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‘Prue and Nicky.’ The words tasted sour. ‘Prue adored Toby.’
‘She did, and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but she was only a slip of a girl. Granted it was a sharp knife, and she was hysterical that evening, but the blow that killed Toby required a great deal of force. Could she have mustered that?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Whereas Nicky is a tall man who can handle a blade,’ Jem said, and thought he tasted bile in his throat.
Hugo gave him a sharp look. ‘In your shoes, I should be careful about accusing Nicky. It might look as though you have a score to settle.’
The blood burned in Jem’s face. ‘I’m not accusing him. We’ve spoken about all the others.’
‘To no purpose. Look, Jem, it wasn’t me, and I will take your word it wasn’t you. Aaron and Ella gave each other alibis, Prue is too small, and Nicky…I fenced with him. He always fought fair. And he adored Toby. I can’t sit here and speculate on which one of us might be a murderer; I don’t believe it of any of us.’
‘But it was one of us,’ Jem said through lips that felt a little stiff. ‘I quite agree that none of us could possibly have done such a thing, but we all know that one of usdid.’
Hugo shook his head. ‘I have no answers for you, Jem. Nobody found an answer then, when the trail was fresh, and none of the sleuths, amateur or professional, have found an answer since.’
‘Because we kept our secrets,’ Jem said. ‘Nobody told the inspector about what really happened that evening. None of us mentioned the trick with the door. Ella gave Aaron an alibi in which none of us believed, and nobody said he was lying. We hid everything, and Toby’s murderer walked free because of it.’
Hugo’s face had hardened as he spoke. ‘If you wish to suggest we were all guilty of perverting the course of justice?—’
‘Weren’t we?’
‘Toby’s murder almost destroyed us all. Do you wish that to happen again?’
‘Are you saying you don’t want to know who did it?’
Hugo shook his head, eyes half-closed. It looked like a rehearsed movement, something he’d do in the House to convey weary rebuke. ‘I should very much like to know who did it. What I don’t want is for everything we hid then to come out now, another scandal, ruining the lives we’ve since built for ourselves, to no purpose. Because the fact is, nobody saw the murderer, all our movements were examined in detail to no effect, there was no physical evidence. All we have is inference, implication, and suspicion. And I am tired of the suspicion, the sound and fury that signifies nothing. Aren’t you?’
The clocks were chiming as Jem left Hugo’s townhouse. It was only ten o’clock, which seemed extraordinary. He felt adrift in time, unmoored, as he had done since that damned letter had made him think of things he’d held under the water for so long that he’d almost believed they’d drowned.
He needed to think. He hadn’t thought when he’d set off to see Hugo—or rather, he hadn’t faced the question of what he wanted in its stark truth. Now it was unavoidable.
The air was cold and wet, leaving a shimmer of droplets on him as he walked. He headed up to Berkeley Square and sat on a bench, staring at the winter-sodden shrubs without seeing them.
What he wanted was to know who had killed Toby. Not who had sent one more malicious letter: that didn’t matter. There were always letter-writers; they were legion and would never stop. He wanted to know which of them, which of his friends, which of the people he’d most loved and trusted in the world had put a knife in Toby’s ribs, jammed the door, and walked away.
That was the great unspoken truth that had festered for a decade. It was one of the six of them, and they knew it for the simple reason that Toby’s door had been stuck.
Toby had died on the night of Summoner’s Gift, an ancient Anselm’s tradition involving a procession around the quads, followed by free beer for all in the formal gardens. They should have been there, along with other Anselm undergraduates and alumni and passers-by who wandered through the open back gate to see what was going on, walk in the torchlit gardens and drink the college-brewed ale. But Toby had asked them to meet elsewhere beforehand, and they had, and the slide into hell had started there.
They had argued, terribly and destructively, with unforgivable things said on multiple sides. They’d walked away from one another a little after eight o’clock. Jem had never seen Toby again.
Jem hadn’t known or cared what the others did after the row. He’d just walked, as though pounding Oxford’s pavements could somehow blot out the words echoing in his brain, and, when he’d exhausted himself with walking, he had trudged back to his digs, and let loose the choking sobs of humiliation he’d been holding back. He’d huddled on his bed, wondering how he could possibly face the morning, until itwasmorning and he had to. He’d gone into college horribly aware that the others might be present, that he might see them, they might see him. He hadn’t wanted to speak to any of them. He’d never wanted to speak to Nicky again.
Late that afternoon he had been in the library, because Finals wouldn’t wait, when he had felt a tap on his shoulder and looked round to see a white-faced porter.
Toby had been found dead a couple of hours earlier, lying in his room in Summoner Quad. The curtains were drawn, windows closed, and the door stuck fast. His scout had been unable to get in to clean that morning, but Toby had often been known to put a chair under the doorhandle when he didn’t want to be disturbed. He had missed a tutorial, but it was the fourth he’d skipped that term, and his absence had caused annoyance rather than concern. Goodness knew when the murder would have been noticed, in fact, except that Toby had borrowed someone’s gown and its owner had become tired of waiting for its return. Hammering on the door had garnered no reply, neighbours had offered that the habitually loud Toby had not been heard from all day, and then someone asked if there was, perhaps, a smell.
A porter came with a spare key and found the door was already unlocked, and still wouldn’t open. Eventually he put his shoulder to it, and everything changed.
Toby had been killed with his paperknife, the Italian stiletto. It had been driven deep into his chest, under his ribcage, upwards to the heart. There was surprisingly little blood; he would, the doctors thought, have died almost at once. Time of death was settled on as the previous evening, at some point between quarter past nine—when the upstairs man had knocked in the hope of borrowing a bottle of ink, and been told to go to the devil in a bellow that carried through the door—and two in the morning, going by the body’s rigor. The college gates had been locked at ten o’clock.
Some students who lived in the surrounding rooms agreed they had heard raised voices at various points, including one that might have been a woman’s, but there were always raised voices in Toby’s room and it had been Summoner’s Gift, the gardens full of visitors and chatter and ale. Nobody had paid particular attention at the time, or observed anything unusual. Nobody had noticed who’d come and gone.
If it had happened a few years later, the paperknife could have held the answer. The new study of fingerprints might have identified the killer; just this year, two men had hanged thanks to the fingerprints they left at the scene of their crime. But a decade ago fingerprints had been the preserve of scientific discussion, not criminal detection, and a doctor had pulled the knife from Toby’s chest without a thought.
The police had needed evidence, and there was none. Summoner Quad had buildings on three sides of the quadrangle, forming a U shape looking down onto the college gardens. Staircase Thirty-One was the furthest away from the rest of the college, with a high wall behind it separating StAnselm’s from neighbouring Trinity. Toby’s was the end room on the ground floor. They had sometimes used to clamber in through the window from the quad or the garden rather than troubling to enter by the staircase door; one could also take the cellar route that ran from Old Quad under Summoner Quad, and came up, via a serving stair, in Thirty-One.
Someone had come to Toby’s room that night, by whatever route. Someone had killed him with his paperknife, made sure the windows were fastened, left the room, and jammed the door. That had given the murderer the rest of the night and all the morning to wash hands, dispose of stained clothing, recover their composure, and come up with a story.
