‘Me?’ Another one of her staccato, bare husks of a laugh. ‘I don’t think I’m the unreasonable one here, Adam.’

  ‘Are you sure it was taken from outside?’

  A long pause. Is she looking at the photo again? He doesn’t want to picture the image. It can’t look good, wherever it was taken from.

  ‘Inside, I think,’ Tania eventually says. Her tone sounds marginally less hostile. ‘Maybe by the kitchen window, by the dresser.’

  The dresser. Where Clio moved her phone earlier to charge it. He was certain it was plugged in by the pinboard when he took Tania’s call in the sitting room. By the time he came out again, it was charging by the dresser. Did she take the photo? Set her camera up to record in video mode while he was out of the room and then select a still from the footage later, when she was in the Uber?

  ‘Can you forward it to me?’ he says. ‘Please?’

  ‘I’m not sending this to anyone.’

  Adam takes a deep breath, trying to conceal his frustration. ‘Is she looking at me? Or…’

  Another long pause. ‘She’s looking straight at the camera.’

  Adam closes his eyes. Clio knew exactly where the phone was. Made sure to stand in her underwear in the right place. Sightlines. An old pro dusting down her acting skills. Christ, he remembers now. At one point she glanced over towards the kitchen window. Or was it the dresser? He thought she was looking at the storm.

  ‘And does it look like it’s a still from film footage or is it just an ordinary camera photo? A single image?’

  A still from a video would look worse than the actual moving footage, which would show that nothing had happened.

  ‘I really don’t care, Adam,’ she says. And then, a few seconds later, ‘Maybe from a film.’

  ‘I think I should come down to Wiltshire, tonight,’ he says, walking over to the kitchen window and staring out into the night.

  ‘You’re not invited.’

  Adam sighs. What a total car crash this evening has been. He’s glad he didn’t set off earlier. She definitely wouldn’t have let him in. Not in this mood. He’s tried to explain in rambling texts and answerphone messages that nothing went on between them, that Clio had arrived soaking wet and ironed her dress when he was out of the room talking to her on the phone, but it all sounded so lame and Tania is understandably suspicious. He needs to speak to her face to face.

  ‘Nothing happened, darling. Please believe me. She wanted it to, but I managed—’

  ‘To resist her charms? Are you actually after praise here? I don’t believe this, Adam.’

  Silence. Has she hung up? ‘Tania?’

  22

  May 1998

  ‘You look half asleep,’ Louis said as I wobbled past him on my old bicycle down King’s Parade.

  ‘Because you’re working me so hard,’ I called out after him. We’d already filmed a short early-morning sequence of me in my room, studying at my desk, and he now wanted a shot of me cycling to lectures. King’s Parade wasn’t actually on my route. Artistic licence, I guess.

  To be fair, Louis didn’t look great either. Smoking a roll-up, he seemed more sallow than usual, his black hair thinner too. Maybe to compensate, he’d swapped his regulation black shirt for a flowery one, but he was still wearing his standard black leather jacket, torn black jeans and his I-didn’t-go-to-Eton Doc Martens.

  I pulled over, waiting for him to catch up. A change to my morning routine wasn’t a great start to what I knew would be a testing couple of hours. I’ve found that walking to the Anatomy Building on the Downing Site, picking up a coffee in Market Square en route, is the best way to prepare for a cadaveric dissection session, but Louis insisted that I cycle. For once, my bike hadn’t been stolen. He was continuing to film me with the same gusto as yesterday, but my own enthusiasm was waning.

  The dissection classes are getting easier, it’s true, now that I’ve got over the shock of seeing that first cadaver at the beginning of term. The stink of the formaldehyde used to preserve the bodies no longer makes me want to vomit. It does make me incredibly hungry, though – ravenous, just like the second years warned us it would. After two hours of cutting up a human body, we all leave the labs in need of a burger, which doesn’t feel right on any level. It’s extraordinary, though, how quickly everyone’s adapted, become desensitised. Respect is meant to be at the heart of what we do in the classes. We all have to write tributes for the donors’ committal services and there’s an annual service of thanksgiving. And we do respect those who give their bodies to science, we really do. But medical students are a particular breed, with a very particular sense of humour… In last week’s abdo session, two of us were tasked with removing and measuring the small intestine. It just kept on coming, more than six feet of it. Even our anatomy demonstrator struggled to keep a straight face as he watched our reaction. At least we didn’t try skipping with it.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, glancing at my watch as Louis walked up to me. ‘My dissection class is about to start.’ After three takes of me cycling down King’s Parade for him, I was out of time and patience.

  ‘I think we’ve got the shot,’ he said, checking his camera. ‘How do you find dissecting a real dead body, by the way?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  I’m not sure if it was because of my years of gutting fish – I still remember Dad showing me the intestines, swim bladder and liver – but I was fine with cutting open a human body. Not squeamish at all.

  ‘Do you get to work on the brain?’ Louis asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They’re very fragile, I guess. Easily damaged.’

  His eyes lingered on mine. I didn’t know where he was going with this. ‘It’s why we have thick skulls,’ I said, tapping my own to lighten the mood.

  Today’s session was to be about the thorax, removing the ribs to get a better look at the heart and lungs. I pored over my dissection manual last night, but I was still a little apprehensive. The human body is complicated inside, messy, not neat and tidy like the anatomy diagrams. And not for the first time I felt out of my depth. But the words of our professor on our first day have stayed with me: ‘View your donor as your first patient and your silent teacher.’

  ‘And there’s no chance I can film you in there? Discreetly, of course. It would make a stunning sequence.’

  I shook my head, alarmed by his morbid enthusiasm. It was the second time he’d asked.

  ‘It’s all very tightly controlled,’ I said. ‘Ever since some medics at another uni posed for pictures with a corpse a few years back. They watch us all like hawks now.’

  ‘How about the seat of the soul – found that yet?’ he asked with a smirk.

  ‘The soul?’

  ‘The Mesopotamians thought it was in the liver. Descartes, the pineal gland. Then of course Duncan MacDougall attempted to weigh the human soul in 1907.’

  ‘How do you know all this stuff?’ I asked. Not for the first time, I was surprised by Louis’ general knowledge, his love of random facts.

  ‘Come on, you have to guess the weight of the soul,’ he said, ignoring my question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, irritated now.

  ‘Twenty-one grams. MacDougall put a dying man and his deathbed on an industrial set of scales and measured the body before and after the exact moment he passed.’

  I shifted my bike to one side to make way for a group of approaching cyclists, troubled by the image Louis had painted. As they passed us, I recognised some of them as fellow medics.

  ‘Oi, Adam! Can’t keep Colin waiting,’ one of them called out to me, grinning.

  I smiled back awkwardly.

  ‘Who’s Colin?’ Louis asked.

  ‘Err, the professor who takes our class.’

  In fact, Colin’s the name we’ve given to the cadaver that I’ve been working on. The one next to mine is called Pamela – she’s had breast implants, two incongruous summits in a flaccid landscape of decay. So much for the moral high ground.

  ‘Are you alright today?’ Louis asked, once the students had gone. ‘You seem a little down.’

  I felt more than a little down. The suicide at King’s has really shaken me, but, more than that, snapshots of that night in Newlyn keep returning.

  Like Louis said, the brain is fragile, and mine must still be processing what happened in Cornwall, even though it’s more than a year ago now and I’m hundreds of miles away. I thought I’d dealt with it, or with what I could remember after too many pints. I do remember we’d had a good session in the Swordy, me and the gill-netter boys, who I’d not seen since I’d quit the boat and started night school. It was the usual banter and funny stories, but then a group of braying uni rahs walked in and the mood changed. Everyone knows the Swordy’s the roughest pub around, and those blokes were totally out of place, slagging off their holiday let in Mousehole – ‘shithole, more like’ – and the trashy nightclub they were going on to in Penzance. I could tell there was trouble in the air. They were loud and posturing, completely unaware of how they sounded. And then Tom, good old Tom, never one for subtleties, started to do impressions of them, putting on his posh, Tim-Nice-But-Dim voice. Usually one of us would have told him to pipe down, apologised for his behaviour, maybe explained that he had learning difficulties and tended to misjudge social situations, but this time we left him to it. His impression was spot on – ‘What a bloody nice bloke!’ – and had us all in stitches.

  When I finally left the pub, last one out the door, I saw a crowd gathered up on the North Pier. The rahs were hanging Tom over the harbour wall by his arms and legs, threatening to drop him into the oily water below.

  ‘I can’t swim!’ Tom was pleading. ‘Please let me go. I can’t swim!’

  I sprinted over to help him, but I only managed to make the situation worse. The splash. The sickening silence.

  I wasn’t going to tell Louis any of this, though. ‘I’m sad about the student who killed himself,’ I said, checking that I’d put my dissection manual in the bike’s wicker basket.

  And it’s true, I was. It didn’t take long for my suspicions to be proved correct. Aldous was a third-year law student who’d had a row with his girlfriend in the afternoon. I must have witnessed the tail end of it on Mathematical Bridge. She’s inconsolable, apparently, but there’s talk of other reasons for his sudden decision to end his life. In particular, he was depressed about a recent important job interview. It doesn’t add up, but gossip is rife, facts few and far between. And then there was his comment in the bar about Louis, his warning that I should keep away from him and his films. Should I have told someone about that? Confronted Louis?

  ‘Shocking,’ he said. ‘And the poor woman he landed on. I mean, what are the chances?’

  Was there a hint of levity in his voice?

  ‘Someone even filmed it, you know,’ I said. ‘Posted it on the World Wide Web. One of my college mates showed me last night.’

  I studied Louis’ pale face for a reaction.

  ‘Filmed it?’ He sounded surprised. ‘Maybe they were tourists and it happened to be in their shot. You see enough Japanese people with cameras around here, filming the chapel.’ He glanced back down King’s Parade, towards King’s College.

  ‘Who’d put that sort of stuff online, though?’ I asked.

  ‘Who’d watch it?’ he said, turning to me.

  I looked away. Guilty as charged. Ji hadn’t forced me to watch the video.

  I wanted to ask Louis another question about Aldous – Why did he tell me to stay away from you and say that you were ‘evil’? – but it was hard to know how to phrase it without causing offence. I also wasn’t sure any more if it was relevant. Louis, once again, seemed far from evil. Sickly and hungover, yes, but not exactly the devil incarnate.

  ‘Did you ever come across him?’ I asked, unable to let the matter go. ‘Aldous?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Louis said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I saw him in the ADC Bar the other night, at the after-show. Wondered if you knew him. Clio thought she’d met him once.’

  ‘Clio? She said that?’

  For the first time in our conversation, he seemed troubled. I didn’t want to land Clio in it – all she said was that she’d once had a drink with Aldous – so I backed off.

  ‘I’m not sure, maybe I’m confusing things.’

  ‘You had a good time with her, though,’ Louis said, happy to move on. ‘Yesterday.’

  It was the first mention of our date. I still didn’t know how much of it he’d managed to film. Had he seen us kissing? Would it even bother me if he had?

  ‘We punted to Grantchester and back,’ I said.

  ‘You did?’ he asked with pantomime surprise.

  ‘Clio will be mad if you filmed us.’ I glanced around, just in case she happened to be nearby. Unlikely, given she said she rarely gets up before midday.

  ‘Mad as hell.’ Louis grinned.

  He’d definitely filmed us. My mind raced as I tried to imagine where he might have hidden. In another punt? Somewhere on the footpath?

  ‘For the record, it’s not Clio’s life I’m filming,’ he continued. ‘It’s yours. And you’ll have to wait until the final edit. All I’ll say is that Grantchester looked fabulous in the spring sunshine.’

  I pushed off on my bicycle, shaking my head in mock disbelief.

  ‘Don’t forget tonight,’ he called out after me. I lifted my hand in a wave. The party. ‘Clio’s looking forward to seeing you.’

  23

  ‘I’m here.’

  Tania’s voice is quiet. She hasn’t hung up on Adam after all. They’re still talking, which is something. He’d rather be in Wiltshire with her, but at least channels of communication are open.

  ‘This must have been some sort of twisted act of revenge,’ Adam says, pacing around the kitchen. ‘It’s all I can think of.’

  ‘For denying her your toned body?’ she asks.

  It’s a cruel shot. They both know he’s put on weight recently, particularly around the waist. A soft girdle of subcutaneous fat. ‘She wouldn’t have texted you the photo if she’d got what she wanted.’

  ‘Are you sure it was her who sent it?’ she says.

  He can’t be certain of anything right now. Tonight his worst nightmare has been realised. Ever since the events of Louis’ party at university, he’s dreaded the thought of being secretly filmed. It’s stalked him like an invisible shadow, drawing closer to him in recent months, and now it’s actually happened. But not in the way he feared. He wasn’t expecting it to coincide with Clio’s reappearance in his life after all this time. Or with her apparent attempt to destroy his marriage.

  Her behaviour tonight has completely wrong-footed him, made him even more paranoid. If she’s done this, what else might she be capable of? He thinks back over what happened today, considering everything in a new light: Freddie’s sudden disappearance, how she had appeared out of nowhere in the park with him in her arms, what Freddie had said about a puppy. Will she have one next time? A thought hits him like a jackhammer. Christ, what if the whole thing was a dry run? A chance for Clio to build trust with Freddie?

  ‘Where are you?’ he asks Tania, his blood running cold. ‘In the main house?’

  ‘In my old bedroom. I didn’t want my parents to see me crying over a photo of my husband with a half-naked woman who’s not his wife.’

  He knows she wants to punish him, but he’s more concerned about the whereabouts of their son. A terrible train of thought is gaining momentum. ‘Can you check on Freddie?’

  ‘So you can rev him up like you usually do at this time of night?’

  He does a quick calculation in his head. It takes almost two and a half hours to get from Greenwich to her parents’ house in Wiltshire. Clio left three hours ago.

  ‘Tania, please, I just need you to make sure he’s… he’s safe.’

  ‘Of course he’s safe. We’re in Wiltshire not Willesden. Why wouldn’t he be?’

  ‘I know you’re angry. And you’ve every right to be.’

  ‘I’m glad we agree on that. I think most women would object to being sent a photo of—’

  ‘I don’t think Freddie was lying when he said that Clio found him in the sandpit today,’ he says, interrupting her.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ she says. ‘Trying to distract me. Reminding me that I fell asleep in the playground. You’re the one in the dock here, not me.’

  ‘I’m just asking you to look in on Freddie,’ Adam says, forcing himself to remain calm.

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll check on our son, who I put to bed barely half an hour ago. It’s not as if I’ve got much else to do.’

  Adam listens as Tania walks down the corridor in the old stable block that’s attached to the main farmhouse, trying to distract himself by picturing her surrounds. Single-storey, no-expense-spared conversion for family and guests. Tania’s dad had a very successful career as a brain surgeon – NHS and private – and it’s an extensive, late-Georgian property, set in two acres of land. When he first went to stay there, he was put in a separate bedroom and had to creep down the corridor to spend the night with Tania. And creep back to his room the next morning.

  He holds his breath as Tania lifts the phone to her ear. ‘Adam, he’s gone,’ she says, her voice shaking with fear. ‘The window’s open and Freddie’s not here.’

  24

  May 1998

  ‘How was your day?’ Ji asked. He was lingering in his doorway when I returned to my room in the late afternoon.

  ‘I broke a rib,’ I said.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Not mine, fortunately. In the anatomy class. I think it hurt me more than it hurt Colin.’

  Ji knows all about Colin. I wish I’d never mentioned my cadaver to him as it’s stoked an unhealthy interest.

  ‘If only I could come along to one of those,’ he said. ‘So cool!’ What is it about anatomy classes that arouses such curiosity? ‘There’s some great footage on Rotten. Have you seen the one where the medical student recognises the cadaver as his missing best—’