Killing You Softly

by Lucy Carver

  ‘And they see him,’ I reminded her. ‘They pay him loads of attention. Anyway, Charlie is officially his girlfriend now – why doesn’t he send her hearts?’

  ‘Maybe he does.’

  ‘OK, maybe. But if Marco is serious, what do I do next?’

  To Galina the answer was obvious. ‘If you want to be with Jack, ignore them,’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘Easy then. Let Charlie have Marco.’

  ‘But do I mention any of this to Jack?’ I wanted to know.

  She shook her head and tutted, sighed and said definitely no – don’t tell Jack.

  ‘OK, thanks, Galina. Will you come back with me to the sports centre? We could watch the football match together.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ she cried. ‘I have more things to do, better things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I meet someone,’ she said, tilting her head to one side and giving a small, coy smile. ‘Someone special.’

  ‘Give me a clue. Is it someone I know?’

  ‘Of course,’ she answered, still smiling.

  ‘Who is it? Come on, tell me. We’re friends, remember.’

  ‘It is secret,’ she whispered. ‘I get ready. I meet him. Later I tell you who.’

  Cool – she must be feeling better, I thought. ‘So be good,’ I told her as I walked out. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  You know my fondness for agony-aunt columns, so here’s one to contemplate:

  Dear Problem Page Pamela. I am in a long term relationship and I love my boyfriend very much. But I also have an admirer who sends me secret messages … [OK, delete ‘sends me secret messages’, insert ‘sent me a secret message’ – best to be completely accurate] Do I let my admirer know that I received the message and that I’m not interested in him? In the interests of honesty and openness, do I tell my boyfriend what’s happening? Or do I ignore the whole thing and hope that my admirer loses interest? Please help.

  Pathetic, huh? Of course, I would follow Galina’s advice about keeping quiet and I’d never write a letter like that. It was just in my head as I rushed back to the sports hall to meet up with Jack.

  By the time I got there, I’d made my decision.

  ‘Hi – did you win?’ I asked my showered and shiny-clean boyfriend.

  ‘A draw – three-three. Where were you? I thought you were going to watch the match.’

  ‘Coffee?’ I suggested, steering him out of the way of Will, Luke and Marco. ‘I watched the start then something came up.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Will pause by the sports-centre exit and delve into his rucksack. Luke and Marco said something to him then walked on. Will tipped all his belonging out of the bag on to the floor.

  ‘Nothing bad?’ Jack asked me.

  ‘No, I had to dash over to my room and check something with Galina – that’s all.’

  ‘Cool,’ Jack said as he put coins into the coffee machine and it started to hiss and spit cappuccino froth into a paper cup. He smiled at me – oh, that smile! ‘We were rubbish,’ he told me. ‘Will played like an idiot and Marco never passed the ball, just tried to do it all himself. OK, he looks the part, but he’s not a team player.’

  ‘Quelle surprise!’

  ‘Yeah – really!’

  The smile lingered on his lips, the lips that I always want to kiss. ‘Coffee to go?’ I suggested as the machine filled the second cup. I offered Jack two plastic lids and led the way downstairs.

  ‘Why? Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Your room?’ I suggested. Jack was one of the lucky ones – he had a single room at the end of the boys’ dorm, his own personal space, and we had two whole hours before the eight o’clock curfew. ‘And let’s skip dinner.’

  The smile turned into a grin as he slid his arm round my waist.

  We passed Will at the exit, still unzipping pockets and searching in his bag. ‘Hey, Jack, do you have a minute?’

  ‘No, actually.’

  ‘Just call my number,’ Will muttered.

  ‘Sorry – aren’t you the guy who punched me in the stomach?’ Jack reminded him. ‘Why would I suddenly want to call your number?’

  ‘I lost my phone – that’s why. Just do it, will you?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘Sorry – out of battery.’

  We walked on hand in hand, leaving Will in a major strop until I acted like I’d remembered something and retraced my steps. ‘Oh, Will,’ I said. ‘Hooper was looking for you earlier.’

  ‘Piss off, Alyssa.’ Will stuffed everything back into his bag – football kit, shower gel, deodorant, towel.

  ‘Please yourself,’ I told him. ‘Hooper said it was important. Oh yeah, silly me – now I remember. Actually, he found your phone.’

  Jack’s room is just a place to dump his stuff. There are jeans and socks on the floor, a tangle of cables and adaptors trailing from his desk connecting to his TV and iPad, or waiting to recharge his phone. You have to fight your way through all this to get to the bed. The only object he’s chosen to display is there on his windowsill – a white ceramic head with areas of the brain mapped out – ‘Intuitive, reasoning, selfish propensities, reflective facules,’ etc. Yes, ‘facules’.

  Before Freud and Jung, they used to measure the bumps on your skull to work out your personality type – thanks to L. N. Fowler of Ludgate Circus, London. He wrote, ‘For thirty years I have studied Crania and living heads from all parts of the world and have found in every instance there is a perfect correspondence between the conformation of the healthy skull of an individual and his known characteristics.’

  If you had a big bump in your cranium just behind your left ear it meant you were brave, a big bump below and to the right meant you were a sex addict – my twenty-first-century terminology, not Mr Fowler’s.

  It’s a joke now, when you think about it, but Jack liked his ceramic head enough to put it on his windowsill.

  Anyway, we stepped through the chaos and sank on to the bed under the eyeless socket of Fowler’s head and I knew I was in the best possible place to escape from the so-called real world – here, in Jack’s arms. We held each other for a while and let the world melt away, getting physically close and allowing me to forget the taunting messages, the creepy feeling that someone was breaking into my room and watching my every move.

  Have I said recently that Jack’s smile lights up the room? I guess so. But I haven’t mentioned his abs or his sculpted torso or those perfect tennis-player’s quad muscles just above the knee. Well, I admired them all again as he stroked my cheek, cupped my chin between his hands and softly kissed my lips.

  But when the kissing stopped Jack lay on his back, arms behind his head, looking thoughtful.

  I turned on to my side. ‘So?’ I asked.

  ‘So?’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  Now here’s a rule I’ve learned since then and it deserves upper case initial letters – Never Ask a Guy What He’s Thinking. It’ll end badly, believe me.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, without giving me eye contact.

  ‘Yes – you’ve got something on your mind.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. Forget it.’

  ‘Have I done something wrong?’

  Retrospective rule number two – Never Invite Blame. It’ll end even worse.

  ‘Honestly, Alyssa, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  I guess I fell into a small panic at the idea that Jack was hiding a problem from me so I went on digging the hole. ‘Something I said?’ I asked.

  Jack sat up and propped a pillow behind his back. ‘No – if you really want to know, it’s something Hooper told me after the match.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said you found out who texted the hearts message.’

  Thanks for nothing, Hooper! ‘It was Marco,’ I muttered. ‘I recognized his number on Will’s phone.’

  ‘Yeah – Hooper said,’ Jack interrupted. ‘So when did you plan on telling me?’ />
  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s not important.’ I tried to sound calm, but inside I was flailing in deep water, far from shore like a woman who can’t swim. ‘Not waving but drowning’ – as Stevie Smith once wrote. She was a poet-contemporary of my own lion aunt, Lady Caroline Stephens, code breaker at Bletchley during the Second World War. Stevie admitted in the poem that she was too far out all her life, not waving but drowning.

  ‘Not important when Marco Conti sends you a loved-up text?’ Jack countered.

  ‘OK, then – it matters. But I didn’t tell you because I thought it would upset you. And I was right – it has.’ By this time I was swinging my legs over the side of the bed, struggling into my clothes.

  Jack did the same. ‘I wouldn’t have kept it secret if it was the other way round – I’d have come clean,’ he insisted.

  ‘Why are we fighting over this?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Because you asked me what I was thinking and I told you.’

  ‘And you should be pleased, not angry.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’

  ‘Because now we don’t have to worry about the red hearts being one of the clues, part of the trail set by the killer,’ I explained. ‘It’s just Marco being stupid. Now, can we stop arguing?’

  ‘Yes, if you swear here and now that you didn’t do anything to encourage Conti to send that text.’

  In Stevie Smith metaphorical terms I was back on dry land, striding out of the water and, hands on hips, standing up for myself. ‘Jack, wait – did I just hear that properly? You’re suggesting that I led Marco on?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he answered sullenly.

  ‘You implied it. I can’t believe it would even enter your head.’ I was standing up and fighting back, ready to walk away. ‘Let me spell it out – Marco sent a stupid message. I deleted it.’

  Picture it – my bare feet shoved into Uggs, jacket zipped, door slammed behind me. End of episode where Alyssa loses it with Jack and immediately regrets it.

  By the time I’d crossed the quad with its shitty little heaps of dirty, melting snow and climbed the stairs to my room I felt hollow, as if all my insides had been gouged out of my body. I ran down the long corridor, past Zara and Connie’s open door, ignoring Eugenie as she came out of her room and flinging open the door to Room twenty-seven.

  Jack and I had argued over nothing – I needed to bury my head under my pillow and not talk to anyone until my innards were back in place and I was calm again, which might be several days, the way I was feeling right then.

  Eugenie must have realized something was wrong because she followed me into the room. ‘Alyssa, are you OK?’

  ‘No!’ I groaned, curled up on my bed in foetal position.

  ‘Don’t tell me – you and Jack are over.’

  I sat right back up in shock. ‘No. What makes you think that?’

  ‘I saw your face – you looked tragic. That can only mean you two had a terminal fight.’

  ‘Not terminal,’ I protested weakly.

  ‘But a fight?’

  Nodding, I made the effort to clear the mess on Galina’s empty bed and create room for Eugenie to sit down. ‘Jack’s jealous of Marco.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Eugenie gasped. ‘What about Marco and Charlie? Aren’t they an item?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Anyway, Jack sees Marco as a threat.’

  ‘As any guy would,’ she acknowledged. ‘But don’t worry – it’s good that Jack’s jealous.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel good.’

  ‘Not right now, I agree. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work it out – jealousy basically means that he cares.’

  ‘OK, keep talking.’

  ‘If he didn’t care about you, he wouldn’t mind who you spent time with or who you got text messages from.’

  ‘How come you know about the text – yeah, don’t tell me – Hooper.’

  ‘Hooper,’ she echoed. ‘And, aside from all that, you should be flattered.’

  ‘That Marco sends me a message?’

  Raising her mass of wavy red hair from the nape of her neck, Eugenie elaborated. ‘That he chooses you over Charlie. She throws herself at him and he ignores her. It’s you he’s interested in, Alyssa.’

  ‘And I don’t care. Charlie can have him – I’ve got Jack.’ That’s what it boiled down to, however simplistic it sounds.

  ‘Cool.’ Eugenie felt we’d cut through the crap and got where she wanted me to be. ‘Anyway, I was looking for Galina. Do you happen to know where she is?’

  I shook my head. ‘She said she was going out to meet someone.’

  ‘I called her to talk about buying one of her handbags at mates’ rates but she’s not answering.’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t help.’

  Eugenie took out her phone. ‘Look, there’s a picture of it here on the website – the little clutch purse in nude patent leather. Do you like it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s cute.’ Noticing that Galina had ditched her own phone on her pillow, I picked it up and saw missed calls from Eugenie. ‘That’s why she’s not answering,’ I pointed out. My mind was still snarled up in the traffic jam of thoughts and feelings following on from my fight with Jack, so I wasn’t paying much attention.

  ‘Who ever goes anywhere without their phone?’ Eugenie was suddenly concerned.

  ‘You’re right.’ Now I was alert, checking Galina’s phone and noticing that the battery was low. Automatically I looked around for the cable to recharge it, but had no luck.

  ‘Does she often go AWOL?’ Eugenie wanted to know. ‘I mean, it’s past ten o’clock, it’s the middle of winter and it’s blowing a gale outside. I’ve looked everywhere.’

  Something else was missing and it only occurred to me at this point. ‘And where are Sergei and Mikhail? Were they at dinner? Did you see them hanging around?’

  Eugenie shook her head. ‘But then Galina wasn’t at dinner either, otherwise I would have mentioned the bag face to face.’

  I saw that the phone battery was down to ten per cent and kept on looking for the cable. Then Eugenie took it from me and listened in to Galina’s voicemails to see if they told us where she was and who she’d met. Her eyes widened and her face changed from puzzled to shocked. ‘Quick, Alyssa – someone just asked for you on Galina’s phone. It sounds like the start of a message.’

  I snatched the phone back in time to hear a man’s voice. ‘Hey, honey,’ it said in an American accent that I straight away knew was fake. ‘I missed you – where have you been? OK, I understand – you were making out with Jack and didn’t want any interruptions. Listen – I know you’re not expecting to hear from me on Galina’s phone, but I do love to surprise you and I knew you’d pick this up sooner or later.’

  A guy’s voice with a fake Texan drawl, using an app which slowed it down and distorted it. I felt my skin begin to prickle. ‘Are you still there, Alyssa? Yeah, it’s me again. Listen, darling, I’m doing all I can to help you …’

  ‘I can’t listen to this!’ I said as I threw down the phone.

  Eugenie picked it up again and gave me a whispered report. ‘He says he’s disappointed in you again. He keeps giving you clues, but you let the trail grow cold. What’s a message for you doing on Galina’s phone, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know, but save it – don’t delete it!’ I gasped.

  ‘He says never mind that you let the trail grow cold, he still loves you, especially when you’re angry.’

  ‘Press SAVE!’ I heard cold fingers scratching at the windowpane, saw the robin lying dead on the sill – they flashed back into my mind as vividly as when they first happened. Now there was a new message, a voice telling me he loved me, and on top of this Galina was gone.

  chapter seven

  Raisa lived in a rented cottage in Upper Chartsey.

  I didn’t know this until I retrieved her landline number from Galina’s phone before the battery finally gave out
.

  ‘Hold on – maybe we shouldn’t panic,’ Eugenie said.

  ‘Then again, maybe we should.’ After the events of last year and given what had happened so far this term, I decided to call Raisa on my phone. ‘Hi, it’s Alyssa Stephens here. I was wondering if you knew who Galina was meeting tonight.’

  ‘No.’ The answer came slowly, as if I’d woken Raisa, or as if she had trouble interpreting what I’d asked. ‘I think she is in school.’

  ‘That’s the point – she’s not here and she went out and left her phone in our room, which makes me worry that she left in a hurry.’

  ‘Say this again,’ Raisa interrupted.

  ‘Sorry, I’ll speak more slowly. I’m worried about Galina. Do you know if she went into Ainslee with a friend to see a movie or something?’

  ‘No movie.’

  ‘So when did you last see her?’

  ‘The afternoon. I brought clean dress from dry cleaner. She says she stays home tonight; she doesn’t need me. I come back to my house.’

  ‘OK, thanks.’

  I was about to end the conversation when Raisa came back with questions of her own.

  ‘She is not in room? She is not with school friends?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘She is unhappy?’

  ‘No, not that I know of. Not since she ran away from Mikhail and he busted her lip. Since then she’s been OK – not crying or anything. And she said she was meeting someone. Someone she knew.’

  ‘Lyublmaya moy,’ Raisa murmured sorrowfully. ‘I worry now. I take taxi. I come to school.’

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ I decided. ‘Let me make a proper search. I’ll call you back.’

  Eugenie heard the plan and was out of the door ahead of me. We tried the obvious places again – other rooms along the girls’ corridor then out across the quad to knock on the boys’ doors.

  We didn’t get far before Bryony joined us.

  ‘Sorry to be a jobsworth, girls,’ she said at the top of the stairs, ‘but it’s my solemn duty to remind you that the boys’ dorm is out of bounds after eight o’clock.’

  Of all the staff, Bryony was the one I’d have chosen to be on duty that night. She doesn’t give out any crap about rules unless she absolutely has to. On the other hand she quickly picks up a problem and helps when something serious is happening. Tonight she was warmly wrapped in a long black coat with a soft cream beret covering her dark hair.