light from a storm, I will turn a page and come across a postcard covered in a script too faded to read, or a photograph of Rachel with someone I do not recognise, and I will remember what she used to say about the sort of person who went to the trouble of using an actual bookmark to keep their place.
‘Are you really sure you don’t want a space for yourself?’ I asked her one evening as I lay on the sofa marking up a contract and she sat typing, and she said no thank you, honestly, she’d already told me it was fine. It was enough that she could lock the drawers of her desk and know that I’d never be able to look in them. Sometimes when she was out, or asleep, I would walk past her desk and look at the drawers and wonder whether she’d been joking when she’d said that, or whether they were actually locked, and if they were, where she kept the key. I never thought of trying them, not until the Tuesday after she died when I got home from Oxford to find a message on the machine from Evie. She wanted me to look for a document wallet of Rachel’s and courier it to her at her house in Chelsea the next morning. It was black, she said, black leather, zipped up around its sides. And if I didn’t find it straight away, she said, I should carry on looking until I did because she absolutely had to have it. I couldn’t see it immediately and I noticed that the desk drawers were probably big enough for it to be in one of them. They were locked after all, every single one, but then I looked on the shelves again and found it so there was no need to force them. That was something the police did when they came the following afternoon. The search they had done on the night of Rachel’s murder was only a brief one; they had come back again, they said, to look more thoroughly, and to take some things away with them.
After they had finished, and a couple of officers had bagged up Rachel’s things and carried them downstairs, the detective came and sat with me on the balcony. He explained that they’d found very little of interest when going through the emails in her Hotmail account, and none to speak of in her university account. There didn’t seem to be much that was particularly personal, hardly anything at all in fact; the only emails she’d kept were ones relating to research, or holiday or theatre bookings. They weren’t particularly surprised by the lack of personal correspondence in her university account, but when it came to her Hotmail they had to assume one of two explanations: either she was someone who deleted almost everything she received, and everything she sent, as a matter of course, or someone else had hacked into her account and done it for her, knowing that the content would be incriminatory. I told him she would never have been so fastidious, describing the state of her desk in her department office the few times I’d visited her there, and her tendency to leave her post unopened for days. In that case, the detective said, did I think she might have printed off her correspondence and kept it somewhere, and could I think of anywhere they hadn’t looked yet, since nothing much seemed to have emerged from their search that afternoon? No, I said. No I couldn’t. And I explained then that although we’d been careful with our boundaries, Rachel and I, and that I’d respected hers to the extent that there may well have been personal correspondences she’d kept from me, I was sure she would have said if anything had been troubling her. He asked one or two more questions about my relationship with Rachel then and I told him I’d had that conversation already, in the police station, and that we’d been very much in love, and if he was suggesting that there might have been someone else he was mistaken. He made a note of our conversation and said they’d carry on looking, and that something would be bound to show up, it usually did. If anything occurred to me, though, I must let them know immediately, and I
‘Are you really sure you don’t want a space for yourself?’ I asked her one evening as I lay on the sofa marking up a contract and she sat typing, and she said no thank you, honestly, she’d already told me it was fine. It was enough that she could lock the drawers of her desk and know that I’d never be able to look in them. Sometimes when she was out, or asleep, I would walk past her desk and look at the drawers and wonder whether she’d been joking when she’d said that, or whether they were actually locked, and if they were, where she kept the key. I never thought of trying them, not until the Tuesday after she died when I got home from Oxford to find a message on the machine from Evie. She wanted me to look for a document wallet of Rachel’s and courier it to her at her house in Chelsea the next morning. It was black, she said, black leather, zipped up around its sides. And if I didn’t find it straight away, she said, I should carry on looking until I did because she absolutely had to have it. I couldn’t see it immediately and I noticed that the desk drawers were probably big enough for it to be in one of them. They were locked after all, every single one, but then I looked on the shelves again and found it so there was no need to force them. That was something the police did when they came the following afternoon. The search they had done on the night of Rachel’s murder was only a brief one; they had come back again, they said, to look more thoroughly, and to take some things away with them.
After they had finished, and a couple of officers had bagged up Rachel’s things and carried them downstairs, the detective came and sat with me on the balcony. He explained that they’d found very little of interest when going through the emails in her Hotmail account, and none to speak of in her university account. There didn’t seem to be much that was particularly personal, hardly anything at all in fact; the only emails she’d kept were ones relating to research, or holiday or theatre bookings. They weren’t particularly surprised by the lack of personal correspondence in her university account, but when it came to her Hotmail they had to assume one of two explanations: either she was someone who deleted almost everything she received, and everything she sent, as a matter of course, or someone else had hacked into her account and done it for her, knowing that the content would be incriminatory. I told him she would never have been so fastidious, describing the state of her desk in her department office the few times I’d visited her there, and her tendency to leave her post unopened for days. In that case, the detective said, did I think she might have printed off her correspondence and kept it somewhere, and could I think of anywhere they hadn’t looked yet, since nothing much seemed to have emerged from their search that afternoon? No, I said. No I couldn’t. And I explained then that although we’d been careful with our boundaries, Rachel and I, and that I’d respected hers to the extent that there may well have been personal correspondences she’d kept from me, I was sure she would have said if anything had been troubling her. He asked one or two more questions about my relationship with Rachel then and I told him I’d had that conversation already, in the police station, and that we’d been very much in love, and if he was suggesting that there might have been someone else he was mistaken. He made a note of our conversation and said they’d carry on looking, and that something would be bound to show up, it usually did. If anything occurred to me, though, I must let them know immediately, and I