Never Tell

He climbed into the Porsche. With a screech of tyres the Sweeney would have been proud of, both vehicles were quickly swallowed up by the night.

And then I went home, put the milk in the fridge, checked the children, fed the cat and finally went to bed alone again, I found that the woman’s image was imprinted on the back of my lids. And even as I fell into sleep, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the second man, the man called Ash, had been less guiding her towards the vehicle than forcing her.

And there was something else, something deeper down, something clicking, whirring into place, like the levers on a deadlock that are not quite true yet. Images from the day: the mysterious Kattan, the MP’s wife so outraged, James, all newly tense. These images fought something I couldn’t quite access, a memory buried deep. A memory fighting to the surface.

UNIVERSITY, AUTUMN 1991

FRESHERS’ WEEK

The vague city … veiled in mist … A place much too good for you ever to have much to do with.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

In the beginning …

In the beginning there was just me. And then they found me.

Had I known I was being chosen for such immoral ends, I like to think I would have declined the invitation, that I would have made good my escape before it was too late – though I fear that my belief only comes from the beauty of hindsight – and anyway, theory is too hard now to distinguish from fact. But if I had ever guessed it would all end in tragedy and death, I would have stayed at home.

But I didn’t know. I was a true innocent when I began.

Petrified and knowing absolutely no one, I arrived in the small soft-coloured city with my father’s best suitcase, a dog-eared poster of the Happy Mondays and a box-set of Romantic poets that my grandma had bought me for my eighteenth birthday. I’d tried really hard to decline the green velvet lampshade my mother insisted I take from the spare room, to no avail; I planned to dump it at the earliest opportunity.

About to become part of an institution so venerable and famous, in the place of pride I felt fear, constantly wishing I’d gone with Ruth to Bristol to study drama with all the cool kids. I’d endured a painful Freshers’ Week of starting stilted conversations with other monosyllabic teenagers, or worse, kids who wouldn’t stop talking about anything elitist. By and large the beautiful crowd from Britain’s public schools – Roedean and Eton, Harrow and King’s – all seemed to know one another already and were imbued with the knowledge they needed no one else. Completely ignored, I felt adrift and friendless; overawed by the beauty of the city and the magnitude of history resting on its shoulders. Everywhere I walked were buildings so classical I’d seen them in books or on television; everywhere I wandered, the voices of students far more erudite than I echoed in my ears.

Eventually, sick of my own company, and with the vague hope I could win kudos enough to hang out with the ‘journos’, I wrote a ridiculously pretentious piece for the student newspaper (cribbed largely from library textbooks) on the Romantic poets, their denial of organised religion and how they would have loved the speed and freedom of motorbikes. To my undying amazement, it was printed.

On the Sunday evening, about to venture to the college bar for the first time, confident I finally had something to talk about of interest, I stacked my ten-pences up on the top of the payphone in my corridor and rang my parents to tell of my first success. My mother had just answered when I heard a snigger behind my back.

‘Shelley fucked Mary on a Yamaha, didn’t you know?’

‘Yeah, but Keats preferred Suzukis, I think you’ll find. La Belle Dame Sans Suzuki. Brilliant.’

Mortified, I banged the phone down on my poor mother and hid in my room for a week.

But boredom eventually got the better of me and I finally accepted an invitation from my sole acquaintance, a sulky girl called Moira, to go to the bar – where I drank two pints of snakebite ill-advisedly fast through sheer terror. Moira, who’d attached herself to me the previous week in the introductory lecture on Women’s literature of the nineteenth century, was for some reason deeply bitter already, and I was concentrating hard on blocking out both her drone and her rather pus-encrusted chin when a dark-haired boy, who looked like he might be about to introduce himself, tripped over a stool.

‘Watch out!’ I shrieked, ten seconds too late. He’d deposited his entire pint in my lap, the cold beer soaking straight through to my skin. ‘Oh God.’

‘Very sorry,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I’ll get you another one if you like.’

‘I don’t like, thanks very much,’ I huffed, standing up, my smock dress an unpleasant second skin. I had an odd feeling he’d done it deliberately. ‘I absolutely stink now. I’ll have to go and change.’

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the boy. ‘At least you’ll deter this lot.’ He nodded towards a group of apparently giant youths whose ears stuck out at funny angles and who had just begun a round of indecent rugby songs. One of them winked at me and immediately began to sing, ‘The girl with the biggest tits in the world is the only girl for me.’

‘I doubt it.’ I found I was emboldened by the alcohol. ‘The smell of beer’s probably a turn-on for them.’

The dark-haired boy laughed. ‘You could be right there.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Moira shot to her feet, clamping my arm between slightly desperate hands as if she sensed she was about to be usurped. ‘I need to start work on my Wollstonecraft essay anyway.’

‘Oh dear, do you?’ I looked at the boy’s grin and then at Moira’s yellow pimples. ‘Look, actually, you go on.’ I eased my arm gently from her hold. ‘I’ll have a gin and orange please,’ I said to the boy with a confidence I didn’t really feel. It was what my grandma drank; the first sophisticated drink that came to my slightly panicked mind. ‘As long as you promise to stay between me and him.’

The rugby player’s ruddy face was gurning scarily at me as he invoked the delights of the arse of an angel. Moira stomped off muttering about beer and Wollstonecraft and ‘some people’.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I called after her, rather too quietly.

The evening became a blur of alcohol and fags, and smoking a joint round the back of the bar, which was not as scary as I’d feared before my inaugural hesitant drag, though my head did spin a bit, and then going to someone’s room in Jesus College, where someone else suggested a drinking game and we shared what they called ‘a chillum’, and I felt very debauched and grownup until a plump girl called Liddy was sick in the bin, so we left. And frankly I was relieved, because my head was by now on the verge of spinning right off.

‘I’ll walk you back if you like,’ said the boy, who was called James and had nice smiley eyes and freckles. He said his dad had been a butcher and he was the first in his family to go to university, which bonded us because I was also the first in my immediate family, though actually my uncle – the white sheep of the Langtons – had attended this college and I wasn’t entirely sure that hadn’t helped me a bit to get my place. That, and the fact that during my interview the white-haired professor had sucked a stubby old cigar throughout, most of the time gazing at the velvet smoke whilst I’d banged on about William Faulkner and the great American novel for fifteen painful minutes. Finally, as bored of the subject as the be-suited professor obviously was, I’d asked what brand he was smoking as my father imported cigars from Cuba to his little shop in Derby and loved a Monte Cristo himself. After a discussion about the hotspots of Havana, where I managed to drop in mentions of both Hemingway and Graham Greene, as well as the delights of a daiquiri, the enchanted professor was happy to recommend I got an unconditional place.

On the way back to my room James and I passed a polished Ducati parked between two obviously student cars, one of them an Escort leaning dangerously towards the pavement. Drunkenly I admired the bike; my big brother rode one and there was nothing I loved more than getting a lift on the back – though my mother always went mad when I did.

James looked at me strangely as I kneeled down by the bike (wondering, actually, whether I could ever stand again). ‘You’re the girl who wrote that article in the Cherwell, aren’t you?’

‘My fame precedes me,’ I agreed, too drunk to be embarrassed. The fresh air was doing nothing for my level of intoxication. ‘I thought it was quite good when I wrote it, but everyone else thought it was terrible. It was terrible wasn’t it?’

‘Do you know Society X?’ James said quietly. I could have sworn he checked behind him before he did so, but I was having some trouble focusing at all by now, so perhaps I’d imagined it.

‘Nope,’ I shook my head. ‘Never heard of Society X.’ I’d just attended the Freshers’ Fair because frankly I’d had nothing else to do. I’d signed up to do Martial Arts because I quite fancied Bruce Lee and the idea of felling a villain with the single chop of a swift hand, and the Poetry Society because occasionally I wrote a few fairly dreadful stanzas myself, mainly about my dreams – but to be honest I found large groups of people rather shy-making. So instead I made a bad joke about X-rated films but James didn’t laugh; he just looked at me strangely again before depositing me at the porters’ lodge without so much as trying to kiss me. I was a bit surprised but actually relieved because that week I was still in love with a boy called Ralph whom I’d met in the summer holidays and who had promised to call me a fortnight ago. I was still waiting.

And to be honest I forgot all about James and Society X until I met Dalziel, the aristocratic Honourable who spoke like he’d stepped from the pages of Waugh but partied like a rock star in the making.

UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1991

The heavenly Jerusalem.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

A week or so later Moira and I bumped into James on the Bridge after a tutorial, battered old guitar slung across his back.

‘Come for a drink. I might even play something, if you’re lucky.’ James winked at me, dodging the bike-riders who sounded indignant bells. I didn’t need much persuading; I realised I was pleased to see him. So far, university wasn’t turning out to be the social whirlwind I’d imagined. As I followed James into the King’s Arms, the pub where all the cool kids drank that term, I felt a quickening in my step. For the first time since I’d arrived in the city, I felt like I might actually be part of something.

I spotted Dalziel as soon as I walked in; it was impossible not to. His reputation preceded him; I’d heard a couple of girls whispering and giggling about him a few times in the bar or over coffee in the rec. He was apparently infamous, a third year known for his flamboyance, his looks and his charm. Lounging against the bar with an indolent grace, seemingly born of the innate knowledge that the world was his, he idly saluted James and then turned back to his friends. James bought a round of cider whilst Moira and I found a table beside Dalziel’s friends.

I watched Dalziel hold court, laughing about something, blowing smoke-rings. After a while, I found I couldn’t look away. I heard him mention a group called The Assassins.

‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I muttered to James. ‘What do they sing?’

‘They don’t sing anything, petal,’ James laughed. ‘They’re a group of supposed student dissidents who mess around with gunpowder, amongst other things.’ He downed half his pint in one. ‘Bunch of stupid schoolboys, if you ask me.’

‘I got sick of blowing things up, to be honest,’ I heard Dalziel drawl, and I felt a quiver of something visceral; a leap in my belly that I couldn’t name. I stared at him. ‘Pretty bloody tame.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Not enough banging.’

What did I feel then? Did I see a chance to be lifted from my so-far dull suburban life? The chance for the parameters of my life to be widened? Or did I just sense pure unadulterated danger?

Dalziel’s group leaned together and began to whisper. A peroxided beauty, small and dark-skinned, lazed beside him, biting her nails in evident boredom and scowling at a taller girl with a funny angular chin, apparently called Lena. Lena was swaying at the table between the bar and us; talking very fast and with great animation to anyone who’d listen. I heard the words ‘X’ and ‘commandment’ and then she was told to keep her voice down.

‘Is that the society – the X one?’ I asked James. ‘That you were on about before?’