Every Contact Leaves A Trace (5 page)

But as I get closer I see that she is not on her back looking up at the moon. She is positioned with her face down and her knees tucked underneath her and her arms flung out before her as if she is praying but her head seems to be pressed right into the ground so I start to run again and when I reach her I see in the half-light that her hair is spread about her and it looks wet and I fall to her and touch it and say Rachel Rachel and she says nothing and I lift up my hands in front of my face and there is something on them and I look at her again and I see that there is blood everywhere and she is covered in it, the whole of her back is covered in it and it is seeping still from her head and I shake her and I can’t breathe and I can’t say her name any more but then I can and I shout it over and over and I lean forward and down onto her and I hold her and she is very still and then I sit back and I am shaking, my whole body is shaking, and I slide one of my hands under her forehead and I lift up her head and I press my other hand down onto the back of it and I try to stop the blood but I can’t and that is how the porter finds me: I am kneeling on the ground holding her head in my hands.

4

I WAS RELEASED
from custody the following evening on the condition that I would return for a further interview in a fortnight’s time, and that I would inform the police if I was planning to leave the country. I know now that my release was delayed by the lack of security cameras around the lake. That, and the absence of the porter from his lodge when I decided to come out from the shadows of the library steps. Until Harry Gardner had been tracked down, the police had been unable to find anyone who had seen me leave. Nobody could confirm the time at which I had done so nor whether it was before, or after, the screaming. The camera trained on the inside of the college doors had caught Rachel and me making as if to leave after saying our goodbyes to Harry. In a slightly later frame we are seen kissing each other before she disappears in one direction and I move out of sight in the other. The porter had pinpointed the moment he heard the scream to exactly midnight, and I had no way of proving that I had been sitting on the library steps when I also heard it and began to run towards Rachel’s body. There would easily have been time, apparently, for me to have left my hiding place, as one of the policemen insisted on calling it, and run down to the lake to kill her, all before the porter found us under the tree.

After I was arrested, after I’d been checked in at the station and had everything taken from me, I was allowed to make a phone call. Godmother Evie wasn’t at home and when I tried her mobile it was switched off, so I decided to wait and try again the following morning. I lay on the bed in my cell wishing very much that Rachel was with me. I felt half certain she might be shown in at any moment, all apologies and explanations, telling me it was someone else’s blood that had stained the shirt the police had taken from me, that it was
someone
else’s head I had cradled in my hands, rather than her own. And I was sure that my being held there was little more than a formality, that there was no question of my being seriously considered a suspect for more than a few hours. When the duty lawyer had been to see me and we had discussed what I would and wouldn’t say in my interview, they told me I should try to get some sleep. There was no hurry, the police said, and there were things that had to be attended to before they spoke to me properly. Even with the brightness of the light from the corridor and the faces looking in on me every ten minutes, I managed eventually to do as they said: when they called me at eight and gave me something to eat, they told me I’d been asleep for hours.

I wasn’t especially troubled by the first interview, despite its length and the resigned manner in which the detectives were asking their questions, their conclusions obviously drawn before they entered the room and read out their caution again. Nor was I concerned by the youthfulness of the duty lawyer who sat beside me in a shiny suit, his face flushed from sleep and, presumably, excitement. I remembered enough from law school to know that the police were, in all likelihood, still only at the stage of gathering information, of collecting stories, and that mine would be one of many that was being told. It was clear that what they actually knew amounted to very little, and I was quite certain that in the hours to come, as the facts settled into some kind of order, something would emerge to make them question the assumptions they had made about me.

Throughout the whole experience of telling and retelling my tale, of sidestepping their tricks and their feints, I felt nothing but the coldness which had seeped into my chest and my stomach at the moment I’d first realised there was something odd about the position of Rachel’s body. I remember having a sense somehow, as we sat around the table talking into the tape recorder, that what was happening was not in fact happening. It was as though we were all pretending; as though we were playing a game and performing our roles and marking out time until someone opened the door to tell us we could stop, she had been found, it was over. In fact, looking
back
and thinking through the days I spent in Oxford after her death, my overriding memory is of feeling that I was elsewhere, or that elements of my cognitive functioning had been frozen, so that I couldn’t keep up with what was happening around me, and nor could I see or hear or understand it properly.

What seems to be happening now, particularly over the last few days and nights, is that my perspective is growing clearer. Something, or someone, is twisting the lens on the camera that is my memory, so that as the focus sharpens, questions are beginning to occur to me that did not then and should have done. I realise now that it wasn’t until the second interview that I began to feel uncomfortable, the one that took place in the late afternoon of the same day. It quickly became apparent that someone had provided me with an alibi, and that if I gave the right answers, I would be released for the time being. There were certain things about it that didn’t feel quite right, and something in the approach the police were taking that didn’t strike me as being entirely sensible. I can’t pretend that I was aware of anything more than a vague sense of unease or confusion. And perhaps that is what anyone would have felt in such a situation; I’m sure it’s possible that another man might even have felt it much sooner than I did. But the more I think about Rachel’s murder and the days that followed, what was then no more than a hazy sense of disquiet is growing into something more troublesome than that.

I was aware from the start of that second interview that there were stories circulating in the room which were not my own. I knew that these stories would already have been divided into parts and shared out between people all over the building who would have been busy all night and all day checking facts and calculating timings. I knew also that the college, shut down to the outside world from the moment the police had arrived, would have been full of people knocking on doors and asking questions, or moving slowly across the lawns on their hands and knees, or swimming across the bottom of the lake looking for something, anything. Whatever they had discovered, I realised, would have been woven together with whatever had been found in our hotel room and
whatever
had been taken from our apartment in London, and the stories flying around the room would have been made from all of these things. I was aware also that the men interviewing me were throwing their theories like fishing nets and testing my responses against them, and that in so doing, they were inviting me to incriminate myself. So I answered their questions as fully as I could, whilst trying to relate only the sequence of events that I intended to, despite what seemed like several attempts to persuade me I was mistaken in my recollection.

For my part, I received very few answers to the questions I asked in return. They said they couldn’t tell me who they’d spoken to during the night, or who they would be speaking to in the coming hours or days, or even if they had arrested anyone else. Nor would they tell me what had happened to Rachel’s body; where she had been taken or whether any part of her was injured apart from her head. I didn’t realise how badly I wanted to know these things until it became obvious that I wouldn’t find out, however I framed my enquiries. ‘I just want to know if there is somebody with her, that’s all,’ I said. ‘I just want to know where she is. Has she been left on her own? Did someone stay with her, through the night?’ I’ve learned since that as I lay in my cell waiting for my second interview, she was also lying in a small room, somewhere on the other side of the city, waiting on a gurney to be sliced into pieces and weighed and measured and photographed, and that parts of her had already been sent away in unmarked vans to be measured all over again.

Whilst they would say nothing directly, it was clear by the end of the afternoon, after they had gone away and discussed my answers and come back again, that their stance towards me had shifted. Only slightly, but enough for me to realise that they considered it likely, or at least possible, that by the end of my fortnight on bail I would become their chief witness rather than their prime suspect.

From what my lawyer was able to gather, and from what Harry himself told me the following morning, I discovered it was Harry I had to thank for my release. After he had said goodbye to Rachel and me the night before, we’d turned to let ourselves out of the
wicket
door. At the same time, or so we’d thought, he’d set off in the other direction to go back to his rooms. He’d told us he had to collect something, and that otherwise he’d have come with us and crossed over the road to catch a taxi to his house on the Woodstock Road, leaving us to walk back to our hotel on St Giles. However, instead of returning to his rooms immediately, he had changed his mind and, out of sight behind us, taken the steps up to the Old Library. It seems that Rachel had asked him a question over dinner that he hadn’t been able to answer, and that her obvious surprise at finding him without a response had irked him somewhat. Not being entirely insensitive to the assumptions he thought people were making as he approached his retirement, quite unfounded assumptions about his memory not being what it had once so famously been, he had wanted to look up the answer to her question straight away, thinking that he might write out his findings on a card and drop it into our hotel first thing in the morning so she could read it over breakfast. A poet, my lawyer told me. Something to do with a poet. I hadn’t heard the exchange Harry was referring to, the one in which Rachel had asked him a question he couldn’t answer, occupied as I was with the woman on my other side who spent the evening telling me about where I should go when I was next in New York, or what I should have seen when I’d been there last. Whatever Rachel’s question was, it had so perturbed Harry that by the time she had finished persuading me to wait for her while she went to look at the lake, he was already standing in front of one of the window tables in the library directly above me, the volume he needed lying open in his hands.

As Harry stood there puzzling out his answer and switching his gaze between the pages in front of him and the view of the quad from the library window, he saw two things. First, a woman who looked like Rachel, although he told the police that it hadn’t occurred to him at the time that the likeness was anything other than a coincidence, walked quickly down the steps from Hall and on along the path running in front of the cottages on the south side of the quad.

The last in this line of cottages, their grey and rose-clad exteriors little changed since the sixteenth century but for the chalked and
rechalked
boating ephemera etched above their doorways, was where Haddon had taught Richard and me every Friday afternoon. Our tutorials took place in his study on the ground floor and he lived in a small flat laid out above. It was in what he referred to as the drawing room of this flat that he hosted his welcome tea every year for newly arrived undergraduates; the tea that had been the occasion of my first meeting with Richard. French doors opened from the drawing room on to what everyone in College called the secret garden. Sitting as it did at the height of the first floor, this tiny garden was suspended on top of an arched passageway, the inside walls of which were lined with doors opening into a series of sheds where the gardeners stored their mowers and their tools, so that the only access to the garden was either from the drawing room or by way of a tiny set of steps built into the wall and running up from the flower bed beneath. The path that ran down the side of the quad passed in front of Haddon’s cottage, at which point one could choose either to turn to the right and continue walking around the quad, or sharply to the left, passing into the passageway that ran beneath the secret garden.

Harry, watching from the library window, saw the woman he’d thought looked like Rachel pass in front of Haddon’s cottage and duck left into the passageway. Had she turned right from the other end of it and continued walking, she would soon have found herself looking on the lake in the moonlight.

The second thing that Harry saw was the porter emerging from the alcove beneath the library. The man stood on the north terrace of the quad looking about himself, sniffing the air as if for a scent before glancing back up at the clock which sat on the wall immediately beneath where Harry was standing. This, Harry said, made him think of pulling his own watch from his pocket. It was 11.42 precisely. He turned back to his reading for a few moments. When he looked up again he saw the man disappearing into staircase number 6, exactly as he had described his route to the police. This would have taken him through to the orchards and down towards the student blocks at the northern end of the lake.

At what Harry notices is 11.55, he finds the answer to Rachel’s
question
about the poet and leaves the library. He passes me, sitting on the staircase with my head in my hands, and, hearing me snore, realises I have fallen asleep whilst, he presumes, waiting for Rachel to come back from wherever she has gone. Choosing not to disturb me, he leaves the alcove and follows in the porter’s footsteps, intending at last to collect whatever it was that he had left in his rooms on staircase number 5.