Every Contact Leaves A Trace (51 page)

It was clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to work out precisely what their respective roles might have been on the night of the murder, and that I wouldn’t be able to answer the question of whether Cissy had run up the side of the quad with her hood pulled tight about her face as the piece’s primary villain, or merely as an accomplice in Anthony’s grand plan. Nor, I realised, would I be able to say with any certainty whatsoever whether the crime they had committed that night was premeditated. I was aware, of course, that it was entirely possible they’d gone to the lake in search of the apology that Anthony said he had so badly needed, and that Cissy had wanted one just as much as he had. And I could see how, in the circumstances and in light of the considerable tension that would have surrounded such a meeting, something could easily have gone
wrong
, and that Rachel might have said something that could have provoked either one of them into attacking her.

I couldn’t think of any concrete suggestions to put to the police as to when it was that Anthony and Cissy had met one another again after they’d both left Oxford; whether perhaps Anthony had moved to Arizona and found Cissy there by chance, bumping into her in a Tucson bar one night, or whether they might even have kept in touch ever since the night of the Casablanca Ball, so that it was because she was living in Tucson that he’d moved there in the first place, theirs being a friendship that was only disrupted, rather than broken, by the events of that summer term. Either of these things seemed possible, now I knew that the tale Anthony had told Harry was a tapestry woven from half-truths, picked clean of any thread by which she might be glimpsed.

My thoughts came next to the question of Cissy’s name, and the fact that Richard was so certain her father had called her something else, which tied in with my being unable to find any trace of her online. Whilst I thought it more than likely that of all the questions the police would face, this would be the easiest to answer, and that it would take no more than a phone call to her father to do so, it bothered me to think that I didn’t know. I wondered if she’d had another name at Worcester, a nickname I should have been able to remember, but I couldn’t recall one, and I decided instead that unless she’d simply changed her name altogether and the one she used now had no connection whatsoever to her past, the most obvious explanation was that the name ‘Cissy’ itself had been the nickname, being short for Cecilia, or Alice, or something, and that on leaving Worcester she had reverted to the use of that name, whatever it might be.

I laid out my notes of Harry’s story across the train table in front of me, as well as my charts and my diagrams, and I looked at them again, wondering what it was that Cissy would turn out to have been doing since she left Oxford, and what would be discovered, eventually, about how her life tied in with Anthony’s. Having read all of these things a couple of times, my mind was flooded with
such
a multiplicity of options that I was unable to process them in any measured way and turned my thoughts instead to whether I was able to draw any conclusions as to what her motives could have been for killing Rachel, intentionally or otherwise, or, if she’d acted only as Anthony’s accomplice, for having condoned what he had done. And if, on the other hand, they had each of them gone to the lake in search of an apology, only for things to go horribly wrong, then why, I wondered further, would she have felt such a need in the first place to have held Rachel to account in that way?

What Richard had told me about Cissy’s father hiring a private detective to trail his own daughter reminded me of the story she’d told Towneley about how she’d got her scar, and I thought then about the two of them, alone together for weeks on the ocean, her wound becoming infected under her bandages, and I wondered what kind of a man he was. And then I remembered her dressing up for him when he came to visit her in Oxford, and how she’d taken him everywhere with her that week, even to her lectures, and how I had read his presence there as a manifestation of the pride he took in his daughter’s achievements, and the affection that he felt for her. And I tried to imagine how he might have reacted when she came home from Oxford that June and told him she wouldn’t be going back. It made perfect sense to me that she should bear a grudge against Rachel that was equal to the one Anthony had carried with him for so much of his life. Cissy also had lost her degree that Midsummer Night when she had walked out of Haddon’s room and caught the plane home to the US, going back to this father who she’d said would kill her if he found out she’d been involved in the writing of the letters, and she also had lost a future that might otherwise have been hers. But still I couldn’t quite see how this, without more, would have made her able to lay claim to the same strength of motive as Anthony had had, given the nature of his obsession with Rachel and the strength of his feelings for her.

I began then to look again at what I had brought with me from the boxes of Rachel’s things and as I did so, moving them about on the table in front of me, something Evie had said when we last
spoke
came back to me. I’d barely registered it at the time, it striking me only as a throwaway comment, and one buried in amongst others of the sort I’d come to block out, so derogatory were they about Rachel, and so obviously expressions of the fanciful notions Evie entertained about her on account of the jealousy she still so clearly felt towards her. She’d said something fairly nasty about my being mistaken if I thought my wife had been some kind of a saint, and didn’t I realise that she was, in fact, only capable of thinking of herself, and that she’d hurt plenty of people in her time. And that was when she’d said it: ‘That poor little American girl was actually in love with her, Alex, you do know that don’t you?’ and I’d said nothing in reply.

Of course, I had always known that Rachel and Cissy had shared some physical intimacy; I’d seen them kiss one another on the night of the Ball, on stage in Rick’s Bar. But apart from that moment, which was after all part of the cabaret, I had only rumours to go on, and largely those I’d picked up from Richard, via Towneley, about the so-called weekend parties Rachel might or might not have given at the Chelsea house. And then there were the scenes that had been described with varying degrees of specificity by Harry and Evie in their piecemeal retellings of what had only ever been Anthony’s version of the ‘lost afternoons’ that the three of them had apparently spent together. I thought again about what Evie had said, and then, my thoughts returning to Towneley carrying Rachel across the lawns and taking her to hospital, I thought again about Rachel and Cissy on stage in Rick’s Bar that night, and other images began to come into my mind. It was when I recalled their presence in the black and white photograph that hung on Harry’s wall, Cissy’s arm draped lazily across Rachel’s shoulders, that I began to look with more urgency through the things I had brought from the boxes the police had returned, and I found the envelope I’d grabbed before running out of the apartment, stuffing it full of as many photos as I could fit in it. I searched among them thinking I might have forgotten it, but there it was all of a sudden, the picture of Rachel standing on the deck of a boat in Turkey, the photo she had cut in two before reconsidering and taping it back together again and keeping it
locked
away in her desk. And it was only as I sat on the train yesterday and looked more closely at the woman who stood beside her, her head resting on Rachel’s shoulder and her arms wrapped around her waist, that I recognised Cissy smiling out at me from underneath her sun hat. As I began to think that there might, after all, have been more to this relationship than I had realised, I put the photograph down and took up instead the love letter, the one the police had brought to me twice in London and asked me to help them with.

It is only a copy that I have, and I recall as I look at it again that the original had been written on airmail paper, and that there had been neither an envelope bearing a postmark, nor a date, an address, or a signature. But I find when I read it this time that I need none of those things to see, clearly, that it could only have been written by Cissy.

We spoke of love once, you and I, when we fell on the grass and held each other. And I really thought you meant it when you told me that you cared for me
.

I found out last night just how wrong I was
.

Like I said, I’ll never forget you, whatever happens, and I don’t think you’ll forget me either, not for a long time anyway. You might think now that you will one day, but this much I know for sure: you won’t be able to, however hard you try
.

So long then. I’m going this afternoon and I won’t be coming back. I guess that’s the way you wanted it
.

The clues in the letter are slight, and will take some explaining to the police, but there is enough for me to be quite certain of its authorship. It is by her use of language that she reveals herself to me, and these glimpses of her that I catch in the text are visible to my eye only because of the particular attention which Harry, in the telling of his tale, paid to words, and the ways people use them. ‘
Whatever happens
’ is the phrase that gives me my first hint of Cissy’s voice, and as I hear her say it I picture her on one of the earliest of those lost afternoons, making the other two repeat it back to her again and again, this boy-scout mantra with which they sealed their membership of their secret clique.

‘
Like I said
’ is what she breathes to me next, her voice lifting from the page just loudly enough for me to hear it above the hum of the train as it hurtles, and I remember Harry having told me that Rachel said these words to him in the hospital, on the night of the Casablanca Ball. He said then that he had been struck by her use of the phrase, recalling it to have been a favourite of Cissy’s and observing that Rachel’s reproduction of it had indicated to him how close the two of them must have been to have absorbed one another’s language in this way. And then I hear Cissy saying it also, her voice echoing to me from across the years in the hour or so after she’d been found behind the Pavilion fighting with Anthony, Rachel having informed Haddon of their presence there. I picture again the scene that took place in the aftermath, and I can almost sense the anger with which Cissy used this phrase that night in Haddon’s drawing room when she realised it was all over for her. I remember Harry describing her response to the last of Haddon’s threats: ‘Like I said, you’re a jerk,’ she’d said, before carrying on, in her American way, ‘So long then,’ and walking out of his cottage. And then I recall Harry telling me that Haddon had found a letter from her in his pigeonhole the next morning informing him that she was leaving Oxford and wouldn’t be coming back, and as I read again the last two sentences of Cissy’s letter, ‘
So long then. I’m going this afternoon and I won’t be coming back. I guess that’s the way you wanted it
’, I realise that she would have written this letter on the same morning that she’d written to Haddon, leaving it in Rachel’s pigeonhole and going from Oxford for good.

As the fields shot by and the train neared Oxford, I read the whole of the letter one more time, using a wider lens and going back over the opening once or twice:

We spoke of love once, you and I, when we fell on the grass and held each other. And I really thought you meant it when you told me that you cared for me
.

I found out last night just how wrong I was
.

I thought about what Cissy’s experience might have been of the events she referred to as having taken place ‘
last night
’, and I remembered Harry’s description of what she’d said to Rachel, and then to Anthony, behind the Pavilion, and the way she and Anthony had fought that night. I turned over this idea of her having been in love with Rachel, really in love, as I had been, and I wondered whether she might have come to hate her enough to have killed her, or to have been an accomplice to her murder, such was the intensity of her passion, and such was the pain she felt, perceiving herself to have been rejected, or wronged, by this woman she had loved, this woman who she thought had loved her back.

I closed my eyes and I saw Anthony hit Cissy to the ground and climb on top of her, and I saw Cissy struggle and bite Anthony’s hand and I saw her use the only opportunity that was afforded to her for speech by crying out Rachel’s name, and I saw Rachel, standing there watching Cissy being assaulted and calling out her name, and I saw her smile and say through her tears, ‘Go for it Ciss. It’s only a fuck after all, isn’t that what you said?’ And I saw what Cissy would have seen from where she lay, Anthony’s hand clamped back over her mouth again: I saw Rachel walking from the clearing and leaving Cissy to her fate, and I felt what Cissy would have felt then, on realising she had been abandoned by her lover.

For my own part, that was enough. Of course I didn’t know whether Cissy had actually been in love with Rachel as much as it seemed she might have been, and nor did I have any sense whether Rachel had ever loved her back, remembering only the awkwardness with which Rachel had responded to my questions in the summer about whether she had kept in touch with Cissy at all since she had left Worcester, and how strange it seemed to me at the time that she had broken off contact altogether in the way that she had. What I did know though was that their relationship had been an unusually intense one, and that there had been anger there in Cissy, and that if what her father had told Richard was true, it was an anger from which she hadn’t yet found release. It seemed quite possible to me, therefore, that she might be someone who was still likely, so many
years
later, to have been able to give that anger a voice only through violence, whether intentionally or otherwise.