by S J Bolton
‘And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’
A shudder grabbed a hold of Dan’s whole body; even Megan noticed and looked at him in surprise.
‘Let us pray,’ the rector announced, and, in the quad, every head lowered for a prayer about the waking of the spring and the return of the light, and Daniel realised at last why he hated May Morning. It was a celebration of the end of winter; a ceremony to mark the return of all that was good and light and strong in the world. But for those who lived their lives in darkness, there would be no return to the light. Daniel had spent twenty years looking for redemption and each springtime saw it slipping from his reach. And the woman beside him, if not the cause of that, was its living symbol.
He didn’t hear much more after that. The choir sang three madrigals, and he didn’t doubt they were as lovely as always. He watched several more blue balloons sail towards the heavens and they seemed to Daniel to be prayers, climbing ever upwards in search of a kindly ear. His prayers would never fly, he realised that morning; they were destined forever to be earthbound.
In paying the price that should have been his, Megan had stolen his redemption.
They watched the choir return to earth and applauded their journey across the quad. They were no longer angels, just kids and young men with good voices, and they wanted their breakfast.
‘Can we go up?’ Megan asked, meaning the tower.
There was no reason why not, now that the choir had come down, and the queue into breakfast would take some time, so Daniel led the way and they climbed the narrow spiral staircase.
‘It was beautiful,’ Megan said, when they reached the parapet. ‘That bit about the birth of an early morning, welcoming the light after a long darkness. It felt like it was spoken just for me.’
Most people turned north-west when they climbed Magdalen Tower at dawn, to see the turrets, pinnacles and spires in the early sun, but Megan went to the southern edge. Daniel joined her and they looked down at the people on the high street. Like a block of ice melting at the edges, the crowd was starting to drift away. It would take time, though; there could be twenty thousand people in the city centre and most wouldn’t be hurrying. They’d be heading into the nearby pubs, maybe to watch the morris dancing at St Giles. The carnival atmosphere would last for the next few hours at least.
Megan turned east, squinting into the sun. He opened his mouth to tell her he had her sunglasses, which she’d left behind at Tal’s on Saturday.
‘I don’t have anyone else,’ Megan said, without looking up.
Dan waited.
‘You and the others, you’re all I have,’ she said. ‘One doesn’t make friends in prison, one forms alliances, and allies. Even those who are outside now, are no use to me any more. I won’t live the life of an ex-con, Dan.’
No, you want to steal our lives. It was a thought in his head, nothing more; he wouldn’t have dreamed of uttering it.
‘What about your family?’ he said instead.
She glanced around at him. ‘Mum died, didn’t you hear?’
He hadn’t. But then he’d made no attempt to keep in touch with Megan’s mother.
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’
‘I think I wrote to you at the time. To one of you at least, but by then I was resigned to none of you writing back. Did you even read them, Dan?’
‘Meg,’ he sighed. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I’m not going to quietly slip away, you know,’ she said. ‘You and the others, you need to accept that. One way or another, I’m coming back into your lives.’
‘You don’t know what—’ he stopped. He’d been about to say, you don’t know what you’re asking, except maybe she did. Maybe she knew exactly what she was asking; and had yet to ask of them.
‘Do you really remember nothing about that summer?’ he asked.
Megan looked him directly in the eyes and he thought, This is it, she’s going to come clean now. Instead, she shook her head in the gesture that was becoming familiar, like she was trying to dislodge something that was stuck inside it.
‘I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ she said, and her face was screwed up in concentration. ‘I want you to picture something, close your eyes.’
Dan did what he was told; he couldn’t see any choice.
‘A child’s bicycle goes rolling into a pond,’ Megan said. ‘There’s no one riding it – don’t worry. It breaks the surface, sending frantic ripples racing to the edges, and then it topples, landing flat among some reeds.’
There was something about Megan’s voice that was almost calming. Daniel felt as though she was telling him a story, one she’d rehearsed many times.
‘There it remains,’ she went on. ‘Winter comes and the pond freezes over. The bike is captured in ice. One of the handlebars, the spokes of most of the front wheel and part of the seat remain above the surface, the rest is below. We can see but not touch it. It’s inaccessible. You can open your eyes now, Dan.’
He did. She’d moved a little closer to him. He wanted to take a step away but was right up against the stone wall of the parapet.
‘That’s what my memory’s like of that summer,’ she said. ‘Parts of it I can recall clear as day, but the rest? I know it’s there, I can almost see it beneath the surface, I just can’t get to it. That’s how it is for the murder. I know I killed Sophie Robinson and her children. It’s all in my head, I just can’t find it.’
She spun around and stepped away, back to the edge but further from Daniel; he thought, She’s not lying, she really doesn’t remember. We’re safe.
Leaning out again, Megan looked down. ‘What’s with the green costumes?’ she asked. ‘They’re a bit scary.’
‘People have been dressing up in green for hundreds of years,’ Daniel told her. ‘It represents nature, rebirth, the springtime.’
From the quad below came a whiff of bacon. He was on the point of suggesting they go down for breakfast.
‘Paganism,’ she said. ‘On such a Christian morning.’
‘You’ll find churches all over Europe sporting images of the green man,’ Daniel said. ‘The lines between Christianity and paganism are notoriously and endlessly blurred. Look, do you want to go—’
He was stepping towards the ladder.
‘I’m going to try hypnosis,’ she said.
Daniel stopped moving. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m going to be hypnotised. See if I can’t find some of those memories I’ve locked away.’
His appetite was gone.
‘Are you sure?’ he managed. ‘I mean, what would you gain? You know it happened, you paid the price. You can move on now, surely? Put it behind you. We’ll help you. Actually, there’s been something I’ve been meaning to—’
‘But that’s the point, I can’t put it behind me until I understand,’ she said. ‘I need to know what made me do such a stupid thing. When I had my whole life ahead of me, and such great friends. We were going to conquer the world, weren’t we? Why would I throw that away?’
She was so very convincing.
‘I can’t move on,’ she said. ‘Not until I can remember exactly what happened that summer.’
She could be telling the truth. On the other hand, maybe she remembered everything and was torturing him. He had no way of knowing for sure.
And then a thought came out of nowhere, so unlike him that Dan could have believed it had been implanted by aliens. Megan was standing by one of the pinnacles. Only her head and shoulders would be visible from below, if anyone were still looking up, and most people wouldn’t be.
He’d thought of a way of bringing everything to a close, of ensuring that they were completely safe, now and always. All he had to do was run at Megan, grab hold of her by her ankles, lift and tip. She’d plummet 144 feet t
o the hard stone below.
And that would be that.
21
Felix’s office was on the upper floor of the industrial unit, facing north over a car park and feeder road, a mile outside Thame town centre. He watched a bus pull up at the stop a hundred yards away but couldn’t see who’d got off. There were too many trees in the way.
He forced himself away from the window and poured his second cup of coffee. He drank it white, with full-fat milk and two sugars. When he was alone, he added a dessertspoon of Irish whiskey from a bottle he kept at the back of the locked cupboard in his desk. He didn’t keep a dessertspoon and in his more honest moments, acknowledged that the dessertspoon had morphed over the years into a tablespoon, possibly a serving spoon and, by the time the morning was out, would probably be the measure of a fucking soup ladle.
He drank, feeling the familiar warmth spreading from his heart outwards, calming his nerves, smoothing out the trembling. After an hour, it would be back, of course. It would help if he could eat, soak up some of the alcohol, but his appetite, poor for years, had dwindled to non-existence since the news of Megan’s release.
And now here she was, walking towards the front door of his factory, wearing a green belted raincoat and carrying a bag over her left shoulder. She stumbled as she stepped off the kerb, almost over-balancing, and it lightened his heart to see her vulnerable.
He swallowed down his coffee and grabbed a couple of mints from a packet he always kept on his desk, before running down the stairs. It was too early for anyone to be at the front desk, and he had to unlock the door to let her in.
‘You made it?’ he said.
‘As you see.’
‘Get the bus all right? Not too crowded?’
She gave him a look that was half amused, half pitying, but still he continued to make stupid small talk as he showed her to the desk she would use in the general office on the upper floor, not too far from his own room, and then took her on a tour around the building.
‘This is Megan,’ he said to the warehouse staff who always arrived first. ‘She’ll be with us for a while, sorting out the accounts. Time someone did, I know.’
He was conscious of odd looks as he left the warehouse behind, but maybe with Megan beside him he was more perceptive than usual; maybe the odd looks had been there for some time. From the warehouse, they walked through the stock rooms and here, among the products, rather than the people, he felt a little easier. Chemicals didn’t judge. There had to be five hundred or more unique compounds on the shelves in front of him, and he understood the precise formula of each. The compounds spoke to him; he understood them in a way he never would people.
‘We’re sourcing materials from extreme environments for our male grooming range,’ he said, as Megan lingered by the shelves. ‘I’m stoked about this. Listen, for a plant to survive in some of the toughest conditions on earth, it has to develop its own natural protective compounds. We harvest them and turn them into active ingredients in the products. The idea of thriving in harsh environments is an absolute gift when it comes to marketing to the male psyche.’
He leaned over and took a small plastic bottle from the shelf behind Megan, turning it so she could see the name and formula on the label. ‘Black crowberry juice from Lapland,’ he told her.
Megan made an impressed face. ‘What does it do? Apart from appealing to the male psyche?’
‘Improves microcirculation and increases skin firmness,’ he told her. ‘Our clients – L’Oréal, Unilever, Proctor and Gamble – they buy this from us, with advice on how it can be assimilated, and use it in their own products.’
He put the bottle back on the shelf. ‘This is perlite.’ He took up another bottle. ‘Natural volcanic glass.’
‘Exfoliant?’ Megan asked.
For a split second, Felix was reminded that he’d once liked Megan, rather a lot in fact; she was the only person he’d ever met whose passion for chemistry came close to his own. ‘Exactly,’ he said.
She fell behind as he led the way out. ‘That’s a lot of sodium hydroxide,’ she said, looking at a stack of drums in one corner of the room.
Felix made a face. ‘Cock up,’ he admitted. ‘They should have gone to the new factory in Uganda. It’s where our soap range is being made. I need to get them returned.’
The folk in the lab, PhDs all, gave him curious looks as he steered Megan around the fume cupboard, the row of homogenisers and the centrifuge, but he’d already started to suspect that they had started to suspect that his drinking might be teetering on the edge of out of control. His voice was too loud, and he was laughing too much. The only person in the company to seem unperturbed was Megan, who walked beside him as composed as a visiting royal.
‘Cosmetics?’ she said, when they were back at her desk and he’d made her coffee. He didn’t think he’d ever made a member of staff coffee before. He’d poured them drinks, of course, at Christmas, but coffee? No.
‘Personal care products,’ he corrected. ‘Cosmetics are what women, usually, put on their faces. We work on the entire range of personal care – deodorants, moisturisers, hair-removing creams, self-tanning products – but it’s really all about the chemistry.’
She smiled, and he would have given anything to know what she was thinking. He remembered that the two of them had often worked together in the school labs. Not when Xav was around, of course.
‘OK, right. All outstanding invoices are in this tray. I’ve put the accounting system password on your desk.’
She said, ‘I always knew you’d do well, Felix.’
‘Thanks. But, you know, we all did. I mean, who would have thought Amber—’
She interrupted him. ‘But you’re the one with the big bucks.’
The Scotch was definitely wearing off. He’d need another shot before the hour was up. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. The factory in Uganda’s been a big stretch. Xav’s doing OK. He doesn’t talk about his bonuses, but we’re pretty sure he doesn’t have a mortgage on that place he and Ella have bought on St John Street.’
Megan’s eyes fell and he felt sure she was mentally storing away Xav’s address. He’d been stupid to give it away, but she’d have found it sooner or later, one way or another. In his pocket, his phone buzzed. The green-cased burner phone that Talitha had given him. He glanced at the screen. Daniel.
‘Do you have everything you need?’ he asked Megan. ‘Take your time, I’m not expecting immediate results. Get a feel for the place. Pay day isn’t for another two weeks, so don’t worry about the salary run today.’
‘What’s his wife like?’ Megan intended her voice to sound casual, he could tell; it didn’t quite come off. ‘I bet she’s super glam, like Sarah.’
She was flattering him, and his wife. Sarah was attractive enough, in an ageing Boden-catalogue model kind of way, but a long way from ‘super glamourous’. A long way from Ella.
His green phone buzzed again. Xav, this time.
‘You’ll have to judge for yourself,’ he said, and was conscious of the spite creeping into his mind, if not his voice. ‘I’m sure you’ll meet her before long.’
‘When did he and Amber split up?’ Megan asked.
For a second Felix was tempted to accept the call from Xav and hand him over; let Xav explain himself to the woman scorned. ‘Not long after we all went to uni,’ he said instead.
‘Who dumped who?’
He put his phone away. ‘He broke it off with her in the first term. She was gutted. She went up to Cambridge a couple of times to try and sort it out. I know because she stayed with Talitha at Downing and she filled me in. It was no use though, Xav had moved on.’
‘He was seeing other girls?’ Megan’s eyes had fallen, as though she didn’t trust herself to look directly at him any more.
Felix caught hold of his next thought and held onto it. Xav had been shagging his w
ay around Cambridge, according to Tal, but saying that to Megan didn’t feel entirely wise right now.
‘I couldn’t say. We lost touch for a while.’
In his office next door, the desk phone began to ring. Felix excused himself and left her to it. In his own room, he poured himself another drink. This time, he didn’t bother with the coffee.
22
Talitha, better than the others, knew the benefit of self-possession and keeping her own counsel. In the days that followed the disastrous lunch party, she picked up the phone several times to ring one of the others, but each time put the phone down before the call went through. When Daniel called her towards the end of the week, it was almost a relief and she readily agreed to meet up.
‘As there’s been nothing in the papers,’ she said, when the two of them stepped through the giant stone arch and into the walled garden. ‘I’m assuming you didn’t do it?’
One of the oldest scientific gardens in the world, the Oxford Botanical Garden stood on the high street, almost directly opposite Magdalen College. Were Talitha and Daniel to turn at that point, they would have caught a glimpse of the tower through the rim of specimen trees. Instead, they made their way towards the wilder sections on the perimeter where they would encounter fewer people. It was a cloudy day, cold and damp, but there were always visitors in the gardens.
‘Course I didn’t bloody do it,’ Daniel said as their footsteps crunched past fallen ranks of tulips. ‘There was a moment though, Tal, when I thought she was going to jump of her own accord and, God help me, I’m not sure I’d have run to stop her.’
A sudden gust of wind threw pink blossom into their faces as the sky darkened. Talitha turned up the rim of her coat and thought she could feel rain in the air.
‘Here’s what I don’t get,’ she said. ‘You say she was threatening you—’
‘Warning me – us – not to underestimate her.’
