Every Contact Leaves A Trace (6 page)

Harry is halfway along the north terrace when he hears the scream. He turns to face the direction the sound has come from and looks across the quad towards the lake. He stands stock still on hearing it; he makes no attempt to move. And then he sees me, running like a wild thing from the alcove and virtually throwing myself down the steps. He sees me stumble, sees my glasses fall from my face, and sees me fall forwards and fumble about before jumping up again and dragging myself through the passageway at the top of the south side of the quad. At the moment at which I drop my glasses and retrieve them, which I do, he says, in a single slow-motion movement, a sort of a balletic dive followed almost immediately by my leaping back up again, so that it is as though I don’t really stop, as such, he notices a movement in the right of his peripheral vision. He turns to see a figure running up the path from the passageway underneath Haddon’s secret garden. It is a small figure, perhaps that of a woman, or a teenage boy. It wears dark clothing, a hood pulled forward and down, tight around its head. Because of the hood, and because it is hurtling towards me at an extraordinary speed, its torso thrown so far in front of itself that it looks like a sprinter just off the blocks, he doesn’t see any part of the face and is unable to provide a description. He says that this little figure dressed in black is moving so fast that it reaches the top of the quad in an instant and passes me as I stumble and fall, and that by the time I have picked myself up and carried on, it has gained the top of the steps behind me and is away. The police have told my lawyer that if my glasses hadn’t fallen from my face when they did, I would undoubtedly have seen this running figure, just as Harry had done. As things turned out, I was entirely unaware of its presence.

Partway through my second interview the detectives began to focus with some intensity on the figure Harry had seen. I remember thinking at the time that it had caught their attention in a way that seemed to be somewhat disproportionate. Had I been more alert, or more engaged with what was going on around me, I think it likely I would have suggested there was perhaps a danger in the approach they appeared to be taking, in that it might prevent them from seeing other strands emerging. As it turned out I made no such comment, and in the weeks that followed I allowed myself to be reassured by my lawyer that this was merely one of many lines of enquiry that were being pursued, and that, in any event, it was possible they had not been misguided by their instincts. It seemed that they had been able to eliminate from their enquiries almost everyone who had been recorded as entering or leaving the college during the forty-eight hours before and after Rachel’s murder. Every entrance and every exit was covered by CCTV, and the tapes had been scrutinised and a list of individuals compiled and worked through exhaustively. There were, my lawyer said, only one or two points on the tapes that were proving to be problematic. The end of the academic year was a busier than usual time in the porter’s lodge and there were a couple of moments, each of them lasting no more than a minute or two, when the number of people gathering in such a small space meant, inevitably, that some of them remained, as yet, unidentified. The police were comfortable though that they had all that they needed on those tapes, and they were comfortable also that there was very little chance that anyone could have got in, or out, by any other route. Following a major rebuilding programme five years ago, my lawyer told me, the college had been made impenetrable apart from these entrances, the height of the walls having been raised and the levels of deterrent increased. Metal spikes and pieces of broken glass were everywhere, and anyone exiting by an unofficial route would have left some trace of their presence. The only weak point, apparently, was the path that ran alongside the south-west side of the lake and followed the line of the canal, the boundary there being formed only by a border of trees and hedges, at the back of which
was
a low brick wall. However, anyone running that way from Rachel’s body would, first, have passed the porter coming in the opposite direction and, second, have had to jump down from the wall directly into the canal.

I wonder now at my inertia that afternoon, and am coming to think of it as a very serious error on my part. Despite the months that have passed, the police have been unable to track down the person Harry saw that night, and, despite their repeated assurances that it is only a matter of time, I am beginning to doubt their chances of doing so. I don’t think of myself as someone who is of a mindset capable of accepting this kind of uncertainty. Indeed I have begun, in recent weeks, to find it very difficult to accommodate. It has occurred to me once or twice that if I had only said something that afternoon, things might be quite different. But I have been told that to think such things is entirely normal, given the situation in which I find myself, and that I should not allow myself to follow such trains of thought too frequently, for fear of indulging what is no more than the forlorn but inevitable fantasy of a man who has lost his wife.

Towards the end of the interview, when it became apparent that I was sticking to my story that I hadn’t seen anyone running past me on the steps, I was taken to another room and shown the CCTV playbacks. The footage from the camera trained on the inside of the college doors shows the figure with its hood still pulled down and its head bowed low. It reaches out its hand and opens the wicket door at exactly the same time as the camera on the street outside captures a group of students arriving. Some of this group change their minds at the last moment and go back the way they have come. Apparently drunk as well as indecisive, they appear not to notice the diminutive figure that is new to their number and huddles among them as they stand in the full glare of the street lights. They provided nothing in the way of assistance in their interviews, their memories of the incident being blurred by alcohol and their thoughts being only of the exams that had ended and the summer that was beginning. The group was recorded again five minutes later by the camera
positioned
at the north-west corner of Gloucester Green, the square lying diagonally opposite the college entrance. The hooded figure is no longer among them.

I watched those sequences of grainy images several times that afternoon, but still it does not sit well with me, the idea that this figure ever really existed. After they had been played to me once or twice, I began to have the strangest of senses that I’d seen it all before somewhere; the whole of Harry’s description of the running figure, and the footage of it slipping out of college, began to seem to me an echo, as it were, of something I had already experienced. I set the thought aside, realising it was probable that anyone in my position would have felt the same, it being a well-documented phenomenon that a person without any recollection of a certain sequence of events, if they are told enough times that it has happened, and shown some visual record of it, will come to believe not only that it did, but also that they have actually experienced it, or witnessed it, for themselves. And in any case, there was never any real doubt in my mind. Not only had I not seen anyone run past me on the steps, but nor had I even so much as sensed them. Of course I can’t think of a reason why Harry should have fabricated such a story, but nevertheless, I am uneasy about it. He said that the entire episode had lasted no more than twenty or thirty seconds, and the police have established from their repeated reconstructions that it is entirely possible for someone to have run from the passageway under the secret garden to the top of the quad and on up the steps within that time frame.

My undergraduate knowledge of the law of evidence was at best rudimentary and is now no more than sketchy, but that which I have retained is sufficiently clear to mean that I must accept, in principle, the fallibility of the human eye. And I know that even a person of sound mind who claims to have observed a sequence of events from a reasonable distance in daylight hours can have their statement entirely undermined by a competent advocate who elicits the apparently unremarkable fact that the witness occasionally wears reading glasses, albeit only after a particularly long day and only when they
find
themselves to be unusually tired. The doubt he needs to establish has been introduced; his long assault is safely underway.

Were I to take to a stand and swear to a jury that I had been alone in the quad as I ran to find Rachel’s body that night, and to swear that there had been no running figure, I am quite aware that a barrister would have no difficulty in persuading that jury to discount my evidence in its entirety on account of my glasses having fallen from my face as I stumbled down the steps, and of my mind having been so firmly focused on the path ahead and on my desire to run faster than I had ever run in my life.

The police have staged their reconstructions so carefully I cannot fault them. As well as the ones they carried out for themselves the morning after Rachel’s death, the ones with runners and clocks and watchers at the library windows and tapes marking off sight lines, they staged more lifelike versions later in the summer, with actors playing the parts, in case there were memories already buried that could be jogged. They have made this story as true as it can be. My lawyer has told me that they have even gone so far as to visit my opticians to verify my prescription. Yet despite all this, despite knowing that I could not ask for more in the way of reasons for believing it, I find that I am unable even now to accept the narrative that has been presented to me.

Reflecting this evening on my reluctance in this regard I was reminded of my father experiencing a similar difficulty one summer in Cornwall. For a moment I was almost entertained by the memory, but only for a moment, realising as soon as it began to surface that it must have taken place on one of the last of the summer holidays that we took together as a family, perhaps even the very last one before my father stopped coming with us, my mother and me.

And as it flits now across the inside of my mind I am there again, cold at the end of the day, so cold that the tips of my fingers are starting to turn dark blue and I am hoping in my eight-year-old way that somebody will tell me it is time for Final Swims before we head back to the cottage for tea and a bath, at the same time as hoping this announcement will never be made, so that instead we will stay
out
into the evening, all night even, and build a fire on the clifftop to keep us warm as we sleep. My friend Robbie has come on holiday with us, my parents giving in to my badgering and seeing that I needed someone to play with, and to talk nonsense with, and that his coming would give them more time to themselves. And although Robbie, who is almost a year younger than me and far smaller, has noticed that his fingers also are turning blue, we keep our mutual blue-fingeredness to ourselves, knowing that to share this extraordinary phenomenon would make my mother shriek with horror and be certain to bring the day to a close immediately. But because we are beginning to feel quite uncomfortable in our coldness, when the call does eventually come for Final Swims we demur, claiming that we would prefer instead to remain on the side and watch my father take his. And so we stand with the children from the other cottages who have dried and dressed themselves and are ready to climb back up the cliff path for their tea but have persuaded their parents to let them stay just to watch Dr Petersen’s final swim.

My father, delighted by his audience, stands as a prizefighter might, draping his towel around his neck and clenching his hands into fists and raising and lowering each arm in turn as if flexing his muscles, and as he does so we all jump up and down and clap our hands and my mother tries to take a photograph but she’s laughing too hard to keep the camera still for long enough. At last he drops his towel and strides to the place we have dived from all day long. It stands at the edge of a tidal pool formed by a perfect ring of rock which protrudes high enough to mean that the water never drains from it. The tide is come back in again now and the ring of rocks is submerged, the water deep and dark and churning and the boundaries between pool and sea blurred in a way that we children find exciting and terrifying at the same time. My father is everyone’s hero as he swings his arms round and round before launching himself into a perfect arc and slipping into the sea. He rises up again almost immediately to holler and shout and say My God Georgie it’s cold and to laugh as my mother shouts Oh Love don’t swear, the children. And then suddenly he is swimming hard and fast and straight and this is when
it
happens, this extraordinary occurrence that he would never believe had taken place, even though we all saw it, all of us children and all of our mothers.

He has struck out from the side and has reached the pool’s halfway point when two things happen simultaneously that make us children stop mid-jump and thud back down to the ground our hands clasped over our mouths our laughs and whoops and cries silenced so that we all hear my mother shout Oh Jesus Oh Jesus as the body of a bull seal, all eight feet of its length and all three feet of its girth trembling, rears up from the water and towers above my father’s head which is half-submerged in his front-crawl endeavour. At precisely the moment at which the bull seal emerges my father executes a perfect underwater turn and starts the swim back to the diving place, moving twice as fast as he had been. He drags himself up on the side and we run towards him, expecting him perhaps to fall to the ground in terror. Instead, he only reaches for his towel and bends over to rub his hair before looking up and smiling. His smile becomes a frown as he sees that our faces are white and realises that we are jumping up and down screaming and that my mother is in tears. When we are calm enough to tell him what we saw he laughs again and says don’t be silly, there was nothing there. But why did you turn and swim back when you did, we all ask, incredulous. I’d had enough, that’s all, he says, shaking the water from his ears. I’d had enough, and so have you two, it’s time for your tea you’re turning blue. But why did you swim twice as fast on your way back, my mother asks, it was because you’d seen the seal, it must have been. It was because I was hungry, he replies, pulling on his clothes. I would have seen it, there was nothing there, I would have seen it, and he says this all the way back up the cliff path to anyone who tries to talk to him about it.