by Lucy Carver
‘Easy. I said, “Delete Scarlett’s photos, you bastard!” ’
‘And?’
‘He said sod off, he didn’t have them on his phone any more, the lying swine.’
‘OK, I get that too. Just one thing, Alex. When you and Will had the stand up argument, did he have a black eye – a bruise just here?’ I put my fingers across my right eye socket.
‘No.’
‘No bruise – you’re sure?’
Alex stopped and turned back towards me. ‘Where are you going with this? Who cares about a sodding black eye?’
Will turns up at the start of term minus the Louis Vuitton luggage. He’s bulked up, blond and nervous when we talk about Scarlett. He has a bruise under his right eye.
I press him for information about the dead girl.
‘Quit that, Sherlock, while you’re ahead,’ he tells me.’
‘So he didn’t get it working out in the gym over Christmas like I thought,’ I mused as Jayden and the others came within earshot. ‘Jayden, you were there on New Year’s Eve – do you happen to know how Will Harrison damaged his face?’
‘He walked into a door?’ was Jayden’s suggestion, like he couldn’t give a damn.
‘Did he get involved in a fight at the party?’
‘Not with me personally. Anyway, he didn’t hang around long enough.’
‘He left early?’
‘Come to think of it – yeah.’
‘Was he in a bad mood? Did he argue with anyone?’
‘What am I – his keeper?’ Jayden was about to go off on a typical one when he suddenly saw where I was going. ‘Yeah, he did. Nobody wants to hang out with him since he left Ainslee Comp and his head grew to twice the normal size. All he was interested in at the party was avoiding Scarlett. He didn’t stay long – in fact, he was out of there before midnight.’
‘And still no bruise?’ I checked.
‘He was well pissed but there was no facial damage,’ Ursula confirmed calmly before a sudden thought lit up her expression. ‘Hey maybe it was Will on the CCTV footage – hassling Scarlett!’
‘It’s a definite possibility,’ I said quietly.
‘Sammy Beckett – he’s cool,’ Zara told Eugenie.
Jack and I had cycled home. He’d gone off for a Sunday session with his tennis coach and I’d gathered the girls in the sports-centre coffee bar.
‘Very cool,’ Charlie agreed.
Eugenie, who has my pale complexion, coloured up bright red.
‘Have you taken him home to Farfield Hall?’ BWS wanted to know. Rich girl takes poor boy home to meet her parents.
‘Ouch!’ Zara winced.
Eugenie flicked her hair back behind her shoulders and withered Connie with her scorn. ‘Your class prejudices are so twentieth century, Connie Coetzee. And, sure, my parents have met Sammy and they like him.’
We all backed Eugenie and disagreed with Connie, making up our minds that Sammy (who incidentally is cool because, though he may be a statistic-obsessed nerd, actually looks like a young Johnny Depp with that honed, exaggerated jaw line and those big, dark-lashed eyes) was in the clear.
Down below on the indoor tennis court, Jack’s coach fired balls from a machine and Jack returned them at a hundred miles per hour.
‘So what did Ripley say about the video footage?’ Completely unfazed, Connie pushed us forward to another burning topic.
‘Ripley hasn’t come back to me yet,’ I replied. ‘It’s only twelve hours since I gave it to her. The techies will do their thing and try to trace where it came from. Today’s Sunday, so maybe not until tomorrow. Anyway, I expect the guy’s an IT geek who’s clever enough to block that info, even from police experts.’
Jack’s coach called him to the net and the machine tried to lob him. Jack jumped and smashed, sprinted and retrieved from the base line. I stood up for a closer look.
‘Any more nasty messages?’ Zara enquired. She was with me, leaning on the rail, looking down at the court.
Catch me quick, memory girl. It’s going to get worse, one hundred per cent guaranteed. Killing you softly.
‘Nasty doesn’t cover it,’ I muttered.
‘Surreal?’ Zara suggested.
‘Yes – like we’re playing a game where no one tells me the rules or the score.’ I stared down at Jack executing a perfect forehand drive. ‘The thing is, I’m beginning to realize now that if I lose Galina could die.’
Zara sidled close. ‘I’m sorry, Alyssa. I guess there’s nothing I can do?’
I shook my head and felt the urge to cry that you get when someone is being especially nice.
Jack picked up balls from the corner of the court, glanced up and flashed me one of his bright smiles.
Thank you, thank you! I smiled back down.
‘You want my advice?’ Zara said. ‘You probably won’t take it but I could give it anyway.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Deep breath, Alyssa. Are you OK? You’re sure you’re not going to cry on me?’
‘No.’
‘So this is what I would do if I were you. I’d step right back from this crappy situation. Hand over everything you know to the police, stay out of it from now on and let them do their job.’
‘I can’t,’ I sighed.
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve already said – he’s got Galina. He could kill her if I don’t work out a way to stop him. How do I step away from that?’
‘But think about it, Alyssa. This really isn’t down to you. You’re getting dragged in, and it’s probably too dangerous for you to deal with.’
Leaning on the rail, I closed my eyes.
‘You’re sure you’re OK?’
‘Yeah, just dizzy.’
‘So I’ll quit talking. But remember, we’re here for you – me, Eugenie, Connie, Charlie – whenever you need us.’
I took the deep breaths and choked back the tears. ‘Thanks. That means a lot.’
‘And guess what,’ Zara rattled on. ‘I’ve decided to switch from physics to neuroscience in my UCAS applications. I’m more and more fascinated by how this stalker guy’s brain works. It’s turned me on to neuroscience – trying to understand the brain of a psycho. I’ve started to read about temporal lobes and synapses. It’s incredibly complicated.’
‘I think you’ll be brilliant at it,’ I told her. Then we hugged and I felt a whole lot better.
In your experience, how would you expect an exiled Russian oligarch to look? Here’s how I see it. He’d have no hair to speak of and a thick neck, giving him a bullet-headed look, and his grey eyes would be cold and hard. His suit would be hand tailored to cover a thickening waistline. He would ride horses bare chested and go fishing in a raging river like Putin and he would attend film premieres with a trophy wife at his side.
In fact, Anatoly Radkin had the suit and the wife, but a head of thick, dark hair, no paunch and eyes full of concern when Molly called me to meet him in her office on Sunday afternoon.
‘This is Alyssa Stephens. She’s Galina’s roommate,’ Molly told him.
Anatoly shook my hand. ‘You were the last person to see my daughter before she vanished.’
I nodded and stole a glance at Salomea’s face as she stood quietly by the long window overlooking the lawns. Her expression was tight and guarded.
‘How did she seem?’ he asked.
‘Excited. She said she was going to meet someone special, that she would tell me about him later.’
‘She hadn’t told anyone else?’
‘I don’t think so. I got the impression it was a big secret and she planned to slip off to meet him without Mikhail or Sergei finding out.’
Anatoly blinked away the two names without comment. ‘I’m sorry to ask you so many questions, Alyssa. You have told this to the police and I’m sure that soon they will actively question everyone here at St Jude’s, but you understand I’m impatient because I’m very afraid for my daughter. I need to know from you everything that happened on Fri
day night.’
‘It’s OK. I’ll do all I can to help.’
‘And the video footage – you were the one who handed it over to the police?’
‘Yes. At first I was totally shocked. Then I started to think it through. It’s all cut up into quick, two or three second segments. When the kidnapper first filmed her walking down the drive it was from behind, so that probably means he followed her out of the quad where the boys’ and girls’ dorms are. Maybe he watched her from one of the boys’ rooms and left just after she did.’
Galina’s father listened closely and calmly, considering the circumstances. I got the impression that he agreed with what I’d just said.
‘The second segment is filmed as she moves towards him, which must mean he’d taken a short cut and got to their prearranged meeting place before her.’
‘Or else he’d kept her waiting,’ Molly suggested. ‘She could have sat for a while – in someone’s house, in the cafe in the village.’
I disagreed. ‘Inspector Ripley will have checked that out – it’d be the first thing she’d do. As far as I know, no one saw Galina in Chartsey Bottom on Friday night. Besides, the video shows them meeting out in the open, in the dark – there were no street lights.’
‘OK, so he took a short cut and overtook her,’ Anatoly decided. ‘He’s ready to film her as she arrives.’
‘And she knew him because she was smiling.’ I was totally clear about this. She knew her attacker/abductor/potential killer. That was the most chilling thing – Galina’s smile of anticipation, lips parted, eyes sparkling as she approached.
‘No street lights?’ Anatoly repeated.
‘No. There were trees behind her, but there was nothing else – no landmark that would help to identify the place.’
‘What kind of trees?’
‘Oaks. There are lots of those around here, everywhere you look. It was only a couple of seconds before that segment ended then the video cut to a close-up of Galina’s face without any background detail, and that’s when suddenly she wasn’t smiling.’
I stopped, unable to go on until Anatoly pushed me.
‘It helps me to know this,’ he insisted. ‘If you could continue, please.’
Catch me if you can.
Galina is in school uniform, she’s eager to meet her abductor, she risks meeting him late at night, in the middle of the countryside. She smiles at him. Cut.
Her lips stop smiling, her eyes widen and her pupils dilate. That’s when she opens her mouth to scream.
What has changed? Has he said something to her? Is it something he’s done? What makes her change from delight to terror as the camera comes close and her features dissolve into a blur? Does he produce a knife or a gun as he reaches her? Does he put a hand to her neck to throttle her?
She’s backing off, screaming, pleading.
Cut to the final sequence. Galina lies curled up in foetal position on the back seat of a car. The car has fancily stitched cream leather seats, which means it’s high spec. Galina’s mouth is taped with silver duct tape. Her hands are tied behind her back with cable from a phone charger (her own, presumably) cutting into her wrists. Her eyelashes and cheeks are wet with tears, her nostrils flared. She looks up and sideways at her ‘someone special’, who must be leaning into the back of the car to film her. She is betrayed, afraid for her life, desperate. Cut.
Anatoly listened and considered. I told him everything I knew and he thanked me. ‘Galina’s mother is in Moscow. She will be kept informed.’
I stole another glance at Salomea, wife number two or three, the un-wicked stepmother who was nonetheless cheating on a man who appeared in the top twenty of rich lists around the world. She met my gaze and her eyelids flickered.
‘Does anyone know what happened to Sergei and Mikhail?’ I asked.
Salomea turned to stare out of the window at the gathering dusk.
Anatoly raised an eyebrow. ‘My people found them in London. They were on the tube train to Heathrow with tickets for Moscow in their pockets.’
‘Your people?’
‘I have more than thirty permanent employees in this country, all engaged in various aspects of security – bodyguards for me, my wife, my daughter. They are well trained. It’s difficult for Mikhail and Sergei to hide for very long.’
Ouch! ‘So you’re supposing that they lost track of Galina and panicked?’
‘Yes, maybe. They planned to do the first thing that came into their heads, which was to leave the country and head for Russia because they know I can’t follow them there. That was the mistake – it was too obvious. I had my men pick them up at the checkin desk.’
It was like having your own personal police force, but without the official codes of conduct or any accountability. Anatoly’s ‘pick them up’ phrase probably edited out a few brutal details that he didn’t want me to know, but which Salomea understood all too well. A shudder ran through her slight, ballet dancer’s frame as she listened to her husband’s account of what had happened to her secret lover.
I took a moment to picture it. Mikhail and Sergei hurry towards checkin. They didn’t do their job; they let Galina leave the school undetected. Only one of them had officially been on duty on Friday night, but both were responsible for her safety. Their gut reaction was to run.
They don’t reach the self-check-in machines before ripped men in suits surround them and hustle them out of the line. It’s discreet so nobody notices as Sergei and Mikhail are escorted from the terminal. A car is waiting.
Anatoly Radkin is the picture of civilized concern as he quizzes me in Molly’s office – as handsome as his daughter is beautiful, prompting me for every detail I can remember, backed by an army of well dressed thugs.
‘Where are they now?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied dismissively. ‘They are no longer on my staff.’
No longer part of the story – officially at least. I wondered how long it had taken Sergei to buckle under pressure and admit his relationship with his ex-boss’s wife. Salomea must have been wondering the same thing.
I pictured her walking through a desert of hidden landmines in the full glare of her husband’s sun. After all, a kiss on the lips in Ainslee Westgate station is unbelievably high risk when you’re married to a man as powerful as Anatoly Radkin.
‘There’s a reward for information,’ Anatoly said, maybe or maybe not coincidentally directing his attention to Salomea for the first time since I got there. He went over and put a protective arm round her shoulder. She shuddered and he withdrew the arm. ‘So, Alyssa – if you think of anything else …’
I didn’t need any reward, I told him with a burst of angry contempt that I didn’t try to hide. ‘Right now, getting Galina back safe is all that matters.’
chapter nine
There’s a row of metal lockers in the glass corridor connecting the technology centre to the music room and that’s where I found the tie. It was slung over the top of my locker door, hanging like a noose.
Jack, fresh and damp from his shower after tennis coaching, saw me freeze on the spot but it took him a while to clock the red and green tartan noose.
‘Why is my door hanging open?’ I wondered aloud. Not ‘Whose tie is that?’ or ‘Oh my God, that could be Galina’s!’ No, what bothered me was that I was sure I’d left the metal door locked and now it was mysteriously ajar.
Jack slid his hand through the noose part of the tie then handed it to me. I read the name tag stitched into the reverse side. Galina Radkin. My heart lurched.
‘And a message,’ Jack told me as he swung the door fully open. He pointed to a lime-green Post-it note on the inside.
I’VE SAID THIS BEFORE, ALYSSA. THE PROBLEM WITH YOU IS THAT YOU KEEP MISSING WHAT’S UNDER YOUR NOSE.
I read it and screwed it up, threw it down on the floor. Thumping heart, breathlessness, pins and needles in my arms – the note induced an immediate, full-on panic attack.
Jack rescued the piece of pape
r then paced up and down the corridor. He stared out at the car park as if the answer lay among the rows of cars.
‘He opened my locker!’ I wailed, as if violated. The small things become big because it postpones the moment when you have to address the central issue, which was more proof that my stalker was on my case twenty-four/seven, breathing the air I breathed, predicting every move I made. I slung the tie back at Jack and another lime-green note slid out of the lining and fluttered to the floor.
Jack picked it up. ‘PLEASE HELP ME,’ he read.
‘Is it definitely Galina’s handwriting?’ was Luke’s first question.
Jack and I had taken the two notes and the tie into the music room where we’d found him, Will, Hooper and Connie, instruments in hand, waiting for Eugenie and Marco to begin their singing lesson with Bruno Cabrini.
‘Let me see.’ Snatching the PLEASE HELP ME note, Connie studied the unsteady, upper case letters. ‘You can’t really tell,’ she decided as she showed it to Hooper.
‘My gut tells me yes, it’s her writing and she wrote it in secret and stuffed it into the lining of the tie,’ I said. ‘And you can see by the name tape that it’s definitely her tie, which she was wearing when she vanished.’
Hooper studied the note. ‘She was scared shitless when she wrote this,’ he commented. ‘The handwriting shakes and wobbles all over the place. But in one way we should be relieved – at least she did write it.’
‘Meaning what?’ Jack asked.
‘Meaning, obviously she’s still alive,’ Hooper explained patiently. ‘And, when you think about it, this guy does need to keep Galina alive as long as possible so he can carry on playing cat and mouse with Alyssa. Once Galina’s dead, it’s game over.’
My stomach flip-flopped, my heart thudded.
‘Hey, Hooper, no need to pull your punches,’ Connie muttered under her breath.
‘I’m just saying …’
‘We know and we agree,’ I butted in.
Across the soundproofed room, Carlo the music maestro took up his baton and tapped it against his lectern. Eugenie and Marco picked up their scores.
‘We’d better go and play for him or we’re all in the dog house.’ Connie grabbed her violin and strode across the room. Her Jo’burg language is like that – quaint, a couple of generations out of date.