Saturday
Charlie hadn't planned to revisit St Scholastika's, but to get to the Newsams' house from the guest house she'd booked herself into meant passing the college gates. And she couldn't resist her old haunts. Some people, she knew, never quite cut the umbilical cord with their Oxford colleges, continually returning for whatever excuse they could come up with — a lecture, a guest dinner, a gaudy — but she had never been one of them. She'd mostly loved her time at Schollie's, but she'd been ready for the less cosseted world outside. The only time she'd been back had been for her ten-year gaudy, an event that had depressed her beyond words.
Returning to Schollie's then had been strange. Almost schizophrenic. Charlie had felt like her real-time self-a successful professional whose opinions were sought and respected by her peers, a woman who had made the transition from infatuations to love, someone at home in her own skin — and, simultaneously, like that awkward creature on the cusp of adolescence and adulthood, hiding uncertainty behind arrogance, desperately trying to figure out the shape of her future. Encountering people who knew only what she had been rather than what she had become had been a disorienting experience. She'd felt like a shape-shifter by the end of the evening, glad to escape to the Spartan college room with its grimly single bed. It had not been an experience that filled her with a desire to repeat it.
So wandering round her old stamping grounds hadn't been on Charlie's agenda. For most of the three-hour drive from Manchester to Oxford, she'd alternated between a fantasy that involved Lisa Kent and not much sleep, and castigating herself for even allowing the thought to cross her mind. What she couldn't deny was that she'd put herself in temptation's way.
As soon as she'd manoeuvred herself into a trip to Oxford without Maria, Charlie had texted Lisa. Am in Oxford Friday/ Saturday, possibly Sunday. Get together? Lisa had simply texted back, Will email l8r, leaving Charlie in a ferment of impatience. The email, when it arrived, was a disappointment. But Charlie had to acknowledge that in her present frame of mind, almost any response would have been. According to Lisa, most of her weekend was regrettably spoken for: training sessions with those chosen to spread the Negotiating Vulnerability gospel to the people, meetings with conference organisers and a couple of one-to-one sessions with individual therapy clients. Charlie wondered if booking one of those sessions was the only way she'd ever get some face time with Lisa.
Then, hot on the heels of the disappointing message came a second. Charlie wondered if it was game-playing, but she didn't much care. At least she was playing with an equal. Now, Lisa was offering to meet her for a late drink on Friday evening. I should be free by nine thirty, ten at the very latest. Why don't we meet at the Gardener's Arms? Near where you're staying, right?
And so Charlie had arrived at the pub just after eight, setting up base camp with a view of the door in a bar that felt like a living room. She'd ordered a Thai curry from the vegetarian menu and made it last. She was on her third glass of wine by nine thirty, fighting the desire to knock it back and calm the clench of nervous anticipation that had her in its grip. Lisa would soon be sitting opposite her, the air crackling with the tension between them. Irresistible, that's what it would be, Charlie told herself. The guest-house bed would remain empty; they'd go back to Lisa's house in Iffley village. What would happen beyond the sleepless night and the dazed morning, Charlie had no idea. But it would cut through her life like a knife blade. The two parts would fall apart like a split fruit.
The hubbub of a Friday-evening pub seemed to rise round Charlie as time trickled past. The voices echoed in her ears, the laughter felt like an assault. Quarter to ten and no Lisa. She checked her phone every minute, but nothing appeared on the message screen. By ten, Charlie had started to feel sick. Her hands were clammy, her skin flushed and sweaty. She had to fight the urge to push through the crowd and into the fresh air. When the phone finally vibrated with a message at ten past ten, Charlie's whole body jerked.
So, so, sorry, everything running l8. Nothing 2 b done. Talk 2moro. Lx She read the words and felt the bile rising. She barely made it to the narrow street outside, vomiting her drink and dinner in the gutter between two tightly parked cars. Shaking and sweating, she leaned against the wall and swore at herself. Why had she let herself be sucked into this emotional game? With Lisa, everything was ambiguity. Was her message genuine? Had she got cold feet over embarking on an affair with a married woman? Was she playing the game for the hell of it? Or was it all on the level and Charlie just torturing herself out of guilt?
Back at the guest house, Charlie had lain awake, self-pity and self-disgust taking turns to beat her up. Then remorse had kicked in, making sleep impossible. Somewhere around one, she'd given up and gone online, reading everything she could find about the murder of Philip Carling. At least she would be prepared for her meeting with Corinna. Just like a tutorial. Old habits died hard.
By three, she was yawning. Before she signed off, she did a quick search on Jay Macallan Stewart, to remind herself of the headline public information. Wikipedia gave her a reasonable overview. After Oxford, Jay had used the economics element of her degree to take up a research post with a social policy think-tank. Within two years, she'd figured out where the world was heading and left to set up her own dotcom business buying up excess airline seats and self-catering holiday accommodation at rock-bottom prices and selling the resulting tailored packages on at a profit. Doitnow.com had been one of the runaway successes of the first online boom and Jay had had the wit to sell the business before the bubble burst. She'd spent a couple of years travelling, mostly under the radar, sending despatches home to various newspapers and magazines.
Her next venture had taken advantage of the second wave of internet business. With the explosion in short-break travel, what the world needed was a series of travel guides, constantly updated, available online and tweaked for the consumer's personal interests. And so the 24/7 brand was born. Available by subscription only, Jay's company boasted that there wasn't a major city in the world to which they couldn't produce a personally designed guide. Charlie herself was a subscriber, cheerfully handing over her PS4.99 a month so she was never at a loss when travelling.
All of this had built Jay a reputation in the business world. Economics editors knew who Jay Macallan Stewart was. But what broke her out into the wider public consciousness had been a shameless leap on to the bandwagon of misery memoirs. Jay's upbringing had not followed the usual pattern. Her mother had been a hippie and a junkie. For the first nine years of her life, Jay had run as wild as it was possible to run. Then her mother had undergone a dramatic conversion to one of the more restrictive versions of Christianity and married one of the most repressive men in the North East of England. It had been, to quote Jay herself, 'like running headlong into a brick wall'. Factor into the equation Jay's gradual realisation that her burgeoning sexuality would make her even more of an outcast, and it was a recipe for precisely the kind of misery that sold in the millions. Charlie had no idea how truthful Unrepentant had been, but nobody had come out of the woodwork to contradict it, so nothing had interfered with the momentum that took it to the top of the bestseller lists.
And that was where the online story ended. There was nothing about Jay's personal life beyond the fact of her homosexuality. She was somebody whose name people knew without her actually falling into the dubious category of a celebrity. Charlie had to admit Jay had handled it impeccably. Somehow, she'd managed to airbrush the awkwardnesses out of history.
For there were awkwardnesses. Even Charlie knew that. She'd fallen asleep with an image of Jay Macallan Stewart in the front of her mind. Not Jay as she was now, but Jay as she had been when Charlie had first clapped eyes on her. Tall, rangy inside a baggy fisherman's sweater, hair a mane of chaotic dark curls, all wreathed in the blue smoke of a French cigarette. She'd made Charlie, two years her senior, feel gauche and adolescent. Even then, even though she had no valid reason for her instinct, she'd understood there was someth
ing dangerous about Jay Stewart.
Charlie had slept more soundly than she'd expected or deserved, and woke feeling groggy with barely enough time to shower and make it to breakfast. That left her with more than an hour to kill before she was due to meet Corinna. A wander through the gardens and the river meadow of Schollie's on a bright spring morning would at least have the advantage of dragging her down memory lane rather than through the tortured back alleys of what Lisa Kent was doing to her head. More importantly, it would give her a clear picture of the scene of Philip Carling's murder. She didn't imagine the college grounds would have changed much since she'd been an undergraduate. Oxford prided itself on its adherence to tradition, after all. But there would be differences, even if they were only subtle ones. If — and at this point it was a very big if — she was going to take a look at Corinna's supposed miscarriage of justice, she needed to treat it exactly as she would any other case and leave aside any preconceptions. And although she was a detective of the interior state, it never hurt to have a first-hand image of the scene of the crime.
Back when Charlie had been an undergraduate, Schollie's had still been a women's college, one of the last singlesex establishments. Along with St Hilda's, they'd resisted the pull towards admitting men, staunch in the belief that a collegiate university like Oxford should be able to offer a full range of choice to its students. They'd finally, ironically, been forced to give up their stand by the brutal economics of gender equality legislation. So now Schollie's was, like every other college in the university, open to both men and women. Unlike the former men's colleges, its buildings lacked beauty or distinction and, although the grounds were extensive and attractive, the college held no particular attraction for tourists. So there was no admission fee, no scrutiny of ID to establish whether a visitor was entitled to enter. Anybody, it seemed, could wander at will round the gardens and river meadow of St Scholastika's College.
Term had just ended so suitcases and blue IKEA bags were being hauled to cars while parents hovered and undergraduates tried to look cheerful about going home. Some who were paying to stay on for an extra week's residence lounged on benches, smug and still liberated from the old lives that lay in waiting to reclaim them. Charlie slipped through the porter's lodge and across the parking area outside Magnusson Hall to the part of the garden where the wedding reception had taken place. It was about the size of a football pitch, perfectly manicured lawn surrounded by a gravel path then herbaceous borders that looked bedraggled and unpromising in March. But back in July, when Magda and Philip had married, Charlie knew they would have been a luxuriant riot of flowers and greenery of every shade. In the middle of the lawn was a pair of cedars of Lebanon, taller and broader than Charlie remembered. On the far side of the grass was a bench where Charlie had often spent summer mornings reading or just staring, trying to get her head round her next tutorial as the fat brown river flowed sluggishly past.
Charlie crossed the grass, trying to conjure up the summer wedding that had ended so violently. There would have been a marquee, perhaps two. Tables on the grass. A band, a dance floor. People everywhere, shifting patterns of conversation, dancing. Hard to keep track of anyone's movements. Even the bride and groom.
The other thing about weddings in college was that there was no effective security. Just as anyone could walk in and out of college, so it was with private functions. Especially open-air events. There was no effective way to make them secure, not when there were other people on the site who had legitimate access to the buildings around the lawn. The side door of Magnusson Hall would have been open so guests could have access to the toilets. So anyone inside Magnusson could have walked straight out and joined the party as if they had a right to be there. Other buildings flanked the garden — the Chapter House, a small building that contained only seminar and tutorial rooms, and Riverside Lodge, another residential building. Charlie wondered whether the Chapter House was locked up on a Saturday. In her day, it would have been.
She came to her old bench and turned round to look up at Magnusson Hall. The Victorian building had once been an insane asylum, a source of much sardonic wit among students. In spite of that, it was decently proportioned, its yellow and red brick decoratively arranged. According to the court reports that Charlie had read, Magda had been in her mother's room when she'd seen Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson slip away from the party. They'd disappeared round the bottom end of Riverside Lodge, between the building and the river, a route that led only to the landing stage where Philip's body had later been found. 'Unless the fire door from Riverside was open,' Charlie said softly.
She walked over to the corner of Riverside and stared back at Magnusson, trying to remember which room was Corinna's. It had a bay window, she recalled. On the second floor. There were only two possibilities, and both had a line of sight to where she stood. So, nothing wrong with what Magda said she'd seen, from a feasibility point of view.
Charlie turned away and walked the narrow flagged path between Riverside and the water. Tall iron railings topped the knee-high wall to keep the students from falling into the river. On her left, the gable end of Riverside rose, a sheer grey brick cliff punctuated by the square windows that had been fashionable in the 1970s when the building had been built. Halfway along was the fire door, a double square of glass with a deep band of black metal across the middle. In Charlie's day, the building had always been so stuffy in summer that the door was propped open more often than not. She wondered whether that was still the case. Everyone was more security-conscious these days. But if the people Charlie taught were anything to go by, students still liked to think of themselves as indestructible. They'd weigh the danger against the unbearable mugginess in the building and open the door. She'd put money on it.
At the end of the building, the path opened out on to a gently sloping concrete slipway. Beyond that was the sturdy wooden jetty where the punts were chained up. It was here that Philip Carling had been found. Smacked on both sides of the head with a heavy wooden paddle that shattered his skull, then bundled into the water and stuffed head first under a punt to drown. It wasn't a dignified way to go, but it was probably pretty quick. Any sound swallowed by the noise from the wedding party. Whoever did it would be wet, but if they'd had the presence of mind to stash a change of clothes nearby in Riverside or even further down the river bank in the college boathouse, they'd soon cover their tracks. Witnesses said that when Barker and Sanderson had returned to the wedding celebration, she'd been wearing a different dress and he'd changed his shirt. Their defence had been that they'd slipped away to have sex; that they'd been so desperate to get at each other that her dress had ripped and his shirt had been stained with lipstick and mascara, so they'd changed. It was one of those explanations that, although reasonable, was always going to sound contrived, especially since they were the only apparent suspects.
Of course, that was an argument that weakened if you knew about Magda and Jay. If Charlie was going to have anything to do with this business, there were a lot of questions she wanted the answers to. Like, when had Jay and Magda got together? Like, where had Jay been that Saturday night? And if you had a nasty suspicious mind, how long was Magda away from the wedding herself? Charlie gave a little hiss of a laugh. Oh, Corinna would love that question.
Charlie slowly turned and looked up the slope towards the Meadow Building. She'd lived there for three years, first in a tiny cubicle of a room sandwiched between a stairwell and a pantry, then in a big airy room on the top floor that she'd managed to swing because of her role as treasurer to the student body. She'd grown up in that building. She'd learned as much about herself as she had about her academic subjects. She'd fallen in love, had her heart broken then fallen in love all over again. Just like you were supposed to. She'd made friends and she'd changed her future.
Now that future she'd created for herself was sliding out of her grasp. Professionally, personally, she was on the skids. And here she was, back where it had all started. It would never
have occurred to her to look for salvation here. But maybe Corinna was right. Maybe this was her chance to reclaim her life.
12
Jay stood at the window and watched Magda drive away. Allowing her to face so difficult a confrontation alone was hard for Jay. But there was nothing to be gained by getting into a fight about it. If Corinna and Henry chose to make Magda miserable over her choice of partner, that would be a ruck worth getting into. One Jay would relish. Still, in one sense, it didn't matter; Jay knew Magda was hers, regardless of what her parents might say or do. For now, it made her look better to step back and let Magda attempt to fight her own battle. And it freed the day for her to write. There hadn't been much time for that since the trial verdict. Jay made herself a coffee and settled down at the keyboard.
I only went home for a fortnight that first holiday. I didn't belong there any more. People I knew from school had lives that excluded me. Most of them had gone off to university with a gaggle of friends. Others were working, earning a wage that set them apart. The house where I'd spent half a dozen years before Oxford wasn't home either. My mother's disappearing act had removed any possibility of that. Mary Hopkinson next door took pleasure in revealing that nobody had heard a word from her since that chill winter night when she'd disappeared with a suitcase containing her best clothes, toiletries, and a framed photograph of me aged six. Any older and she'd have had to admit to her real age, I thought.
My stepfather's house wasn't a place where anyone would choose to be. He'd stripped it of anything that reminded him of my mother and now it was as icon-free as the chapel where I'd been forced to spend all my adolescent Sundays. Going back only reminded me of how liberating it had been to leave in the first place. I spent most of my time out of the house, even if that meant making a coffee in the local burger bar last three hours and a dozen chapters. On the second of January, I fled back to Oxford and slept for three nights in the Newsams' attic room before I could move back into college.
Trick of the Dark Page 7
