by S J Bolton
‘We took the toy you found in your house on Friday to the shop,’ said Castell. ‘They confirmed they’d had those toys in stock until a couple of weeks ago.’
‘So where did you find the receipt?’
Castell seemed to lean a little closer towards her. ‘Well, that’s the problem, Evi,’ he said. ‘According to the officers who attended your house on Friday evening, it was found in your desk at home.’
THE WOMAN BEHIND the hospital’s main reception desk gazed at Nick Bell as if he were a rock star who’d just wandered in off the streets. Not that I could entirely blame her. I made a point of avoiding exceptionally good-looking men myself, they always behaved as though they were doing you a big favour, but there was something about Bell, about the way he seemed oblivious of his looks and gave you his full attention, that was flattering in spite of all the warnings you could give yourself.
We’d gone back in to see Bryony again but there had seemed little point staying with a patient who was deeply sedated. ‘If she’s awake I just sit and talk to her for a while,’ Bell had told me in a low voice. ‘Any old stuff about what’s going on in the news, how the various university sports teams are doing. I imagine it must get quite bewildering for her otherwise, having no idea of the time, hearing nothing but nurses creeping around her and doctors muttering medical terminology.’
‘What about her family?’ I’d asked.
Nick’s mouth had given a little twist but he avoided making eye contact. ‘They’ve visited,’ he said. ‘Although not for a while. They live some way away. And she doesn’t seem to have many friends. I don’t know, maybe peace and quiet is what she needs. Maybe I’m just trying to salve my own conscience.’
We didn’t talk on the way out of the hospital. Nick seemed genuinely upset by the condition Bryony was in. Outside, the air was so cold I felt as though my face had been slapped.
‘It won’t be easy for you,’ he said, as we reached the car park. ‘Joining a university partway through the academic year. Friendships are already formed. Everyone around you will appear to know exactly what they’re doing. They’ll be busy. Won’t have time to look after a newcomer.’
‘I expect I’ll cope,’ I replied, before remembering I wasn’t self-reliant, cope-if-it-kills-me Lacey Flint any more. I was Laura Farrow, insecure and vulnerable. ‘I know what you mean though,’ I back-pedalled quickly. ‘Everyone seems to have formed tight little groups. I haven’t even met my room-mate yet. She’s never in.’
We’d reached my car. Bell glanced up at the clouds, which had taken on the colour of charcoal now the sun had gone in, then back down at me. ‘It was kind of you to come and see Bryony,’ he said. ‘Take care.’
He turned, walked quickly over to an old Range Rover, climbed inside and drove away.
I DROVE BACK to college via the B road where Nicole Holt had died. Remains of police tape still clung to trees and petrol-station flowers had been left at the side of the road. I parked and got out of the car.
It was an eerie enough spot. A narrow road, just wide enough for two cars to pass, with tall trees on either side. There were no street-lights and no kerb. Not somewhere you’d want to break down if you were female and on your own at night. It struck me as a very lonely place to take your own life.
In my Sunday-afternoon briefing, I’d learned that Nicole had bought a strong nylon rope in a hardware shop three days before her death (the police had found the receipt in her room) and had tied it round the thick trunk of a beech tree. The other end had gone round her neck.
The tree in question, still with police tape round its base, was on the left side of the road as I looked out of the city. It stood a good half-metre closer to the tarmac than most of its neighbours. By choosing this one, Nicole had minimized the chances of the rope’s being tangled on other trees.
I’d brought a torch from the car and by this time I needed it. I shone its beam up and down the tree trunk. Just over a metre from the ground, some of the bark had been broken away, no doubt by the sudden tightening of the nylon rope as it reached its full length.
The Mini convertible goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 11.8 seconds, according to the CID report into Nicole’s death. It wouldn’t have had time to reach that speed on this short stretch of road, probably hadn’t got to much more than thirty mph. Still fast enough to sever a slim neck.
I started to walk along the road, thinking that it would have required some planning, a suicide of this nature. You’d need to think about speed, distance, length of rope needed. Had the rope been too short, Nicole could be with Bryony right now, nursing a crippling neck injury. She’d been a history student. A suicide involving mathematical calculations didn’t really seem her thing.
I figured I was reaching the point where the rope had stretched tight and Nicole’s head had left her body. There would have been a lot of blood and I knew it hadn’t rained in Cambridge since Saturday afternoon.
Fearful of discovering I was walking across pink-stained frost I took a quick look down. No blood, just a few half-rotten remains of beech nuts and conker shells. And fresh tyre tracks. I looked back and followed them for a few yards. When they disappeared I stopped and shone the torch around. At the point where I was standing, a vehicle had left the road and driven instead along the grass verge. A short distance ahead, it had swerved to avoid a bank of earth and then gone on for another sixty paces before rejoining the road.
OK, think. The tracks had to be fresh because the CID file had contained a weather report. It had rained on Saturday afternoon and both road and surrounding ground had been damp. It hadn’t rained since, though, so any tracks or prints made after Saturday afternoon would still be here. Early Sunday morning, police tape had been stretched along the length of the road and, at each extremity, into the woods. It was still there.
So, sometime between late Saturday afternoon and early Sunday morning, a car had left the road and travelled about twenty yards along the verge.
I pulled out my phone and took close-up photographs of the tread. Then I turned back, following the tracks again. I stepped over the bank of earth just as a very cold, fine rain started to fall.
It couldn’t have been the Mini that made these tracks. I would compare tyre prints to be certain but it was impossible. On the road I could see the chalk mark that the police had made to indicate the point at which the rope stretched tight and Nicole was killed. The car that left the road had been further out of town. Even if the Mini had swerved after Nicole was dead (in itself quite likely) it could not have steered itself around the bank of earth. There’d been another vehicle here.
EVI LET HERSELF in, using the new keys the university’s maintenance department had provided. The house felt cold, even though the heating should have kicked in an hour ago. She checked the controls as she entered the kitchen. Both heating and hot water were switched off. She cursed softly and flicked both on. Getting cold always made the pain worse and she’d spent too much time outdoors today. She flicked the switch on the kettle and pulled open the fridge door. Cooked salmon, green vegetables, pasta. It was getting harder all the time to drum up any interest in food.
She left the room and went into her study.
DI Castell could not have been kinder. He’d stressed that if someone had been able to gain entry into her house to leave the fir cones and the skeleton toy behind, they could easily have left the receipt as well. It was being sent away for fingerprint analysis and it would make no difference to their treatment of the case. He’d done his best to reassure her.
Trouble was, after he’d left, Evi had checked back through her diary. On the date in question, she had been shopping in Cambridge. The receipt was from a shop she knew. She remembered buying two of the items – cards, one for a friend whose birthday was coming up, the other of Tuscan sunflowers, an all-purpose greeting card.
The receipt was for three items, two of which she definitely remembered buying. Was it remotely possible she’d bought the skeleton toy herself? Bought it
, put it in the cupboard upstairs and forgotten all about it? Grief and depression played tricks with people’s memories, she knew that perfectly well. She’d been depressed for a long time, even before what had happened last year. Losing Harry had been the final straw.
But to have done something so totally out of character and then to have forgotten about it completely. It wasn’t possible.
Was it?
Dinner in the college refectory, otherwise known as the Buttery, was a whole lot easier than dining in Hall but still an experience. I’d forgotten just how self-conscious young people can be. The students around me in the brightly lit, noisy dining room were all hair and limbs, brash loud accents and forced laughter. The girls fiddled with food on their plates and jewellery on their bodies; the boys scratched and yawned and used longer words than they seemed comfortable with.
Each kid around me appeared to have at least two conversations going, the first with their immediate neighbours, the second with some absent friend on the receiving end of text messages. The tinny beeping of texting was a constant backdrop to the buzz of conversation. Heads craned constantly to see who might have entered the room.
And this wasn’t even the busiest time. I’d sat in my room earlier, waiting for the queue outside the building to get smaller. I’d used the time to get to know my new laptop. Standard-issue Met laptops are ruggedized, serious pieces of kit that will stand up to a great deal of physical and intellectual punishment. They are as secure as you could hope a piece of IT equipment could be. One of those babies would have been far too conspicuous in the possession of an undergraduate, so I’d been given instead an off-the-shelf model along with clear instructions to keep it with me at all times, make sure the password requirement kicked in after sixty seconds of inactivity and not accept any incoming mail from unknown sources.
There was nothing in my inbox apart from a welcome email from Student Counselling Services with a Freshers’ questionnaire for me to fill in.
I’d glanced up. Still a queue. So I’d opened the Freshers’ questionnaire. Strictly confidential, totally anonymous, purely in the interests of researching general trends, etc., etc. I glanced quickly down the list of questions and decided it was needy, self-indulgent nonsense. Right up Laura Farrow’s street.
Did I find the experience of being at university for the first time overwhelming? Well, yes actually, I did. Was I unsure of the demands that were being placed on me? Yes, I could probably tick that one as well. Did I experience feelings of isolation and loneliness? Tell me about it.
I went down the questionnaire ticking boxes and half laughed when I realized I sounded a complete basket-case. I stopped when I realized 99 per cent of what I’d put was absolutely true. I closed the file and sent it back.
When the Buttery started to clear I went too. Around me kids were inviting each other for coffee or making arrangements to meet in various pubs or bars later. I even heard someone talking about the library. It was nearly half past seven and I wanted nothing more than to go back to my room, make my first report to Joesbury and curl up with a book. No such luck. I had work to do.
Back at her desk, Evi accessed her clinic’s files. The detective calling herself Laura Farrow had picked up on the reference in Bryony’s notes to possible rapes. It had been the only time during their conversation that her self-control had seemed to be slipping.
Evi’s clinic had a policy of attaching key words to the summaries of patient consultations. Rape would almost certainly be one of them. Evi keyed rape into the search engine and waited.
Thirty-eight case files were found. The most recent was the case of Bryony Carter. The next on the list was that of a girl who’d been raped by her uncle when she was fourteen. Evi didn’t bother with the details. She closed the file down and moved on. There were several other cases that academic year, a few more in the previous year. None seemed relevant. Evi was starting to lose heart when she got to the case of Freya Robin, a plant sciences student. The computer files contained only summaries – the more detailed notes of meetings weren’t usually typed up – but there were still sufficient similarities to Bryony’s case for Evi to read carefully.
During the Lent term three years earlier, Freya had talked about bad dreams, problems sleeping and an unsubstantiated fear that someone was getting access to her room at night while she slept. One night she’d woken in the small hours, convinced she’d been raped. Her college friends, alarmed at the semi-hysterical state they’d found her in, had persuaded her to go to the police. No physical evidence had been found on her body, other than some scratches and minor bruising, and the rape test the police had carried out had proved inconclusive. With nothing to go on, the police had been unable to pursue the case.
Freya had drowned herself in a university swimming pool six weeks later.
Evi reached across the desk for the list of suicides. Freya Robin was on it.
Cross-checking the two lists, it didn’t take Evi long to find the rest. Donna Leather, a 21-year-old medical student, had never used the word ‘rape’ in her counselling sessions, but like Freya and Bryony had talked about bad dreams, often of a sexual nature; of feeling hungover and sluggish in the morning, although she claimed she hadn’t been drinking; of soreness in the genital region. ‘Violated’ was the word Donna had used to describe how she’d felt on certain mornings, but as though her own mind were doing the abusing. Donna hadn’t gone to the police. She’d hanged herself within two months of first raising her concerns.
The same year, French-language student Jayne Pearson had reported her suspicions of ongoing rape to the police. They’d found substantial levels of ketamine in her blood, although she’d sworn she’d never taken it. Unfortunately for the case, no conclusive physical evidence of rape was found. Jayne had died later that year, after a gunshot wound to the head. The fourth and last similar case Evi found was that of Danielle Brown, a neurology student from Clare College. Danielle’s claims were all too familiar by this stage. Bad dreams, trouble sleeping and vague recollections of sexual abuse whilst she’d been asleep. Danielle had hanged herself three days before the Christmas vacation but had been found before she’d suffocated.
The computer screen went into sleep mode but Evi didn’t notice.
Including Bryony, it made five instances of possible rape in five years. Statistically, that wasn’t remotely remarkable in itself. But when you factored in that all five women had attempted to take their own lives shortly afterwards, the coincidence was starting to feel stretched.
From: DC Lacey Flint
Subject: Field Report 1
Date: Tuesday 15 January, 22.22 GMT
To: DI Mark Joesbury, Scotland Yard
It’s now ten thirty in the evening, Sir. I’ve drunk so much coffee I’m hyper and enough mineral water to keep me on the loo all night. I’ve been chatted up by nineteen-year-old nerds who stand five foot four in heels and drunken jocks who think manly sweat a powerful aphrodisiac. And a lesbian with peroxide blonde hair who was easily the best company of the lot. Many more evenings like this and I might just try batting for the other team.
I stopped typing. I was whingeing on my first night on a case but – good God above – less than an hour after leaving my room I could cheerfully have wrapped a nylon rope round Joesbury’s neck and pulled it tight. The thought that I might have to keep this up for another three months was enough to give me suicidal thoughts. I’d wandered from library to TV room to coffee bar to pub. I’d been anywhere and everywhere I could find where students hung out. I’d made small talk all evening and learned nothing.
I leaned back in the chair, stretched and turned my head first one way then the other. A shiny blue jacket strung across the opposite desk and a faint floral scent reminded me of my room-mate’s existence. OK …
Evi Oliver is very bright and certainly committed to her job but seems nervy and uptight. Has issues of her own, in my opinion, and could well be the type to overreact to a problem. I take it you’ve run a background chec
k, Sir. Any chance of sharing?
What I can’t ignore, though, are her concerns about the statistical anomalies in the suicide stats. Not only are there simply more of them than you would expect, but there is a disproportionate number of women on the list and the methods they’re choosing are untypically violent.
Practically none of what I’d written so far was in language suitable for a senior officer and I should just scrub it and start again, pretend I was writing to Dana Tulloch, or my DI at Southwark nick. Someone who didn’t rub me up the wrong way simply when I allowed myself to think about him.
I was too tired to start over. I went on to describe my visit to Bryony and her GP’s opinion that she was being neglected by her friends and family. It was nearly eleven o’clock by this stage and I had no idea whether Joesbury would be at home, on the top floor of that white-painted house in Pimlico, or out somewhere having fun.
Bryony Carter’s GP is exceptionally good looking and, whilst on the surface very nice, seems more involved with Bryony than I might expect a GP to be. Do you think I should try to get to know him a little better?
I finished by describing my visit to the site of Nicole Holt’s death.
The presence of another car on the road that night needs further investigation, in my view. I’ve compared the tyre print at the site with the prints of several tyres commonly used on Mini Coopers and found no matches at all. Not even close. A different vehicle was on that stretch of road close to the time Nicole died yet no mention of this in the CID report.
It was well after eleven by the time I finally pressed Send and put the laptop into sleep mode. It felt like I was alone in the block. I undressed, locked my door and crossed the corridor to the communal bathroom. Inside, I turned the taps on full pelt.
Evi had turned on the bath taps and begun the slow and difficult process of getting undressed when the phone rang. The first thought in her head, as always, was Harry. It was never Harry, though. Harry had probably forgotten all about her by now.