by S J Bolton
The butter practically sizzled when it made contact with the warm slice of bread he’d offered me. I didn’t have to spread, it was just going to ooze its way across the surface.
‘Liz Notley’s hedgerow jam,’ he said, pushing a jar of red stuff towards me. ‘Excellent.’
‘Do I want to know what’s in hedgerow jam?’ I took a bite by way of experiment and, in fairness, it was excellent.
‘Mainly blackberries,’ he replied. ‘Some wild apples, sloes, hips and haws.’
Hips and haws? I wasn’t going to ask. ‘So, you’re gorgeous, you’re a GP and you bake your own bread,’ I said. ‘I guess the catch must be your embarrassing taste in music. Were we listening to Billy Joel last night?’
He made a sheepish face. ‘You got me,’ he said. ‘We used to play it around the house a lot when I was a kid. I guess it reminds me of Mum. Another one?’
And he’d loved his mother! I let him cut me another slice of bread. I felt as though I could eat the whole loaf if it was offered. If this was what mornings after were like – blimey, they were quite nice.
‘Lucky for me you were snoring before Neil Diamond came on,’ he said.
That took a second to register. ‘I don’t snore.’
‘You do,’ he said. ‘I could hear you from the corridor. But only in a cute, snuffly, dormouse sort of way.’ He raised his wrist and looked at the slim, elegant man’s watch he wore. ‘We have to hustle,’ he said. ‘Can I call you tonight?’
He found my coat and boots and ushered me out of the house and into my car. The two pointers went with him, jumping into the back of his Range Rover. He set off along the pothole-strewn path and I followed more slowly, not sure how much punishment my suspension could cope with, or how I was going to deal with the turn events had taken. I’d started this investigation with no real idea of what it had in store for me, but what I really hadn’t expected was that I’d find myself with a boyfriend.
Or, at nearly twenty-eight years old, with the knowledge that I snore.
I DROVE BACK to St John’s, parked the car and jumped out, knowing that if I didn’t run I’d be late for my first lecture. All around me, people had the same idea. Bikes were speeding past, people hurrying through the rear gates. Just one solitary figure wasn’t moving. A tall man, padded coat concealing his muscular build, woollen hat pulled down over his ears, was leaning against one of the gate’s pillars.
I needed to touch base with Evi before I went out again, find out the latest on Jessica. I also wanted to check emails.
The man in the padded jacket straightened up when he saw me coming and stepped into my path. I slowed down.
Turquoise eyes were looking directly into mine. Don’t give him a chance, I told myself. Get in there first. Ask him where the hell he’s been, how he can just abandon you like that. I couldn’t say a word. All I could do was to look into his eyes and wish something large and heavy would fall down from the old building and knock me into oblivion. I stopped three feet away and waited for him to start. It was going to be bad. He was going to say things I’d never be able to forget.
‘Good morning,’ Joesbury said. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine,’ I replied, still bracing myself for the blow. ‘You?’
He actually smiled. ‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said. ‘New orders for you, Flint. Go to your room, pack your bags and drive yourself back to London. Report to the Yard nine o’clock tomorrow for a debrief.’
It took me a second to take it in. ‘I’m not sure I …’
‘Don’t contact your room-mate, Dr Oliver, or any of the people in college. Above all, don’t attempt to contact Nick Bell. If you do, we’ll know.’
I’d expected it to be bad. I hadn’t expected this.
‘What’s going on?’
He sighed and looked at his watch. ‘You’re off the case,’ he said. ‘I want you out of Cambridge within the hour.’
‘Oh, screw you, Joesbury.’
OK, that wasn’t wise, I know that, but I wasn’t having him pulling rank on me when we both knew what this was about. He barely blinked. ‘Excuse me?’ he said.
‘You can’t kick me off the case because I spent the night with someone.’
And then he laughed. ‘Get over yourself, Flint,’ he said. ‘The only interest I have in your boyfriend is that he’s taken your mind off the job and seriously jeopardized your cover. The decision’s made.’
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I began.
He held up one hand. ‘Save it for the Yard, Flint. That’ll be soon enough.’
I wasn’t going to win this. I had to turn and leave now if I wanted to retain any shred of dignity. But I took a step closer. I could smell coffee on his breath.
‘I think you need a reality check,’ I said. ‘Students have sex. They’re known for it. My room-mate never sleeps in her own bed.’
He leaned away as though I still had morning breath. I probably did. ‘No, I’m giving you a reality check,’ he said. ‘Sending you here was a massive mistake. You’ve disobeyed orders from the moment you arrived. You’ve persistently run around like some sort of demented Nancy Drew, poking your nose in everywhere and threatening to jeopardize months of work. Your antics yesterday were the last straw.’
Three girls passing looked at us curiously. It was pretty obvious to everyone in the vicinity that we were rowing. I didn’t care. Something he’d just said had made my ears prick up like a fox hound’s.
‘What do you mean, months of work?’
For the first time, he couldn’t look me in the eye. ‘You have nothing like the focus needed for this sort of operation,’ he said to the snow at our feet. ‘I want your bags packed in thirty minutes.’
‘What do you mean, months of work? What the hell is going on here?’
He turned away, tried to walk off. I wasn’t having it. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
He took a deep breath. ‘Take your hands off me,’ he said, ‘or I’ll stick you on.’
Stick me on meant make an official complaint. I was past caring. I stepped closer. ‘What job have I taken my mind off?’ I insisted. ‘What exactly is the job here, Joesbury? Every time I send you information, you tell me to butt out, that I’m not investigating, that there’s nothing to investigate, to keep my eyes open and my head down. Now you’re telling me I’ve messed up months of work.’
Getting this close gave him the perfect opportunity to look down and sneer. ‘How come every time we get close, you stink of another man?’
I was going to break his nose for that the second I had a chance. In the meantime …
‘Women are being drugged and abused and raped,’ I said. ‘They’re disappearing from college and turning up seriously fucked up. Then they’re dying. Someone is doing this and you know it, don’t you? But every time I try to help, you say the same thing. Don’t interfere, don’t ask questions, just keep up the good-looking fruitcake act … Wait a minute …’
As my hands released him, Joesbury stepped back. He dropped his eyes to the ground and ran a hand over his face.
‘You set me up,’ I said.
‘Lacey …’
‘I’m bait,’ I said, and half of me was praying he’d deny it. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? I can’t believe you’d do that to me again.’
Even I knew enough about undercover work to know that officers were never sent into operations without being fully apprised of the facts. Joesbury had broken a major rule by keeping me in the dark. He turned his back on me and looked up at the sky. I watched his shoulders rise and fall and knew that I’d have done it anyway, if he’d asked. But to know he’d put me in danger without even …
‘You put me in Bryony’s room, made me as conspicuous as possible,’ I said. ‘You know what’s going on here. You know why women are ending up dead. When would you have stepped in, sir? When my corpse came floating down the Cam?’
He turned back. The skin around his eyes was red. ‘Lacey, I wanted to tell you,’ he said. �
�I have to obey orders too.’
I’d never heard Joesbury sound pathetic before. ‘I’m next on the list, aren’t I?’ I said. ‘Jessica will turn up dead sometime in the next couple of days and then it’s my turn. I’ve already had the college hazing ritual and the weird hallucinogenic dreams. Evi thought I’d been drugged two days ago. I told her she was wrong. Looks like she wasn’t.’
His face stiffened. ‘What do you mean, you’ve been drugged?’
‘Oh, like you didn’t know. Apparently I was displaying all the symptoms of recreational drug use. As was Bryony, as were Nicole and Jessica. I have no idea how they do it, but you know, don’t you? You know!’
Joesbury pulled himself together. He stepped closer, took my arm and started to frogmarch me down the path. ‘OK, I need you to stop yelling now, Flint. They’d never have targeted you this quickly. If you really have been drugged, it means they know who you are. Who have you told?’
So now everything was my fault. ‘No one, you prat. Evi knows, that’s all.’
‘What about your boyfriend?’
‘Thinks I’m Laura Farrow.’
‘This is serious. You’re leaving now.’ He half walked, half dragged me back to where I’d left the car and waited while I opened it up.
‘Go to the Yard now,’ he told me. ‘Report to DCI Phillips. I’ll meet you there later.’
‘What about my room?’ I said. ‘My stuff?’
‘I’ll sort it. Now go.’
I got into the car, started the engine and looked at him. Maybe I wanted to see if he really meant it. He raised one arm and pointed in the direction of the M11. He did. He was an arrogant, unreasonable bastard but he was my senior officer. I started the engine and drove along the road without looking back. As I turned the corner, my phone rang. It was Evi.
‘Can you meet me at the hospital?’ she said. ‘I’m on my way there now. Jessica’s turned up.’
I ALMOST WALKED past the woman in the wheelchair on the second-floor corridor before realizing that it was Evi. We both stopped and faced each other.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I asked, in a low voice.
In response, Evi blinked away tears and I knew she was searching for the right words. I crouched down so my face was on a level with hers. Her lovely creamy skin looked like paper and her eyes seemed to have lost all their colour. The frown line between her brows deepened.
‘She isn’t dead,’ she told me. ‘Physically, she’s not too bad. Mentally is another story entirely.’
Not dead? But that figured. Nicole had come back from her disappearance. For a while.
‘What has she told us?’ I asked. ‘Where has she been?’
Evi shook her head. ‘Let’s talk when we’ve seen her,’ she said. ‘Do you mind pushing me? I’m not feeling too great.’
Given how she looked, I’d have called that an understatement. She barely had the strength to hold herself upright in the chair. I stood up, took hold of the chair’s handles, and we set off.
‘She was found in her room at St Catharine’s first thing this morning,’ Evi told me after a few seconds. ‘The door was slightly ajar, one of her neighbours poked her head in and found Jessica fully dressed on the bed. She called me first. I called the ambulance.’
A little out of breath, Evi gave herself a minute.
‘She was conscious for the thirty minutes the ambulance took to arrive and said nothing helpful,’ she went on as we turned a corner and narrowly avoided running into a porter pushing an elderly woman along on a bed. ‘She claims to have no idea where she’s been or what she’s been doing for the past five days. She didn’t even know what day it was.’
We came to the nurses’ station and were directed to a door at the end of the corridor. As I let go of the chair handles to push the door open I caught sight of the people inside. A girl with fair hair asleep on the bed, and Nick Bell standing at its foot. He’d been staring down at the girl with a frown on his face. When he looked up and saw us, his face cleared.
‘Hi,’ he mouthed at me. Then he turned to Evi. ‘Everything stable,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s unduly worried. They’ve taken bloods and salivas like you asked. They’ve asked for results later today if possible. And a police doctor’s on her way to do an intimate examination.’
‘Has she said anything?’ asked Evi.
‘Got very agitated when she arrived here, apparently,’ he said. ‘Rambling about wooden clowns or something.’
‘She’s scared of clowns,’ said Evi. ‘Did they sedate her?’
He nodded. ‘Ten milligrams of diazepam intravenously. She’ll be out for a couple of hours.’
I had to bite my lip. We needed to talk to Jessica now.
‘I’m having her transferred to the psychiatric ward as soon as they have a room free,’ said Evi.
‘You’re admitting her?’ Nick looked surprised.
Evi nodded. ‘And putting her on suicide watch. She was a serious risk before she disappeared, in my view. I’m taking no chances.’
Nick looked at the girl on the bed and then back at Evi. ‘Her parents will be here later today,’ he said. ‘They might not be too keen on that idea.’
I opened my mouth and closed it again. An undergraduate student would not get involved in a professional disagreement between two medics.
‘Tough,’ said Evi. ‘I’m keeping this one alive.’
Nick looked at me. ‘Laura, can you give me a minute with Evi?’ he asked.
I gave Evi a don’t-you-give-in look and left the room. Leaning against the corridor wall, I could see Nick, through the room’s window, crouched in front of Evi, arguing with her. He did it gently, though, at one point putting his hand on her arm in a concerned gesture. She seemed to be trying to reassure him. I looked at my watch. I should have been on the M11 by now, speeding towards London.
In the room, Nick straightened up, patted Evi’s arm and opened the door. ‘I’m already late for morning surgery,’ he said to me, as the door to Jessica’s room closed behind him. ‘Any chance of seeing you tonight?’
Difficult to think of anything less likely. If I wasn’t in Scotland Yard arguing for my job by the time night fell, I’d be in my own flat in London looking through Situations Vacant. ‘If only,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a lot of notes to catch up on.’
‘I’ll call you at nine,’ he said. ‘See if I can’t persuade you over for a late supper.’ He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and disappeared off down the corridor. Pushing aside the nagging thought that I might never see him again, I went back into the room. Evi had pushed her chair to Jessica’s bedside.
‘We need to talk to her,’ I said. ‘I can stay with her until she wakes up.’
What was I thinking of? If I wasn’t in London before midday, my career was probably over.
‘Better if I do that,’ Evi said. ‘She knows me. But if there’s been no improvement on an hour ago, she won’t be able to tell us anything.’
I stepped closer and took my first real look at Jessica. At blonde corkscrew curls, skin like milky coffee, a slender, five-foot-seven-inch frame.
‘How are they doing it?’ I said. ‘How do they find the pretty, vulnerable girls in the first place and then know which buttons to press?’
Evi shook her head. Too quickly, it seemed to me.
‘They have medical expertise, don’t they?’ I said. ‘You’ve thought of that yourself, you just didn’t want to say. The drugs, the psychiatric history, it all fits.’
Evi sighed. ‘I have,’ she admitted. ‘And there’s something I haven’t told you.’
I looked round, spotted a visitor’s chair and sat in it. Even when my eyes were on a level with Evi’s she still found it difficult to look at me.
‘Fifteen years ago, when I was an undergraduate, there were five student suicides in one year,’ she said. ‘The only time until recently the figures have spiked at all. I mentioned it to Francis Warrener on Saturday and he remembered them. He also checked back through his old files. The aut
horities at the time were convinced bullying was a factor but they couldn’t prove anything.’
I waited, not sure where she was going. Fifteen years was a long time.
‘Three of the five were medical students,’ Evi went on. ‘From three different colleges, so the common denominator was the course they were doing.’
I waited some more.
‘I know of four medical students from those days who are still at the university,’ Evi said. ‘I’m one of them. My friend Megan Prince, like me a practising psychiatrist, is another. Nick Bell’s a third. Do you see now why I didn’t want to say anything?’
‘You said four. Was Scott Thornton the other?’
‘How did you …?’ Evi sighed and nodded her head.
‘Another friend of yours?’ I asked.
‘Not really. I didn’t know him at all fifteen years ago. We say hello if we bump into each other but that’s all. I know it looks bad but I just can’t see it, Laura. I know and trust both Nick and Meg. And Scott Thornton saved Bryony. He was the one who put the flames out and summoned help when everyone else was just in shock.’
Of course he was. I knew I’d heard that name somewhere before. I’d read it in the report Joesbury had given me the night he’d briefed me on the case.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s just pursue the medic-in-general angle before we get bogged down with specific practitioners. Could it be someone here, at the hospital?’
‘The girls would only be on the hospital’s records if they’d been admitted,’ Evi said. ‘I don’t remember many instances of hospitalization, do you?’
‘No. What about a GP?’ I said.
‘There are twenty different practices in Cambridge,’ Evi told me. ‘Patient information is confidential to each one. We can double-check if any practice had more of the victims than others but I think we’d have spotted it already.’
She was right, we would have done.
‘They’re getting into these girls’ heads somehow,’ I said. ‘Could it be someone at your clinic? A counsellor would be in the best position to know what freaks someone out, wouldn’t they?’