The It Girl(10)

“Heard him playing the Stone Roses through the wall.” Ryan pointed his fork at Will. “Went over to introduce meself and it turned out we’re ont same course. And he introduced me to this bloke.” He nodded at Hugh.

“Will and I were at school together,” Hugh said, and then flushed again. “Oh wait, duh, Will already told you that. Sorry. Such a thicko.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Will said with an affectionate dig in his friend’s ribs. “Hugh was the brainiest chap in our year.”

Ryan spoke around a tortellini, his expression rather droll.

“Well, in’t that the coincidence. I was the brainiest chap in my year. Looks like you and me have summat in common.”

“We were all the brainiest in our year,” said the girl next to Ryan, speaking for the first time. Her voice was deep, and rather brusque and impatient. “Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“And who’re you?” Ryan said, looking her up and down. She had long dark hair, a serious, slightly equine face, black rectangular glasses, and she looked Ryan straight back in the eye with none of the diffidence Hannah would have felt at being appraised so baldly.

“Emily Lippman.” The girl put a forkful of pasta in her mouth, chewed deliberately, and then swallowed. “Mathematics. You can call me Emily Lippman.”

“I like you, Emily Lippman,” Ryan said with a broad grin, and Emily raised a single eyebrow.

“To which I’m supposed to say?”

“Whatever you like,” Ryan said. “Nothing if you want.” He was still grinning. Emily rolled her eyes.

“Anyway,” April said lazily, “it’s not true.”

“What’s not true?” Hugh asked.

“About being the cleverest in our year. I wasn’t.”

“How did you get in here, then?” Emily said. The remark should have sounded rude, but somehow, coming from her, it didn’t. Just preternaturally direct.

“My natural charm, I suppose,” April said, and she smiled, the deep, soft dimples showing in her golden cheeks. “Or maybe my dad’s money.”

There was a long silence, as if no one quite knew how to take this. Then Ryan gave a short, barking laugh as if April had told a joke.

“Well, good for you,” Emily said. “On both counts.” She shoved the last forkful of pasta into her mouth and stood up, brushing herself down. “Now. What the fuck does a woman have to do to get a drink around here?”

“We could go to that common room place,” Ryan said. He stood too. Hannah saw that he was much taller than she had realized. “What did they call it, the JCB?”

“JCR,” April said. Her lips curled in a smile that Hannah was beginning to recognize as quintessentially April—beguiling, and at the same time, just a little bit wicked. “Junior Common Room if you read the handbook, which you clearly didn’t. And there’s also a bar next to the Great Hall. But sod that. We’re hardly commoners. And who needs a bar when you’ve got a totally majestic suite and a fridge full of champagne?”

She pushed her still-full plate of tortellini away, looked around the group of faces, and then pulled a room key out of her pocket, dangling it from one finger as she raised a fine dark eyebrow.

“Am I right?”





AFTER


The past hangs between them as Will makes supper, chopping aubergine and chorizo in a silence made somehow more oppressive by the chatter of the Radio 4 announcer. Hannah tries and fails to think of what to say, and in the end she retreats to the living room, where she pulls out her laptop and opens her emails.

She deleted the Gmail app from her phone in a panic after her mother’s call came through, not wanting to be ambushed by notification pings on her walk home, and now she’s more than a little afraid of what will be waiting for her, but she knows that leaving it would be worse. At bedtime, with nothing else to distract her, she will lie there wondering what’s lurking in her inbox, until eventually she’ll crack and log back in on her phone. And then whatever she finds—whatever new revelation, dangled lead, or fresh attempt to manipulate her into responding—will set her pulse spiking and her adrenaline pumping, driving the possibility of sleep so far away that she will be awake all night, nauseous with apprehension, refreshing and refreshing and googling April’s name in a kind of sick terror.

She knows that’s how it will go down, because it’s what happened before. Daily, more than daily messages in the first few months and years after April’s death. A constant, numbing flood of beseeching, badgering, beleaguering requests that left her shocked and bruised by the national obsession that April’s death had triggered.

As the court case concluded, the requests slowed. First they came weekly, and then, as she and Will managed to slip beneath the surface of everyday life, camouflaging themselves in the reassuringly boring minutiae of accountancy courses, house buying, money worries, and all the other mundane clutter of daily existence, they became more and more sporadic.

Now she is contacted only rarely and almost never by phone, not since they got rid of the landline and Hannah changed her mobile number. It still happens, though—every time John Neville’s name rears up in the press—every time there’s an appeal by Neville’s legal team, or someone publishes a book, or a new podcast is launched. And it’s taken this long for her to learn avoidance is not the way to deal with it.