Every Contact Leaves A Trace (47 page)

‘And then?’

‘And then, having done so, I continued on it, but only because I had been left there all alone, and could find no other route. Don’t think I haven’t dwelt on how I could have done things differently. Don’t think I haven’t lain awake at night these last months thinking through every step I took, even from the moment the three of them walked through my door for the first time, so many years ago. And don’t think I didn’t see, for every step, the other I might have taken instead.

‘I have made a series of errors of judgement. I was kind where I should have been firm, and harsh where I should have shown only compassion. I tried always to be fair, Alex. But I did not ask questions where I should have done, and I listened to others where I should have heard only Rachel, and what she was trying to tell me that day on the South Bank: that she was afraid of Anthony, and had good reason to be. And when, at the last, I hesitated about the plan that had been put in place, and I woke one day in a panic, thinking I might be mistaken about Anthony after all, I failed her again by seeking counsel in Evie about what had been planned, rather than keeping my own and confronting my doubts. And then suddenly it was Midsummer Night, and there you both were, knocking on my door. I’d had a sense that afternoon that things were slipping from my grasp, and that people were beginning to withdraw, and to withhold things from me. But events began to move too fast, and in directions I could not fathom. I tried, Alex. I tried to keep hold of it all, to stay in control. I did what I could. But then—’

‘But then what?’

And, when he said nothing,

‘Well, what?’

‘But then it was too late,’ he said, quietly, and as he spoke the words he was unable even to look at me.

‘And that was when you began to tell your lies, to cover up what you had done. And now, what? You’re asking me to tell them with you?’

‘I lied to the police that night in the belief that Rachel was alive, Alex. Injured, perhaps, yes. But alive. And in the belief also that I had made her a promise, and that by staying silent, I was keeping it.’

‘And then? When they told you what had happened?’

Harry paused then and didn’t answer. He sat down again, hunching forwards on the sofa and wrapping his arms around himself as though he was cold, and when he did speak again, the pauses he left between his sentences were so long I kept thinking he had finished.

‘Alex,’ he began, and he sat back up, keeping his arms wrapped around himself even more tightly than before. ‘I am asking you to forgive me, and to help me. The project I embarked upon when I agreed to Anthony’s request has failed, and it has done so catastrophically. I am left with the worst kind of despair. I have passed my story on to you in the hope that you will share with me the burden of deciding what to do with it. It is, in many ways, more yours than it is mine. You’re hardly even a character in it for large swathes of the narrative, but you and Rachel loved one another a great deal, and of that I am very conscious. You are now in possession of what may be the key to the mystery of her death, and I don’t seek to stand in your way if you choose to divulge it to those who may be able to solve that mystery. I am simply proposing that you think a little longer, at least, before you reach your decision.’

I said nothing, my head spinning, not at all sure how to respond. And then I told him, as calmly as I could, ‘I’m afraid I don’t see it like you do, Harry. I just don’t.’

‘Of course, Alex. And you have every right not to. That was the risk I took when I invited you here.’

He stood again and walked over to the window and leaned against the frame, with his back towards me. I thought he was looking down on the quad, but then the light changed and fell differently for a moment and I caught his reflection in the glass and saw that he had
caught
mine also and was looking right at me. ‘As I said when I began, the question of whether the tale is to have a conclusion is one that you must answer. It is for you to decide whether we shall remain as innocents, Evie and Anthony and I, or whether we shall each in our own way be condemned for whatever parts we have played in Rachel’s murder. We can, I think, be almost sure that Anthony killed her, and for myself, I believe there is little to be gained by a further telling of the tale. The scent of a hare is fresh and strong when you put her up, but the longer she runs the more it fades. I can see no great advantage in the protracted and painful exercise that would have to be undertaken to establish his guilt, if indeed it is possible to do so conclusively, given his absence.’

And then he was silent for a time, and the light changed again and I could no longer see the image of his face.

‘There is this need in us always, isn’t there, Alex, to find everything out, and to judge, so that there may be some final atonement for what has passed. The mistake we can so easily make, all of us, is to assume that if we achieve those things, then we will have our solace. All I am asking you to do is to be quite sure, before you reach a decision, that this need cannot be met some other way. That we cannot seek expiation by another route. When you have thought further on it, you may come to agree with me that we can close the book and let things lie. Alternatively, you may wish to see it published, in order that others may read it, and in order that its villains might be punished.’

He turned from the window and walked across the room towards me. ‘I would suggest, if I may, that you go and get some rest, or perhaps take a walk and think things through. I will do the same, and would be grateful if you could come back later on this afternoon, at half past three or thereabouts, and let me know what you have decided. Alternatively, should you find you need longer to make up your mind, you might be so kind as to tell me what point you have reached in your deliberations. Goodbye, Alex,’ he said, holding the door open for me. ‘And thank you for keeping to your agreement to hear me out. I am grateful.’

23

I HAD WALKED
halfway down the stairs when I felt suddenly dizzy. I fell forwards, grabbing on to the rail and sitting down as quickly as I could, thinking I was about to faint. I felt none of the things one might have expected me to feel on leaving Harry’s room that day. I remember wanting to weep as I sat there, or at least thinking that was what I ought to be doing, and that perhaps I should even be crying in the way I did from time to time as a boy, heaving out sobs so great that I’d often wondered in my childish way whether it was possible to drown myself with my own tears.

Instead I felt only a kind of numbness, and when I realised after a while that my dizziness had passed, I stood and walked back to my room and climbed fully clothed under the covers of my bed. A few hours later I woke suddenly from a dream. My shirt was soaked with sweat and my skin was running with it, and I was hot and cold at the same time and the room was swimming around me. I got up, and undressed, rubbing myself dry with a towel before taking the last of the clean things that were left in my bag and putting them on.

I had been dreaming of my mother, and it struck me as I stood beside the window, looking out across the lawns, that it was the first time I had dreamed of someone other than Rachel since the night of her murder. The dream was one that recurred frequently after my mother died and I went to Oxford and had only my father to stay with during the holidays. In the dream I am floating in the air, completely enclosed in a bubble. The bubble is somehow flimsy, and soft, and not quite transparent but clear enough for me to be able to see through it. And I notice that there is another bubble floating next to my own, made of the same material but slightly bigger than
mine
. I become aware that there is someone inside it, and as I press my face against the fabric I see that it is my mother, and at that moment she sees me also, and we reach out our hands towards one another as we float, but we cannot touch one another, and although we try again and again, it isn’t possible and we drift away from one another and I call out to her but then she is gone and I am alone and it is as though she was never there.

I put all of my things in my bag and look around the room to make sure I have left nothing and I go straight over to Harry’s rooms for half past three. I stand and wait for some time before I see the note that is tucked between the door and the frame. It is addressed to me, from Harry, and it says that he has gone for a walk and why don’t I meet him beside the lake instead; there is something he would like to show me. I walk back down his staircase and I stop at the spot on the terrace where he said he’d stood and watched me stumbling down the steps on the night of Rachel’s murder. I look up towards the Old Library windows, and back at the quad, and I see that the snow has begun to melt much faster now and that large swathes of green are beginning to show through where the sun has fallen on it, and I wonder why Harry wants to meet me by the lake rather than in his rooms. And at about that moment, a thought that has been formulating itself in a tentative kind of a way throughout the whole of my visit, the seed of which was perhaps planted when Harry sent me the little book of Browning, crystallises into something firmer, and I feel as though someone has shaken me, hard, on the shoulder, or clapped me on the back.

Of course, the fact that Harry himself is the only authority for any of the information that he has given to me was something of which I was aware from the start of his tale, when he sat by the fire and told me that what he was about to relate was a version of events, and nothing more. But such was my absorption, and such was my desire to hear an ending, that I think I paid less attention than I might have done to the fact that so many of the things he said were based on untruths, or on fabrications of his own or others’ making. As Harry said to me himself, there was always a reason for the lies
that
he told. He had to say that he was going to London for the day to make sure I wasn’t around to find him searching in vain for the old gate I had reminded him of, but as I stand there I remember the ease with which he had glossed over exactly what he’d done with himself that day, diverting my attention by showing me the photograph of his boyhood self in Trafalgar Square. And then I recall him saying how simple it had been, really, to lie his way through his police interviews and to continue to do so in the months that followed Rachel’s death, and I remember also the seeming glibness with which he confessed his dishonesty to me at the close of his story, and I wonder, just for the briefest of moments, whether it is entirely wise of me to go in the growing gloom of a winter’s afternoon, at a time when the college has become almost entirely empty, to meet Harry at the place where Rachel was killed. He put to me his theory that Anthony and Evie were in College that night, but the fact remains that if they weren’t, then the only other person who could have killed Rachel is Harry himself. He told me he had forgiven Rachel, and that he had come to understand her behaviour, but he told me also how angry he’d felt when he found out the extent to which she had manipulated him. And although he said his anger had passed, it can’t have done completely; there must also have been bitterness in him still, even just a little, knowing that she’d kept so much from him that was known to others, and that she had done so despite the constancy of his kindness.

I begin my walk across the quad towards the passageway beneath the secret garden, making my way towards the lake, and I think about the insistence with which he had presented himself as forever the fable’s innocent bystander: gazing at Rachel as she worked in the British Library; watching from the library windows; standing on the terrace; loitering on the pavement outside Anthony’s flat hoping for a glimpse of him, and following the reconstructions of the night of the murder from where he sat in his college rooms above the quad. And I reflect on how much at odds this is with what seems actually to be the case: not only did Harry take a leading role in the drama he has produced for me, but he also stood beside the camera
from
time to time with his megaphone, directing the spectacle we were all of us taking part in.

And then I emerge from the passageway, onto the lawns, and I see him. He is waiting beside the lake with his back towards me, looking out across the water. I walk over to where he is and I stand behind him for a while, keeping as still as I am able to, until finally he becomes aware that I am there and he turns and I am staring at him and he is staring at me and I realise we are both thinking exactly the same thing: each of us is wondering whether the other is a man capable of murder.

I smile at him, and shake my head, and he smiles at me, and neither of us says a word.

A minute or two passes with us standing there like this, each in a silent way, and then he shifts his posture slightly, pointing at the stump of the tree we are next to. I look at it, puzzled, and then I remember that it was once a gently spreading holm oak, and that Richard and I would sit beneath it sometimes at the weekends to read the paper together and skim stones across the lake. Harry leans into it, patting its trunk with his hand and rubbing it as though it were the flank of a horse, and he tells me that it had to be felled last year, when it was found to be rotten at its core.

The light is fading, and there is the soft sound of a woodpigeon in the trees on the other side of the lake, and Harry bends down towards the ground as if to pick something up and I am once more suddenly, foolishly, afraid, but then I realise he is pointing at something in particular, gesturing to me to bend over also and look at the base of the stump. It seems easier, clad as I am in my winter coat and boots, to kneel on the ground, and so I do and with Harry standing over me, I try to work out what it is that he wants me to see. There appears to be nothing to look at other than snow, until Harry steps forward and brushes some of it away to reveal a tiny plaque with something engraved on it and I read the words, ‘Rachel’s Worcester’, and I shiver slightly against the cold. As I stand back up I notice that a rose has been planted at the base of this broken holm oak, and that it has sent three shoots up around the trunk, trailing
itself
about. I turn to Harry and he smiles again, and I see that there is a tear running slowly down his cheek. He tells me then that it is an old rose, and that it was found the previous summer in the Provost’s garden. He did some research and discovered that it was a variety that had not yet been named, and so it was that the Provost had asked him to choose one. That, he said, was how he came to name it after Rachel, and that was why it was planted beside the lake, so that in the summer months this silent piece of tree will become busy with bees, and clad about with flowers also.