S. Bolton: Dead Scared

‘I’ve got clearance from your guvnors at Southwark to request your help on a case,’ he said, and he might have been any senior officer briefing any junior one. ‘We need a woman. One who can pass for early twenties at most. There’s no one in the division available. I thought of you.’

‘I’m touched,’ I said, playing for time. Cases referred to SO10 involved officers being sent undercover into difficult and dangerous situations. I wasn’t sure I was ready for another of those.

‘Do well and it’ll look good on your record,’ he said.

‘The opposite, of course, also being the case.’

Joesbury smiled. ‘I’m under orders to tell you that the decision is entirely yours,’ he said. ‘I’m further instructed by Dana to inform you that I’m an irresponsible fool, that it’s far too soon after the Ripper business to even think about putting you on a case like this and that you should tell me to go to hell.’

‘Tell her I said hi,’ I replied. Dana was DI Dana Tulloch, who headed up the Major Investigation Team that I’d worked with last autumn. She was also Joesbury’s best mate. I liked Dana, but couldn’t help resenting her closeness to Joesbury.

‘On the other hand,’ he was saying, ‘the case largely came to our attention through Dana. She was contacted on an informal basis by an old university friend of hers, now head of student counselling at Cambridge University.’

‘What’s the case?’ I asked.

Joesbury opened the file. ‘That stomach of yours still pretty strong?’ I nodded, although it hadn’t exactly been put to the test much lately. He took out a small stack of photographs and slid them along the table towards me. I looked briefly at the one on the top and had to close my eyes for a second. There are some things that it really is better never to see.

EVI RAN HER eyes along the brick wall that surrounded her garden, around the nearby buildings, into dark areas under trees, wondering if fear was going to overshadow the rest of her life.

Fear of being alone. Fear of shadows that became substance. Of whispers that came scurrying out of the darkness. Of a beautiful face that was nothing more than a mask. Fear of the few short steps between the safety of her car and her house.

Had to be done sometime. She locked the car and set off towards her front gate. The wrought ironwork was old but had been resprung so that a light touch would send it swinging open.

The easterly wind coming off the Fens was strong tonight and the leaves on the two bay trees rustled together like old paper. Even the tiny leaves of the box hedging were dancing little jigs. Lavender bushes flanked each side of the path. In June the scent would welcome her home like the smile on a loved one’s face. For now, the unclipped stalks were bare.

The Queen Anne house, built nearly three hundred years ago for the master of one of the older Cambridge colleges, was the last place Evi had expected to be offered as living accommodation when she’d accepted her new job. A large house of soft warm brickwork, with blond limestone detailing, it was one of the most prestigious homes in the university’s gift. Its previous occupant, an internationally renowned professor of physics who’d narrowly missed the Nobel Prize twice, had lived in it for nearly thirty years. After meningitis robbed him of his lower limbs, the university had converted the house into disabled-living accommodation.

The professor had died nine months ago and when Evi was offered the post of head of student counselling, with part-time teaching and tutoring responsibilities, the university had seen a chance to recoup some of its investment.

The flagstone path was short. Just five yards through the centre of the knot garden and she’d be at the elaborate front porch. Carriage-style lanterns either side of the door lit the full length of the path. Usually she was glad of them. Tonight she wasn’t so sure.

Because without them, she probably wouldn’t have seen the trail of fir cones leading from the gate to the door.

‘YOU’RE LOOKING AT Bryony Carter,’ Joesbury told me. ‘Nineteen years old. First-year medical student.’

‘What happened?’

‘She set fire to herself,’ he replied. ‘On the night of her college Christmas ball a few weeks ago. Maybe she was pissed off not to be invited, but dinner was just coming to an end when she staggered in like a human torch.’

I risked a glance at the figure enveloped in flames. ‘Grim,’ I said, which didn’t seem enough. Choosing to die at your own hand was one thing. To do it by fire was another entirely. ‘And people saw this happen?’

Joesbury gave a single, short nod. ‘Not only did they see it, several took photographs on their iPhones. I ask you, kids!’

I started to look through the rest of the photographs. The burning girl had thrown her head back and it wasn’t possible to see her face. One thing to be grateful for. More of a problem were small, vague shapes visible through the flames that looked like chunks of flesh melting away from her body. And her left hand, outstretched towards the camera, had turned black. It looked more like a chicken’s claw than anything you might see on a human body.

The fifth photograph in the stack showed the girl on the floor. A long-haired man wearing a dinner jacket and a shocked expression was standing closest to her, a fire extinguisher in his arms. An upturned ice bucket lay nearby. A girl in a blue dress had a water jug in one hand.

‘She was pretty high on some new-fangled hallucinogenic drug at the time,’ said Joesbury. ‘You have to hope she didn’t know too much about what was going on.’

‘What has it got to do with SO10?’ I asked.

‘First question I asked,’ he replied. ‘Local CID aren’t unduly concerned. They’ve done the classic three-tick-box check to determine a suicide and found nothing to suggest anything sinister.’

I took a moment to wonder how many acts would be considered more sinister than setting fire to yourself. ‘I’m not familiar with that,’ I said. ‘What you just said about tick-boxes.’

‘Means, Motive, Intent,’ said Joesbury. ‘First thing to check with a possible suicide is whether the means of death was readily to hand. Pistol close by the shooting hand, noose round the neck and something to stand on, that sort of thing. In Bryony’s case, the petrol can was found outside the dining hall. And the investigating officer found a receipt for it in her room. He also found traces of the drug she’d been using for Dutch courage.’

Someone leaned over to put an empty glass on the table and caught sight of the photograph. Without looking up, I slid the pictures under the file.

‘Next box is motive,’ Joesbury went on. ‘Bryony had been depressed for some time. She was a bright girl but she was struggling to keep up with the coursework. Complained about never being able to sleep.’

‘What about intent?’ I asked.

Joesbury nodded. ‘She left a note to her mother. Short and very sad, I’m told. The report prepared by the first officer on the scene and the SOCs report on the state of her room are in the file,’ he went on. ‘No evidence of staging that they could see.’

Staging refers to tricks sometimes used by killers to make a murder look like suicide. Placing a gun near to a victim’s hand would be a classic example. The absence of the victim’s fingerprints on the gun would indicate staging.

‘And a couple of hundred people saw her do it,’ I said.

‘They certainly saw her in flames,’ said Joesbury. ‘And it’s the third suicide at the university this academic year. Does the name Jackie King ring any bells?’