The It Girl(86)

Hannah is remembering. Remembering the tension between Ryan and April, the polite smiles, the teeth-gritted argument with Will. Had April known she was going to do this to Emily all along, even while she was smiling and sharing drinks and inviting her over for coffee? She must have done. There’s no other explanation.

For a moment Hannah feels quite sick.

Then something occurs to her. If April was angry at Emily, who had after all done nothing apart from being Ryan’s girlfriend, how furious must April have been with Ryan for rejecting her? Furious enough to fake a pregnancy test?

In which case, maybe April wasn’t pregnant when she died?

But then if she was pregnant, and she had just been rejected by the father of her unborn baby, then perhaps that would explain her vicious overreaction to Emily.

Oh God. She has to stop going back and forth like this, guessing and then second-guessing. She has to find someone who actually knows what April was thinking that week. She’s just not sure who that could be.

For the next hour they talk about other topics, as if by unspoken agreement. The baby. How Will is doing at work. Hugh tells her some funny anecdotes about his patients, and she counters with some of her more eccentric customers. It’s only later, when they’re leaving, paying their bill, and Hugh is helping her into her coat, that something else occurs to her about Hugh’s revelation. Something that makes her stomach twist with a strange mix of anxiety and guilt, and makes her stop, coat half-on, half-off, so that Hugh has to gently cough and remind her where she is.

If April was that angry with Emily—poor Emily, who had done nothing wrong at all—how angry must she have been with the girl Will was, maybe, falling for? How angry was she with Hannah?





AFTER


The next few days and weeks had the cadence of a waking nightmare, and afterwards Hannah could only remember that time in jolting, disordered snatches.

First the running feet, the porters and the college staff pushing her aside to climb to the stairs, Hugh standing in the hallway, saying in a cracked and desperate voice, “No one should touch her until the police get here, please, no one should touch anything in the room.”

Then the sound of sirens, uniformed police taping off the landing, the blue lights of the massed squad cars reflecting back from the building opposite on Pelham Street and flickering off the still, black waters of the river.

Hannah was interviewed by the police until the small hours, when she was given a parcel of her own belongings and allowed to go to bed in a strange room in Old Quad. The next day she was interviewed again, and then moved to a different room in Cloisters with better sound insulation, because her sobs the night before had kept her neighbors awake. Her parents arrived, and she cried in her mother’s arms, and moved rooms again, this time to sleep on a pull-out sofa in her mother’s hotel room. The college closed for the summer break, but Hannah was not allowed to leave Oxford, and neither was Hugh.

Emily, Ryan, and Will were interviewed but then told they were free to return home. None of them were suspects. Ryan had spent the whole night in the bar, with multiple witnesses including Hannah and Hugh. Will had been away from the college, at home in Somerset until Sunday morning. Emily had been in the college library all evening, and examination of her swipe card showed she hadn’t left until after 11 p.m., when she, along with the few other students still studying, had come out to see what was going on, why the police were hurrying across the forbidden lawns to New Quad.

Hannah and Hugh were different. They weren’t suspects—but they were witnesses. They had discovered April’s body, and Hannah had reported the prime suspect to the college authorities just days before April’s death.

Lying awake at night beside her sleeping mother, trying to reconstruct what had happened, what she could have done differently, what she might have missed, Hannah came to think of her existence as divided into two sharp halves—before and after.

Before, everything was fine. After, everything was broken.



* * *



HANNAH SAW APRIL’S PARENTS ONLY once. She was leaving the police station after giving yet another statement, and a tall blond woman with enormous sunglasses accompanied by a man in a gray suit straining across his gut walked past her, their faces stony and grim. She was never quite sure what made her do it, perhaps something about the shape of the woman’s mouth and chin, but she pulled out her phone and googled “April Clarke-Cliveden parents” and there they were. April’s mother, Jade Rider-Cliveden and her father, Arnold Clarke, former city banker turned private equity investor.

There were older shots, pictures of Mr. Clarke climbing into taxis, waving with a broad self-satisfied smile, or shaking hands after a successful business deal; photos of Mrs. Clarke-Cliveden entering a spa, or leaving Harrods, shooting daggers at the photographer. But the one that held Hannah’s attention was the most recent—one plainly taken after news of April’s death had been broken. Their faces stared out at her from the search page, snapped by some opportunistic paparazzo as they hurried into a waiting car. They looked like people in a waking nightmare—and she knew how they felt, for she was trapped in the same bad dream.

Part of her wanted to hurry after them, tell them how sorry she was, ask if they were okay—though that was clearly stupid, for how could they be okay? Their child had died, the worst thing that could happen to any parent.