All These Perfect Strangers

by Aoife Clifford

  ‘But Rachel?’

  ‘Rachel found out about Marcus. Found coke in his desk when she stole his keys. Found out about Marcus and found out about me.’

  His voice was not so confident now, more like a harsh whisper.

  ‘That night at the bar she was showing off. Decided she needed coke right there and then. I tried to make her understand who she was dealing with. These guys control everything. They’ve got police on their payroll. But she didn’t and she ended up dead.’ I flinched inside at this, but said nothing.

  ‘Just like those bikers killed Leiza,’ he continued. ‘At the start, I pretended to myself that this wouldn’t hurt anyone, that we were all adults here. Guess I got that completely wrong.’ There was contrition in his voice but there was an element of self-pity as well.

  The problem was I knew that he hadn’t told me everything.

  I pulled the balaclava out from under my pyjama top and held it in my hands. It was warm but from my body this time.

  Recognition flooded his face. His voice was harsh. ‘Where did you get that? Did Rachel give it to you? What did she tell you?’

  ‘Enough,’ I lied.

  It was as though I’d punched him. He folded up and slumped onto a nearby couch. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her. You’ve got to believe me. We all had to take turns being the Screwdriver Man and it was mine. Marcus said I was in too deep to get out of it now. The Marchies wouldn’t accept reality. So Screwdriver Man had to teach Nico a lesson. I wasn’t strong enough to attack him so I thought of Alice.’

  I looked at the balaclava in my hands. The wool felt greasy, as if his guilt had seeped into it. As I thought of the blood flowing out of Alice, the floor seemed to be moving up towards me, the room tilting. Did Alice even know Nico was dead?

  ‘I thought it would be easy, just scare her. Tell Nico to back off. But she struggled, I panicked, and then the screwdriver . . . it was an accident, I swear. I stayed there in the bushes until I was sure she got help. That’s when Rachel saw me. Then she snuck into my room on the Academic Night and stole the balaclava and the screwdriver.’

  How Rachel must have enjoyed our secrets, pulling our strings to make us jump, never realising how desperate we were.

  His face was bitter as he picked up the bin near the desk and swept the packets into it.

  ‘How did the drugs get into Rachel’s bag?’ I was trying to put together the final pieces of that night.

  ‘Stoner freaked out when he saw that cop at the bar, and insisted I take his supplies back to college. When we found Rachel, I forgot about it until I heard the sirens, so I stuffed it all in her bag. When I told Marcus, he decided that we’d pretend she was the one dealing. Put all the blame on her.’

  Marcus. It always came back to him.

  I watched Rogan lean down and open the last drawer. He found another bag and dropped it into the bin and I decided this was enough. I needed to get out of here. But then he straightened up, listening hard. I heard it too.

  Footsteps outside the door.

  He clicked off the desk light. Coming around to where I was sitting, he grabbed my hand and pulled me up. Silently on the thick carpet we crossed the room and stood flat to the wall next to the door.

  The handle turned.

  A shuffling outside. Someone pushing. The handle moved, harder this time. But the door didn’t budge and the person didn’t have a key.

  Along the corridor came the echo of voices and hundreds of moving feet. The firefighters had given the all-clear.

  The footsteps darted away.

  Rogan interlaced his fingers in mine, and we just stood there. A soft hand that had never worked hard.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry about everything.’

  My treacherous heart leapt as if it had been deaf to what I had just heard.

  ‘I try to tell myself I’m not a bad person, but after all that’s happened . . .’

  Rogan might not be bad, but he was weak, and I knew that was just as dangerous. Weak people will always find an excuse.

  There was one last thing I needed to know.

  ‘Why did you come to my room that night?’

  I could almost hear his reluctance. Eventually, ‘Marcus told me to.’

  ‘To have sex with me?’

  ‘He didn’t say that . . .’ But it was the hesitation that gave me the real answer and I allowed the pressure of silence to build until it forced the truth out of him. ‘He said it was important to keep you on side.’

  And finally I had heard enough and the spell was broken. I withdrew my hand but Rogan barely noticed. He was busy grabbing the bin liner. He might have been weak but he was a survivor as well. Marcus knew how to pick them.

  I moved towards the middle of the room. Looking up, I noticed that the broken boy was back up on the wall. The shadows were even darker than usual. Definitely dead, I thought as I watched him, and for the first time I was almost envious. He was safe now. The worst thing had already happened.

  Chapter 25

  Carol was sitting hunched at her desk. It was clear she had been crying. When I pointed my finger at the door, she said nothing, merely nodded me through. Marcus’s nameplate had already disappeared. The Sub-Dean was inside, talking on the phone. Up until then I had only been focused on what last night’s revelations had meant for me. With him sitting at Marcus’s desk, I could see that everything was going to change.

  The Sub-Dean was saying something about not wanting to be presumptuous and ‘innocent until proven guilty’ but the look on his face said otherwise. When he saw me at the door he waved me forward. ‘A safe pair of hands . . . no, thank you, Chancellor,’ he concluded the phone call.

  ‘Ms Sheppard,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘You said you wanted to see me.’

  I sat down on the other side of the desk, in the same chair as last night. Lying between us was today’s newspaper, folded over to page six. ‘ACADEMIC ARRESTED’ was written in small type across the top of the right-hand column with a small picture of Marcus underneath.

  ‘I have had discussions with the police this morning. They no longer wish to interview you.’ My heart skipped a beat. The relief I felt was mirrored in his face. He didn’t need to be interviewed either. Both of us were in the clear.

  The telephone next to him buzzed, and he pressed the speaker.

  ‘Carol, I said hold all calls this morning.’

  ‘But it’s Joe McCardle for you.’

  The Sub-Dean leant back in his seat, getting a feel for it. ‘You can tell him that the college will be issuing a public statement to the media this afternoon.’

  A tinny version of Carol’s puzzled voice came through. ‘He said he was returning your call.’

  With a quick dart forward, he snapped up the phone and turned away from me. ‘I’ll ring him back shortly.’

  Putting down the phone a little harder than was required, he glanced at me. No smile now. ‘Was there something else, Ms Sheppard?’

  I wanted to know if Rogan was going to be interviewed, but instead I asked, ‘What has Marcus been charged with?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say any more than what is already in the public sphere.’ Frowning, he pushed the paper over to me. It was short on specifics other than saying it was related to the murder investigation that was underway. A police spokesperson talked about enquiries being ongoing, but hopefully this arrest would lead to others.

  ‘Extremely damaging for the college,’ he said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with his tie. He was addressing the room at large, rather than me specifically, something Marcus was fond of.

  ‘Unfortunately, no matter what the outcome, there will have to be changes at Scullin. Marcus Legard will never be able to return to his position at this college. The Chancellor has appointed me to take over his duties immediately.’

  Without his glasses, his face was mole-like, but the naked triumph was obvious. Perhaps sensing he was giving too much away, he put his
glasses back on, a stubby white finger pushing them up onto the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I feel I should warn you in particular, Ms Sheppard, there will of necessity be changes to some of the unorthodox financial decisions that he set up during his short time with us. But that is a discussion for another day.’ And I knew that the next time I saw this room, the pine-framed fruit bowls and flocks of sheep would have returned, the walls would be back to a nice safe cream and I would no longer have a bursary.

  ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I have a very busy morning.’

  Carol looked up as I shut the door behind me.

  ‘He talks to that journalist all the time and he’s already ordered new business cards,’ she whispered. ‘Hateful man.’

  · · ·

  College was a half-asleep world, unaware of the Sub-Dean’s coup. Most students, tired from last night, were ignoring the fact that it was a weekday and sleeping in. When I walked past the dining hall few people were in there. Only one person was walking down the stairs as I climbed up them. Returning to my room, I decided to keep my decisions simple, to take one step at a time. I didn’t have the energy to worry about the Sub-Dean’s threat to my finances. Not today. I didn’t have all the answers to what had been going on, but I thought I had enough to navigate my way through safely. The police weren’t interested in me now. For the first time since Rachel’s death, I wasn’t living with the fear of imminent exposure. I had my own quiet moment of relief as I walked down the corridor. Until I saw my door was open, a door I knew for certain I had locked.

  The article was on the floor, neatly folded, a copy of the one I had found the night Rachel had died. Next to it was a set of bangles. Rachel’s bangles. I picked them up and put them on my wrist. They tinkled as I looked around my room. The balaclava had been taken.

  Last time I had assumed Rachel had left the newspaper article in my room. Whether it was to show she could harm me or was protecting me, I could never tell. I picked up the paper. Words had been scrawled above the headline, above where Rachel had written my name. ‘Meet me on the roof.’

  Maybe the first article had not been left by Rachel at all. Maybe I had been wrong about that. I had been wrong about so many things, especially that there would be an end to this. There are always threads.

  For a moment, I wondered if I could ignore it, go have a shower, eat my breakfast, pretend I had never got it. But that wasn’t possible. I had to do what the note said, but first I ripped it into little pieces and flushed it down the toilet so no one else could find it. I pushed the bangles halfway up my arm, tucked in place by the cuff of my jumper. I would get rid of them later.

  My floor was still empty. I could hear quiet music behind some doors and the occasional muffled voice. But the kind of cozy sleepiness of the place had changed to something harder. Isolation. I could have passed a hundred people and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to face this alone.

  I climbed the stairs and walked along the corridor until I came to the room with the only bath in the tower. Unlocked. The chair was waiting for me on the top of the counter. No face looking down at me or putting out a hand to help. I wondered what would happen if I couldn’t pull myself up. A tiny giggle flickered inside me for one moment but I snuffed it out immediately. There was a hysterical edge to it.

  I stared into the black square above my head, the man-hole cover already removed, and then down at my slip-on shoes. I took them off, thinking that at least bare feet would have a better grip out on the roof. I clambered on to the chair. It felt flimsy this time and I held on to the square’s edges to stop my legs from shaking. My head was already through the hole. I stood there for a while, half in, half out, letting my eyes adjust properly to the dark before I moved.

  Taking hold of the sides of the manhole, I jumped. My legs only half pushed, my feet slipping on the chair. Arms gripping, legs kicking furiously, I was swimming in the air, trying to propel myself upward. I kicked hard again, lurched forward and my hands thrust into the space, reached a beam and I scrambled up. I was through.

  The air was hot and so thick with dust that I gasped and coughed as if I had taken in water. The only light came up through the hole. Cautiously, I moved an arm around, feeling for the torch that had been there last time.

  But there was no torch.

  The air swirled in clouds, disturbed by my movement. As I sat there with my legs dangling through the square trying to remember the way, I noticed a pair of footprints on a beam near me, as crisp in the dusk as on wet sand at a beach, a trail to follow into the dark.

  The square of light lit up a few of the vertical beams around me. They stood there as dark as the trees from last night. Then, I had run away from danger, but now I was walking towards it, and it was probably the same person in both instances. Logic and time were disappearing and something more primitive had taken their place inside me: the honing of senses, the pulse of adrenalin.

  I could have jumped back down into the world below and taken the consequences but instead I began walking along the horizontal beam, carefully putting my foot into each footprint as if pretending I wasn’t there, as if none of this was really happening.

  As I reached the first vertical beam, I hugged it tightly, swaying slightly. I held my breath and listened. I could hear the scurry of tiny feet. Rats perhaps, trying to work out what the disturbance was. I could almost feel their teeth on my skin, and my heart began to thump.

  The roof got lower and I ducked my head further and further. Finally, almost bent double, I could see the chinks of light, the lighter grey in the black of the wall. Something scuttled down my arm and I jerked forward, almost falling off the beam but catching a rafter at the last moment. In straightening up, I smacked into the side frame. Pain flashed red across my eyes. Steadying myself, whimpering, I put my hand to the top of my head. My hair was sticky. Blood smeared my fingers.

  I needed to get out. In desperation I banged my hands against the side of the roof and caught my palm against a metal fastening. Pushing the hatch open, I heard the dull clang on the tiles outside. The sky appeared and I half fell, half stumbled onto the roof.

  Chapter 26

  The world was the colour of milk.

  I shut my eyes and slowly opened them again, squinting in the light. The white discoloured and shapes began to form. A fog wrapped the building like gauze. The air smelt of leftover smoke and wet pine.

  I blinked again.

  Tiles the colour of weathered wood. Moss and dew making them slick.

  Michael sitting on the roof, watching me.

  I scrabbled across the tiles and perched myself at the other side of the hatch. A careful distance. I felt my head. Blood spotted on my hand. Scrapes on my arm, a couple of nails torn . . . not so serious.

  I waited for what was going to happen next.

  ‘Have you ever been up here during the day?’ he asked.

  I shuddered. Cold was seeping into my bones. ‘Only once. At night. Weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh, I know about that.’ His voice was bitter. ‘I followed you up here. I’ve followed you everywhere.’

  And I knew that was true. The ever-present flicker at the corner of my eye. The dark shadow in the bush. The face across a room. But I was not ready to bring him into sharp focus yet so I looked at a small black bundle lying nearby. The balaclava, I guessed.

  ‘Did you take that from my room?’ I asked.

  A nod.

  There was something thin and sharp next to it. A screwdriver.

  ‘Do they really belong to Rogan?’

  ‘I think so. I mean, I took them from Rachel’s room, but I am assuming she took them from his when she worked out that he attacked that girl, Alice. They’ve been useful, but don’t worry, I’ll return them to their rightful owner in time for the police to discover them.’

  Carefully, he picked up the screwdriver in gloved hands, angled so that a sudden spike of sunshine pierced through and illuminated the stained black edge.

  ‘Hard to bel
ieve that it could do so much damage. That you could literally chisel the life out of someone.’

  My chest felt tight. ‘You left the balaclava there last night for me to find. You weren’t in your room at all. It was you who chased me.’

  A nod.

  ‘And you’re going to frame Rogan for Leiza’s murder?’

  ‘That depends on you. If you keep fucking him, like you did here that night, as you probably did last night in Marcus’s office, then yes, I will. But to be honest, even if I don’t, he’s in enough trouble already. Isn’t he?’

  The sun disappeared again, as if it had seen enough.

  ‘The problem is, Pen, I don’t think you understand all that I’ve done for you.’

  I took a deep breath as though drinking in the sky.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me, then?’

  So Michael told me his version of the last few months. Events I knew but now saw again distorted through his dead-eye gaze. The story of a boy who stole into someone’s room to set an alarm clock for the early hours and found a rolled-up balaclava, a screwdriver and a news -paper article about a murdered policeman with the name of the only girl who had ever kissed him scrawled on top. What I worried would repel people only attracted Michael more. He watched me even more closely. So closely, that he noticed me storm out of the girls’ toilets one night at the bar and crush something over Rachel’s beer.

  ‘It was how you smiled when you handed it to her. A beautiful, genuine smile. Nothing fake about it. No pretence. I wanted you to smile at me the same way.’

  He followed Rachel outside and watched her stumble to the river. She fell down and sprawled on the bank, possibly overdosing already, possibly not. It was hard to tell, he said. It was taking so long. He wanted to watch her die, this girl who tormented him. Partly, because he hated her, but also because he was curious. What did death look like? How did it feel?

  In the end, he became impatient. He dragged her into the shadows where the river was deep and held her face under and in that grey water, synapses sparked and a neural pathway was completed and Michael’s world was changed forever. It was like hearing music or seeing colour for the first time. A revelation, he said.