Page 49

But whichever way I looked at it, I had to assume that Holly had learned to hide the bad stuff.

That made me wonder how much else she’d been willing to hide for them.

She’d known about Esther, hadn’t she? About this older boyfriend.

But maybe she’d messaged Cordelia because she’d figured out who he was and there were legal ramifications to it.

She might have hidden other secrets, too. Even Kit’s secrets. Maybe she’d gone that day to confront him.

The big question was whether talking to Kit had got her killed.

With Gael’s voice ringing in my ears, I decided I was going to have to ask Kit about Holly’s visit. There was no time to be careful or wait for things to fall in my lap.

I still had to wait twenty-four hours, because he had his final exam the next day and needed to focus on it. But that left me free to focus my attention on Esther instead, who was free of exams now and eager for company.

Knowing that my spending on the company card was under fierce observation, I still asked Esther to come into London and help me find a dress for the upcoming Tribal Barbecue that marked the start of May Week.

(It’s no longer actually called Tribal Barbecue, by the way, but Cambridge students seem to hold onto names for decades.) Wincing, I paid down some of the company credit card using my own bank account, and decided this was just going to have to be something I funded myself.

Though with that in mind, I asked Cordelia to tell me exactly where to shop before I did it.

It was a great bonding experience for me and Esther, but it produced frustratingly little in the way of firm information about this boyfriend of hers.

Esther opened up quite a lot about her mother and the way she had Esther’s whole life mapped out for her, and also about her fear of standing up to her.

But on the subject of this lover’s identity, she was silent.

The only thing I learned wasn’t something she intentionally told me. Late in the afternoon, once we’d finished spending on clothes and switched to spending on alcohol at a French-styled bar off Oxford Street, I came back from the bathroom to witness Esther sending a message.

It’s a little gross, I know, but I hung back to watch from behind her. And it turned out she was editing and then sending an image of herself she’d clearly taken in one of the fitting rooms. In it, she had a finger in her mouth and was posing in a sultry, incredibly un-Esther-like way.

Just underneath, I could see that she’d written the words:

Dress shopping in London today with A. xx

I got as close as I could to try and work out who the guy she was messaging was, but there was only the name Beau, and his photograph was of a dog. The name could be his actual name, or it could well just be a nickname for a boyfriend. Unhelpful.

I realised I couldn’t hover there until he replied without risking getting caught, so I took a few steps back and then pretended to arrive noisily. Esther quickly blanked the screen out and put her phone down on the table.

She had her defences up as she talked to me, and I heard the phone buzz a short while later. I looked at it when she did: a banner that said ‘Beau’ but no message content.

I was itching to see that response and realised the best way of doing it was probably to seem like I was distracted. So I found an excuse to google an eating place and then, while apparently engaged with my own phone, I covertly watched Esther pick hers up and open it.

She went straight to WhatsApp, and I could see it was the same chat. Luckily for me, she left his reply up for a few beats while she stared at it, giving me plenty of time to read:

You look beautiful, as always. But aren’t there any of the two of you together? x

I’d just finished reading when Esther clicked her phone screen off again and put it quickly away. Despite the smooth facade, I could tell that she was upset. More than upset.

I felt my heart squeezing for her. Whoever this guy was, he was a sleaze who didn’t care about hurting her feelings. What kind of an asshole gets a sexy picture of a woman and then asks to see their friend? It was even worse considering he was already in a relationship.

He’s someone who thinks he can have whatever he wants , I thought.

But that horrible interaction was all I was able to learn about this Beau of hers, and I couldn’t find any university lecturers or people connected with her named Beau when I googled later on. A frustrating lack of progress.

So, by Wednesday, I was seriously desperate to find something– anything– out.

I promised to meet Kit late afternoon to catch a little Bumps racing (an insane set-up, by the way: hugely expensive rowing eights all lined up in a row down the river with the intention of crashing into each other.

It’s just as chaotic as it sounds) and then to dinner with the whole gang to celebrate the end of everyone’s exams.

It was desperation that led me to suggest that Ryan should come to the dinner, too.

I wanted so badly to say the opposite: to tell Kit I wanted Ryan nowhere near me, but I had eight days left here at most, and I was facing total failure.

If getting Ryan into a room was what it took, then I needed to do it.

I’d hoped to talk privately to Kit on the riverbank before the dinner, but the moment we arrived we saw a whole group of people he knew and had to sit in a group and make generalised conversation.

Luckily, none of them were actual rowers, which meant I could relax a little.

I held my composure and chatted nicely to them, bantered with Kit and gave commentary on everyone’s technique as they rowed past.

So the dinner was going to have to be it. Kit had booked us a private room at Restaurant Twenty-Two. ‘I can’t be bothered with other people tonight, and bollocks to having to dress up for Midsummer House,’ had been his breezy comment. ‘But let’s get a drink in first, before the others come, hey?’

Dressing up was, I realised as I arrived, all relative.

There were folks in the downstairs room of Restaurant Twenty-Two dressed up more than I would have been for a cocktail party.

There was also a seriously expensive wine list, which made me wince when I thought about Gael’s comments.

But Kit was dead set on paying for everyone tonight, and I thanked my stars.

The food was going to be in the hundreds, too.

Cordelia and I had chosen one of the Zimmermann silk minidresses Imogen had donated for me to wear, benefiting from the fact that the plunging neckline was made a lot more so by Imogen having breasts a good two sizes smaller than mine.

I felt dressed up just enough, and I could see that it was working from the way Kit kept reaching out for my hand or my leg as we sat alone together over our pre-dinner champagne.

I knew I had seriously limited time to talk to him in private and that I’d just have to jump in. Even so, my heart was pounding as I pulled big, sympathetic eyes and asked, ‘How are you feeling about the stuff with James the other night?’

‘God, I’m… sorry,’ he said, leaning down to kiss my hand.

‘That was a pretty crap start to things, wasn’t it?

And it wasn’t even James’s fault,’ he went on.

‘We’re all pretty messed up over Holly. I don’t expect him to be…

you know. Totally chill. And it’s pretty natural to blame the people who should have looked out for her. ’

I gave him a sympathetic smile, and then I hit him with, ‘He thinks you gave her the drugs, you know.’

He didn’t move his hand, but his eyes snapped up to my face. ‘What?’

‘He saw her coming out of your room earlier on that day,’ I told him. ‘She lied about where she was going, so he thinks she went to get drugs from you and didn’t want to tell him.’

Kit looked, to do him credit, completely horrified. ‘What the hell…? Why would he think that?’

‘You’re often the guy with the gear,’ I said with a shrug. ‘And he said you never mentioned her visiting.’

Kit looked dumbstruck for a good few seconds. His eyes were moving as if he were trying to work something out, or remember something, or, I don’t know, fabricate something.

‘I didn’t think to… She came to pick up her cardigan from me,’ he said. I was looking for anxiety, but he looked sad, actually. Really sad. ‘Her… bolero, she said it was. Because she needed it for the ball and had left it at my room the day before. That was the only thing I gave her.’

I looked past him for a second, then said, ‘You don’t think it was an excuse?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I might deliberately leave something behind if I wanted a private conversation,’ I explained. ‘Did she try to talk to you about anything while she was there?’

Kit looked genuinely startled, and then he said, ‘She kind of– I mean, yeah…’ He frowned and then let go of my hand to rub his forehead.

‘It seemed like a side point. Not her main reason for being there. But she asked… yeah, about what I’d do in a dilemma.

’ The rubbing at his forehead faltered. ‘She said her friend was having a crap time. And she asked… what would I do if I’d worked out something really bad about two people I cared about.

Something that might ruin people. Was it my duty to tell everyone, even if it meant a huge amount of hurt?

’ He stopped, and took my hand again. ‘Something like that.’

I could feel my heart doing strange things, and I was afraid he’d be able to feel it in my pulse.

‘Oh. Weird,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’

‘Well, I said I’d need a lot more specifics to be sure,’ he said with a tight laugh.

‘I mean, even from a legal perspective, there’s a huge difference between something that might affect a financial situation and something really criminal.

I… kind of suggested we should talk about it when we had more time. ’