Clara rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mum. Honestly, we’ve been friends since last year.”
I held the white one up to the window to check if it got see-through in direct light. Maybe that’s what Eleanor had meant by flattering …
“And Anna’s a new friend,” Clara explained. “She’s a graduate student. I’m not supposed to tell you, but she’s dating Blake.”
I flinched. “Blake?”
Blake was so serious. He had friends, but his energy went into his studies and chapel responsibilities. He hadn’t yet attended a May Ball.
“If they’re still together then. Wolfson doesn’t have a May Ball.” Clara pursed her lips at the mirror in annoyance. “It’s so easy for the boys. Blake already has a proper suit, black tie.” She snatched the white dress out of my hand, and squinted at it. “I’m just being selfish. This one”—the white one—“would look better on Anna, so I’ll wear the other one. Problem solved.”
“Tell me about Anna,” I said.
“She’s very nice. She makes Blake blush. She’s getting an M.Phil in history. She was at Warwick as an undergrad, like Lindsay is now.”
Lindsay was Clara’s best friend when she was ten. My brain plucked that information right out, even though I hardly ever think of her. It plucked a more recent memory too. Warwick … But a lot of people have gone to Warwick. A lot of people are called Anna. It might be the most common name in the world.
Clara had thrown the rugby shirt across the bed and was pulling the pink dress up over her leggings. “Ta-da!” she announced, pinching it shut behind her back. She looked like a Degas.
My throat tightened when I asked, “What’s her last name?”
“Who?”
“That girl. With Blake.”
“Williams. Anna Williams.”
She was looking in the mirror, so didn’t see my face. Before she turned around, I forced myself to smile. I forced myself to breathe.
She looked hopefully at me.
“You look perfect,” I told her. “You chose the right dress.”
She jumped up and kissed my cheek. Her half-dressed state reminded me of the snogging mourners in the church closet. This had been an awful day.
I needed to excuse myself. “I promised Simon I wouldn’t be out all day.”
Clara ducked her head, then turned to slip her shirt back on. “I know it was really weird when you told us you were getting married, but Simon is really nice. He’s really nice. I think you picked the right guy.”
She’d never said that before, not directly. She’d toasted us at our wedding dinner and was as polite as you could ask over Christmas in the new house, but she’d never specifically approved of him before.
“Thank you,” I said, fervently. I apologised for one errant tear and wiped it off my face. “I went to a funeral today,” I explained, deflecting.
Her eyes widened. “Oh no—whose?”
“A friend. No one you know,” I quickly clarified, having forgotten how sensitive she still is to ceremonies of death. She’d hated Tom’s funeral, every moment.
She hugged me. “You know what I wish for you, Mum? No more funerals.”
“I’m afraid that as one grows older, there are only more and more.”
It was unfair for me to be honest with her. She would discover it soon enough and didn’t need to hear it now. Still, she recovered brightly and plopped down onto her bed. “And I have to study. Thanks for the gloves.”
I fumbled for my handbag and my books. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had impulsively bought a present for Blake. It had been so important when they were young to keep everything even and fair that I still tried to balance things out of reflex. “I have something for Blake. Do you know where he is?” He lives in a terraced house around the corner, or could have been in any of a number of lectures or supervisions.
“Chapel?” she suggested, already working, her eyes flicking across the dense text of a thick book she’d opened to the middle. “College library?” He has roommates, so takes advantage of the enforced library silence to study there.
“Thanks. I’ll check.”
I slipped out of the room and down all those stairs, out into the court. I breathed better out there. I called his phone; he didn’t answer.
Annalise Williams was pretty. She was twenty-four; Blake was twenty-one. She had the kind of assertive personality that’s needed to get a shy man’s attention; anything more subtle, and he’d never guess that she was interested. She was getting an M.Phil. She knew that I’m from near Lilling. She’d been playing with me. She knew who I was.
Blake had been supposed to meet me that day after her first session. What if he’d been there after all? Had she met him then? Had she already known him then?
I was in no condition at that moment to have a conversation with him about her. Maybe I should leave the chapel photo book for him, I considered, with a note that we need to make a lunch date? No, what if she read the note? I pictured her laughing at me. Wearing Clara’s goddess dress.
Damn. As a therapist, I have to guard the information she’s revealed in sessions. As a mother, I have to grant my adult children autonomy, because control backfires, especially romantic control. But as myself, as … as a stalking victim, that’s what I felt like … I had to have some rights. Didn’t I?
I couldn’t see what she wanted. If she wanted him, she apparently had him. Why tell me? Why deliberately become a client, and give me a front-row seat? She wanted me to figure this out. She wanted to rub it in my face.
I glanced over at the college library. It was new, like the Darwin bronze. If Blake was there, I couldn’t do more than slip him the book. No talking, unless I persuaded him to drop what he was doing and come outside with me. To say what? That I heard he has a girlfriend? Clara hadn’t been supposed to tell me anyway.
I walked back through the cloister. The chapel was busy; I could hear the choir, and brass. It sounded grand, too big for evensong rehearsal. Must be for a concert. Blake wouldn’t be in there. He only assists with services.
I exited past the porters. Blake might be at home, I thought.
Then, She might be with him.
What had Clara said? “Wolfson doesn’t have a May Ball.” Yes, Annalise Williams had told me that was her college. I turned my back on Blake’s front door and headed across town for Wolfson College.
The city’s changed in the twenty years since I was at university. I’ve continued to live here, so the gradual process should have blended together for me; but it hasn’t. The changes from the city I was young in to the city it is now are underlined to me. That patisserie used to be a bicycle shop. Woolworths is gone… .
I found Wolfson on the other side of the river, deep in residential territory. It’s one of the youngest colleges at less than fifty years old, but that’s still older than me, so as far as I’m concerned it’s as much a fixture as the colleges that go back centuries. I’d been there before, for a party or two, but the porter here would not recognise me.
“Hi? I’m from Christ’s.” Not currently, but declaring my affiliation was bound to be helpful. “I’m looking for Anna Williams. Have you seen her come through today? Longish brown hair?”
I was fishing. Maybe, maybe, Blake’s Anna Williams wasn’t my Annalise Williams. I willed for the porter to counter with a description of curly black hair or a bobbed blonde.
The porter looked blank. “Sorry, who?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. She’s an M.Phil student here. History? Anna or Annalise.”
The porter checked a list, probably only to humour me. Porters know their students. “No, sorry.”
“Look, this is ridiculous. I feel like I’ve made a silly mistake. Maybe Annie? Hannah?” There are a lot of starts that can end up at the nickname Anna. Melanie? Diana? “Surname Williams,” I repeated.
He typed something into his computer; I released my pent-up breath.
“Sorry,” he said again.
“No Anna?”
�
�Who did you say you are?”
“Sorry,” I said. He’d apologised half a dozen times; it was my turn. “I’ve been such a bother.”
I dashed out of the lodge, feeling light. It wasn’t her. However I’d misunderstood Clara’s information, whatever Anna herself had claimed to me, Annalise Williams wasn’t a student at Cambridge. Whomever Blake was dating was Anna Something-Else, or perhaps Some-Other-First-Name Middle-Name-Anna Williams.
What if this supposed “Annalise Williams,” who lied to me, is with Blake and also lying to him?
I went cold. I wished I could play the recordings for Simon. Would it be enough to explain that she’s not really a fellow student of Blake’s? That she’d spun a story to finagle herself into our lives? Not just Blake, but me, and Clara… .
I called Clara. It went to voice mail.
I rang off. My request was too bold to leave as a message. It required tact, and responding to her reactions. Blake would not react well to interference from me. Clara could probe things that I couldn’t, and would let him down more easily. She could help him save face. She could say that she came to Wolfson and discovered no Anna Williams there. He’d never have to know that I knew.
When did Blake become so fragile? I marvelled with sadness. He used to be a typical boy: bold and oblivious, easily pleased. I thought about that for a moment, and about how Annalise had manipulated him. Perhaps he hadn’t changed after all.
The pedestrian light turned green. I entered the Lammas Land playground, dodged manic children, and eventually came out the other side to the comparative calm of a commuter traffic jam on Fen Causeway. Cambridge has always felt compact to me, but today it felt elongated, stretched, and far too wide for the particular things I’d had to do.
At the end of Lensfield Road, I found myself back at the Catholic Church. Our Lady and the English Martyrs. Martyrs. More death. My stomach tightened.
Don’t be ridiculous. The funeral was long over. No one would be left, in a closet or otherwise. Indeed, mine was the only vehicle left in the car park.
It was surrounded by police.
My breath caught in my throat. I angled my path, to get nearer to the cluster of confusion and uniforms while obscuring that that was my destination.
I saw the shoe before I saw the leg. I recognised it: black suede and a bow. I’d seen it that morning in the supply closet, on a foot rubbing up against Henry Ware’s ankle.
An official-looking man was talking into a phone or radio, something chunky and rectangular in his hand. “Sandra Williams,” he said into it, followed by numbers and jargon. Sandy. Hannah’s cousin?
I recalled once watching a television programme about famous artists, which showed the way that figures can be reduced to an assortment of shapes: oval head, conical hat, triangular torso. That’s what I saw then: shapes. The leg was a sausage-like tube. The curve of the foot was a Roman arch.
I turned away. I wanted to cross the road. Traffic was tight. The man behind me with the rectangle recited into it what I assumed was a driving licence number, presumably the victim’s. Also, my number plate. I wanted to get across the road more than anything.
A gap appeared. I slithered through, and, on the other side, phoned Simon. “Please come pick me up,” I said, breathless. “Come now.” I walked purposefully in the opposite direction of the church, back towards the city centre.
“Why? Are you all right? Did you have a breakdown?”
He meant the car. I answered “yes,” meaning me. “Yes. Yes. Please, Simon. I need you to come get me now.”
I heard him shutting down his computer. I heard his keys and his breathing. I wanted him to get out of the house before the policeman phoned our number from my vehicle registration. Simon would tell me to go back to them. I couldn’t, though. I just couldn’t.
“Where do you want me to find you?” he asked.
I considered. “Silver Street.” The bollards there block through-traffic except for buses and taxis, so there would be room to pull over. More importantly, it was far from here. Back I went through the city that wasn’t quite right any more: the post office had moved across the street; the Grand Arcade had sprung up out of nowhere.
All of these thoughts about the city were denial and self-defence; I recognised that. My mind was taking a roundabout journey away from my car as much as my body was. She … the body … was tucked between my front bumper and a brick wall. That probably meant that she was—I groped for unvivid words—put there when my car was the only one left behind, after everyone else had gone.
Everyone but two: her, and someone with her.
I had to tell the police what I’d seen. I had to tell them that she and Henry … And they’d want to know how I knew Hannah. I needed to get my head straight. There were things I should say and things that I shouldn’t.
The tube-leg. The arch-foot. The oval-face, tilted away from me, towards the wall. Thank God for that, I thought. Thank God.
I crossed the bridge at Silver Street. Recent studies have shown that doorways have a physical effect on the brain, causing that common experience of going to get something and forgetting it when you cross a threshold. I concentrated on the bridge underneath me, begging it to make me forget.
On the other side, nothing had changed: There was still a body in the church car park. The police would still follow up on my car and call me at home.
I hadn’t seen the face, so my mind gave me Hannah-Claire Finney’s. But the body wasn’t like hers; it was younger; so I picture Annalise Wood instead, as on the covers of those true crime paperbacks. They’re not that different, except that Hannah had become older than Annalise ever got the chance to be.
Is this how memory works? I wondered. Would my mind ever see any other face on that body now, even later when I’d know who it was? Would I recognise her; had I seen her at the funeral? But I’d stayed in the back and kept my head down, not wanting to invade the family’s privacy.
It suddenly felt important to know, desperately important, and selfishly. I couldn’t bear having Hannah or Annalise dead under my bumper, even just in my mind. It needed to be a stranger. I turned around, bumped into a child who’d been following too close behind me, returned the mother’s glare. “Excuse me,” I mouthed without sound, and pushed myself back towards the church.
I phoned Simon as I walked, but he didn’t pick up. He must have already been driving.
Medical people were putting the body on a rolling bed, so she must not have been dead. I still couldn’t see the face; I saw only a paramedic’s back.
He moved. Cousin Sandy’s head lolled in my direction. It was Annalise, but not the book-cover one, not the one who’d gone missing in Lilling forty years ago.
It was Annalise Williams, my client. She was dressed in black, bloody, and barely alive.
Chapter 10
Chloe Frohmann
DAN HAD CALLED my bluff. I should have guessed he’d do something like that.
“It was your idea,” he claimed, bouncing our daughter. “You suggested it.”
I bit my lip. He kept a straight face. He’d called her after Stephen Fry. Well, he’d called her Stephanie. Stephanie Robin.
I’d have to make up a story if people asked how we’d come by the name. I could make up an obscure but beloved relative. I could say it meant “diligent” or “happy” in … French? Swedish? (Maybe it did, for all I knew.) I didn’t want to admit that I’d left it entirely up to Dan. I didn’t want to admit that we’d named her after a comedian, for Christ’s sake.
“You love it,” Dan said, lifting our happy (and possibly diligent) daughter up to my face. “Ste-pha-nie,” he said, tapping my nose with her reaching fingertip.
“It’s going to take some getting used to,” I said, because if I said that I loved it, or, worse, said the name itself, I would cry. It’s bad enough that my chest leaked; I had to get that from my eyes too.
Dan looked worried. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said. �
��It’s a good name.” I took her in a cuddle. “I’ll feed her now,” I told him, settling in on the couch. “You can use a bottle later if I’m gone long.”
Dan puttered, clearing the coffee table. “Who are you seeing today?”
“That’s a sensitive subject.”
“Sorry,” he said, quickly. There are sometimes things I really can’t share.
“No, not like that. I need to talk to Spencer.”
“What about?”
“Morris.”
“Oh,” said Dan, meaning “Oh, shit.”
“And ‘oh’ about me assisting on a case off the books. I’m not sure how he’ll react to that.”
“Why talk to him at all?”
I repositioned the—no, not “the baby” any more; Stephanie—and spilled all. “Our old case has collided with a current case. Maybe.” After all, someone being delusional about their relationship with a famous crime doesn’t mean that they’re actually connected to it. Except, when the delusional person ends up suddenly dead just around the time we’re looking into it, maybe it does …
I explained about Charlie’s DNA and the clothes on the body, and what they meant for the date the body had gone into the ground. More importantly, for where the body—dead or alive—had been before it got those clothes on and went into the ground.
I told him what Morris had learned from the previous investigators about how sure they were—or weren’t—that the body was Annalise. It had the right hair, though not grown significantly longer over the three or more years between disappearance and burial. It had matching teeth, but only in that the teeth had had no work done, which could match many, many people. It was the right stage of development for a sixteen-year-old, or thereabouts. It was in Annalise’s clothes, but those clothes were identified only by initials, not the full name, so it’s possible, somehow, that they’d been chosen without awareness of whose they’d been years before. After all, even if it was Annalise, why would the killer, or the girl herself, prioritise finding a fresh iteration of her old clothes to wear? Unless it wasn’t Annalise and the killer wanted us to think that it was… .
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