Trick of the Dark (11 page)

I was staggering down the corridor with a heavy cardboard carton when Louise emerged from her room. As we jockeyed to pass in the narrow corridor, our eyes met, and I felt for the first time the jolt and spark of instant attraction.

It was a moment of pure terror.

Somehow, I manoeuvred past Louise and stumbled into my own room. I virtually flung the box on the floor and collapsed on the bed, blood pounding in my ears. My senses were on overload. I could feel the weave of the bedspread beneath my fingers. I could see the coarse grains of dried plaster in the chips on the wall where drawing pins had gouged holes. I could smell dust and the cigarette butts in my ashtray and the bowl of orange-and-lemon potpourri that Corinna and her girls had brought round that morning as a 'welcome back' present after the Newsams' two-week package tour to Greece. And I could hear a voice in the room next to mine calling, 'Louise?'

I stumbled over to the window and pushed it open. At the next window, a middle-aged woman with wavy greying hair in a long bob leaned out, waving to the girl I had nearly collided with moments before. Louise looked up and saw us both at around the same moment her mother saw me. 'Hello!' Mrs Proctor greeted me cheerfully. 'Trying to get my daughter moved in!' Then she turned to look down again. `Louise, bring up the grey suitcase next, darling.'

Louise nodded and opened the boot of a red Volkswagen Golf. Her gleaming dark head disappeared momentarily, then she reappeared with the suitcase. I suddenly realised I must look a complete idiot and retreated inside. I crossed the room and closed my door. Then I sat down on the bed again, trying to work out what on earth was happening to me. I didn't like the obvious answer, so I tried to carry on as if nothing had happened.

Louise's reaction made that easier. Whatever had hit me, Louise acted as if she hadn't shared it, in spite of my conviction that the moment of pure electricity had been mutual. After that first encounter, Louise seemed to steer clear of me. If we passed unavoidably between our rooms and the bathrooms or stairs, she scowled and her eyes dropped.

It took a force of nature to change everything.

Back in those days the idea of students having en suite bathrooms was laughable. Each floor had its communal bathrooms, with separate shower and bath enclosures. Unknown to each other, Louise and I were taking baths in adjoining cubicles. Outside, a prodigious thunderstorm raged, the rumbles and claps so loud that the windows rattled in their frames. Jagged forks of lightning skittered across the skies like fear shooting down the tree of the central nervous system.Then one thunderclap pealed louder than the rest; a crack, a scream of wood struggling against itself and suddenly chunks of plaster were cascading from the ceiling.

I yelled something incoherent and jumped out of the bath. Instantly, I was covered in plaster dust that stuck to my wet body. Grabbing my dressing gown, I wrenched the cubicle door open just as the other door also flew back. Louise's long black hair hung in strings round her frightened face, everything streaked with the same dirt that was clinging to me. We both stood gaping at the door leading from the bathrooms to the corridor. There was a roof beam crossing it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Since the door opened inwards, we were trapped. I looked up. Through the mess that had been the roof and the ceiling, I could see the heavy bough of the massive copper beech that was no longer shading the lawn outside.

'Oh shit,' I said.

'That's a word,' Louise replied drily.

'Actually, it's two, but this probably isn't the time to be pedantic,' I said, desperate not to be outdone in the cool stakes.

It took the emergency services most of the night to get the door cleared. Once we'd established that the groans and creaks of stressed timbers weren't life-threatening, Louise and I huddled together against the outer wall and started to talk properly for the first time. By dawn, we knew there was something unprecedented between us. Neither would acknowledge what it was, but we knew it was there.

Once we were freed, we were hustled off by the college nurse in spite of our protestations that neither was suffering from anything more than a few cuts and bruises. After we'd been liberated and had given our soundbites to the media, we retreated to a greasy spoon up the Banbury Road. Over bacon, eggs, sausages and fried bread, I finally said, 'I've never felt like this before.'

'I'm scared,' Louise said. 'I don't know what we're supposed to do.'

I shrugged. 'What comes naturally?'

'Yes, but what exactly is that?'

'I don't know. Play it by ear?' I seemed to be incapable of getting beyond cliche but either Louise didn't notice or she didn't care.

Louise dipped sausage in her egg yolk. 'I thought I was so sophisticated when I came up to Oxford.' She looked up at me, her eyes appealing. 'But I don't know anything about anything really.'

'We'll work something out,' I promised. I was only six weeks older than Louise, but I was an academic year ahead of her. Somehow, that made me responsible for whatever came next. It was the most frightening prospect of my life. Suddenly, I had lost my appetite.

I watched Louise finish her breakfast, then we walked back to college arm in arm. It was a slightly daring gesture, but everyone knew about our adventure by then, so it wasn't hard to place an innocent construction on the action. Back in my room, we stood facing each other. Then, inch by tentative inch, our faces moved closer until our lips touched.

What I remember most was feeling like there had been an explosion of light inside my head. Looking into Louise's eyes, I saw my wonder mirrored. Right then, I felt invincible.

Unfortunately, as I was to learn the hard way, that was never a feeling that lasted for long.

13

C
harlie found it hard to believe how little Corinna had changed. She was still wearing the familiar heavy oval spectacle frames that might have been fashionable for fifteen minutes in 1963 in her native Canada, but hadn't had a single moment of glory since. Even now, her hair was pure 1960s: side parting, backcombed, flicked under her rather heavy jaw, the whole monstrous confection held in place with a layer of hair lacquer hard as shellac. It remained the same uniform dark tan of Cherry Blossom shoe polish. Charlie couldn't help wondering about the portraits in the attic. She smiled an uncertain greeting.

'Charlie. You came.' The same warm Transatlantic voice. Corinna reached out and put a hand on Charlie's arm.

'I said I would.' Charlie let herself be drawn into the hall. Unlike Corinna, it was not as she remembered it. The scuffs and grazes of four young children had gone, painted over and erased. An Afghan runner on sanded and polished boards replaced the worn chocolate brown carpet. And there were proper pictures on the walls, not the garish splodges of kids' artwork. 'Wow,' she said. 'This has changed.'

Corinna's laugh was the familiar cracked cackle. 'That's what happens when your kids grow up and your husband grows old. There's no obstacle to having the place the way you always wanted it.' She led the way down the stairs to the basement kitchen. 'This hasn't changed much, though.'

She was right. The kitchen still had the air of a room through which a mild tornado had passed. Clothes, books, sports equipment, magazines, newspapers and CDs were strewn haphazardly over the sofas and armchairs that lined half the room. The dark red range still had one cream door, because the Newsams were accustomed to taking what was going, especially if it meant saving money. Radio 4 muttered in the background.

'Only the book titles are different,' Corinna said. She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and waved at it. 'Coffee, yes?' She glanced up at the clock. 'We've not got as long as I hoped. Magda and Wheelie are coming for lunch. We can catch up on the small talk then.'

Small talk; my life to Corinna.
'Won't that be a bit awkward? Given why I'm here? Though of course, I'm still not entirely sure why I am here.'

Corinna gave her an odd look as she spooned coffee into a cafetiere. 'Well, I wasn't exactly expecting you to interrogate Magda over the chicken-and-ham pie. I'd given you credit for a little more subtlety than that.' Then, more briskly, 'Besides, they're used to former students dropping in. The place has always had open-house leanings.' She brought the pot to the table along with a pair of mugs. 'So, how much do you know about what's been happening to Magda?'

'I know she married Philip Carling last July. They'd known each other three or four years, depending on which newspaper you read. The wedding and the reception were held at Schollie's and late in the evening Philip Carling was found dead in the river by the punt station. He'd been beaten unconscious and stuffed under a punt. How am I doing?' Charlie was deliberately brutal, trying to provoke a reaction.

What she got was pretty much what she expected. 'Holy moly, Charlie. I see you never mastered the euphemism.'

'I prefer not to leave room for ambiguity. A few weeks later, Philip's business partners were arrested for his murder. They'd been using privileged information to make a killing on the stock market. Philip had found out and was planning to blow the whistle when he got back from his honeymoon. So they killed him. Magda found the key evidence that clinched the case against them. And this week they were both found guilty of his murder. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you sent me a package of newspaper clippings.'

Corinna stirred her coffee mechanically. 'You haven't lost the gift for precis.'

'But why am I here, Corinna? What in God's name is all this about? Why do you care about the convicted killers of your son-in-law?'

She stirred some more, then sighed. 'This is going to sound crazy. I thought about going to the police, but I knew they wouldn't take me seriously, not when they had such a good case against Paul and Joanna. This is why I wanted to talk to you and not some stranger in a private investigator's office. You know I'm not a crazy woman.'

Charlie gave a sad, wry smile. 'You don't have to be crazy to have the occasional crazy fixation, Corinna. It happens all the time.'

'Trust me, Charlie. This is not a crazy fixation. I am convinced that Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson did not kill Philip.'

Corinna clearly expected this to be a bombshell to Charlie, but she'd already worked out that she was going to hear something like that. 'The police got it wrong? The jury got it wrong?'

Corinna finally put her spoon down. 'It wouldn't be the first time.'

That was a well-aimed barb, and it stung. 'It happens less often than you think.'

'It nearly happened to Bill Hopton.' Corinna's voice was as level as her stare. 'I bet you wish it had.'

Charlie took a deep breath through her nose and counted to ten. She'd forgotten quite how challenging Corinna could be. 'No. I don't. I know it's not a popular position, but I still believe the legal system is worthless if we don't put truth at the heart of it.'

To her surprise, Corinna grinned. 'That's the Charlie I remember. That's why I wanted you on board.'

Charlie shook her head. 'A discredited expert waiting to be struck off? Nobody in their right mind would want me in their corner these days.'

Corinna flapped a hand impatiently. 'That'll sort itself out. You'll see. In the meantime, you're the person to get to the heart of this.'

'To the heart of what? Why are you so sure this is a miscarriage of justice?'

'Because I know who really killed Philip.'

Charlie knew this was the point where she should, like an investigative journalist in a massage parlour, make her excuses and leave. Knowing as she spoke that she was going to regret it, she said, 'Who?'

'The person who murdered my son-in-law was Jay Macallan Stewart.'

14

S
ometimes it seemed to Jay that the past was more immediate than the present. She could lose herself in making love with Magda, but when they lay together afterwards, Jay often found her thoughts drifting away from the moment, sifting through memory before settling on one particular episode. It wasn't just because she was delving into her past to make sure her memoir leapt off the page. It had always been like this. It was as if she was constantly re-examining the past in an attempt to cast it in a shape she found acceptable. Jay wanted to look back down the vista of the years and see an unbroken, consistent upward path. Sometimes that took more effort than others.

By the time Louise and I were discovering just what it was that lesbians did in bed, I was already committed to running for President of the Junior Common Room - the quaint term for the undergraduate student body of an Oxford college. It has always been one of those jobs that looks more impressive on a CV than it ever is in reality. But for me it was the next step in the reconstruction of insignificant Jennifer Stewart. Another measure of the distance I had travelled.

All it really involved at Schollie's in my day was making sure the other committee members did whatever they had been elected to do; meeting weekly with the college principal to thrash out any contentious issues and to drink the dry sherry I'd had to train myself to love; running college meetings and, depending on how Stalinist the holder of the office felt, altering the political and practical direction of life for the college's undergraduates. If, for example, one were so minded, one could persuade the JCR members to donate all their funds to the Society for Distressed Gentlewomen. Or some radical Marxist Central American guerrilla army. Depending on your point of view, it was either power without responsibility or responsibility without power.