I followed her out into the garden and took the opportunity to light a pungent Gitane. The fact that I knew Jess loathed my cigarettes was merely an added pleasure. 'You've got as long as it takes me to smoke this,' I said bluntly.'
I won't need that long. I want you to withdraw your candidacy. '
I shook my head in disbelief. 'When you get back to planet earth, give me a call,' I said sarcastically.
'I'm making the suggestion for your sake. I don't want you to humiliate yourself. The JCR members won't vote a lesbian in as JCR President,' Jess retorted, smugness smeared across her face like dogshit on a shoe.
I had a moment of panic. We'd been so careful. Our embraces had all been inside the safety of our own rooms. I didn't think we'd ever done anything publicly that could be thrown in our faces; we'd never even been to a gay bar. Jess had to be bluffing, I decided. She couldn't know. Nobody could know. 'I'm sure you're right,' I said mildly. 'But why should you think that would bother me?'
'I spent ten years at boarding school, Jay. Give me some credit. I know you didn't have my advantages, but surely you're not so naive as to think you and Louise could make kissy faces at each other over breakfast ever since the roof fell in on you without half the JCR noticing?'
I could feel my ears turning scarlet. Right then, I wasn't sure if I was angrier about our love being reduced to a schoolgirl crush or being reminded I was socially not up to snuff. Either way, it didn't matter. With that one speech, Jess had managed to undo all the softening I'd undergone at the hands of love. 'You're full of shit, Jess,' I snarled.
'I don't think so. As I say, I can't be the only one who's noticed. And unless you withdraw your candidacy, I suspect more people will know by polling day.'
'Are you trying to blackmail me?'
'Good lord, no,' Jess protested. 'But on my way out, I couldn't help noticing the election poster in the kitchen on your floor of the Sackville Building had been defaced. We wouldn't want that sort of thing to happen all over college, would we?'
There had been several times since I'd left the North East when I'd felt the urge to demonstrate my street fighting skills. Never more than at that moment. Somehow, I stopped myself, letting my hands relax out of their reflexive fists. Instead, I pushed past Jess and, leaving my books and notes behind for collection later, I made straight for the Sackville Building.
It was even worse than I'd imagined. The poster that this morning had read, 'Put a Stewart back on the throne' now had 'DYKE' pasted over my name. And added to the list of bullet-point promises I'd made were, 'Lesbian erotica section to be established in college library' and 'Coming-out workshops with professional counsellors'.
I ripped the sheet from the wall, tearing it to pieces. I dumped the remains in the sink and with a shaking hand spun the wheel of my Zippo and reduced its vileness to ashes. I leaned against the sink panting, my eyes smarting with more than the smoke. The knowledge that not many people would have seen it between first thing and now was no balm. I couldn't believe what Jess Edwards had done to me. I'd thought I was the ruthless one.
But I knew with stony certainty that, if I didn't back down, there would be a smear campaign the length and breadth of the college by next morning. And my chances of becoming JCR President would have vanished in the kind of humiliation that people would talk about for years afterwards. Whenever my name came up in conversation where there was anyone from my Oxford vintage, it would be, `Oh, wasn't she the lesbian who thought she could be JCR President?'
And there was Louise to consider. Her ambitions were different from mine; she had no desire for power or notoriety. She'd been having difficulty enough adjusting to the idea of being gay without being humiliated by our fellow undergraduates. And make no mistake about it, I thought bitterly, humiliated we would be. Not much reality lay behind the romantic notions of the solidarity and supportiveness of a community of educated women. At St Scholastika's they were every bit as petty, envious and self-seeking as anywhere else. Thanks to Corinna's indiscreet gossip, I knew of two fellows of the college who had not spoken to each other for the best part of twenty years because of an irreconcilable disagreement over the true cradle of classical civilisation. No, my peers would barely tolerate Louise and certainly would never forgive me for thrusting the personal so very firmly into the public arena, even though I had had nothing to do with its dissemination.
For once in my life, I really didn't know what to do. I couldn't even turn to Corinna. I hadn't told her about Louise; some instinct had made me hold back. I knew the Catholic Church's line on homosexuality only too well, since it was the principal stumbling block between Louise and me. I simply couldn't trust Corinna to let her personal affections supersede her religious views. Wisely, as things turned out.
Jay cocked her head, considering what she'd just written about Corinna. She didn't think there was anything there that would upset Magda. After all, Corinna's subsequent behaviour spoke for itself, and Jay wasn't going to sugar-coat it when she got to that part of the story. However things turned out now, it was still valid. If Corinna welcomed her as a daughter-in-law now, it would play as a Damascene conversion; if not, Jay could take the moral high ground and stand tall under the weight of Corinna's continued disapproval. It might force Magda to a difficult choice, but Jay was convinced she would choose lover over mother at this point. And once that choice was made, there was no going back. Just as there had been no going back all those years ago.
I was sitting at my desk, staring out across the meadows when Jess reappeared. She knocked and stuck her head round my door. 'I see you removed the poster.'
'Wouldn't you?'
'Let me know what you decide,' she said, as casually as if she were asking me how I liked my coffee. 'I'll see you at breakfast.'
But she didn't. By breakfast time, Jess Edwards was dead.
Раrt Two
1
Charlie stared at Corinna, incredulous. 'You're sitting there and telling me you honestly think Jay Macallan Stewart is a murderer? Internet multimillionaire and misery memoir author Jay Macallan Stewart? Your family friend Jay Macallan Stewart?'
Corinna looked affronted. 'She's no friend of this family.'
'According to the newspapers she is. I know Magda's said nothing to the press, but I did see one photograph taken in the street where she was with' — Charlie made a quotation marks sign in the air — '"family friend" Jay Macallan Stewart.' She cocked her head to one side. 'I did wonder about that.'
'No way is she a friend. She's not welcome in this house. Hasn't been for fifteen years or more. Damn it, Charlie. Damned media and their lies.'
'But Jay? Why the holy fuck do you think Jay killed Philip?'
Corinna winced. Blasphemy or obscenity offended her, a prudery that had always amused Charlie. 'Because she's done it before. At least once, and almost certainly more.'
Until that point, Charlie had been willing to give Corinna the benefit of the doubt. But this was too much. 'Is this some kind of elaborate Oxford joke, Corinna? Some wind-up at my expense?'
'It's the truth, Charlie.' At least this intensity was familiar to Charlie from her professional life. It often accompanied the most sincerely held delusions.
Charlie held her hands up, palms outward. 'OK, let's just take this step by step. For now, let's leave to one side the suggestion that Jay Stewart is a serial killer and look at the case in point. Corinna, why on earth would Jay want Philip dead? What's the connective tissue here?'
She'd seen Corinna disappointed by her pronouncements before but Charlie would have said she was past being affected by it. To her surprise, she felt nettled when Corinna said, 'Can't you work it out, Charlie? You're the one who brought up the newspaper photo.'
'Magda? You're seriously suggesting that Jay killed Philip because she wanted Magda? Corinna, do you have any idea how bonkers that sounds? Even from the most besotted of mothers, that would sound mad.'
'Be that as it may, Charlie. But they're together. Jay is my daughter
's lover. My beautiful, clever daughter. Magda hasn't had the nerve to tell me in so many words, but I know my daughter and I know what's going on. I've no idea how they met again, but I'm convinced that Magda's version of events is a lie. She says they ran into each other at the house of a colleague a couple of months after Philip died. But I think they were already seeing each other by then.'
Charlie frowned. 'But why on earth would Magda marry Philip if she was already having a relationship with Jay?'
Corinna shrugged in frustration. 'I don't think they were lovers then. Magda's too honest, too honourable. I can't imagine her cheating on Philip, no matter how attracted she was to Jay. And Jay's no fool. She must have realised that the only way she'd have a chance with Magda was to get rid of Philip.'
'That's a hell of a stretch. Killing the bridegroom on the wedding day in the hope you can move in on the bride? In my professional life, that's what I'd call grandiose thinking.'
Corinna refilled their mugs and started the stirring ritual again. 'Oh, come on, Charlie. You're a psychiatrist. You know how vulnerable people are to emotional predators when they've been bereaved. Jay would never have a better chance. She's a manipulator. You must remember that, surely?'
'I didn't know her that well. I was two years ahead of her, remember. That's a big gap in student terms. But Corinna, it's a huge jump from "I fancy her" to "I'm going to kill for her".'
'Not so big if you've killed before.'
Charlie held her hand up in a 'stop' signal. 'We'll come back to that, I promise. Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Jay had set her sights on Magda and she didn't care what she had to do to get her. But that's just supposition. It is — forgive me, Corinna, but it is — just a fantasy. You've got to have something that vaguely qualifies as evidence before you can go around making accusations like that.'
'You think I don't realise that? I do have some more to go on. The wedding wasn't the only event in college that day. There was also a weekend seminar on setting up online businesses. And guess who the keynote speaker was?'
'Jay?'
'That's right. She was there, on the spot, when Philip was killed.'
'So were a lot of other people. At least two of them with a confirmed motive, as opposed to a possible motive you've just dreamed up.'
Corinna pursed her lips in disapproval. 'And speaking of motive… do you know how the police came up with the evidence against Barker and Sanderson?'
'According to what I read, there was a letter on Philip's computer to the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority indicating how the pair of them had come by their confidential information and how they'd used it in an insider trading scheme to make themselves very rich. Is that not how it was?'
Corinna looked pleased with herself, as if she'd finally, incontrovertibly got one over on Charlie. 'That's nearly right. Except it wasn't on Philip's computer. Not on his desktop at the office, not on his desktop at home and not on his laptop. It was on a back-up hard drive that he'd left in Magda's old room here. He slept there the night before the wedding, so supposedly he'd tucked it away in her underwear drawer for safekeeping.' Corinna's voice dripped scepticism. 'And Magda just happened to find it when the police were starting to get frustrated about ever nailing anyone for the murder.'
Puzzled, Charlie said, 'I don't understand what that has to do with Jay.'
'This letter is very detailed. It doesn't appear anywhere else in Philip's records. But apparently most of the information in it does. According to a very helpful detective I spoke to a while back, it could have been compiled by someone with accounting skills and computer skills and access to the office systems where Barker and Sanderson left their own digital trail. With the best will in the world, that is not a description of my daughter. But it does sound a lot like the skills Jay Stewart must have to have reached the pinnacle of business that she's achieved. Wouldn't you say?'
'Jay Stewart and a shedload of other people,' Charlie said. 'And it's not like somebody made this stuff up. They just made it easily accessible when it became clear the police weren't getting a handle on it.'
'Quite. But Magda made a mistake. The weekend before the trial, she drove up for Sunday lunch. Obviously, we were talking about the case, and Patrick said it had been a stroke of luck, Magda finding the back-up drive that gave the police their crucial leverage. And Magda said, quite casually, that it had been Jay who suggested there might be a back-up somewhere and that Magda should retrace his steps on the days before the wedding to see if she could track it down.'
'And why was that a mistake?'
'Because the discovery of the hard drive precedes the occasion when Magda supposedly met Jay again by a couple of weeks.' Corinna kept her eyes on Charlie, a measured stare with absolutely no madness in it.
'It's suggestive,' Charlie said. 'But not necessarily suggestive of collusion to fit up Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson. And presumably the police checked the internal information on the back-up drive to see when the file was created and saved.'
Corinna threw her hands up in the air. 'I don't know about stuff like that. But I've read about people fiddling with the dates on files. And Jay's whole professional life has been devoted to internet businesses. If anybody's got access to the kind of geeks who know how to alter digital information, it's her.'
'That's still not evidence. Corinna, there's nothing to attack here, in terms of a miscarriage of justice. Even if I got alongside Jay and became convinced, professionally speaking, that she was capable of doing what you suggest, there's still nothing you could call evidence.'
Corinna folded her arms tightly across her chest. 'I was afraid that's what you'd say. And however much I wish it was otherwise, I do understand there's little prospect of calling Jay to account for Philip's death. But she's got to be stopped, Charlie. This is my daughter we're talking about. Jay might want to pull down the moon and stars for her now, but what happens when that changes? What happens if she falls out of love with Magda and Magda doesn't want to let go? Or what if Magda comes to her senses and wants to leave her? Can you imagine what it feels like to know your daughter is spending her nights with a killer?'
'No, I can't. And I can see how concern for a child might make you build castles in the air.'
'This is not castles in the air.' For the first time, Corinna had raised her voice. 'There is a trail of bodies in her wake. Magda thinks I banned Jay from this house all those years ago because I discovered she was a lesbian. Now, you know me well enough to know that couldn't be the case. I never tried to keep you away from my kids even though I knew pretty much from the get-go that you were a lesbian. The reason, the real reason I froze Jay out of our lives was because I was convinced she killed Jess Edwards.'
Charlie was stunned into silence, the words echoing in her ears. She gave a tiny shake of the head. 'That was an accident,' she said at last, blinking hard to shift an image of Jess from her mind's eye.
'I didn't think so at the time, and I don't think so now,' Corinna said.
'What possible grounds could you have for saying that?' Charlie felt close to tears. Jess the bright and beautiful, the one with the glorious golden future she never got to live. Even though she'd only been a fresher in Charlie's final year, she'd made an impact. Charlie had not long left Schollie's when Jess had died, but it was a death that reverberated inside her, a denial of possibility that could reach out and touch any of them.
'The morning Jess died…' Corinna stared through the basement window, eyes level with the muddy winter grass. She sighed. 'Back then, I used to go into college really early. I'd get a couple of hours' work in, then run home and make sure the kids were clean and fed and dressed for school. That morning, I came in by the meadow gate around six. And I swear I saw Jay Stewart coming across the meadow from the direction of the boathouse.'
A moment of stunned silence, then Charlie said, 'Wasn't it dark that early?'
'It was dark. And kind of misty too. But I know what I saw. I knew Ja
y pretty well. Well enough to be certain it was her.'
'And you never said anything?' Charlie was trained to interview the most vicious of killers without letting judgement creep into her tone. But it was taking all of her professional skill not to scream at Corinna right then. 'You kept this to yourself?'
Corinna took off her glasses and polished them on her sweater. 'I told myself there must have been an innocent explanation. Maybe Jay was meeting Jess to try and take some of the sting out of the election campaign.' She glanced up at Charlie. Without her glasses, her face looked small and naked. Charlie wondered how calculated the move was. 'I had no reason then to imagine Jay was a killer. I thought I knew her. And think about it, Charlie. If I had told the police what I'd seen' — she spread her hands wide — 'it would have proved nothing. It would just have created a storm of rumour and suspicion that would have tainted the college. I didn't want Schollie's splashed over the tabloid press. And besides, there wasn't the slightest suggestion then or any time later that Jess's death was anything other than a terrible accident. Talking about what I'd seen would have achieved nothing. I didn't make the decision alone, either. I talked it over with Dr Winter and she agreed with me.'
Helena Winter, chatelaine of the legend of Schollie's, Charlie thought. She would have agreed to anything so long as the college remained untarnished. Charlie willed herself to sit still, not to show how agitated Corinna's words had left her. 'Well, that's one suspicious death. What about the rest?'
Corinna replaced her glasses and glanced at her watch. 'We've not got much time. There's two others that I think should be investigated. Her business partner in doitnow.com, Kathy Lipson.'
'I remember that. It was a climbing accident.'
'Jay cut the rope.'
'And the verdict absolved her of any blame.' Now Charlie's voice was rising in pitch to match Corinna.
Trick of the Dark Page 9
