S. Bolton - Dead Scared

So, sometime between late Saturday afternoon and early Sunday morning, a car had left the road and travelled about twenty yards along the verge.

I pulled out my phone and took close-up photographs of the tread. Then I turned back, following the tracks again. I stepped over the bank of earth just as a very cold, fine rain started to fall.

It couldn’t have been the Mini that made these tracks. I would compare tyre prints to be certain but it was impossible. On the road I could see the chalk mark that the police had made to indicate the point at which the rope stretched tight and Nicole was killed. The car that left the road had been further out of town. Even if the Mini had swerved after Nicole was dead (in itself quite likely) it could not have steered itself around the bank of earth. There’d been another vehicle here.

EVI LET HERSELF in, using the new keys the university’s maintenance department had provided. The house felt cold, even though the heating should have kicked in an hour ago. She checked the controls as she entered the kitchen. Both heating and hot water were switched off. She cursed softly and flicked both on. Getting cold always made the pain worse and she’d spent too much time outdoors today. She flicked the switch on the kettle and pulled open the fridge door. Cooked salmon, green vegetables, pasta. It was getting harder all the time to drum up any interest in food.

She left the room and went into her study.

DI Castell could not have been kinder. He’d stressed that if someone had been able to gain entry into her house to leave the fir cones and the skeleton toy behind, they could easily have left the receipt as well. It was being sent away for fingerprint analysis and it would make no difference to their treatment of the case. He’d done his best to reassure her.

Trouble was, after he’d left, Evi had checked back through her diary. On the date in question, she had been shopping in Cambridge. The receipt was from a shop she knew. She remembered buying two of the items – cards, one for a friend whose birthday was coming up, the other of Tuscan sunflowers, an all-purpose greeting card.

The receipt was for three items, two of which she definitely remembered buying. Was it remotely possible she’d bought the skeleton toy herself? Bought it, put it in the cupboard upstairs and forgotten all about it? Grief and depression played tricks with people’s memories, she knew that perfectly well. She’d been depressed for a long time, even before what had happened last year. Losing Harry had been the final straw.

But to have done something so totally out of character and then to have forgotten about it completely. It wasn’t possible.

Was it?

Dinner in the college refectory, otherwise known as the Buttery, was a whole lot easier than dining in Hall but still an experience. I’d forgotten just how self-conscious young people can be. The students around me in the brightly lit, noisy dining room were all hair and limbs, brash loud accents and forced laughter. The girls fiddled with food on their plates and jewellery on their bodies; the boys scratched and yawned and used longer words than they seemed comfortable with.

Each kid around me appeared to have at least two conversations going, the first with their immediate neighbours, the second with some absent friend on the receiving end of text messages. The tinny beeping of texting was a constant backdrop to the buzz of conversation. Heads craned constantly to see who might have entered the room.

And this wasn’t even the busiest time. I’d sat in my room earlier, waiting for the queue outside the building to get smaller. I’d used the time to get to know my new laptop. Standard-issue Met laptops are ruggedized, serious pieces of kit that will stand up to a great deal of physical and intellectual punishment. They are as secure as you could hope a piece of IT equipment could be. One of those babies would have been far too conspicuous in the possession of an undergraduate, so I’d been given instead an off-the-shelf model along with clear instructions to keep it with me at all times, make sure the password requirement kicked in after sixty seconds of inactivity and not accept any incoming mail from unknown sources.

There was nothing in my inbox apart from a welcome email from Student Counselling Services with a Freshers’ questionnaire for me to fill in.

I’d glanced up. Still a queue. So I’d opened the Freshers’ questionnaire. Strictly confidential, totally anonymous, purely in the interests of researching general trends, etc., etc. I glanced quickly down the list of questions and decided it was needy, self-indulgent nonsense. Right up Laura Farrow’s street.

Did I find the experience of being at university for the first time overwhelming ? Well, yes actually, I did. Was I unsure of the demands that were being placed on me ? Yes, I could probably tick that one as well. Did I experience feelings of isolation and loneliness ? Tell me about it.

I went down the questionnaire ticking boxes and half laughed when I realized I sounded a complete basket-case. I stopped when I realized 99 per cent of what I’d put was absolutely true. I closed the file and sent it back.

When the Buttery started to clear I went too. Around me kids were inviting each other for coffee or making arrangements to meet in various pubs or bars later. I even heard someone talking about the library. It was nearly half past seven and I wanted nothing more than to go back to my room, make my first report to Joesbury and curl up with a book. No such luck. I had work to do.

Back at her desk, Evi accessed her clinic’s files. The detective calling herself Laura Farrow had picked up on the reference in Bryony’s notes to possible rapes. It had been the only time during their conversation that her self-control had seemed to be slipping.

Evi’s clinic had a policy of attaching key words to the summaries of patient consultations. Rape would almost certainly be one of them. Evi keyed rape into the search engine and waited.

Thirty-eight case files were found. The most recent was the case of Bryony Carter. The next on the list was that of a girl who’d been raped by her uncle when she was fourteen. Evi didn’t bother with the details. She closed the file down and moved on. There were several other cases that academic year, a few more in the previous year. None seemed relevant. Evi was starting to lose heart when she got to the case of Freya Robin, a plant sciences student. The computer files contained only summaries – the more detailed notes of meetings weren’t usually typed up – but there were still sufficient similarities to Bryony’s case for Evi to read carefully.

During the Lent term three years earlier, Freya had talked about bad dreams, problems sleeping and an unsubstantiated fear that someone was getting access to her room at night while she slept. One night she’d woken in the small hours, convinced she’d been raped. Her college friends, alarmed at the semi-hysterical state they’d found her in, had persuaded her to go to the police. No physical evidence had been found on her body, other than some scratches and minor bruising, and the rape test the police had carried out had proved inconclusive. With nothing to go on, the police had been unable to pursue the case.

Freya had drowned herself in a university swimming pool six weeks later.

Evi reached across the desk for the list of suicides. Freya Robin was on it.

Cross-checking the two lists, it didn’t take Evi long to find the rest. Donna Leather, a 21-year-old medical student, had never used the word ‘rape’ in her counselling sessions, but like Freya and Bryony had talked about bad dreams, often of a sexual nature; of feeling hungover and sluggish in the morning, although she claimed she hadn’t been drinking; of soreness in the genital region. ‘Violated’ was the word Donna had used to describe how she’d felt on certain mornings, but as though her own mind were doing the abusing. Donna hadn’t gone to the police. She’d hanged herself within two months of first raising her concerns.