In a Dark, Dark Wood(91)

‘She did it before, you know,’ Lamarr says. Her rich voice is like a soft, warm blanket around the coldness of her words. ‘Or a variant. It took us a while to dig it up, but there was a professor at her university. He was sacked for sending inappropriate emails to undergraduates, implying that they would get better grades if they slept with him and that there might be penalties if they told anyone. He denied it throughout, but there was no doubt that the students did receive the emails, and when his machine was raided, they were there in the deleted folder, all of them, although he’d made a clumsy attempt to destroy them.

‘It seems pretty clear now that Clare was involved, although at the time no one ever suspected her. She wasn’t one of the students he was emailing. But a few weeks before he had raised concerns with her that one of her papers was plagiarised, threatened to take it further. Of course in the ensuing furore the accusation was forgotten – but one of his colleagues remembered him discussing it. She said she’d always wondered …’

I shut my eyes, feeling a single tear trace down the line of my nose. I don’t know why I’m crying. It’s not relief. I don’t think it’s even grief for James any more. Maybe it’s just fury and frustration at the waste of it all, anger at myself for not realising sooner, for being so stupid.

And yet, what then? If I had noticed? Would it have been me, lying with my guts splattered across the blond wood and the frosted glass?

‘I’ll leave you,’ Lamarr says softly, and she gets up, the plastic leather of the chair creaking. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow with a colleague. We’ll take your formal statement, if you’re up to it.’

I don’t speak, I only nod, with my eyes still tight shut.

After she’s gone there is silence, broken only by a soap theme tune filtering through the wall. I sit and listen to it, and to the breaths I draw in and out of my nose.

And then, into the middle of the calm, there’s a knock at the door.

I open my eyes at once, assuming it’s Lamarr come back, but it’s not. There’s a man outside. For a second my heart flip-flops, and then I realise it’s Tom.

‘Knock-knock,’ he says, putting his head around the door.

‘Come in,’ I say. My voice is croaky.

He shuffles inside. His expression is diffident, unsure of his welcome. He looks pale, and far from the groomed urbanisto I’d met just a few days before. His checked shirt is crumpled and has some kind of stain on it. But I can tell from his expression that I must look even worse myself. The black eyes are fading to yellow and brown, but they’re still shocking if you haven’t seen them.

‘Hi, Tom,’ I say. I pull the hospital gown up, where it’s slipped down my shoulder and he smiles, the stiff, frozen smile of someone whose social graces have temporarily deserted them.

‘Look, I have to get this off my chest,’ he blurts at last. ‘I thought it was you. I mean there was all that stuff about your past with James, and then when the police started on about your phone and the texts, I just assumed …’ He trails off. ‘I’m … I’m very sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ I say. I gesture to the chair beside the bed. ‘Look, sit down. Don’t worry about it. The police thought it was me too, and they weren’t even there.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeats, with a crack in his voice, as he sits awkwardly, hugging his knees. ‘I just … I never thought …’ He stops, and then sighs. ‘Do you know, Bruce never liked her. He loved James. I mean, really loved him, even though they had their ups and downs. But he never had much time for Clare. When I rang him last night and told him everything that’s happened he said, “I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised. She never stopped acting, that girl.”’

We sit in silence for a while as I ponder Bruce’s words, the judgement of a man I’ve never met on one of my oldest friends. And I realise he’s right. Clare never stopped acting. Even as a small child she was acting a part, the part of a good friend, the part of the perfect student, the ideal daughter, the glamorous girlfriend. And I realise, suddenly, that perhaps that’s why I found it so hard to reconcile the Clare I knew with these other people. Because she was a different person to each of us. What will happen to her, I wonder? Will a jury convict anyone so charming, so kind, so very, very beautiful?

‘I wonder …’ I say – and then stop.

‘What?’ Tom asks.

‘I keep thinking, what if I hadn’t said yes? To the hen night, I mean. I so nearly didn’t come.’

‘I don’t know,’ Tom says slowly. ‘Nina and I were talking about the same thing last night. The way I see it, you weren’t the point of all this. The point was James. You were just the icing on the cake.’

‘So you mean …’ I’m silent, working it out, and he nods.

‘I think if you hadn’t been there, it would have been one of us instead.’

‘It would have been Flo,’ I say sadly. ‘She sent the text, after all.’

Tom nods. ‘It wouldn’t have been hard for Clare to twist the truth a bit, start saying she was afraid of Flo, that Flo was jealous of James, acting irrationally. The worst thing is, we’d probably have backed her up.’

‘Have you seen Flo?’ I ask.