Dead Scared

‘HE?’ SAID EVI. ‘We have a he?’

‘Just think about it,’ I said. ‘If your first theory was right, that there are websites out there where the dangerously disturbed make contact with the seriously depressed, and then goad them into self-harm just for the fun of it, what are the chances of nearly 70 per cent of them being very pretty women?’

‘Well, slim,’ admitted Evi. ‘You think these girls were targeted?’

‘Not slim,’ I said. ‘Verging on non-existent. What I’m struggling with is how far are they going? If the victim won’t jump, does she get pushed?’

‘Laura, slow down. CID investigated all these deaths,’ said Evi. ‘If there was any suggestion that they were anything other than suicides, surely they’d have found it.’

‘You’d hope so,’ I said, thinking about the second set of car tracks at the site of Nicole’s death.

‘Your senior officers,’ said Evi. ‘The ones who sent you here. Did they hint that we might not be looking at suicides?’

‘Not for a second,’ I said.

‘Nearly two hundred people saw Bryony set fire to herself,’ said Evi.

‘No, they saw her stagger into the hall in flames,’ I said.

Evi’s creamy face visibly paled. ‘Oh, good God. Laura, you can’t think …’

‘I don’t know what to think right now. But even if she did strike the match, she was high on some powerful hallucinogen.’

Evi went behind her desk, pulled open a drawer and took out a file. ‘You’re right. Extremely high levels of dimethyltryptamine in Bryony’s system,’ she said after a few moments of searching. ‘Her blood and urine were tested shortly after she was admitted. Standard procedure.’

‘I know very little about hallucinogenic drugs,’ I said. ‘Can they make you do things you wouldn’t normally?’ I’d done basic courses on the most common street drugs as part of my training, all police officers do, but since I’d never worked for the drug squad my knowledge of the different drugs available and their effects was pretty weak.

Evi was nodding her head. I only had half her attention. She was still reading through Bryony’s notes.

‘There’s nothing about recreational drug use in her counselling notes,’ she said. ‘We always ask whether students have any sort of drug history.’

‘The paraphernalia for smoking it were found in her bedroom,’ I said.

Evi looked up and blinked. ‘She smoked it?’

‘According to the CID report,’ I said. ‘It’s the usual way, from what I’ve read.’

‘I was never shown the CID report,’ said Evi, her eyes going back down again. ‘That’s worrying.’

‘What?’

‘Well, two things, the first being that this is a very high concentration to have come from inhalation. I’d expect this sort of level to be administered intravenously.’

‘CID found a smoking bowl and pipe, not a hypodermic,’ I said.

We both thought about that for a moment. I didn’t want to say the word ‘staging’, but it was right up there on the end of my tongue. Maybe someone had wanted to make it look as though Bryony had voluntarily taken drugs, only not quite got the detail right.

‘If there’d been a post-mortem, would that discrepancy have been picked up?’ I asked.

Evi nodded. ‘Almost certainly,’ she said.

‘What else?’ I asked. ‘You said two things were worrying you.’

‘Bryony was taking an SSRI,’ she said. ‘That’s an antidepressant, in the same class as Prozac. There’s no way Nick would have prescribed that if he’d known she was using hallucinogens. So she must have lied to him and been pretty convincing.’

Or he’d known exactly what he was doing.

‘Because …’ I said.

‘Hallucinogens react badly with certain antidepressants,’ she said. ‘Taken together they’ve been known to create a dissociative fugue state.’

‘Come again?’

She looked up at me. ‘A state of temporary amnesia,’ she said. ‘When the sufferer forgets completely who he or she is and goes wandering, sometimes lost and frightened, sometimes imagining they’re someone else entirely. It can last for hours, or weeks.’

‘Nicole Holt disappeared for several days before she died,’ I reminded her. ‘She turned up in quite a state, with no recollection of where she’d been or what she’d been doing.’

Evi looked at me. When Bryony had tried to kill herself, she’d been taking a combination of drugs that could have wiped out huge chunks of her memory. A few weeks later, another girl with a history of memory loss had taken her own life.

‘If there was DMT in Nicole’s bloodstream too, that can’t be coincidence,’ I said. ‘Her post-mortem was done this week, wasn’t it?’

Evi nodded at me. ‘Tuesday, I think,’ she said. ‘Nicole disappeared, you say?’

‘I need to get hold of that report,’ I said. ‘Can you access it?’

Evi shook her head. ‘She wasn’t my patient,’ she said. ‘If Nicole had been taking drugs, or if there were any excess levels of alcohol in her system, it’ll all come out at the inquest. Until then …’

I breathed out heavily. The normal course of events was for an inquest to be opened and then immediately adjourned. The full inquest could be six months away. ‘Do you know the local coroner?’ I asked.

Evi waved her head around in a completely non-committal way. ‘I’ve met him,’ she said. ‘At one of the college dinners. We talked for a while.’

‘What sort of age?’

She shrugged. ‘Late fifties.’

‘Married?’

‘Bachelor, I thought. What has this …’

‘Gay or straight?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘Oh, like you’d need to. Gay or straight?’

‘Straight,’ said Evi. ‘Quite flirtatious, if you must know.’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ I said. ‘We need to see him. Do you have his home phone number?’

Evi held up one hand. ‘Hang on a sec. You said a girl had disappeared. Did you say her name was Jessica?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, why?’

Instead of answering, she picked up her desk phone and dialled a number.

‘Hello,’ she said after a moment. ‘Could you try Jessica Calloway’s room for me?’

We waited. I was trying to remember what I’d seen on various websites the night before about the girl who was missing.

‘Hello, may I speak to Jessica, please?’ said Evi a second later. ‘This is Dr Oliver.’ The frown line on her forehead deepened. ‘I see,’ she went on after a moment. ‘And have you spoken to her family at all?’

She looked up at me. For the first time, I thought she looked scared. ‘OK, thank you,’ she said, before putting the phone down.

‘Jessica Calloway,’ she said to me. ‘I’ve been seeing her for a few months now. She has a history of depression and eating disorders. I saw her on Tuesday and was seriously concerned. I was starting to think about hospitalization. Now she hasn’t been seen since that evening. I need to go and talk to the people in her block, her tutor.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘You’re taking the local coroner out to lunch.’