Chapter 28
Although it’s Saturday night, the three of them manage to find a table at a restaurant easily enough.
Edgar leads the way in, seating Victor opposite him and Lucy to his right.
She’s pleased that she still gets to sit next to him, until he and Victor become engrossed in conversation.
She might as well not be there. So much for her nonsensical fantasies of how the evening would play out.
A waiter appears beside them to take their order for drinks, and Lucy interrupts the men to draw their attention.
Edgar turns to her almost with confusion when she taps at his arm, mouth still open, mid-sentence.
He asks for a bottle of red wine without even checking what the other two are drinking, before waving the waiter away.
Lucy raises an eyebrow at his presumptuous behaviour, half-irritated, half-entertained, and Victor catches her eye, a similar expression on his face.
‘Still the same Edgar,’ he says, interrupting their conversation to include Lucy.
‘I haven’t seen him for ten years but nothing has changed.
’ His words might be critical, but his tone is far from it, a fondness that’s survived all this time.
Lucy is impressed; it’s yet another virtue of Edgar’s that he can inspire loyalty and friendship like this, not just the lust that so many have shown him.
Including her. She sits on her hands to stop them from reaching up inadvertently to her hair, smiling back at Victor.
‘We need to include our friend here in the conversation,’ he continues, gesturing at Lucy. ‘There will be plenty of time for all this.’
Edgar nods, no sign of annoyance that he’d prefer not to be interrupted. ‘Sorry, Lucy. Of course. It’s just been such a long time . . .’
‘How come so long?’ Lucy says. ‘I mean, pandemic aside.’
The men look at each other with rueful expressions, almost shame-faced, as if they’ve been caught doing something wrong. Then they speak, both of them at once, before Edgar prevails.
‘Victor is one of the finest thinkers I’ve ever met,’ he says. ‘He’s got a wealth of experience from universities in the US, specialising in prisons in Central America. He worked with me in Oxford for a couple of years, gave me some incredible insights.’
Victor is nodding, his face lit up with enthusiasm. ‘It was a brilliant time. Cross-pollination of ideas, some truly revolutionary concepts that we were working on. I remember it so fondly.’
Lucy has finally put two and two together. ‘Wait, you’re Victor Machado? Sorry, I’ve only just clocked. I’ve read your book about prison and philosophy. It’s brilliant.’
Even more enthusiasm on his face, if that were possible. ‘I can’t believe you’ve read it.’
‘Lucy has read everything,’ Edgar says. ‘I told you she was brilliant.’
The love-in is getting silly. Any minute they’ll be suggesting a threesome.
Lucy almost snorts at the thought, glancing between the two men and thinking, on balance, she wouldn’t be entirely averse to it.
At that moment Edgar catches her eye, and she blushes to her hairline, paranoid suddenly that he can see what she’s thinking.
Mercifully the waiter arrives at that moment to pour the wine.
Victor holds his hand over his glass, muttering about driving, but Edgar and Lucy’s glasses are filled.
Lucy takes a huge gulp to cover her confusion, but in doing so, she ends up spilling half of it down her shirt before slopping the rest of it over the table when she puts her glass down too fast.
‘Let me help you,’ Edgar says, dabbing at her front with his napkin, his arm grazing dangerously close to her breasts. She jumps to her feet, muttering something about going to the ladies’, before escaping to lean her head against the cool wooden door once she’s locked it behind her.
She’s behaving like a fucking idiot, all clumsy and adolescent. They’re academics. Criminologists. Not rock stars. When she’s out of the cubicle, she splashes at her face with cold water, willing herself to cool down, reminding herself of quite how ordinary they are, how ridiculous she’s being.
It’s no good though. She can’t fight it anymore.
She’s obsessed. She thinks about the way he’s described her to Victor – brilliant.
Surely it must mean he’s got a thing about her, too, that he’s noticed she exists not just as a tool to summarise his work for him, but as something more than that, someone real.
Only too real. Her face is still flushed, her shirt stained with wine, and the eyeliner that she applied that morning is long gone, only a trace of it remaining to enhance the shadows under her eyes in the harsh light of the bathroom.
She dabs at her shirt, drags her fingers through her hair, wipes off what’s left of the eyeliner, before giving it up for a waste of time.
Edgar is so good-looking, his age a badge of honour that suits him more than she can say.
He doesn’t need her to be beautiful, just brilliant. That’s how she’ll reel him in.
But the mood has changed by the time that she gets back to the table.
Victor’s face is drawn, all smiles gone, while Edgar’s is flushed red, distress almost palpable in the air.
Anger, too. She slips back into her chair and looks from one to the other before checking the bottle of wine which is almost empty.
Edgar’s been hitting it hard, or so it looks by the flush on his face.
‘Is everything all right?’
Edgar is staring down at his glass, no reply forthcoming. Victor steps into the silence.
‘We were . . . We were talking about why I went back home,’ he says. ‘When I left Oxford.’
‘I was wondering about that, if you’d thought of staying on,’ she says.
‘There were reasons I needed to get back,’ he says. ‘Family stuff. Plus visas. My tenure was uncertain, and they wouldn’t extend the visa past the end of the last term of my contract. I was under threat of deportation if I didn’t get out.’
‘I did try,’ Edgar interrupts. ‘I did try. But there was so much else . . .’
Victor picks up the narrative again, looking at Lucy yet past her, his eyes sliding away.
‘Gabriela,’ he says, and at the name Edgar seems to shudder, huddling into himself. ‘That’s what was going on.’
‘Who is Gabriela?’ Lucy says, her voice low. The skin is crawling on the top of her scalp.
‘Gabriela was my wife,’ Edgar says, sitting upright. ‘She was killed.’
Victor puts his hand up. ‘Murdered. She was murdered. By an evil bitch of a stalker.’
‘We’re not going to agree on this, Victor. I know what you’re telling me, but . . .’ Edgar leans back into his chair, head slumped. His shoulders move up and down as he inhales deeply. ‘She was killed. That I will say.’
Soraya’s words, this dead wife in the background. No one said anything about her being killed. Or anything about stalkers.
Lucy’s scalp prickles. ‘She was what . . .?’
No reply.
She looks from Edgar to Victor, back to Edgar. Their faces are still. Too still. Lucy can see the tension sparking between them. Any minute, one of them is going to leap out of their seat, grab the other by the throat.
The waiter comes to the table, asks if they’re ready to order. The moment passes. Victor’s face relaxes, slightly. He shakes his head to food, orders another bottle of wine.
‘I think they’re going to need it,’ he says.
Victor starts the account. Edgar is too far gone, still hunched over, his face pinched now in a way that robs it of all pretensions to beauty. This is how he’ll look when he’s old, Lucy can picture it: the deep lines that have formed from nose to lip, the pallor that’s overtaken him.
‘I went to see Gabriela this morning.’ Lucy takes a moment to catch on; Gabriela’s grave is what he means.
An image of a headstone comes into her mind.
Flowers. A man standing, his head bowed.
‘She was perfect,’ Victor continues. ‘The kindest woman you could meet. Everyone loved her. She was truly—’
‘She was my wife,’ Edgar interrupts, ‘and I didn’t look after her properly.
It’s a short story, really, though there’s no end to the pain it’s caused.
One of my students – she became obsessed with me.
I didn’t know. She was bright, I was helping her with her dissertation.
Anyway, she found out that Gabriela was pregnant, and she lost her mind.
I came home from the university one evening to find Gabriela dead. Killed.’
‘It was all planned. She was stalking her. It was murder,’ Victor says, his face grim. ‘Premeditated murder.’
‘It wasn’t planned, Victor. She didn’t know what she was doing.’
‘Who is “she”?’ Lucy says, but they ignore her.
‘Edgar,’ Victor says, as if in warning. ‘You know that’s not true.’
‘I still can’t accept what you told me,’ Edgar says.
She can’t look away from him, from the way he’s glaring at Victor, his face full of anger.
‘Wait till you see the notebook,’ Victor says. ‘Then you’ll change your mind.’
‘I have seen it. I got the scans you sent.’
‘It’s different when you see it for real. The way the pen digs into the paper, the anger . . . it’s obsessive. It changes everything.’
‘I will not change my mind. You’re the one who’s changed.
This goes against everything I’ve ever taught.
We can dress it up in academic theory as much as we want, but it comes down to forgiveness.
Redemption. Without them, there’s nothing,’ Edgar shouts, sitting up now.
He’s practically standing, hands clenched into fists as they rest on the table.
Lucy is finding it hard to breathe; so much emotion in the air she wants to shut her eyes, cover her ears. Make it all go away. Edgar shakes his head as if to throw it off, at least the worst of it. Gradually, he sits back, unclenches his fists. Then he drinks some wine, his eyes closed.
‘What happened next? After the . . . death?’ Lucy says, finally getting her breath back enough to be able to speak.
Victor takes over again. ‘As I said, the woman confessed. No need for a trial, that was something. Sentenced to life.’
Without stopping to think, Lucy says, ‘Ten years ago – does that mean her killer is out now?’
A tremor runs through Victor – she can feel it, as if there’s a source of tension in the air. ‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s why I’m here. I want to make sure she never gets out.’
Lucy digs her nails into the palms of her hands.
Edgar doesn’t reply, drinking what’s left in his glass and refilling it before sitting back down.
The bottle is empty, and he waves it in the direction of the waiter, who swiftly brings a replacement.
Edgar glances down at the menu before ordering quickly, shared platters of tapas and chips.
The subject is clearly closed. There’s so much more that Lucy wants to know, wants to ask, but she’s not going to get anywhere. At least for now.