Chapter 39: After

AFTER

For a moment Hannah thinks she’s going to faint. Everything goes very far away, and there is a roaring sound in her ears. She holds on to the edge of the table with both hands, trying to steady herself, trying to tell herself this cannot be true.

“Hannah?” she hears Geraint saying, worriedly. “Hannah? Are you okay?”

“Hi,” the girl says. She comes towards them, shoving her mobile into the pocket of her silk harem pants. Her Louboutins click as she walks across the marble. She holds out a hand towards Hannah. “Hi. I’m November, really pleased to meet you.”

And then—something snaps into place. Hannah isn’t sure whether it’s the sound of the girl’s voice, which is very like April’s, but not April’s, or something in her eyes. There is no mistaking that expression; the girl coming towards her does not recognize Hannah and even April, superb actress though she was, could not have faked that.

“Who—who are you?” Hannah says, and her voice is harsher than she intended; it comes out as a kind of hoarse accusation.

“Oh God,” Geraint says, as if he understands only now what he has done. “I’m so sorry, I should have said—I thought you knew. November is April’s sister.”

Hannah blinks. And then, very slowly, she sits down. The girl—November—sits opposite her, and she smiles, a soft, sad smile that’s so like April’s it catches at Hannah’s heart, but she doesn’t have April’s dimple, and for some reason Hannah finds that obscurely comforting; concrete evidence that these are not the same people. Up close she can see that the girl is also much too young to be April. She is closer to the April Hannah remembers than April as she would be now—if she had lived. This girl can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three.

“I’m sorry we never met,” November is saying. “I heard about you, of course, from April. I kept begging to come and stay in Oxford, but I was just her little snot-nosed baby sister at the time. And then afterwards, I think my parents wanted to protect me from all the coverage. I was never allowed in court or anything. I can understand why, to be honest—I was only eleven or twelve at the time.”

“I—I’m sorry too,” Hannah says. She is still trying to make sense of this. April’s sister—after all these years. And what was it Geraint had called her in his introduction? November Rain? “I’m sorry, did Geraint say your surname was Rain? Did you change it?”

“Oh…” November gives a slightly self-conscious laugh and brushes her short white-blond hair out of her eyes. She is wearing long feathered earrings, Hannah sees, the tips brushing her tanned bare shoulders. “Sort of. Rain is my professional name, I suppose you’d call it. I’m an Instagram influencer, but Clarke-Cliveden as a surname… aside from sounding a bit posh, it’s got all that… history. Rain… I suppose it was just a bit of a joke. The song, you know. And somehow it seemed to make the November part stand out less.”

Of course. Suddenly Hannah understands the photo shoot, the hotel, November’s effortlessly made-up beauty. Out of context the name hadn’t clicked, but even Hannah, who rarely goes on Instagram except to torture herself with memories of April, has heard of beauty influencer November Rain.

“I’ve been in Edinburgh all week doing a shoot for D and G, and, well, it just seemed like serendipity. When Geraint messaged me on Insta and said you lived here, and would I have time to meet…”

She shrugs. A waiter arrives with Geraint’s Americano and Hannah’s cappuccino and there is a brief pause as they sort out the drinks and Hannah refuses sugar.

When the waiter is gone Hannah takes a deep breath. There is so much she wants to ask November, so much she wants to discuss, but she has to cut to the chase here, she doesn’t have much time.

“November, I’m sorry to ask this so abruptly, but I’ve only got a short lunch hour. I have to get back to work pretty soon. Geraint said… he said that you knew something… about the autopsy?”

November nods.

“Yes. I mean—not everything. Obviously no one was going to tell a twelve-year-old girl the grisly details, but they couldn’t stop me listening at doors and so on. There was a lot of stuff that didn’t come out in court—the drugs, the pregnancy—”

Hannah catches her breath at that. So it’s true?

“How—um—oh my God.” She lets out a shaking breath. “I’m sorry, this is a lot. So, she definitely was pregnant?”

“Or had been very recently,” November says. “I was never quite sure which. Whichever it was, there were enough hormones for them to trip a blood test. And I think they tried to do DNA matches to determine a father, but I’m not sure if they ever pinned it down. I don’t know if they just didn’t swab enough people or if they couldn’t get enough DNA from April to get a good profile.”

Hannah shuts her eyes. Suddenly it all makes sense. She remembers the police coming around, swabbing her, Will, Ryan, and all the others. “Elimination DNA,” they called it, along with the fingerprints. At the time Hannah had assumed it was simply to rule out all the people who had been in April’s room for innocent reasons. Now she wonders if there was more to it than that, with the boys at least.

“So it wasn’t—” Her voice is croaky, and she is not sure she can bear to say it, but she has to. “It—it wasn’t… Will’s?”

November shakes her head sympathetically, but her eyes are sad.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I don’t think so, or I think we would have heard. But I just don’t know for certain. You could probably go to the police and ask—I don’t know if they would tell you, though.”

But now it’s Hannah’s turn to shake her head. She knows she won’t do that. Not just because the police are unlikely to hand out confidential information on a closed case. Not just because of what it might unleash if she admitted her fears, admitted that all these years later she is becoming more and more uncertain of whether she pointed the finger at the right man. But because she is afraid of what she might find out.

“Wh-what about your parents?” she asks now. “Would they know?”

“I doubt it,” November says. “My father died—did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Hannah says. She bites her lip. “I’m so sorry.”

“Massive heart attack two years ago. He was never really right after April’s death, to be honest. She was his firstborn, his golden girl, you know? I don’t think he ever got over what happened. And my mother… well, perhaps April told you. She has… problems. Even before April died. Her memory isn’t reliable at the best of times and she’s done her best to block all this out. I don’t think she would agree to talk about it, and even if she did, I don’t think you could trust anything she told you.”

“Oh God, November, I’m so sorry,” Hannah says. “That’s so difficult.”

November gives a little shrug as if to say, What can you do?

“And… drugs?” Hannah asks. “You said the autopsy showed up drugs in her system? Did that have something to do with her death?”

“No, I don’t think so,” November says. She sighs. “From what I could tell it was mostly that stuff, what’s it called—they give it to kids with ADHD… dex something.”

“Dextroamphetamine,” Geraint says quietly, and November nods.

“That’s it. They found a stash of it in her room at home, as well as at college. I don’t think there was any suggestion that someone gave it to her covertly, or she overdosed. She was taking it deliberately, methodically, and for quite a long time. I’d say she was well aware of the toxicity.”

“An ADHD medication?” Hannah is puzzled. “But that makes no sense. Why would April be taking that? She didn’t have ADHD.”

“It’s sometimes used as a study aid,” Geraint says. “They gave it to air force pilots in the war, to help them concentrate and stay awake. Kids use it to pull all-nighters, study for exams and so on. But it’s not easy to get hold of—you have to have a prescription because it can be extremely addictive if you’re using it recreationally. It’s highly controlled.”

“Oh God.” Suddenly so many things click into focus. April’s frequent red-eye essays, her seemingly superhuman ability to act all week and then study all night. Hannah remembers her own complaints about her essay, April holding out her hand, two pills in her palm, Hannah’s puzzled What are they—like, NoDoz or something? And the way April laughed, and said dryly, NoDoz for grown-ups.

“What do they look like?” she asks Geraint, and he googles for a moment and then holds out his phone. Hannah’s heart sinks. It’s them. It’s the capsules filled with little beads that April offered her so long ago.

“I knew she was taking those,” she says. “I just didn’t know what they were. But—that doesn’t have anything to do with her death, does it?”

November shakes her head.

“I don’t think so. I assume that’s why it never came out at the trial. The pregnancy stuff, though… I mean, I’m surprised Neville’s defense lawyer never brought it up.”

“I think they thought it was too risky,” Geraint says. “I mean, they had a good shot with reasonable doubt—there wasn’t anything concrete to tie him to April’s death apart from having been seen coming out of the building around the time she was killed. But he did badly in the witness box.”

Hannah nods. She remembers hearing about this. First, Neville had denied being in the room at all—had claimed that he had simply been checking something in the building. But halfway through cross-examination he’d become flustered and changed his story—confronted with fingerprints on the inside doorknob, he had abruptly admitted that he had been in the room. But he said that he had simply been bringing up the weekly parcel from Hannah’s mum, and that April had let him in. He claimed they’d had a pleasant chat, which Hannah found implausible in itself, and that he had left her alive and well just a few minutes later.

That had sealed his fate. By John Neville’s account, he had seen April alive at 11:00 p.m. Hannah and Hugh had discovered her dead body just a few minutes later—and they’d had a clear view of the entrance for the whole time. There had been absolutely no opportunity for anyone else to enter staircase 7. It was Neville, or no one.

Or… was it?

Hannah is frowning, trying to puzzle something out, when she realizes Geraint is speaking again.

“The thing is, being devil’s advocate for a moment,” he is saying, “even if April was pregnant, it’s hard to see what that’s got to do with the case. It’s not Victorian England. No one was going to force anyone into a shotgun marriage. There’s the sexual jealousy angle”—he shoots Hannah an apologetic look, knowing that he is tacitly pointing the finger at Will here—“strangulation typically points to a domestic murder, usually a crime of passion—but April’s boyfriend was never in the picture, he was away from college the night of the murder. Pregnancy just isn’t much of a motive.”

“Well, you say that,” November puts in. “But there’s pregnancy and there’s pregnancy. What if it was someone who couldn’t afford to be found sleeping with a student? Someone whose job or marriage might be at stake?”

“You mean a member of staff?” Geraint asks. November shrugs and Geraint looks intrigued. “It’s certainly a possibility,” he says.

“Oh my God,” Hannah says. Her hands have gone suddenly cold. “Oh my God.”

“What?” Geraint asks, and then frowns. “Are you all right, Hannah?”

Hannah shakes her head, but she’s not sure if she means I’m not all right, or That doesn’t matter right now. She knows her face has gone pale, and from Geraint’s expression she can tell that she must look as stricken as she feels.

“Dr. Myers,” she whispers, more to herself than to them.

“Who?” November says. Geraint is frowning.

“That tutor who lived on your stairwell?”

“Yes.” Hannah’s heart has started pounding, sickeningly hard. She feels unutterably stupid. She cannot believe this never occurred to her before. “Yes. Oh my God, he’s the one person who could have accessed April’s room between Neville leaving and me and Hugh arriving. He wouldn’t have needed to enter the building, he was already there.”

“But are you saying—” Geraint frowns, and then starts again. “He couldn’t have got April pregnant, surely? He wasn’t even her tutor.”

“No, he was mine—but April knew him. She went to a party he threw. He had this reputation.” Hannah feels sick. There is a buzzing in her ears. “He used to invite students—female students—out for drinks. They were all April’s type, very beautiful, very—”

Suddenly she cannot go on. The ringing in her ears is growing louder. The room is taking on a strange, distant quality.

“Are you saying he could have been sleeping with her?” Geraint asks. He looks skeptical but also strangely hopeful. Hannah feels anything but.

“I don’t know—” Hannah manages. Her tongue feels strange and thick in her mouth. Her fingers are freezing. She feels numb all over. “Did I get it wrong all along? I don’t—I don’t—”

The words are not coming. Suddenly her body feels as if it doesn’t belong to her, like her limbs are made of Plasticine.

“I don’t—” she says. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from very far away.

“Hannah?” she hears. “Hannah, are you okay?”

“I—”

Everything disintegrates, and she slides into the dark.