S. Bolton - Dead Scared

The phone on her desk was ringing. Evi reached out and put it to her ear. ‘Evi Oliver,’ she announced. To silence. ‘Hello,’ she tried. No response. She put the phone down.

The girl with the fake name, Laura Farrow, talked tough but looked brittle. The way she held her face when she wasn’t speaking had made Evi think of glass blown almost to breaking point. The way it hovers, fragile and beautiful, a split second before it shatters. The phone was ringing again.

‘Evi Oliver.’

No response.

‘Hello.’ Not even trying to sound patient this time.

Evi put the phone down, telling herself not to overreact. It could simply be a genuine caller with line problems. It was ringing again. She picked it up and put it to her ear without speaking. Silence on the line. Not even the sound of breathing. Very strong, the temptation to say something. She resisted, just put the phone softly down.

It rang again immediately.

OK, this wasn’t going to scare her. This was going to piss her off. She picked up the receiver and put it softly down on her desk. A few seconds later, her mobile began ringing. She reached into her bag and pulled it out. Number withheld. Evi answered the call.

‘Hello.’

Just empty air. Five seconds later it was ringing again. Evi switched the mobile off, replaced the receiver on the desk phone and unplugged it at the wall. Then she got up and walked round the ground floor. There were three more handsets to be unplugged.

She wasn’t going to overreact. It would be someone pissing about. They’d get bored and move on to someone else. When she got back to her desk she had a new email. She clicked it open.

I can see you , it said.

I stood just inside the front door of my block, taking in the chaos. ‘So did the boys with the buckets come back?’ I asked a slim girl with dark curly hair who’d made me tea the previous night.

The girl with the mop gave me a quick smile. ‘Plumbing problems,’ she said. ‘Sounds a bit gynaecological, doesn’t it? Second time this year. Your room’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I think it might have been your pipe that burst. Maintenance are still in there.’

The day was just getting better. I opened my door to find no sign of Talaith, plenty of water on the floor and a man in my bedroom. A tall man, with dark hair and kind eyes.

‘Hello, Tom,’ I called to him, before turning back to the corridor. ‘Yell when you’ve finished with the mop,’ I told the girl with black curls. Then I squelched my way across to my bedroom.

‘What happened?’ I asked, pausing in the doorway. There wasn’t really room for two people in these tiny rooms, unless you wanted to get very cosy.

Tom looked up from whatever he’d been doing under the sink. ‘Frost damage,’ he told me. ‘This is the fourth we’ve had this year. You know, we hardly ever have problems in the old buildings. There’s pipes in there hundreds of years old and they just keep going. Crap in the new blocks hardly lasts five minutes.’

‘Guess they don’t make poisonous lead piping like they used to,’ I said, looking round. There was no damage to speak of, just a damp and muddy floor and small piles of dust where Tom had been drilling. The cupboard beneath the basin had seen plumbing activity, as had the pipes that ran round the mirror. A fairly complicated metal junction looked new.

‘Chipped your mirror,’ I’m afraid,’ Tom said to me, nodding to where a tiny fraction of the glass was missing. ‘I’ll report it, should be able to get it replaced without much trouble.’

I thanked him and went to find the cleaning cupboard.

Evi’s hands were shaking but if anything she felt better. She hadn’t been phoning herself for the past half hour, nor had she sent herself the email. Which almost certainly meant she hadn’t poured red dye into her header tank and she probably hadn’t bought the skeleton toy either. She wasn’t losing her marbles, she was being stalked. By someone who had had access to her house. Thank God she’d had the locks changed.

And emails could be traced. Even if it had been sent from somewhere anonymous like an internet café or a public library, there would still be a record of it on her computer. She resisted the temptation to reply to it and carried on working.

Another email had arrived in her inbox. Great, more evidence. Evi flicked it open.

Purple makes you look sallow. Try another colour.

Evi stood up and walked as quickly as she could to the window. The curtains were drawn, no gaps through which anyone could see, but she pulled them a little closer all the same. She didn’t need to look down at what she was wearing. The cashmere sweater, the colour of lavender in bud, had belonged to her grandmother. Keep it from moths and cashmere lasts for ever, Granny had told her. It wasn’t quite true. It was looking worn and bobbly in places and she only ever wore it at home. She’d changed after the police had left. No one could have known that she was wearing purple right now.

Cracks in the mullioned windows might have been made by stray arrows, centuries ago, and the enclosed stone staircase looked old enough to have ivy growing on the inside. As I climbed, I left behind the smell of woodsmoke and cooked food, to have it replaced by that of fresh laundry and used towels, cosmetics and damp sports equipment. It was the smell of youth, with feminine undertones.

After speaking to Stenning, I’d accessed the university website and typed Scott Thornton into the search facility, realizing as I did so that there was something a bit familiar about the name. I found out that he was part of the medical faculty and a member of St John’s. He was also a Cambridge alumnus, having studied medicine here some fifteen years ago. It was probably all I needed to know for now. I still couldn’t remember where I’d heard the name before, but if it was important it would come to me. A more urgent priority was finding out a little more about Nicole Holt’s last days. The second set of tyre tracks I’d found near where she’d died was bothering me.

The room guide at the base of the stairwell had told me that Nicole lived in room 27. A single flower, pink and daisy-like, pinned opposite her name suggested that might not be strictly true any more.

I spotted Nicole’s room the minute I pushed open the door to the corridor. Cones of cellophane with flowers somewhere in their midst had been propped against the wall outside. Cards had been pinned to the door, addressed to Nicole, occasionally Nicky. Sometime in the next few days, I guessed, her parents might take them down, even read them if they could bear to.

At the end of the corridor I could hear female voices. In the communal kitchen four girls, caught in the act of making coffee, were passing a milk bottle between them. I stood in the doorway, waiting for one of them to notice me.

‘Hi,’ I said, a second later. ‘I’m really sorry to intrude.’

‘No worries,’ replied one. ‘You lost?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Actually I came about Nicole.’ This was the tricky bit. This was where I had to feign emotion for a dead girl I’d never met, in front of bright young women who might just have been her genuine friends. I dropped my eyes, brought my hand up to cover my nose, as though to conceal tears. Tears that weren’t actually there. I was obviously getting better at this acting lark because two of the girls had stepped forward. One of them had a hand on my shoulder, the other was steering me to a chair. I sniffed and realized the tears were there after all. My eyes had been watering in the cold most of the way over and now they were just flowing.

‘It’s OK,’ said a third girl, whose own eyes were damp now. ‘We’re all upset. Are you from the history department?’