Killing You Softly (20 page)

Anatoly listened and considered. I told him everything I knew and he thanked me. ‘Galina’s mother is in Moscow. She will be kept informed.’

I stole another glance at Salomea, wife number two or three, the un-wicked stepmother who was nonetheless cheating on a man who appeared in the top twenty of rich lists around the world. She met
my gaze and her eyelids flickered.

‘Does anyone know what happened to Sergei and Mikhail?’ I asked.

Salomea turned to stare out of the window at the gathering dusk.

Anatoly raised an eyebrow. ‘My people found them in London. They were on the tube train to Heathrow with tickets for Moscow in their pockets.’

‘Your people?’

‘I have more than thirty permanent employees in this country, all engaged in various aspects of security – bodyguards for me, my wife, my daughter. They are well trained. It’s
difficult for Mikhail and Sergei to hide for very long.’

Ouch! ‘So you’re supposing that they lost track of Galina and panicked?’

‘Yes, maybe. They planned to do the first thing that came into their heads, which was to leave the country and head for Russia because they know I can’t follow them there. That was
the mistake – it was too obvious. I had my men pick them up at the check-in desk.’

It was like having your own personal police force, but without the official codes of conduct or any accountability. Anatoly’s ‘pick them up’ phrase probably edited out a few
brutal details that he didn’t want me to know, but which Salomea understood all too well. A shudder ran through her slight, ballet dancer’s frame as she listened to her husband’s
account of what had happened to her secret lover.

I took a moment to picture it. Mikhail and Sergei hurry towards check-in. They didn’t do their job; they let Galina leave the school undetected. Only one of them had officially been on
duty on Friday night, but both were responsible for her safety. Their gut reaction was to run.

They don’t reach the self-check-in machines before ripped men in suits surround them and hustle them out of the line. It’s discreet so nobody notices as Sergei and Mikhail are
escorted from the terminal. A car is waiting.

Anatoly Radkin is the picture of civilized concern as he quizzes me in Molly’s office – as handsome as his daughter is beautiful, prompting me for every detail I can remember, backed
by an army of well dressed thugs.

‘Where are they now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied dismissively. ‘They are no longer on my staff.’

No longer part of the story – officially at least. I wondered how long it had taken Sergei to buckle under pressure and admit his relationship with his ex-boss’s wife. Salomea must
have been wondering the same thing.

I pictured her walking through a desert of hidden landmines in the full glare of her husband’s sun. After all, a kiss on the lips in Ainslee Westgate station is unbelievably high risk when
you’re married to a man as powerful as Anatoly Radkin.

‘There’s a reward for information,’ Anatoly said, maybe or maybe not coincidentally directing his attention to Salomea for the first time since I got there. He went over and
put a protective arm round her shoulder. She shuddered and he withdrew the arm. ‘So, Alyssa – if you think of anything else . . .’

I didn’t need any reward, I told him with a burst of angry contempt that I didn’t try to hide. ‘Right now, getting Galina back safe is all that matters.’

There’s a row of metal lockers in the glass corridor connecting the technology centre to the music room and that’s where I found the tie. It was slung over the top
of my locker door, hanging like a noose.

Jack, fresh and damp from his shower after tennis coaching, saw me freeze on the spot but it took him a while to clock the red and green tartan noose.

‘Why is my door hanging open?’ I wondered aloud. Not ‘Whose tie is that?’ or ‘Oh my God, that could be Galina’s!’ No, what bothered me was that I was
sure I’d left the metal door locked and now it was mysteriously ajar.

Jack slid his hand through the noose part of the tie then handed it to me. I read the name tag stitched into the reverse side. Galina Radkin. My heart lurched.

‘And a message,’ Jack told me as he swung the door fully open. He pointed to a lime-green Post-it note on the inside.

I’
VE SAID THIS BEFORE
, A
LYSSA
. T
HE PROBLEM WITH YOU IS THAT YOU KEEP MISSING WHAT
’
S UNDER
YOUR NOSE
.

I read it and screwed it up, threw it down on the floor. Thumping heart, breathlessness, pins and needles in my arms – the note induced an immediate, full-on panic attack.

Jack rescued the piece of paper then paced up and down the corridor. He stared out at the car park as if the answer lay among the rows of cars.

‘He opened my locker!’ I wailed, as if violated. The small things become big because it postpones the moment when you have to address the central issue, which was more proof that my
stalker was on my case twenty-four/seven, breathing the air I breathed, predicting every move I made. I slung the tie back at Jack and another lime-green note slid out of the lining and fluttered
to the floor.

Jack picked it up.
‘PLEASE HELP ME,’
he read.

‘Is it definitely Galina’s handwriting?’ was Luke’s first question.

Jack and I had taken the two notes and the tie into the music room where we’d found him, Will, Hooper and Connie, instruments in hand, waiting for Eugenie and Marco to begin their singing
lesson with Bruno Cabrini.

‘Let me see.’ Snatching the
PLEASE HELP ME
note, Connie studied the unsteady, upper case letters. ‘You can’t really tell,’ she decided as she showed it to
Hooper.

‘My gut tells me yes, it’s her writing and she wrote it in secret and stuffed it into the lining of the tie,’ I said. ‘And you can see by the name tape that it’s
definitely her tie, which she was wearing when she vanished.’

Hooper studied the note. ‘She was scared shitless when she wrote this,’ he commented. ‘The handwriting shakes and wobbles all over the place. But in one way we should be
relieved – at least she did write it.’

‘Meaning what?’ Jack asked.

‘Meaning, obviously she’s still alive,’ Hooper explained patiently. ‘And, when you think about it, this guy does need to keep Galina alive as long as possible so he can
carry on playing cat and mouse with Alyssa. Once Galina’s dead, it’s game over.’

My stomach flip-flopped, my heart thudded.

‘Hey, Hooper, no need to pull your punches,’ Connie muttered under her breath.

‘I’m just saying . . .’

‘We know and we agree,’ I butted in.

Across the soundproofed room, Carlo the music maestro took up his baton and tapped it against his lectern. Eugenie and Marco picked up their scores.

‘We’d better go and play for him or we’re all in the dog house.’ Connie grabbed her violin and strode across the room. Her Jo’burg language is like that –
quaint, a couple of generations out of date.

Hooper followed with his cello, then Luke with his double-bass and Will with his viola. The quartet took their place by the side of the singers.

Tap-tap-tap.
Bruno settled them down and appealed for full concentration. His manner was fussy and irascible, like Hercule Poirot. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad comparison.
Bruno is short and stout, dapper and methodical. Every time he conducts, he follows the bars, quavers and semi-quavers like a detective picking up clues. The musicians followed him, playing the
quiet, slow prelude to the most famous aria from Verdi’s
Aida.

Egyptian slave girl Aida is waiting for Ramades, her lover. Eugenie is Aida; Marco is Ramades.

Eugenie opened her mouth and the beautiful words poured out.

‘No, no!’ Bruno
rat-a-tat-tatted
his baton against the lectern. ‘More feeling, more passion, Eugenie.
L’ultimo addio –
last goodbye!
Aida knows she will lose him. She is sad beyond words.’

Marco stayed in the background as Eugenie began again. The string quartet kept perfect pace and rhythm. Bruno conducted with theatrical intensity, head to one side, both arms raised.

Jealousy, exile and betrayal – that’s the theme of Aida. Songbird Eugenie closed her eyes and sang as if she had an old soul in her seventeen-year-old body, a soul that had
experienced all there was to know about love and loss.

‘Yes,’ Bruno said with quiet satisfaction at the end, after each of his students had sung their parts. He didn’t praise or critique, but simply put down his
baton and turned to the page where Aida and Ramades die together in a darkened tomb.

‘I never knew Marco could sing like that,’ I confessed to Hooper when the lesson had finished.

Six of us left the music room together, leaving Eugenie and Marco to take notes from Bruno. We were headed for dinner, me with Galina’s school tie and the two Post-it notes stuffed in my
jacket pocket.

‘I expect there’s a lot about Marco that we don’t know,’ Hooper suggested.

‘Like what?’

‘Like where he went to school before he came to St Jude’s, how big is his allowance, plus why he hates his dad.’

‘Does he?’

‘That’s my theory. Why else would he make a big show of saying no to following in his father’s giant footballing footsteps then play anyway?’

Hooper braved the sub-zero gusts of wind, surging ahead of me across the car park then turning left round the front of the main building, his cello case in hand. I stopped to consider then ran
to catch up with him at the main entrance. ‘You think Marco’s rejecting the whole football-hero lifestyle?’

He nodded. ‘I know zilch about the game but even I realize that he’s already good enough to play at professional level – you saw that for yourself.’

‘In the five-a-side match – yes, you’re right. I remember that he did say he hates the game. Is that the same thing as hating your dad, though?’

‘Please yourself.’ Hooper shrugged. ‘I just thought it would be worth looking at. I’ll do it for you if you like.’

‘Cool. Yeah, go ahead.’ Ever since the hearts text and the jealous-rival flare-up with Jack, I’d pretty much kept my distance from Italian lover boy so Hooper’s offer to
do a little investigating on my behalf was welcome. ‘I don’t think there’s much there, though,’ I warned.

Zara and the girls had my back and eager, introverted, brilliant Hooper had taken up the Marco trail. Both things felt good as I waited for Jack in the entrance to the dining
room.

‘This’ll only take a couple of minutes,’ he’d promised when he spotted Shirley Welford talking to Justine by the self-service counter. ‘I need to change the time of
our next tutorial.’

And this was a chance for me to contact Ripley about the tie and the messages, I decided. I took out my phone and found my list of contacts, but before I could make the call Will came up from
behind and snatched the phone from my hand.

‘Will, what are you playing at? Give me that!’ I protested.

‘ “Give me that!” ’ he mimicked, holding it out of reach. ‘Who were you planning to call – your friend, Inspector Ripley? Yeah, I’m right – it was
her.’

‘What’s it to you, Will?’ Here was another person who was not my flavour of the month – ever since the scuffle had broken out in the boys’ dorm and Hooper had hared
off to fetch Molly.

‘Alyssa Stephens thinks that Alex Driffield is innocent –’ Will sneers as he breaks off from his card game – ‘holy shit! Now she’s got her super-sleuth
claws in me!’

Jack takes a swing at Will, punches him in the stomach and Will bends over double. Luke and Marco are the ones who drag them apart.

Hooper sprints off while Zara insists that we hear Will’s version of events. ‘Come on, Will, we’re listening.’

‘So, I knew Scarlett,’ Will admits. He’s furious with me for dragging his relationship with Scarlett into the open and still has one hand across his stomach to protect
himself from another attack. ‘But what am I going to do – go around telling everyone I was her ex and she dumped me for some other kid she met on holiday?’

And Will was suddenly suspect number one.

Ripley came knocking and interviewed him for two hours. But I still needed to be sure in my own mind – was Will a crazy psychopath?

‘Will, give me back my phone,’ I insisted.

‘Like you and Hooper gave me
my
phone back? Or, excuse me, let me rephrase that: like you and Hooper did after you’d stolen it from me?’

‘We didn’t steal it!’ I reminded him in a tone of injured innocence. ‘You dropped it and Hooper handed it back to you.’

Those were the incriminating messages, word for word.

‘The problem with you is that you keep missing what’s under your nose.’

My stalker is in a constant state of disappointment with me. He keeps raising the stakes, taking major risks to return Galina’s tie and leave me more messages. And I’m still not
getting it.

Will is here right now, in my face, under my nose. He is challenging me. Is it him – is he my stalker?

‘You read my texts,’ he accused, waving my phone in front of my face then rapidly raising it above his head. ‘You dropped me in deep shit.’

There was no point denying it. ‘No deeper than the shit you dropped yourself in. You shouldn’t have kept those pictures on your phone.’

‘I didn’t see why not.’

‘Because she asked you not to. You kept them because you thought you could twist the knife by using some old photos against her. That’s nasty, Will.’