Every Contact Leaves A Trace (50 page)

The memory that surfaces is an old one, but none the less vivid for it. It is so vivid in fact that when I close my eyes and watch as Richard and I walk up the steps on to the terrace in front of Hall on a winter morning in our second year, knowing as I sit there in front of my computer what it is that I am about to see next, I experience the sensation that someone has walked into the room behind me and emptied a bucket of ice down my back.

We’re on our way to the Old Library to work for a couple of
hours
before breakfast, there being only ten days left until the mock-exams Haddon has insisted on setting us. We reach the alcove by the porter’s lodge and are met by the sight of the Men’s Eight, huddled in a pack, their breath steaming against the cold and all of them jumping up and down in preparation for the training run they’re about to go on. Richard steps into the lodge to get something and I hear a couple of them mouthing off about the fact that their bloody cox has demanded they get there at six a.m. only to be late herself. Then one of them who has been hovering on the edge of the group keeping a lookout says, ‘Here she is, the lovely lady herself, at long bloody last,’ and they turn, and so do I, and we all see Cissy Craig running improbably fast up the side of the quad, the hood of her jogging top pulled forward and down, tight around her head, her figure so small she might be a teenage boy. And as they start to sing, ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes!’ their slow hand-clap keeping time with their voices, she picks up her pace even more and hurtles towards us at an extraordinary speed, her torso thrown so far forward she looks like a sprinter just off the blocks. She is moving so fast she reaches the top of the quad in an instant and takes the whole of the steps in no more than a couple of strides. Reaching the men waiting in the alcove, she runs straight in amongst them, barely pausing, and the group moves off as one, slipping out through the wicket door to begin their run around the city. I step forward and hold the door open for the last of them and I see them jogging across the road to Gloucester Green, the height of the pack and the proximity to one another with which they’re running meaning that the hooded figure seems no longer to be among them.

And then the memory has run its course and I remember watching the CCTV playbacks the police had shown me on the day after Rachel’s murder. They’d recited to me, again and again, the precise details of Harry’s description of the figure he’d seen hurtling up the side of the quad, the one that I insisted I hadn’t seen. And then, when still I said I hadn’t, they’d shown me, over and over, the images of the figure slipping out of the door and losing itself among the group of students who were gathered outside. As I turn back to
Richard’s
email once more, I realise that when I’d sat there in the police station, listening to them repeating what Harry had said, and watching the images flicker on the screen in front of me, the reason I’d had the sense throughout the whole experience that I had seen it all before, at some other time, and in some other place, was that, in fact, I had.

And as soon as I realise it was Cissy who Harry saw running up the side of the quad in the minutes after Rachel was murdered, I realise also, from what Richard has said in his email, that because she is alive and well somewhere, it will be possible to find her. I get up from my desk intending to leave for Oxford straight away and to go directly to the police station when I get there, trying to remember as I walk across the room what time the first train leaves from Paddington. But then I decide that I should speak to Richard before I go and find out what else Cissy’s father told him during the conversation in which he’d said he’d been stood up at the airport by her and her boyfriend, and what was so odd about the ‘oddest story’ that the man had told Richard in his drunkenness.

I go back to my desk and pick up my phone and dial Richard’s number, but it’s Lucinda who answers and when I ask to speak to him she says for god’s sake Alex, I mean, hello and it’s lovely to hear you and everything, but it’s the middle of the night here I thought you were coming tomorrow can’t you wait till then? And when I say I’m sorry but it’s urgent she holds the phone away from herself and I can hear her soothing one of the twins. When she speaks again she says alright, if you really have to, I’ll go and wake him up but I’ll have to finish the feed first so can I get him to ring you back?

While I wait I google Cissy Craig, thinking Harry must either have been as gullible as Evie thought he was if he believed Anthony when he said he’d been able to find virtually nothing on her when he’d begun to stalk Rachel online from Arizona, or alternatively, he was simply so ignorant of how the internet worked that he wouldn’t have realised how improbable this claim was. And I am angry with myself for not having thought there was something suspicious about this when Harry told me, and for not having realised it was such an
obvious
lie that it must have meant Anthony was hiding something, something about Cissy. When my search comes back with precisely nothing beyond a few references to some Worcester Boat Club results dating back to the early nineties, I am no longer angry with myself, and instead I am confused, but then Richard calls, and he explains immediately why my search was unsuccessful.

‘Yes yes yes. Cissy. Of course. You’re right. That’s what she was called. Her dad called her something different that’s all. By the way can I just say it’s bloody the middle of the bloody night Alex? Lu’s pretty pissed off actually, and, well, I mean, I’m pretty knackered myself. This is the first night in the last fortnight I’ve got to sleep before three.’

‘Are you sure it’s the same person though? It’s Cissy you’re talking about? Are you sure he’s her dad?’

‘Alex you’re not even listening to me are you? Are you alright?’

‘Please just answer my question. Do you really think I’d be asking you if it didn’t matter? Are you sure she’s the same person? Rachel’s friend? The cox? Why was her dad calling her something different?’

‘Yes, Alex, it’s the same person, but that isn’t what she’s called now and the man should know he is her bloody father. Can you please get a grip and let me get back to bed and we can talk about it tomorrow. Oh god. They’ve both woken up now. Hold on,’ and he goes away and I can hear a high-pitched wailing in the background and it sounds as though Richard and Lucinda are having an argument as well.

When he comes back he tells me he has to go and do I have any idea how hard it is for them both, the sleepless nights, the feeding?

‘Well no,’ I say, ‘I don’t suppose I do. And I don’t suppose I ever will, Richard, will I? Not now.’

‘Oh god, Alex, I’m sorry. Can we not talk about this tomorrow though? Are you sure you’re alright? Have you been drinking?’

‘I’m alright, Richard. And no I haven’t been drinking. I just need your help that’s all. And I need it now, not tomorrow. I can’t explain, sorry. It’s just too complicated. I’d be very grateful if you would just do this one thing for me, OK?’

‘What one thing?’

‘Trust me. That’s what. Just trust me. I’m going to ask you some questions. And I want you to believe me when I say it’s very, very, important that you try as hard as possible to remember everything this man said to you. In an hour or so I’ll be passing it all on to the police. They’ll contact him themselves but I need to make sure they know where to start when they get to him.’

Richard doesn’t say anything and I think perhaps I have been cut off, but then he is there again.

‘Alex, you do realise you’re actually being an idiot don’t you? A complete idiot. I’m sorry but I’m actually beginning to wonder why I asked you to come. You do know I pretty much staked my reputation on you when I vouched for you being ready for this?’

‘And? What? Are you saying you don’t want me to come any more?’

‘For god’s sake. You just don’t seem to have made any improvement, psychologically speaking. Listen to yourself. What the hell does Cissy Craig have to do with any of it?’

‘It’s your call, Richard. Trust me or don’t trust me. But make up your mind soon will you? I’ve got a train to catch. Practically speaking.’

And that was when he gave in, saying that he wouldn’t be able to tell me much but that that was hardly surprising, given the conversation had no significance for him whatsoever beyond the quirk of the coincidence that a contemporary from our Oxford days came up. What little he could tell me was enough though, once I’d asked him question after question and he’d drawn on the deepest reserves of his barrister’s memory for his answers.

He told me Cissy’s father had come back disappointed from the airport having gone there to meet her and her boyfriend. He’d been looking forward to seeing them, and he’d even texted her on his way and told her he’d met up with an old chum of hers from Oxford and he was sure that he could fix it that they could all get together at some point while she was in town. But when he got there the flight had already landed and they were nowhere to be seen, so he came
back
to the party and carried on drinking. So disappointed was he, Richard said, that he’d drunk a lot more than he should have done and became quite emotional about the whole thing. And when I stopped him then and asked about this boyfriend of Cissy’s, and whether he’d said anything about him, anything at all, Richard said oh yes, now he came to think of it, he’d said something about the boyfriend being English, and that he couldn’t remember for certain but that he might have said his name was Edward, or Ted, or Benjamin or something, yes, that was it, Ben, no no, wait. Benedict. Benedict Wilson or something. No, not Wilson, some kind of Italian sounding surname. But yes, he’d definitely said he was English.

And when I asked him whether the man had said anything about where the flight had been coming in from he said ‘Jesus, Alex, the man was drunk, we both were, and I was knackered. And I’m even more knackered now.’ But then he said, ‘Oh. Hang on, OK. I remember.’ And when I said ‘Well for god’s sake, Richard, where?’ he said Tucson, Arizona, and it was by way of this last detail that he confirmed for me that Cissy had been there on the night of Rachel’s murder, and that Anthony had been there with her.

I asked him why Cissy’s father had been quite so upset about them having cancelled on him and he said that that was where things had become slightly odd, and that he was sorry to say that the two of them really had got quite drunk and he wasn’t all that happy to go on the record with it, given what I was intending to do with the information, and why didn’t I bloody well ring him myself if I had so many questions and did I want the man’s number in Washington DC, which was where he’d gone back to? And then, straight away, he said he was sorry, he was tired, and that the man had said something about having been estranged from his daughter for years, and that she’d come back from Oxford in the nineties and dropped out completely, and that there might have been some drugs involved, and that the next thing she’d done was to take herself off to some kind of a commune in Arizona and do what Richard called ‘the whole healing thing’. She’d apparently refused to speak to her father for the entire time that she was there, blaming him for the fact that
things
had gone so badly wrong for her. Richard said he’d got the impression that the meeting at the airport had been one of many failed attempts at reconciliation, and her father had said he’d be trying again as soon as she decided to start speaking to him. And then he remembered, at the last, that the man had also said something about having been so cut up about the whole thing, and so worried about her being sucked in by some kind of a cult, that he’d had her trailed by a private detective while she was in Arizona. And that when the detective had told him some things about the English boyfriend she was hanging around with, things he wished he’d never known, he’d sent his daughter a letter telling her these things and begging her to come home but she’d written back saying that was the last straw and he should forget the idea of seeing her again, ever.

And then Richard said he really couldn’t tell me anything else, and that he was too tired to even think about where I was heading with it but that I should go to the police if that was what I wanted to do and let them take it from there. He told me to think things through very carefully, given who Cissy’s father was and what it would do to my career if I got it wrong. I said thank you, and I’d explain everything when I got there, and that of course I’d think things through, what the fuck else did he think I had been doing for every minute of every day since I’d got back from Oxford. Alright, he said, alright, and I asked him to apologise to Lucinda for me and he said he would, and not to worry too much about her. She was just like that these days, she’d get over it.

As soon as we’d finished speaking I got dressed and made a half-hearted attempt to mop up the bathwater that had spread across my bedroom, and then I stuffed all my papers and charts and timelines and diagrams and notes into a bag, along with a few things from the boxes that the police had returned, and I went downstairs and out on to the New North Road and caught a cab to Paddington.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with answers to all of the questions I’d be asked in Oxford when I got there, and nor would
I
be able to give them the name of Rachel’s killer, not for sure. But I felt fairly certain that what I could tell them would lead to their being able to solve the mystery of her death. And as the train pulled out of the station, I found a table to myself and did as Richard had felt it necessary to suggest I do, and I thought things through very carefully indeed.

I decided at the beginning of the journey that I would work still on the premise that Evie’s alibi would hold fast, and that despite this new information that had come to light about Cissy, and the impact I considered it to have on almost every aspect of Anthony’s story, I would assume also that Harry had told me the truth about his own involvement in the meeting he had persuaded Rachel to attend. I knew that the police would have to set those assumptions aside for the purposes of their investigation, and that they would in all likelihood start from scratch with both Evie and Harry, given the fact that they had lied so comprehensively in their statements. Where the police would be able to revisit both Evie’s alibi, and the whole of Harry’s version of events as he had described them to me, I could do no such thing. I turned my thoughts instead to Anthony and Cissy, being certain that they had been there, the two of them, and being almost certain also that they had met with Rachel beside the lake, and that this meeting had resulted in her death.