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He wondered how he’d find out more, and decided he might as well ask.
Dear ______
As I wrote to you before, I am now staying at StAnselm’s. I have had a number of informative conversations here. In particular, I have learned that, before his death, Toby enquired about the possibility of laying anonymous accusations of a certain serious offence against a fellow student.
I need not say more, I think. I shall not put the specific details of the accusation on paper.
I have no intention of dragging up private matters if they are unrelated to Toby’s murder. But I need to be sure they are unrelated. I hope you will agree to talk to me about this at your earliest convenience.
Yours,
Jem
He read his note over with some disgust. It seemed horribly like a blackmailer’s letter. Well, it was one. If any of them had been harbouring a secret, they would have to assume Jem knew what it was. And then, perhaps, he might have a chance of actually finding out.
It felt vile and intrusive, but he had no idea how else to get what he wanted, so he copied it out four times, one for each former friend. He’d speak to Nicky in person.
He addressed the envelopes as ‘Strictly Private and Personal’, and stared at them, a cold feeling growing in his stomach. An innocent person who received this letter would be angry and disgusted. Someone with a secret would be angry and afraid. And someone who had killed Toby to keep him quiet might be angry enough to kill again.
But what choice was there? He needed to know, if anything more urgently than when he’d started on this path. He needed to know if?—
Oh God, just face it.He needed to know if it was Nicky.
Nicky had had a motive to kill Toby, and the opportunity too, though they’d all had that. It was said criminals returned to the scene of the crime; Nicky had barely left it. Nicky had loved Toby, and hated him, and people killed the objects of their love and hate. Jem knew that too well: ten years ago he had loved Nicky, and hated him enough to kill him too, and he had no doubt Nicky knew that. He would have found it very easy to say,Forget the murder, forget the past.
Was that what Nicky had wanted to achieve by reaching for him? Wasn’t it a great deal more probable that he’d wanted to manipulate greying, limping Jem than that he’d desired him?
Manipulate or, of course, simply have something on him. You got two years for gross indecency, with hard labour if the magistrate was unsympathetic. If Nicky was the murderer, if he saidI’ll tell if you do?—
‘Christ,’ Jem said aloud, and dropped an arm over his eyes.
It was dark when he went out to post the letters, and the fog had thickened noticeably. It was only a wet mist, nothing like the choking stew of a London particular or the rolling black clouds of his industrial home, but it was freezing and clammy and it bit. Jem stood at the base of the stair, bracing himself for the weather. The ghostly white birches of Bascomb Wood loomed opposite as though he were in a forest, not an Oxford college. He tied his muffler with chilly fingers and fumbled his gloves out of his pocket.
He wondered as he walked if he would stand at the pillar box hesitating, if he’d walk up and down, plagued by doubt and fear and second thoughts, but in the end, it was too damned cold, so he just dropped the letters in.
He found a small café for a cheap meal, ordered, and looked for something to read. He checked his coat’s capacious pockets, and found Nicky’s pamphlet,The Wife’s Lamentation.
The poem was a mere fifty-three lines according to Nicky’s extremely erudite introduction, and was the lament of a woman separated from her lord, first by travel or exile, then by the malice of others. Toby had once described Nicky’s beloved Anglo-Saxon poetry as ‘a lot of chaps wailing and waiting to die’, which seemed fair. Jem leafed through the pamphlet, unable to see what on earth the appeal of this ancient rambling was, until he turned a page.
There are friends on earth,
lovers living who lie in bed,
while I walk alone in the dawn light
under the oak tree and through this cave of earth,
there I must sit the summer-long day;
there I can weep for all my woes,
my many miseries; and so I may never
flee from my grief of heart,
nor all the longings that have snatched my life.
Jem stared at the words, his food untouched. He flicked to find the poem’s date. The tenth centuryad, it said. A millennium ago, yet the pain at loneliness and its injustice were raw on the page to the point that Jem had to squeeze his eyes shut.
