Graham Sutcliffe

Graham Sutcliffe is 26 and a philosophy teaching assistant at the university. Born in Portland, Oregon, the son of a high school teacher, he did his undergraduate degree on scholarship and is preparing a doctorate in ethics that he is starting to find easier to write than to live. He lives with his fiancée, Delia, and plans to marry her in the summer, in a small ceremony, in a garden, with few guests.

He spends most of the day in the university library, in a wooden carrel on the third floor, among stacks of paperbacks and yellow legal pads. He eats a cheese sandwich on the lawn at lunch, grades freshman papers with patience and reads Kierkegaard until closing time. At home, he likes to cook spaghetti with canned sauce and argue politics over the cheap wine Delia hates.

He is tall and thin, with wavy brown hair down to his collar, a thin mustache and metal-rimmed glasses that slide down his nose. He usually wears a gray turtleneck sweater with worn elbows and brown corduroy trousers. He speaks well and fast, like someone giving a lecture, and quotes philosophers when afraid. When he wants to seem calm, he takes off his glasses and slowly cleans them on the hem of his sweater.

About Monday night, his account is full of details: the kidnappers knocked at 9, a woman's voice said she had hit the driver's car and needed the phone, and Delia took off the chain. The phone was already dead. Three came in, in ski masks and with shotguns, and he took a rifle butt and passed out on the rug. When he woke, at 9:30, she was no longer there.

Graham knows the fiancé who was in the apartment, without a bump on his head, is the first whose story is doubted. When the detective accuses him of handing over his fiancée, he replies, indignant, that he was going to marry her in June and asks the other man to look for the van instead of insulting him. It could be the honest pain of a man who lost the only person who mattered. It could be someone quoting Kierkegaard to cover an embarrassment. The detective will have to decide which.