“Is there news?” Marc said.
“Not as such,” DI Jones said, stepping into the hall. Nicola followed. Marc pointed them toward the living room.
“We’ve come to return Alexandra’s things and ask a few more questions.”
Marc sat in the chair by the bay window.
“Here.” Nicola thrust a clear plastic bag at him. He could see folded fabric, a bra strap, papers from my desk, my toothbrush. “We thought you’d want these back.”
“Th-thanks.”
“There’s also—” Nicola paused and began again, “I thought you might like to know Alexandra’s going to be featured on a special edition of Crimewatch this evening.”
“Great,” he replied, the small delights of his day dramatically different to just a few weeks ago.
“Yes,” DI Jones said. “Sometimes it helps, but we have to be prepared for a lot of time-wasting responses in an appeal like this. I’d advise you not to get your hopes up.”
“Okay,” Marc said.
DI Jones cleared his throat. “We’ve received the lab reports back from the river.”
Marc looked at him, a breath caught in his throat.
“We estimate Alexandra lost two to three pints of blood on the bank there.”
Marc’s torso crumpled. He held his hands over his head, his breathing rapid and shallow.
“I know this is hard to hear,” DI Jones continued. “But we’re now working on the theory that your wife’s body was moved after the incident at the river.”
Marc’s knees began to tremble. He still held his head in his hands, shaking it from side to side. “No, no, no, no,” he murmured. “You’re wrong.”
Nicola uncrossed her legs. DI Jones glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.
Marc looked up, his eyes red but his gaze steady. “What does two to three pints mean? Could she have survived?”
DI Jones hesitated. “It’s a significant amount, Dr. Southwood.”
“Is it fatal?” Marc said.
“Not conclusively so,” said Nicola. “But it’s enough to lead to a loss of consciousness. It’s—”
“So she could be alive?” Marc said, cutting her off.
Nicola and DI Jones exchanged a look.
“She could be alive,” Marc said again. “Why aren’t you out there looking for her?”
DI Jones leant forward. “Dr. Southwood, if somehow your wife is alive, we will find her, but we will only do that by being realistic about what the evidence indicates. Do you understand?”
Marc’s nostrils flared, but he nodded. He watched DI Jones’s mouth move as he told him only our family’s DNA had been found on my clothing, that there was a trace of something on my handbag, but it could belong to the thief who stole its contents. “The next step,” he said, “is to petition for Alexandra’s phone and digital records, to try to build as clear a picture of her last movements as possible. We’d also like permission to access yours as well.”
“Mine?” Marc said.
DI Jones looked him straight in the eye and Marc felt heat rise to his cheeks.
“It’s routine,” Nicola said softly.
Marc scratched his temple. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
DI Jones stared at him for a moment longer. “While we’re here,” he said eventually, “I want to ask about your wife’s work.”
Marc nodded.
“You said she was going to do a PhD?”
“Yes,” Marc said curtly.
“Why now?”
Marc shrugged. “The girls are a bit older. Alex has been talking about working full-time again and a PhD would allow her to get a senior lectureship.”
“So you’d say Alexandra was ambitious?”
“Of course. She’s the smartest person I know.”
“And what she wanted was a senior lectureship?”
Marc nodded.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, for such a clever, ambitious woman to have waited this long to pursue something she’s so passionate about?”
“Excuse me?” said Marc.
“It’s just, we’ve talked to some of your friends and they’ve painted a slightly different picture.”
Marc narrowed his eyes. “Who has? What did they say?”
“Did you and your wife ever discuss who would stay home with your children?” DI Jones said, ignoring Marc’s questions.
Marc glared at him.
“It’s in everyone’s interest that you co-operate with us, Dr. Southwood. All I’m trying to do is establish if Alexandra was as happy with your arrangements as you say she was.”
“Of course she was,” Marc said. “Why would I lie? We share the parenting. We support each other.”
“But you’re the head of your department—that must involve a lot of long hours. It must help to have a wife willing to work part-time.”
“What are you getting at?” Marc said, his temper flaring. “What exactly has been said?”
“We’re not getting at anything, Marc,” said Nicola, exchanging a glance with DI Jones. “We’re just trying to fill in some gaps.”
Marc looked from Nicola to DI Jones and back again, feeling like more than a coffee table separated them.
After they left, he returned to the living room and picked up the bag of my things. He extracted my toothbrush and clothes, laid them on the table before him. He fished back in the bag and retrieved two crinkled sheets of typed paper. They were single spaced and lacking page numbers and footnotes. An early draft. The title at the top read: “Are Aesthetic Emotions More or Less ‘Real’ Than Those Experienced in Life?” Underneath, hand-scrawled in pen, it said: Or, I Miss Tony Soprano??
I’d told him a little about the paper I planned to write. We discussed it briefly, but realized we were unlikely to agree. I wanted to do something fun, to depart from the fusty norms of Art History conferences, with their endless slides and attention to the minutest details of the most ancient of paintings. When I got enthusiastic about becoming what I called a “real” academic, I’d dream of being a public intellectual, of writing kooky columns in the Guardian and The New Yorker. Marc teased that wasn’t exactly the highest of academic aspirations and I poked my tongue out and complained he was too boring to understand. He was fully supportive of me doing a PhD, but we both knew he was one of those fusty academics I wanted to riot against. He liked real papers that addressed serious topics. He wanted citations and bibliographies, texts containing actual text, not critical analyzes of Big Brother and Katie Price. I rolled my eyes when he complained about his students’ tenuous theses, before kissing him on the lips and saying, “I love you anyway, Dr. Bore.” There was a kind of equilibrium, we joked, in our academic incompatibility.
He pushed thoughts of the blood by the river and DI Jones’s questions and who on earth might have said we weren’t happy to the depths of his mind and folded himself on to the sofa, his slippered feet resting on the opposite arm. Okay, Al, he thought. I’ll give your kooky academia a go. My mind’s open.