Killing You Softly

by Lucy Carver

  The bodyguard started off in a hurry, but he slowed down when he saw us, his eyes still trained on Galina when she veered off across the road towards the churchyard. It was dark, remember, but the street lamps were on, casting pools of light on the snowy pavements.

  Something about the situation – beautiful girl running away from thickset man in suit and tie – kicked us into action. Even though the guy was employed by Galina’s dad, we felt we couldn’t stand by and let it happen.

  ‘Back off, buddy.’ Jack stood in Mikhail’s way as Galina’s minder tried to cross the road.

  Mikhail sidestepped Jack and followed Galina.

  I quickly followed her under the lych gate. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

  Marco meanwhile took direct action. He ran right at Mikhail’ intercepting him outside the churchyard and barring his way.

  ‘Galina, come back!’ I shouted.

  Either she didn’t hear me or she did and chose to ignore me. She went on running, stumbling and staggering up the path towards the church porch. I followed and found her sobbing, sitting on a stone bench, hiding her face in her hands.

  Out on the road, Marco took a swing at Mikhail who sidestepped again and blundered into Jack, the whole thing happening almost in slow motion in a pool of orange light.

  ‘Galina, look at me!’ I knelt beside her and eased her hands down. Then I gasped. There was a cut on her bottom lip and a trickle of blood down her chin. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘He did it,’ she sobbed. ‘Mikhail, he did this.’

  ‘In the cafe?’

  ‘No. Outside the village, on small road. I run away.’

  ‘And he came after you? OK, I get it. He caught up with you and tried to stop you – that’s his job. You stumbled, you got this cut, right?’

  Back on the street, Jack and Marco grappled with Mikhail. Eventually Jack wrestled him to the ground and Marco put a foot firmly on his chest.

  Galina shook her head. ‘Not an accident. He punches me.’ She touched the bleeding cut with trembling fingertips. ‘He tries to kidnap me.’

  ‘No, hang on, that can’t be right. What do you mean, he tried to kidnap you?’

  ‘I tell truth. I take walk in school grounds, by lake into woods and he follows me. He wants to snatch me and take me away.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Was this drama queen Galina hatching a plot to get rid of her bodyguards, or was it for real?

  ‘I am scared, but I escape. I run to village and hide in cafe.’

  ‘But he followed you?’ Whether or not he was a kidnapper after a big ransom from the Radkins, it was clear that punching his boss’s daughter in the mouth wasn’t part of Mikhail’s job description.

  ‘I am very’ very scared,’ she insisted. ‘I phone Papa and tell him what Mikhail has done – in cafe I have time to make call, but it is Salomea who answers. She doesn’t listen. She tells me I make up story. She goes off phone.’

  ‘But seriously – Mikhail did this on purpose?’ I checked as Jack and Marco rolled the bodyguard on to his stomach and pinned him down.

  Galina nodded. ‘What do I do?’ she whimpered. ‘Who will believe me?’

  ‘Me,’ I decided. ‘I believe you, Galina. Don’t worry, we’ll call the police.’

  ‘They arrested Mikhail.’ Once we got back to St Jude’s, I told the whole story to Hooper, Will, Luke and Connie.

  Marco had waited with Jack for the cops to get there. I’d asked for paramedics to check out Galina’s cut and they’d arrived at the same time as the police. The paramedics decided that the cut needed a couple of stitches and they drove Galina to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Ainslee. I went with her. We had to wait two hours in A and E and it was 8.30 p.m. by the time we got back to St Jude’s.

  ‘You know what this reminds me of,’ Connie decided as we sat around a table in the recreational area overlooking the vast sports hall. ‘It’s a gamekeeper-turned-poacher situation. The guy is hired to protect Galina and instead he tries to kidnap her.’

  ‘If we believe her story,’ Luke said, feet up on one of the coffee tables.

  Hooper agreed. ‘Remember, she hates the guy. Maybe she made this up to get rid of him.’

  ‘She wouldn’t exactly sock herself in the jaw,’ BWS pointed out. ‘She’s way too vain for that.’

  Touche!

  ‘So where is she now?’ Will wanted to know.

  ‘Asleep in our room. She was knackered, poor thing.’

  ‘And where’s Jack?’

  ‘With Marco in the head’s office. The police are taking statements.’

  ‘Saint Sam won’t like that,’ Will tutted. ‘A visit from the cops is the last thing he needs.’

  ‘You know him – he’ll play it down.’ I pictured Saint Sam’s reaction – cool, calm and beige, assuring the police that security at the school was excellent and if there was another attempt at kidnap and it took place within the school grounds evidence would be captured on CCTV.

  ‘Let’s hope he does play it down,’ Luke added. ‘Galina probably did make the whole thing up as an excuse to go to her dad and get him to take her out of school.’

  You can see how this was going – the girls tending to side with Galina, the guys not. Except for Jack, who said he’d picked up bad vibes from Mikhail when the cops arrested him (‘Like he wanted to mow me down with a repeat-action rifle the first chance he got.’). I wasn’t sure about Marco – I didn’t have a clear picture of whose version he believed.

  Anyway, it was late so we left the sports centre to head back to our rooms and the jury was out until tomorrow.

  I trudged through the snow back to the dorms with Will and we happened to run into lean and hungry Sergei outside the entrance to the quad. ‘Lean and hungry’ as in Shakespeare again. Cassius in Julius Caesar – ‘he thinks too much – such men are dangerous’. I’m full of these quotes and I know they might annoy the hell out of you, but they spring into my magpie mind and make the point way better than ever I could.

  So, lean and hungry Sergei talked on the phone and watched us go by. I caught two names amidst the torrent of Russian – ‘Galina’ and ‘Salomea’.

  ‘What’s that about?’ I wondered.

  ‘You really want to know?’ Will asked as we walked on across the quad, our footprints the first to spoil the virgin snow.

  I stopped in the middle of the lawn. ‘You speak Russian?’

  ‘Russian, Italian, French, a smattering of Mandarin.’

  ‘OK, my multilingual friend, what did Sergei say?’

  ‘He said things didn’t work out. He wasn’t happy.’

  ‘I could tell that from his tone of voice. Who was he talking to, do you know?’

  ‘Someone called Salomea.’

  ‘Really! What else?’

  ‘He said Galina had to go to the hospital but not to worry, they fixed her lip and now she was back at St Jude’s.’

  ‘You know that Salomea is Galina’s stepmother? Sergei definitely told her that things didn’t work out?’

  ‘Yeah, but what does that give us? He could have been talking about a plan to go to the movies, an appointment at the dentist’s – anything.’ Will carried on with the guy thing of backing off from the day’s drama and I gave up trying to involve him.

  I stared at him – at his guarded expression and the bruise fading from under his eye. ‘How did you get that bruise?’ I asked.

  ‘Hey, Alyssa,’ I hear him say again last Saturday afternoon. His hair is shorter, lighter. He looks in good shape.

  ‘Hey, did you hear about the Ainslee girl in the canal?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he drawls. Everyone in Ainslee had heard about that.

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says again.

  ‘Did she fall or was she pushed?’

  ‘They’re not sure yet. Why?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘Quit that, Sherlock, while you’re ahead. You worked things out for Lily but you should leav
e this one alone.’

  ‘It was in the gym. I was lifting weights, training for a half marathon at the end of March,’ Will told me. End of translation, end of conversation. Goodbye.

  For some reason he stayed in my mind and I replayed our short Saturday conversation all the way up to my room. Quit that, Sherlock, while you’re ahead. You worked things out for Lily, but you should leave this one alone.

  Galina’s bed was empty. The duvet was thrown back and a pillow with small spots of blood on it was tipped on to the floor.

  My stomach flipped – where the hell was she?

  Then I saw a scrawled note on my own neat bed.

  CAN’T SLEEP. AM IN CONNIE AND ZARA’S ROOM. DON’T WAIT UP - GALINA X

  OK, Alyssa – chill. Take off your top, hang it in the wardrobe, do normal stuff to keep yourself calm.

  I’d finished with my clothes and was checking to see whether or not Molly had got the guy in to fix the window when I came across another note, printed out in red ink on a sheet of A4, not scribbled in felt-tip pen like the one from Galina. It was on the windowsill where the robin had been, folded then slotted between two bottles of my roommate’s miracle moisturiser. This one was in verse and it was really weird.

  Who killed Cock Robin?

  ‘I,’ said the Sparrow,

  ‘With my bow and arrow,

  I killed Cock Robin.’

  I read the first verse of the old nursery rhyme then the first two lines of the handwritten message beneath.

  Come on, Alyssa - they said you were smart! Why so slow to pick up clues?

  My hand shook as I read the lines again, turned the paper over, saw that the back was blank, turned it over again and reread the verse. Then my freaky eidetic memory kicked in and I remembered exactly how the rhyme went on.

  Who saw him die?

  ‘I,’ said the Fly,

  ‘With my little eye,

  I saw him die.’

  There was a knock at the door and I jumped a mile, screwed up the paper and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.

  ‘I saw him die.’

  Jack poked his head round the door. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘I caught his blood.’

  ‘You’re not meant to be here!’ I cried. The screwed-up paper fell out as I ran to the door. ‘It’s after eight o’clock!’

  He kicked snow off his boots then pointed to the paper on the floor. ‘You dropped that.’

  I stooped to pick it up, but he was there first. Straightening it out, he laid it flat on my bedside table and read the rhyme out loud.

  ‘Stop!’ I pleaded.

  ‘Who’ll make the shroud? … Who’ll dig his grave?

  Jack came to the message underneath the verse. ‘Come on, Alyssa – they said you were smart! Why so slow …’

  ‘Stop!’ I said again. I knew there was more handwritten stuff – I just hadn’t had chance to read it.

  ‘Who’ll be the parson? … Who’ll be the clerk?’

  ‘Why so slow to pick up the clues?’ Jack read on. ‘Bad things are happening under your nose, Alyssa. It’s up to you to work them out, which I’m sure you can do if you’re as good as they say. Who the hell wrote this?’

  Who’ll carry the coffin?

  Who’ll bear the pall?

  ‘Don’t ask me. I just found the note here on the windowsill.’

  ‘The killer is in plain sight – right under your nose. Love and kisses … Why is this guy sending you love and kisses, Alyssa? What’s this about?’

  All the birds of the air

  Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing

  When they heard of the death

  Of poor Cock Robin.

  My head spun. It was hard to get a coherent sentence out as Jack thrust the paper towards me.

  ‘Whose killer?’ he demanded.

  My head spun, but in my heart I knew. ‘Scarlett Hartley’s, I answered. ‘I think the murderer left this note to challenge me. That’s what this is about.’

  ‘It takes a seriously sick mind,’ Connie decided.

  Jack and I had gone along the corridors of the boys’ and girls’ dorms and called a late-night meeting in the coffee bar overlooking the sports hall. People had thrown on some clothes and braved the snow to cross the quad and hear what Jack and I had to say.

  ‘Tell me again – what’s the link between Scarlett Hartley and Alyssa?’ Charlie asked. She sat down strategically between Marco and Zara, across from me, Hooper and Jack. Eugenie, Galina, Luke and Will were there too, along with the Black Widow.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Jack answered. ‘We know that Scarlett had perfect recall, a photographic memory – whatever you want to call it – the same as Alyssa. That’s the one link we’ve made so far.’

  In the thirty minutes since he’d read the verse and the message, I’d shared with Jack all the details of the past few days. He’d dragged them out of me, every last one.

  ‘We’re together on this,’ he’d promised me, holding me so tight I could hardly breathe. ‘You don’t have to do this alone.’

  Zara turned straight to Will. ‘OK, scholarship boy – you went to school with Scarlett before you reached the dizzying heights of St Jude’s. So is that true – did she have total recall?’

  Will looked as if he’d already been in bed when Jack had knocked at his door. His hair was messed up and he was wearing his sweater inside out.

  ‘Yeah,’ he acknowledged. ‘She came top in every exam she ever sat, right from the start of secondary school. We all hated her for it.’

  ‘Really?’ Charlie looked puzzled. ‘Jeez, I don’t get you Brits.’

  ‘I’ll explain some other time,’ Zara said. ‘The point is, somebody killed Scarlett and threw the body in the canal and it’s bringing up memories of what happened to Lily last term. And now bad things have started to happen to Alyssa and this sick person is setting up a challenge – catch me if you can, signing off with love and kisses.’

  ‘Kiss-catch,’ Eugenie murmured, shuddering and pulling her jacket tighter across her chest.

  Connie stuck to the practical. ‘You need to find out if the sick bastard did the same thing to Scarlett – taunting her and drawing her in with his psycho games to the point when she got too close to the truth, then he had to kill her.’

  My heart hammered against my ribs when she put it all out there, but I tried not to show the fear. ‘Let’s take this more slowly. It’s still possible that there’s no connection between what happened to Scarlett and the stuff that’s going on here. It could just be someone with a warped sense of humour.’

  ‘Yeah, funny,’ Hooper commented. He’d hung back from the main group, but was listening intently to every word that was said.

  ‘He won’t be laughing when I get my hands on him,’ Jack muttered.

  I loved it that he sprang to my defence, though that small, independent part of me said, No, let me do this, let me work it out for myself. ‘OK, so say it’s a pathetic joke by some loser with nothing better to do.’

  Connie and Charlie nodded.

  ‘Would that make it a student here at St Jude’s?’ Charlie asked. ‘Or is there someone out there who knows enough about you to hack into your Facebook account and leave dead birds and messages in your room?’

  ‘One message, dead bird – singular,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Someone here in the college,’ Connie decided, and she looked around the circle of faces in the room. ‘Girl or guy? Maybe even a teacher.’

  ‘We’re not getting any answers staring at each other,’ Luke told her. ‘It’s not going to be anyone in this room, is it?’

  ‘And say it’s not a joke.’ Zara broke the uneasy silence. ‘Say it’s serious.’

  ‘That’s why we wanted everyone to be here,’ Jack explained. ‘We all need to be looking out for Alyssa.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Zara and Eugenie agreed. Others nodded – all except Galina who sat quietly in a corner with a hand over her injured mouth.

  ‘We don’t want it to be lik
e last time, with Lily and Paige, when Alyssa dealt with it alone.’

  ‘Right.’ Luke threw a lot of force into one short word. I guess he still felt that he’d let Paige down by not being there for her, either before her so-called accident or after, when she was seriously ill in hospital.

  ‘Yeah, we know you better now,’ Zara conceded. ‘Last term you were new to the place. We weren’t sure where you fitted in.’

  ‘I’m still not certain,’ I admitted. ‘It’s hard to be the new girl at St Jude’s.’

  ‘Yes.’ Galina let her hand drop to her lap and we all saw the bright red scar, the stitches and swelling on her lip. ‘Very hard to be new girl.’

  Saying goodbye to Jack that night was hard too, and we would have stood longer in the quad where the snow was twenty centimetres deep, hugging and keeping each other warm and safe, if Shirley Welford, the member of staff who was on late duty that night, hadn’t walked by.

  ‘Further maths, private tuition, midday tomorrow,’ she reminded Jack, who quickly stepped away from me.

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he told Shirley.

  ‘We’ll be doing more work on Newton-Raphson’s use of iterative methods to solve equations.’

  It was clear that Jack’s straight-laced maths teacher was making a point and that she wasn’t going to leave the quad before I did.

  ‘Night, Jack,’ I murmured as I slipped away.

  Up in my room, I was glad that Galina was already asleep. I checked my phone and found two junk emails plus a text message from a number I didn’t recognize – no words, just a row of emoticon red hearts.

  Forget it – it’s a mistake, I told myself. But, as you know, that’s the problem with me – it’s a physical impossibility for me to forget – so I spent the whole night wondering who had sent the hearts and listening for more creaks in the corridor and more fingers scratching at the window. I lay with my eyes open, my ear attuned to every sound.

  And I was still wide awake when another message came though at 7.00 a.m.

  They arrested Alex, Jayden wrote. Meet me.

  When? Where? I texted back.

  Today at twelve, Ainslee, Lock-keeper’s Cottage.