by Mel McGrath
She turns on her phone. There is a text from Honor that feels surprisingly welcome.
How are you?
She texts back OK but stops short of a suggestion to meet. The discovery of the letter broke something between them. In the first few days afterwards she looked for ways to approach Honor and tell her what she’d found and what she felt about it but she could never quite summon the courage. And so she said nothing but watched herself filling up like a boat overwhelmed in a storm, bailing so hard that she could no longer feel where she ended and the hurt began, wishing away the days until it was time to go back to Bristol and she could right herself and forget the discovery for a while. The scheme worked. Once she was back and fully engaged in her coursework, the letter lost some of its power and neither seemed so vital nor so urgent. The hurt crystallised and a little of it turned to anger, which made it more bearable somehow, but she hadn’t gone home at Christmas, afraid of blurting out something that might sink them both. As the months passed it became harder and harder to broach the topic. And so it floated through her inner world, like a great iceberg, a still, silent thing to be steered around and at all costs undisturbed.
Anxious now not to remain alone in the flat, she packs her laptop and a notebook in her daypack and makes her way to the bus stop outside the chippy and there waits for the bus to the campus. A woman lifts her tiny dog from the seat beside her and places it on her lap.
‘Are you a student?’ the woman says, smiling.
‘Yes,’ Nevis says.
‘At the old university?’
‘No, Avon.’
‘Wasn’t it one of yours who caused that ruckus on the bridge on Sunday? I heard they had to close the bridge to traffic for hours. You youngsters these days never think about anyone but yourselves.’
The little dog begins to growl. The woman does not speak to her again. A little further on the bus stops to change drivers and the whole journey takes longer than it would have done to walk.
Chapter 20
Cullen
The bleep of the internal phone jolts Cullen awake. Asleep on the job, not like him at all. All those disturbed nights dealing with Amanda and last night, when he did finally drop off, a series of frantic, scratchy dreams. When he looks up his eyes fall on the Victorian etching of his alma mater that he’d put up on the wall beside his desk. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind he hears his mother’s voice, all those years ago, as he left their tiny, rented flat, hot-eyed and miserable, to walk to the freshers’ orientation. Don’t wipe your nose on your shirt sleeve. A fifteen-year-old kid in a college built for adults. The memory makes his heart shrink a little. He comforts himself by imagining the feel of her fingers drawing through his hair. My darling little boy.
There comes a knock on the door.
‘One moment.’ He checks his watch, remembers the prearranged meeting and brings up Nevis Smith’s file on his screen. Strange, quiet thing, otherworldly almost, but intensely academic. The only dead cert for a first in mathematical biosciences in the year. A gifted mathematician but otherwise of interest only in so far as what she might or might not know about Satnam Mann.
He wonders if Nevis Smith has Satnam’s phone. Not that he’s overly worried about it. No more than a four out of ten, but you never know.
Cullen arranges his features into an expression of repose and calls, ‘Please do come in!’ The door slides open and the girl enters. She looks tired and strung out.
‘Take a seat. Can I get you a coffee?’
She comes over to the desk, sits down in the visitor’s chair, lays her rucksack on the floor by her feet as if offering it protection at the same time as Cullen rises to get the coffee. She does not smile and in the fragility of her composure he senses bewilderment and guesses that all this high emotion has been difficult for her to process or perhaps to understand. Keane has told him that Nevis’s mother has been in touch, worried about her daughter.
Placing a cup of coffee beside her he resumes his chair. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘Rather shaken up I should imagine.’
She bites her lip and with some reluctance says, ‘I’m fine. Like I told student welfare, I’m, you know…’ She tails off.
‘We are very concerned about Satnam’s welfare, obviously, but also about you,’ Cullen continues. ‘I’m sorry to put you through it again, but could you help me understand what happened that day? I’d like to understand for myself, to make sure we find the best way to support your studies. You are such a gifted student and I wouldn’t want this to set you off course.’ He waits until she has absorbed this, before going on, ‘Start from the beginning.’
‘I woke up at 8.36 a.m.’
He holds up a hand to stay her and offers up a reassuring smile. ‘Maybe not literally from the beginning. Perhaps from earlier that evening, say?’
‘Oh,’ she says, sounding surprised, ‘Well, OK then.’ She goes on to relate how she and Satnam had had an awkward conversation and Nevis had gone to the library only to return a few hours later and go straight to her room. At that point Satnam’s door was closed and there was no light on and Nevis assumed she was asleep. The phone call had come out of the blue.
‘If I hadn’t gone to the library…’
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ he says, then picking his way, adds, casually, ‘you say you had a difficult conversation?’
‘Yes, Satnam told me she wanted to leave Avon.’
Cullen’s pulse quickens. He blinks hard to try to steady himself. ‘Any idea why?’ he says, his voice hard and splintery.
She shakes her head and he hears himself breathe out heavily.
‘So no idea what might have precipitated this, then?’
‘Not really.’
He closes his eyes, drinking in the surge of freedom coursing through his body. Thank Christ, I’m in the clear. Nevis doesn’t know.
‘Good…’ he stops himself and rephrases, ‘I mean, naturally, you probably had other things on your mind.’
‘Yes.’
He observes her quietly for a moment or two as she sips her coffee.
‘And what’s on your mind now?’
She looks up, worried. ‘I’m scared it might happen again.’
He frowns. ‘Why would you think that?’
Nevis launches into a long explanation of suicide contagion most of which Cullen is already familiar with. He nods along and every so often interjects with, ‘I am aware,’ but the girl keeps on all the same. By the end Cullen is left wishing he’d never asked. The girl simply did not seem to realise that he no longer wanted to hear her rambling explanation. Absolutely no off button on her. Such an oddball.
‘We’re here to ensure the safety of all our students,’ he says blandly, smiling and doing his best to get her attention but he can see she has drifted off somewhere.
A few moments pass, then, suddenly looking up from her coffee, Nevis says, ‘I’m hoping to run some models. My aim is to determine the likelihood that another student might do something similar, based on the probability that the spread of suicide ideation – via various means of communication – increases as the number of suicides rises. I think I might be able to determine a threshold condition for a potential epidemic. Once I’ve got that, then the total probable size of an epidemic can be calculated. But it means I might be late with my coursework on deep vent modelling which is supposed to be handed in to Dr Ratner in…’ she checks her watch ‘…forty-five hours and twenty-seven minutes.’
‘Are you all right?’ Cullen asks, almost genuinely concerned.
She bites her lip again. Oh, now Cullen sees it. She is doing her best to keep herself together. He supposes that the maths helps somehow.
But first he needs to find out what else she knows.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To go back to Satnam, you have no ideas about what led up to this? What made her say she wanted to leave? Family problems? Workload? Boyfriend? Nothing on her phone?’ He hold
s his breath.
She shrugs. ‘She had a boyfriend, Luke, but she broke up with him months ago. Since then she’s just been focusing on her work. She goes to the library a lot. Except…’ She tails off. A bead of sweat rises up on Cullen’s forehead. He wipes it away.
‘Except what?’
‘I’m there 24.66 hours a week on average and I haven’t seen her there.’
‘I see.’ He doesn’t like the direction the conversation is taking. He wants Nevis to tell him what she knows without raising questions of her own. ‘As you might know, Satnam took a catch-up class with me last summer. I’ve been seeing her on and off since then to make sure she stays caught up. I can attest to her increased output. She’d been working hard.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Nevis looks unconvinced.
‘But if we had her phone?’ he goes on, with the most casual tone he can muster.
‘It’s passcode protected.’
‘Do you know where it is? There was a suggestion it had been lost.’
‘Oh.’ She compresses her lips and falls silent.
He changes tack again. ‘You’ve probably also heard that Satnam’s parents are saying what happened was an accident?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘And what do you think about that?’
‘Probability close to zero.’
‘You are aware, I suppose, that an amount of Ritalin was found in Satnam’s blood? A great deal of alcohol too.’
She nods.
‘From what I understand, a combination of that particular drug when taken with alcohol can lead to all kinds of mental confusion, hallucinations even. Satnam might have thought she was going somewhere quite different from the bridge.’
He watches her make a mental calculation and then the lines on her face appearing. ‘If it was an accident why would she have taken so many pills? And she doesn’t usually drink, or not much anyway.’
‘I don’t think you’ve quite understood,’ Cullen says, pressing the point. ‘The studies I’ve read show that delusions can come on very rapidly and at low levels. It’s the combination rather than the quantity that’s the important parameter here.’ He observes her face as she considers this, sees the mental effort tighten her jaw. ‘It’s perfectly possible that she washed down a couple of Ritalin with a vodka shot just to enhance her studies and the effects of combining meant she lost track of her consumption, so she just kept taking them. I think that’s what her parents meant when they said it was an accident.’
‘I don’t know,’ Nevis says, looking unconvinced.
‘Really? Because that seems the most plausible explanation to me,’ Cullen says. ‘We’ve had similar cases before.’ He picks up Nevis’s coffee cup and, sensing he’s got as much out of her as he can, and done a good job planting the idea – which would absolve her of the guilt she clearly feels – that the whole incident was an accident, offers her a closed smile to signal that the meeting is at an end.
‘Should I wash that up?’ she says.
‘That won’t be necessary.’ Tina will oblige. ‘You’ll let me know if you come across anything that might shed some more light? Probably best to go through me rather than student welfare.’ He cracks open his lips. ‘I’ll have a word with Dr Ratner about getting you a coursework extension. One of us will email.’
‘Which one?’ she says.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it’ll be me. I’ll email you.’
He waits until she has gone then closes his eyes and blows a sigh of relief. That went as well as it could. For now the ship is off the rocks. He’ll need to keep an eye on Nevis Smith in case the weather turns.
Chapter 21
Honor
When Honor next passes by the Helene, Alex, who is sitting in the cratch having a smoke, waves and shouts, ‘Everything OK?’
‘Lovely thank you!’ Damn, her hair is a bird’s nest and she’d been hoping Alex wouldn’t spot her. What a beautiful city Bristol is, but this determined rain… Does it never stop? Or not rain even, more like mist. It licks her hair into the most terrible frizz. She pushes it back, then immediately regrets the action, remembering that it was covering a hole in the shirt she’d bought from Oxfam which she hadn’t seen until she’d left Lea Keane’s office. And then there are those tweed trousers with the floral DMs. I look sad and a bit mad, she thinks, sighing. About right then.
Alex puts out his cigarette. ‘Fancy a coffee?’
Oh absolutely, Honor does, but she can’t, not now, not looking like this and not with all this on her mind.
‘Probably should be getting on,’ she says, ‘But another time would be lovely.’
‘Need anything for the work on the boat? As I expect you’ve discovered there’s not a lot on the Halcyon. Hobbyists, not serious boat people.’
‘Yes, yes, thank you.’ She keeps all her own tools out of sight of prying eyes on the boat and only puts them in the van to transport them to and from a job. She can’t bring herself to tell him that she hasn’t thought about the boat yet.
Alex is standing on deck with his hands on his hips. ‘I’ve got a load of stuff here you’re welcome to use if you want to take a quick look?’
He holds out a hand and to her surprise – because she is always so meticulous about no special treatment, has found over the years of working on boat engines that it’s the only way to be taken seriously in that world – she takes it and steps on board. He has a toolbox and supplies cupboard in the stern beside the pump.
‘So,’ he says, ‘anything useful?’
She casts an eye over the box. ‘I’m not sure. That rachet spanner? And some marine sandpaper. I won’t really know until I start.’
‘Well feel free to use whatever you want.’ He turns and gestures towards the saloon. ‘Now, how’s about that coffee after all?’
He moves into the saloon, pulls out a spare chair and invites her to sit beside the wood stove before turning his attention to the galley.
‘This interior is gorgeous,’ she says, admiring the gleaming wooden floorboards and the fitted shelves stuffed with books, the glorious old brass ship’s light beside the stove.
‘Thank you. It was a labour of love. Kept me sane after I was made redundant.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I realise I haven’t asked what your profession is, or was?’
‘Hack,’ he says, ‘if you can call that a profession. Worked on local newspapers in the Midlands mostly. These days I get by doing websites, that kind of thing. Not inspiring but pays the bills.’ He brings over a worn stove top espresso maker and two cups. ‘What about you? Bill told me almost nothing except that you’re a whizz with boats. You mentioned a research project?’
‘Yes, yes. I’m…’ She finds herself hesitating, put on the spot. Should she come clean? ‘I’m looking into a suicide, an attempted suicide.’
‘Any particular reason?’ he says, taken aback.
Ahead, in the near future, she can already see a thicket of lies and misunderstandings. Better to come clean now.
‘My daughter, Nevis…’
‘…named for the island or the mountain?’
‘The mountain. Her birth mother Zoe’s favourite place.’
‘Sooo…’ Alex says, sounding unsure of himself.
‘Zoe was a great friend of mine and when she died, nineteen years ago, I adopted Nevis.’
‘That must have been very difficult.’
‘It was an easy decision but other people made it difficult.’ She tells him how Zoe’s parents had sued for custody, though they had never visited Nevis or even asked after her, how they’d wanted Zoe to abort her. Finally she relates the events of Sunday evening. He listens attentively, rocking very slowly on his heels, as if he were a spinning wheel onto which she was feeding twine.
‘So the real reason I’m here is because I want to be close to my daughter while this is going on.’
‘I see,’ he says, then brightening, adds, ‘Look, if you want her to stay on the
boat with you, I’m sure…’
Honor shakes her head. ‘Thank you, but she wouldn’t come, not now. Something happened between us, I honestly have no idea what it was, but Nevis has been really distant with me since then.’
‘Oh God, teenagers,’ Alex says.
She smiles and allows the expression to fade slowly. ‘There’s something else too.’ She relates the meeting with Lea Keane. ‘I can’t get my head around why the university is trying to pretend what happened on Sunday was an accident.’
‘Aren’t they just being cautious? Especially if that’s what the parents are saying. I should imagine it’s all rather sensitive.’
‘Could be, but there was something evasive about the welfare woman I spoke to. As if she felt as uncomfortable about the situation as I did but wasn’t willing to say.’ She pats her thighs and, standing to leave, says, ‘Anyway, it might be nothing, but let’s say I’ve come across this kind of thing before. Just because it’s a hallowed educational institution, a university isn’t above covering up a crime to protect its reputation.’
‘Crime?’ He’s shocked, she can tell, but not disbelieving. Journalists must come across that kind of thing all the time. ‘Well, if I can do anything to help?’
‘You just did,’ she says.
He stands and follows her up the stairs onto the deck. ‘Come for supper later if you like. I make a none-too-shabby spag bol.’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘Seven then.’ He takes a step back and lowers his head under the cratch. ‘Oh, and Honor. From an old hack and at the risk of teaching you to suck eggs, best not broadcast your suspicions. Not yet anyway. Universities have deep pockets and lawyers. But it sounds like you already know that.’