Chapter 4: After

AFTER

As Hannah puts the phone down, she feels the quiet of the shop close around her like a cocoon. She would never tell Cathy, but these times are the reason she came to work at Tall Tales—not the Saturday hustle and bustle of customers, or the August rush of tourists for the festival, but the quiet midweek lulls when she is—not alone, exactly, for you’re never alone in a room filled with a thousand books. But when she is alone with the books.

Christie. The Brontës. Sayers. Mitford. Dickens. These are the people who got her through the years after April’s death. She escaped the stares and sympathy of real life, the terrifying unpredictability of the internet, the horrors of a reality where you could be ambushed at any moment by a reporter or a curious stranger, or by the death of your best friend—into a world where everything was ordered. In books, a bad thing might happen on page 207, that was true. But it would always happen on page 207, no matter what. And when you reread, you could see it coming, watch out for the signs, prepare yourself.

Now she listens to the gentle spatter of the Edinburgh rain on the bow window at her back, the tick, tick of old floorboards creaking as the heating pipes come on. She feels the silent sympathy of the books. For a moment she has a visceral longing to pick up one of them, an old favorite perhaps, a novel she knows practically by heart—and sink into the pile of beanbags in the children’s section, shutting out the world.

But she can’t. She is on duty. And besides, she’s not alone. Not really. She can see Robyn now, edging her way back through the maze of little Victorian rooms that make up Tall Tales, each crowded with display tables and dump bins.

“Beep beep! Robyn Grant, tea lady extraordinaire, coming through!” she says as she enters the front of the bookshop. She plonks the two cups cheerfully down on the counter, slopping hot brown liquid dangerously close to the card display. “The one with the spoon is yours. Are you—” She looks over at Hannah, and then stops, taken aback by something in Hannah’s expression. “Hey, are you okay? You look really odd.”

Hannah’s heart sinks. Is it that obvious?

“I—I’m not sure,” she says slowly. “I’ve had some weird news.”

“Oh my God.” Robyn’s hand goes to her throat, and her eyes flick involuntarily to Hannah’s stomach, and then back up to her face. “Not—”

“No!” Hannah says quickly. She tries to smile, though it feels false and stiff. “Nothing like that—it’s just—just family stuff.”

It’s the closest she could come to the truth on the spur of the moment, but she wishes, as soon as the final words leave her mouth, that she had not chosen them. John Neville is not family. She doesn’t want him or his memory anywhere near her family.

“Do you need to go?” Robyn says. She looks at her watch and then at the empty shop. “It’s nearly five. I doubt we’ll get a rush now. I can handle anything that comes up.”

“No,” Hannah says reflexively. She shouldn’t need to leave—after all, what’s really changed? Nothing. But at the same time, the thought of trying to stand here, smiling at customers like nothing has happened, with the memories boiling and churning inside her…

“Go,” Robyn says, making up her mind. “Honestly, just go. I’ll explain to Cathy if she comes in, but she won’t mind.”

“Really?” Hannah asks, and Robyn nods firmly. Hannah stands up, picks up her phone, feeling a rush of guilt and gratitude. She finds Robyn irritating sometimes—her relentless Girl Guide–ish cheerfulness, her habit of telling customers “No, you have a great day!” over and over again. But now there’s something immensely comforting about her solid, unflappable kindness.

“Thank you so much, Robyn. I’ll return the favor, I promise.”

“Hey, no thanks needed,” Robyn says. She smiles, pats Hannah on her arm, but Hannah can see the concern in her eyes beneath the friendly smile, and she feels Robyn’s gaze on her as she walks slowly back to the staff room to gather up her things.

---

WHEN SHE LEAVES THE SHOPthe rain has stopped, and it’s a damp clear autumn afternoon, so like the day she first turned up at Pelham that for an instant the links to the past feel almost sickeningly real. As she stops at the traffic lights, waiting for the green man, she has the strangest sensation—that at any moment she might see April walking casually through the crowd, that lazy mocking smile on her lips and the deep dimples coming and going in her cheeks. For a second Hannah has to steady herself on a lamppost, the past is so real, so close. She feels an unassuageable yearning for it to be true—for that tall blond girl hurrying through the crowd with the light behind her to be April—brilliant, beautiful, alive. How would she greet her? Would she hug her? Slap her? Cry?

Hannah does not know. Maybe all of them.

She is heading through the crowds of tourists towards the bus stop for her usual number 24 back to Stockbridge, eager to get home in time to get supper on, put up her increasingly weary feet, watch some trashy TV.

But as she nears the stand and her pace doesn’t slow, she realizes that she is not going to stop, that the thought of spending twenty minutes trapped in a stuffy bus in the halting city traffic appalls her. She needs to walk. Only the pavement beneath her feet will help her pace off this sense of unease, order her thoughts before she has to face Will. And besides, what is there for her at home except an empty flat and a waiting laptop, with all the sickly glittering allure of the Google searches she knows she will perform as soon as she’s back?

For now, though, she’ll allow herself just one—just to make it real, in the same way she didn’t quite believe the child in her belly was real until she saw the images on the screen, heard the strange, subterranean whoosh and echo of its heart.

In the shadow of the castle she stops in a doorway and pulls out her phone. Then she opens up an incognito browser tab, and types the words into Google: John Neville BBC News. She doesn’t need the last part, but she’s learned not to put anything as unfettered as just his name into search engines—the sites that come up are full of gross images, wild speculation, defamatory statements about her and Will that she has neither the time nor the resources to fight.

At least the BBC can be relied upon to stick mainly to the facts.

And there it is—the top result.

BREAKING: PELHAM COLLEGE KILLER JOHN NEVILLE DIES IN PRISON

The shock is like ice water on her skin, but she steels herself and clicks through.

John Neville, better known as the Pelham Strangler, has died in prison aged 63, prison authorities confirmed earlier today.

Neville, who was convicted in 2012 of the killing of college student April Clarke-Cliveden, died in the early hours of this morning. A prison spokesperson said that he had suffered a massive heart attack, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Mersey Hospital.

Neville’s lawyer, Clive Merritt, said that his client was in the process of preparing a fresh appeal when he died. “He went to his grave protesting his innocence,” Merritt told the BBC. “It’s a huge injustice that his chance of overturning his conviction dies with him.”

The Clarke-Cliveden family were unavailable for comment.

Hannah’s hands are trembling. It’s been so long since she voluntarily sought out news of Neville that she’d forgotten how it feels to be confronted with his name, with the memories of April, and worst of all with their pictures. There are only a few shots out there of Neville—the one used most is his college ID, a glowering image like a police mug shot, where he stares uncompromisingly out of the screen at the viewer, his gaze discomfitingly direct. Seeing his face is enough of a jolt, but the pieces Hannah really hates are the ones that focus on April—lissome social media snaps of her sprawled in punts, draped over other students, their faces pixelated to protect a privacy long since ripped away from her.

Worst of all are the shots of her dead body.

Those pictures aren’t supposed to be out there, but of course they are. You can find anything on the internet, and before Hannah learned to stop searching, long before she figured out how to use incognito tabs, Google’s algorithm identified her as someone with an interest in the Pelham Strangler, offering up clickbait articles on the subject with a sickening regularity.

Is this helpful?her phone would ask, and after she had clicked Not Interested enough times, stabbing the screen with such force that her shaking fingers felt the shock of impact long after she had put the phone away, eventually it got the message and stopped showing her the links. But even now, occasionally one will slip through, prompted by some inscrutable inner quirk deep in the workings of Google’s news algorithm, and she will open up her phone to see April smiling out at her, with that clear direct gaze that still stabs her to the heart, even ten years on. And every now and again someone will track her down, and an email will ping, unsolicited, into her inbox. Are you the Hannah Jones who was involved with the April Clarke-Cliveden murder? I’m writing a piece / a college essay / a psychological profile / an article on John Neville’s appeal.

At first she replied, angrily, using words like morbid and vulture. Then, when she’d learned that only made them keep trying or include her furious emails in their article as attributed quotes, she changed tack. No. My name is Hannah de Chastaigne. I can’t help you.

But that was a mistake too. It wasn’t just that it felt like a betrayal of April. For the researchers to have gotten this far, to have tracked down her email address, they knew. They knew who Will was, and they knew who she was, and the fact that she had taken Will’s name on marriage did nothing to obscure her tracks.

“Why don’t you just ignore them?” Will asked, baffled, when she told him about them. “That’s what I do.”

And of course he was right. Now she simply doesn’t reply. But still, she can’t quite bring herself to delete them. So they sit there, in a special folder buried deep at the bottom of her inbox. It’s titled Requests. Just that. And one day, she keeps promising herself, one day when it’s all over, she will erase the whole lot.

But somehow that day has never quite come.

Now she’s wondering if it ever will.

She is about to shut down the screen when she looks, for the first time, at the photograph accompanying the article. It’s not one of April. It’s Neville. But it’s a shot she’s never seen before—not the hatchet-faced ID card she knows so well, nor the snatched paparazzi snap of him sticking two fingers up at reporters outside court. No, this one must have been taken much later, at one of his many appeals, probably quite a recent one. He looks old, and more than that, he looks frail. He has lost weight, and although it’s not possible that he’s lost height, he looks so far removed from the towering figure Hannah remembers that it’s hard to believe they are the same person. He’s dressed in a prison uniform that seems to hang off his gaunt frame, and he is staring at the camera with a haunted, hunted expression that seems to suck the viewer into his nightmare.

“Excuse me.” The terse voice comes from behind her and she jumps, realizing that she has ground to a halt in the middle of King’s Stables underpass, and a woman is trying to get past.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” she stammers, shutting down the phone with hands that aren’t quite steady and shoving it into her pocket as though it has been contaminated by the image on the screen. “Sorry.”

The woman pushes past with a shake of her head, and Hannah starts for home. But even as she comes out of the dark underpass, into the autumn sunlight, she can still feel it—still feel his eyes upon her, that dark, hunted gaze, like he is beseeching her for something—she just doesn’t know what.

---

IT’S QUITE DARK BY THEtime Hannah finally turns into Stockbridge Mews, her feet sore with walking, and she has to search in her handbag for the keys, cursing the fact that no one has replaced the burned-out bulb above the shared front door.

But at last she is inside, up the stairs, and the door of their flat is closed behind her.

For a long time she just stands there, her back against the door, feeling the silence of the flat all around her. She is home before Will, and she’s glad—glad of this moment to just stand there in the cool, quiet welcome of their little flat, letting it wash over her.

She should put on the kettle, take off her shoes, turn on the lights. But she does none of these things. Instead she just goes through to the living room, slumps into an armchair, and sits, trying to come to terms with what has just happened.

She is still sitting there when she hears Will’s bike draw up outside, its throaty roar reverberating off the other houses in the narrow mews. He kills the engine, and a few moments later she hears his key in the downstairs lock and the noise of him coming up the stairs.

As he opens the front door she knows she should get up, say something, but she can’t. She just doesn’t have the energy.

She hears him dump his bag in the hallway stand, come down the corridor, hissing some silly pop song between his teeth, flick on the lights—and then stop.

“Hannah?”

He’s standing in front of her, blinking, trying to make sense of her being here, alone in the dark.

“Han! What are you—is everything okay?”

Hannah swallows, trying to find the words, but the only one that comes out is a cracked “No.”

Will’s face changes at that. He falls to his knees in front of her, his face suddenly frightened, his hands on hers, holding her.

“Han, it’s not—it isn’t—has something happened? Is it the baby?”

“No!” It comes quickly this time, as she suddenly understands his concern. “Oh my God, no, nothing like that.” She swallows, forcing out the words. “Will—it’s—it’s John Neville. He’s dead.”

It’s unintentionally brutal—harsher even than the way her mother told her—but she’s too shaken and broken to figure out a better way of conveying the news.

Will says nothing, but he lets his hands drop, and his face for a second goes unguardedly, heartbreakingly vulnerable—before he closes in on himself. He stands, moves over to the bay window, and leans against the shutters, looking out into the darkness of the mews. She can see his face only in profile, pale against his dark hair and the blackness of the glass behind him.

She’s always found him hard to read in moments like this—he’s generous with his joys, but when he’s in pain or afraid, he holds his emotions close to his chest, as if he can’t bear being seen to be hurting—a legacy, she supposes, of a military father and a boarding education at a school where showing emotion was for sissies and crybabies. If it weren’t for that split second when he let his defenses drop, she would have thought he hadn’t heard what she said. Now she’s not sure what’s going on underneath his silence, behind the polite, neutral mask of his face.

“Will?” she says at last. “Say something.”

He turns and looks at her, as if he has been very far away.

“Good.”

It’s just that one word, but there’s a brutality in his voice that she’s never heard before, and it shocks her.

“Now,” he says. “What’s for supper?”