Dead Scared

by S J Bolton

  Without noticing, I’d crossed the threshold. ‘I’ve just moved into her old room,’ I said, having cooked up a cover story on the way over. ‘And I found this tucked under her bed.’ I pulled the book from my bag. ‘There’s a page corner turned down. I think she must have been reading it before it happened.’

  ‘Jane Eyre,’ he read, looking down at the Penguin Classic paperback. ‘Doesn’t the hero get very badly burned?’

  ‘I didn’t think of that,’ I admitted, feeling stupid. ‘I should just take it away again.’

  ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Let her parents decide, when they come back.’

  I made myself take another look at the girl in the clear plastic tent. ‘Why does her face look like that?’ I asked. ‘Her skin looks dead.’

  ‘That’s not her skin,’ the man replied. ‘And it is dead. That’s cadaver skin covering her face. Tell you what, I was just about to get a coffee and you look like you need one. Come on.’

  ‘CAN YOU TELL me about the dreams?’ Evi asked.

  Jessica had left her chair and was at the window. Two weeks ago, she’d been a young girl with a history of anxiety and eating disorders who’d been struggling to cope with being away from home for the first time and the rigorous academic demands of the university. Now she seemed a seriously disturbed young woman, exhibiting behaviour that was making Evi think about hospitalization.

  ‘We all have bad dreams, Jessica,’ she said, when her patient didn’t reply. ‘I’m not going to get all Freudian on you, but I do think they can point towards what’s worrying us.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Jessica, without turning round. ‘Have bad dreams?’

  The question caught Evi by surprise and she answered without thinking. ‘You have no idea,’ she said.

  Jessica had turned on the spot and was looking Evi full in the face now. ‘What do you dream about?’ she said.

  ‘Something that happened to me just over a year ago,’ said Evi. ‘I can’t give you details, because other people were involved, other patients, but it was a very difficult time. It became a very frightening time. And although it’s over now, I still dream about it often.’

  ‘Do you ever want to talk to someone about it?’ asked Jessica.

  ‘I do talk to someone about it,’ replied Evi. ‘And you have very cleverly turned this conversation into one about me. I’m going to turn it back again, if that’s all right with you.’

  The girl seemed calmer now. She sat down again, her hands rubbing her upper arms, as though for warmth. She really was horribly thin. Evi waited.

  ‘I’m scared of clowns,’ said Jessica, after a moment.

  ‘A lot of people are,’ replied Evi. ‘It’s a very common phobia.’

  ‘But really scared,’ said Jessica. ‘I can’t see a picture of one without feeling cold.’

  ‘And are clowns what you dream about?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Evi waited. Nothing. She raised her eyebrows. Still nothing.

  ‘You think so?’ she prompted.

  ‘I can’t really remember,’ said Jessica. ‘That’s the weirdest thing. I know I’m in a fairground. I can remember the lights spinning and the music. I was lost in a fairground, you see, when I was about four. I just got separated from my parents in the crowd. When they found me I was beside one of those mechanical laughing clowns in a big Perspex box. I didn’t speak for a week.’

  ‘That would have been a terrifying experience for a four-year-old,’ said Evi. ‘Being lost in an unfamiliar place that was noisy and crowded, and then coming face to face with a clown. And, you know, coming to university is putting you in an unfamiliar place, away from your parents for the first time. It’s not surprising that your mind is harking back to a scary experience you had as a child.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s just … not knowing what happens in the dreams is the worst thing.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I remember lights, music, laughing and bright colours. Swirling things like those horses on poles … but nothing else.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s all you can remember from what happened to you as a child.’

  ‘So why do I wake up exhausted?’ said Jessica. ‘And sore, like I’ve been beaten up in the night. Why do I wake up screaming?’

  I WALKED AHEAD of the man with rust-coloured hair, out of Bryony’s hospital room and into the corridor. He indicated a coffee machine close to the ward’s reception desk. When the foul-smelling liquid had been poured, we sat down on nearby chairs.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked me.

  I nodded. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wasn’t expecting …’

  ‘No one ever is. I’m Nick Bell, by the way. Bryony’s GP.’

  Nick Bell smelled of the outdoors, of wet mud and woodland in winter. Compared to the chemical smell of the hospital corridors and the putrid stench of the burns unit, being close to him felt like striding home through crisp winter air.

  ‘Is she likely to recover?’ I asked, after I’d told him the name that was still feeling odd on my tongue.

  He shrugged. ‘Bryony is one of the most serious cases they’ve had here for some time,’ he said. ‘She has a mixture of first, second, third and even fourth degree burns over nearly 80 per cent of her body,’ he replied. ‘At 90 per cent, it’s nearly always fatal.’

  From my reading over the weekend, I knew that first degree burns were superficial, like sunburn, that second degree went deeper and damaged the underlying, dermal layer of skin, and that third degree burns, the ones I’d believed to be the most serious, invaded the fat and muscle layers beneath the skin. ‘What are fourth degree burns?’ I asked.

  ‘Fourth degree burns damage the bone,’ he told me. ‘The surgeons couldn’t save her left arm.’

  I bent down to put my coffee on the floor and found I didn’t want to straighten up again. So I stayed there, elbows on knees, looking at the floor tiles. Then a hand touched down lightly on my shoulder.

  ‘Laura, given the severity of her injuries, she’s not doing too badly.’ The hand lifted away again. ‘The flames were extinguished pretty quickly, which meant the damage to her respiratory system wasn’t great. She should be breathing on her own again quite soon. The biggest challenges now are getting her wounds to heal.’

  ‘Will they?’ I asked, spotting a beautiful tortoiseshell-coloured feather on the sleeve of his sweater.

  ‘The more superficial burns should heal by themselves,’ he said. ‘The epidermis is pretty clever at replenishing itself. The deeper ones will require a skin graft from a donor site elsewhere on the body. Are you sure you want to hear all this?’

  I nodded. Strangely, it was helping.

  Bell was drinking coffee as though it wasn’t scalding hot and foul. ‘The difficulty is that because so much of Bryony’s skin was damaged, there isn’t much they can harvest to use as grafts,’ he said. ‘They’ve created a donor site on the small of her back and they’ve used it to graft over the worst wounds, which were on her left shoulder. So far, they’re taking quite well.’

  ‘So that’s good news,’ I said.

  ‘It is. But they have to wait now until the donor site replenishes itself before they can harvest it again. It’s a long and painful process and there’s no getting round it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘One small area on her back has to grow enough skin to cover her whole body?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly.’ Bell nodded at me, as if I were a student who’d just grasped some important principle. ‘In the meantime,’ he went on, ‘the cadaver skin is keeping her wounds covered, reducing the pain that exposure to the air would cause and helping to guard against fluid loss and infection. And, although it’s from a corpse, technically it’s still alive, meaning blood vessels from the wound can grow into it. Surgeons have been using it for thousands of years. It’s called an allograft.’

  He put his coffee on the floor and ran a hand through his hair. It was still damp from the rain outside. I looked back at the clo
sed hospital door, to where the sedated girl lay, kept alive by a dead person’s skin.

  ‘Do you think she’ll ever be able to tell us why?’ I asked.

  I sensed, rather than saw, Nick Bell shake his head at my side. ‘Even if she survives, she’ll probably remember very little about it,’ he said. ‘We’ll probably never know what happened to her.’

  ‘MEG I THOUGHT he was going to come through the kitchen window,’ said Evi. ‘That he would just spring from the tree branch, straight through the glass, and that would be it.’

  ‘Do you want to rest for a while?’

  The two women had reached a wooden seat beneath a rose arbour. Evi put the brake on her chair and her companion, fellow psychiatrist and Cambridge alumna Megan Prince, sat beside her. When Evi had felt the need of someone to talk to about the events of the past year, Megan, who’d been just two years ahead of her at university, had been the obvious choice; known and trusted but not too close a friend. Evi had been seeing Megan weekly for three months. She wasn’t feeling a huge improvement but, as she knew better than most, these things took time.

  As always, Megan smelled of patchouli and Marlboro Lights, a fragrance from her student days that she seemed unable to leave behind.

  ‘I think I broke in here one night,’ said Evi, looking round at the perfect formation of beds, box hedges and grassed walkways. After a day of weak winter sun, frost still gleamed on the thin branches around them and the thorns looked as sharp as steel. ‘With cannabis and cider.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Almost certainly not.’ Evi smiled. ‘But names and faces escape me.’

  ‘Cider and cannabis can do that.’

  Silence fell as both women looked at the six-foot-high brick wall around the garden that Evi wouldn’t have a hope of climbing now.

  ‘Did you call the police?’ asked Megan quickly, as though anxious to get the conversation back on track. ‘On Friday night, I mean.’

  Evi turned back. There was no point dwelling on the past, but avoiding it wasn’t always easy because Megan looked as skinny and as young and dishevelled as she had in the old days. ‘From a locked bedroom,’ she replied. ‘Of course, by the time they arrived there was no sign of him.’

  Megan drew the lapels of her jacket a little closer round her neck and clenched her jaw, as though trying not to shudder. She still never wore enough clothes in cold weather. ‘Him?’ she asked.

  Evi shrugged. She had no idea whether the masked figure in her garden had been male or female.

  ‘The police came pretty quickly?’ Megan asked.

  ‘Yes. Some uniformed constables arrived first, then a detective sergeant a few minutes later.’ Directly in front of her a robin had landed on the stem of a rose bush. It paused and seemed to look directly at her.

  ‘Did they take it seriously?’

  The robin took flight and Evi looked back up again. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

  Megan glanced down for a second and squirmed, as though the seat were cold, or damp. ‘What did they find?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Evi. ‘No sign of a break-in. No footprints in the garden. No recent fingerprints inside other than mine.’

  A moment of silence, then the moment stretched. When Evi was in the counsellor’s chair, she waited the silences out.

  ‘There’s something you want to say, isn’t there?’ said Megan.

  ‘You won’t like me for doing so.’

  ‘Go for it.’

  Evi braced herself. ‘Is there any possibility someone could have accessed the notes you’ve made during our sessions?’ she asked.

  Megan tucked a loose coil of hair behind one ear. Then, ‘You think someone has hacked into my records?’ she asked. ‘And then that someone broke into your house and used his inside knowledge to scare you witless?’

  Evi pulled her face into an apologetic smile. ‘Doesn’t sound too likely, does it?’ she admitted. ‘But those pranks just seemed so personal. I haven’t discussed what happened last year with anyone but you. No one but you would know I have a phobia about fir cones. Do you remember we talked about it in one of our early sessions?’

  ‘It’s not just unlikely, it’s impossible,’ said Megan. ‘Our systems at the practice are completely secure. They have to be, to protect all our patients’ confidentiality. Even my colleagues couldn’t access my files without my passwords and most of them, frankly, have trouble switching their computers on in the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Evi. ‘I was on edge and then scared on Friday night. It just felt like someone had got inside my head.’

  ‘A bone man,’ said Megan, her forehead creased with frown lines. ‘But from what you’ve told me, the bone men were more like bonfire-night Guys. Built around a frame stuffed with rubbish and wearing clothes. They weren’t skeletal. You’re sure the figure in the tree was meant to be a bone man?’

  Evi felt some of the tension draining out of her. ‘You’re right,’ she said, after a few seconds. ‘There were people, in that place I told you about, who dressed as skeletons but they weren’t the bone men. The skeletons carried the bone men to the fire.’

  Megan’s thin, pencilled eyebrows disappeared into the coils of her fringe.

  ‘It was an odd town,’ said Evi.

  ‘Remind me to give it a miss next time I’m walking the Pennines.’

  Neither spoke for a moment.

  ‘Rag week can’t be very far away,’ said Megan. ‘Dressing up seems pretty much compulsory then. And fir cones are very common this time of year.’

  ‘True,’ said Evi. ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that someone was in my house.’

  ‘You mean the fir cones on the table? What did the police say about that?’

  ‘They didn’t think it was too sinister,’ said Evi. ‘But they advised I get the locks changed. Which I have done. The university’s maintenance department did it yesterday.’

  The two women fell quiet for a moment, as Megan looked at her scarlet fingernails and Evi watched a dried leaf fall from the stem of a rose bush.

  ‘Are you thinking about Harry as much?’ asked Megan.

  As if she ever stopped thinking about Harry. He was there, in her head, like an unspoken awareness of her own self. Didn’t mean she wanted to talk about him. And the college porter would be locking the garden gates soon.

  ‘Are you still worried about the suicides?’ asked Megan. ‘Did you talk to CID again?’

  Evi felt her eyes drop to the ground. She couldn’t tell Megan about the undercover investigation she’d instigated. About the girl she’d installed in her faculty. So now she was hiding things from her counsellor. She shook her head.

  ‘CID believe the suicides are exactly that,’ she said. ‘Suicides. There’s no evidence of coercion or third party involvement. They’ve respectfully suggested I concentrate on being accessible to vulnerable members of the university community and leave them to policing Cambridgeshire.’

  ‘Well, I guess we never hesitate to tell the police how to do their jobs when we see fit,’ replied Megan with a smile. Then the smile faded. ‘Wasn’t there a spate of suicides when we were here?’ she asked. ‘Or was that before your time?’

  Evi thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘From what I can gather, the suicide rate here has been bang on normal until five years ago,’ she said. She looked at her watch again. ‘Time’s up,’ she said. ‘Is Nick around this afternoon, do you know?’

  ‘I think he got called to the hospital. Do you want me to leave him a message?’

  ‘It’s OK. I’ll call him at home.’

  The two women left the walled garden and made their way the short distance down the street to the GPs’ surgery where Megan was based two days a week.

  As they turned the corner, Evi saw that an expensive-looking Japanese saloon was blocking her own car in. When he spotted them coming, the driver, a man she knew she’d seen before, got out. He was tall, late thirties, with short dark hai
r, square jaw and a muscular build. His dark suit looked expensive and fitted him well. Evi watched his dark eyes focus on Meg immediately behind her. As a slow, confident smile softened his jawline, she turned to see Meg smiling back at him.

  ‘Hey,’ he said to Meg, his left eye just hinting at a wink, before turning back to Evi. ‘Detective Inspector Castell, Cambridgeshire Police.’

  ‘John Castell?’ asked Evi, her eyes flicking from him to Meg.

  Meg nodded, still smiling. ‘Yes, this is John,’ she said. ‘John, this is Evi. Do you remember her now?’

  Castell smiled properly as he held out his hand. The wide grin gave his otherwise plain face a considerable dollop of charm. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I was at Emmanuel. Read Law and Psychology. You do look a bit familiar.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to meet you properly,’ said Evi. ‘Sorry if I’ve made Meg keep you waiting.’

  ‘Actually, I came to find you,’ he replied. ‘Your secretary told me you were here. I’ve been asked to have a look at your report of an intruder on Friday night.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Meg. She stretched up to kiss Castell on the cheek before disappearing inside the building.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought Friday night merited a detective inspector,’ Evi said. ‘Do I get special attention because I’m Meg’s friend?’

  ‘Partly that,’ said Castell. ‘But I’ve been keeping a watching brief on the suicides as well, so I’ve come across your name a couple of times before now. I wanted to have a chat with you about Friday, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Castell reached into his pocket and held out a small, thin sheet of paper in a clear plastic bag. Evi took it and looked down. The writing was very faint.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘A receipt,’ replied Castell. ‘From a card and gift shop in town. Dated three weeks ago. It’s for two greetings cards and a small wind-up toy.’

  Evi screwed up her eyes to make out the faint lettering. ‘It says skeleton toy,’ she said.