Killing You Softly (10 page)

‘Tell me again – what’s the link between Scarlett Hartley and Alyssa?’ Charlie asked. She sat down strategically between Marco and Zara, across from me, Hooper and Jack.
Eugenie, Galina, Luke and Will were there too, along with the Black Widow.

‘We’re not sure,’ Jack answered. ‘We know that Scarlett had perfect recall, a photographic memory – whatever you want to call it – the same as Alyssa.
That’s the one link we’ve made so far.’

In the thirty minutes since he’d read the verse and the message, I’d shared with Jack all the details of the past few days. He’d dragged them out of me, every last one.

‘We’re together on this,’ he’d promised me, holding me so tight I could hardly breathe. ‘You don’t have to do this alone.’

Zara turned straight to Will. ‘OK, scholarship boy – you went to school with Scarlett before you reached the dizzying heights of St Jude’s. So is that true – did she have
total recall?’

Will looked as if he’d already been in bed when Jack had knocked at his door. His hair was messed up and he was wearing his sweater inside out.

‘Yeah,’ he acknowledged. ‘She came top in every exam she ever sat, right from the start of secondary school. We all hated her for it.’

‘Really?’ Charlie looked puzzled. ‘Jeez, I don’t get you Brits.’

‘I’ll explain some other time,’ Zara said. ‘The point is, somebody killed Scarlett and threw the body in the canal and it’s bringing up memories of what happened to
Lily last term. And now bad things have started to happen to Alyssa and this sick person is setting up a challenge – catch me if you can, signing off with love and kisses.’

‘Kiss-catch,’ Eugenie murmured, shuddering and pulling her jacket tighter across her chest.

Connie stuck to the practical. ‘You need to find out if the sick bastard did the same thing to Scarlett – taunting her and drawing her in with his psycho games to the point when she
got too close to the truth, then he had to kill her.’

My heart hammered against my ribs when she put it all out there, but I tried not to show the fear. ‘Let’s take this more slowly. It’s still possible that there’s no
connection between what happened to Scarlett and the stuff that’s going on here. It could just be someone with a warped sense of humour.’

‘Yeah, funny,’ Hooper commented. He’d hung back from the main group, but was listening intently to every word that was said.

‘He won’t be laughing when I get my hands on him,’ Jack muttered.

I loved it that he sprang to my defence, though that small, independent part of me said, No, let me do this, let me work it out for myself. ‘OK, so say it’s a pathetic joke by some
loser with nothing better to do.’

Connie and Charlie nodded.

‘Would that make it a student here at St Jude’s?’ Charlie asked. ‘Or is there someone out there who knows enough about you to hack into your Facebook account and leave
dead birds and messages in your room?’

‘One message, dead bird – singular,’ I said firmly.

‘Someone here in the college,’ Connie decided, and she looked around the circle of faces in the room. ‘Girl or guy? Maybe even a teacher.’

‘We’re not getting any answers staring at each other,’ Luke told her. ‘It’s not going to be anyone in this room, is it?’

‘And say it’s not a joke.’ Zara broke the uneasy silence. ‘Say it’s serious.’

‘That’s why we wanted everyone to be here,’ Jack explained. ‘We all need to be looking out for Alyssa.’

‘Definitely,’ Zara and Eugenie agreed. Others nodded – all except Galina who sat quietly in a corner with a hand over her injured mouth.

‘We don’t want it to be like last time, with Lily and Paige, when Alyssa dealt with it alone.’

‘Right.’ Luke threw a lot of force into one short word. I guess he still felt that he’d let Paige down by not being there for her, either before her so-called accident or
after, when she was seriously ill in hospital.

‘Yeah, we know you better now,’ Zara conceded. ‘Last term you were new to the place. We weren’t sure where you fitted in.’

‘I’m still not certain,’ I admitted. ‘It’s hard to be the new girl at St Jude’s.’

‘Yes.’ Galina let her hand drop to her lap and we all saw the bright red scar, the stitches and swelling on her lip. ‘Very hard to be new girl.’

Saying goodbye to Jack that night was hard too, and we would have stood longer in the quad where the snow was twenty centimetres deep, hugging and keeping each other warm and
safe, if Shirley Welford, the member of staff who was on late duty that night, hadn’t walked by.

‘Further maths, private tuition, midday tomorrow,’ she reminded Jack, who quickly stepped away from me.

‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he told Shirley.

‘We’ll be doing more work on Newton-Raphson’s use of iterative methods to solve equations.’

It was clear that Jack’s straight-laced maths teacher was making a point and that she wasn’t going to leave the quad before I did.

‘Night, Jack,’ I murmured as I slipped away.

Up in my room, I was glad that Galina was already asleep. I checked my phone and found two junk emails plus a text message from a number I didn’t recognize – no words, just a row of
emoticon red hearts.

Forget it – it’s a mistake, I told myself. But, as you know, that’s the problem with me – it’s a physical impossibility for me to forget – so I spent the
whole night wondering who had sent the hearts and listening for more creaks in the corridor and more fingers scratching at the window. I lay with my eyes open, my ear attuned to every sound.

And I was still wide awake when another message came though at 7.00 a.m.

They arrested Alex,
Jayden wrote.
Meet me.

When? Where?
I texted back.

Today at twelve, Ainslee, Lock-keeper’s Cottage.

Life was full of surprises – wild boy Jayden, with his hunched, feral look and his warning for me not to go near the Scarlett Hartley murder, had changed his mind.

‘Don’t worry – I’ll be careful,’ I told Jack over breakfast.

‘I’d come with you but . . .’

‘. . . But you’ve got a class with Shirley. I know.’ I was still feeling the afterglow of our train-station reunion so I reached out and took his hand. ‘It’ll be
OK. Jayden is the hero who rescued me from Harry Embsay, remember, and I promise not to get dragged into anything I can’t handle.’

Jack was still edgy. ‘It’s not Jayden who bothers me. It’s the nutter who’s sneaking into your room and leaving weird notes.’

‘Yeah, it freaks me out too. But everyone knows what’s happening now and sooner or later the guy is going to make a mistake – someone will spot him or we’ll be able to
track him down.’

‘Why not wait until I’m through with maths? Then we could both meet Jayden.’

‘It’s not dangerous,’ I insisted. ‘I can deal with it on my own.’

‘So let me write down the number of the text with the hearts,’ Jack decided. ‘I’ll run through my list of contacts, and if it’s not there I’ll ask around to
see if anyone recognizes it.’

‘OK, and I’ll meet Jayden, find out why they arrested Alex.’

We agreed on a plan and went to our morning classes – Jack to physics with Dr Alex King, and me to English literature with Bryony and Synge’s
Playboy of the Western World
.

I got to the classroom five minutes early to find Hooper and Eugenie already there.

‘Did you notice that Mikki the gorilla’s back?’ Hooper mentioned as he lifted his bag from an empty seat and invited me to sit next to him.

‘Mikhail? How come? Did they charge him then release him on bail?’

Hooper gave a quick shrug. ‘You share a room with Galina – I thought you’d know the answer to that.’

‘No, she didn’t mention anything.’ Actually, I hadn’t talked to her at all that morning since she’d still been asleep when I left the room. ‘She definitely
won’t be happy that Mikhail’s back on the scene and I don’t blame her.’

‘Anyway, he’s here. I saw him outside Saint Sam’s room on my way to class.’

After that, Bryony arrived and plunged us into an analysis of the romance between Christy Mahon and Pegeen Mike – is it more comic than tragic or the other way round? Etcetera,
etcetera.

Back in my room at eleven, I found Galina crying on her bed. Her glorious mane of dark hair was tousled, her stitched lip swollen and sore.

‘Here,’ I said, offering tissues from the box I kept in my top drawer. I sat beside her and waited for her to dry her eyes.

She blew her nose and grimaced when her hand brushed against the scar. ‘The police, they let him go,’ she murmured.

‘Mikhail? Yes, Hooper told me. Did they charge him?’

‘No. They do nothing. He tells them it’s his job – he must protect me. He says sometimes I am wild and do stupid things. Like yesterday, I yell at him and run away. I fall over
in forest and cut my lip. What can he do? The police believe what he says.’

I handed Galina more tissues. ‘I suppose they don’t have any witnesses or evidence – it’s your word against his. And you couldn’t make your dad understand what
actually happened?’

‘I can’t talk to him. He is in New York at meetings. Salomea takes his calls.’

‘And she said it was OK for Mikhail to carry on doing his job?’

She nodded and blinked back more tears. ‘Before Salomea, me and Papa’ we have good life. We travel; we have fun. Then he sees her dance in St Petersburg – he loves women like
this – my mother too, she dances in Bolshoi Ballet when she is young. Salomea is beautiful as Mayerling in story of lovers who die. She is out of this world. Papa goes backstage to meet her;
he falls in love.’

As Galina’s voice fell away, I understood for the first time how tough it must have been for her. An image flitted through my head of a beautiful glossy blackbird trapped inside a golden
cage. ‘How old were you?’

‘Thirteen. In this year Papa marries Salomea and runs from Putin’s Russia. Putin says Papa is corrupt, that he steals oil and gas from people of Russia. They will put him in prison
for rest of life.’

‘So he can’t go back? But you can, I guess.’

Galina dabbed at her eyes and shook her head. ‘There are too many bad people there. They hate Papa so they promise to hurt me. I cannot go back, even to visit my mother.’

‘That’s really tough,’ I sighed. And I remembered her vivid account of the accident that wasn’t an accident in Monte Carlo. ‘The bad people you’re talking
about – were they involved in the thing with the boat, where one of your friends died?’

‘At first I think no but now I think maybe. These men, they follow us everywhere but you never catch them. They hide, they wait for next chance.’

‘You poor thing, that must be awful,’ I said. I almost told her about the conversation I’d overheard the day before – Sergei talking to Salomea on the phone, saying that
things hadn’t worked out – but I held it back for later, after Galina had had time to get herself back together. ‘Right now, can I do anything to help?’

She looked at me with moist, puppy-dog eyes. ‘Yes, Alyssa. You can be my friend.’

At that point Raisa had come into the room and clucked around Galina like a mother hen. She spoke in short, gentle sentences that ended in an endearment that sounded like
lyublmaya moy
. Then she took up a brush and drew it through Galina’s tangled hair.

Relaxing now that my roommate had someone with her, I’d hurried off on one of the school bikes, cycling down the cleared drive between banks of snow and out between the wrought-iron gates,
along the lane to the Bottoms, where I managed to catch the 11.30 bus into town. From the bus station I walked on towards the canal and Lock-keeper’s Cottage.

Jayden was already there and, though he’d set up this meeting, my heroic rescuer didn’t look pleased to see me. Mind you, he never looks cheerful (he has the wrong set of facial
muscles, I guess) and there can’t be many reasons to smile when a student in your school gets killed and one of your best mates lands in police custody.

Hands thrust deep in his pockets, with biscuit-coloured Bolt sniffing busily at a couple of crushed cans that had recently been dumped on the steps down to the canal, Jayden scowled a greeting.
‘You’re late.’

‘Five minutes. Sorry – the snow was bad. I had a lot to do . . .’

‘Oh, I know, Alyssa – you’re always so busy, running around picking up clues, chasing killers . . .’

‘. . . Dealing with your sarcasm,’ I added. ‘And, you’re right, I am busy so go ahead and tell me what we’re doing here.’

‘I wanted you to take a look at where it happened to see if you notice anything. It’s a hundred metres in that direction.’ He pointed along the cycle path, past a high brick
wall bordering a supermarket car park. Beyond that I could make out police tape, a square white tent erected by a forensic team and a ‘
Closed to pedestrians
’ notice half obscured
by snow.

‘I’m not sure what you think I’ll see that the cops haven’t already spotted,’ I told Jayden who was trailing a couple of steps behind.

‘Look anyway,’ he insisted.

‘OK, you lead the way.’ I stood to one side then followed him down the steps, noticing a thin film of ice on the surface of the canal and taking care not to slip on the path. Close
to the spot where Scarlett’s body had been recovered, I saw that the ice had been shattered and transparent shards floated on the black water – possibly where police divers had gone in
to search for clues.

Turning to Jayden, I thought one more warning might be in order. ‘You have to understand that I might not be able to help this time round. Memory is my thing. I can rerun events that have
happened to me – what I saw, what I heard, even smells and how things felt – but I can’t conjure stuff up out of thin air.’

‘OK, I know you weren’t around when Scarlett died. But you did talk to Ursula then Alex, so now you’re involved.’

‘Even though you didn’t want me to be,’ I reminded him. ‘What changed?’

‘They got Alex, remember!’

‘So your buddy gets arrested and now you expect me to come riding in on my white charger?’

‘You got it,’ he said, moody and hating to admit that he needed me. ‘You people at St Jude’s are the brainy ones. You know the right people; you’re in the right
place at the right time.’