Every Contact Leaves A Trace (24 page)

Before that summer, the one with Robbie and the medicine cabinet and our foolish game gone wrong, he would pick me up and run around the garden with me, hurling me up towards the sky and laughing as though something extraordinary had happened when all it was was that the last of his patients had left for the afternoon and he had come to find me in my room and taken me outside for what he called my Runaround. And sometimes we would throw a ball to one another and my mother would call from the sitting room not to hit the wisteria it had only just been planted and don’t get him dirty it’s not his bathnight tonight you know it’s not. And then we would stop and he would go to the pub for his Justahalf, the drink he would never explain, the drink I knew I would choose as soon as I was old enough to go with him. And my mother would take me upstairs and wash the grass stains from my feet, and then she would put me to bed. And as I fell asleep on those cool summer nights, the windows open and a lamp burning in the corner of my room, I would sometimes hear my father’s feet crunch across the gravel on the drive and he would laugh as he came in and my mother and he would fall to their supper, silently.

Sometimes, when he was with a patient, the sound of his laughter would drift from his consulting room. It would echo around the house in the quietness of the afternoon so that whatever I was doing, submerged under a pile of cushions on my bed reading a story, or lying on the floor of the playroom whittling a stick, or sitting at
the
kitchen table colouring in a picture, I would hear it and stop and wonder when it would be time for tea, or whether Robbie might come soon and ring on the bell and run with me into the garden to play.

And on one of those afternoons when Robbie had come, when we were inside rather than out because it was raining, we were playing together in my bedroom, just above my father’s consulting room, and because of that we could hear him quite clearly, on and off, as we played. ‘Why does he laugh so much anyway?’ Robbie asked me, pushing me off the window seat and jumping on top of me and punching me on my arm. ‘Is it medicine do you think? Do you think he takes medicine or summink, your dad?’ And that was how it had begun, this plan of ours, or of mine, I can never remember which of us it was who thought of it first: to take the key from my mother’s bedside table while she had her afternoon sleep and to creep through the house past the door of his consulting room to the special room next to the pantry that I was on no account ever allowed to enter, and to unlock his dispensing cabinet and see if we could find it, this medicine, this medicine that might make Robbie laugh as much as my father did.

There was a moment in my mother’s bedroom, just after Robbie and I had tiptoed to the head of her bed and he was leaning over to take the key, when I caught the scent of the night stocks from where they stood in a vase on her dressing table. As I did so, I remembered going into the garden with my father to watch him cut them, and how I had felt when we brought them in and my father had given them to her, and the look on her face, and I thought to myself then that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing, Robbie and I, because it would make her unhappy. But he had the key in his hand suddenly and we were running down the corridor and I could hardly breathe I was so excited and then it was too late.

I never heard my father laugh again. Sometimes in my memory it will sound still, suddenly, unexpectedly, incongruously, catching me
unawares
and stopping my breath in my chest and sending a pain sharp into the middle of my heart so that I think I might die with it. It was the kind of laugh that began as a chuckle and grew as his torso started to shake and grew again as his head fell back so that he had to pause and say Ye Gods Man and gasp two short breaths before starting all over again, slapping his thigh and roaring with it, his face red and shiny with tears so that my mother, if she was there, would start to laugh as well despite the fact she always looked as though she didn’t really want to, and she would say Oh Love stop please, stop you’re making my tummy ache.

14

I WENT BACK
to my room and lay on my bed, drifting for a while between memories and dreams and the weight of them, and I woke with just enough time to get to the Old Bursary for drinks, so it wasn’t until after dinner that I was able to turn to the parcel Harry had given me that afternoon. The meal had taken longer than usual and I’d stayed on afterwards for coffee only to find myself stuck in an interminable conversation with a visiting historian who was determined to talk about his research in more detail than I was really able to follow. I didn’t manage to make my excuses until around half past eleven, when I went straight back to my room and sat at the desk. I peeled away the tape and pulled out what was inside and as soon as I saw it I realised it wasn’t the first time I’d done so. It was a document wallet, in heavy black leather with zips around the sides. I opened it and looked at the first of the pieces of paper that I found there, and I remembered where I’d seen it before.

It was the one I’d found for Evie on the night I got back to my apartment after Rachel’s murder, the one she’d asked me to courier to her the next morning. That night, having listened to her phone message, I’d tried Rachel’s desk drawers only to discover they were locked and then I’d looked again on the bookshelves and found that it had been there all along. I’d unzipped it straight away of course, to see what was inside. I don’t think I formulated any particular opinion, at the time, as to there being anything suspicious about what I was being asked to do. It was Evie, after all. I was just curious, there was nothing more to it than that, and so I’d opened it and leafed through the first few pages of its contents. What I found there would have allayed even the faintest sense of unease, had I felt
anything
of the sort. There was nothing other than some old essays, that was all, and when I’d looked at a few of them, and turned the page to find a reading list on Robert Browning with Harry’s name at the bottom of it, I’d zipped the wallet back up and made the call to the courier. That they were essays of Rachel’s from her Oxford days was clear enough; the overly bold hand and the colour of the ink in which they’d been written suggested as much, and if I needed any further confirmation, it was provided by the dates at the top of each page and the presence of the initials ‘R.C.’. And so, assuming Evie wanted them as a keepsake of her god-daughter, I’d done as she asked and thought nothing further of it.

Sitting last month in a pool of lamplight in that little College room, I took all of the papers out of the wallet and placed them on the desk in front of me, realising there must be more to it than I’d first assumed, and wondering how it had ended up in Harry’s possession. At first, it really did seem to be just a pile of Rachel’s old essays. ‘“There she stands/ As if alive.” (My Last Duchess). Examine Browning’s perverseness.’ was followed by one with a longer title strung along the top: ‘“Love, you saw me gather men and women,/ Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,/ Enter each and all, and use their service,” (One Word More). Discuss Browning’s use of the dramatic monologue.’ I flicked through a few more until I reached the fifth or the sixth: ‘“… he played with the curious and the special, they never submerged him, and it was a sign of his robustness that he could play to the end.” (Henry James on Browning). Discuss.’ I stopped there and looked back through the ones I’d already seen, noticing that they were all dated either May or June of 1994, the summer term of our second year. I read a little further into each of the essays I’d looked at so far, but there really seemed to be nothing of any particular interest in the text that followed the titles. It wasn’t until I reached the seventh or the eighth one that I paused in my reading. I looked at the title a second time, ‘Robert Browning: Wife Killer?’ and then I skimmed over the script below. What struck me straight away, apart from the somewhat macabre tone, and relative brevity, of the question that had been
set
, was that the whole of the essay was in pencil, rather than Rachel’s purple ink, and the handwriting was completely different.

The other essays had been written in the broad and flourishing script that Rachel had cultivated as a student. By the time I got to know her again later on, after Richard’s wedding, her handwriting had softened into an almost ordinary cursive, and although the overall effect was still markedly more artistic than my own, she’d begun to use black ink, rather than purple. But the pencilled writing I was looking at now was in neither of those styles. It was tiny, cramped and scrawling, and the whole of the text seemed to run down the page in one continuous paragraph. I looked at it again and again, knowing I’d seen something like it once before, and then all at once I was there again, on that afternoon in the summer term of my first year when I’d followed Rachel and Anthony and Cissy around the quad, running after them to catch the piece of paper that Rachel had dropped and picking it up having assumed it was hers only to see the very same handwriting I was looking at now. I looked at the top of the essay I held in my hand, ‘Robert Browning: Wife Killer?’ and I saw that the initials ‘A.T.’ had been squeezed in next to the title, so faint as to be barely legible.

I hadn’t read this far through the contents of the document wallet when I received Evie’s message asking me to courier it to her. This time though, pulling my chair further into the glow of the lamplight so I could see Anthony’s essay more clearly, I carried on reading, turning over page after page, trying as best as I could to decipher his writing. The next few essays seemed also to have been written by him, and I was about to give up and put everything away again, thinking that I would need Harry’s help to understand the meaning of what I was looking at, when suddenly I noticed that there was something more than a little familiar about the text I was partway through. Looking back again to the essays of Rachel’s that had gone before, I quickly realised that, apart from ‘Robert Browning: Wife Killer?’, every one of Anthony’s essays had a replica in Rachel’s hand, and that each of the pairs of texts was identical to one another, word for every single word.

That in itself was puzzling enough, but then I turned over the final page of the last of Anthony’s versions of the essays, and what I saw next made me feel not only confused but also suddenly sick, with a rush of something like panic passing through the whole of my body, as though I was being pulled through deep water, my mouth open and my lungs filling with it. I looked at the letter that lay there and whilst I didn’t understand what it meant, or how it might have come to have been written, I realised that it was somehow immensely important, and that if I’d only carried on reading that night in my apartment in London, I would have found this letter and I could have taken it to someone and shown it to them, and that if I had, the ensuing weeks would almost certainly have taken a different course.

WORCESTER COLLEGE

6 JUNE 1994

DEAR HARRY,

She had

A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad
,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere
.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast
,

The dropping of the daylight in the West
…

WAS YOUR WIFE A SLAPPER HAZZER? COULDN’T HANDLE IT, COULD YOU? YOU WILL SLEEP EASY IN YOUR BED ONLY IF YOU CONFESS YOUR CRIME.

I AM A WELL-WISHER

I turned over the next page, and the next, the sickness growing in my stomach as I saw that the letter was the first of three. Each of them was dated a week apart from one another and they were all laid out in an identical fashion, being typed rather than handwritten, and I looked
more
closely and saw that they were photocopies rather than originals. The second letter was in a tone that was somehow more menacing than the first, and it seemed to contain a kind of a threat.

WORCESTER COLLEGE

13 JUNE 1994

DEAR HARRY,

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt
,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands
;

Then all smiles stopped together
.

SO DID YOU DO IT YOURSELF OR DID YOU GET SOMEONE ELSE TO DO YOUR DIRTY WORK FOR YOU? THAT IS THE ONLY PUZZLE THAT REMAINS TO US HARRY. WE’RE CLOSING IN ON YOU.

I AM A WELL-WISHER

The third letter was perhaps even more threatening, and the other thing that made it stand out from the other two was the fact that the quotation it contained was one I had read only a few days before, on the first evening of my stay in College.

WORCESTER COLLEGE

20 JUNE 1994

DEAR HARRY,

That moment she was mine, mine, fair
,