The Long Dark Road

by P. R. Black

  ‘How did you get a hold of it?’

  ‘It was left in a filing cabinet. Adrienne’s not that stupid… but she is quite stupid.’ The tall girl grinned. ‘She’s great at giving the impression she’s in control, but in actual fact she’s all over the place, most of the time. She locked Stephanie’s handwritten notes and a printout of what she’d written inside her filing cabinet. She didn’t realise that there’s a universal key for it – so we had a look one day. It’s all in there. The printout makes it look like Stephanie had written her story on a machine in here, on the system.’

  ‘No sign of it, before you ask,’ Ivan said. ‘We checked. Whatever it was has been deleted. Right off the system. No sign of it anywhere. It was completely wiped.’

  ‘So Adrienne printed it off, and copied it over, and passed off the work as her own, then deleted it off the computer system?’ Georgia asked.

  ‘Yep. Bitch.’ Ivan relished the syllable and its closing digraph, as if it was something he needed to spit. ‘We couldn’t believe it.’

  Georgia pointed from one to the other of them. ‘And how did you go about finding this out?’

  Maria looked uncomfortable. ‘Well…’

  ‘We’re journalists, is the answer,’ Ivan said, unabashed. ‘And by that I mean, we’re nosy bastards.’

  ‘And we hate her,’ Maria said, nodding. ‘Right to the tip of her tail. She’s awful. You’ve got no idea…’

  ‘I mean, the other day – that concert. I’m the music editor, right? The music editor. That’s my title… I might even wear a badge. I could do, if I wanted to. Music editor. That’s me. And she not only gets on the guest list for the biggest concert the Orchard has seen in decades, but she bars me from it, as well as the after-party, and makes me get a ticket with the plebs? Can you believe it?’

  ‘That’s not even the worst thing she did,’ Maria said, head bent close to Ivan’s. ‘The other day the dean was coming to talk to her about something and she sent me out somewhere, to make sure I was…’

  ‘Can I just cut in a second?’ Georgia asked. ‘How did you get the files you’re talking about? How did you know about them?’

  ‘We found loads of things,’ Ivan said. ‘It was just a fishing trip, I guess. We knew she just threw things in there then made sure she locked it up afterwards. She was always double-checking if we were looking, when she did it.’

  ‘Which we were,’ Maria admitted.

  ‘This made us think that there was something locked up in there we should see. And to be fair… most of it was just a mess. Crap thrown in there, printouts, general rubbish. But there was some gold in there. We’re left alone in here to crack on with doing her job for her while she makes a nice little career for herself. So obviously we’re going to have a little nosy around.’

  ‘And do you still have this?’

  ‘I’ll email you some scans,’ Maria said. ‘You should have them. I have to say, it probably has nothing to do with what happened to your daughter. But she was ripped off, we can say that for a fact.’

  ‘Did you pass this onto the police?’

  ‘Well… yeah. Straight away.’ Ivan’s manner grew serious, and he sat up straight. ‘Could have been something worth knowing, for sure.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘February. She vanished for an entire week, left us to put the paper together…’

  ‘And what did the police say?’

  Maria scratched the back of her head. ‘The copper, his name was Neal something…’

  ‘Hurlford?’

  ‘That might have been it. He said he already knew all about it, but thanked us for getting in touch.’

  Georgia nodded. ‘Operational issues. Gotcha.’

  ‘We were going to pass it on to you,’ Ivan said. ‘I mean, morally, you know. The papers have gone missing recently, the bitch has moved them, but we’ve got scans and pictures of it. You have to know. You need to know… You should know that Adrienne’s building a case on the back of what your daughter did. I never met Stephanie; I started after the summer, but… Well, everyone knows about that case. I saw you come in that day. She was very quiet about it… Course, I put two and two together.’

  ‘Meaning I put two and two on the table for him, and Ivan came up with four,’ Maria said, not unkindly. ‘I knew about you and knew about the case. Adrienne was very nervous about you coming here, in the lead-up to it. No matter how she appeared on the day.’

  ‘Yeah. I think that’s Adrienne Connulty, all right.’

  ‘So,’ Ivan said, ‘now we’ve told you, we feel better. Don’t we?’

  There was a pause. Maria said: ‘I guess,’ but looked away from Georgia as she said it.

  ‘I’ll take a look at the scans. You’ve done the right thing.’ Georgia smiled, kindly. ‘Now there’s something I can do for you.’

  Maria and Ivan shared a look. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a story you might be interested in. An exclusive.’

  *

  Apart from the bar and coffee shop on the bottom floor, the building was lunch-hour quiet, that eerie calm a school building takes on once all the pupils have gone home. Georgia emerged into the sunlight. It wasn’t everything, but it was something. Something new to think about; something to go on; a missing piece of the whole, no matter how trivial it might turn out to be.

  Bitch, she thought, thinking of Adrienne Connulty’s open, America’s-sweetheart face. Bitch is right.

  Georgia had only briefly clicked on the scans, but one in particular had pierced her defences. Just a single line in Stephanie’s familiar hand, scrawled over the top of some photocopied transcripts of conversation with Jasmine. ‘Hope this is OK for you xxx’ To Adrienne, almost certainly. Georgia read the shy girl’s hopeful tone, and saw in it the little girl from long ago, inviting other little girls around for tea. ‘You do like the tea, don’t you?’ she’d asked. ‘It’s good tea, isn’t it?’

  Poor little mite, she thought, and choked back a sob.

  And then there was someone behind her – a shadow detaching from the wall outside, something camouflaged, breaking cover.

  Tony Sillars, his jaw tense, his eyes hard behind his pebble glasses.

  ‘What do you want?’ Georgia said, shocked out of her reverie, annoyed as much as alarmed.

  ‘I need to speak to you, somewhere private,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no one here, Tony, spit it out.’

  ‘Come with me a minute, please.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what it’s about.’

  Sillars sighed. ‘I want to confess,’ he said.

  27

  In the olden days they used to catch butterflies by the dozen. It wasn’t collecting so much as mass murder. These polite, precise Victorian men actually existed, outside of melodramas. They would catch them in nets, put them in jars, expose them to gases that might erupt from swamps on alien planets, and then, once the wings were stilled, pin them to a board. They saw nothing wrong with this. Even if the butterflies died by the hundred, in industrial quantities. Sometimes they’d even show them to their friends. You can still admire these transfixed flecks of colour at museums today. Their stilled life as a bequest, ownership passed on. And they would seem like the nicest, quietest men, these hunters. In other news, I wrote another poem on request.

  From the diary of Stephanie Healey

  Georgia didn’t want to accompany Sillars back to his office. Nor did he wish to sit with her in the coffee shop. So, Sillars took her into an empty lecture theatre, after a conversation with a confused security guard.

  Georgia remembered taking notes in here, with a spotlight diagram of the four lobes of the brain pinned to the back wall. It was a grand arena, with vertiginously high tiers. The desks had survived Georgia’s time till the present day, and were of course covered in graffiti. It was a place of browns and tallows, that would have perfectly suited gaslight.

  He sat in the front row; she took her
place in the row behind him, two seats away – far enough to avoid a lunge, and enough of a head start to make the exit, should it be necessary.

  ‘If you’re going to confess to something, I wouldn’t shout too loudly,’ she told him. ‘The sound carries a long way in here.’

  ‘I’m not confessing to a crime,’ Sillars said. In the gloom he looked less than assured. Something had gnawed at him since the last time they’d been together in the same room – but it was a difficult quality to pin down. As with DI Hurlford, he was fastidiously groomed, dressed tidily and his shoes still shone – but there was something off about him, an angle on his countenance that didn’t quite sit right. ‘I told you – I have nothing to do with Stephanie’s disappearance.’

  ‘Then what are you confessing to?’

  ‘We had a relationship that… crossed the line.’ He swallowed. ‘We didn’t sleep together. But I kissed her once, after a cheese and wine event.’

  ‘These cheese and wine parties. It’s like the court of Caligula. The things that go on, eh?’

  ‘It was unplanned. Not something I wanted to happen. Not something that I’m proud of.’

  ‘Your next line is “It just happened,” isn’t it? “It just happened, it’s just one of those things.”’

  ‘That’s as far as it went. We shared a kiss. And it’s not something I made a habit of. I’m…’ He tinged a fingernail off the gold band on his finger.

  ‘Not something you made a habit of. Just the once or twice, eh? Three times? A handful, let’s say.’

  ‘Aside from the petty morality, you have to appreciate we’re all adults. I did not sleep with Stephanie. We had a situation that was… close. Too close. I appreciated that and I shut it down. You might have heard something else. You might have heard that she shut me out, or rejected me for someone else. Maybe even that I was the instigator, that I had come after her. I promise you it isn’t true.’

  ‘And the police know all this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And the faculty? You have regulations, don’t you? You might not have broken the law, but you broke the rules.’

  ‘As I’ve said before – there was no finding of impropriety.’

  ‘Except there was impropriety. That’s your confession, is it? Well, you’ve confessed to something I already know.’

  ‘Partly. I also want to confess to something else. Intimacy. In a word.’

  He reached into his jacket and brought out lined sheets of paper, torn from a refill pad. Georgia recognised the writing immediately; and also the drawings. Stallions in flight, manes flying away in the wind. Dragons, of course. A naughty pixie, floating above the lettering with a coquettish hand clamped to her mouth.

  ‘Love letters?’

  ‘No – poetry. We wrote poems to each other. Our relationship was… close, too close. I accept that, in person. I apologise for it. But it wasn’t quite on a physical level. It was closer than that. Cerebral. We enjoyed writing. We wrote poetry – she wrote poetry to me, and I responded. I don’t know whether it was a game for her. I don’t know whether she appreciated we couldn’t be together in the way she wanted… The way we both wanted. But she wanted the closeness. She wanted to talk about it. This is… awkward. But it’s true.’

  ‘So, it was a platonic relationship? Apart from the kiss?’

  ‘You can laugh about it, you can be suspicious of it, and you can hate me for it. But that’s it. That’s the truth. That’s my confession. That’s how close we were. And how close we weren’t.’

  Some of the lines on the pages ran faint; and the punch-holes were filled. ‘These are photocopies?’

  ‘The police have the originals,’ he said. ‘I think you should have them. But I wanted to speak to you, and explain. You mentioned something to me the other day, something about truth. It struck a chord. I’ve made mistakes, but I’m not dishonest.’

  Georgia’s breath caught when she saw something drawn in the margins of one of the verses: A kingfisher, beautifully detailed, standing proud, with a stickleback dangling from its beak. “We will dive,” one of the verses alongside it began. “We will go deep in the river, and find our promised land.”

  Drivel, she thought, slamming the sheaf of paper shut.

  ‘Thank you for passing these on to me,’ she said, bitterly. ‘Something else to make me cry. Something else to steal my sleep, and my appetite. It’s one of these things that will kill me. Letters. Text messages. Emails. Fucking footnotes. Marginalia. It’s a bullet with my name on it.’ She wanted to dash the pages into his face.

  ‘It’s all I can do,’ Sillars said. ‘If I could take it all away from you, I would.’

  ‘You can’t do that. But there is something more you can do. More than you’re telling me. You can tell me more about the fight and the love triangle… Or was it a square? I’m losing my bearings, in fact. There are a lot of points to plot in that one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, first of all, there’s you. And there’s Stephanie. So, you binned Stephanie off – against her wishes, you say. But she wrote special poems to you. Off the record, right?’

  ‘That’s fair enough,’ he said, warily.

  ‘Then there’s Martin Duke. He adored Stephanie. She didn’t adore him. Although they did have a fling of some kind. That isn’t how he portrayed their relationship. It’s a sore point for him.’

  ‘That’s also my understanding.’

  ‘Then enter the rock star, Riley Brightman. Steamrollering them all. The caliph.’

  This amused Sillars. ‘Granted, he had his choice of the girls.’

  ‘And his choice was Adrienne Connulty.’

  His eyebrows knotted. ‘Connulty? You sure about that?’

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t miss an opportunity, that girl. She sees what way the wind’s blowing. She takes advantage and she takes control. That’s who she is. Is this a surprise to you? For all I heard, they were quite open about their relationship. It wouldn’t surprise me if it continued today. Casual or otherwise.’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose that wouldn’t totally surprise me, either.’

  ‘Except it did surprise you – right then, when I mentioned it. So, were you sleeping with her too?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Angry, now. ‘I might be a dreamer and I might be too open with people, but I’m not completely stupid. I can spot a wrong ’un. It wasn’t for lack of effort on her part, I can say that for a fact.’

  Georgia smiled. ‘You know, this might be the first time you’ve told me something I completely believe.’

  ‘That’s entirely up to you. Yes, it was a mess. Yes, it was a soap opera. Between that lot and Colette Browning…’

  ‘That’s the girl who’s with Martin Duke, now?’

  ‘Yes… Dark hair, black clothes. Quite fragile-looking. Pretty, I guess. You’ve met her?’

  ‘Once or twice. She was involved, in all that?’

  ‘Well, yeah. She adored Martin Duke. It was clear from the very first. It gets embarrassing, sometimes. You see these things happen year after year. It’s like a migration pattern. They’re in an adult world and doing adult things, but a lot of these kids are, well… kids. They’re still teenagers, in a teenage world. Colette was very young, very naïve. She told Martin Duke that Riley had been sleeping with Stephanie. I don’t even know if it was true. She wanted to drive a wedge between Martin and Stephanie. Split them up.’

  ‘And how did you come by this information?’

  ‘Just gossip you pick up.’

  ‘Gossip, from who?’

  ‘Who do you think? Connulty.’

  Georgia nodded. She indulged that feeling of things coming together. Of the pieces beginning to knit. ‘Colette engineered the brawl between Martin Duke and Riley Brightman? As a way of diverting Martin’s attention from Stephanie?’

  ‘That’s the conclusion I arrived at.’

  ‘And did you find this gossip titillating?’

  ‘Stop being ridiculous.’


  ‘Did you tell Adrienne that it didn’t concern you, that you didn’t want anything to do with it?’

  ‘Yes – almost exactly in those terms.’

  ‘And you didn’t like being so intimate with your students when the consequences of all the friction and jealousy blew up in your face? Curious, that.’

  ‘I’ve come here to tell you the truth – and I am telling you the truth.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me a little bit more about the Hephaestians?’

  ‘I’m sure we went through this the last time. It’s a writer’s circle – totally informal, open to anyone on any faculty. You just have to be a student at Ferngate to take part.’

  ‘If I wanted to know who was part of the Hephaestians, then you could tell me?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s legal, or within the rules… Data protection, and all that.’

  ‘You just said it was entirely informal. And I refuse to believe you don’t know who attended. You’re pretty diligent when it comes to keeping hold of the material they produced. Like Stephanie’s poems, for example. And the police must have made you go through the members’ list, after all.’

  ‘That’s true. I can get a list to you. But I can tell you the hard core – Riley Brightman, Scott Trickett, Adrienne Connulty, Colette Browning, and Stephanie, of course.’

  ‘No other people attended? Just those five?’

  ‘There were others who put their name forward, but from that year group, they’re the only people who submitted, and they’re the people who attended the cheese and wine evenings and pub nights.’

  Georgia sighed. ‘I want to ask you one favour. Get me a list of people who put their names forward, too. Outside the hard core, as you phrased it.’

  ‘I can do that for you. I don’t know what it is you’re aiming for, though. If you get caught doing something you shouldn’t, like harassing people, then I’ll deny ever having spoken to you.’

  ‘We’ll meet up again. You can give me a sheet with the names on them. Or you can whisper them in my ear, if you want to go the cloak and dagger route.’

  Sillars thought for a moment, then nodded briefly. ‘I can do that for you. I owe you that much.’