by Val McDermid
She came to her old bench and turned round to look up at Magnusson Hall. The Victorian building had once been an insane asylum, a source of much sardonic wit among students. In spite of that, it was decently proportioned, its yellow and red brick decoratively arranged. According to the court reports that Charlie had read, Magda had been in her mother's room when she'd seen Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson slip away from the party. They'd disappeared round the bottom end of Riverside Lodge, between the building and the river, a route that led only to the landing stage where Philip's body had later been found. 'Unless the fire door from Riverside was open,' Charlie said softly.
She walked over to the corner of Riverside and stared back at Magnusson, trying to remember which room was Corinna's. It had a bay window, she recalled. On the second floor. There were only two possibilities, and both had a line of sight to where she stood. So, nothing wrong with what Magda said she'd seen, from a feasibility point of view.
Charlie turned away and walked the narrow flagged path between Riverside and the water. Tall iron railings topped the knee-high wall to keep the students from falling into the river. On her left, the gable end of Riverside rose, a sheer grey brick cliff punctuated by the square windows that had been fashionable in the 1970s when the building had been built. Halfway along was the fire door, a double square of glass with a deep band of black metal across the middle. In Charlie's day, the building had always been so stuffy in summer that the door was propped open more often than not. She wondered whether that was still the case. Everyone was more security-conscious these days. But if the people Charlie taught were anything to go by, students still liked to think of themselves as indestructible. They'd weigh the danger against the unbearable mugginess in the building and open the door. She'd put money on it.
At the end of the building, the path opened out on to a gently sloping concrete slipway. Beyond that was the sturdy wooden jetty where the punts were chained up. It was here that Philip Carling had been found. Smacked on both sides of the head with a heavy wooden paddle that shattered his skull, then bundled into the water and stuffed head first under a punt to drown. It wasn't a dignified way to go, but it was probably pretty quick. Any sound swallowed by the noise from the wedding party. Whoever did it would be wet, but if they'd had the presence of mind to stash a change of clothes nearby in Riverside or even further down the river bank in the college boathouse, they'd soon cover their tracks. Witnesses said that when Barker and Sanderson had returned to the wedding celebration, she'd been wearing a different dress and he'd changed his shirt. Their defence had been that they'd slipped away to have sex; that they'd been so desperate to get at each other that her dress had ripped and his shirt had been stained with lipstick and mascara, so they'd changed. It was one of those explanations that, although reasonable, was always going to sound contrived, especially since they were the only apparent suspects.
Of course, that was an argument that weakened if you knew about Magda and Jay. If Charlie was going to have anything to do with this business, there were a lot of questions she wanted the answers to. Like, when had Jay and Magda got together? Like, where had Jay been that Saturday night? And if you had a nasty suspicious mind, how long was Magda away from the wedding herself? Charlie gave a little hiss of a laugh. Oh, Corinna would love that question.
Charlie slowly turned and looked up the slope towards the Meadow Building. She'd lived there for three years, first in a tiny cubicle of a room sandwiched between a stairwell and a pantry, then in a big airy room on the top floor that she'd managed to swing because of her role as treasurer to the student body. She'd grown up in that building. She'd learned as much about herself as she had about her academic subjects. She'd fallen in love, had her heart broken then fallen in love all over again. Just like you were supposed to. She'd made friends and she'd changed her future.
Now that future she'd created for herself was sliding out of her grasp. Professionally, personally, she was on the skids. And here she was, back where it had all started. It would never have occurred to her to look for salvation here. But maybe Corinna was right. Maybe this was her chance to reclaim her life.
12
Jay stood at the window and watched Magda drive away. Allowing her to face so difficult a confrontation alone was hard for Jay. But there was nothing to be gained by getting into a fight about it. If Corinna and Henry chose to make Magda miserable over her choice of partner, that would be a ruck worth getting into. One Jay would relish. Still, in one sense, it didn't matter; Jay knew Magda was hers, regardless of what her parents might say or do. For now, it made her look better to step back and let Magda attempt to fight her own battle. And it freed the day for her to write. There hadn't been much time for that since the trial verdict. Jay made herself a coffee and settled down at the keyboard.
I only went home for a fortnight that first holiday. I didn't belong there any more. People I knew from school had lives that excluded me. Most of them had gone off to university with a gaggle of friends. Others were working, earning a wage that set them apart. The house where I'd spent half a dozen years before Oxford wasn't home either. My mother's disappearing act had removed any possibility of that. Mary Hopkinson next door took pleasure in revealing that nobody had heard a word from her since that chill winter night when she'd disappeared with a suitcase containing her best clothes, toiletries, and a framed photograph of me aged six. Any older and she'd have had to admit to her real age, I thought.
My stepfather's house wasn't a place where anyone would choose to be. He'd stripped it of anything that reminded him of my mother and now it was as icon-free as the chapel where I'd been forced to spend all my adolescent Sundays. Going back only reminded me of how liberating it had been to leave in the first place. I spent most of my time out of the house, even if that meant making a coffee in the local burger bar last three hours and a dozen chapters. On the second of January, I fled back to Oxford and slept for three nights in the Newsams' attic room before I could move back into college.
For the rest of my first year, Corinna was my rock and the children my occasional saviours. Of course I'd made friends among my fellow undergraduates by then. I'd even been elected as a representative on the JCR committee. But I could talk to Corinna more openly and more honestly than I could to any of my student peers. I felt as if I had nothing to prove with her. It didn't hurt my academic work either. I swear there was astonishment in Helena Winter's voice when she conveyed my first-year exam results to me. I savoured it as I had savoured few things.
The memory of the moment still made Jay smile. She'd had plenty of glory since then, but that early triumph still had the power to move her. It was strange how powerful these recollections were. She wondered whether they would have been so strong without Magda's reappearance in her life.
There was no escaping the fact that Corinna had been the centre of Jay's emotional life that year. She'd worshipped her, dreamed of her, fantasised about her and been pathetically grateful to be allowed so close to the object of her desires. But she'd always had to be careful, to guard against word or gesture that might lead Corinna to suspect there was anything 'unnatural' about her feelings. As far as Corinna and anyone else was concerned, Jay took great pains to foster the belief that she was merely an undergraduate Corinna had taken under her wing, not least because she was good with the children.
None of which she'd be sharing with Magda. Jay sighed and stood up. She needed to root herself in the past now, not allow thoughts of Magda to drag her back to the present. She walked through to the kitchen and took a packet of Gitanes and a battered brass Zippo from the drawer in the big pine table.
Out on the terrace, Jay lit one of the pungent French cigarettes and let the smoke fill her mouth. She hadn't smoked properly for years, but she'd discovered when she'd been writing Unrepentant that the taste and smell of the strong tobacco were the best trigger for catapulting her back into her past. She sometimes thought their choice of cigarette was the only thing she'd had in common with he
r mother. She let the smoke drift from her open mouth, watching the blue swirl dissipate in the chilly morning air. Even after all these years of abstinence, the cigarette felt completely natural between her fingers. She let it burn down, holding it near enough her face for the smoke to perform its magic. Now she could recall the urgency of those emotions, the rawness of experience that she wanted to translate to the page.
After the summer, things changed. Not between the Newsams and me, but between me and the rest of the world.The reason? My new next-door neighbour in college. A first year reading modern languages. Louise Proctor.
I was staggering down the corridor with a heavy cardboard carton when Louise emerged from her room. As we jockeyed to pass in the narrow corridor, our eyes met, and I felt for the first time the jolt and spark of instant attraction.
It was a moment of pure terror.
Somehow, I manoeuvred past Louise and stumbled into my own room. I virtually flung the box on the floor and collapsed on the bed, blood pounding in my ears. My senses were on overload. I could feel the weave of the bedspread beneath my fingers. I could see the coarse grains of dried plaster in the chips on the wall where drawing pins had gouged holes. I could smell dust and the cigarette butts in my ashtray and the bowl of orange-and-lemon potpourri that Corinna and her girls had brought round that morning as a 'welcome back' present after the Newsams' two-week package tour to Greece. And I could hear a voice in the room next to mine calling, 'Louise?'
I stumbled over to the window and pushed it open. At the next window, a middle-aged woman with wavy greying hair in a long bob leaned out, waving to the girl I had nearly collided with moments before. Louise looked up and saw us both at around the same moment her mother saw me. 'Hello!' Mrs Proctor greeted me cheerfully. 'Trying to get my daughter moved in!' Then she turned to look down again. `Louise, bring up the grey suitcase next, darling.'
Louise nodded and opened the boot of a red Volkswagen Golf. Her gleaming dark head disappeared momentarily, then she reappeared with the suitcase. I suddenly realised I must look a complete idiot and retreated inside. I crossed the room and closed my door. Then I sat down on the bed again, trying to work out what on earth was happening to me. I didn't like the obvious answer, so I tried to carry on as if nothing had happened.
Louise's reaction made that easier. Whatever had hit me, Louise acted as if she hadn't shared it, in spite of my conviction that the moment of pure electricity had been mutual. After that first encounter, Louise seemed to steer clear of me. If we passed unavoidably between our rooms and the bathrooms or stairs, she scowled and her eyes dropped.
It took a force of nature to change everything.
Back in those days the idea of students having en suite bathrooms was laughable. Each floor had its communal bathrooms, with separate shower and bath enclosures. Unknown to each other, Louise and I were taking baths in adjoining cubicles. Outside, a prodigious thunderstorm raged, the rumbles and claps so loud that the windows rattled in their frames. Jagged forks of lightning skittered across the skies like fear shooting down the tree of the central nervous system.Then one thunderclap pealed louder than the rest; a crack, a scream of wood struggling against itself and suddenly chunks of plaster were cascading from the ceiling.
I yelled something incoherent and jumped out of the bath. Instantly, I was covered in plaster dust that stuck to my wet body. Grabbing my dressing gown, I wrenched the cubicle door open just as the other door also flew back. Louise's long black hair hung in strings round her frightened face, everything streaked with the same dirt that was clinging to me. We both stood gaping at the door leading from the bathrooms to the corridor. There was a roof beam crossing it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Since the door opened inwards, we were trapped. I looked up. Through the mess that had been the roof and the ceiling, I could see the heavy bough of the massive copper beech that was no longer shading the lawn outside.
'Oh shit,' I said.
'That's a word,' Louise replied drily.
'Actually, it's two, but this probably isn't the time to be pedantic,' I said, desperate not to be outdone in the cool stakes.
It took the emergency services most of the night to get the door cleared. Once we'd established that the groans and creaks of stressed timbers weren't life-threatening, Louise and I huddled together against the outer wall and started to talk properly for the first time. By dawn, we knew there was something unprecedented between us. Neither would acknowledge what it was, but we knew it was there.
Once we were freed, we were hustled off by the college nurse in spite of our protestations that neither was suffering from anything more than a few cuts and bruises. After we'd been liberated and had given our soundbites to the media, we retreated to a greasy spoon up the Banbury Road. Over bacon, eggs, sausages and fried bread, I finally said, 'I've never felt like this before.'
'I'm scared,' Louise said. 'I don't know what we're supposed to do.'
I shrugged. 'What comes naturally?'
'Yes, but what exactly is that?'
'I don't know. Play it by ear?' I seemed to be incapable of getting beyond cliche but either Louise didn't notice or she didn't care.
Louise dipped sausage in her egg yolk. 'I thought I was so sophisticated when I came up to Oxford.' She looked up at me, her eyes appealing. 'But I don't know anything about anything really.'
'We'll work something out,' I promised. I was only six weeks older than Louise, but I was an academic year ahead of her. Somehow, that made me responsible for whatever came next. It was the most frightening prospect of my life. Suddenly, I had lost my appetite.
I watched Louise finish her breakfast, then we walked back to college arm in arm. It was a slightly daring gesture, but everyone knew about our adventure by then, so it wasn't hard to place an innocent construction on the action. Back in my room, we stood facing each other. Then, inch by tentative inch, our faces moved closer until our lips touched.
What I remember most was feeling like there had been an explosion of light inside my head. Looking into Louise's eyes, I saw my wonder mirrored. Right then, I felt invincible.
Unfortunately, as I was to learn the hard way, that was never a feeling that lasted for long.
13
Charlie found it hard to believe how little Corinna had changed. She was still wearing the familiar heavy oval spectacle frames that might have been fashionable for fifteen minutes in 1963 in her native Canada, but hadn't had a single moment of glory since. Even now, her hair was pure 1960s: side parting, backcombed, flicked under her rather heavy jaw, the whole monstrous confection held in place with a layer of hair lacquer hard as shellac. It remained the same uniform dark tan of Cherry Blossom shoe polish. Charlie couldn't help wondering about the portraits in the attic. She smiled an uncertain greeting.
'Charlie. You came.' The same warm Transatlantic voice. Corinna reached out and put a hand on Charlie's arm.
'I said I would.' Charlie let herself be drawn into the hall. Unlike Corinna, it was not as she remembered it. The scuffs and grazes of four young children had gone, painted over and erased. An Afghan runner on sanded and polished boards replaced the worn chocolate brown carpet. And there were proper pictures on the walls, not the garish splodges of kids' artwork. 'Wow,' she said. 'This has changed.'
Corinna's laugh was the familiar cracked cackle. 'That's what happens when your kids grow up and your husband grows old. There's no obstacle to having the place the way you always wanted it.' She led the way down the stairs to the basement kitchen. 'This hasn't changed much, though.'
She was right. The kitchen still had the air of a room through which a mild tornado had passed. Clothes, books, sports equipment, magazines, newspapers and CDs were strewn haphazardly over the sofas and armchairs that lined half the room. The dark red range still had one cream door, because the Newsams were accustomed to taking what was going, especially if it meant saving money. Radio 4 muttered in the background.
'Only the book titles are different,' Corinna said. She pulled o
ut a chair at the kitchen table and waved at it. 'Coffee, yes?' She glanced up at the clock. 'We've not got as long as I hoped. Magda and Wheelie are coming for lunch. We can catch up on the small talk then.'
Small talk; my life to Corinna. 'Won't that be a bit awkward? Given why I'm here? Though of course, I'm still not entirely sure why I am here.'
Corinna gave her an odd look as she spooned coffee into a cafetiere. 'Well, I wasn't exactly expecting you to interrogate Magda over the chicken-and-ham pie. I'd given you credit for a little more subtlety than that.' Then, more briskly, 'Besides, they're used to former students dropping in. The place has always had open-house leanings.' She brought the pot to the table along with a pair of mugs. 'So, how much do you know about what's been happening to Magda?'
'I know she married Philip Carling last July. They'd known each other three or four years, depending on which newspaper you read. The wedding and the reception were held at Schollie's and late in the evening Philip Carling was found dead in the river by the punt station. He'd been beaten unconscious and stuffed under a punt. How am I doing?' Charlie was deliberately brutal, trying to provoke a reaction.