Hannah goes completely still. She has no idea what to say, and she finds she is gaping at Geraint, her mouth open. She closes it, but the words still don’t come and the silence hangs between them, oppressive. Inside her head, though, it’s the opposite problem. There are too many words—words buzzing and whining like bees in a jar. Ryan. April. Pregnant.
Why on earth would she have told Ryan, of all people? Unless…
But Geraint is speaking, cutting across her spiraling thoughts.
“Ryan’s theory was the defense didn’t bring it up because they thought it would look like victim blaming,” he says. “You know, smearing someone’s sexual past to distract from what’s happened to them. They believed it would go down very badly with the jury, and they thought they could get Neville off by pointing out other flaws in the evidence. Only… it didn’t work.”
“And Ryan told you this? He confirmed it?”
Geraint nods.
“Did he say why April told him?”
Geraint shakes his head.
Hannah sits back, trying to make sense of this. But she can’t. It makes no sense at all. Can it really be true? Or is this another one of April’s pranks?
“The thing is…” she says now, the words coming slowly. “The thing that you have to remember is that April was… well, she made stuff up.”
“What do you mean?” Geraint looks puzzled.
“She was… I suppose you’d call it a practical joker, though it doesn’t seem very funny in hindsight. She used to do stuff to get a rise out of people. Elaborate stuff sometimes. Like she sent Hugh this whole thing about how his mobile phone had a possible safety recall on it, and persuaded him to ring up Nokia and go through this diagnostic test. Only of course the number wasn’t Nokia, it was April. She put on this funny accent and talked him through the supposed test, and I can’t remember the whole thing, but the punch line involved typing out what was supposed to be a diagnostic numerical command code—it was back when some of the older phones still had a number pad. Only when you typed out the numbers in a text message it came out as I am a knob.”
“Ha!” Geraint says, and then looks slightly ashamed of his own levity, as if he forgot, for a moment, the gravity of why they are here and how the topic came up. “So… um…” he says, more diffidently. “Do you think this was a practical joke against Ryan?”
“Maybe,” Hannah says, but it sounds weak in her own ears, and she knows it. Her heart is still thumping and her mind is whirling, trying to figure things out.
Why would April have chosen Ryan, out of all the possibilities, to confide in? And why would Ryan believe her?
She thinks of April’s closed door, early in the morning, of the unmistakable sound of two people having sex, filtering through the wood.
She thinks of the way she walked into breakfast to find Will already there, cheerful and unsuspecting. Could I be cheeky and get you to grab me another coffee if you’re going up?
“I’m sorry,” she says now. She pushes away her glass and stands up. “I’m really sorry, I have to get back. I’ve got an appointment. I hope this was helpful.”
But she knows it wasn’t. She doesn’t know what Geraint wants from her, but whatever it is, was, she’s fairly sure he didn’t get it. She’s told him nothing he didn’t already know. She, on the other hand, has a whole mess of unwanted information and thoughts in return that she is going to have to sift, sort, and eventually live with. Why did I come here? she wants to cry as she turns for the door. Why did I agree to this?
“Yeah, thanks,” Geraint says. He’s standing too, and now he follows her to the door, though she desperately wants to tell him not to. “I really appreciate it. Listen, could I call you sometime, if I dig anything else up?”
She stops at that, turns, trying to keep her face neutral so that it doesn’t reveal to him all the horror that’s roiling underneath. Dig something up? Why? Why would he do this?
“What do you mean?” she says, her voice level. “What kind of thing?”
“Well, you know, I’m talking to people—Neville’s lawyers, some of April’s family. If there’s something I think you might want to know—”
No, is what she wants to say. In fact she wants to scream it. No, there is nothing about that case I could possibly want to know. I want to forget it—move on—pretend none of it ever happened. Leave me alone!
But she can’t forget it. She can’t pretend it never happened. Not if it’s really true that she made a mistake. Because Geraint’s right—she’s spent over a decade trying to strangle those doubts, push them down, hide them away. But they’ve always been there, gnawing at her. Why would Neville protest his innocence, year after year, sabotaging his own chance at release, if he was really guilty? Why didn’t anyone hear a struggle, why wasn’t there any DNA at the scene? These are all questions that have floated to the top of her mind in the long hours between midnight and dawn, questions she’s pushed back down, drowned in sleeping pills and therapy and the reassuring monotony of everyday life.