Chapter 46: After

AFTER

“So? How did it go?”

Emily, Hannah remembers with a sigh, is nothing if not direct. They’ve done the obligatory small talk, ordered and received their food—but now she’s getting down to business.

“It went… okay, I think?” She turns to November for confirmation, but November is winding ramen around her chopsticks and only shrugs.

“Okay? What does that mean? Did he do it, that’s what I’m asking.”

Hannah cannot suppress a flinch, and even Emily has the grace to look abashed.

“Sorry. That was a bit brutal. But isn’t that why you’re here? Did he explain anything? Did he say why he didn’t come out to help?”

“He did,” November says. She sucks noodles into her mouth, then swallows. “He wasn’t there.”

“What?”

“That’s his story, he wasn’t there. That’s why he didn’t hear anything, why he didn’t come out to help, why he was never called to give evidence in court. He was presenting at a conference in Cambridge and stayed the night there. He didn’t see or hear anything.”

“Is that true?” Emily demands. She looks from November to Hannah, as if they are the ones covering up for Dr. Myers. “I mean, it’s a bit too convenient for him, don’t you think?”

“I have no idea,” Hannah says, a little wearily. “But it’s what he said, when November asked him if he could tell us anything about that night. And it would have been pretty easy to check at the time, so if the police accepted it, I would imagine yes, it’s true.”

“So you’re back at square one?” Emily says.

“Maybe,” Hannah says.

“So does that mean that maybe you’re not back at square one? That you found something out?”

“It just means maybe,” Hannah says, a little more acidly this time. She is regretting her choice of words now. The truth is that she is not sure if they are back at square one. Something has been gnawing at her since her conversation in the set with November, something November made her see with fresh eyes. But she’s not sure she wants to share it with Emily. Not yet—not while she’s still figuring out the implications.

“Are you… okay?”

“How do you mean?” Hannah shifts in her seat. She can’t get comfortable. The seat belt is cutting into her bump and her spine aches from the fashionable backless benches in the restaurant. “Is this about me saying I didn’t want coffee? I was just tired, that’s all.”

“I didn’t mean that. It was the way you went quiet halfway through the meal. I wondered if something had happened.”

“Shit.” Hannah bites her lip. “Was it that obvious?”

“It was a bit.” November looks awkward. “I mean, Emily started grilling you about Dr. Myers and you… you just clammed up. Did I miss something? I mean, that was what we went there to find out, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like she was asking anything we hadn’t been thinking.”

“No,” Hannah says. She rubs her face. What she said to November about feeling tired was an understatement.

“Are you worrying that Myers’s alibi doesn’t hold up?” November asks anxiously. “I was thinking about that earlier—I mean, he could have come back. After establishing his alibi at the conference.”

Hannah shakes her head.

“I really don’t think so. I mean, when? The porters would have seen him coming through the main gates, and if he’d used one of the unmanned ones, he would have had to swipe in, and his Bod card would have been recorded. I mean…” Something strikes her for the first time. “I guess… there’s always the possibility he climbed over that gap in the wall.”

“A gap in the wall?” November sounds puzzled, and Hannah realizes that of course she wouldn’t know any of this. It’s strange, she’s so like April, and she clearly knows so much about their friendships and their time at Pelham, that it’s hard for Hannah to remember that she was never actually there, that this is all just secondhand information to her.

“Pelham was—is—completely walled,” she explains. “And mostly it’s pretty secure, but there was this one place behind Cloade’s where you could climb over. It was on the route you’d take back from the station. But I can’t see Myers doing that. That was something the students did to avoid going the long way round after the gates were locked, not a member of staff on his way back from a conference.”

“So… what, then?” November says diffidently. She looks uncomfortable—like she is trying not to pry but is genuinely worried about Hannah’s silence.

Hannah’s phone beeps and she glances down at it in her lap. It’s from Will. How did it go? Can you talk?

“Hang on,” she says to November, “it’s Will, I need to take this, he’s been worried.”

She dials him back, and he picks up on the first ring.

“Hey, are you okay? How was it?”

“I’m fine. I’m in the cab back to the hotel with November so I won’t talk for too long, but the meeting was… I mean, he was nice. Helpful.” She knows it sounds like she’s reviewing a hotel receptionist, but she doesn’t know how else to put it. “I don’t think it was him, Will.”

“What do you mean?” Will’s voice is uneasy on the other end. “How can you tell?”

“He wasn’t there—November asked him outright what he’d seen, and he said he was away that evening, that was why he was never called to give evidence or anything. I’m assuming the police would check up on something like that, so I’m guessing it’s true?”

There’s a long silence at the other end of the line, as if Will is thinking about something.

“Will?”

There’s another silence. Then Will clears his throat.

“I’m sure you’re right. If he’s got an alibi, he’s got an alibi. So… you’re coming home?”

“Yes.”

“Great.” The relief in his voice is unmistakable. “I’m glad. I know you wanted to do this, but I’m glad it’s over and you’ve got your worries out of your system.”

Now it’s Hannah’s turn to fall silent. Will waits for her to respond and then says, a little more sharply.

“Hannah? It is over, isn’t it?”

“I—” Hannah says. She’s not sure what she’s going to say. She only knows that she can’t, won’t lie to Will. But the truth is, she’s not sure it is over. That realization that came to her on the tour is preying more and more on her mind. She just needs some time to think, to figure out what it means.

“Hannah…” Will says now, and she can hear the note of warning in his voice, and also the frustration. “Love—this is ridiculous. Please, please, please just leave it. You’ve done enough poking around, this is getting stupid. You’re not some kind of pregnant Miss Marple.”

He probably means the last words for a note of levity, trying to soften his obvious anxious irritation, but it hits a false note—it makes him sound glib, dismissive, and Hannah, already tense, feels her hackles rise.

“I’m glad you find April’s death so funny.”

She knows the words are unfair as soon as she says them, but they’re out, and she can’t take them back.

“Hannah, that’s not what I was saying and you know it,” Will says, his voice deliberately even. “Look, I think I’ve been pretty reasonable—”

It’s that tone again. That autocratic, lord-of-the-manor, I’m the boss here tone.

“Pretty reasonable?” She strives to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, but it’s there. “Pretty reasonable? Like, giving me permission to go poking around, is that what you mean? How very reasonable of you.”

“Hannah,” he says, and now she can tell his temper is really frayed, and that he’s holding on to the threadbare edges as hard as he can, his voice brittle with the effort. “You knew I didn’t want you to go. You’re six months pregnant for fuck’s sake, you shouldn’t be digging up some cold case that no one cares about—”

“No one cares?” she cries, so that November and the taxi driver look at her in surprise. “If April’s killer is walking free then I care, Will, and I can’t believe that you don’t—”

“How dare you,” Will shouts back now, loud enough that she has to hold the phone away from her ear. “How fucking dare you. I care, I care just as much as you, but the fact that I don’t want my pregnant wife putting our unborn—”

She hangs up.

Her hands are shaking. Her heart is thumping so hard in her chest that she feels like she might be sick.

Think of the baby. Think of the baby.

“Hannah?” November says tentatively. “Hannah? Are you okay?”

“No. No, I’m not,” Hannah says harshly. Her fists are clenched. She has never, never been so angry at Will. At Will.

This is Will, she reminds herself. Will, who has loved her, waited for her, saved her from herself in so many ways since they were both just teenagers themselves.

And right now she hates him.

“What happened?”

“He wants me to pretend there’s nothing wrong,” she says shortly. “And I can’t. I wish I could but—” And then, realizing they are almost at the hotel, she says to the taxi driver, “Sorry, can you stop at that supermarket? I need to grab something.”

The driver pulls up outside a Tesco Metro and Hannah gets out. Her pulse is still racing, but she knows it will do her good to stretch her legs for a moment, walk off some of her anger, stretch her aching back. November gets out after her, her face worried.

“Hannah?”

“I just need to get some Gaviscon. I’ve got heartburn.”

“Okay,” says November, following her into the almost painful brightness of the little store. “But what did you mean, you can’t pretend nothing’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah says. She grabs a basket and begins to walk the aisles, scanning for the pharmaceutical section. “I just—it was when we were in April’s room. I realized something. Something that made me think that perhaps…” She swallows. “Perhaps we’d all been looking at this the wrong way.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was when we were leaning out of the window,” Hannah says. She’s found the Gaviscon now, a box of pills rather than the liquid she’s used to, but it will have to do. She checks the label. Suitable for pregnancy. “I’d forgotten that April climbed down one time.”

“Yes, you told me,” November says, looking puzzled. “But I don’t see—”

Then she halts in her tracks, in the middle of the aisle. Her eyes are wide under the fluorescent lights.

“Wait, maybe I do. Are you thinking someone could have—”

She stops, as if she doesn’t want to say it.

“Someone could have killed April, and then climbed out the window,” Hannah finishes for her. She pays for the Gaviscon at a self-service till and then turns to face November. “We’ve all been focusing on the fact that no one could have got into the building after Neville left. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that no one could have got out. Or so we assumed. If Neville’s last sighting of April alive was correct, then Hugh and I had the staircase in view the whole time. But what if the killer didn’t use the stairs? What if he—or she—climbed out the window?”

“Hang on,” November says. They are walking to the exit now, and she runs her hands through her short hair, as if trying to cudgel her brains into action. “If someone was already in the set when Neville went up there, he would have seen them.”

“Not if whoever it was stayed in April’s bedroom. I’ve been thinking about this all evening—trying to piece it together, and it all fits. By Neville’s own account he never went farther than the living room.”

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying someone went up there to see April, probably with the intention of killing her. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment, crime-of-passion thing, or the students below would have heard an argument. It must have been planned, someone waiting for their chance to surprise her. So whoever it was lulled her into a false sense of security, and then while they were talking, Neville knocked. April went out to talk to him, and the killer stayed in the bedroom. Then they came out and killed her as soon as Neville shut the door.”

“But they couldn’t have known Neville would come up…” November says slowly. Hannah shakes her head.

“No, I don’t think that part was planned. I think it was just the killer’s good luck that Neville gave them the perfect alibi.”

“The timing would work…” They have reached the taxi and November opens the door and slides back inside. Her face, golden in the sulfurous yellow of the streetlamp, is troubled. “It would make sense of Neville’s story, and it would explain why you never saw anyone coming out after him. But… wait, how would whoever it was know not to take the stairs? They had no way of knowing you were waiting at the bottom.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Hannah says. She feels more than a little sick, and it has as much to do with what she is about to say as it does with the aftermath of her argument with Will. “And if I’m right, if the killer did escape down the drainpipe, then I think what must have happened is this: The killer knew they couldn’t afford to be seen coming down the stairs—so they would have waited until Neville was well clear to leave. They wouldn’t want to bump into him in the quad if he was still hanging around. So whoever it was, they probably killed April, then hung around by the window to check Neville was gone. By the time Neville came out of the building—”

“By that time, they would have seen you crossing the quad,” November finishes. Her face is pale. “Shit. You mean they saw you coming. They knew you’d be coming up the stairs, so they had no choice but to escape through the window.”

“I think so. The only other possibility is that they heard me coming up the stairs as they were finishing the”—she swallows, the word sticking in her throat—“finishing the job.”

“Oh my God.” November closes her eyes. The beam of a streetlamp passes over her face as they drive beneath it, illuminating the shape of her skull with ghostly beauty. In the half-light she looks so like April that Hannah almost cannot bear it. For a moment it is as if April has come back to haunt her with the specter of the mistakes she made—except that April has never left her. The voice in the crowd. The blond head weaving down a busy street. April has always been here, with her, trying to make her see.

I’m sorry, April, she thinks. I’m sorry I failed you.

“So… who then?” November whispers. The driver is not looking round at them, but they are both conscious that in spite of the plexiglass screen, he could be listening. Guess who I had in the back of my cab… “It could have been anyone, then… right?”

“Someone with a motive,” Hannah says, ticking the list off on her fingers. “And someone that April trusted.” The sick feeling is back. “It must have been someone she knew well. That’s always been an unanswerable problem with the case against Neville. April hated him. There’s no way she would have let him come anywhere near her without a struggle. But a friend? That’s different. I mean, not Hugh—because I was with him outside the building. And I’m pretty sure it couldn’t have been Ryan. He was still in the bar when we left, although I guess it’s theoretically possible that he could have pelted it round the long way and got to New Quad before us. But…”

She stops.

“But it could have been Emily,” November says with sudden, dawning comprehension. “That’s why you went so quiet over dinner.”

Hannah feels something twist inside her like a knife. Because it’s true, and hearing it out loud makes it suddenly and sickeningly real. That is what she was thinking. She was sitting there working things out in her head, realizing that Emily’s alibi is the shakiest of them all. Yes, she was in the library. But there was absolutely nothing to stop her from slipping through the turnstile without swiping out, climbing the stairs to April’s room, sitting there with her, talking, laughing, maybe even poking fun at herself over the A-level prank—and then when Neville came up, providing the perfect fall guy, strangling April before sliding down the drainpipe and returning to her seat in the reading room.

I can’t believe it, she wants to protest, and it’s true too, except… that a little part of her can. Maybe several parts in fact. The part that knows that April had spent all year fucking Emily’s boyfriend. The part that recoiled when Hugh told her about the cruel trick with the A-level letter. And most of all, the part of her that remembers walking under the cloisters with Emily and Ryan on a cold November night, and hearing Emily hiss, If she tries any of that shit with me, I will end her.

The venom in Emily’s voice—that was real. It has stayed with Hannah for more than ten years. And even now it makes her shiver.

“It could have been plenty of other people,” she says now, trying to persuade herself as much as November. “April had pranked a lot of people. It could have been someone from another college entirely. It could have been—” The idea comes to her, and she clutches at it with a barely concealed desperation. “It could have been whoever was supplying her with the dextroamphetamine. A drug deal gone bad.”

This is all true.

But what November said is truer.

It could have been Emily. She has always had motive. And now she has opportunity.

“Hannah,” November says, and her voice is warning. “Hannah, please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.”

“I won’t,” Hannah says, a little impatiently. “I’m not stupid.”

“I mean it—if this is right—if you tell anyone—”

“I said, I’m not stupid. I’ll phone them up tomorrow, as soon as I’m back in Edinburgh.”

“Okay,” November says. She looks at Hannah critically, as if she’s appraising Hannah’s strength, if it came to a fight. She looks worried.

“Why didn’t you say anything to Will?” she asks now, and Hannah feels a sudden tightness in her throat.

“Because he won’t listen,” she says. “I’ve tried—I’ve tried over and over to tell him that there’s something wrong about that night, something that I’m not seeing, can’t remember—but he won’t listen, he just wants me to shut up, pretend it’s all fine.”

She shuts her eyes. It is the worst feeling in the world, to be afraid—and to have the person you love tell you that it’s all in your head.

“Look, I don’t know him,” November says softly, “but… I feel like if you love him, he must be a good guy?”

“He is,” Hannah says. It feels as if something is lodged at the back of her throat, hurting her.

“He’s frightened for you. He lost one person he loved, much too young. I can see why he doesn’t want to lose another.”

“I know,” Hannah whispers. “I know.”

She puts her hand up to the corner of her eye and angrily brushes away the moisture prickling there, furious at her body for betraying her. She doesn’t want to be that woman—that pregnant woman who bursts into tears at the drop of a hat. She wants to be strong, logical, analytical—but she doesn’t feel like any of those right now.

“I could be wrong,” she says, forcing the words out as levelly as she can, and November nods, but the concern doesn’t leave her face. Hannah could be wrong. But if she’s not, there is a killer out there. Someone April trusted. Maybe even someone April loved.

And that idea makes Hannah very frightened indeed.