Every Contact Leaves A Trace (32 page)

I switched off the computer and tried her number at the same time. When I got her answerphone I hung up and walked down the corridor and out into the open air, my breath coming even more rapidly than before.

18

I LEFT THE
Nuffield Building with the intention of going straight over to Harry’s rooms and confronting him, but instead I made for the lake. As I came to the place where I had found Rachel’s body I felt a sudden rush of anger towards Harry, and hatred towards Evie. It took me by surprise and I began to run, half sobbing and half howling as I went, not stopping until I reached the far side of the playing fields. I sat on the ground then and waited until I had cried myself out. When it passed, eventually, I felt only irritation with myself for having lost control like that, and I stood and walked back and forth for a while, trying to clear my head.

I thought about the firmness with which Evie had written. Either she was completely secure in her position, knowing there was nothing I could discover that would alter it, or she was a very good liar, and, having something worth hiding, had chosen to brazen things out in an attempt to destabilise my view of Harry to the point where I would give up on him and go back to London. I felt nothing but disdain for her then, and for the way she’d assumed she could so easily steer me from my chosen course of action.

She had, of course, made an entirely unjustified assumption in questioning my having decided to trust him, since I’d done nothing of the sort; the only decision I’d taken was to listen to him, which is a very different thing altogether. But what she’d said about there being no truth in his tale did have an impact on the way I regarded him, of course it did. When eventually I walked back round the lake, making for his rooms again, I reflected on the fact that if Evie really hadn’t been at the hospital, then Harry was either as gullible as she’d suggested he might be, and had fallen for a story Rachel had made up, or he had made up the story himself and was, as Evie had put
forward
in the alternative, telling me lies. But even if I did believe Evie’s version of events instead of his, there was something about Harry’s behaviour that made me hold back from agreeing with either of her readings of it. Whatever was going on was more complicated than that, I knew it was. When he had begun his tale in the middle of the night he’d come clean about having invited me to Oxford on false pretences, and he’d offered an explanation for what he’d done. I had agreed to listen until he’d finished, and that was what I intended to do. He’d made no secret of the fact that he was executing a plan he’d drawn up before my arrival, and that what he had begun was a series of revelations of a long and complex nature. What Evie was proposing about my leaving was unthinkable: that he was playing some kind of a game was clear, but if there was one thing I was certain of it was that I wanted to watch him at it a little longer.

Whilst Evie’s email had in no way altered my resolve to stay, it did, I suppose, mark the point at which I drew back somewhat from Harry’s tale and my feelings began to shift into a new territory, becoming somehow harder than they’d been before, and colder also, so that they resembled something I can only describe as a fairly straightforward sort of scepticism. Harry had made no claim that the version of events he was relating to me was an authorized one, and I had learned enough from the cases I’d conducted over the years to know that the narrative he had begun, the one that Evie had already splintered apart by telling me she hadn’t been at the hospital, would be likely to fracture further as it continued. And I knew it was probable that it would do so in ways I couldn’t foresee, so that an as yet unheard testimony might be given that would turn everything on its head, or so that the characters themselves might begin to move at will up or down the table of dramatis personae that Harry had drawn up, stepping altogether from the positions they had been allocated to allow other characters, previously considered altogether too minor for inclusion, to take their place.

It was with a kind of resigned anticipation of that happening that I walked up the stairs to his rooms and knocked on the door and took my seat opposite him, deciding as I did so that I would say
nothing
of Evie’s email, and that instead I would wait and see how he went about explaining things further. He asked me if I would like something to eat with my tea before he began again, seeing as it was lunchtime, and when I said yes, he went off into his side room to prepare it. I sat back in my chair and as I listened to him moving about, clattering a knife on a plate and opening and closing the door of his fridge, I allowed my mind to become a blank canvas once more, ready for him to take his brushes to it.

Harry came back through with some cheese and biscuits on a tray, and once he had poured me a cup of tea, he began to talk. He said he hadn’t really thought very carefully, in those early stages, about precisely what he was taking on when he cleared the grant of Rachel’s vacation accommodation, gratis, after the end of that summer term. He certainly couldn’t have predicted she’d end up as a lodger in his house on the Woodstock Road for the whole of her third year and longer. Evie had written to her at the end of August and said she had no intention of assisting her financially throughout the autumn, and it became apparent to Rachel that she would have ongoing difficulties funding her third year. Her scholarship helped, but when she told Harry towards the end of September that she was looking for a job, and that the only way she could carry on with her course would be to do her studying in the evenings, he’d stepped in and offered her the attic flat in his house, saying he’d been meaning to find a lodger and hadn’t done so and she may as well have it for the time being. Those were the reasons that he gave her, and they were true as far as they went. But he knew his offer was motivated also by his own loneliness, and by the emptiness there was in that house now that he lived in it alone.

He invited her up to see the place, so she could be sure, and over tea in his kitchen he set out for her, on and off, the way he lived then, so that she would know how best to live around him. He told her the hours that he kept, and who she might expect to see there; when it was that the cleaner came and what it was that she did as
well
as a myriad other domestic details he thought Rachel would need to know. He made it clear from the start that he’d accept no payment from her, telling her that in many ways he regarded what she was doing by moving in as a kind of favour to him, since she’d be keeping that part of the house lived in and looked after. He hadn’t wanted to make her feel in any way obliged to him, but nor had he been able to see a way of avoiding mentioning that he’d had a job persuading Haddon of the wisdom of what he was doing. He told her he’d talked Haddon round by saying he’d keep an eye on her, so to speak, and would ensure that she was aware that the college’s expectations of her academic performance were high, and that it would be in her interests if she could see a way of meeting them, or, if at all possible, exceeding them.

Rachel hadn’t said a great deal in response, but she’d seemed to take on board what he was saying. He thought it best, while he was at it, to outline a few of the things he’d prefer her not to engage in; parties, loud music, that sort of thing. And although, as far as he had been able to make out, she wasn’t involved with anyone in particular, or at least not in any serious fashion, he’d decided to be safe rather than sorry, given some of the things she seemed to have been caught up in the previous term, and to add in passing that he’d prefer it if she didn’t have overnight guests. He’d been a little surprised when she’d mentioned something about there being someone who might visit her, every now and again, and would that be alright. He responded by saying yes, of course, occasionally, if it really wasn’t possible for them to stay elsewhere, but it was to be understood that her priority should be affairs of the mind, rather than those of the heart, at least for the immediate future. He wondered afterwards whether he’d been a little draconian about it, but he felt on balance that what he’d said was no more than fair, under the circumstances, and that even if there was someone who’d seemed to be important, it wouldn’t have been more than a fling of some sort, and one that would in all likelihood have petered out sooner or later, in the way that student flings did.

Once the term was underway they’d retreated from one another
slightly
, getting on with their own lives and their own work in the way that he’d expected them to. Harry dined in Hall most evenings and Rachel seemed quite content with her own company, working away at the top of the house. Having settled into a pattern of sorts, they didn’t see a great deal of each other; the attic flat was almost self-contained, and he’d given her a front-door key when she’d moved in. But he liked the idea that she was up there, and he liked the sounds that she made, singing to herself in the bath, or thudding back down to the floor after a headstand, or clattering pots and pans in the kitchen. And sometimes she would drop in on him in the evenings to say hello, if she was lonely herself, and they would sit by his fire and talk about a poem that was troubling her, or a novel she couldn’t navigate a way through. He said that he wondered occasionally if she was only humouring him by having these conversations, and they were perhaps an attempt to repay him somehow for what he’d done, but she really did seem at ease as they sat there talking, in a way that she hadn’t been at any point during the previous year. She came to see him more frequently as time went by, and in the summer term she took to doing her revision in his garden, on the other side of the lawn from where he sat reading, so that sometimes he would bring out a jug of lemonade and she would take a break and tell him what she’d been working on, running through her ideas for an essay, or suggesting something she’d come across that he might like to write an article about.

Initially he had been fairly confident that Evie would see sense, and he’d even telephoned her himself on one occasion to try to reason with her and ask her whether she hadn’t perhaps overreacted. He’d tried to make light of the situation at first, saying they weren’t in a Fielding novel were they, and didn’t she think she’d made her point well enough, and wasn’t it time to let bygones be bygones? What really shocked him about the conversation wasn’t so much what she’d said as how she’d said it, and the anger that he sensed when she told him to mind his own business and that if he actually knew what Rachel was capable of he wouldn’t be questioning the situation. There was something almost like hatred in her voice, so he’d given up in
the
end, and besides, Rachel seemed perfectly satisfied with the arrangement they’d come to. Her work maintained a steady improvement throughout the year, so that nobody was surprised, least of all him, when she got her First and the British Academy funding that she needed in order to stay on as a postgraduate.

And that, Harry said, was that, for a number of years at least. It was inevitable that he should be Rachel’s supervisor for her MPhil, and it wasn’t until she moved to London to study for her doctorate that she finally did what he described as ‘making the break’. The teaching post that came with the PhD funding meant she was more than capable of supporting herself from then on. They kept in fairly close contact in the years that followed and he tracked her progress with pleasure, taking a certain degree of pride in her achievements. The two of them met from time to time in the British Library, at least once a month or more. If he was up in London for his research, or for any other reason, they would have coffee there together, or lunch if he was making a whole day of it. She’d told him that she’d renewed her acquaintance with me, having known me at Worcester, and that she had been surprised to find herself falling in love. She’d explained that it was because we’d married so quickly that she hadn’t had time to even think of inviting anyone to the ceremony apart from Richard and Lucinda, who were our witnesses, and Evie of course. He was a little hurt, but he knew that he had no reason to be, and he’d told her he understood, and that instead she must allow him to invite us to dine on High Table as soon as we were able to, in celebration. She’d sent him photographs of the day and written to him all about it, telling him of her happiness. It was a happiness he shared, not having a daughter of his own. And he was pleased when she’d told him that her marriage had been a catalyst for a reconciliation with Evie, to the extent that their relationship had become one that could at least be described as functional, and sometimes even cordial.

That was the way of things by the early summer of this year. For a number of years he’d thought nothing of Anthony, or of Cissy, or of what had happened on the night of the Casablanca Ball. He wasn’t
particularly
surprised not to have heard anything of Anthony in all that time, it being the case with most of the students he’d ever had to send down from the university, and certainly with those who had brought their disgrace on themselves so completely in the way that Anthony had done. He assumed that perhaps he had relocated abroad, there being such a comprehensive silence about him, even from his closest contemporaries. It was rumoured once or twice that he’d graduated from another university and managed to reinvent himself somewhere in the US, but Harry had avoided looking too closely into it. Rachel never spoke of him and Harry never pressed her to, and he had almost begun to forget Anthony altogether until one day in late May, just a few weeks before the night of Rachel’s murder.

He’d been sitting one morning at his favourite desk in the Rare Books and Music Room, one of the quieter reading rooms in the British Library and the one that he and Rachel preferred to work in. He was checking his pocket watch every now and again and wondering how much longer it would be until she signalled to him that she was ready to take a break. He looked once or twice across the room to where she sat reading, a strand of hair falling across the book in front of her and the frown flickering on her face that was always there when she was concentrating. And that was when he’d become aware somehow of another presence, of someone else intruding on his gaze.