Page 7

One and a half weeks later I was walking into a Cambridge college with a whole new identity, all ready to crash a party hosted by Kit Frankland and Esther Thomas: two of the four people Holly had been with the night she died.

I’d already found out as much as I could about the four of them during the preceding days.

Cordelia and I had met up several times in the American Bar of the Savoy Hotel, selected by her because it was convenient when she was on her way to or from her mother’s house or the centre of the city, and because nobody connected was likely to be there.

And by the way, Reid, that place has the most intensely patterned carpet I have ever experienced, and looks about as un-American a place as you can imagine. Major colonial British vibes.

‘I have to warn you,’ she told me during our first mini interview, ‘that I don’t have any inside information on them now.

After what happened, I asked them all a lot of questions.

’ She pulled a face, looking down into her coffee.

The tables in there are all shiny gold, which I do not understand.

Who the hell wants to look down and discover what the underside of their chin looks like?

I’d covered my side of the table with my laptop case to make sure I didn’t catch sight of it by mistake.

‘They one by one stopped talking to me, and then it became a united front, and that was it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying not to wonder if she was looking at her drink or her warped reflection. ‘That sounds tough.’

Cordelia shrugged. ‘In some ways, it made it easier. The decision to leave Cambridge and come to UCL. Which was the right thing to do.’

I watched the set of her jaw as she said it, and I wondered if she really thought that, but I felt like I should leave difficult subjects and focus on the actual job.

‘Tell me about the four of them, then. As much as you know.’

And, in fact, Cordelia knew a lot. Kit Frankland was, by her account, the ringleader of the group: the handsome, charming, athletic and effortlessly clever son of a highly successful City lawyer who’d gathered them all together.

He studied law at Downing, played rugby for the university, and allegedly socialised for England.

‘He also, in my opinion, likes to collect damaged people,’ she added.

‘He could easily have made friends with whoever he wanted, and on the surface of it, he selected people with status. But in reality, there were a lot of other students with status who he just wasn’t interested in, and I think it’s because they weren’t fragile enough for his liking. ’

I narrowed my eyes at her. ‘You think he likes to feel better than they are?’

Cordelia considered this, and said, ‘Maybe. I think he definitely gets a kick out of feeling like he can make their lives better, but I wonder whether that’s also to do with control.’

I nodded, thinking about this. Holly had definitely counted as a girl who was damaged. She’d been orphaned and had lost a friend to drugs. She was also a misfit in their group. She would have been easy for him to manipulate if that was what he’d wanted.

‘Esther is his right-hand woman,’ Cordelia had gone on. ‘Huge mummy issues. Single-parent upbringing, and her mother is an ultra-ambitious member of the UN General Secretariat who likes to tell Esther she’s not good enough.’

I winced. I’d met parents like this at numerous events. The kind who thought their children should live their lives to fulfil their own ambitions.

‘I guess she’s a lot less confident than Kit?’ I asked.

‘Rigidly self-controlled,’ Cordelia said. ‘And a tough one to crack. Esther liked Holly, but I think she found my friendship with her a threat.’

‘She and Kit aren’t together?’ I asked Cordelia, scrolling through social media photos of Kit and Esther.

They appeared time and again, but interestingly there were also other group shots where Kit’s arm would be slung possessively round one of a series of petite brunettes; girls with dimples and a less flawless veneer.

‘No, it’s never been like that,’ Cordelia replied.

‘They’re not each other’s type. Kit likes them little, brunette and exuberant.

Whereas Esther is super together and collected, and wants…

well, I think she finds it hard to decide what she wants because her dearest mama is so set on her marrying a rich boy with status.

But I’ve never seen her look at Kit as anything more than a brother figure. ’

This all made sense of the fact that a young woman named Sarah Lafferty seemed to crop up in a lot of Kit’s recent photos.

She was presumably the latest of the petite, exuberant brunettes.

She was easy enough to find online. Her social media taught me that she listened to a lot of Taylor Swift and watched tennis of all kinds, so at least we’d have something to talk about if I met her at the party.

‘Esther was the first one to tell me I wasn’t welcome in the group any more,’ Cordelia added.

‘I was suspicious of her at first, but later I thought… well, she took Holly’s death incredibly hard and I don’t think she knew how to deal with questions about it.

Difficult to know what’s underneath when everyone grieves in different ways. ’

Ain’t that the truth, Reid?

‘James was more straightforward,’ Cordelia went on.

‘He’s always been pretty emotionally open.

After Holly died, he was angry at everyone and everything, and he basically oscillated between wanting to listen to my questions and storming off, like it was too much.

’ She shrugged. ‘He seemed to me absolutely like someone who was hurting and didn’t know what to do with the feeling. ’

I got where Cordelia was coming from, not least because the anger and shutting down sounded a lot like your coping mechanism. But I also had other thoughts about James Sedgewick.

However much I understood the bereaved urge to lash out, I also knew the figures on how often women are killed by their romantic partners.

Anger can be down to many things, and one of those is guilt.

But it sounded like Cordelia had decided he was innocent, so any of that was a conversation for another day.

‘How about Ryan?’ I asked instead.

Cordelia considered this. ‘He stopped socialising half as much after she died. He was always out, before. He’d hit bars with Kit’s crowd, and then go out with the rugby guys the rest of the time.

But then in third year, after Holly, he was suddenly staying in and working.

I don’t know if he’s still like that, but it clearly hit him somehow. ’

I logged this, too, as equally likely to be guilt or grief.

I was intrigued to see how the four were now, and whether any of these emotions still told on them almost a year later.

The party wouldn’t necessarily provide instant access to their innermost thoughts, but it would tell me something about how well they were coping on the surface.

My sort-of invitation to the party had been engineered by Cordelia’s older brother Luca, by the way, who used to be a Pitt Club guy himself and still gets invited to student parties.

I wasn’t too keen when Cordelia first suggested him being the one to introduce me.

‘It would be a great idea if he weren’t related to you,’ I told her. ‘But if they think I’m some friend of yours, after they pretty much excommunicated you for asking too many questions…’

But Cordelia shook her head. ‘Luca doesn’t have the same surname, and looks nothing like me. Better still, back while he was at Cambridge we weren’t really talking. I think I may have written him a letter formally disowning him because of his chosen career path and morals.’

‘What does he do?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘Conservative MP?’

She laughed. ‘He’s in finance. Which is almost as bad. I told him exactly how many people were killed every year by the hoarding of wealth.’

I couldn’t help laughing at that, and Cordelia looked momentarily offended. ‘Sorry. I just… I love that you wrote to disown him. I would literally rather die than admit I was angry with someone.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s… impressive. And I basically want to be you when I grow up.’

‘Oh god, don’t be like me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It makes friendships hard work. I’ve had to learn to ease up on my principles sometimes and… you know. Accept people for what they are.’

It was funny. I’d been thinking how alike Cordelia and I were, but right then I realised that she actually reminded me of you, Reid.

Because although we’d both lost people and got a little hooked on finding out the truth, her way of looking at morality is a lot closer to yours than mine. She is a person of absolutes.

Even the thorough, clinical way she’d analysed everything to do with Holly’s death was your style. Obsessive, yes, but not in the random-ideas-and-leads way I looked at things: it was the dogged, checking-all-the-bases way you work.

Learning that you worked like that surprised me about you, you know. Because the way we talk ridiculous crap and make jokes that go off at weird tangents is so similar. I kind of thought you’d work the same way I did.

But we’re chalk and cheese: me all diverting round corners, and you straight down the line. And yet you’re so damn smart with it. The first rule-following, structure-and-systems person I’ve ever met who I’ve thought was seriously clever.

Sorry, this was a digression. I was talking about getting to that party.

The one other piece of planning I’d done with Cordelia had been about my way into the group. Both Cordelia and Gael had been adamant that I needed to basically seduce one of them.

‘They’re about to leave university,’ Gael had told me, with breezy pragmatism. ‘They won’t care about making new friends at this point. But if you’re a possible girlfriend, they’ll care.’