Niki thought she could sense it on all their minds, hovering between the four of them as they threw cushions and sandals into the boat, lowered the wine bottles in, and collected the long pole, but it wasn’t until they were out of the city that they started to talk about it. Even then, it was one of those odd conversations that skirted around what they all wanted to know. Each could feel an alertness in the others that made them cautious about what they said.
Niki was punting, standing barefoot on the raised wooden platform. It occurred to her that if her family could see her, they’d think she’d changed irrevocably, but although she’d made a few friends and learned to punt, she still felt adrift at the university. Some of the other students still smiled at her accent when she spoke, and she was routinely patronized by people who’d never been to the North. She was the first in her family to go to university, and even though she was doing well on her course, part of her secretly suspected that some sort of administrative error had led to her offer and that the dons had deftly hidden their surprise when she’d turned up.
She steered around another boat, pulling the long pole in a smooth arc across the surface of the water, glanced up at the clusters of people drinking outside pubs in the thick evening heat, and turned back to the others as they went under the bridge. They were coming into the countryside now. They didn’t have to worry that someone might hear.
All the same, they held back. No one wanted to be tasteless. A young woman their age had died, after all. Jenny, she was called. She was the daughter of a well-known journalist, and she’d fallen from a height. Drugs were involved. The police were trying to work out who’d sold them to her.
To Niki, the others seemed more subdued than usual but alert, too, and on edge. They felt close to the center of a national news story, to the torrent of photos, interviews, and speculation that had engulfed the city in the last few days. None of them had known Jenny, but it troubled them even so. Nothing like this had happened before. Each of them felt an urgent need to find out what they
