wife knows. It wasn’t a shock hearing it from Magnus Foley. He didn’t trigger some rage that made her run up to Cressida’s room and throw her off the balcony. That’s ludicrous.”

“She may have suspected about the affair,” Kersti perseveres. “But she didn’t know that any of the students knew. She found out from Magnus that night that everyone at the Lycée was about to find out.”

“She’s barely a meter and a half!” he cries. “How could she possibly throw Cressida off a balcony?”

“Cressida was wasted. It would have been easy to shove her—”

“Exactly, Kersti. Cressida was wasted. She was reckless, careless, and she had a death wish at the best of times. She could have jumped, or she could have fallen by accident like they said. Hell, for all we know, she may have been standing on that railing like a tightrope walker. That’s the kind of girl she was, Kersti. Or have you forgotten?”

Kersti remembers the car accident with Magnus. Remembers her leaning over her balcony railing and shouting, “I’m the queen of the world!”

“I still don’t understand why everyone was so quick to rule out a crime,” Kersti says. “She had hurt so many people, your wife most of all. And what a coincidence Mrs. Fithern was the teacher on duty that night—”

“Kersti, I don’t know who or what has planted this seed in your head after all this time, but Annie wouldn’t kill a mosquito if it was sucking her blood.”

“The timing of Cressida’s fall prevented the scandal from erupting, and it also took care of the baby—”

“I think you should go,” he says.

“Are you protecting Mrs. Fithern because you still feel guilty about what you did?”

He shakes his head. “I won’t stand here and have us both attacked,” he says. “I have to get back. Is there something else you want from me?”

“One more thing,” she says.

His shoulders slump.

“Cressida’s mother gave me these,” she says, taking the letters from her handbag. “We’re going to pursue this. Deirdre may file criminal and civil charges for sexual abuse—”

“What are they?”

“I can only imagine the things Cressida must have written back to you,” Kersti says. “Actually, I can’t, but I do know that if Mrs. Fithern had ever found them . . . if she’d ever read them . . .”

She hands him the notes and watches him read the first one, waiting for his shocked reaction, for the horror and shame to rush to his face as it all comes back to him. He reads the next one and another after that, until he’s read them all. His expression remains blank, bewildered. No tell.

He looks up at Kersti and says, “I don’t understand. Who are they from?”

“Cressida’s mother kept them. You’ve got to admit, they’re very disturbing. In the wrong hands, you can see they’re incriminating. You were going to leave your wife; the gossip would have destroyed her. These could be evidence if there’s ever an investigation—”

“Evidence of what?”

Kersti is beginning to lose hope that he might reveal some useful bombshell, some admission that, yes, Mrs. Fithern was angry. In fact, she was so enraged she threatened to kill them both, or something dramatic and prophetic like that.

“I never wrote any of this,” he says. “That’s not my writing. Nor my, er, style.”

“To C from C? Please. She told me what you were like. I saw the bruises. Who else could it be?”

“I’ve no idea who the hell wrote these. It’s not my handwriting. I’d take a test if I thought it would assuage you, but I don’t think anything will.”

“Who else could possibly have sent her these?”

“Magnus?”

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