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‘But you will,’ Aaron said. ‘You’ll bring us all down, Jem. Stop.’
‘Who killed Toby?’
Aaron gave Jem a long look, up and down. ‘Do you know something? I really don’t give a damn.’
On which he left, shutting the door with some force.
Jem flopped back on his bed to think. Suppose Ella had killed Toby. Suppose she had left Aaron while the back gates were still open, and returned to Toby’s room, to confront the brother who had thwarted her love affair and intended to control her life. Suppose she had lied about her movements the next day, and asked Aaron to support that lie. He would not have refused her, Jem was quite sure, but he would have asked himself why she was lying.
And they had never married, and Aaron was still sticking doggedly to the alibi she’d forced on him.
Aaron would rather be suspected of murder his whole life than see Ella, and perhaps Prue, suffer. Jem considered that and, for a moment, his pursuit of some abstract truth seemed rather contemptible.
Toby, he reminded himself. Toby was dead. Jem was living in limbo. Theyneededthe truth.
Even Aaron probably needed the truth because he thought it was Ella, and he’d never married anyone else. Did he still love her? Did she still love him? Had she killed her own brother for her lover’s sake and found herself rejected, guilty, and alone?
‘Christ,’ Jem said aloud. His voice was a little raspy, and very small in the stark, cold room.
EIGHTEEN
Jem forced himself off the bed around six o’clock. He’d thought and fretted and, surprisingly, drowsed a little, and he was still entirely unsure what he should do.
He laced himself back into his built-up shoe, deciding that he would have an early dinner, alone, and an early night. He would sleep on what he’d learned and make a decision in the morning. He would not go to Staircase Thirteen to put it all on Nicky’s shoulders. That wasn’t fair, or right, or even sensible.
He had once read that very whimsical book by MrDodgson of Christ Church, published under another name because mathematicians weren’t supposed to write nonsense. There was a character in it, the White Queen, who prided herself on her ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Jem wished he could do the same, because the mutually incompatible possibilities were jostling in his head now, all true, all false.
It was Ella, because Toby threatened Aaron.
It was Prue, because Toby got her pregnant and abandoned her.
It was Nicky, because he loved Toby.
There was a thin stream of gowned students coming out of Old Quad, from chapel or the library; he could imagine Nicky among them in full-length academic regalia, carrying it off as he had that absurd fur coat once upon a time. Jem kept his head down, just in case.
He went up to Seal’s, for lack of better ideas. The icy air had thickened noticeably and had a sour muddy, chemical taste to it; there would be a full-scale pea-souper fog by tomorrow. He found a table and ordered beef broth as a cheap way to feel full. Students came in around him, shedding coats and college scarves, talking loudly. Jem leafed through a newspaper and ignored them.
He couldn’t have said what made him look up. A slight hush, a voice not consciously heard, an instinct? He only knew that he raised his head and saw Aaron once more. With Ella.
Jem stared, barely believing it. Aaron had a hand under Ella’s arm. Neither of them looked happy. But they were together.
Jem ducked his head. It was an instinctive response not to let them see him, and indeed they didn’t, settling a few yards away.
He stared unseeingly at the table. He’d felt a single, agonising pang through his heart as they went by, which, he realised, was precisely because they hadn’t seen him. They hadn’t spotted him, called his name, swept him up as friends did, and the hurt of that was startling.
Of course they hadn’t: it was ten years since that would have mattered. But what the devil were Ella and Aaron doing in Oxford, and one another’s company?
Aaron had led him to believe that he had no contact with Ella. If that had been a lie, if they had remained together all along, in secret, away from the world’s eyes…
That changed everything.
It would have been without benefit of marriage, but Jem was quite sure that Ella would count herself New Woman enough not to care. Aaron was far more conventional, and an honourable man—or so Jem had thought—but Aaron had claimed not to have seen Ella in years, and here they were together. After Jem had sent them each a letter claiming he knew their secret.
And Aaron was physically powerful, and Ella was ruthless, and if one of them was a murderer, then the other one knew, had always known. What if they’d been in it together from the start? What if they’d come after Jem now?
You’re panicking, he told himself. He gripped his wrists, feeling the pulse in each with his thumbs, concentrating on his breathing. He wanted, urgently, to flee to Nicky for shelter, or support—to hide behind him, frankly, because he’d have given anything for a physically competent ally—but he’d have to pass them to reach the door. They might look round and see him, and then what?
He needed to calm down and pay attention. He glanced surreptitiously up at them, feeling absurdly like the jealous husband in a French farce. Aaron gave the waitress their order, and then turned to Ella and spoke in a low voice. Jem couldn’t hear anything, to his frustration. According to detective novels, he should have slipped quietly over and concealed himself behind a handy pot plant to eavesdrop, but Seal’s was as inadequate in the matter of pot plants as Jem was in surreptitious movement. He’d just have to sit here until they left and pray they didn’t spot him.
