Killing You Softly (7 page)

‘Yeah, I wouldn’t like it,’ I agreed. ‘And they don’t exactly blend in here at St Jude’s.’

‘I tell my father they’re mafia, not nice men. He replies nice men cannot be bodyguards. Bodyguards need to shoot people; they must have cold hearts.’

Realizing that the magazine wasn’t doing its job of keeping out the wind, I decided to pile some books against the gap instead. ‘What does Saint Sam think about your security?’
I wondered. ‘Saint Sam – the head teacher, Dr Webb. That’s his nickname.’

Galina shrugged. ‘He knows Papa doesn’t let me stay alone since accident in Monaco. He pays extra money for Mikhail and Sergei to be here. Dr Webb agrees.’

‘But they don’t actually live here in the grounds?’

‘No. They have hotel in Ainslee, I think. In the day they work together, guarding school gates, buildings. At night, one goes to hotel to sleep, other stays here. But don’t ask me
– I know nothing about their stupid lives.’

‘So the accident on the boat – it must have been serious for your dad to need these guys around 24,’7?’

‘Scary, yes. We’re in harbour and another boat drives fast towards us and doesn’t stop. It hits us – bang! Our boat tips over. Me, my friend Isabella and her boyfriend,
Carlos, we all fall into water. Engine of our boat doesn’t stop like it should and now there is no one to steer it so it goes crazy in water while other boat goes away. No one
helps.’

‘So then you have to swim to the shore?’

‘Yes’ but our boat is going very fast in circles. Carlos can’t escape. The boat crashes into him and he is killed.’ Galina shuddered at the memory.

‘And they never found out who was in the other boat?’

‘No. The police in Monaco – they say that maybe it was accident, that boat engine was faulty to make it go round and round that way and Papa should blame guy he bought it from.
Isabella says no because other boat, it drove straight at us – bang! And then it went away. Papa agrees. After this, he tells Mikhail and Sergei, never let Galina out of your sight. And
that’s what happens – I’m in prison in this horrible place, never alone.’

‘Were you very scared?’ I pictured a blue bay lined with palatial villas, a hot sun, a speedboat cutting through the water.

‘Very,’ Galina admitted, her eyes clouding. ‘But I don’t show this fear and you must not tell anyone. Promise.’

‘OK,’ I agreed, rearranging things on my bedside cabinet – mobile phone, hairbrush, iPad, small framed picture of Jack, all in order. That’s the OCD me coming out.
‘Time to turn out the lights?’

‘Tell Molly Wilson that someone dumped a dead bird in your room,’ Eugenie suggested before breakfast next morning.

Galina had drifted off down the girls’ corridor to scrounge some chewing gum. She’d gone into Eugenie and Charlie’s room and told them about the robin. They’d all gasped
then laughed about it and come back to Galina’s and my room. Charlie, still in her PJs, sat down on the spare bed while Eugenie examined the remains of the dried patch of blood on the
sill.

‘What’s the point? Galina thinks it flew into the window and killed itself,’ I explained.

‘You’ll still have to tell the bursar, though. She’ll need to get a guy to come and fix the panes of glass.’ Charlie came through with the same advice as Eugenie.

‘Good point,’ I conceded.

‘Anyway, if it was a suicide robin, why would there be two panes broken and not just one?’ Eugenie said as she checked the damage.

‘Yeah, another good point.’

Energetically Charlie took up the argument again. ‘I agree with Eugenie – it can’t have been a kamikaze robin. I think somebody climbed up and broke the window, reached through
and dumped it there.’

‘Yeah, poor you.’ Eugenie had turned her attention to the waste bin and was poking around amongst the screwed up paper. ‘It’s another practical joke, like those fake
pictures.’

‘You heard about that?’ I groaned.

‘The whole school heard. Lots of people went on Facebook to look before you had a chance to take them off. All the boys drooled over them.’

There was more groaning from me and a Slavic toss of the head from Galina. ‘Big deal,’ she muttered.

‘No, hold it, Galina. If someone’s using Alyssa’s password and faking pictures and now dumping dead birds on her windowsill, it kind of suggests she’s being
targeted.’ As she spoke, Charlie gathered her fair hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. ‘Can I borrow some cleanser, please?’

Galina nodded. ‘Help yourself. Maybe I get Mikhail to check it out, find bully,’ she told me with a stage wink.

‘Funny!’ Really, actually. So we all laughed at the idea that macho Mikhail should investigate the case of the expired robin and then we borrowed Galina’s expensive
lotions’ rubbed them over our faces and legs and went on gossiping.

Galina developed the picture for us. ‘My bodyguards find bird killer and get confession. He leaves school in disgrace.’

‘Or she,’ Eugenie pointed out. ‘Maybe a girl set up the whole thing. She climbs up the drainpipe in the dark and breaks the glass, deposits the dead robin. Why the hell
not?’

‘You have enemies here in school, Alyssa?’ Galina wanted to know. The idea seemed to perk her up no end.

‘Not that I know of.’

‘So maybe it’s someone with a secret grudge.’ Eugenie developed her conspiracy theory. ‘Who’s left over from last term and the whole Lily and Paige thing? Who
besides Harry Embsay and that lot might still have it in for you, Alyssa?’

‘No one,’ Please God, no one. The right people were in jail, Saint Sam had glossed over the whole thing and St Jude’s was sailing on into a future perched at the very top of
the independent-school league tables. Students would get the usual brilliant baccalaureate results and go on to Oxbridge, fees would go up again, the school would continue its tradition of taking
nothing but the best.

‘Who’s got it in for Alyssa?’ Zara burst into the room, squeezed on to the spare bed and sat cross legged next to Charlie. ‘Come on – what am I missing? Tell,
tell!’

‘Whoever thinks spooking her out by putting a dead bird on her windowsill is a fun idea,’ Eugenie replied. ‘It turns out she has a phobia.’

‘It’s not a phobia,’ I protested. This whole thing was getting out of hand. ‘Look, it’s nothing. I’ll let the bursar know about the broken window. End
of.’

But Zara refused to let it drop and went off on a new tack. ‘Maybe it wasn’t Alyssa who the jokester was targeting. Maybe it was Galina.’

‘And he thinks this scares me?’ Galina’s voice with loaded with scorn but I knew now that this was a cover for the fear she’d shared with me. ‘A bird is dead.
It’s nothing.’

‘Yeah but it could be a metaphor for something, or a kind of warning.’ Eugenie had performed in too many melodramatic operas. Her mind was full of gothic events. ‘Dead bird
sings no more. It represents the fall of something beautiful, the ending of a brief life. Soaring in the sky one moment then dead and cold the next.’

‘Thanks for that,’ I told her, trying not to shiver and glancing at Galina who by now wasn’t smiling.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ Charlie was the first out of the room. ‘I have to work with my fitness trainer for a half hour before breakfast, and, Eugenie, you have to practise
your scales or whatever it is opera singers do.’

I haven’t forgotten that it’s Tuesday.

As soon as the others left and Galina had begun another angry conversation with her dad about the pervert bodyguards he’d employed, I went off to take a shower. I washed my hair and rubbed
in Moroccan oil, shaved and exfoliated, moisturised and tweezered. Then I went back to my room and set out the clothes I would wear later in the day.

Jack is on a plane out of Denver and I’m getting ready for our reunion at Ainslee Westgate. Focus on that, Alyssa.

First though, I put on my uniform – white shirt (top button undone), red tartan skirt and matching tie. I customized the tie by making the knot big and the ends short then dropped by Molly
Wilson’s office on my way to breakfast.

I’m glad to report that the new bursar’s room had been totally refurbed. Gone was D’Arblay’s glass cabinet with its Second World War books and trophies – the
medals, the small silver box containing his macabre collection of teeth taken from victims of the Holocaust. The big leather-topped desk was gone too and the walls had been repainted in fresh,
cooking-apple green. There were white flowers on the new glass-and-steel desk and Molly herself sat behind it wearing a welcoming smile.

‘Alyssa, isn’t it?’ she asked.

I nodded. Impressive – the woman had done her homework, studying students’ photographs attached to our files and learning names off by heart.

‘Have a seat. How can I help?’

‘Our window’s broken,’ I replied, sitting on the edge of the seat, not planning to stay. ‘Room Twenty-seven.’

Molly made a note. ‘Room Twenty-seven – yes. In fact, Alyssa, I’ve been reading your file and wondering if you might want to change rooms, considering what happened last term.
Make a fresh start, maybe?’

‘Thanks, but it’s OK.’

‘You’re not reminded too much of Lily and Paige?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t mind. We had fun together in Twenty-seven. I like to relive it.’ On balance I decided that it lifted my mood to give my crazy memory free rein to roam
through the happy times – Paige polishing horse tack, smelling of saddle-soap, Lily energetically slapping paint on to her canvases and abandoning clothes in a heap on the floor.

Molly sat for a while without speaking, pen poised over her pad. She looks like the type of person who springs out of bed and into her clothes without a crinkle or a crease, whose short dark
hair never suffers from bed head and whose lip gloss lasts the whole day without smudging or fading. I admire that even though I’m never going to be that way – my hair’s too wavy
and wayward and my clothes don’t make much contact with an iron.

‘I was a student here once,’ Molly said at last. ‘A scholarship girl.’

‘Like me.’ I said. OK, I decided I liked the new bursar – we had things in common.

‘Yes. I saw that you scored top marks in our entrance exam in summer of last year – one point above Will Harrison. Anyway, I’m a local girl and my family still lives in
Ainslee. I went away, though – first to King’s College, Cambridge, then I threw it all up to do voluntary work in Tanzania, which was a good move on my part. I never really felt I
fitted in, either at St Jude’s or at Cambridge – I was always a bit of an outsider.’

We were deep in conversation and I was relaxing back into the chair, identifying with Molly in a big way – except for the hair and clothes, of course.

‘You didn’t mention how the window was broken, by the way.’

I thought about it then chose the easiest answer. ‘It was a bird – a robin. It flew straight at the glass.’

Molly nodded. ‘Leave it with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll see that it gets fixed.’

‘Here comes Justine – whoo, check out the shoes!’ Zara hissed across the breakfast table, and Connie, Eugenie, Galina and I clocked the red-soled
Laboutins.

Our French teacher was seriously stylish, we agreed.

Justine sat down across the room from us, next to Shirley Welford, head of maths. Shirley was over fifty and not stylish, but what she didn’t know about non-right-angled-triangle
trigonometry and the unit circle and radian measure wasn’t worth knowing.

‘Forget Justine’s killer heels, here comes Marco,’ Eugenie sighed.

‘With Charlie,’ Connie noted, which made Zara sit up and pay attention.

While Marco and Charlie chose their food from the breakfast bar and selected a quiet corner to sit, Connie went off to join Luke.

‘I bet Charlie and Marco aren’t talking about football,’ Eugenie said over the clatter of cutlery and the hum of conversation, while our American friend dazzled the playboy
newcomer with her perfect teeth and a quick flick of her big, hot-rollered blonde hair.

Zara frowned and rethought her Marco strategy.

Anyway, I wasn’t really listening or contributing to any of this. I was looking at my phone to check the time, thinking, Only seven more hours to go.

‘When does Jack get here?’ Hooper seemed to read my mind as he passed by with his muesli and milk.

‘Two o’clock into Ainslee on the Paddington train,’ I answered. At this moment he was 36,000 feet above the Atlantic, inching towards me on the airline map that showed miles
per hour, distance travelled and distance to destination.

‘Are you going to meet him?’ Eugenie asked.

‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ Zara must have noticed my clock-watching and lack of participation in the serious bout of Marco worship going on around our table.

‘Who is Jack?’ Galina wanted to know, while Zara went on plotting how best to break up the budding romance between Marco and Charlie.

Only five more hours to go, then four then three. I drifted through my English literature class with Bryony Phillips, not getting involved in Irish playwrights of the early
twentieth century.

‘Are you doing OK, Alyssa?’ Bryony asked. Normally I would have been deep in discussion about the political situation behind J. M. Synge’s
Playboy of the Western World
when it opened at the Abbey Theatre in 1911.

‘She’s due to meet Jack in Ainslee,’ Hooper butted in before I had time to gather my thoughts.

‘Ah.’ Bryony was steeped in medieval romance and Shakespeare’s sonnets so she cut me some slack. She knew that for once I wouldn’t care one way or the other about poor
Christy Mahon’s tragi-comic ‘murder’ of his drunken old da’.

With two hours to go I was free of classes and up in my room, slipping out of my uniform into my skinniest pair of jeans and Jack’s favourite top – an emerald green
one that matched my eyes, he said. I looked in the mirror, frontways, sideways and the view from the rear. I tried my hair up then down then up again, changed from flat boots to heels.

‘This Jack is special,’ Galina observed with a touch of what felt like envy. But she did offer style advice. ‘Hair down is best.’

‘Thanks,’ I said as I shook my hair free and hurried off.

Jack’s text came through as I arrived at Ainslee Westgate.
Meet me under the station clock.