Dead Scared

I DROVE BACK to college via the B road where Nicole Holt had died. Remains of police tape still clung to trees and petrol-station flowers had been left at the side of the road. I parked and got out of the car.

It was an eerie enough spot. A narrow road, just wide enough for two cars to pass, with tall trees on either side. There were no street-lights and no kerb. Not somewhere you’d want to break down if you were female and on your own at night. It struck me as a very lonely place to take your own life.

In my Sunday-afternoon briefing, I’d learned that Nicole had bought a strong nylon rope in a hardware shop three days before her death (the police had found the receipt in her room) and had tied it round the thick trunk of a beech tree. The other end had gone round her neck.

The tree in question, still with police tape round its base, was on the left side of the road as I looked out of the city. It stood a good half-metre closer to the tarmac than most of its neighbours. By choosing this one, Nicole had minimized the chances of the rope’s being tangled on other trees.

I’d brought a torch from the car and by this time I needed it. I shone its beam up and down the tree trunk. Just over a metre from the ground, some of the bark had been broken away, no doubt by the sudden tightening of the nylon rope as it reached its full length.

The Mini convertible goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 11.8 seconds, according to the CID report into Nicole’s death. It wouldn’t have had time to reach that speed on this short stretch of road, probably hadn’t got to much more than thirty mph. Still fast enough to sever a slim neck.

I started to walk along the road, thinking that it would have required some planning, a suicide of this nature. You’d need to think about speed, distance, length of rope needed. Had the rope been too short, Nicole could be with Bryony right now, nursing a crippling neck injury. She’d been a history student. A suicide involving mathematical calculations didn’t really seem her thing.

I figured I was reaching the point where the rope had stretched tight and Nicole’s head had left her body. There would have been a lot of blood and I knew it hadn’t rained in Cambridge since Saturday afternoon.

Fearful of discovering I was walking across pink-stained frost I took a quick look down. No blood, just a few half-rotten remains of beech nuts and conker shells. And fresh tyre tracks. I looked back and followed them for a few yards. When they disappeared I stopped and shone the torch around. At the point where I was standing, a vehicle had left the road and driven instead along the grass verge. A short distance ahead, it had swerved to avoid a bank of earth and then gone on for another sixty paces before rejoining the road.

OK, think. The tracks had to be fresh because the CID file had contained a weather report. It had rained on Saturday afternoon and both road and surrounding ground had been damp. It hadn’t rained since, though, so any tracks or prints made after Saturday afternoon would still be here. Early Sunday morning, police tape had been stretched along the length of the road and, at each extremity, into the woods. It was still there.

So, sometime between late Saturday afternoon and early Sunday morning, a car had left the road and travelled about twenty yards along the verge.

I pulled out my phone and took close-up photographs of the tread. Then I turned back, following the tracks again. I stepped over the bank of earth just as a very cold, fine rain started to fall.

It couldn’t have been the Mini that made these tracks. I would compare tyre prints to be certain but it was impossible. On the road I could see the chalk mark that the police had made to indicate the point at which the rope stretched tight and Nicole was killed. The car that left the road had been further out of town. Even if the Mini had swerved after Nicole was dead (in itself quite likely) it could not have steered itself around the bank of earth. There’d been another vehicle here.