Dead Scared (25 page)

‘One of the lines we’re pursuing,’ Lacey was saying, ‘is that vulnerable students are being encouraged to harm themselves by some sort of online bullying. Did you ever visit any sort of suicide website or chat room while you were at Cambridge?’

Danielle nodded her head. Joesbury sat further back in his chair and watched her. From where the two women were sitting, Lacey could see him, Danielle couldn’t.

‘I just needed to know there were other people out there who felt as bad as I did,’ Danielle said.

‘Did anyone tell you about these sites?’

Blank look.

‘Did these sites find you, in any way? Did you get any emails, or did they pop up in your search engines, or anything like that? How did you know about them?’

‘I Googled
suicide
,’ said Danielle, with a faintly contemptuous tone to her voice. ‘It wasn’t hard.’

‘Were any of the sites Cambridge-specific?’

Again, Danielle shook her head. ‘Most of them seemed to be based in the United States from what I can remember,’ she said.

Quietly, Joesbury stood up and walked to the window. The
garden
outside was mature and well cared for. Even in winter it was attractive, with grasses and evergreen shrubs gleaming with frost. He’d give them ten more minutes then bring it to a close. There was still time for lunch, maybe a chance to talk about something that wasn’t police work. Had they ever actually done that before?

Over on the sofas Lacey and Danielle were talking about the event itself, the morning Danielle had ridden her bike to some nearby woods, thrown a rope over a branch and hanged herself.

‘How did you reach the branch?’ Lacey was asking. ‘If it was high enough for you to hang yourself, it must have been too high to reach from the ground.’

‘It’s all a bit fuzzy,’ said Danielle. ‘Even the next day I couldn’t remember it too clearly. The police said I’d had the rope ready looped and just thrown it over.’

‘You must be good with knots,’ said Lacey. ‘I’m hopeless. Can never sort out my reefs from my bowlines.’

No response.

‘So how do you make a loop in a rope?’ asked Lacey. ‘And then, how do you get the knot round your neck right? So that it tightens as it should? I wouldn’t have a clue.’

Joesbury gave up all pretence of admiring the garden. He turned round to face the two women.

‘I don’t remember,’ said Danielle. ‘I’d taken something, according to the doctors. It’s all just a blur.’

‘What had you taken?’

A shrug. The girl’s face had stiffened. Defences were coming down.

‘What did you usually take?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t take drugs.’

‘Just on the morning you tried to kill yourself?’

‘DC Flint,’ said Joesbury, stepping forward.

She looked up, half defiant, half guilty. Then, with a tiny purse of the lips, she turned back to Danielle. ‘What did you stand on?’

‘DC Flint …’ Joesbury raised his voice.

‘To die by hanging, you need to raise yourself off the ground, tighten the rope and then jump. What did you stand on?’

‘According to the CID report, Miss Brown balanced on the
pedals
of her bicycle for long enough to tie the rope,’ said Joesbury. ‘And if we don’t take her back now, she’ll be late for work.’

‘Bull –
shit
!’

Joesbury glanced along the road and pulled out of the small car park. ‘Don’t mince words, Flint, say what you think.’

‘Double bullshit. What was she, a trick cyclist? She balanced on bicycle pedals for long enough to tie a noose round her neck and the other end round a tree. Bullshit in triplicate!’

It was kind of nice, in a way, seeing her composure slip.

‘Yeah, I get the point,’ he said. ‘You hungry?’

‘She couldn’t have done that by herself. You heard her, she didn’t know her knots from her knitting. She had help.’

‘Possibly. Pub grub do you?’

‘What the hell do you mean, possibly?’

‘Danielle didn’t die because someone found her and cut her down,’ said Joesbury. ‘They phoned for help and then legged it. CID never found them. It’s possible it was some sort of black joke that went a bit too far.’

‘She couldn’t identify them?’

Joesbury shook his head. ‘Unconscious when they found her. The important point to take away from today is that websites don’t seem to have unduly influenced her.’

‘She visited them.’

Up ahead was a pub. The sign outside said it served food all day. It also said it offered overnight accommodation. Oh, if only. Steak pie and chips, a bottle of good claret and then upstairs for the rest of the afternoon.

‘Of course she did,’ he said. ‘Anyone semi-computer literate contemplating any major step Googles it first these days. What we don’t have is any indication that what she found online made a significant difference.’

Make that the rest of the week.

‘Guess not,’ agreed Lacey.

Joesbury indicated left and pulled into the pub car park. ‘So, you’ve had a day out of school and done some proper detective work,’ he said, as he switched off the engine. ‘Now, can you get on
with
the brief you were given or do I have to replace you with an officer who understands the meaning of the phrase do what you’re told?’

For a second, maybe two, they stared at each other. She’d kissed him once, last October, at around four in the morning, had pulled him gently towards her bed. And he really could have done without remembering that right now.

‘Is it a disciplinary offence to call a senior officer a patronizing bastard?’ she asked him.

She might never know what it had cost him to say no. What every second in her presence cost him when he couldn’t touch her.

‘Pay for lunch, Flint,’ he said, ‘and you can call me what you like.’

THE SUPPER PARTY
at which I’d been invited to be Evi’s guest was in the middle of nowhere. Or, if you want to be picky, a tiny hamlet called Endicott, between two villages called Burwell and Waterbeach, some eight miles north-east of Cambridge. I was well and truly in the Fens now. I had a feeling that, had it been a clear night, the view would have been un-interrupted until the North Sea. I’ve spent my life in cities and I was finding the vastness of the East Anglian landscape disturbing. There was just too much of it somehow, too much emptiness. No place to hide.

Mind you, the sunset that evening as Joesbury and I had driven back had been awe-inspiring. There had been plenty of cloud cover all afternoon, and as the sun went down the wind picked up and the heavens began to swirl with endless shades of orange, crimson and gold. If someone had told me the sky was on fire, I might just have believed it.

The awesome skyscape seemed to have affected Joesbury too. He was silent for most of the journey back and dropped me off with barely a goodbye. Now, colour had largely fled the world and just a few ribbons of gold broke up the unrelenting blackness. Like memories of a day I really hadn’t wanted to end.

I spotted the gap in the hedgerow Evi had told me to watch out for and turned off the road. A few yards down the lane I switched
off
the Black Eyed Peas album I’d been listening to. There was something about the farm track, stretching for what seemed like miles ahead of me before disappearing into a black void, that made hip-hop seem entirely out of place.

The surface wasn’t great and I had to go slowly, rocking and lurching from one rut to another. I seemed to have left civilization behind, my headlights the only break in the darkness for miles. Nor could I rely on anything astral. Someone had taken a vacuum and cleaned the sky of stars, and if the moon had come up at all this evening, it had changed its mind and gone in again.

On a whim, I slowed right down and switched off the headlights, just to see. The night seemed to solidify. It leaped closer, surrounding the car. I swear I could hear the metal of the bodywork groaning under the pressure. Completely freaky! I switched my headlights back on quickly. I’d had no idea that night-time could be so intense.

I carried on past farm buildings on the right-hand side of the track and what could even have been a house. No lights though. No parked cars. Nothing to indicate a gathering. I think I was almost considering giving up when I passed through two tall stone columns and saw the farmhouse ahead. Several vehicles were parked at the front and there were lights on in the downstairs windows. I parked and got out. The email Evi had sent me earlier had warned against wearing heels. Easy now to see why. This wasn’t even a rough gravel drive. This was rock-spattered earth.

The house was two storey, square built, of stone construction. It looked like a haunted house in a children’s story book: carved window ledges, elaborate crest over the front door and those nasty imp-like statues that leer down at you, tongues dangling, from the roof edge. There was a large iron ring centrally placed on the door. I lifted it, was about to let it fall.

‘That door hasn’t been opened since the old Queen died,’ said a voice from the side of the house. I turned to see Nick Bell heading towards me, lit cigarette in one hand.

‘This is your house?’ I asked when he was closer, cursing my stupidity for not asking Evi whose party she was inviting me to.

‘I rather think it owns me,’ he replied. ‘Laura, isn’t it? Evi told me you were coming. Good to see you again.’

He bent lower and kissed me on one cheek. The skin of his face was cold and his breath smelled of smoke and red wine. I couldn’t help a shudder as his lips made contact.

‘So did the old Queen die here?’ I asked, more to cover my confusion than because I have any interest in deceased royalty. The house looked old enough for any number of dead queens to be associated with it.

‘Quite possibly,’ he replied. He was wearing jeans and the same blue and brown flecked woollen sweater I’d seen him in at the hospital. ‘Her rotting corpse could still be in one of the attic bedrooms,’ he was saying. ‘We get some very odd smells from time to time.’

I followed Nick round the side of the house, past smokers huddled around a fire-pit and in through a boot room that smelled of dogs. On a counter I saw what looked like a cardboard box of fluffy yellow chicks. I leaned closer. Chicks all right. Dead ones. I was about to ask Nick why he kept dead poultry in his boot room when he ushered me into the kitchen. A slim woman in her early fifties with shoulder-length dark hair claimed his attention and a couple of pointers grabbed mine.

I have very little experience of dogs but it’s difficult to resist creatures that are so unashamedly pleased to see you. Both were predominantly white with speckled markings. The smaller and slimmer of the two had a chocolate-brown face with ears so active they almost seemed to be talking at me. The other, with red-brown face and markings, looked older, its big cocoa-coloured eyes both wise and friendly. The name tag on the older one said Merry. The younger was Pippin.

In my experience, people who are very keen on
The Lord of the Rings
can be a bit odd. On the other hand, I was quite a Tolkien fan myself.

Nick was searching around in a kitchen drawer. I put down a bottle of wine and poured myself an orange juice.

‘Wonderful house,’ I said, when Nick had emptied the drawer of cutlery and I had his attention again.

‘Belonged to my parents,’ he replied. ‘I inherited a few years ago. I’m going to sell it to someone who can afford to renovate it just as soon as I can get it safe enough to show estate agents round. The place is falling apart.’

Someone else came over to speak to Nick and I took myself through to an oak-panelled dining room awash with old Toby jugs and willow-patterned plates. The fireplace was massive. A second later I realized it needed to be. There was practically a breeze running through the room from ill-fitting windows on opposite walls. I counted two buckets and a bowl on the stone-flagged floor to catch the rain. And this was the ground floor.

There were around a dozen people in the room and not much space for more. I carried on walking into another stone-flagged room with easy chairs, a shiny black grand piano, an even larger fireplace and, cliché though it was, the decapitated head of a large mammal on one wall. Evi was perched on a window seat at the far end. An older man was sitting next to her, leaning rather closer than would have felt comfortable had I been in her position. Evi was dressed in bright scarlet this evening: red sweater that came down to mid-thigh, black jeans tucked into red boots. Her hair had been gathered up and was held in place by a red clip. Tiny, sparkly red earrings. She had a long neck, I noticed, and she held her head high.