Dead Silent

by Sharon Jones

  Was it an Angel doing all of this? Even if the murderer now had the book, he or she must have known Danny was an Apostle before. And why would someone try to set Dad up? Was that the point of all this? Were people getting hurt so Dad would get into trouble? What possible motivation could they have for that? Did someone want his job? Or maybe he’d upset someone. No. She was pretty sure the motive was revenge. The memory of that terrifying voice echoed through her mind.

  I am his avenging angel.

  She unscrewed the top off the bottle of water and took a long gulp. That wasn’t evidence! She had to stick with the facts, only the facts. Except, what if there was some truth in what Ria had said? What if Dad had been involved in a death and now someone was out for revenge?

  She unzipped her backpack and pulled out her laptop. After a couple of minutes of messing around on a registration page, Poppy was able to connect to the internet. The only possible crime that would provoke murder was another murder. And the only death she knew of connected to Dad and Cambridge was that of the Dean’s son. Bea had said it was suicide but she’d made it sound like she thought that someone was responsible. Plus, she hated the Apostles. Why?

  Poppy opened a new search page and typed in: LANCE SUICIDE CAMBRIDGE.

  She scrolled through the search results. There weren’t many – after all, Lance had died before the Internet had taken off – and most of them had nothing to do with the Dean’s son, but then she found one local newspaper report that just said that Lance Tillman had been found dead in a punt floating near Grantchester Meadows. He was believed to have taken a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. The police weren’t looking for anyone in connection with the death.

  The Dean had said that Lance had developed a crush on someone. Could that someone have been Dad? Ria had said… No! Everything Ria had said was crap. She’d been trying to goad her. In fact, Poppy was beginning to think that the girl had a guilty conscience.

  Danny had been Ria’s boyfriend, but she’d hardly been playing the grieving widow apart from that one time she’d lost it in the corridor. Maybe that was for show. In fact, she was never apart from Conal. It wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility that Ria and Conal were more than just friends, and if they were secretly seeing each other, maybe they wanted Danny out of the way?

  But then there was the Dean. What if she somehow blamed Dad for her son’s suicide? Chrissie had said that the Dean had it in for Dad. Why, if she wasn’t bearing a grudge?

  Poppy groaned. None of it made any sense.

  She had to go back to the crimes themselves. The way the murderer had killed his first victim had pointed her to the Apostles. But what about the second crime? Why the hell would someone gouge out a person’s eyes? That had to be significant.

  Poppy searched: EYE GOUGING.

  By the time she’d read an article about it, a whole new wave of nausea crashed over her. It seemed that the biggest issue with eye gouging happened on the rugby pitch, which confirmed everything she already thought about the guys on the school team. Very helpful – not. She needed to be more specific than that. What happened if she added Lucy’s name?

  As soon as she hit the return key, she knew she’d found what she was looking for. The first result was a Wikipedia entry about Saint Lucy. The accompanying image showed a painting of a young woman holding a golden bowl containing two eyes. It seemed that Saint Lucy was said to have had her eyes gouged out and was tortured before being killed for the crime of giving away her dowry to the poor and refusing to marry some guy who thought she had beautiful eyes. Her feast day was the 13th December. Christians really did pick the strangest things to celebrate.

  Poppy glanced down at her computer’s calendar. It was the 13th December today.

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ she muttered. The murderer seemed to have gone to a lot of trouble to point to St Lucy…but why?

  Poppy carried on reading, finding it harder and harder to concentrate. St Lucy appeared in Dante’s Inferno, and her feast day was often called the shortest day of the year, which was crap because the winter solstice was the 21st December. Having been brought up a good Pagan, Poppy had known that bit of useless information since she was five years old.

  She sighed, squeezed her eyes shut and massaged her aching forehead with her fingers. This was no good. She was no closer to knowing who the murderer was or what they wanted.

  Except, a little voice whispered, Dante was the subject of Dad’s PhD thesis.

  That just meant that there was no doubt about it – someone was trying to set him up. They knew him, they knew his interests and they were trying to make it look like he’d done these terrible things but, unfortunately for the killer, she knew her dad and she knew it wasn’t possible. He could never hurt anyone. Never. Not…purposefully.

  This was so messed up. All of it.

  She needed to text Michael and tell him she was OK. He was going to be so pissed off with her. She felt in her pocket for her phone. It was gone. Bugger! Then she remembered handing over her phone to Michael. No wonder she hadn’t had a million phone calls.

  She was about to close the laptop when she spotted there were new emails sitting in her inbox. She clicked on the email icon and froze.

  Subject: Want to play a game?

  From: TheAvengingAngel@cantab.net

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Michael took the stone steps two at a time. He’d given Poppy ten minutes before heading down to the women’s toilets to find that she wasn’t there. He should have known that she’d give him the slip after he’d gone behind her back to her parents. But what option had she left him with? She clearly wasn’t going to talk to him about what had happened in Ria’s room. For a minute in there, he’d thought she was having some kind of fit, and it wasn’t like he was worrying over nothing – she’d fallen unconscious!

  He ran down the path towards M staircase, nearly crashing into an elderly academic.

  ‘No running!’ the man growled, shaking his stick at Michael.

  ‘Sorry…sorry…’ he muttered, without stopping.

  He bolted up the steps, unlocked the door onto the corridor and headed for their set. The main door was open.

  ‘Poppy?’

  He strode across the empty study and pushed open the door to her room. She wasn’t there, but on closer inspection he couldn’t see her bag or her laptop.

  ‘Sodding hell, Poppy!’

  He stared around the room again. His gaze stalled on the bundle of red silk sitting on the bedside table. Tarot cards. If she’d just kept away from all that stuff… Anger rushed through him like a tidal wave, until his muscles were tight with the need to throw something. He grabbed the package and hurled it at the wall. The cards spilled out of the red silk and fluttered to the floor.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think where she would go. She’d taken her laptop. Had she gone looking for an open internet connection? The only way she’d get one of those was in a café. Which would be a great start if they weren’t in the land of the flaming coffee shop. He’d just have to do a tour of them all.

  He headed back out into the study. It was then he saw the note on the coffee table, simply addressed: Michael.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  You and I are going to play a little game.

  Tell anyone and we’ll see how

  nice your boyfriend looks with wings.

  Poppy stared at the screen. At any moment a message would pop up saying Just kidding! It didn’t.

  Shit!

  She closed the laptop, stuffed it back in her bag and made a race for the door. Straight into a guy carrying a tray-load of drinks. Cups smashed against the floor as the guy tried to jump back, away from the splashes of coffee and hot chocolate.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted, brushing at his now coffee-stained jacket.

  Automatically she crouched down to start cleaning up the mess. What was she doing? She didn’t have time for this! She had to go and find Michael before
the killer did. She shot back to her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she edged around him. ‘Really, I’m sorry.’

  She ran out of the door into an oncoming flurry of snow to the sound of the guy shouting for her to stop.

  The streets had almost emptied. Only students returning to their colleges and die-hard shoppers remained, bustling through the streets with their heads down, not looking where they were going.

  Poppy darted back up the street, the way she had come. When a double-decker bus rounded the corner and she almost stepped right into its path, she realised that she must have gone wrong somewhere. She spun around. Shops, a weird-shaped church – none of it was familiar.

  ‘Damn!’

  Poppy grabbed a passing student. The girl looked up in alarm.

  ‘I’m looking for Trinity.’

  The girl pointed to the left.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Poppy took off again, nearly impaling herself on some scaffolding. She pushed through a cluster of shoppers, ignoring the angry words shouted after her.

  By the time she reached the porter’s lodge she was breathing so hard she thought her lungs would explode. One of the old guys she’d spoken to before came around the counter, frowning.

  ‘Miss Sinclair, your dad’s looking for you. Are you all right? You look like you’ve run a marathon.’

  ‘Dad’s here?’ she gasped. Thank God!

  The porter frowned as he moved towards her. ‘Why don’t you come and sit down and I’ll give him a call.’

  Poppy edged back out of his reach. ‘What about my friend, Michael?’

  The porter shook his head. ‘I’ve not seen him, but I’ve not long come on duty.’

  ‘He was with the Dean.’

  ‘The Dean went out about twenty minutes ago.’

  With that she backed out of the lodge, ignoring the Porter’s protest, and sprinted into Great Court. Now that the big gates had been shut and only students were allowed through, the court was almost deserted. There were, however, three uniformed police standing at the corner by the entrance to Angel Court.

  She couldn’t afford to be noticed or stopped. Images of the French girl, her eyes pools of blood, sent a sickening shiver through Poppy. She couldn’t let that happen to Michael. Poppy quickened her step. She instinctively put her head down as she passed the police, feeling like some kind of criminal.

  As soon as she reached M staircase, she ran up the stairs and grabbed the keys out of her pocket. Her hand was shaking so much that she struggled to get the key into the lock.

  ‘Damn it!’ she swore, jiggling the key with frozen fingers. Finally, it turned.

  The door swung open and any breath left in her lungs was knocked clean out. She pitched to the side and had to cling to the doorpost to stop herself from tumbling back down the stairs.

  Six feet away, lying on the floor, was Conal. Both hands clutched his chest. He lay in a nest of large white feathers, like a pillow had exploded over him. Feathers had attached themselves to his hands and shirt, fixed there by the scarlet blood seeping through his fingers.

  She darted down the corridor, dumped her bag and fell on her knees beside him.

  A wet, gurgling noise was coming out of his mouth. He was still breathing, or trying to. His dark eyes turned to her.

  ‘It’s going to be OK.’ She squeezed his shoulder gently, not wanting to hurt him further.

  She had to call for an ambulance. Bugger! She had no phone. Maybe he did. She leaned over him and felt his pockets, but Conal had no phone either. She’d have to leave him, go and get help. There were police down in the courtyard.

  She looked into his eyes. ‘I’m just going to call an ambulance. Hold on, OK?’

  His lips were moving, but she couldn’t make out what he was trying to say.

  ‘I’ll be right back.’ She tried to push herself to her feet.

  ‘Nooo,’ he hissed. A hand wet with blood caught hold of her arm. He was mouthing something, but she didn’t understand. Shit! There wasn’t time. She had to get him help.

  ‘I can’t hear you, Conal.’

  His face crumpled with pain. He sucked in a rasping breath and tried again.

  The words came out as a husky whisper. ‘Too late.’ His shoulders jerked as he tried to cough. ‘St…st…sta—’

  ‘Stay? You want me to stay with you?’ Oh God! She couldn’t.

  His head tipped forward a little.

  ‘I need to get help. I’ll only be a minute. We need to need to get you to a hospital. You’re going to be OK.’

  His sticky red hand found hers and clung to her with surprising strength. And in the dark eyes that had intimidated her more than once she saw real fear. He was scared. Suddenly, she knew he was dying. It was in his eyes, the colour of his skin, his breathing. It was too late. She had to stay – she couldn’t leave him alone.

  ‘OK.’ She nodded. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here.’

  His shoulders dropped a little and the muscles in his face relaxed but his eyes remained on her, like she was his anchor in this world. But the chain connecting them was buckling and breaking. Soon it would snap.

  Her heart raced at the thought. She couldn’t do this. She had no idea what to say. Even if it was hopeless, shouldn’t she be doing some kind of first aid? She glanced down at his chest. Something had torn through his shirt, leaving tattered bloody edges. He’d been shot. Oh God! This couldn’t be happening. But it was. And she had to see it through.

  With her free hand she stroked the damp hair away from his forehead, brushing away the awful feathers that clung to his skin. When a single tear streaked down his cheek, pain slid into her heart. What was she supposed to do? If there were right words to say, she didn’t know them. There should have been someone else here – someone who knew how to comfort him…someone who really believed in something beyond this life who could tell him that death was a doorway into…something else…something better. Her nose started to run, and as tears clouded her vision she did the only thing she could think to do: she leaned down and kissed his forehead. When she pulled back his lips had lifted almost into a smile.

  She did her best to smile back at him. ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m here. You’re not alone.’

  His gaze remained fixed on hers but she wasn’t sure he saw her. He seemed to be looking through her to something else.

  She continued to stroke his hair until the hand holding hers fell slack, his face relaxed and the noise of his gurgled breathing gave way to silence. The strangest feeling of peace filled the corridor, blanketing out the blood and horror like a layer of freshly fallen snow. He was gone. The pain and fear were over. It was OK… He was OK now. Her mind cleared and the terrible ache in her chest subsided.

  She forced herself to lay Conal’s hand down by his side – to let go of him. She had to leave him now and go and find help.

  Then a terrible thought hit her, and her peace was shattered. What if Michael had been in their room when the killer came? She stumbled down the corridor and pushed open the door to their set. She almost collapsed with relief when she found the rooms empty. She should have asked Conal who’d shot him. How could she have been so stupid as not to ask that question?

  She ran back down the corridor and had to fight back the wave of hysterics that threatened to swallow her when her foot caught on Conal’s hand.

  She grabbed her bag, and tried to slow her breathing as she made it out of the door and onto the landing. Clutching the handrail she staggered down the stairs and out into the night air.

  ‘Help! Please! Somebody help!’

  Heavy footsteps beat the pavement. She swung around to see tall black shadows pelting towards her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ a policeman gasped before they even reached her.

  ‘There’s… Someone’s…’ She couldn’t bring herself to say dead. ‘Someone’s been hurt.’

  ‘Shit!’ one of them swore, before swerving past her and heading up the stairs, shouting into his r
adio.

  ‘Wait right there, somebody will be with you in few seconds,’ the other policeman said to her, before chasing after his colleague.

  Her brain was full of static. She couldn’t seem to pull one clear thought out of all the chaos except Michael.

  Someone had Michael.

  She couldn’t stand there waiting for the police. She needed to find Dad.

  She ran straight across the thickening snow covering the lawn, up the steps leading to the walkway through to Nevile’s Court. She looked back as she reached the door. Police swarmed out of every archway, all heading towards M staircase.

  She slipped through the door and jogged along the walkway, past the doors open to the servery, wafting food smells, and out the other side into Nevile’s Court. Her hands were sticky; she rubbed at them without thinking, looked down, saw Conal’s blood, dark smears on her palms. Her stomach lurched. No time to wash. She thrust her hands in her pockets, clenching sticky fists.

  What would she do if Dad wasn’t there? She couldn’t go back to the police. She’d just run from a crime scene. For God’s sake, she had blood on her hands! No: she couldn’t go to the police. And what if the killer was watching her? If the bastard saw her talking to the police, Michael could get hurt. He could die.

  Her legs turned to rubber as she jogged up the worn steps to Dad’s rooms. Before she reached the top step she saw the note pinned to his door bearing her name.

  She tore it down and unfolded the paper.

  The note read:

  Danny, Lucy, Conal…all Angels now.

  They gave their lives to keep the Apostles’ secret but they’re not the only ones. Others had their lives taken from them – innocents.

  Tell the world, Poppy, or your father will be the next to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Poppy hammered on the Master’s door and then stuffed her bloodstained hands into the pockets of her hoodie. She couldn’t stop shaking. If the Master wasn’t in she had no idea who else she could tap for information. Maybe one of the porters, but that would risk her being handed over to the police – she had, after all, run away from a crime scene.