gone everywhere together, Ruth and Richard. She could see them traipsing around college, lighting each other’s cigarettes, sitting next to each other in the library. Richard had been good-looking in a ruffled sort of way: scruffy dark hair, faded jeans. He’d fronted a college band. Alice remembers seeing Ruth dancing at one of his gigs, leaping up and down with an abandon Alice had envied. These days he looked older, more tired, in his byline photograph, and his face had hardened in a way that Alice couldn’t recall from college.
Ruth Walker and the subjects of mental health and missing people seemed to have shaped a lot of Richard’s journalism. He’d even written a book called The Disappeared about unsolved cases with a chapter about Ruth, who appears in his writing as ‘my ex-girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or ‘my student girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or occasionally ‘my girlfriend Ruth Walker’. Alice wonders how Richard’s current girlfriends, or wife, feel about this. She notices most of the articles are from a few years back. Perhaps the obsession petered out.
Alice copies and pastes the most interesting of the links and emails them to herself. Then, almost out of habit, she has another wander before leaving the room. She goes to George’s desk and tries the drawers. They are locked, as always. The feeling she has as she tries them is always the same: a sort of shame. It’s a similar feeling she gets when she goes to an acquaintance’s Facebook page and their privacy settings mean she can’t see what they’ve been up to. It’s not something you could ever talk about – only a snooper knows when they’ve been locked out. She never used to think of herself as a snooper, but she’s got worse over the years. And it’s become easier, too, with social media to find people, to peek at the way their lives are now. It’s this period in particular, the university years, she can’t leave alone. She scratches away at it like a scab.
Alice perches on the desk. There’s a framed collage of photos on it, which Christie and Teddy had put together for George’s thirtieth with Alice’s help. There’s a photograph of his parents at Ascot, standing to attention for the camera, with his father ruddy-cheeked, his mother in a monstrous hat. Another of George and her with Christie and Teddy on holiday in Greece, all looking a bit sunburned and worse for wear. There’s a photo of Alice on their wedding day. She remembers it being taken, one of the last in a long, long session of photographs, and how, by that stage, her head was beginning to ache with the strain of the tight hairdo, the hairspray, the clips, the constant smiling.
There’s another of George and Dan in black tie at the memorial ball. They look so young – like children. It doesn’t fit with her memory of George and his gang as impossibly sophisticated and cool.
The brrr of the landline makes her jump. It’s an old-fashioned, heavy thing on George’s desk. Alice looks at it guiltily for a second before picking it up.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, darling, it’s me.’
‘Hello you.’ Alice stands up as if caught out.
‘What are you up to?’
‘Oh, you know, pottering.’ She glances down at the photo in her hand.
He pauses. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, of course. Just enjoying my Saturday. How was the interview?’
‘Not bad. Are you OK? You seemed a bit strange last night.’
‘Well, I’d had a strange day. That’s all.’
Alice’s attention returns to the photograph. She picks it up to examine it more closely. George, rosy-cheeked from drinking, is clutching a bottle of champagne in his right hand with his left thrown around Dan’s shoulder. A little out of focus, there’s a cluster of people in the background.
‘Yes, I know,’ George says, more sympathetic than he might usually be.
‘Well …’
Alice wants to wind things up, to be left to her snooping alone. She’s never paid much attention to it before but there’s someone standing next to George, just out of the photo. There’s a sliver of a white shoulder, the strap of a dress and a thin slice of long hair.
Where had Alice been by this stage of the night? She must have been in bed; she’d still been recovering from glandular fever in her first year. She certainly hadn’t made the survivors’ photo. They had never bought one of their own but she’d seen them in the staircases or loos of other people’s houses when they’d all initially made the exodus to London. You didn’t see so many of them now – tasteful black-and-white photos of weddings and children had replaced student snaps.
‘I sometimes think we’re all stuck,’ George says quietly at the other end of the phone.
Alice sits down; this is unusually reflective for George. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘That what happened to Dan stopped us in our tracks somehow. That we’re all still there – stuck at that time at the end of uni.’ He laughs suddenly. ‘Or maybe I’m just talking bollocks. It’s probably the hangover.’
‘No,’ says Alice. ‘I feel the same.’
She wants him to say more, for this version of her husband to stay on the phone, but then he’s making his excuses, signing off, leaving her with the dialling tone ringing in her ears, the framed photograph still in her hand.
The thing is, she thinks, looking down at the photo, the thing she’d been thinking during the call, the thought she couldn’t fight, is that the hair in the photograph is red, bright red. Maybe she is stuck, but maybe it’s to do with this feeling – which she had even back then but was too ashamed to admit – of being left out; of knowing there was something she wasn’t being told.
The next time Kat sees Ruth, she is wearing the same ridiculous Pre-Raphaelite dress again, though – Kat can’t help noticing – it is wringing wet. Ruth’s hair is wet too, plastered to her shoulders. She is not wearing a coat, so she might as well be standing in her underwear for all Kat can see, which is black under her white dress. She is standing outside the porters’ lodge looking at Kat as if waiting for her.
‘Haven’t got my fucking keys, have I?’ she says.
Her voice is soft. There is a Welsh lilt to it. She speaks as if she and Kat already know each other, as if they are in the middle of a conversation. You could see why boys might find it seductive.
‘George suggested we go swimming,’ the girl continues, though Kat hadn’t asked. ‘I think he meant skinny-dipping – thought he might see me with my kit off, but I went in fully dressed.’ She barks a short laugh. ‘And when I came out he’d disappeared.’
‘Right.’ Kat raises an eyebrow but says, in a voice that sounds like her mother’s, ‘That’s actually quite dangerous.’
‘It’s OK.’ The girl smiles quickly. ‘I’m a strong swimmer. I love being in the water – it always clears my head.’
‘Still …’ Kat lets the word hang.
‘Haven’t I seen you before?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Kat. ‘Are you a fresher?’
‘Yeah, Spanish. You?’
‘English.’ Buzzing the front door open and stepping in first, Kat holds its weight for the other girl. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Ruth.’ The girl steps after her. ‘Yours?’
‘Kat,’ says Kat. ‘How are you finding it all?’
‘It’s OK.’ Ruth pauses. ‘A bit disappointing.’
‘I know what you mean.’ Kat smiles. ‘No one ever says that, do they?’
Ruth glances at the college clock tower. ‘Do you fancy