Killing You Softly

by Lucy Carver

  I opened my door.

  The first thing I saw were fragments of the ceramic head taken from Jack’s room, smashed and scattered across my pillow. Phrenology by L. N. Fowler. Intuitive, reasoning, reflective facules – destroyed by a heavy hammer abandoned amongst the broken pieces. The second thing was a red, scented candle flickering on my bedside cabinet. Third, a big heart lipsticked on to the mirror. Fourth, Hooper sitting quietly on Galina’s bed.

  chapter fifteen

  ‘Good work, Alyssa,’ Hooper said. ‘I have to admit I was disappointed at first, when you were so slow to make sense of what was going on – especially the connection between the red clues and Scarlett’s name – but you got there in the end.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I backed towards the door, but he was there before me, moving faster than I’d expected, knocking me to one side and blocking my way.

  ‘That depends.’ He saw his things tucked under my arm and wrenched them from me. The phones spilled out of the box. One by one, slowly and deliberately, he trod on them and ground them under his heel. ‘Now give me yours,’ he demanded.

  Scared and shocked, I handed him my phone, which he put in his pocket. ‘So what’s the issue you’d most like to talk about now that you know the truth and you’re starting to come to terms with things?’ he asked. ‘Is it the loss of trust? That’s a big one for starters. You know – I was your “friend”, you trusted me and I betrayed you, yaddah yaddah. That must really hurt.’

  I refused to enter into discussion. Instead I stayed silent and studied him, noticing the way his Adam’s apple slid up and down as he swallowed and smiled. And I remembered.

  ‘What we’d both give for normal parents, hey?’ I say to Hooper as Connie eats spoonfuls of Luke’s Eton mess.

  Flash forward. Zara reads to me about narcissistic personality disorder.

  ‘“Sufferer may have over-indulgent parents who hand out unrealistic praise on a daily basis. On the other hand there could be severe emotional abuse as a child. Or a combination of both.”’

  Hooper’s dad is a prize-winning novelist, his mother is a society photographer. That’s all I knew and it wasn’t enough to make sense of their son’s psychosis. Think some more.

  NPD has a neurological basis. If a sufferer is criticized, he displays anger-management issues. He can be hyper – push the right button and any fake modesty falls apart then the psycho comes roaring out.

  ‘Useful tip for whenever I finally come face to face with the guy,’ I tell Zara.

  Here, now, staring at loyal, modest, sensitive Hooper, waiting for the maniac to pounce. Fear rose so high in my throat that I could hardly breathe.

  ‘Are you not comfortable with this?’ he asked me with a show of concern. ‘We could stop talking if you’d prefer.’

  ‘You talk, I’ll listen,’ I said. Flatter his narcissistic ego, don’t move, play for time.

  He took me up on it. ‘I really do like you, Alyssa, so the friendship thing was genuine. I admire your type of intellect – the way you pay attention to detail and use logic to work things out. You do that more than most girls, and I’m sorry if that sounds sexist. It must be part of the eidetic-memory syndrome because I noticed that was how Scarlett was too. Anyway, it sets you both apart from the mainstream, plus of course you’re both very, very beautiful and sexy. And, actually, you know, that’s where it went wrong between you and me – you being so far out of my league and you making sure I knew it.’

  ‘I didn’t …’ I began.

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I could stand in for him for seventy-two hours,’ Hooper offers with a hopeful look.

  I laugh.

  ‘No?’ he asks.

  I shake my head.

  Hooper watched me as I recalled the incident in the refectory. ‘You see – you did, you laughed in my face.’

  They’re excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, these people with NPD. They need admiration. I’d failed to boost Hooper’s fatally flawed ego. And now we stood here at the door to my room and he was talking at me, lecturing me about how it had all been my fault.

  ‘Call me over-sensitive if you like, Alyssa, but that conversation over dinner is what kick-started this. And of course I’d been through the whole thing with Scarlett before you. You want me to explain that in more detail? Come on – how come you’re not responding?’

  ‘I’m still listening.’ Keep a grip, don’t show fear.

  ‘OK, so I’d stayed over in Ainslee after the end of last term, delaying the moment when I had to go home to those two pathetic excuses for parents. Honestly, if you knew them, you’d immediately get what I mean. Anyway, I’d seen Scarlett around town but I didn’t know her very well, only that Will Harrison mentioned she was top of her class, A* in everything, all that.’

  Hawk-like, I watched his every move, waiting for I don’t know what.

  ‘That was a kind of challenge in itself,’ he mused. ‘She couldn’t be that beautiful and that ridiculously clever, could she? Not cleverer than me, surely. So I was bored hanging out in town by myself and I decided to start testing it out, sending Scarlett poetry and lyrics from songs and waiting for her to respond. And you know what – she never did reply, probably just deleted them, so in the end that made me angry with her and that’s when my messages started to get a little threatening, so she couldn’t ignore them any more.

  ‘I took pictures and Photoshopped them – you know the routine. I was dropping clues left, right and centre, making it more and more obvious for her. And it was funny – while I was away for Christmas, Alex found a really interesting picture of Scarlett on Facebook, much more explicit than the one I posted of you, by the way. He went totally apeshit.’

  Still I held back, using every ounce of willpower not to react, but with a hundred thoughts and feelings flickering through my brain, but mainly, Poor Scarlett, poor Alex.

  ‘You asked me what I got for Christmas,’ Hooper reminded me, pulling up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. ‘Well, nothing this year, but up until I was eight years old my main present would be this.’ He showed me a mass of healed scars on his forearm. ‘Amongst his manifold faults, my father is one of those nicotine addicts who can’t give up the smoking habit,’ he explained. ‘Sometimes, when I was a little kid, he didn’t bother to use an ashtray to stub out his cigarettes.’

  The old scars on the inside of Hooper’s arm went from wrist to elbow. They made me shudder then recoil as he thrust the arm close to my face.

  ‘If only people knew what goes on behind educated, middle-class doors,’ he said. ‘Ah well, obviously I still can’t stand being en famille for very long, so this year, as always, I got out of there as fast as I could and came back to school early. Only I couldn’t stay at St Jude’s until term officially started so again I hung around in Ainslee, continuing to offer my little challenges to Scarlett, and finding out that her detective skills were well below A* standard, I’m afraid.’

  Didn’t she tell anyone what was happening? I wondered.

  ‘Yes, good point,’ my mind-reader psycho interjected. ‘You’re right, she did eventually confide in her parents – especially when her little grey cat, Mimi, was found strangled and dumped in her bed, Godfather style. A touch of melodrama never harms in a situation like this. The Hartleys actually reported that one to the police, but the on-duty desk sergeant handed it over to the local branch of the RSPCA, which was a major mistake in retrospect.’

  Unwarranted self-importance. Severe egocentrism. Preoccupied with fantasies of power and intelligence. These were the textbook terms for NPD and now I was living that nightmare, watching the frown lines on Hooper’s thin face, the pauses for reflection and, worst of all, the chilling smiles.

  ‘The trouble is, even the best-laid plans can go wrong,’ he went on. ‘Like for instance the CCTV cameras outside The Fleece. I hadn’t reckoned on them. But luckily it turned out OK, since they only captured my back view and there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of ident
ification – oops, cat metaphor probably inappropriate here, given one dead moggy recently slipped between the sheets.’

  ‘Hooper!’ I said weakly.

  ‘You’re right – bad taste. But funny.’ There was another long pause while he pulled my phone out of his pocket. ‘No new messages,’ he reported as he took his time to slip it back in. ‘Actually, in case you’re wondering, The Fleece incident was very significant. True, you can’t see my face on the footage, but I’m asking Scarlett if she’d like a lift home from the party, all very nice and polite. She says no, she’d rather walk. I say, “Why’s that?” She pushes her hair back from her soft-as-a-petal face and says she doesn’t accept lifts from people she doesn’t know, as if there’s something amusing about that, and she struts off. You know how kids from Ainslee Comp can be about St Jude’s kids – not very nice at all. It stems from inverted snobbery if you ask me.’

  ‘Is that it?’ I gasped. Hooper offers his victim a lift and picks up an implied insult. It’s enough to push his NPD button and turn him into a killer.

  Like now, like my three-word challenge – ‘Is that it?’ spoken with disbelief.

  This is what sent him suddenly crazy.

  He lunged at me without warning, pressed me back against the door and shoved his elbow into my throat so hard that I gagged. I fought back, bringing my knee up to his crotch so that he released the pressure on my throat and I fell forward on to my knees. He used the few seconds that it took me to get back on my feet to run to the bed and grab the hammer. He raised it and came back at me. I crouched forward and used both arms to cover my head.

  Hooper smashed the hammer wide of my head into the oak door panel. Smiling, he then tapped it lightly against the splintered wood – once, twice, three times. ‘Not here,’ he decided with a final tap that pinned a lock of my hair to the door.

  I jerked my head sideways then tried to tug my hair free.

  ‘No, definitely not here. Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’ I pleaded with tears smarting in my eyes. ‘Hooper, where are we going?’

  ‘Ah, that would be telling.’ Shoving me against the door and stooping to pick up the black scarf, he quickly wrapped it round my neck and pulled it tight.

  Then, as I struggled to stop him from throttling me, he opened the door and tugged me backwards down the corridor. ‘Hush!’ he warned, finger to his lips, trying not to giggle, as if we were naughty children out of bed in the middle of the night and trying not to wake our parents.

  He dragged me down the stairs and out into the silent quad, talking normally again now that we weren’t in danger of being overheard. ‘I thought we might revisit some of our old haunts. You know, the grounds, the lake, the woods – a walk down Memory Lane.’ He seemed delighted by the idea. ‘One last chance for you to use your eidetic talents.’

  Down the sloping, snow-covered lawn to the lake where the tall reeds rustled and rattled in the wind, to the spot where police divers had recovered Lily Earle’s body in early December.

  I watch with Paige from the window of Room 27. The water is black and freezing. Lily has been submerged in her watery tomb for four whole days. Her dark hair streams back from her face. She wears her black leather jacket and one shoe is missing.

  ‘Remember that?’ Hooper asked. ‘Silly question – of course you do.’ And he pulled the scarf tight to drag me away from the lake, the ruffled surface of which reflected a fragmented moon. ‘If we had time, I’d take you up to the stable block to give you a chance to remember Paige.

  The tack room door flies open. A figure in a grey hoodie flies out, a hoodie with an Adidas logo and triple stripes down the arms. He has a knife in his left hand. He takes hold of a wheelie bin and thrusts it straight at Mistral. The horse rears, Paige yells, hooves crash down and pin her against the stable wall. He rears again, lands on top of her.

  There’s silence. No blood, but Paige doesn’t move. Her eyes are closed and though they take her to hospital and put her into intensive care she never opens them again.

  ‘But we really don’t have time,’ Hooper decided. ‘It won’t be long before Will starts looking for me. You woke him up, didn’t you? I’m not safely tucked up in my bed and eventually even he’s bound to wonder what’s going on.’

  The pressure on my throat made me tilt my head back and I lost my footing as Hooper dragged me to his Peugeot in the car park. I was still off balance and choking when he thrust me inside and locked the door.

  He ran round the back of the car and sat behind the wheel. ‘Comfy now?’ he asked, starting the engine and reversing out of his parking space. ‘It’s OK, don’t bother with your seat belt – to tell you the truth, there isn’t much point.’

  Amused, unflustered, he drove past Saint Sam’s house where all was dark and quiet, between stone pillars and into the lane leading to the Bottoms. At the first junction, he slowed at a Give Way sign and I grabbed the door handle and tried to open the door.

  ‘Thank goodness for child locks,’ he commented as the door stayed shut.

  I groaned and lurched forward as he shot out on to the main road. ‘Don’t worry, we won’t be stopping in the village. We’ll be heading straight into Ainslee.’

  ‘Don’t!’ I begged as he picked up speed. ‘Please, Hooper!’

  ‘Sorry, Alyssa, I can’t slow down, not when I’m in one of my hypo-manic moods. And yes, I recognize that’s what this is. I have full understanding of my condition.’

  ‘But you don’t have to—’

  ‘Don’t have to what? Don’t have to kill you the way I killed Scarlett and would definitely have killed Galina if you hadn’t got in the way?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve proved your point. You can stop now.’

  He tutted and shook his head, drove on in silence until we reached the village.

  ‘You won,’ I insisted. ‘You played the game better than me and you beat me.’

  ‘What’s this – is it flattery?’ He grinned. ‘Are you trying to win me over? Is that what Zara said would work with nut-jobs like me?’

  ‘No. I mean it!’

  ‘And of course it’s true – I did win. But I’m writing your life story and I can’t stop short of the satisfying ending, can I?’

  The country lanes ended and we entered the town’s quiet streets. ‘Yes, you can,’ I argued. ‘The main thing is that you won – you’re better than me, no contest.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, you don’t understand – I found with Scarlett that I got an enormous buzz from the killing part. Besides, you still have to be tomorrow’s headline: “Second Body in Canal”.’

  A fresh, powerful shockwave ran through my body and I tried again to open the door, shoving against it with my full weight. Still it stayed shut.

  ‘I like the symmetry of that, don’t you?’

  Oh God, he meant it. He was fixated on an ending he’d planned from the start. He would throw me into Ainslee canal and the water would close over my head.

  My phone rang inside his pocket. I tried to lean across and snatch it, but again he was too quick. He took it out and waited for the ring-tone to end. ‘That was Jack,’ he reported casually. ‘Must be driving him crazy, not being able to get in touch.’

  Jack, my Jack! I love you. I want you to know.

  ‘What do you see in a guy like him?’ Hooper seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘It’s got to be more than the six-pack, surely.’

  Much, much more but not something that you would ever understand.

  ‘To me he doesn’t seem that special,’ Hooper continued. ‘He’s too easy to read for a start. There are no twists and turns, no depth to his personality.’

  I love him. He loves me. I will carry one certainty in life, right to my grave. It will be enough. But Jack, promise me you won’t miss me forever – just for a while. Then live, be the best you can be. Nihil sed optimus.

  ‘Here we are,’ Hooper said chattily as he pulled up by Lock-keeper’s Cottage.

  I noted where we were – the steps down to t
he canal, high brick wall to one side, narrow towpath and the humpbacked bridge ahead. My mood had switched and I felt calm now, beyond shock or terror, completely out of Hooper’s reach. Which didn’t mean that I’d given in – no way.

  He held my door open and I got out of the car. He had the hammer in one hand, the black scarf in the other. I met his gaze, searching for one small sign that the old, sane Hooper still existed somewhere in there amongst the tangled, twisted neurological mess that comprised his brain. He returned my look with an empty unfocused stare.

  Then he turned me towards the steps and prodded me in the back with the head of the hammer. ‘The Industrial Revolution introduced many amazing feats of engineering, but none more so than the network of canals that still crisscross our nation – don’t you think, Alyssa?’ Prod-prod, down the steps, which smelt of damp and urine, on to the path littered with cans and black plastic bin bags emerging from the melting snow. ‘Bunches of navvies working with picks and shovels – no mechanical diggers in the eighteenth century, of course.’

  I was taking everything in – old snow trodden underfoot, yellow stains where dogs had peed against the wall, an upstairs light on in what I remembered was Sammy Beckett’s house. I was no longer tuned in to Hooper’s robotic chattiness.

  ‘Of course, the last time I was here I used a spanner from Alex’s dad’s workshop and, though it spoils the symmetry slightly, I’m afraid on this occasion this hammer was all that came to hand. Plus the trusty old phone-charger cable,’ he added, withdrawing one from his pocket.

  We were down the steps on the towpath, our footfall deadened by the slushy snow. I deliberately didn’t look down to my right at the black, oily surface of the water. Instead I looked up at the moon.

  Jack, ignore what I said earlier. Don’t forget me. Always keep a little place in your heart for me.

  ‘Ready?’ Hooper asked, raising the hammer.

  No, this is not how it ends! I dodged as he brought the hammer down hard. It hit the wall and I sprinted towards the bridge. But the path was slippery and my feet went from under me. Hooper quickly caught up and bent down to hook the scarf around my neck and pull me to him. Then suddenly he stopped. He looked over at the bridge.