by Lucy Carver
But Paige had stopped brushing and sighed.
‘Just a teeny bit par-a-noid?’ she suggested, and she winked to ease the tension. ‘Chill, my friend.’
Then hoodie boy burst out, carrying the knife in his left hand. He looked at me then at the angle of the security camera fixed high on the wall. He detoured to stay out of shot, meaning he at least thought it was working and he already knew enough about the security of the place to avoid being caught on camera. Then he grabbed the wheelie bin and shoved it straight at Paige’s horse, raised the knife to slash at his neck.
Up went Mistral, hoofs flailing. Hoodie boy backed off. He moved fast, yelled at me to stay out of his way as he panicked and fled directly under the lens, creating the perfect photo op.
Come on, come on! I told myself. Recall every last detail.
As Mistral squealed and came crashing down to the ground, the kid scaled the wall. He sat astride it and leaned out to sever the cable with his knife. He slashed it clean through. Then he swung both legs over the wall and jumped down. Gone.
‘Harry Embsay was definitely in on it,’ I told Jack as the rain spilt over the gutters on to the cobbles below. ‘He stayed away to give the kid with the hoodie time to do what he had to do. And, cross my heart, I swear I’m not paranoid.’
There was nowhere at St Jude’s more out of Hooper’s comfort zone than the stable yard on a cold and rainy winter’s day, not even the sports centre. Yet here he was, splashing through puddles without a jacket and looking like a drowned rat, as Jack and I got ready to leave.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, in a hurry to get to the hospital to see Paige.
‘Wait – it’s important,’ he insisted.
‘What?’ I asked, feeling the hairs at the back of my neck rise. How important did it have to be for Hooper to drag himself out here?
‘Before I start, I’m not making any of this up – OK?’
‘OK, we believe you,’ Jack said quickly. ‘Just tell us.’
‘I went back and did some more research on Eleanor Bond.’
‘Not this again, please!’ I was already shaking my head before he reached the end of his sentence.
‘Yes, this again.’ Hooper dug in his heels.
‘What about Eleanor Bond?’ asked Jack.
‘I started with the whole Bond family. The mother, Simone – she got caught up in the Nazi takeover of Vienna – remember I told you, Alyssa? That was for obvious reasons, because she was Jewish. So I started looking at Edward Bond, who, it turns out, wasn’t Jewish, but he had pro-Jewish business interests in Birmingham and all through Europe.’
Jack realized there was a lot of history to get through and like me he was eager to get out to see Paige. ‘Where are we going with this?’
‘Somewhere you’re not going to like,’ Hooper warned. ‘Listen. All through the 1930s there were marches in the streets of the main British cities – London, Manchester, Birmingham – it’s well documented. You’ve heard of Mosley’s Blackshirts and those extreme fascist groups? Yeah, right. They organized the marches, targeting communists and Jewish groups and it turns out they included Edward Bond in this target group because of his wife and his businesses, and because he was known to be offering a place of safety to Jewish refugees. He went public about the evils of Nazism – even wrote articles about it for some national newspapers. That caused an argument about him setting up St Jude’s in 1938 – nimby residents in Ainslee viewed Edward Bond as a troublemaker. They didn’t want the school anywhere near. They were right, in a way, because the Nazis tried to bomb St Jude’s during the war.’
I was tuning in now, listening more carefully, paying attention to those tiny hairs standing up on the back of my neck.
‘That was the atmosphere back then – people over here mostly didn’t see fascism for what it was until after Hitler went into Austria then Czechoslovakia then finally Poland. They didn’t diss his haircut or laugh at his moustache. He was building the VW Beetle – the people’s car – and they thought he might actually be a good guy.’
Jack’s attention was also fixed on the emerging story. ‘Come on, Hooper – what are you saying?’
‘OK, as we know – Edward Bond was an idealist. He went ahead and set up St Jude’s Academy anyway. He ignored all the political stuff and founded it on the principle of nihil sed optimus, focusing on the talents of the individual student, fostering brilliance. Then his wife was swallowed up in a Nazi pogrom in Vienna, which happened without warning, and in the same year his daughter – a pupil at this school – was found drowned.’
‘We already know this!’ I exclaimed. ‘So what’s new?’
‘OK, I moved on from Edward and Simone Bond to the daughter, but you have to take into account the political stuff I’ve just mentioned. Now, Eleanor – the first verdict was misadventure, but it turns out that wasn’t accurate. I shouldn’t have stopped investigating at the point where she died; I should have moved on into 1939 when someone – presumably Edward Bond – asked for Eleanor’s body to be exhumed for a second autopsy and the coroner agreed.’
‘Oh my God!’ I sighed. Of all the shit life throws at you, exhuming your daughter’s body is about as bad as it gets.
‘I know. Bond must have had a good reason – a suspicion, maybe some proof that they’d got the wrong verdict first time round. It turns out he was right. They eventually did a second autopsy and found that the body had been mutilated . . .’ Hooper paused then began again at top speed to clear up any doubt we might still have. ‘Yeah, it was a missing tooth. I swear this is true, Alyssa. It turns out it was a kind of signature – a tooth missing from a corpse had happened at least four times before in the Midlands and south-west – all in the mid to late 1930s.’
‘A signature?’ Jack prompted. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s where a serial killer leaves a kind of trademark to let the police know it’s the work of one man.’
‘Like Jack the Ripper?’
‘Exactly – only in this case, less obvious and messy. But it must have been totally premeditated, which makes it even creepier. And here it wasn’t one killer – it was a small group of right-wing fanatics, an offshoot of Mosley’s Blackshirts and the British Union of Fascists, who wanted to persecute prominent pro-Jewish political activists like Edward Bond. They would pick on a family member, someone vulnerable.’
‘Like Eleanor?’ I said.
‘And they would target that person and . . . and eliminate them.’
The word sent nasty shudders down my spine and I forced my attention down a different channel. We have to find out who took the tooth and why, Jayden had told me.
‘But that was then,’ Jack protested. ‘Not now. We’ve moved on – we’re living in the twenty-first century!’
‘And we still have problems in Israel and the Middle East, and our society still breeds fanatics.’ Hooper drew breath and waited for me to respond. Répond, Alyssa. Dis quelque chose.
Find out who took the tooth and why. This is where the personal becomes political.
‘Anna Earle is Jewish and Robert Earle’s Comco is planning a neo-Nazi exposé,’ I reminded the two Jacks quietly.
It was there, clear as day in Lily’s diary – the headline that read Comco Leads Campaign to Expose International Fascist Cells. There, you see – more proof that my memory hangs on to every tiny detail.
The personal becomes political and maybe Lily’s death isn’t just Jayden any more, or Harry, or a random guy killing her in a fit of rage or jealousy or fear. No – Lily is a small part of something enormous, a victim of forces none of us could even begin to get our information-stuffed heads around.
‘Hooper was born to do research,’ I decided as Jack and I rode in a taxi through Ainslee’s Christmas streets. ‘He should write a historical novel set in Nazi Germany. Isherwood’s Cabaret for the modern reader.’
‘He probably already has,’ Jack agreed.
‘So who would know the history of St Jude’s well en
ough to do a carbon copy of Eleanor Bond’s killing?’ I wondered. ‘Besides the principal and the bursar,’ I added. The school’s rocky pre-war start had been officially laid to rest and no way would Saint Sam and D’Arblay want it resurrected.
‘Yeah, they would know,’ Jack agreed.
Christmas lights twinkled, carols drifted out of shop doorways and manic shoppers hurried along the wet streets.
‘So why aren’t Sam and D’Arblay making the connection between Eleanor and Lily?’
‘Maybe they are,’ Jack said.
The taxi dropped us at the hospital gates where a couple of die-hard smokers stood in the rain, taking last drags at their cigarettes before they stepped into the no-smoking grounds.
THIS BUILDING WAS OPENED ON 5TH MAY 1986 BY HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II said the brass plaque at the main entrance. A door glided open and Jack and I stepped inside. We crossed Reception and followed the arrows to the ICU – up one floor in the lift, left past Swallow Ward and Nightingale Ward, down a long, empty antiseptic corridor, before reaching the outer door to the ICU. I pressed the buzzer. For a long time nothing happened, then we heard a click and the invitation to speak.
‘We’re friends of Paige Kelly,’ I said into the intercom.
There was another click and the locked door opened. We stepped inside. A nurse waited at the end of a short corridor. ‘Come this way,’ she said.
She led us into a small waiting area with out-of-date magazines spread carelessly across a low pine table, six red chairs backed against the wall and a coffee machine in one corner. Amateur watercolours on the wall had been donated by grateful patients.
‘When can we see Paige?’ I asked the nurse.
‘You’re from her school – right?’
‘I’m her roommate.’
‘Well, the doctors are with her right now.’
There’s a specific moment when extreme fear kicks in. It explodes like a bullet in your heart. This was that moment.
Doors opened and closed, medics rushed to save a life. I saw a nurse accompany Paige’s weeping parents out of the ICU.
‘Wait here,’ our nurse told us.
They couldn’t save her. Paige died at 9 p.m.
The hole in your heart gets bigger. You can’t feel, you can’t think.
At 9.30 our nurse took us down to the taxi rank. ‘You’re sure you’re both OK?’ she checked.
We nodded. Paige was dead, but we were OK. We took a taxi back to St Jude’s in silence. Neither of us could utter a single word about how we felt.
That night I tried not to think about the tubes and stents, the fragments of bone, the unstoppable bleeding inside her brain. Instead I tried to picture Paige riding Mistral across country, windswept under blue skies, clearing those fences by a mile.
In the morning when I turned on my bedside light, I noticed that Paige’s bed was still unmade.
I fixed it, carefully smoothing down sheets and plumping up pillows. Then I got dressed and went downstairs, looking for Jack. He was waiting for me in the quad.
‘I was thinking, now that this has happened, maybe you should go home,’ was the first thing he said. He looked like he hadn’t slept either. ‘Listen, Alyssa, what we . . . what you’ve been doing is too risky.’
He wanted to protect me because he loved me, he said. He wanted to wrap his arms round me and never let me go, but he was too scared for me to stay.
‘I know it,’ I told him gently.
But there was a gaping hole in my heart and no one, not even Jack, could persuade me to leave St Jude’s until it was knitted together by answers and solutions.
We went to the dining hall where Bryony Phillips came to sit with us while others stayed away, as if we were contagious and they might catch our grief. I noticed that Zara was with Luke at a nearby table and I was glad he had someone to help him through the day.
‘Any time either of you need to talk, you know where to find me,’ Bryony confided. ‘Forget the student-teacher relationship, I’m here for you both, any time, day or night.’
It helped a little.
When Bryony left, I joined Zara and Luke. Both had the blank expression that comes with the internal agony of grief. Zara didn’t say anything – she just took my hand and stared at me with her lovely, luminous blue-grey eyes brimming with tears. It was Luke who wanted to talk.
‘I thought she would make it,’ he mumbled. ‘I was sure she would.’
‘Me too.’ She was invincible, unstoppable Paige.
‘Why didn’t she?’
I shook my head, knowing now wasn’t the time for medical details.
‘She should have made it.’
‘I know.’
We lapsed into silence then Shirley Welford delivered a message from the principal – both Jack and I were excused from lessons and did I feel strong enough to see Dr Webb in his office at 9.30?
Twelve hours after Paige’s death, Saint Sam’s face was ashen. He looked like a man under siege, standing by his stained-glass window, hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his heels and clearing his throat. Inspector Cole sat calmly in a chair by the principal’s desk. I noticed that his suit jacket was crumpled and his shirt cuffs were grubby.
In its time the room had surely seen disaster and triumph and everything in between. Even before it became a school in 1938, it had absorbed four centuries of history, witnessed tragedy and acquired the patina of people breathing and loving, fighting and dying inside its oak-panelled walls. But this day was surely one of its worst.
‘Did you tell the inspector about Eleanor Bond?’ I didn’t hold back or wait to find out why I’d been summonsed – I just launched straight in.
Saint Sam almost staggered under the weight of the question. His smooth manner was nowhere to be seen.
‘I’m talking about the first girl to die here,’ I explained to Cole. ‘It’s weird how history repeats itself – Dr Webb should have discussed it with you.’
I wouldn’t have expected Saint Sam to be dumb enough to deny all knowledge, but he was. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Alyssa. Please sit down and explain.’ He pointed to an empty chair underneath a framed black-and-white photo of the first ever intake at St Jude’s Academy – fewer than thirty co-ed kids with pudding-basin haircuts, wearing gym slips or grey serge trousers and all in red-and-green striped blazers.
I pointed to the carefully posed picture. ‘Which one is Eleanor?’
Saint Sam apologized for me. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. Yesterday was extremely traumatic for Alyssa. I’m hoping that now she’ll take my advice and leave school early to give herself some time at home with her aunt.’
Not that old tactic! ‘Which one is she?’ I repeated stubbornly.
Again he ignored me. ‘Don’t expect rationality,’ he warned Cole. ‘She really is very upset.’
Inspector Cole took time to study his fingernails before he spoke to me. ‘What do you mean about history repeating itself?’
‘Eleanor Bond – 1938. Lily Earle – 2012. Google it.’
‘Why don’t you just tell me?’ Cole invited.
So I drew the parallels – two bodies in the lake: accidental death, suicide or murder? Two missing teeth, with four other identical mutilations back in the bad old, neo-Nazi 1930s. Two reactionary, right-wing, racist groups who collected molars and put them in a jar (OK, I made up the part about the jar).
‘I’m afraid this is nonsense,’ Saint Sam sighed. ‘In any case, I’m sure what happened over seventy years ago is of no relevance to your current investigation.’
Cole tilted his head to one side and picked at the dead skin surrounding his fingernails. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Go on, Alyssa.’
‘Lily’s mum is Jewish. It’s possible the Earles give money to support an Israeli cause – I don’t know for sure. But I do know that Comco is planning an exposé of neo-Nazi groups – which in my opinion is all the link you need.’
‘We can definitely check that out,’ the inspector agreed. ‘But I’m w
ondering why a fascist group, if it exists, would target Lily specifically.’
‘Quite,’ Saint Sam said with a complacent air, but once more he’d misjudged the situation.
‘Because they knew they could get at Robert Earle via his daughter, the same way the Blackshirt splinter group picked on Eleanor.’
‘And why take the extreme measure of killing her and mutilating the body?’ Cole wanted to know.
‘Again, because Earle’s threatened exposé is putting them under serious pressure. Plus, the killer is probably a lunatic, right-wing racist and he sees that no way will Robert Earle pull his journalists off the topic. And so it ran out of control,’ was my gut-instinct answer. ‘That’s how Lily ended up dead.’
I thought Saint Sam was going to rock so far back on his heels that he would crash straight through the leaded window. He was so thrown that he didn’t try to object when Inspector Cole asked for a few minutes alone with me.
‘Somewhere private,’ he emphasized.
Saint Sam suggested the old library and I led the way, aware of long-distance lenses trained on us from the gate and a new police presence in the shape of two patrol cars and four uniformed officers. Cole held the library door open for me as we went in.
‘What will you do?’ I wanted to know as we sat in the deep tweedy armchairs in the periodical section.
‘About what?’
‘About Dr Webb.’
‘What would you like me to do?’
‘Charge him with withholding important information. He must have known about Eleanor Bond – he knows the whole history of St Jude’s. It’s something he should have told you.’
‘Difficult to prove,’ Cole said. He watched me closely then morphed unexpectedly into a caring father figure. ‘Anyway, right now I’m more concerned about you, Alyssa.’
‘I’m fine,’ I muttered. My heart was still in tatters over Paige, but at least my brain was beginning to work again.