It was Chloe’s father, Hector Cabot, who broke the news. Since divorcing Chloe’s mother, he had been living in Woodstock, Connecticut, and it was to Woodstock that Chloe had been dispatched within days of Jeannie’s departure. Hector had called to exchange notes with Jeannie’s mother, and to suggest that the two girls be brought together so that they could do the same. He had been somewhat taken aback to find that Nancy Wakefield wanted to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ But he knew how to talk to her. In early July he was granted permission to drive over to Northampton to speak to Jeannie face to face.
‘Though you don’t know me from Adam, you know at least that I understand the country. I can guess what you loved in it. For I once loved it, too. And Jeannie – I know the pain of heartbreak. The onus of a new beginning. What’s more, I know your father – as a man, and as a friend.’
It was in this sanctimonious mode that he began his weary monologue. This is not my harsh judgment, but his. When we met in Istanbul in November 2005, Hector Cabot talked of hating the ‘tinny echo of manufactured goodwill.’ But in July 1970, he had less than two years of sobriety behind him, ‘which means I was very sober. Suffocatingly sober. It was the best I could do.’
He had never met Jeannie before so could not tell me how she’d changed. He recalled an emaciated girl with a great mass of blonde hair, a mouth that twisted to one side and hands that never stopped tapping. She sat hunched in her chair, eyes fixed on the ground between them – though from time to time she would fix him with a cold blue glare.
‘You were stepping out with Sinan, I take it.’As soon had he said this, he knew it was the ‘wrong way in’. Was it the past tense that made her wince as if she’d just been stung? Had his antiquated turn of phrase added insult to injury? He proceeded with caution. ‘How well did you know Dutch Harding?’
Another wince. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’
Sensing now that there was no right way into this ‘tangled web – or right way out, for that matter’, he answered her directly. ‘Jeannie, he’s been murdered.’
‘What?’
He’d heard people say some pretty nasty things about Jeannie over the years – rumours, based on speculation, or on outright lies – but none of these people had been in that room that day, and he had been. He’d seen the terror in her eyes, so he could assure the ‘sirens of the gossip mill’ that (a) she was hearing this ‘macabre tale’ for the first time and (b) she had no idea what to make of it.
The story he told her was a sanitised version of the account I myself had read in that lurid news article: a group of students belonging to a Maoist cell called Enlightenment had discovered that the man they trusted above all others was an agent provocateur… She stopped him here. ‘Are we talking about the same people?’ She’d gone on to claim that she knew no Maoists. ‘They only said so to annoy their mothers. They never opened the Little Red Book except to laugh at it.’ But Hector had persevered. He could give her the names. Suna, Lüset, Haluk, and (‘there is no easy way of saying this, my dear, so brace yourself’) Sinan. Had it not been for the prompt and selfless intervention of Jeannie’s father, the list might well have included Chloe’s name, and her own.
‘Prompt, perhaps. But not selfless! Not selfless!’
Tears, followed by tissues. ‘May I continue now? There’s more, I’m afraid. ‘Much more.’
A peremptory nod from Jeannie. A deep breath, and then he went for it. Keeping to the basics: upon hearing that one of their number was an agent provocateur, the group’s suspicions had passed from one possible culprit to the next, until a chance remark exposed Dutch Harding as the enemy amongst them. After putting him on trial (‘though I hope you understand that I am using this word metaphorically’) and pronouncing him guilty, they had condemned him to death. (‘Which must be seen as a measure of their betrayal. I have never been to a country where they honour their teachers more deeply than they do in Turkey.’)
She took this news calmly. Too calmly. Falsely encouraged – though he ought to have asked himself why she was clutching her head in her hands, and why she had dropped her head so low it almost grazed her knees – he had described the gory aftermath: the chopping up of the body, the cramming of body parts into the trunk, the ill-conceived getaway plan, the trail of blood that prompted a member of the public to report the girls and their trunk to the police. The arrest. The so-called interrogation, and Suna’s leap from the window.
Here she’d interrupted his ghastly flow. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think I heard that right.’ So he’d told her again, but filling in some detail. Turkey being Turkey, they would never know for sure what had gone on in that interrogation room. But officially Suna had jumped. A flower vendor in the street below had seen her dangling her feet on the fourth floor window. Which did suggest…
This was when she had gone for his throat.
Painful and startling though this had been, he had only himself to blame. He was better at passing on sad tidings now. ‘I was awfully clumsy in those days,’ he told me. ‘Sobriety had robbed me of my social graces. Having made such a mess of it, I decided to concentrate on Chloe, who was in the same sort of mess. I sorely regret sending her off to Radcliffe that September. I ought to have realised she just wasn’t ready yet. She’d barely spoken all summer. My every effort to discuss this terrible murder ran right into the proverbial brick wall. Why I thought that meant she’d moved on… Though I must say, I kept pretty close tabs on her all autumn. She and Jeannie were very close that first semester, did you know that? Though it was not, I would now say, the healthiest of bonds. They’d joined together against a world that didn’t understand them. They goaded each other on. I am not trying to say that Jeannie was responsible in any way for Chloe’s breakdown. Far from it. No, if Jeannie hadn’t called me that December, to express her concerns – by which I mean, to tell me Chloe was in the infirmary, having cut herself – well, who’s to say? We might easily have lost her. So of course – and whatever injury or distress Jeannie later caused us – we are eternally grateful to her.’