Dead Scared

by S J Bolton

  ‘You dark horse, you,’ she greeted me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had such a gorgeous brother? Is he single? Is he straight? Oh God, please tell me he’s not gay?’

  ‘What?’ I said, which I admit wasn’t the most intelligent response in the world but I’d had a tough day.

  From further down the corridor came the sound of a lavatory being flushed. Tox gave a tiny wiggle, twisted round so she could see her own arse in the mirror and tucked a straggle of hair behind one ear.

  ‘Here she is,’ she trilled at a tall, dark-haired man walking towards us along the corridor. ‘I told you she wouldn’t be long.’

  ‘Hey, squirt,’ said Joesbury, bending down to kiss me on the cheek and pat me on the bottom in a manner that would probably have earned a real brother a split lip.

  ‘Yo, bro,’ I replied, and yes that was lame, but, as I say, tough day.

  Joesbury was wearing pale cream chinos and a pink and lilac striped button-down shirt with a lilac sweater slung over his shoulders. I’d never seen him look so wholesome. He was positively preppy.

  ‘Mum asked me to pop in,’ he said. ‘Gran’s had another one of her turns.’

  ‘That’s three this year,’ I said, before remembering it was only January. ‘Academic year,’ I added, turning to Tox, who seemed unable to take her eyes off Joesbury.

  ‘Are you going to be here for the evening?’ Tox said to him. ‘We could take you out somewhere, couldn’t we, Laura? Unless you’re seeing that delectable GP of yours, in which case I’ll look after Mick.’

  Good to know my brother’s name, I suppose.

  ‘Actually I need to hit the road,’ Joesbury said, smiling at her in a way I swear he’d never smiled at me. Sort of cheeky and flirty and … ‘I just came by to pick up little Laura’s laptop. She’s broken it again. Walk me to the car, squirt?’ he finished.

  ‘I’ll give you his number,’ I promised Tox, as Joesbury picked up the heavy canvas bag in which I kept my laptop and led me out of the room. ‘If ever a man deserved you, it’s my big brother.’

  ‘Squirt?’ I said, as we crossed the covered bridge. Below us the river had taken on the blue-grey cast of wet slate, the banks were still frosted over with snow and the fields and gardens beyond stretched white as far as light from the colleges could reach.

  ‘Seemed siblingy,’ he replied. We stepped into Third Court just as a dusting of snow fell down on us from one of the window ledges. I indicated that we needed to turn left and head north to get to the forecourt.

  It was properly dark by this time and everywhere we looked, warm yellow light was shining from medieval windows. When we reached Chapel Court I decided that if I was about to be fired, we might as well get it over with. ‘If you’re interested in why I’m still here …’ I began.

  ‘I know why you’re still here,’ he interrupted me. ‘I know about Jessica.’

  A male voice, pure and light, drifted across the court from the chapel, asking God to intervene on our behalf and to do it quickly. Then the choir and congregation joined in with the response. Evensong was taking place, as it seemed to most evenings. ‘O Lord, make haste to help us,’ sang the choir leader.

  ‘I sent you several messages,’ I tried again.

  ‘Didn’t get them,’ said Joesbury. ‘We disconnected your phone this morning.’ He dug into his pocket and pulled out another mobile.

  Candlelight from inside the chapel was glowing through the stained-glass windows. In the few places where the snow was unbroken, the religious images from the windows were reflected in perfect detail.

  ‘Take this for now,’ Joesbury said, holding the mobile towards me. ‘I picked it up at the Carphone Warehouse earlier. It’s for emergency use only. Don’t try to phone me with it, or Dr Oliver, or any of your colleagues on the force. And that includes DC Stenning. Is that clear?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘I need your old one,’ he said.

  I dug into my bag, handed it over. ‘As it’s been disconnected, not much point hanging on to it.’ Joesbury wasn’t looking at me any more. He was staring at the chapel, a tiny smile on his face.

  ‘This is Haydn,’ he said. ‘“The Heavens Are Telling”.’

  ‘Like you’ve ever been to church,’ I grumbled. There was something about the music that was making me feel sad, and needy. As if I wanted to go into chapel and let it wash all around me and, at the same time, to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

  ‘The wonder of his works displays the firmament,’ sang Joesbury, perfectly in time with the choir inside the chapel, and in a surprisingly good voice. By this time, the music had become loud and jubilant.

  ‘I’m taking your laptop too.’ He indicated the bag he’d carried from my room.

  ‘How did you even get in here?’ I said. ‘You can’t just drive into a Cambridge college, claiming to be a relative.’

  Joesbury looked down at me. ‘You think you’re the only undercover officer we have in town?’

  ‘I’ve just discovered you were a choirboy. Nothing will surprise me any more.’

  As silence fell inside the chapel, Joesbury caught the look on my face and stepped closer. ‘I’m sorry about this morning,’ he said.

  ‘I stand corrected,’ I snapped, glaring at him.

  A tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth. ‘Setting aside for a moment the fact that you’re a completely loose cannon who wouldn’t know the rule book if it jumped up and bit you on the arse, you’ve actually done quite well,’ he said.

  There was a sudden need, on my part, to sit down.

  ‘The stuff you’ve been emailing me about Nicole and the other girls has been pretty helpful,’ he went on. ‘The only reason you’ve been kept in the dark and why we’ve been telling you repeatedly not to get involved is for your own safety.’

  In the chapel a beautiful, soothing voice was reading prayers. I looked up into turquoise eyes that I knew I’d never tire of. ‘There’s more,’ I said.

  Another twitch. Any second now he was going to smile at me. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  He listened while I told him the theory that Evi and I had come up with. Sometimes almost shouting in his ear, to compete with the choir and congregation, sometimes dropping my voice when silence fell, I told him about the bogus questionnaire. That, armed with immensely private information on girls’ innermost secrets, someone was devising a targeted campaign of bullying and intimidation, feeding on their worst fears. That, when the girls were close to being nervous wrecks, the abuse became physical, aided by a powerful and highly dangerous cocktail of hallucinogenic and sedative drugs.

  I went on to say that I was especially worried about Evi herself, that it looked as though she too had become part of the campaign of intimidation, not because she matched the vulnerable-young-woman profile, but because she’d been poking her nose in where someone didn’t want it.

  As music that seemed too good for this earth rang around the court, I told Joesbury I suspected the girls were being abducted, for a purpose I couldn’t begin to imagine but didn’t have any good feelings about, and that, shortly after being released, they were pushed, probably again with the assistance of drugs, into taking their own lives. I told him that Bryony hadn’t bought the petrol that nearly killed her.

  ‘You’re sure about that?’ he interrupted me.

  ‘Absolutely. And does it bear repeating that Nicole’s wasn’t the only car on the road the night she died?’

  ‘No, I got that loud and clear. Go on.’

  Only yards away, people sang of God’s wonders and glory. In the real world, I told my senior officer that we were looking for a group of people with both medical and IT skills and that three such people in town had been at Cambridge fifteen years ago, the last time a spate of suicides had occurred. His face didn’t flicker when I named Nick Bell, Scott Thornton and Megan Prince as possible suspects. I told him about Iestyn Thomas.

  ‘Bell has always taken more of an interest in Bryony than medical protocol dema
nds. And Megan Prince is a psychiatrist, one who knows Evi very well. Thomas sounds like a twisted individual who has, very conveniently, fallen off the grid. The only one we have anything tangible on though is Scott Thornton.’

  He frowned at me. ‘What?’

  I told him how and why I’d discovered Thornton’s identity, and about seeing him going into a unit on the nearby industrial estate. When I got to my stake-out of that afternoon, he raised one eyebrow and shook his head.

  ‘I’ll have them all watched,’ he said. ‘And get this Iestyn Thomas character traced. I’ll also have someone keep an eye on the industrial unit. That could be important.’

  ‘I could drive out there and …’

  His eyebrows lifted. ‘Don’t go anywhere near it. I mean it, Flint. Now promise.’

  I’d have promised him anything. ‘Is there any possibility of you telling me what’s going on here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He broke eye contact to look at his watch. ‘But not now. I have to get your phone and laptop to the Yard.’

  ‘Because …?’

  In the chapel, the organ sounded up again. It was taking on a personality of its own for me, that instrument, swanky and loud, like an annoying boy in the school playground. ‘Your cover’s almost certainly been compromised,’ Joesbury said. ‘From what you’ve just told me about that questionnaire, it’s probably been done electronically. Someone could have hacked into your files, maybe read the emails you’ve sent to me. They could know exactly who we are and what we know.’

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. If you’d been properly briefed, you’d have been on the lookout for that sort of thing. Lacey, don’t worry about it. These people are bloody clever and I may be wrong. Either way, we’ll know tonight.’

  ‘And if we are blown?’

  ‘It won’t be the end of the world. We have other people here. And, partly thanks to you, we’re a lot closer than we were.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Stay in college for a few more hours and act normal. Well, as normal as possible for you,’ he said. ‘An added complication is that we think the police are involved in what’s going on here. We don’t know yet whether it’s a couple of bent local coppers or whether it even reaches the Met but you are not to trust anyone but me. Is that understood?’

  I nodded. People were leaving the chapel now, the organist playing them on their way.

  ‘There are roadworks on the M11 so I’ll have to take the long way round, but I’ll be back before midnight all being well and I’ll call you. Do you know a hotel called the Varsity?’

  Another nod. ‘I think so. Just round the corner, small, concrete place. Looks very trendy.’

  ‘That’s where I’m staying,’ he said. ‘I’ll text you with a room number when I’m back.’

  One of the porters left the lodge and crossed the court towards us, nodding to a few members of the departing congregation as he did so. As I watched him approach, the choir left the chapel. They were mostly boys, some of them barely in their teens, with black robes and bright-red collars. Red and black tassels on their funny, flat little hats.

  ‘You on your way out, sir?’ the porter asked Joesbury. It was George.

  ‘Yes thanks,’ Joesbury replied, before turning back to me and lowering his voice. ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘About Bell.’

  I’d been so caught up in the sheer joy of being on good terms with Joesbury again that for a second I thought he was talking about a large bronze thing that went ding-dong. ‘If he’s in the clear when this is all over, I’m fine with it,’ he said. ‘He seems like a nice bloke. Just stay away from him and keep your eye on the case for a bit longer, OK?’

  Suddenly there was a large and heavy lump where my tongue used to be.

  ‘I’m looking forward to finding out exactly what this case is,’ I said, because I had to say something and what sprang to mind didn’t seem appropriate somehow.

  Joesbury put a hand behind my head in a brotherly gesture that made me want to hit him. Or weep. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said. ‘When you do, you’ll wish you hadn’t.’

  He got into his car, George opened the gates and he drove away.

  Cambridge, five year earlier

  ‘YOU JOINING US tonight, boss?’

  The man sitting behind the desk shook his head. ‘Got a college reunion.’ He nodded his head towards the screen in front of him. ‘Have you seen this, Stacey?’

  Stacey, a slim blonde in her early thirties, who’d had a secret crush on her new boss for several months now, was glad of the opportunity to walk to the other side of the desk and lean over it. This close, she could smell his cologne and the warm cotton of his shirt. See the gleam of his hair.

  ‘Good Lord, is that real?’ The image on the screen, for a second, distracted her even from the fantasy of pressing her face against that broad shoulder, breathing in the male scent more deeply.

  ‘Must be,’ he replied. ‘Her parents are kicking up merry hell.’

  ‘That was here, wasn’t it? She was a student at the university.’

  The video clip was just four minutes thirty-six seconds long. It showed a young woman, hanging by the neck from a tree. Her legs kicked furiously, her fingers seemed to be trying to rip her neck apart, they worked so frantically at the noose around it. The expression on her face was hard for Stacey to look at.

  ‘I’m surprised YouTube haven’t taken it off,’ she said. The clip reached the end. To her surprise, her boss started it again.

  ‘They will,’ he said, ‘any day now. We’re among the last to see it.’

  Stacey looked at the viewing figure in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. ‘Last of nearly a million,’ she said. ‘People are sick.’ She moved away, back round the front of the desk. She was wearing her tightest skirt but his eyes didn’t follow her.

  ‘That’s for sure,’ the boss said. ‘Have a good time, Stace.’

  It was her cue to leave. To stay any longer would look obvious. She’d reached the door when her boss spoke again.

  ‘Just imagine,’ he said, but when she looked back he was still staring at the screen and she got the impression he was talking to himself now. That maybe he had even forgotten she was there. ‘If every one of those punters paid a pound for the privilege.’

  As Stacey closed the door, she thought she might, at last, be getting over her childish crush.

  SPIKE-STRIPS, ALSO KNOWN as stop sticks and stingers, are used by traffic police the world over to bring high-speed car chases to an end. Typically constructed of metal teeth, between an inch and a half and three inches long and fixed to a fold-up metal frame, spike-strips are unfolded widthways across a road directly in front of a speeding car. They work by puncturing the vehicle’s tyres and, used properly, bring speeding vehicles to a rapid halt whilst causing minimal damage to both people and property.

  Usually, the spikes are hollow, rather than solid, and once embedded in tyres will deflate them slowly. The vehicle will be able to travel a short distance before the tyres are completely flat but the possibility of an accident is greatly reduced. Solid spikes, on the other hand, cause multiple tyre blowouts that invariably lead to trouble.

  DI Mark Joesbury was a good driver. Police officers are trained to drive quickly and confidently, with maximum levels of concentration. His aptitude behind a wheel had been spotted whilst he was still a cadet and he’d been on several advanced driving courses, including one on evasive techniques.

  In daylight, he might have seen the home-made spike-strip laid across the A10 just before he reached it. Had he done so, he would have stood as good a chance of being able to avoid it as just about any other driver on the UK’s roads. In the dark, driving at speed, and with a lot on his mind, it wasn’t going to happen.

  His BMW hit the nail-embedded steel pipe at just over sixty miles per hour. All four tyres exploded with a sound like gunshots. The BMW hit the crash barrier, broke through it, left the highway and careered do
wn a wooded bank. It came to rest on its roof. The last thought in Mark Joesbury’s head was that he hadn’t passed on any of the information Lacey had shared with him.

  I got back to find Tox working out ridiculously complicated equations as heavy metal rocked everything in the room that wasn’t nailed firmly down. She grinned at me, mouthed something and then turned down the volume.

  ‘I am so coming to your place for the Easter break,’ she announced.

  ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ I replied, wondering if Joesbury could conjure up a house in Shropshire and a plump, middle-class lady in her fifties to be our mother.

  Tox grinned at me. ‘Do you mind Guns N’ Roses?’ she asked.

  ‘Louder the better,’ I replied and, when she took me at my word, went into my room to read and wait.

  As the rattle and crash of the accident faded away into the night, two hooded figures emerged from the trees. One of them picked up what was left of the spike-strip and pulled it to the side of the road. The other climbed the broken crash barrier and made his way down the bank. As he reached the vehicle, his companion joined him.

  The man inside was suspended upside down by his seat belt. His head was twisted at an angle that looked unnatural.

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked the first man.

  ‘Don’t know,’ replied the second. ‘Looks it.’

  ‘Let’s get the stuff.’

  They’d brought a crowbar with them to force open the boot. It wasn’t needed. The crash had disabled the lock and the boot hatch was open. Joesbury’s bag was three yards further down the slope. In it, they found the laptop and mobile phone that Joesbury had taken from Lacey less than half an hour earlier. From the main body of the car they took his own mobile. They also found a jacket with a wallet inside and took that too. Then they stood back to survey the scene.

  ‘Torch it?’ suggested the first man.

  The second shook his head. ‘Too obvious,’ he said. ‘They’d find the match. And he looks dead to me. Come on.’

  They turned and made their way back up the slope. At the sound of another car they ducked low. It carried on, having no idea of the devastation just a few yards away.