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Alone on stage, Nicky was supposed to embark on his soliloquy of remorse and defeat. He wandered around the stage instead, as though he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, prodding at papier-mâché rocks with his sword. The prompter hissed at him a couple of times, finally getting through; Nicky said, loudly, ‘What?’, repeated the first line, ‘The heaviness and guilt within my bosom takes off my manhood,’ and started to giggle. He laughed for a couple of moments, as the audience stirred in bewildered confusion, then sat abruptly on the stage, hunched over.
‘Get him off,’ Helmsley snarled. A couple of Roman soldiers hurried on to drag Nicky out of the way. He fought then, kicking out, and it took several agonising minutes and four people to get him off the stage. Helmsley furiously detailed a couple of stagehands to get rid of him, upgraded a blond soldier to speak a few vital lines on his behalf in the final scene, and expressed his firm intention of throttling him once the cast had retreated, after polite but not triumphant applause, to the rooms they were using to dress.
‘What the devil was he thinking!’ Helmsley bellowed. ‘On stage, that drunk—What’swrongwith the man?’
‘It’s not his usual practice,’ Aaron said. ‘He must have been putting it away all day.’
‘He was hitting it hard in the interval,’ Toby said, rubbing his face. ‘I tried to stop him, but he was high as ninety.’
Hugo was in a towering rage, face red. ‘Wretched swine. He made us, me in particular, look fools out there. Damn the man.’
‘It’s the last day of the year,’ Jem said, with a sudden sense of emptiness. ‘I’m going home tomorrow. I wish—I wish he hadn’t done that.’
Jem didn’t see Nicky again before he left—there was no answer when he knocked at his door, and no sign of him in Hall. At the start of the next term, Nicky greeted him as usual, without reference to his behaviour or explanation for it, still less an apology. It was never brought up again.
SIX
Jem decided to go to Aaron next. It was Aaron or Ella, and after that he’d have to leave London to pursue his nagging need to know.
Ella and Aaron, Aaron and Ella.
He’d known the two were close. They were all close, of course, the seven of them, but some of the individual relationships were special. Toby and Ella. Nicky and Toby. And Aaron and Ella.
Ella and Aaron were so similar. That might have sounded odd to an outsider, but among the seven of them it was obvious. Fierce intelligence, fierce determination to be judged by that intelligence alone. A certain reserve too, which Jem put down to being ‘the woman’ and ‘the black’ in a sea of white men, because he felt it himself as ‘the commoner’ or ‘the cripple’. He couldn’t react as they did, though. Jem reddened, stared at the floor and felt his inferiority in every biting word, where Ella swept majestically through objection with a cool contempt that made mockery shrivel and die, and Aaron was simply unreactive, unreadable.
He had attended an expensive boarding school from the age of six, which doubtless meant he was used to abuse, and he had all the self-belief of the well-born and well-off. Not that he had any of what people called ‘side’ to him. He never flaunted his achievements in study or sport, and Jem had sometimes thought he was the only one to see that Aaron disregarded applause not because he was humble, but because he was magnificently sure of himself.
Except that Ella had seen it, of course. Like calling to like.
Aaron and Ella, walking up and down the gardens learning Jupiter’s lines, or discussing research papers and scientific innovations in language that left the rest of them yawning. Rarely the jokers, never the leaders.
If it hadn’t been impossible, it would have been obvious to everyone. Ithadbeen obvious to Jem, who knew wanting when he saw it in other eyes because he feared it was all too obvious in his own, but he had still assumed that it was impossible. Aaron was a black man, and Ella was a marquess’s granddaughter, one day to be a marquess’s sister.
Aaron hadn’t seen it as impossible, and nor had Ella, and the two of them had proceeded on their own path until it all came tumbling down.
Jem wasn’t sure how best to approach Aaron now. He was nervous in a way he hadn’t been with Hugo, and he didn’t like that he was nervous.
He’d always thought Aaron to be deeply decent, with an air of calm that, along with his age, made him seem comfortingly reliable in their dizzy, glittering, overheated little world. He’d surely be a superb doctor; one felt better for speaking to him.
But he wasn’t a good liar.
Aaron and Ella’s alibi was straightforward enough. She said they had left the Mitre Hotel after that last great row, and had walked around together for a while before heading back towards Anselm Hall. That took them past Anselm College’s back gates, standing open for the Summoner’s Gift festivities, and Ella had decided to go in and wish her brother goodnight. ‘Never let the sun go down on a quarrel,’ they agreed she had said. Jem couldn’t imagine the homely words in her icy voice.
Ella said she had spoken briefly to Toby and left him alive and well, while Aaron waited for her in the gardens: he at least had been noticed there by a few people. They had left through the garden gates at around nine o’clock and taken several turns around the Parks before returning to Anselm Hall a few minutes after ten, for which she had been written up. Aaron had arrived back at his own digs not more than ten minutes later.
That was Ella’s story, to which Aaron had lent his voice. They had left at nine; Toby had been heard alive and well at nine fifteen; the college gates had been locked at ten. If they had been together from nine until ten, neither of them had killed Toby.
If.
Jem was absolutely sure Aaron had lied in supporting Ella’s story, and equally sure the others had all concluded the same thing. They’d all known, and not said anything at the time because their shattered friendships had still had remnants standing then, like houses broken by an earthquake but not quite ready to fall down.
Had Ella lied in response to the detective inspector’s obvious prejudice, or because she was the one who needed an alibi? Had Aaron asked her to lie for him, or let her do it for his own safety, or had he been lying for hers? Who had protected whom? If that alibi was false, where had they both been, and was it together or apart?
Jem wished he could just ask. Just sit down with Aaron and say,I know as a certainty in my soul that you didn’t kill Toby, so tell me the truth. He couldn’t say that, no matter how much he wanted to defy his wormy suspicions for the sake of the golden years.
He needed to be strategic, not sentimental. He’d realised in those long minutes of waiting that he’d made a mistake giving his name to Hugo’s footman. If Hugo had anything to hide, he’d had plenty of time to prepare himself. Jem wanted to take the others by surprise, to speak without giving anyone the chance to think first. That was a foul thought, planning to trap his friends into admissions, but they weren’t his friends any more, and one of them had murdered Toby.
So he made an appointment to see DrOyede on Monday as Jeremy Dunnidge, using his mother’s maiden name, and tried not to wince when advised of the consultation fee.
