Dead Scared

TWENTY-TWO MINUTES AFTER getting home from work, Evi could no longer resist the temptation that had been nagging away at her for days. She opened up Facebook, typed Harry Laycock into the search engine and waited. The system churned and … of course he was on Facebook, anyone as hip as Harry was bound to be.

Harry Laycock, Anglican minister, with 207 friends. His birthday was 7 April. She hadn’t known that. The photograph was one she hadn’t seen before: outdoor clothes, mountains in the background. The system invited her to send him a message. Evi closed the page down.

She opened up her mail account and the email message she’d received earlier from the policewoman. She wanted details of students who’d attempted suicide in the last five years. Easier said than done. Nick hadn’t exactly been encouraging that afternoon. And his was one of twenty GP surgeries in Cambridge, each of which was likely to have a number of the 22,000 student population on its patient base. Each surgery operated independently. Data was rarely shared and patient confidentiality was sacrosanct. Anything she did find, she couldn’t pass on to the policewoman without risking her entire career.

The phone on her desk was ringing. Evi reached out and put it to her ear. ‘Evi Oliver,’ she announced. To silence. ‘Hello,’ she tried. No response. She put the phone down.

The girl with the fake name, Laura Farrow, talked tough but looked brittle. The way she held her face when she wasn’t speaking had made Evi think of glass blown almost to breaking point. The way it hovers, fragile and beautiful, a split second before it shatters. The phone was ringing again.

‘Evi Oliver.’

No response.

‘Hello.’ Not even trying to sound patient this time.

Evi put the phone down, telling herself not to overreact. It could simply be a genuine caller with line problems. It was ringing again. She picked it up and put it to her ear without speaking. Silence on the line. Not even the sound of breathing. Very strong, the temptation to say something. She resisted, just put the phone softly down.

It rang again immediately.

OK, this wasn’t going to scare her. This was going to piss her off. She picked up the receiver and put it softly down on her desk. A few seconds later, her mobile began ringing. She reached into her bag and pulled it out. Number withheld. Evi answered the call.

‘Hello.’

Just empty air. Five seconds later it was ringing again. Evi switched the mobile off, replaced the receiver on the desk phone and unplugged it at the wall. Then she got up and walked round the ground floor. There were three more handsets to be unplugged.

She wasn’t going to overreact. It would be someone pissing about. They’d get bored and move on to someone else. When she got back to her desk she had a new email. She clicked it open.

I can see you, it said.

I stood just inside the front door of my block, taking in the chaos. ‘So did the boys with the buckets come back?’ I asked a slim girl with dark curly hair who’d made me tea the previous night.

The girl with the mop gave me a quick smile. ‘Plumbing problems,’ she said. ‘Sounds a bit gynaecological, doesn’t it? Second time this year. Your room’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I think it might have been your pipe that burst. Maintenance are still in there.’

The day was just getting better. I opened my door to find no sign of Talaith, plenty of water on the floor and a man in my bedroom. A tall man, with dark hair and kind eyes.

‘Hello, Tom,’ I called to him, before turning back to the corridor. ‘Yell when you’ve finished with the mop,’ I told the girl with black curls. Then I squelched my way across to my bedroom.

‘What happened?’ I asked, pausing in the doorway. There wasn’t really room for two people in these tiny rooms, unless you wanted to get very cosy.

Tom looked up from whatever he’d been doing under the sink. ‘Frost damage,’ he told me. ‘This is the fourth we’ve had this year. You know, we hardly ever have problems in the old buildings. There’s pipes in there hundreds of years old and they just keep going. Crap in the new blocks hardly lasts five minutes.’

‘Guess they don’t make poisonous lead piping like they used to,’ I said, looking round. There was no damage to speak of, just a damp and muddy floor and small piles of dust where Tom had been drilling. The cupboard beneath the basin had seen plumbing activity, as had the pipes that ran round the mirror. A fairly complicated metal junction looked new.

‘Chipped your mirror,’ I’m afraid,’ Tom said to me, nodding to where a tiny fraction of the glass was missing. ‘I’ll report it, should be able to get it replaced without much trouble.’

I thanked him and went to find the cleaning cupboard.

Evi’s hands were shaking but if anything she felt better. She hadn’t been phoning herself for the past half hour, nor had she sent herself the email. Which almost certainly meant she hadn’t poured red dye into her header tank and she probably hadn’t bought the skeleton toy either. She wasn’t losing her marbles, she was being stalked. By someone who had had access to her house. Thank God she’d had the locks changed.

And emails could be traced. Even if it had been sent from somewhere anonymous like an internet café or a public library, there would still be a record of it on her computer. She resisted the temptation to reply to it and carried on working.

Another email had arrived in her inbox. Great, more evidence. Evi flicked it open.

Purple makes you look sallow. Try another colour.

Evi stood up and walked as quickly as she could to the window. The curtains were drawn, no gaps through which anyone could see, but she pulled them a little closer all the same. She didn’t need to look down at what she was wearing. The cashmere sweater, the colour of lavender in bud, had belonged to her grandmother. Keep it from moths and cashmere lasts for ever, Granny had told her. It wasn’t quite true. It was looking worn and bobbly in places and she only ever wore it at home. She’d changed after the police had left. No one could have known that she was wearing purple right now.

Cracks in the mullioned windows might have been made by stray arrows, centuries ago, and the enclosed stone staircase looked old enough to have ivy growing on the inside. As I climbed, I left behind the smell of woodsmoke and cooked food, to have it replaced by that of fresh laundry and used towels, cosmetics and damp sports equipment. It was the smell of youth, with feminine undertones.

After speaking to Stenning, I’d accessed the university website and typed Scott Thornton into the search facility, realizing as I did so that there was something a bit familiar about the name. I found out that he was part of the medical faculty and a member of St John’s. He was also a Cambridge alumnus, having studied medicine here some fifteen years ago. It was probably all I needed to know for now. I still couldn’t remember where I’d heard the name before, but if it was important it would come to me. A more urgent priority was finding out a little more about Nicole Holt’s last days. The second set of tyre tracks I’d found near where she’d died was bothering me.

The room guide at the base of the stairwell had told me that Nicole lived in room 27. A single flower, pink and daisy-like, pinned opposite her name suggested that might not be strictly true any more.

I spotted Nicole’s room the minute I pushed open the door to the corridor. Cones of cellophane with flowers somewhere in their midst had been propped against the wall outside. Cards had been pinned to the door, addressed to Nicole, occasionally Nicky. Sometime in the next few days, I guessed, her parents might take them down, even read them if they could bear to.

At the end of the corridor I could hear female voices. In the communal kitchen four girls, caught in the act of making coffee, were passing a milk bottle between them. I stood in the doorway, waiting for one of them to notice me.

‘Hi,’ I said, a second later. ‘I’m really sorry to intrude.’

‘No worries,’ replied one. ‘You lost?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Actually I came about Nicole.’ This was the tricky bit. This was where I had to feign emotion for a dead girl I’d never met, in front of bright young women who might just have been her genuine friends. I dropped my eyes, brought my hand up to cover my nose, as though to conceal tears. Tears that weren’t actually there. I was obviously getting better at this acting lark because two of the girls had stepped forward. One of them had a hand on my shoulder, the other was steering me to a chair. I sniffed and realized the tears were there after all. My eyes had been watering in the cold most of the way over and now they were just flowing.

‘It’s OK,’ said a third girl, whose own eyes were damp now. ‘We’re all upset. Are you from the history department?’

I shook my head. ‘I knew her from the Blue,’ I said. ‘You know, the pub where she worked.’

They were nodding their heads. Nicole had worked two nights a week and one lunchtime in the Cambridge Blue, a pub on Gwydir Street. There had been photographs and a number of references to it on Facebook. ‘I just came to see if there was going to be some sort of memorial service for her,’ I said. ‘I know she went to church from time to time.’ Something else I’d discovered on Facebook.

The girls were looking at each other, faces puzzled, shoulders shrugging. It was far too soon for a memorial service.

‘Also, there was something she asked me to get for her,’ I went on, lifting my bag up from the floor. Its contents chinked softly together. ‘I’ve got a contact in the wine trade and I can get it quite cheap. She said somebody called Flick had a birthday coming up and she wanted to surprise her.’

I’d already spotted Flick, a gorgeous Amazon of a girl, nearly six feet tall, with an athlete’s build and long Nordic blonde hair. She looked like Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings and she had her hand to her mouth.

‘It’s nothing special,’ I said, pressing home my advantage. I’d learned all about Flick, her imminent twentieth birthday and her love of all drinks sparkling on Nicole’s Facebook pages. ‘Just Prosecco, but quite a good one.’

I pulled three bottles of sparkling Italian wine from my bag. I’d bought them in a supermarket on the way over, making sure they were chilled. ‘If you could see Flick gets them, that would be great,’ I said, going in for the kill. ‘I’ll leave you in peace now. Sorry to be so pathetic. I’m still in shock, I guess.’

‘Would you like a coffee?’ one of the girls asked me. I feigned surprise and opened my mouth to accept.

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Flick. ‘Who’s got some glasses?’

Evi put the phone down, half expecting it to start ringing again any second. The sergeant she’d spoken to had been polite but distant. He’d told her to make a note of the number and times of the calls and to forward the emails on to him. He hadn’t suggested sending anyone round.

She stood up and went into the kitchen. If someone was watching her from outside, the back garden was where he’d be. She crossed to the door, double-checking that it was locked. She really needed to get blinds put on these windows.

‘I’ve seen you wear purple more than once, Dr Oliver,’ the sergeant had said to her. ‘Bit of a favourite of yours, isn’t it? Could be just a lucky guess. Send me the emails and we’ll have a look at them. I wouldn’t hold out much hope, though. If they were sent from a public building using an anonymous Gmail account, there won’t be a lot we can do.’

Evi sat down in her stairlift and pressed the button. The police weren’t coming and someone had to check her top floor. She’d never sleep otherwise.

Ten minutes later the phone was ringing again. She almost didn’t answer.

‘John Castell here, Evi,’ the deep voice with its faint Norfolk accent said. ‘The duty sergeant just called me at home to tell me about your emails. Are you planning to send them through tonight?’

‘I sent them fifteen minutes ago,’ said Evi.

‘Really? I checked with him not two minutes ago. Hang on, let me check again. The line will go dead for a few seconds.’

A short pause while Evi walked back to her desk.

‘Nope, nothing,’ said Castell. ‘Can you try sending them direct to me?’

‘Let me try.’ Evi opened her inbox and ran the cursor to the top of the list. The two emails weren’t there. She flicked open Junk Mail, Personal Messages and Deleted Items, in case she’d accidentally binned them or filed them away. Nothing. Finally, she clicked on Sent Mail. Nothing at all.

The two emails had disappeared from her system.

Two bottles of Prosecco later, we’d moved from the kitchen into Flick’s room. It was a study bedroom, with a large desk and a narrow bed. A crimson creeper was poking its way in through the open window. Flick had offered me the one chair; two more were brought from rooms nearby. Flick and a girl called Sarah lay on the bed.

‘I know it’s normal to wish there was more you could have done,’ I was saying as sympathetic faces nodded around me. ‘The last time I saw Nicole I knew something wasn’t right but I was in a hurry. I figured we could talk it through properly when I saw her again.’

‘We always think we have more time,’ said Flick.

‘I just knew, though,’ I went on. ‘I knew something wasn’t right. Did she say anything to any of you?’

‘What sort of not right?’ asked Sarah.

‘I didn’t give her chance,’ I admitted. ‘But a couple of times she mentioned to me that she thought someone was coming into her room at night when it was locked.’

One big thing bothering me, apart from the second set of tyre tracks on the B road, was Bryony’s reported insistence that she was being abused by mysterious night-time assailants. I was just a little less willing to write her off as delusional than everyone else seemed to be.

Around the room the four girls looked interested but puzzled.

‘Coming into her room?’ asked a dark-skinned girl called Jasmine.

I nodded. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to make of it,’ I said. ‘She seemed pretty worried about it, though.’

Still puzzled. Shrugs. Hair tossing.

‘She did have quite noisy bad dreams but she never mentioned that,’ said Flick.

‘Coming in and doing what?’ asked a thin, pale girl called Lynsey.

I squirmed a bit on my chair, tried to look as though what I was about to say was making me feel uncomfortable. ‘Well, touching her,’ I said. ‘While she was asleep. To be honest, she made it sound pretty creepy.’

Three of them were very interested now. A few bottles of wine and some spooky stories. Not a bad way to spend an evening. The fourth girl, Lynsey, looked worried. ‘She never said anything to me,’ she said. ‘But she got very odd towards the end.’ She looked at the others. ‘Do you remember?’

A couple of heads were nodding. ‘It started in October, didn’t it?’ said Flick. ‘When she disappeared.’

Someone was banging on her door. Evi still hadn’t got used to how loud the round brass doorknocker was. The disabled physics professor had probably been half deaf as well.

‘Hi,’ said the tall man on her doorstep. The last person she’d have guessed.

‘Nick?’

Nick Bell gave an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry to pounce on you like this, Evi. I can come back another time.’

‘It’s fine, really,’ said Evi, stepping back to release the chain and open the door. Nick stepped inside, bringing a scent of cold January air with him. He was in his usual jeans and oiled-wool blue sweater, the only clothes she’d ever seen him wear when he wasn’t at work. She was pretty certain she remembered the sweater from their student days. Men who looked like Nick didn’t need to make an effort and, as far as she could remember, he never had. ‘I won’t keep you,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t want to do this over the phone.’

‘Now I’m intrigued,’ said Evi. ‘Coffee? Glass of wine?’

‘Thank you.’

Evi made her way to the kitchen, hearing his footsteps following behind. He took the glass of red wine she held out and she leaned back against the counter, wondering if he was going to tell her off for drinking alcohol. It really wasn’t a good idea with the combination of painkillers she took.

‘I ran your request past the other partners,’ Nick said. ‘Megan was pretty relaxed but I didn’t get a particularly encouraging response from the others, I’m afraid.’

Evi shrugged. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really expect you to.’

‘They want you to put it in writing, at the very least,’ Nick went on. ‘They also want to know if you have Ethics Board approval. If you get anything out of us, officially, it’ll be months down the line.’

Evi nodded. Exactly what she’d expected. ‘Thanks for trying,’ she said.

She waited. Nick hadn’t touched his wine yet. He looked as though he had more to tell her. ‘Let’s go and sit down,’ she said.

‘Beautiful house,’ Nick said, as he followed her into the room. ‘You were lucky to get it.’

‘I never thought of it that way,’ she said, crossing to the chair at her desk. ‘I assumed I got it because I’m disabled.’

Nick stopped in mid-stride. ‘Open mouth, insert foot,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You should see my bedside manner.’

Evi couldn’t help a tiny smile. He saw it the same second he realized what he’d said. ‘You see, I just can’t help myself,’ he went on. ‘I knew I should have gone into research.’

Evi indicated an easy chair close by. He sat, cradling his wine glass in both hands.

‘You could have told me on the phone about the partners,’ she said.

He raised the glass to his lips then put it softly down on a side table. ‘True,’ he said. ‘But I was curious enough to have a look at the records myself. And something occurred to me.’

Evi pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows.

‘A patient of ours who self-harmed would invariably be recommended a period of counselling,’ Nick told her. ‘They don’t all take up the offer, of course, and there’s a pretty high drop-out rate, but it’s rare for them to refuse the initial referral.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Evi. ‘Self-harm is often a cry for attention. Counselling provides that.’

Nick nodded his head at her. ‘If a student patient of ours self-harmed, we’d invariably refer them to you and your team,’ he said. ‘I rang round a few other GPs in the area, just to find out what their policy is. It’s the same. So, I think it fairly safe to assume that a student in the city who attempted suicide would be referred to you.’

‘We’ll have them on record,’ said Evi. ‘We’ll have the information I was looking for ourselves. Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘If your database will allow you to search according to reasons for initial referral, you can probably find them very quickly.’

He was right. When she had time, she’d be bloody annoyed with herself for not thinking of it first.

‘Give me a sec,’ she said, turning to face her screen and typing in the login name and password that would access the Counselling Services database. A few more seconds and she’d typed Episodes of Self-Harm into the search facility.

‘Here they are,’ she said, scanning through the entries. ‘Nine in the last five years. Seven of them women.’