by Mel McGrath
‘Ms Smith is just leaving,’ Cullen says to Tina when she comes to the door.
Nevis rises from her chair, sensing that everything hangs on these last few moments. She had come seeking an explanation but that no longer seems necessary. What she is after now is proof. That’s what the Dean’s always taught her, isn’t it? Without proof you have nothing. She pulls out the phone from her pocket, and standing calmly, she says, ‘Just before Satnam Mann went to the bridge she texted someone. Whoever it was blocked their ID and called her back. They spoke for seven minutes and twenty-three seconds. More than long enough to have a conversation. I called that number back.’
Cullen lifts his hand, as if to stop her. His face is crumpled now and a peculiar, dead shade of pink.
‘Ms Smith is leaving. Please show her out.’ Alarmed by his tone, Tina hesitates. ‘Now!’ Cullen says. Her face stricken, Tina advances towards Nevis. Before Tina reaches her, Nevis has pulled out her phone and is tapping at the screen. She feels a hand on her elbow as Tina tries to lead her from the room.
‘Call student welfare,’ Cullen says. ‘The student is very unwell. She needs a psych evaluation. And cancel all my meetings.’
The phone on Cullen’s desk begins to buzz and spin.
Chapter 47
Cullen
After Nevis leaves, his heart tick-tocks like a clockwork toy that has been wound too tight, the breath pulsing and whirring. One minute he feels as though he might drown in his own air, the next that the air will all be squeezed from him. Sweat begins to bead on his forehead and his hands are shaking, his throat swollen and sore. He puts his elbows on the table to steady himself, dumps his head in his hands and takes a few deep breaths, attending to the rush of air, following it with his mind as it leads him out of the dark chaos of his firing neurones into the half-light of thoughts.
I am fucked, he thinks.
His mind goes back twenty years to the knock on the door and the voice crying, ‘Zoe, Zoe!’ to the flit from the bathroom window, the frantic run back to the flat and to his mother. He knew he was fucked then, too.
Pull yourself together and stay calm, he thinks. That was what Amanda said to him.
Easier said than done.
He takes a breath, opens the drawer of his desk and, taking out the quarter bottle of Bell’s, takes a swig. The whisky goes down like a pat on the back.
I can do this, he thinks. Stay calm and think straight.
He reaches for his phone, removes the SIM card and scopes about the room for some scissors. Not finding any, he goes through to Tina’s desk, locates a pair there and carefully stashes the cut pieces in his trouser pocket. You foolish man, he thinks, to be so easily outwitted. He has an urge to run but knows there is nowhere to run to. He is cornered. The only way to get out of this is going to be to show Nevis Smith his teeth the way he did Natasha Tillotson.
All is not lost, not yet.
He scribbles strict instructions not to be disturbed on a Post-it note and sticks it to Tina’s screen. He needs time to think straight, doesn’t want her returning from student welfare and asking questions.
Locking his office door behind him, he moves back to his desk and starts cooking up a plan. Time heaves and billows around him unregarded. He will no longer allow himself the luxury of being scattered and panicky. From now on his mind will be a laser beam.
Later, he has no idea how much later, a knock comes on the door. At first, he thinks the sound is coming from his head. Only Tina’s voice brings him to.
‘What is it?’ he says, more irritably than he’d intended.
‘There’s a phone call for you, professor.’
She never calls me professor, he thinks, distancing herself from me already, the coward. All my allies falling, one by one.
‘Did you not see the Post-it? No phone calls, no meetings.’
‘It’s Veronica and she won’t take no for an answer.’
‘All right, I’ll take it. Did you manage to get Ms Smith to go to student welfare?’
‘No but she promised to go home. She seemed to have calmed down a lot, she didn’t give any sign of being ill.’
He takes a deep inhalation. Nothing he can do about the girl now. At least she’s off campus. He swivels the screen back to its usual position and scrolls down Nevis’s student records to the appropriate text box and types in ‘Student made several appointments for welfare consults which she did not keep. Student welfare reached out but student was non-cooperative. Faculty confirmed that student had been underperforming and seemed depressed and anxious.’ Keane will welcome the intervention, he thinks, since it covers both their backs. In any case, he’ll square it with her later. He is about to close the file when his eye is drawn to a familiar name. Under next of kin. He peers and re-reads and peers again. The words grab hold of him like a sickness. That name. Can it be the same one? Frantically he taps out of the university database and searches for Nevis Smith’s social media feeds. Sparse; the girl evidently doesn’t use social much. He searches for images, and up pops a photograph of Nevis on the deck of a narrowboat with a broad grin on her face and a plant pot in her hand. Standing beside her also smiling is a familiar figure from his past. So he was not mistaken. He feels his shoulders tighten, his belly turning over. So it was Honor Smith he’d passed by in the street the other day. Not some ghost set free by his own dark impulses. A real-life woman, the mother of Nevis. He sits back and bites his lip, hears himself snort. So, Honor Smith, still out to get him, too cowardly to come forward herself, using her nineteen-year-old daughter to set him up, to exact her revenge. Well that explains everything.
They won’t be smiling when I’ve done with them.
The light on his desk phone blinks, and his mind zooms back into the present and Veronica. All the difficult, demanding women. He picks up.
A voice thunders, ‘What’s going on? I just tried your mobile but it’s saying the number is unavailable.’ He can’t decide whether she’s angry or afraid.
‘I dropped my device in the sink,’ he says in an emollient voice. He’ll get a new SIM card tomorrow.
‘You need to come home right now,’ Veronica says coldly.
‘If it’s that salesman again…’ he says, carefully.
‘No, not that. I’ll tell you when you get here.’
Moments later he is ducking in and out of traffic, his mind abuzz, gears raging, heading for the outer edge of Clifton and the Georgian house he cannot afford. He parks in the driveway and takes a nip of Dutch courage from the glove box. He’s pretty sure that if it was a problem with the pregnancy she’d be sounding hysterical. Instead her tone was at first anxious then coldly matter of fact. It’s either Amanda, he thinks, or something about the name change again. He waits for the whisky to settle his nerves then gets out of the car. The wind is blowing. As he strides towards the front door, he can feel clean air being sucked into him, the skin on his face taut and prickly with it. He raises a hand to his cheek and feels a warmth there that is not rain. From some distant place in his memory his mother’s voice says, Wipe those tears away and stop being such a baby. He brushes his cheek dry and strides towards the door which opens even as he puts a foot on the first step up. Veronica appears looking stony-faced. He moves in to kiss her cheek but she backs away. He knows then that the only way is forward, into whatever fate awaits.
‘You’d better come in and explain yourself.’ That chilly tone.
In the hallway he shakes the outside air from his coat and hangs it carefully on its usual peg, Veronica all the while standing before him, blocking his entrance into the kitchen, where they would usually do most of their talking. She has on one of her smart dresses, as if she has been to a meeting.
‘Let’s go into your study. You’ll see why in a minute,’ Veronica says.
Cullen hesitates. ‘Uh-oh, I’ve a feeling I’m going to need a glass of whisky,’ he says, doing his best to lighten the mood.
Veronica fixes him with a look of contempt.
Cullen feels himself rise to the bait and does his best to tamp his indignation. All my allies falling. Doesn’t a man have a right to expect his wife to be on his side? His head is pounding.
She turns and walks through the study door, the as-yet modest convexity of her belly catching the fabric of her dress.
‘Take a seat,’ she says, gesturing to the grey sofa where Cullen likes to catnap when he should be marking papers. He sits, expecting Veronica to follow suit. Instead, she walks around his desk and takes a seat in the leather chair as if this were a police interview and he the suspect.
‘If it’s about the man in the driveway, I’ve sorted it. He won’t be bothering you again,’ he says, doing his best to sound confident and alpha.
‘I told you on the phone, it isn’t,’ she says, leaning her arms on the desk and interweaving her fingers.
‘Whatever it’s about, I’m sorry. I apologise. Things have been rather difficult at work lately.’ Her expression brings him to a grinding halt. It’s not going to matter what he says. His eyes light on her perfectly polished fingernails. His stomach drops. ‘Why are you dressed like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘As though you’ve been to a business meeting.’
She compresses her lips and closes her eyes. ‘This isn’t the order I wanted to do things in, but if you must know, I went to see a solicitor.’
‘Why on earth…?’ He feels himself lurch back in shock. What is this all about? He has a sudden urge to stop the clock, get back in the car and just drive.
‘Please Veronica, I don’t want to lose you,’ he says. He needs her now, his last ally. ‘Whatever it is, I’ll change, I’ll be different.’
She meets his eye with a thunderous look. ‘I found something. You’d hidden it rather well which is why, I suppose, I didn’t see it before. But the solicitor advised me to gather information. So that’s what I did. Helps that you’re a little careless about where you hide your keys, Christopher. The envelope is still in the drawer. I couldn’t bear to leave it out.’ She draws out a large manila envelope and pushes it across the polished surface towards him.
Cullen screws his eyes so tight that he’s seeing white spots. He knows what this is, but he does not want to know. His whole life hangs from a spider’s silk. The spider is hiding out somewhere, waiting for him to weaken. His only defence now is to stall for time and act as though he were the wronged party. His eyes spring open. ‘Wait,’ he says, swallowing hard and doing his best to bring out a commanding tone, ‘what were you doing rooting through my things?’
‘What was I doing?’ Veronica says in an unbelieving tone. ‘What’s this?’ She holds up a tiny, scraggy piece of newsprint, something he didn’t recall having kept, but immediately recognises.
‘It was a long time ago,’ he says.
‘Rape?’
‘No, no, Veronica. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’
She reads, ‘Boy questioned by police in alleged rape case is mathematics prodigy Christopher Mulholland.’
‘That was a malicious allegation. Entirely without foundation, which is why it never went any further. I was never charged or even cautioned. God, you can’t hold that against me. I was fifteen.’
‘Is that why you changed your name?’
‘Years afterwards yes. Those allegations tailed me for years, made my life a misery and sullied my name even though I was entirely innocent.’
‘I found this, too.’ A flash drive dangles on its lanyard between them. ‘Evidently, not all your secrets are ancient history.’
It hits him with a terrible gut punch. There is a moment’s pause. Cullen feels as if a team of contractors is digging out a basement in his head. There is banging and noise and dust everywhere. Rising to his feet, he sidles over to the table, snatches up the drive and returns to the sofa.
‘I can’t believe you actually went through all my flash drives,’ he says, weakly.
‘There are more? Tell me, were these designed to humiliate me or to humiliate this girl, or both of us?’
‘You’re not going to believe this…’
‘You’re probably right about that.’ She is staring at him with one eyebrow raised. He has never, until now, quite appreciated just how formidable his wife can be. ‘I recognised her face from that undergraduate Christmas party you gave for the department. Though I had to look twice. Remarkable resemblance to Madeleine Ince. She’s like a very young, Asian, version of her, which I suppose was part of the attraction.’
He takes a deep breath. ‘Her name is Satnam Mann.’
‘Oh, the girl in hospital in a coma. Well, that puts a spin on things, doesn’t it?’
‘Listen, Veronica,’ he says, doing his best to sound authoritative still. ‘I didn’t go anywhere near Satnam Mann. She’s a scam artist. I go to the office one morning and this is in my pigeonhole, some lame attempt to blackmail me,’ he says adding, ‘She’s not even my type.’ This last he recognises is probably a step too far.
‘You’re a terrible liar, Christopher. I realise now that I only believed so much of what you told me because I was overprotected and naïve.’
‘I swear on my mother’s life,’ he says. ‘The girl took those pictures herself. She was threatening to post them to you unless I gave her better grades. Obviously unhinged, or she wouldn’t have tried to off herself.’ He stands and goes towards her with his arms outstretched in a beseeching gesture but she flaps him away.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to take the risk that you’d believe her. Some of these girls are terribly messed up. They want attention. I think they sometimes believe their own lies.’
Veronica is perched on the edge of the desk with her fingers pressed to her mouth, listening, assessing whether or not to believe him.
‘Honestly, Veronica, it’s been awful.’
She looks up and catches his eye then shakes her head sadly. ‘It’s perfectly obvious from the angles that she couldn’t have taken those pictures herself.’
‘So someone else took them, an ex-boyfriend, whoever, I don’t know. I swear I’ve never had anything to do with her in that way. She’s a mixed-up kid. Avon is full of them.’
Veronica heaves a deep sigh. ‘Perhaps you could help me to understand why she would try to kill herself if she was at the same time blackmailing you?’
Cullen shrugs.
‘I’m also struggling to comprehend why one of the images features your brogues and your blue Liberty print tie, the one I gave you a couple of Christmases ago, on the carpet in the background.’ She continues to stare at him. ‘I’ve made copies, in case you’re wondering. They’re with my solicitor.’
‘Solicitor?’
‘Yes, someone Daddy’s used. He’s the best apparently.’
‘The best at what?’ Cullen says, horrified. He feels as if he’s sliding down the slippery bank towards rushing rapids, the spray already stinging his face.
‘Divorce.’
‘You didn’t think to talk this over first?’ he says. ‘Please, Veronica, we have so much to lose here.’
‘I’ve decided Bump and I will be better off by ourselves. I don’t know what’s been going on, Christopher, and I really don’t want to know. The doctor said I shouldn’t be having any stress at all. No strange men on the driveway or a husband turning up drunk or leaving the house in the middle of a dinner party, no name changes and certainly not this.’ She raps on the envelope. ‘I’m going to go back to Mummy and Daddy for a while. Until things are resolved.’
‘Things?’
She leans back and, crossing her arms, says, ‘Let’s have a civilised conversation about next steps, shall we? I suggest we start with you telling me exactly who it is I am divorcing, Christopher Cullen or Christopher Mulholland? Or perhaps there are other Christophers I don’t yet know anything about?’
Chapter 48
Nevis
She waits for Luke at the far side of the campus by the bike store. Her phone chimes.
Honor. She picks up.
‘I got your message. Is everything OK with Satnam?’
‘They’re going to put her under again.’ She thinks about what she knows. ‘They say she’s out of danger but I’m not so sure about that.’
A herring gull lands on the rails beside the bike store. Her mother says, ‘Nevis, are you OK?’
‘Yup, fine.’ Why does Honor do this? All the fussing, making Nevis feel that she’s not trusted to take care of her own business. ‘By the way,’ she says, deflecting, ‘you are aware that the stove on the boat needs looking at, aren’t you?’ The metal has separated from the plyboard underneath the heat shield. A moderate fire hazard.
‘It’s on my to-do list.’ Her mother sounds anxious and distracted. She’s been that way ever since she went with Alex to see a guy about some work, preoccupied by something she doesn’t want Nevis to know. ‘I’m concerned about you,’ she says now.
‘I’m not a kid.’ She is tempted to say, I am not your kid, but stops herself. Things have actually been a bit better between them since she moved onto the boat.
‘I know, I know. I was just thinking, that location finder you told me about? The one on your phone that lets someone else know where you are? I’d feel better if you’d turn it on, just while all this is going on.’
‘Really?’ She does her best to quell her exasperation. Honor has always been a worrier. Still, better that, she supposes, than a mother who doesn’t care. She spots Luke approaching from the student union. No time to debate her mother now.
‘I’ve got to go. I’ll turn on location finder. For now. For you.’
They finish up the call.
‘What’s so urgent?’ Luke says, a cigarette bobbing between his lips.
‘I went to see Satnam.’
She watches him freeze. He blinks as if pushing back tears.
‘She’s breathing on her own. It looked as if she might wake, but they’re saying she might not be ready yet and they’re talking about putting her back under.’
‘I went to the uni chapel, on the Monday after what happened on the bridge. I’ve never been in there before. I don’t even know if I believe in God. I just wanted someone to talk to.’
