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‘But—’
‘I was one of Toby’s friends, and some people called us the Seven Wonders. We were a group of friends, that’s all, and then Toby died. Was killed. Murdered. And I…fell ill.’ Sitting in the Examination Rooms, watching the tremor of his hand, watching the ink dry, unused, on the nib of his pen, and his future dry up with it. He had not written a single thing except his name on the paper that day. ‘I don’t like to think of it.’
‘Naturally, naturally. I had no idea. I remember reading about the case, of course: it was fascinating. And dreadful,’ MrLeighton added hastily. ‘Needless to say. But as an intellectual challenge, you understand? MrsLeighton followed the story closely too. She always thought it was the black.’
Jem shut his eyes, feeling the old, futile fury rise. ‘It isn’t a story, sir. It was our lives. And the man you mention was about the only one of us to have an alibi. As to this…’ He picked up the letter between thumb and forefinger. ‘I received a lot of them when it happened, from people who “followed the story closely” because it was “fascinating”.’ He saw his superior flush and knew he shouldn’t have said it, but he couldn’t hold back the contempt. ‘We all got them, even Ella. Her brother—her twin—had died, and she opened a dozen letters a day calling her unspeakable names and accusing her of his murder. So you will forgive me if I do not treat anonymous spite as a serious matter, sir. I’m used to it.’
‘Yes. Well.’ MrLeighton cleared his throat. ‘I shall have to advise MrRadley, naturally, and seek his guidance. The breath of scandal, attaching to the Bureau—We have a responsibility to uphold. You may take the rest of the day off.’
‘I should rather work.’
MrLeighton’s moustache humped. ‘You will kindly go home. MrRadley and I shall discuss the matter and advise you of our opinion tomorrow.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jem said, since there was nothing else to say, and took his leave.
He walked home. The afternoon spread endlessly in front of him, and he had nothing to do with it. His foot hurt a little, but the new built-up shoe made walking quite tolerable as long as he did not hurry, and he had no reason to do that. London roared around him, motor cars jostling horse-drawn buses for space, pavements crowded with stalls and placards and kiosks and goods on display. The air was speckled with water—not enough to count as rain and justify an umbrella, but quite sufficient to coat Jem with moisture after a few paces and make the paving slabs underfoot slippery. It was three o’clock, and the gas lamps were already being lit.
Grim, grey November weather. It had been blazing bright, the summer Toby died.
You were one of the Seven Wonders?The shock in MrLeighton’s voice wouldn’t leave him. Of course he’d been astonished. There was nothing at all wonderful about Jeremy Kite now.
Here he was, halting through drizzle, a drab man in a drab world. Club-footed and short of stature, always a little shabby, never quite paying attention. He arrived at work on time, left on time, limped his way through a succession of empty days with unremarkable competence, never good or bad enough to be noticed. He could scarcely remember how it had felt to be golden.
He’d known once.
When he got back to his room, he started looking for the photograph. He had not looked at it in years; it was probably still in the chest where he’d hidden it. He had never put it up, but he’d never thrown it away either.
It was there, with other things he didn’t look at: books, letters, papers, pictures. The whole-cast photograph, although he didn’t pause over that. He wanted the special photograph, which Toby had insisted they take. The one showing just the seven of them.
Assuming he still had it. He’d burned his gown and mortarboard in a fit of rage, and some papers and photographs with them before his father had stopped him, and the thought came to him now that he might have burned this one. If he had, it was because he’d wanted it all gone, but even so, his hands were shaking a little as he worked his way through the books and papers and blurred sepia faces frozen in time.
And there it was.
Jem hauled himself onto his armchair and looked at the framed print. Seven of them, all in their costumes and make-up, Old Quad unfocused in the background. It was a good clear photograph of them. The light had been excellent. It always was, back then.
They all looked serious, neutral-faced, as one had to, since a smile wouldn’t survive the long exposure. All except Nicky. Nicky had cocked a hip and arched a brow, and looked into the camera with a taunting expression that was so himself Jem had to shut his eyes for a moment to block it out. He stood with Hugo, both of them in Roman tunics, and Aaron in his glinting wreath and toga, all three of them displaying bare, muscular arms. The two women had chairs: Prue in her boy’s garb, eyes wide with glee that shone down the years; Ella, vivid hair greyed out by the photograph. Toby lolled at Ella’s feet, forever bright, forever youthful, and Jem curled on the stone by him, the crutch that had been his prop lying in front. Toby had insisted they were all photographed in costume, but Jem still regretted the crutch.
He looked at the photograph, smelling greasepaint and lilies, champagne and sun-warmed stone and the faint scent of meadow vapours.
It had been their second year, Trinity term, an idyllic summer. The play wasCymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s later, odder ones; they’d staged it in StAnselm’s Old Quad. It was the perfect space, with its low medieval buildings in greying stone, the gnarled tree in the corner, clematis flowering all around. He remembered Prue sitting in a window—Nicky’s tutor’s room, requisitioned for the occasion—her face alive with pleasure at the sheer joy of success.Being the centre of attention suits her, Nicky had remarked, unkind and accurate as ever.
The play had crowned a year of triumphs, and it had been marvellous, mostly. There had been rows, tensions, but it had been a roaring success in the end. Sold out, critically praised, exhilarating. Until the last night.
The last night, the last Saturday of the term and the academic year, should have been the climax of the best year of his life. It should have been glorious. It almost had been.
They’d been so young and so innocent in the picture he held, but as Jem looked at it now, he felt a surge of anticipatory dread ten years too late, a sense of a terrible inevitability. It hadn’t happened inCymbeline, where tragedy was averted by an attack of conscience and the intervention of the gods, but it had come to them in the end.
He headed to the office the next day with fear curdling in his stomach, as familiar and hateful as the sensation of a brace on his foot.
He knew what was going to happen, today or tomorrow or soon, because it always did. Nobody could resist gossip when it involved murder and notoriety and unsolved crimes.Do you know that fellow Kite in my department? Well…Someone would tell one person, in strictest confidence, and that person would tell one person, and Jem would find himself halting into the office through a gauntlet of accusing eyes. Opening his desk drawer to discover unsigned letters. Trapped against a wall while people explained their theories of who put a blade into Toby’s heart, who took the light from his eyes and the vitality from his body and left him cold, greying meat on the floor of his own room, as though this were a puzzle in a magazine, solution on the back page.
He couldn’t do it again. Not the eyes, the surreptitious watching, the words just out of earshot, the reminders over and over again that Toby was dead and the rest of them were merely waiting to die.
Unless they weren’t, of course. How should he know? He hadn’t spoken to any of his friends in a decade, since Toby’s murder had ripped them apart.
He didn’t want to go to work, but he didn’t have a choice about that. He’d exhausted his savings and his days off in dealing with his parents’ funerals, just four months apart, and the rent had to be paid. So he set off on the trudge to Somerset House, telling himself the whole way that he was panicking. Of course nobody cared about a ten-year-old murder. Of course nobody would be interested in him. He was no longer twenty-one, no longer flayed raw with grief and fear and guilt. He could manage this.
He told himself that all the way along the Strand, walked through the doors of Somerset House into the lobby where thirty or more clerks were gathered in morning gossip, and hit the buzz of conversation like a stone into water, sending silence rippling outward. It looked as choreographed as any performance, heads turning, mouths closing, until the whole room was silent, and watching him.
