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‘He got you drunk? On purpose?’
Nicky shrugged. ‘I drank it. My fault. But Hugo didn’t look like such a romantic hero afterwards, did he? And Toby experienced the unique pleasure of seeing one’s friends fail—Hugo, me—and he liked it.’
‘God.’
‘Then his damned uncle had the child. And there I was in our third year, trying my hardest to believe that the idol of my heart was not in fact a spoiled, capricious, manipulative, whining shit, and finding it harder on a daily basis. Sitting listening to Toby night after night, wondering why I wasn’t in the library, or fencing, or with you. Trying to soothe him, because Ella had entirely delegated that duty to me by then, and who can blame her. You can’t segment the story, you can’t say Toby’s murder—my murder—happened on the fifteenth of May as though it were a discrete and singular event. All through that spring and summer I was falling out of love with him; Ella was falling in love with Aaron; and Toby was indulging his temper more and more. He was savage in private.’
‘He bruised your wrist.’
‘He hit Ella at least once. And then he found out that she returned Aaron’s affections, and everything was so much worse. For Christ’s sake, drink your whisky. I need another one and I don’t want to drink alone.’
Jem took a sip while Nicky poured himself a generous measure. ‘And then?’
‘And then that night.’ Nicky’s hand was trembling slightly, just enough to make the amber liquid quiver in the glass. ‘You all left; Toby spouted his unpleasantness; I told him he was a cunt and went back to my room. I was sick of him, and of myself for what I’d said to you in order to curry favour with a man I was coming to loathe. Plus, I wanted to work, for which I needed a particular book, and, in the way of irritated nerves, it seemed impossible I should change to another task. So I decided I would go and borrow it and speak to Toby while I was there. I would go and tell him he was a cunt again, in significantly more detail, and we would have the damned great row I should have had with him months before, and it would be the last one because I should not speak to him again afterwards.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I was right about that, I suppose.’
Jem’s own hand was shaking. He thought he might drop his glass. ‘And then?’
‘I got the book and took the cellarway to Thirty-One because the quad was full of people and I couldn’t bear it. I passed nobody: everyone was at Summoner’s Gift. That was a relief then, more so later. I found him in a hell of a rage. He said Ella had just been to see him, and the engagement was off, but she had told him that she hated him, would always hate him, and would do her best to ruin him if he harmed Aaron. He might have asked himself how much pain he had caused her to provoke that, but, as ever, he couldn’t see past his own hurt. He was spitting. He told me he was going to destroy Aaron and she’d grovel on her knees to accept Hugo when he was done. I said Ella’s affairs were surely her business. He said, “No. She’s mine.” I told him to stop behaving like the most tiresome character in a Jacobean revenge tragedy. And that was when he turned on me.’
Nicky paused to take another mouthful of whisky. His eyes looked very brown in the firelight.
‘He told me that Aaron had been involved in carrying out abortions. That’s your discovery, of course? Damned fool. I reminded him that not only would Ella never speak to him again if he reported Aaron to the police, but that none of the rest of us would, or any other decent human being. But he had a solution to that. I was going to do it for him.’
‘What?’
‘He informed me,’ Nicky said remotely, ‘that he would be obliged if I went to the police station the next day, lodged a complaint against Aaron, and carried through the business until a prosecution was mounted. I told him to go fuck himself. And he said…he said, if I didn’t, he would report me to the police, for gross indecency, with you.’
Jem’s stomach plunged. ‘He?—’
‘That was the choice he gave me, Jem. Ruin Aaron or be used to ruin you. And at least Aaron’s crime would be his own fault, whereas your fall would be entirely down to me. I’d felt guilty as sin about you for much of that term, but I didn’t know until then—well.’
Jem couldn’t speak. Nicky’s knuckles were white on the glass.
‘I told him to go to hell. He started talking about you, and what he’d say about you, us. And the thing is, I believed him. He wasn’t talking wildly, or rather he was, but I was quite sure it wasn’t just words. That he’d do it.’
‘You are saying that Toby would really have—But he was myfriend,’ Jem said, and heard himself sound like a bewildered child.
‘Yes,’ Nicky said. ‘He was, except in all the ways he wasn’t. Do you not recall how, in that damned argument, he said something aboutyou two wouldn’t want to be caught?’
Jem clenched his hands. ‘Yes.’
‘It was a threat. Much as unsavoury people might say,What a nice shop, wouldn’t it be awful if it burned to the ground.I didn’t know if you’d realised it, but I heard it very clearly indeed. It’s why I said what I did. I was trying to tell him, “I don’t care about Jem, so you’ve no need to hurt him.” He didn’t believe me, of course, so I achieved nothing except to cause you pain.’
‘Maybe that was what he wanted,’ Jem said thinly.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know how much he’d planned and how much he was reacting, feeding off his own anger. I don’t know if he wanted to hurt you or me or simply anyone available. Anyway, there we were. He threatened to use me to hurt you and vice versa, and, at that moment, having known him since we were eight years old, I had had absolutely enough.
‘Perhaps I should have conciliated him even then. Maybe if I’d given in, Ella and I might have talked him round in the morning. But I couldn’t, or at least I didn’t. Instead, I told him precisely what I thought of him, as viciously as I could. We had an exchange of words. And?—’
‘What?’
‘And he picked up that damned paperknife,’ Nicky said. ‘He said, did I not understand that he could stab me here and now and get away scot-free? All he’d have to do was tell the police I’d made advances that he had to fight off, and everyone would believe him. And, you know, he was right. That’s what finally did it, I think. Not that he was jabbing at me with a stiletto, but that he was right.
‘And he slashed at me—sliced my shirt open, didn’t graze the skin—and I went to take the knife off him, and we struggled, and I stabbed him.’
The fire crackled gently in the hearth. Jem could hear Nicky’s breathing and his own.
‘I’d love to say I did it because he threatened you, or to save Aaron,’ Nicky went on. ‘I don’t think I can. I didn’t plan to do it, I swear that. But he wanted me to know that, despite having a quarter of either of our brains and none of your character, none of your courage or determination or steadfastness, despite never having worked for one single scrap of what he had, he was going to use our nature to destroy us, and he would get away with it. And I hated him for it, and I had a knife in my hand, and I killed him.’
