The Burning (43 page)

She thumped him affectionately. ‘You know I won’t. Not all the time, anyway.’

There was a tiny pause. I went into my room, mumbling about needing to check something. I opened the top drawer of my chest of drawers and stared into it, waiting for them to go.

‘Louise, would you like to come with us?’ Avril was in the doorway behind me. ‘We’d love you to join us for dinner.’

I could see Rebecca over her mother’s shoulder, not looking at me but listening. I said what I thought she would want to hear. ‘Oh, thank you. But I couldn’t. It’s your last night together.’

‘Don’t be silly. I get to talk to them all the time.’ Rebecca took her hair out of its ponytail and shook it out, then tied it back up again, smiling at me with uncomplicated warmth. ‘Please come. If you’ve been here for a bit already, have you found anywhere nice to eat?’

I shook my head, miserable again. Failure.

Her father said firmly, ‘We’ll ask the porter. There’s always Brown’s. Or at least, that was the place to go in my day. But I was up at that end of town.’

I fell into step behind the Haworths as they wandered out of third quad, listening to Gerald reminisce. I had fallen for them, from a height, and all I could do was hope against hope that Rebecca might let me be her friend. If I did enough for her – if I put her first, if I earned it – then maybe she would. And it was worth it because I would benefit from it; I could learn from Rebecca, from her parents. I could become someone else with her as an example to follow.

You know as well as I do that Rebecca wasn’t the sort of person who craved attention. She wasn’t my friend because I sucked up to her. She didn’t care about being looked after; it had always happened to her and she neither expected it nor demanded it. She took me for granted, in the nicest way possible, as part of the backdrop of her life, and I never actually needed to work to stay there. But old habits die hard. Old ways of thinking, too. I never quite managed to shake off the feeling that if I didn’t worship at her shrine, she would move on to someone who would. Maybe that’s because I would have been that way, if I’d had what she had and been what she was. Rebecca was a lot nicer than me. Maybe that goes without saying.

Being friends with her was an amazing experience, though. It took me a long time but I started to trust her. I let her choose clothes for me, borrowing from her wardrobe rather than buying, mostly. It had hurt but I had told her I was too poor to go shopping, and she never made me feel self-conscious about it for a second. Nana’s money was dwindling and now I realised I had bought the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, the wrong everything. Eventually I got a job in the college bar that paid for some of my expenses, and later I worked in the city as a tour guide during the Easter and summer vacations, moving into flats while their usual inhabitants were off travelling and didn’t want to have to cover their rent. Plus I made a bit on the side from selling Nana’s drugs. I was the most unlikely dealer imaginable, above suspicion, a meek law student who barely spoke. I let a couple of the more free-living graduates know what I had available and used them for distribution; as before, I didn’t get my hands dirty if I could help it.

Rebecca knew nothing about it. She dressed me up and dragged me around with her to college bars and student parties and the dismal nightclubs that were the best Oxford had to offer. I was her audience, her coat-holder, her general dogsbody. And at Christmas, every Christmas, she took me back to her home, to spend the holidays with her parents in a house that was all holly on mantelpieces and mistletoe in the hall, a huge fir tree and candles everywhere – the great English Christmas that doesn’t really exist, except in tiny pockets of privilege here and there. It sounds fake but there was nothing pretentious about the way the Haworths lived. They were the real thing and I couldn’t get enough of them.

We spent the first year in the greatest harmony, as I got used to Rebecca’s compulsive need to keep everything neat and organised; we lived together in a house in our second year, and in our third year when we were back in college, in separate rooms this time, she spent hours drinking tea curled up on my bed, her eyes glittering as she spun tales. I stood in her shadow, even when she tried to draw me into the light. I preferred to watch, anyway. She broke hearts without meaning to; everyone adored her. It makes her sound like Pollyanna, but she wasn’t, not at all. She was brilliant and funny and a little bit mad. There was a vulnerability too, an innocence, a desire to be liked that was almost childish. The only person who got under her skin – the only one who ever made her really doubt herself – was the one person who seemed to be immune to her. He had worked out that the best way to bring her to heel was to pretend he didn’t like her, and it baffled and intrigued her until she became hopelessly obsessed. If there was one thing Adam Rowley was good at, it was making women crazy, and Rebecca was no different. I might not have been particularly experienced myself but I was born cynical; I tried to tell her that how she was feeling was all part of the game he was playing with her, but she wouldn’t listen, or couldn’t. By the time we were in our last year, she was unguardedly open about her feelings for him, utterly reckless.

You never knew Adam, and I doubt Rebecca ever told you about him, but you have a lot in common. He was beautiful on the outside and vile on the inside. The university was littered with his rejects, the girls he’d pursued and slept with and dropped as soon as he’d got what he wanted from them. It wasn’t sex with him; it was power. He’d find out where your limits were and then devote himself to pushing you beyond them. He was a bully and a misogynist, and if he hadn’t been charismatic – more than that, cult-leader standard – I don’t think he would have had many friends. He wanted to take what was best from people and leave them with nothing. There was a rumour that he had hepatitis, that he had passed it on to a few girls in the full knowledge that he should have been more careful, but no one ever knew for sure. I suppose none of the victims would have wanted to admit it was true.

With Rebecca, he saw her innocence, her trust in goodness, and I think he wanted to take that away from her, just to see if he could. He made her silent and watchful, nervous around him, stepping carefully, trying to please. It was painful to watch, but worse for her, because she couldn’t understand what he was doing. I knew. I could always read people like that. It takes a user to know a user, maybe. I got what I wanted from Rebecca, but I left her whole. Adam took her soul.

You probably think I’m exaggerating, but you didn’t know her before. Not before I killed him. Before what he did to her. You know, you should be grateful to him; he broke Rebecca in for you. She liked you because she’d loved him, and you reminded her of him, physically at least. Does it hurt to know you weren’t the first? To hear that Rebecca was using you to revisit the bad old days? Adam Rowley was much worse than you, if it helps. He was imaginative in his cruelty, for one thing. Rebecca didn’t see the danger until it was far too late.

It was Trinity term, the last term before Finals – almost the end of our time at Oxford, and everything seemed bittersweet, or at least it did when I had the chance to lift my head from my books. Law students don’t get out of the library much and I was desperate to get a good degree. It was my ticket out of my old life. For the first time I had lost focus on what Rebecca was doing. I saw her, every day, and usually had one meal with her at least, but I wasn’t aware that she was drifting ever closer to Adam, or that she was prepared to do whatever he wanted to prove how she felt about him.

It happened one Saturday night. He was living in college but he had friends – acolytes – in the year below who had a tiny house in Jericho. He wanted privacy for what he was planning, and he got it. They went out for the night, obediently, while he invited Rebecca to join him for dinner. She must have thought it was a dream come true. I have no doubt that she didn’t tell me about it because she knew I would disapprove. The first I knew of it was a feather-light scratching at my door in the early hours of the morning, and a tiny whimpering sound that I somehow knew to be Rebecca, though I’d never heard her make a noise like that before. I opened the door and she fell into my arms, shaking uncontrollably, sobbing so hard I couldn’t understand what she was saying at first. But I got the story, in the end. They hadn’t got as far as dinner. He’d poured her a tumbler of whisky when she got there, watched her swallow it too fast because she was nervous, poured her another, and a third, and Rebecca never drank spirits. Then he took the glass from her, and raped her on the living-room floor. He raped her again upstairs, in one of the bedrooms. He raped her and he told her she’d asked for it. No one would believe her, he said. She’d followed him around for too long. She was drunk; he could tell anyone who asked that she’d agreed to have sex with him and then regretted it when he didn’t want a relationship with her. He told her she was ugly, and that it was a pity fuck anyway because she’d made herself so pathetic over him, and no one would ever want her if they knew what she was really like.

She got away when he was in the bathroom having a shower, though I don’t think he would have minded her leaving. He’d been careful to use just enough force to make her do what he wanted. She had bruises, yes, and she was bleeding, but it was just
– just
– within the bounds of possibility that the sex had been consensual, though rough. Oh, he’d judged it well. I don’t think it was the first time he’d done it. He knew what would work.

Rebecca had spirit, though. She wanted to go to the police, or at the very least the d, and make a formal complaint against him. She wanted him to be sent down. She wanted him to be punished. I had the horrible job of explaining that if she told the police and it got as far as a trial she’d be savaged by any decent defence barrister. He would get off, just as he’d said. She had told anyone who would listen that she was obsessed with him. She had gone there willingly. She had drunk more than a little. He was well spoken, handsome, charming and credible. She had very little chance of securing a conviction even if she did manage to get it to court. Basically, it would blight her life for years.

‘Move on,’ I advised her. ‘Get over it in your own time and put it down to experience. There’s nothing you can do legally to punish him. He’s too clever.’

‘But it’s not fair.’ That’s all she kept saying. ‘It’s not fair.’ And it wasn’t. She was so bewildered. Doing that to her was like kicking a kitten – she hadn’t expected it, or known to be afraid, and now she was petrified. She had to go and get tested for STDs because he hadn’t used a condom, naturally, and she had to get treatment. She was on the Pill, so there was that, at least – a pregnancy would have killed her. She couldn’t be around him – couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He had primed his friends to think it was hilarious. They made comments about her, under their breath but loud enough that she could hear them, about what a miserable shag she’d been, what a stupid bitch she was. I could see him enjoying it, feeding off her distress, getting a thrill from the power he had over her.

And I didn’t think he deserved to get away with it.

It was my good luck that Adam was a thrill seeker, the sort who loves to experiment and feel they’re doing something outside the law, preferably demonstrating their own heroism. For once, I broke my own rule about dealing. I approached him directly and asked if he’d be interested in buying something to make May Morning go with a swing. I pretended he was the only person I knew who was edgy enough to want to do drugs. I quoted him a price that was laughable, making him believe I didn’t know the value of what I was selling. It was speed, he thought. Something to put a spring in his step. I promised I’d meet him after the bar closed, by the river, but he had to promise he wouldn’t tell anyone. That was the risky bit. He could have told anyone that he was meeting me, and why. But he loved the secrecy. And he was too arrogant to think twice about why Rebecca’s best friend would even be talking to him, let alone doing him a favour.

I watched him all night from behind the bar, pouring him drink after drink, seeing him flirt and freeze alternately, throwing out negative remarks to make the girls try harder to impress him. Sarcasm had never done it for me but Adam Rowley could have had most of the girls in the bar that night by clicking his fingers. That was why, I suppose, he didn’t bother. Too easy. Much more fun to make them give him what he wanted in spite of themselves.

He shook off the friends who usually followed him around, as I’d told him to. He came down to the river as I’d planned. He took the pills I gave him without really looking at them, and he let me talk to him, a shade desperately, until they kicked in. I’d calculated that he would think I was trying to chat him up, and his amusement at my temerity would hold his attention. I was right about that. And then I asked him about Rebecca – knowing that he knew we were friends. He laughed in my face. She’d deserved it, he said. She’d enjoyed it, in the bit of her soul where the bad girl lived. He’d thought she was enjoying it a little bit too much at times. It almost spoiled it for him.

He was slurring his words and repeating himself, and I hoped that the combination of diazepam and alcohol would dull his reactions. I let him start to walk away from me and I whacked him on the back of the head with a champagne bottle I’d taken from the recycling bin behind the bar. It was reinforced glass, so it didn’t shatter, and it was heavy enough to do the job. Adam dropped like a stone. It was child’s play to roll him into the river, with just the fear that he might come back to consciousness when he hit cold water. The drugs took care of that. He slipped out of sight and the river washed him away. I didn’t stand around to watch him die, or curse his spirit, or gloat, or whatever it is murderers are supposed to do. I didn’t waste my time. I was back in my room within ten minutes, rinsing out the socks I’d put on over my shoes when I left the path so I didn’t leave footprints on the riverbank. I had gambled that Adam, who was exceedingly drunk, wouldn’t notice in the dark, and I had been right. The bottle had been wiped clean and was back in the recycling bin; it was due for collection the following day, I happened to know. I took the money he’d given me and burned it, flushing the ash away down the lavatory in a different staircase.