by S J Bolton
‘I’ve thought of that, too,’ Evi told me. ‘Only about half of the girls came to us for counselling. Even if someone at SCS has been hacking into his or her colleagues’ confidential files, they wouldn’t have found anything on the other half.’
I thought about that for a second. ‘I think I sort of assumed everyone at the university was somehow on your system,’ I said.
‘What gave you that idea?’ Evi asked me.
‘Well, probably that questionnaire your department sent round,’ I said. ‘I thought it said it went to all new students.’
‘What questionnaire?’ said Evi.
I looked at her, saw what was probably my own expression reflected on her face and dug into my bag for my laptop. ‘Give me a sec,’ I said, finding the email with its attachment that I’d received and completed a week ago. ‘There,’ I said, giving Evi the laptop.
She looked at the screen. Her frown lines deepened and she tapped her middle finger on the scroll-down button a couple of times. Finally, ‘I’ve never seen this before,’ she said. ‘This is nothing to do with the counselling services. There’s a whole section on phobias and irrational fears.’
‘Christ.’ I turned, walked to the window, giving myself time to think. ‘We can’t rule Megan, Nick and Thornton out,’ I said. ‘Between them they easily have the medical and psychiatric knowledge needed.’
‘Scott Thornton redesigned the medical faculty’s IT system about six months ago,’ said Evi. ‘He’s got the IT skills.’
The sky outside was the colour of unpolished silver and seemed to be pressing down closer to earth. I had a similar feeling in my head, as though there wasn’t enough space for all the information trying to cram itself in. Oh boy, had I picked the right day to fall out with my senior officer.
A sudden movement made me look round. Evi seemed to be spasming in her chair, a look of intense pain on her face. ‘Laura, could you give me my bag, please?’ she gasped.
Her bag was two feet away from her on the floor. I picked it up and handed it over, then watched Evi fumble inside before popping two oval-shaped pills into her mouth. The second made her choke. She coughed and wheezed for the few moments it took me to fetch a glass of water from the sink in the corner. I handed it over and she drank for several seconds. When she was calmer she looked at me with tears in her eyes.
‘What on earth do we do?’ she asked me, and something about how vulnerable she looked helped me decide.
‘You can make sure Jessica’s OK,’ I said. ‘You’re going to admit her, right? Does that mean she’ll be safe? That no one can get at her?’
Evi was looking scared. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘The psychiatric wards are secure. They’re kept locked and the patients are watched all the time.’
‘Then I think you should go home and rest. Later, if you feel up to it, you can try to dig up names of people who studied medicine here fifteen years ago,’ I went on. ‘We can go through the list together, see if anyone stands out. And I’d like you to give me Megan Prince’s address, if you know it. I already have Thornton’s. And Nick’s,’ I added after a second.
‘Why, what are you …’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve involved you enough in this already. You’re clearly not well.’
Evi shook her head. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘No, you’re not. You’re ill,’ I told her. ‘Listen, I have to go now but I’ll come round later to walk the dog and see how you are. In the meantime, if Jessica says anything else, call me.’
Evi agreed that she would and I left the hospital. Back in my car, I dialled Joesbury’s number and held my breath. After two seconds I got a recorded message.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m still in town. I have good reason. Call me.’
I set off again, wondering if plans to do a spot of breaking and entering were going to cut it with Joesbury.
SCOTT THORNTON LIVED in St Clement’s Road, a row of brick-built terraced houses about a mile outside the city centre. The red Saab was nowhere in sight.
The whole twisted business here was finally starting to take some sort of pattern. The psychological torture and abuse of young women immediately prior to their deaths was almost certainly the ongoing crime that SO10 were investigating here. How it was all being orchestrated I still had no idea. Nor could I begin to explain why it was happening. Thank God, though, I at last had a lead on who was doing it.
After thirty minutes I decided the house was probably empty. Time to get a closer look. I climbed out of the car and walked up the street. The house had three floors, including the basement. To the right of the front door were three tall rectangular windows, each directly above the next. No lights behind any of them. No sign of movement.
At the rear were narrow, walled gardens with high wooden gates and a cobbled alleyway. When I reached 108 I took a quick look round and vaulted up and over the gate.
Snow in the small back garden was largely untouched but I managed to follow the footprints of someone who’d taken a walk to the dustbins and back. Two performance bikes were chained up near the back door. I turned to the gate I’d just climbed over. Three bolts, at the top, halfway down and at the bottom, seemed like overkill for a garden.
Through the glass of the door I could see the kitchen. Not particularly tidy or clean but otherwise a perfectly normal kitchen. The door was locked, with two deadlocks. I leaned over to look in through the window.
There was no way I was breaking into this house. The window had a state-of-the-art lock on it, and from what I could see by straining forward, so did the door. As well as the deadlocks, there were bolts top and bottom. Scott took home security very seriously. Which was interesting in itself, I thought.
‘Any change?’ I asked Evi.
I was back at the hospital, outside Jessica’s room. From St Clement’s Road I’d driven to the cottage on the outskirts of town where Megan Prince lived. Once again, impressive home security but nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. As I’d watched the cottage from a distance, a tall, dark-haired man had left the house and driven away. Megan didn’t appear to live alone. After a few minutes I’d headed for Evi’s house, found she wasn’t home, and come straight back here.
I’d tried twice to get in touch with Joesbury and left two more messages. If he was in contact with Scotland Yard, he would know by now that I hadn’t arrived. I’d heard nothing from him.
Jessica, in the meantime, had been moved to a secure floor and was being watched 24/7. She was as safe as we could make her. A woman constable from local CID had interviewed her briefly but had learned nothing other than that Jessica couldn’t remember where she’d been for the past five days.
‘Her parents arrived an hour ago,’ Evi said. She was still in her wheelchair. She pushed it over to a row of hard chairs so that I could sit beside her. ‘They want to take her home but I’ve persuaded them it’s not a good idea for now,’ she continued. ‘The blood tests showed levels of DMT in her bloodstream, which she claims she’s never heard of, never mind taken. She agreed to an intimate examination but it showed nothing. She was actually very clean which, given that she’s been missing for five days, is odd in itself.’
‘They washed her to get rid of the evidence,’ I said, in a low voice, as an elderly couple walked past.
Evi looked troubled. No sign of her disagreeing.
‘What’s the last thing she can remember?’ I asked. ‘Before she disappeared?’
‘Coming to see me is the clearest thing in her head,’ Evi replied. ‘She has a vague recollection of going to meet someone about a study group, but can’t give me any details. All a bit hopeless, I’m afraid.’
‘Anything else?’
‘She’s jumpy, nervous as anything. Especially with men, but she knew who I was. She did say something quite odd, though: she asked me if I was real. Wasn’t convinced until she could actually touch me. Then she just started talking about terrible dreams again. Terrible dreams that she couldn’t remember.’<
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We both thought about that for a second. Dreams? Or not dreams?
Evi took a deep breath, as though bracing herself for some exertion, then shook her head. ‘Tomorrow, if she’s up to it and she and her parents are happy, we can try a form of hypnosis to see if we can release any memories. It’s unreliable, though, and not normally the sort of thing I’d try until she’s had much more time to recover.’
‘And how are you? I had hoped you might have gone home.’
She managed to smile at me. She was a whole lot tougher than she looked. ‘I’m much better, thanks,’ she said, giving a quick look right and left to check we were alone in the corridor. ‘And I did some digging around on a borrowed laptop. Nick, Meg and Scott were all at Trinity College when they studied here, so that seemed the place to start. There were twenty medical students in Trinity that year and I managed to track down most of them.’
‘Blimey, that was good going.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t difficult. There are alumni organizations that produce directories every year, professional bodies to apply to. Anyway, four are now working abroad, two have gone into other professions and one died a couple of years ago. The rest are either GPs, working in hospitals, or teaching at other universities. They’re scattered around the UK, the nearest being in Stevenage.’
‘So we can probably rule them out,’ I said.
A party of young doctors in crisp green scrubs appeared round the corner. We waited for them to pass by.
‘The only one I couldn’t find was a chap called Iestyn Thomas. He left Cambridge before he graduated and seems to have disappeared. He’d be thirty-six now, same as Meg and Nick.’
‘Thin, geeky chap,’ I said. ‘Everyone thought he was a bit odd.’ Evi’s eyes narrowed. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I ever met him. Why do you say that?’
‘Nick mentioned someone like that,’ I said and quickly filled Evi in with the story of the teenager who’d found his father’s dead body, and then gone on to torment a schoolmate, quite literally, to death.
‘But Thomas, if that’s who it was, was telling this story about someone he’d met,’ Evi reminded me when I’d finished. ‘Not about himself.’
‘Supposedly.’
‘Worth checking out?’
‘Absolutely it is.’
It didn’t take us long. We went to the visitors’ cafeteria, ordered coffee and sandwiches and found a quiet table to log on to the hospital wifi on Evi’s borrowed laptop.
One of the national papers had covered the story briefly, confirming what I’d already suspected, that the family was Welsh. Then it was just a question of trawling through various Welsh newspapers to pin them down. The website AberystwythOnline had archived its old footage and the story had been covered in some detail. The Thomases had been a professional family who’d lived in an old manor house not far from Aberystwyth on the West Wales coast. Both parents had worked at the university until the father was forced to retire in his late forties on health grounds.
‘What’s fibromyalgia?’ I asked Evi.
‘A degenerative muscle disease,’ she replied. ‘More common in women but men get it too. I had a patient once who was a sufferer. I was treating her for depression. It can be quite painful and debilitating.’
Early one Wednesday morning, when his wife was out of the house (the story hinted she’d been having an affair with a work colleague), Bryn Thomas had taken a loaded shotgun into his study and pulled the trigger. His three-year-old daughter, typically the earliest riser in the house, found him shortly afterwards. Two hours later, his teenage son had come downstairs.
‘Photograph doesn’t help much, does it?’ I said, looking at the grainy, taken-from-a-distance shot of the mother and two children leaving the coroner’s court. The son was carrying the three-year-old and only part of his profile could be seen.
‘I’m not sure seeing it properly would make a difference,’ said Evi. ‘There can be nearly nine hundred medical students at Cambridge at any one time. I’d probably recognize most of the ones who were in my year, but the years above …’
‘And as it was taken more than twenty years ago, the chances are he looks very different,’ I said.
‘So he could be here?’
‘Over a hundred thousand people in the city,’ I replied. ‘Plenty of places to hide. On the other hand, maybe I just don’t want it to be Nick.’
Evi slid her hand along the table until it rested lightly on mine.
‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But even if Iestyn Thomas is here, orchestrating everything, he can’t be acting alone.’
Not the least surprising thing to happen to me that day was that I found myself twisting my hand round and closing my fingers around Evi’s. At the same time, nerve endings around my eyes and nose started to sting. I kept my eyes down, in the faint hope Evi wouldn’t notice.
‘These things never end well, Laura,’ she said. ‘Even if we win in the end, the wounds left behind take a long time to heal.’
I was dismayed to see a tear fall on to the keyboard. It landed, splat, right in the middle of the J.
Evi’s hand gave mine a squeeze. ‘Deep breaths, blink hard, then blow your nose,’ she told me in a no-nonsense voice. ‘There’s plenty of time for therapy when the bad guys are banged up.’
I did what I was told. But when I looked at her again, her eyes were shining too.
‘You’re not over it, are you?’ I asked her. ‘That business last year in Lancashire, I mean.’
A tear shone on Evi’s thick black lashes. ‘I’m not sure I ever will be,’ she admitted. ‘Experiencing something like that is like a major bereavement. You don’t get over it, you just learn to live with it.’
‘What happened to the vicar?’ I risked.
She smiled, let go of my hand and gave it a little pat. She didn’t reply immediately, but I didn’t think she minded my bringing him up.
‘There was news footage of him helping you into your car,’ I said. ‘It looked like the two of you were together.’
Sad little shake of the head. ‘We never quite made it to that stage. Harry and I were instrumental in a woman’s death. She was one of my patients.’
‘Instrumental how?’
‘Long story, and it wasn’t Harry’s fault, it was mine. I thought for a while I was going to lose my practising certificate over it. In the end I just got a reprimand for a temporary lapse of judgement, but …’
‘You can’t forgive yourself?’
She sighed. ‘Losing a patient in your care is hard enough, Laura. When it’s because of a selfish act on your part, it’s close to unbearable. I couldn’t be with Harry and deal with it. And nor could he.’
She looked at her watch and pressed a button to close down the laptop. Time was running on and both of us had other places to be.
‘A long time ago I made a big mistake,’ I said. ‘And the repercussions of it will go on for as long as I do. I know exactly what it’s like to really care for someone you can’t be with. I know about obstacles that just won’t go away, no matter how much you want them to.’
‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ said Evi.
‘Oh, big time. But with all due respect, what you’ve just told me about you and Harry doesn’t cut it.’
Eyebrows up, glint in those deep-blue eyes. ‘Oh, you don’t think?’
‘Trust me, as insurmountable barriers go, yours is strictly little league,’ I told her. ‘If he means that much to you, you’ll deal with it. I’d call him if I were you.’ I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone. Well, Joesbury hadn’t said I couldn’t call a man of God. ‘Fully charged up,’ I told her, waggling it in her direction.
‘You’re nuts.’ She made no move to take the phone but I could tell she was on the verge of smiling.
‘I believe that term’s rather frowned upon in professional circles,’ I said, putting the phone back in my bag. ‘Right, when this is all over and the bad guys are banged up, either you call him yourself or I’ll do it for you.’
I borrowed Evi’s keys and went off to take Sniffy out for a run. When the dog had settled back down I locked up carefully and took the keys back to Evi at the hospital, then jogged down a couple of flights of stairs to Bryony’s floor and made my way to her room.
‘Hi,’ I said. Bryony’s blue eyes softened and I thought perhaps she’d smiled at me. Then, before I could speak, the door opened behind us and two men stood there. The first was George, the porter from St John’s who’d showed me to my room on my first day. The second was Nick.
‘Hello, Miss Farrow,’ said George. ‘How’s our patient?’
‘I’ve just arrived myself,’ I replied. ‘But the nurse outside told me she’s doing well.’
The two men stepped further into the room. I saw both glance down at the pad in Bryony’s tent. ‘Well, that’s very good news,’ said George, pulling up a chair and settling himself down beside Bryony. ‘Hello, my dear. How are you this evening?’
Nick gestured with his head that we leave the room and I followed him out. As the door closed, we could hear George talking to Bryony is a soft, low voice.
‘Did he know her well?’ I asked, knowing I was getting suspicious of everyone but wondering why a college porter should be visiting a student.
‘He’s been to see her a lot,’ said Nick. ‘Some of the porters do get quite close to students. Surrogate sons and daughters for many of them.’
‘For a GP, you spend a lot of time here,’ I said, before I could think about whether it was wise or not.
‘Bryony’s my patient,’ he replied. ‘Jessica was registered with one of my partners. And I could say the same about you. What’s your excuse?’
‘I just said goodbye to Evi,’ I said, by way of a reply.
‘How are your plans for the evening shaping up?’ he asked.
‘Still unclear,’ I replied, thinking that by the time darkness fell I might be in serious need of a bed for the night. Not that I was going anywhere near Nick’s house. Not now.
MY ROOM WAS exactly as I’d left it. Except that this time Tox was there.