by S J Bolton
‘Too many women,’ muttered Evi. ‘It’s flying in the face of all the statistics.’
On Laura’s laptop computer was a spreadsheet with exactly the same information and the two women had tried endless calculations in an attempt to discover a link between the victims.
‘There’s no link,’ said Laura. ‘The colleges they belonged to, the courses they did, they’re all random. They come from all over the country, a couple of them from overseas. They’re not all members of the sailing club, or the young Tories. There’s nothing that connects them.’
‘Seventy per cent had a history of psychiatric problems,’ said Evi. ‘But you’d expect that anyway with a group of self-harmers.’
‘HOLMES might have more success,’ said Laura. ‘That’s the police computer system I was telling you about. If they all had their ears pierced at the age of nine, it’ll spot it.’
‘Well, that’s not impossible,’ said Evi. ‘A lot of good-looking girls up there. Such a dreadful shame.’
Laura had stepped back to give herself a better look at the entire wall.
‘Not that it’s any less sad when a plain girl kills herself,’ Evi added quickly.
‘Hello,’ muttered Laura.
‘What?’
Laura had stepped closer to the wall again, was walking from one photograph to the next.
‘I think you’ve found a link,’ she said. ‘Look.’ She pulled a photograph off the wall and held it out to Evi. ‘Olivia Cutler,’ she said. ‘Second-year chemistry student. Churchill College.’
Evi looked down at a photograph of an overweight girl with lank hair. Laura had taken two more photographs down. ‘Anita Hunt,’ she said. ‘First-year Russian student. Bit horsey, wouldn’t you say? And Helen Stott, linguistics. Needed a serious skin-care regime.’
‘Laura, what …?’
‘Rebecca Graham, the classics student, was no oil painting either,’ Laura continued. ‘That’s the four uglies out of the way. Now, look at the rest. Hang on, let me just get rid of the boys. Look at the rest of the girls.’
There were nineteen photographs left. Judith Creasey, a striking blonde engineering student from Churchill College who’d self-asphyxiated; Kate George, from Peterhouse, with black shiny hair and sparkling eyes who’d lain down in a bath and dropped a hairdryer into it; Sarah Treen, of Magdalene, a beautiful black girl with glossy skin and braided hair who’d thrown herself on to a train track. Every photograph still on the wall was of a slim, attractive young woman.
‘I think he likes them pretty,’ said Laura.
‘HE?’ SAID EVI. ‘We have a he?’
‘Just think about it,’ I said. ‘If your first theory was right, that there are websites out there where the dangerously disturbed make contact with the seriously depressed, and then goad them into self-harm just for the fun of it, what are the chances of nearly 70 per cent of them being very pretty women?’
‘Well, slim,’ admitted Evi. ‘You think these girls were targeted?’
‘Not slim,’ I said. ‘Verging on non-existent. What I’m struggling with is how far are they going? If the victim won’t jump, does she get pushed?’
‘Laura, slow down. CID investigated all these deaths,’ said Evi. ‘If there was any suggestion that they were anything other than suicides, surely they’d have found it.’
‘You’d hope so,’ I said, thinking about the second set of car tracks at the site of Nicole’s death.
‘Your senior officers,’ said Evi. ‘The ones who sent you here. Did they hint that we might not be looking at suicides?’
‘Not for a second,’ I said.
‘Nearly two hundred people saw Bryony set fire to herself,’ said Evi.
‘No, they saw her stagger into the hall in flames,’ I said.
Evi’s creamy face visibly paled. ‘Oh, good God. Laura, you can’t think …’
‘I don’t know what to think right now. But even if she did strike the match, she was high on some powerful hallucinogen.’
Evi went behind her desk, pulled open a drawer and took out a file. ‘You’re right. Extremely high levels of dimethyltryptamine in Bryony’s system,’ she said after a few moments of searching. ‘Her blood and urine were tested shortly after she was admitted. Standard procedure.’
‘I know very little about hallucinogenic drugs,’ I said. ‘Can they make you do things you wouldn’t normally?’ I’d done basic courses on the most common street drugs as part of my training, all police officers do, but since I’d never worked for the drug squad my knowledge of the different drugs available and their effects was pretty weak.
Evi was nodding her head. I only had half her attention. She was still reading through Bryony’s notes.
‘There’s nothing about recreational drug use in her counselling notes,’ she said. ‘We always ask whether students have any sort of drug history.’
‘The paraphernalia for smoking it were found in her bedroom,’ I said.
Evi looked up and blinked. ‘She smoked it?’
‘According to the CID report,’ I said. ‘It’s the usual way, from what I’ve read.’
‘I was never shown the CID report,’ said Evi, her eyes going back down again. ‘That’s worrying.’
‘What?’
‘Well, two things, the first being that this is a very high concentration to have come from inhalation. I’d expect this sort of level to be administered intravenously.’
‘CID found a smoking bowl and pipe, not a hypodermic,’ I said.
We both thought about that for a moment. I didn’t want to say the word ‘staging’, but it was right up there on the end of my tongue. Maybe someone had wanted to make it look as though Bryony had voluntarily taken drugs, only not quite got the detail right.
‘If there’d been a post-mortem, would that discrepancy have been picked up?’ I asked.
Evi nodded. ‘Almost certainly,’ she said.
‘What else?’ I asked. ‘You said two things were worrying you.’
‘Bryony was taking an SSRI,’ she said. ‘That’s an antidepressant, in the same class as Prozac. There’s no way Nick would have prescribed that if he’d known she was using hallucinogens. So she must have lied to him and been pretty convincing.’
Or he’d known exactly what he was doing.
‘Because …’ I said.
‘Hallucinogens react badly with certain antidepressants,’ she said. ‘Taken together they’ve been known to create a dissociative fugue state.’
‘Come again?’
She looked up at me. ‘A state of temporary amnesia,’ she said. ‘When the sufferer forgets completely who he or she is and goes wandering, sometimes lost and frightened, sometimes imagining they’re someone else entirely. It can last for hours, or weeks.’
‘Nicole Holt disappeared for several days before she died,’ I reminded her. ‘She turned up in quite a state, with no recollection of where she’d been or what she’d been doing.’
Evi looked at me. When Bryony had tried to kill herself, she’d been taking a combination of drugs that could have wiped out huge chunks of her memory. A few weeks later, another girl with a history of memory loss had taken her own life.
‘If there was DMT in Nicole’s bloodstream too, that can’t be coincidence,’ I said. ‘Her post-mortem was done this week, wasn’t it?’
Evi nodded at me. ‘Tuesday, I think,’ she said. ‘Nicole disappeared, you say?’
‘I need to get hold of that report,’ I said. ‘Can you access it?’
Evi shook her head. ‘She wasn’t my patient,’ she said. ‘If Nicole had been taking drugs, or if there were any excess levels of alcohol in her system, it’ll all come out at the inquest. Until then …’
I breathed out heavily. The normal course of events was for an inquest to be opened and then immediately adjourned. The full inquest could be six months away. ‘Do you know the local coroner?’ I asked.
Evi waved her head around in a completely non-committal way. ‘I’ve met him,’ she s
aid. ‘At one of the college dinners. We talked for a while.’
‘What sort of age?’
She shrugged. ‘Late fifties.’
‘Married?’
‘Bachelor, I thought. What has this …’
‘Gay or straight?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
‘Oh, like you’d need to. Gay or straight?’
‘Straight,’ said Evi. ‘Quite flirtatious, if you must know.’
‘Couldn’t be better,’ I said. ‘We need to see him. Do you have his home phone number?’
Evi held up one hand. ‘Hang on a sec. You said a girl had disappeared. Did you say her name was Jessica?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, why?’
Instead of answering, she picked up her desk phone and dialled a number.
‘Hello,’ she said after a moment. ‘Could you try Jessica Calloway’s room for me?’
We waited. I was trying to remember what I’d seen on various websites the night before about the girl who was missing.
‘Hello, may I speak to Jessica, please?’ said Evi a second later. ‘This is Dr Oliver.’ The frown line on her forehead deepened. ‘I see,’ she went on after a moment. ‘And have you spoken to her family at all?’
She looked up at me. For the first time, I thought she looked scared. ‘OK, thank you,’ she said, before putting the phone down.
‘Jessica Calloway,’ she said to me. ‘I’ve been seeing her for a few months now. She has a history of depression and eating disorders. I saw her on Tuesday and was seriously concerned. I was starting to think about hospitalization. Now she hasn’t been seen since that evening. I need to go and talk to the people in her block, her tutor.’
‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘You’re taking the local coroner out to lunch.’
IT WASN’T FAR from Evi’s house to St Catharine’s. When I reached the candy-striped canopies of the open-air market, I got off the bike and pushed it through the stalls. The early sunshine had all but disappeared by this time and the sky had clouded over. It had a yellow, heavy look that suggested snow wasn’t so far away. I wove my way in and out of the shoppers, past bread stalls, flower stalls, fruit and veg stalls, and everywhere I turned there was an almost visible sense of urgency. People wanted to get their shopping done and get home before the snow came down. I picked up speed again and was soon at the college.
I made my way up to the third floor slowly, praying I wasn’t coming down with something serious. The last thing I needed was to be laid up in bed for days. At the top, I stopped to get my breath, then found Jessica’s room.
She would have a view of Main Court from her window. I knocked and waited. At the sound of a lavatory being flushed I turned to see another young woman coming out of a communal bathroom.
‘Hi,’ I said, before she had time to speak. ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’m here about Jessica.’
‘Nineteen dead women,’ said Evi. ‘It could be twenty by the end of the weekend. One of my patients hasn’t been seen since Tuesday evening.’
Dr Francis Warrener, the coroner for the city of Cambridge, lifted the corner of his napkin and dabbed his mouth. He’d been amenable enough to Evi’s suggestion that they meet for lunch and had sounded intrigued when she’d admitted she needed a favour. Now he was clearly regretting agreeing to see her. Well, tough.
‘It’s only a matter of time before the national press run with the story, asking very pertinent questions about what we’ve allowed to go on here. And before some parents start to get litigious,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about you, Francis, but when that happens I want to know all my boxes are ticked.’
Francis Warrener was small and slim and slick. All his movements were neat and precise. He had dark brown eyes, features that might have been pretty on a woman and very white teeth. He spoke little, but every word he uttered was precise and to the point. He’d stopped speaking a couple of minutes earlier.
‘You know the first question always asked in cases like these?’ said Evi. ‘Could anything have been done sooner? When I’m asked that, I don’t want to have to say, well, yes, actually, I was a bit worried, but I didn’t want to rock any professional boats.’
Warrener picked up his fork, speared a pea and put it carefully into his mouth. Most of his food was still on the plate, cooling rapidly. ‘If you’ve reported your concerns to the police,’ he said, ‘then surely you’ve done all you can.’
‘Yes, that might just save my career,’ said Evi. ‘And if it’s not enough by itself, then the fact that I met you, spelled out my concerns and asked you to look into it further will also help. Having both you and the police tell me to mind my own business will, at a pinch, exonerate me.’
‘And pass the buck firmly into my court,’ said Warrener.
‘I think you just mixed a couple of metaphors but, basically, yes,’ said Evi, forcing her cheek muscles into a smile. She waited, while Warrener pushed the remains of his chicken breast to the side of his plate and then put both knife and fork neatly down in the exact centre of it.
‘Why don’t you just look,’ suggested Evi, feeling sorry for him, but not enough to back down. ‘If you go through the reports and there’s nothing to substantiate what I’m saying, just tell me. I’ll accept your word for it. Then no confidences will be broken and no professional rules breached.’
‘And if I do find something?’ he asked.
‘Then you’ll be very glad you looked,’ said Evi, knowing he was going to do it. ‘And if you think that’s even a possibility, we shouldn’t be wasting any time.’
Nearly an hour later I’d learned nothing new. Except that it’s possible to feel seriously concerned about someone you’ve never met. I’d explained I worked for Jessica’s counsellor, and her friends had been happy to talk. After thirty minutes I felt like I’d known her myself. She was a girl with problems, that had been obvious from the day she’d arrived at the college. She was unnaturally obsessive about her appearance, in particular her weight, and hadn’t put anything in her mouth without carefully weighing up its calorific value. Sensing her vulnerability, people had begun picking on her.
‘Which people?’ I’d asked.
The girls had looked at each other for inspiration.
‘We never found out,’ said the one with cropped blonde hair. ‘Most people round here just don’t seem the type. Everyone’s pretty nice. A lot of it was on websites, you know, that sort of thing. Those things are completely anonymous.’
‘But there were practical jokes played on her too,’ I said. Evi had given me a quick summary before I left.
‘Yeah, but we never saw who was doing it,’ said the one with brown pigtails wrapped, Princess Leia style, above her ears. ‘During the day this floor is pretty quiet. Anyone could come and go and never be seen.’
As the term had gone on, Jessica had become more and more withdrawn, sometimes not leaving her room for whole days at a time.
‘Do you think she might have been on drugs?’ I asked.
Around the room, eyes became evasive.
‘If she’s in trouble, you won’t help her by keeping quiet,’ I said.
‘I’m sure she was,’ said the cropped blonde. ‘You just had to look into her eyes some mornings.’
‘We don’t know that for certain, though,’ said the one with the yellow and purple scarf wrapped round her neck. ‘You’re just guessing.’
‘There were days when she could barely get out of bed and I never saw her drinking much alcohol,’ said the blonde. ‘She was on drugs.’
‘Do you know where she was getting them from?’ I asked. ‘Did you see anyone dodgy hanging around? Was there anyone she met, anywhere she went on a regular basis?’
They looked at each other, thought some more and shook their heads.
‘Did she have money problems?’ I asked. Drugs were invariably expensive.
‘She never seemed to,’ replied Princess Leia. ‘She spent quite a lot on clothes and make-up.’
‘Did you notice scars on h
er arms?’ I asked. ‘Or a constant sniff? Did you smell anything odd in her room?’
More blank looks, more head shakes. Jessica wasn’t coming across as a classic drug addict. Neither had Bryony. I thanked them for their time, made sure they had my number and Evi’s in case anything happened and told them I was sure Jessica would be fine. I was lying. I was becoming more and more convinced that by the end of the weekend, Jessica would be dead.
Leaving the building I had a text from Evi to say she was on her way to the coroner’s office. He’d agreed to look through his files. She asked me to meet her back at her house in a couple of hours.
So I had time to kill. What I wanted to do was speak to Joesbury. Or at least let him know what I’d found out. It was still little more than a theory, though, and he’d been very clear about not contacting him unless it was an emergency. Couple of hours. I decided to check on Bryony.
Evi looked at her watch. The dog had been alone now for three hours. It could have peed on the carpet, chewed the furniture, howled a hole in the roof. And had Laura actually fed it that day? Had it been walked?
‘Evi.’
Evi looked up to see Warrener in the doorway. He had a single sheet of paper in his right hand.
‘Anything?’ she asked.
Warrener glanced down at the sheet of paper and then back up at Evi.
‘I checked eleven post-mortem reports,’ he said. ‘Starting with the most recent, that of Nicole Holt.’
Evi nodded. When she and Laura had taken out the boys, the less attractive girls and the girls whose suicides had failed, the list had numbered eleven. She’d asked Francis to check if any of the women had been under the influence of drugs when they’d taken their own lives.
He handed over the sheet of paper. ‘I’ll be emailing this to the chief constable on Monday morning,’ he said. ‘What he makes of it is anyone’s guess.’