Chapter 26: After

AFTER

The bell above the Bonnie Bagel’s old-fashioned door gives a tinkling chime as Hannah pushes it open. Inside she stands for a moment, catching her breath and waiting for her glasses to unfog. As the lenses clear she glances around the little cafe; there’s no one here, even though she’s ten minutes late.

For a second her heart lightens. Maybe he’s given up, gone home? She won’t hang around to find out. She’ll send him an email—I’m here, but I must have missed you. She’s about to turn on her heel, breathing more easily with a palpable sense of having discharged her duty to the young man, when a woman hurries out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Hello love, sorry I didnae hear you come in. Where would you be wanting to sit?”

“Well…” Hannah hesitates. “Actually I was here to meet a friend, but I think I’ve missed him. I should probably—”

She’s turning towards the door when the woman interrupts, cheerful and happy to be of help.

“Young man with sandy hair? No, no, you havenae missed him, he’s just in the back room, there. Said you’d be wanting to talk so could he have a quiet table. Mind, they’re all that way today! I don’t know what’s making the tourists so shy, it cannae be the rain for we’ve had none to speak of.” She gives a comfortable laugh. Hannah feels her face fall, and then tries to rearrange it into something more appropriate for someone who’s just avoided a wasted journey.

“Oh, good. Thank you,” she says weakly.

“Will I bring you up a cup of something? Tea? Coffee? Or a scone maybe?”

“I’ll… um… I’ll just have a bottle of mineral water, please,” Hannah says. “Flat.”

The woman nods. “I’ll bring it up, love. It’s just through there, up the stairs.”

Hannah nods back, then hitches her bag up over her shoulder and makes her way through the arch the woman indicated and up a half flight of stairs.

Geraint is sitting at a table by the window, though he stands as she comes in.

“H-Hannah, hi.” The sun is shining through the window and it turns the tips of his ears pink, making it look as though he’s blushing, though she’s not sure if he is.

“Hi,” she says awkwardly. He pulls out a chair and makes a little gesture and she sits, feeling like an idiot and beginning to wonder if this was a huge mistake. She’s grateful for the privacy, but she hadn’t bargained on being tucked away at the back of the cafe like this—it’s going to be very difficult to make a quick getaway if the conversation takes a turn she doesn’t like. There’s a brief pause.

“Do you want to see the menu?” Geraint asks.

Hannah shakes her head. “No, it’s fine, thank you. I already ordered downstairs. How are you?”

It’s a stupid question, meaningless really, but she doesn’t know what else to say, and apparently neither does Geraint because he seizes on it gratefully.

“Yeah, good, I mean, really happy that you agreed to come and meet with me. I just wanted to say that—I know it was, well I mean, I wasn’t expecting—”

You didn’t really give me any choice, she thinks resentfully, but she’s finding it hard to resent him now that they’re face-to-face. He looks so anxious and unthreatening. So… nice.

“You said you’re a friend of Ryan’s?” she says at last when he runs out of steam, and Geraint nods.

“Yeah, he was working at the Herald when I started there after uni, and he was—well, I guess, you’d call him my mentor.” He looks down at his hands, his face suddenly seeming years older. “He’s such a good bloke. I felt terrible about what happened.”

“Yeah, me too,” Hannah says softly. “How”—she swallows—“how is he?”

“I mean, good, I think? It was pretty awful at first, I used to go and visit him in that horrible convalescent place, you know the one that smelled of cabbage.”

Hannah nods, but it’s a kind of lie. She doesn’t know the place Geraint is talking about. She is painfully aware of the way she and Will let Ryan down—although that’s not completely fair on Will. Left to his own devices, Will, she is fairly sure, would have kept in touch with the others, the way he’s kept up with Hugh. It was she who fled England, she who dropped ties with everyone from Pelham, refusing to go back, to dredge up memories. Will had wanted to invite Ryan and Emily to their wedding, make it a proper catch-up with save-the-date cards and a hotel in the Borders—it was Hannah who pushed for the registry office, just Hugh as best man, and her father to give her away. And Will, as he always does, agreed—not wanting to cause her pain.

But now, listening to Geraint chatting on about Ryan’s grueling journey back from his stroke, she realizes what they did, what she did, and she feels a sharp stab of something halfway between grief and guilt.

“But he’s really enjoying being back home with Bella,” Geraint finishes. “I know that’s made a huge difference. That and the fact that he can talk and type again. I think he was going up the wall not being able to speak or write, for someone like him, I mean he’s never exactly held back from giving his opinion, has he?”

Hannah laughs at that, a shaky laugh but a real one. Because it’s true. And because, black as it is, she can see the humor in poor Ryan, the person who always talked longest and loudest at any party, the person who would pin you against the wall in the kitchen to harangue you about late-stage capitalism and Engels and Marx, being silent against his own will—having to listen to all the nurses chattering on without a single I think you’ll find, or Look, love, if you haven’t read David Graeber…

“No,” she says now. “That’s true.”

There’s a long silence. Geraint stirs his coffee, staring down into the depths as though he can find a conversation starter in there if he swirls the murky liquid hard enough. He looks for a moment as if he might be about to speak, but then there are footsteps on the stairs, and they both turn to see the cafe owner coming through the doorway with a bottle of mineral water and a glass of ice balanced slightly precariously on a tray. She puts it down on the little table and then smiles at them both.

“There you are, loves. Anything else, you just give me a shout, I’m only downstairs. I’ll hear you. I’ll leave you be now.”

And then she departs.

Hannah opens the water and pours it, more to have something to do than because she is really thirsty. And then, because she has the increasing feeling that if she doesn’t bring it up they will never get to the point, she says, “So. What did you want to ask me?”

Geraint flushes, and for a moment there is a flicker of almost absurd relief on his face, as though she has absolved him of something. He swallows his coffee with determination and speaks.

“So. Yes. First of all, thanks for agreeing to talk about this. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to revisit all this so many years on.”

Amen, Hannah thinks, but she says nothing, only waits for him to continue.

“So a bit of background about me—I first heard about the case when I was a teenager and I guess… well, I guess I was just fascinated really. I was a bit of a morbid kid and there was something about it, something about April…” He trails off.

I bet there was, Hannah thinks, but again, she does not say it. She knows, though, exactly what that something was that Geraint is talking about—the shots of April’s lovely, high-cheekboned face, the photographs of her lounging on the banks of the Isis, one shoulder bare as the strap of her top slipped down her arm. April was every spotty young teenager’s fantasy girlfriend, and the fact that she had been murdered probably only made her more unattainable and therefore safer to desire.

“So anyway,” Geraint is saying, “I kept reading accounts of the case, and earlier this year I did this long-form article about it—it was called ‘Death of an It Girl—Ten Years On, Ten Unanswered Questions.’ Maybe you read it?”

Hannah shakes her head. She’s unsure whether to be honest, whether to tell Geraint that she hasn’t read any press about April’s murder for years, but Geraint is still talking.

“The piece went kind of viral and, well, long story short, I’ve been commissioned to do a ten-part podcast on the case.”

“Okay,” Hannah says slowly. She’s not sure why, but a podcast makes her feel even more uneasy than an article. Then something occurs to her. “You’re not recording this conversation, are you?”

“Um, I mean, no,” Geraint says, a little awkwardly. “Not yet. That’s to say, I usually do record stuff just for my own records, but I wouldn’t broadcast anything from today. I’m still in the research stage. Would you rather I didn’t? I can just take notes if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

“I would prefer that,” Hannah says a little stiffly. She knows she’s being irrational—what’s the difference between a quote on paper versus recorded on a phone? And yet the idea of Geraint capturing her trembling voice talking about that night—it feels unbearable.

“Okay, sure,” Geraint says. He puts his phone away and takes out a pen and a notebook. “Look, I want to be really clear, I don’t want this to be a whitewash. I’m not out to prove Neville’s innocence if he really did it. In fact that’s why I wanted to talk to you, make sure I did justice to the case against him. I just—I just want to understand what happened. There’s gaps I’ve never been able to fill in.”

Hannah says nothing at that. She is holding the water glass so tight her fingers are white.

“Could you—would you mind just… going over what happened that night?” Geraint asks now. His expression is diffident, and he is twisting his fingers together, playing with his pen.

Hannah takes a deep breath. This is not new, it’s all stuff she has gone over a thousand times before; you would think the pain would have dulled, but it hasn’t, or not completely. Still, it’s better if she just gives Geraint chapter and verse, and then he can go away and get rid of whatever little conspiracy theory he’s dreamed up.

“It was late. I’d been in the college bar. Hugh was there, and so was Ryan. Emily was working on some problems in the library. Will wasn’t in college, he’d gone home for the weekend. It was the last night of April’s play, Medea, and we’d arranged this celebration—special cocktails and everything. And about three-quarters of the way through the evening, April went up to our room to change… and she never came back. So I went to find her.”

She closes her eyes, remembering. Remembering the feel of the grass beneath her feet as she and Hugh ran lightly across the Fellows’ Garden. The glow coming from April’s bedroom window as they crossed the quad.

And then, Neville. Slipping out of the opening to the number 7 staircase, his steps surprisingly quiet for such a big man. She had stopped, frozen, half expecting him to see her—but if he did he gave no sign of it. He just turned and hurried off into the night, and she had continued to the foot of the stairwell.

And then—and then—and then—

“I climbed the stairs up to our landing. And the door was open.” Her voice sounds strange in her own ears. “Just like before—just like that night when I came back and found Neville there, waiting. I should have known something was wrong. But I didn’t. I didn’t suspect anything, even though he’d been on the stairs. I should have known.”

The pictures come now, seared into her memory like images seen in flashes of lightning. Her hand on the door. A fan of dark hair, April’s Medea wig, splayed across the rug. And then—

But that’s where it cuts out. The mind protects itself from what is too painful to face, a psychologist told her once, which made the fury rise up inside her, because that sounds like she wants to forget, like it’s an act of supreme selfishness.

“I don’t remember much after that,” she says now. She puts the glass to her lips and takes a long swallow, feeling the iced water numbing her throat and shooting needles of pain through her teeth.

“So it’s never come back?” Geraint says, scribbling, and she shakes her head.

“Flashes, sometimes, in dreams. But I’m never sure how much of that is memory and how much of it’s just my mind reconstructing what it thinks I saw. Nothing I can rely on. I definitely saw Neville, though, coming down the stairs from our room. That, I’m absolutely certain of.”

“The thing is, John Neville came from my town,” Geraint says now. Hannah looks up from her water.

“He did?”

“Yes, his mum lived round the corner from my aunt, and obviously that doesn’t make him innocent, but I suppose it gave me a different kind of perspective on him. I heard all about his defense case, and the holes in the prosecution. It’s not just the crime scene stuff, although that’s odd enough. The fact that they never found any traces of Neville’s DNA on April is something no one ever really explained. Okay, the killer could have used gloves, but it doesn’t seem credible that Neville could have strangled April without her clawing at him or fighting back. For that matter, no one heard a struggle at all, even though there were people in the room below. But it’s not just that—there were loads of other angles the defense never brought up. For example, did you know that April was supposedly pregnant when she died?”

There is a clatter. Hannah has knocked over the glass bottle of water. Fortunately it’s empty, or near enough, and now she scrambles to pick it up before it rolls off the table, her cheeks flaming, trying to figure out what she’s going to say to this extraordinary assertion.

“Sorry,” Geraint is saying, as though it were he who knocked over the bottle. He moves his notebook, mops at the small puddle of water with his napkin. “Sorry, sorry. I take it you didn’t know?”

“No,” Hannah says thinly. She goes to put her hand over her own stomach, and then stops herself. She is still at the stage where her pregnancy isn’t completely obvious to strangers. People who know her can tell she’s changed shape, but to Geraint she might be just carrying a bit of extra weight, and for some reason she doesn’t want him to know, though she can’t put her finger on why.

She feels a strange flutter inside her and the sensation stops her in her tracks. Is it the baby? She hasn’t felt it kick yet—the books say anytime between twenty and twenty-four weeks is normal for a first pregnancy. She is just over twenty-three weeks now, and has been waiting, bated breath, trying to figure out if every little flicker is her child, or just a muscle ticcing. Now she is completely distracted, and Geraint has to say, “Hannah? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says, dragging her mind back to the present. “I’m—no, I didn’t know. But to be honest—”

She stops. She doesn’t want to call this a lie to Geraint’s face. It will make her look prejudiced, set in her opinion. But his words have angered her. April, pregnant? It’s ridiculous.

“Look, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m—” She stops, corrects her tense, as she has so many times before. “I was her roommate, her best friend. I find it really unlikely that she wouldn’t have told me something like that. And if it were true, why wouldn’t Neville’s lawyers have brought it up at the trial? It just—it doesn’t ring true to me. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I agree,” Geraint says urgently. “I dismissed it too when I first heard it. But when I asked Ryan, he confirmed it.”

Hannah goes completely still. She has no idea what to say, and she finds she is gaping at Geraint, her mouth open. She closes it, but the words still don’t come and the silence hangs between them, oppressive. Inside her head, though, it’s the opposite problem. There are too many words—words buzzing and whining like bees in a jar. Ryan. April. Pregnant.

Why on earth would she have told Ryan, of all people? Unless…

But Geraint is speaking, cutting across her spiraling thoughts.

“Ryan’s theory was the defense didn’t bring it up because they thought it would look like victim blaming,” he says. “You know, smearing someone’s sexual past to distract from what’s happened to them. They believed it would go down very badly with the jury, and they thought they could get Neville off by pointing out other flaws in the evidence. Only… it didn’t work.”

“And Ryan told you this? He confirmed it?”

Geraint nods.

“Did he say why April told him?”

Geraint shakes his head.

Hannah sits back, trying to make sense of this. But she can’t. It makes no sense at all. Can it really be true? Or is this another one of April’s pranks?

“The thing is…” she says now, the words coming slowly. “The thing that you have to remember is that April was… well, she made stuff up.”

“What do you mean?” Geraint looks puzzled.

“She was… I suppose you’d call it a practical joker, though it doesn’t seem very funny in hindsight. She used to do stuff to get a rise out of people. Elaborate stuff sometimes. Like she sent Hugh this whole thing about how his mobile phone had a possible safety recall on it, and persuaded him to ring up Nokia and go through this diagnostic test. Only of course the number wasn’t Nokia, it was April. She put on this funny accent and talked him through the supposed test, and I can’t remember the whole thing, but the punch line involved typing out what was supposed to be a diagnostic numerical command code—it was back when some of the older phones still had a number pad. Only when you typed out the numbers in a text message it came out as I am a knob.”

“Ha!” Geraint says, and then looks slightly ashamed of his own levity, as if he forgot, for a moment, the gravity of why they are here and how the topic came up. “So… um…” he says, more diffidently. “Do you think this was a practical joke against Ryan?”

“Maybe,” Hannah says, but it sounds weak in her own ears, and she knows it. Her heart is still thumping and her mind is whirling, trying to figure things out.

Why would April have chosen Ryan, out of all the possibilities, to confide in? And why would Ryan believe her?

She thinks of April’s closed door, early in the morning, of the unmistakable sound of two people having sex, filtering through the wood.

She thinks of the way she walked into breakfast to find Will already there, cheerful and unsuspecting. Could I be cheeky and get you to grab me another coffee if you’re going up?

“I’m sorry,” she says now. She pushes away her glass and stands up. “I’m really sorry, I have to get back. I’ve got an appointment. I hope this was helpful.”

But she knows it wasn’t. She doesn’t know what Geraint wants from her, but whatever it is, was, she’s fairly sure he didn’t get it. She’s told him nothing he didn’t already know. She, on the other hand, has a whole mess of unwanted information and thoughts in return that she is going to have to sift, sort, and eventually live with. Why did Icome here? she wants to cry as she turns for the door. Why did I agree to this?

“Yeah, thanks,” Geraint says. He’s standing too, and now he follows her to the door, though she desperately wants to tell him not to. “I really appreciate it. Listen, could I call you sometime, if I dig anything else up?”

She stops at that, turns, trying to keep her face neutral so that it doesn’t reveal to him all the horror that’s roiling underneath. Dig something up? Why? Why would he do this?

“What do you mean?” she says, her voice level. “What kind of thing?”

“Well, you know, I’m talking to people—Neville’s lawyers, some of April’s family. If there’s something I think you might want to know—”

No, is what she wants to say. In fact she wants to scream it. No, there is nothing about that case I could possibly want to know. I want to forget it—move on—pretend none of it ever happened. Leave me alone!

But she can’t forget it. She can’t pretend it never happened. Not if it’s really true that she made a mistake. Because Geraint’s right—she’s spent over a decade trying to strangle those doubts, push them down, hide them away. But they’ve always been there, gnawing at her. Why would Neville protest his innocence, year after year, sabotaging his own chance at release, if he was really guilty? Why didn’t anyone hear a struggle, why wasn’t there any DNA at the scene? These are all questions that have floated to the top of her mind in the long hours between midnight and dawn, questions she’s pushed back down, drowned in sleeping pills and therapy and the reassuring monotony of everyday life.

And now this—the news that April may have been pregnant… it feels like the last straw. Something she can’t ignore, can’t push away.

She shuts her eyes. The image of Neville, the gaunt, frail old man in the BBC news clip, floats up before her eyes, with his hunted, pleading expression…

She opens them again.

“Fine.” The word that comes out of her lips is short, clipped, almost strangled, spoken in spite of herself.

Then she turns, clatters down the stairs, shoves a fiver onto the payment desk, and leaves without waiting for change, with the nice owner looking after her in surprise.

“Are you okay, pet?” she hears as the door slams shut after her, and she wants to say yes. She wants to say, I’m fine, it’s nothing, everything’s going to be okay.

But none of it’s true.