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Hannah shakes her head. She’s unsure whether to be honest, whether to tell Geraint that she hasn’t read any press about April’s murder for years, but Geraint is still talking.
“The piece went kind of viral and, well, long story short, I’ve been commissioned to do a ten-part podcast on the case.”
“Okay,” Hannah says slowly. She’s not sure why, but a podcast makes her feel even more uneasy than an article. Then something occurs to her. “You’re not recording this conversation, are you?”
“Um, I mean, no,” Geraint says, a little awkwardly. “Not yet. That’s to say, I usually do record stuff just for my own records, but I wouldn’t broadcast anything from today. I’m still in the research stage. Would you rather I didn’t? I can just take notes if it makes you feel more comfortable.”
“I would prefer that,” Hannah says a little stiffly. She knows she’s being irrational—what’s the difference between a quote on paper versus recorded on a phone? And yet the idea of Geraint capturing her trembling voice talking about that night—it feels unbearable.
“Okay, sure,” Geraint says. He puts his phone away and takes out a pen and a notebook. “Look, I want to be really clear, I don’t want this to be a whitewash. I’m not out to prove Neville’s innocence if he really did it. In fact that’s why I wanted to talk to you, make sure I did justice to the case against him. I just—I just want to understand what happened. There’s gaps I’ve never been able to fill in.”
Hannah says nothing at that. She is holding the water glass so tight her fingers are white.
“Could you—would you mind just… going over what happened that night?” Geraint asks now. His expression is diffident, and he is twisting his fingers together, playing with his pen.
Hannah takes a deep breath. This is not new, it’s all stuff she has gone over a thousand times before; you would think the pain would have dulled, but it hasn’t, or not completely. Still, it’s better if she just gives Geraint chapter and verse, and then he can go away and get rid of whatever little conspiracy theory he’s dreamed up.
“It was late. I’d been in the college bar. Hugh was there, and so was Ryan. Emily was working on some problems in the library. Will wasn’t in college, he’d gone home for the weekend. It was the last night of April’s play, Medea, and we’d arranged this celebration—special cocktails and everything. And about three-quarters of the way through the evening, April went up to our room to change… and she never came back. So I went to find her.”
She closes her eyes, remembering. Remembering the feel of the grass beneath her feet as she and Hugh ran lightly across the Fellows’ Garden. The glow coming from April’s bedroom window as they crossed the quad.
And then, Neville. Slipping out of the opening to the number 7 staircase, his steps surprisingly quiet for such a big man. She had stopped, frozen, half expecting him to see her—but if he did he gave no sign of it. He just turned and hurried off into the night, and she had continued to the foot of the stairwell.
And then—and then—and then—
“I climbed the stairs up to our landing. And the door was open.” Her voice sounds strange in her own ears. “Just like before—just like that night when I came back and found Neville there, waiting. I should have known something was wrong. But I didn’t. I didn’t suspect anything, even though he’d been on the stairs. I should have known.”
The pictures come now, seared into her memory like images seen in flashes of lightning. Her hand on the door. A fan of dark hair, April’s Medea wig, splayed across the rug. And then—
But that’s where it cuts out. The mind protects itself from what is too painful to face, a psychologist told her once, which made the fury rise up inside her, because that sounds like she wants to forget, like it’s an act of supreme selfishness.
“I don’t remember much after that,” she says now. She puts the glass to her lips and takes a long swallow, feeling the iced water numbing her throat and shooting needles of pain through her teeth.
“So it’s never come back?” Geraint says, scribbling, and she shakes her head.
“Flashes, sometimes, in dreams. But I’m never sure how much of that is memory and how much of it’s just my mind reconstructing what it thinks I saw. Nothing I can rely on. I definitely saw Neville, though, coming down the stairs from our room. That, I’m absolutely certain of.”
“The thing is, John Neville came from my town,” Geraint says now. Hannah looks up from her water.
“He did?”
“Yes, his mum lived round the corner from my aunt, and obviously that doesn’t make him innocent, but I suppose it gave me a different kind of perspective on him. I heard all about his defense case, and the holes in the prosecution. It’s not just the crime scene stuff, although that’s odd enough. The fact that they never found any traces of Neville’s DNA on April is something no one ever really explained. Okay, the killer could have used gloves, but it doesn’t seem credible that Neville could have strangled April without her clawing at him or fighting back. For that matter, no one heard a struggle at all, even though there were people in the room below. But it’s not just that—there were loads of other angles the defense never brought up. For example, did you know that April was supposedly pregnant when she died?”
There is a clatter. Hannah has knocked over the glass bottle of water. Fortunately it’s empty, or near enough, and now she scrambles to pick it up before it rolls off the table, her cheeks flaming, trying to figure out what she’s going to say to this extraordinary assertion.
“Sorry,” Geraint is saying, as though it were he who knocked over the bottle. He moves his notebook, mops at the small puddle of water with his napkin. “Sorry, sorry. I take it you didn’t know?”
“No,” Hannah says thinly. She goes to put her hand over her own stomach, and then stops herself. She is still at the stage where her pregnancy isn’t completely obvious to strangers. People who know her can tell she’s changed shape, but to Geraint she might be just carrying a bit of extra weight, and for some reason she doesn’t want him to know, though she can’t put her finger on why.
She feels a strange flutter inside her and the sensation stops her in her tracks. Is it the baby? She hasn’t felt it kick yet—the books say anytime between twenty and twenty-four weeks is normal for a first pregnancy. She is just over twenty-three weeks now, and has been waiting, bated breath, trying to figure out if every little flicker is her child, or just a muscle ticcing. Now she is completely distracted, and Geraint has to say, “Hannah? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, dragging her mind back to the present. “I’m—no, I didn’t know. But to be honest—”
She stops. She doesn’t want to call this a lie to Geraint’s face. It will make her look prejudiced, set in her opinion. But his words have angered her. April, pregnant? It’s ridiculous.
“Look, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m—” She stops, corrects her tense, as she has so many times before. “I was her roommate, her best friend. I find it really unlikely that she wouldn’t have told me something like that. And if it were true, why wouldn’t Neville’s lawyers have brought it up at the trial? It just—it doesn’t ring true to me. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I agree,” Geraint says urgently. “I dismissed it too when I first heard it. But when I asked Ryan, he confirmed it.”
