Misty Falls (23 page)

I made space to show her the room. ‘No, it really isn’t.’ My voice broke in a sob. Alex rubbed my neck in sympathy.

‘Misty, someone’s broken in!’ she said, like I hadn’t worked it out myself. ‘Shall I get Mrs Huddleston?’

I glanced up at Alex. He nodded. This couldn’t remain a savant-only matter.

‘Thanks. She’ll want to call the police.’

Hafsa pointed to her room down the corridor. ‘Look, you can wait in there—I’ll just phone and report this.’

‘Thanks. I’d appreciate it.’

I closed the door to my room and took Alex along the corridor to Hafsa’s bedroom. She had decorated her walls with posters of her favourite great authors—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf and Maya Angelou (she has highbrow tastes). My walls by contrast had been a collage of my favourite actors from current film and TV shows and a slim collection of poetry books. I also had some personal touches, such as the picture of our family at Diamond and Trace’s wedding in Venice. From what I’d seen in my glimpse of the interior, all of these were now in a smashed and tattered heap on the carpet.

‘I don’t understand. Why me? Do you think it was Davis?’ I chafed my upper arms. I could imagine him crawling around in there like a cockroach but it seemed unlikely he would go unnoticed by my friends, who were in and out of their rooms the whole time.

Alex had a distant expression. He was talking to someone telepathically—Uriel I guessed. ‘Uri wants to know when you were last in your room.’

‘Until about seven. I picked up my geography books after supper.’

‘If Davis is to be believed, he was in the debate then. I didn’t pay much attention to the audience. Maybe Miss Coetzee did.’

‘I’d prefer it to be him—at least I can put a face to the intruder. Surely there can’t be two people creeping around the school?’

‘He could’ve been lying about hearing my speech.’

‘He wasn’t, not that I could sense, but he might not have stayed for the whole debate so maybe he told us only half the truth.’

Alex relayed this to Uriel. ‘He says to tell you that Victor Benedict is on his way but he’ll be a few hours as he’s in France. Uriel wants his brother to interrogate Davis.’

‘Good idea. No one gets anything past Victor.’

‘He has asked Tarryn to help you deal with the police and the staff. Then he suggests you stay with us at our hotel. Now you’ve been targeted, I don’t want you alone here.’

I grimaced. ‘Mrs Huddleston might not like the idea.’

‘It’s OK. I can be very persuasive.’

Tonight, I thought that was an entirely justified use of his gift. ‘Go for it. She’s a stickler for the rules. So without her permission, I’d have to stay here—and I know I wouldn’t sleep.’

‘Misty, before they come, just let me say how sorry I am.’ He moved over to Hafsa’s desk and picked up a book and put it down again, restlessness revealing his deep unease. ‘I think it’s my fault this has happened. Someone has found out about me and that’s led them to you.’ His eyes were filled with anguished guilt.

I put my arms round his waist to stop him prowling. ‘Don’t be silly; it’s not your fault—and not mine. We’re in this together.’

‘Thanks,
bokkie
.’ He brushed a light kiss on my lips.

‘You’re welcome, Alex.’

Our eyes met, his laser-blue and seeming to dip right inside me. At least there was one silver lining: I was facing this with a soulfinder by my side.

The police found no fingerprints in my room, at least none belonging to a stranger.

‘Gloves,’ said the crime-scene processor. ‘Most burglars know to wear them. And in a school like this it will be almost impossible to isolate any foreign DNA samples from your intruder. I suppose you’re certain it wasn’t one of your fellow students?’ The local police made no secret of the fact that they were hoping to tag this an inside job, student prank that had gone wrong. A phone call from Victor Benedict had stopped them dismissing it without even turning up to look, but the officer dusting surfaces for prints did make me feel as if I were wasting her valuable time.

She stood up and repacked her bag. ‘Nope, nothing. Your room is as clean as a whistle—apart from the mess.’

That reminded me of the killer’s victims, who seemed to have died from no cause, and a murderer who left no trace. If she’d meant to be reassuring, she hadn’t succeeded.

When she left, I locked the door from the outside, in no fit state to put the chaos straight. I promised myself I’d do it in the morning. I looked down the corridor. Tarryn and Alex were talking to Mrs Huddleston in the doorway to Hafsa’s room. From the benign, enraptured expression on my form tutor’s face, Alex’s gift was in full flood. I waited where I was until he gave the signal that it was safe to join them.

He looked across at me and held out a hand.

‘So you’ll go with your friends tonight,’ Mrs Huddleston announced as I approached, sounding for all the world as if it were her idea. ‘I’ll help you sort out your room tomorrow in the daylight.’ She glanced up at the corner of the staircase. ‘We really must see about getting CCTV installed in here. That would put off any would-be thieves.’

I suspected that ghost-intruders such as the one who turned over my room were too clever to register on digital either. I just wanted to get out of here. I had retrieved my wash bag and a change of clothes so I was desperate to go.

‘Can we leave now, please?’

‘Make sure she’s back in time for registration at eight thirty,’ Mrs Huddleston instructed Tarryn.

‘Yes, of course.’ Tarryn smiled reassuringly. ‘Thank you, Maureen.’

We left by the night gate, emerging on to the Trumpington Road. Only a few cars passed as we walked to the city centre. Cambridge was alive with the rustle of leaves, a sound usually drowned out by human activity. It reminded me that we were surrounded by miles of flat countryside, seen from space as just a blip in the fields and fens of Cambridgeshire. I felt very exposed, prey trapped in the gaze of a hawk.

‘Have we caught him?’ I asked when we were clear of the school grounds.

‘You mean is Eli Davis our killer?’ Tarryn frowned. ‘Uri doesn’t know; that’s why he’s summoned Victor. There’s a lot that doesn’t add up about Davis, but murderer? We’re not sure.’

‘Uriel has no authority to detain him. Will he need me to persuade him to stick around for Victor?’ asked Alex.

‘He promised not to use savant gifts on Davis and so far the man’s cooperating, so no, let’s leave that for now. The guy’s on fire to get us; you’d just be throwing fuel on the flames. According to Uri, Davis is relishing the confrontation, just waiting for Uri to put a foot wrong, but of course he won’t. He is too good at what he does.’

This wasn’t a peaceful stroll. I was unnerved but that was nothing to the tension pent up in Alex. With him walking between us, Tarryn and I were like bomb-disposal experts carrying an unexploded ordnance along the road.

‘What if I persuaded him to confess?’ Alex rubbed his hands over his face, trying to delete the stress of the last couple of hours.

‘I don’t think that’s the right use of your power. Your strength is charm, not coercion,’ said Tarryn. Thank goodness one of us was calm. ‘Victor is a professional in the field; leave it to him.’

‘But Davis went after Misty! He threatened her!’

‘I know you want to get him for that, Alex, but that’s hardly the right frame of mind for you to question him in. That’s why we have due process. Victor can put the right questions in a legal framework—that’s important if they end up prosecuting him.’

Alex gave a strangled, frustrated groan. ‘How would you feel if it were Uriel he cornered in the library?’

‘I’d feel very much like you do, but I hope I’d also know I had to step back so that the evidence is collected cleanly. You’d regret it more if you were the reason a suspect got away from us.’

Of course, she was right, but Alex was struggling to feel so detached. ‘OK, OK, I get it. But I want to protect her from creeps like him.’

‘Put your energy into making Misty feel better. I don’t need Francie’s gift to know that she must be really upset.’

‘Yes, you’re right. Sorry, Misty. I’m just finding this … hard.’ Alex wasn’t used to caring for someone. It was frightening him. I could see it in him: the desperation to protect, the dislike of being so vulnerable. ‘What do you want me to do? How can I help?’

‘Just be you.’ I linked my hand with his. I didn’t want to offload on him, not when he was carrying so much of his own baggage right now. ‘You’re doing fine.’

It was one in the morning by the time we got to bed. I was sharing Tarryn’s room in a city-centre hotel on Parker’s Piece, a grassy common that had escaped development. I drew immense comfort from knowing that she was only a short distance away in the twin bed and that Alex was just down the corridor. True to his promise to help me, he sent me to sleep with a soft chatter of telepathy, stopping me thinking too much about the violation of my private space.

But it had happened—and I couldn’t understand why I had been singled out.

‘Did he take anything?’ Victor Benedict stood with me in the disaster area that was my room.

I stooped and picked up a jewellery box. ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’ The hinges had come apart on the casket. The box was painted in the colours of the South African flag but now only one side was still attached, the contents spilled on the floor. I didn’t possess any trinkets of great value, just a few bits and bobs I’d been given over the years. I scooped them back into the broken box, having nowhere else for them.

Victor scanned the room. It looked like a whirlwind had pulled everything from the shelves, drawers, and walls. Only the bamboo-print curtains were still hanging. ‘It wasn’t a burglary but a search.’

‘How do you know that?’ I put the box on the empty dresser surface. From the scatter pattern of objects on the floor I could reconstruct how the intruder had swept his arm to push my stuff to the floor.

‘The small items of value, such as the cash in your purse, weren’t taken. I know you think you don’t have much, but there are still many things here that could be sold if you know where to go and if you’re desperate enough to stage a break-in. Your passport, for example, is worth quite a lot but he ruined it instead.’ Victor plucked it from the top of a pile and put it in my bedside table. It had been torn in two, the page with my photo on it gone completely. ‘Phone charger, iPod, laptop. None of them the latest model but there’s still a market.’

‘But if it’s a search, then he wasn’t very methodical.’

‘No, you’re right.’ Victor gave me an approving look. ‘I realized that a while back but I’m interested to know how you worked it out.’

‘From the mess. I think a professional would manage to search my things without me even knowing he had been and gone. The way this person’s enjoyed destroying my stuff suggests he was angry and mean as he did it.’ I picked up the photo of Summer, Angel, and me which had been ripped in two. I could only find the half with my friends on; my side was missing.

‘You got something?’ Victor noticed that I’d gone very still.

I held out the half photo for him to see. ‘The rest doesn’t appear to be here.’

‘And that part shows … ?’

‘Me.’ I turned over the frame that had held the wedding-party picture. Again, it had been torn up, this time into five or six pieces. I jiggled the bits free of the shattered glass and put them together. There was a gap on the far right where I had been. ‘Victor?’

He took the pieces from my trembling hand. ‘Maybe you should stop now, Misty.’

I’d never heard him be so gentle. I shook my head. Testing my new theory about this attack, I picked up my scrapbook. The pages fell apart from the binding. Shoving them back in, I could tell that any leaf with a photo of me on it had been torn out; even the baby photos if they had been labelled.

‘This is sick. Why do this to me?’

‘Come here.’ Victor pulled me close and put his arms round me, forcing me to end the search. I don’t think I’d ever seen him hug anyone before. He pretended to ignore the fact that I was crying. ‘You have to stop now. I think we know what this guy was trying to achieve and you’ll only drive his message deeper home if you carry on.’

‘What message?’ I wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

‘He wants you scared.’

‘Well, full marks then. He’s saying I shouldn’t exist—or he doesn’t want me to exist, isn’t he?’

Victor tensed. He would have preferred to have left that out. ‘That’s my reading of the situation. It would fit with a savant-hater like Davis.’

‘What about the killer—if that’s someone different?’

‘It doesn’t fit the pattern of the other abductions. There was no warning, nothing like this.’

‘So it was Davis?’

‘Possibly.’ Victor’s cool grey eyes registered his doubt. ‘But he said he wasn’t alone in his investigation. He’s dreaming of a big exposé—winning the Pulitzer—the whole nine yards, so I can’t see how room-wrecking fits. He’s ignorant of the fact that many governments are well aware of our existence and that we have good reasons for not highlighting our presence in wider society. He’s from the school of thought that there is no such thing as a justified secret.’