S. Bolton - Dead Scared

‘I read about that girl,’ she was saying to Lacey as she picked at some dry skin on the inside of her wrist. ‘The one who self-immolated at the end of Michaelmas. Is she dead?’

‘She was very badly hurt,’ said Lacey. ‘Her recovery isn’t certain.’

‘And the one this week. The papers didn’t give any details. What happened to her?’

‘We suspect she may have deliberately crashed her car,’ said Lacey. ‘Danielle, I’m going to ask you some questions that you might find difficult to answer. I’m truly sorry to cause you distress but I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Is that OK?’

Out of the corner of his eye, Joesbury saw Danielle nodding her head, looking wary but also, he thought, intrigued. He looked down again, waiting for the inevitable question about the alleged sexual abuse.

‘Danielle,’ said Lacey, ‘when you were at Cambridge, were you ever scared?’

Joesbury realized he hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. Danielle was getting a whole load of free therapy from Lacey, who’d clearly missed her vocation in life as a student counsellor, but otherwise they’d made little progress.

He’d known before they arrived, because he’d been through Danielle’s file in some detail, that she’d struggled to cope with life at Cambridge. She’d missed assignments, forgotten to attend lectures and tutorials, frequently overslept. Her work had suffered to the point where the authorities were considering taking action. He’d already seen the files from the Student Counselling Services and knew about Danielle’s unsubstantiated claims of sexual abuse in her room at night. What he hadn’t known, in fairness, was what Lacey had unearthed. The fact that, before hanging herself from an oak tree, Danielle had been scared.

‘One of the lines we’re pursuing,’ Lacey was saying, ‘is that vulnerable students are being encouraged to harm themselves by some sort of online bullying. Did you ever visit any sort of suicide website or chat room while you were at Cambridge?’

Danielle nodded her head. Joesbury sat further back in his chair and watched her. From where the two women were sitting, Lacey could see him, Danielle couldn’t.

‘I just needed to know there were other people out there who felt as bad as I did,’ Danielle said.

‘Did anyone tell you about these sites?’

Blank look.

‘Did these sites find you, in any way? Did you get any emails, or did they pop up in your search engines, or anything like that? How did you know about them?’

‘I Googled suicide ,’ said Danielle, with a faintly contemptuous tone to her voice. ‘It wasn’t hard.’

‘Were any of the sites Cambridge-specific?’

Again, Danielle shook her head. ‘Most of them seemed to be based in the United States from what I can remember,’ she said.

Quietly, Joesbury stood up and walked to the window. The garden outside was mature and well cared for. Even in winter it was attractive, with grasses and evergreen shrubs gleaming with frost. He’d give them ten more minutes then bring it to a close. There was still time for lunch, maybe a chance to talk about something that wasn’t police work. Had they ever actually done that before?

Over on the sofas Lacey and Danielle were talking about the event itself, the morning Danielle had ridden her bike to some nearby woods, thrown a rope over a branch and hanged herself.

‘How did you reach the branch?’ Lacey was asking. ‘If it was high enough for you to hang yourself, it must have been too high to reach from the ground.’

‘It’s all a bit fuzzy,’ said Danielle. ‘Even the next day I couldn’t remember it too clearly. The police said I’d had the rope ready looped and just thrown it over.’

‘You must be good with knots,’ said Lacey. ‘I’m hopeless. Can never sort out my reefs from my bowlines.’

No response.

‘So how do you make a loop in a rope?’ asked Lacey. ‘And then, how do you get the knot round your neck right? So that it tightens as it should? I wouldn’t have a clue.’

Joesbury gave up all pretence of admiring the garden. He turned round to face the two women.

‘I don’t remember,’ said Danielle. ‘I’d taken something, according to the doctors. It’s all just a blur.’

‘What had you taken?’

A shrug. The girl’s face had stiffened. Defences were coming down.

‘What did you usually take?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t take drugs.’

‘Just on the morning you tried to kill yourself?’

‘DC Flint,’ said Joesbury, stepping forward.

She looked up, half defiant, half guilty. Then, with a tiny purse of the lips, she turned back to Danielle. ‘What did you stand on?’

‘DC Flint …’ Joesbury raised his voice.

‘To die by hanging, you need to raise yourself off the ground, tighten the rope and then jump. What did you stand on?’

‘According to the CID report, Miss Brown balanced on the pedals of her bicycle for long enough to tie the rope,’ said Joesbury. ‘And if we don’t take her back now, she’ll be late for work.’

‘Bull – shit !’

Joesbury glanced along the road and pulled out of the small car park. ‘Don’t mince words, Flint, say what you think.’

‘Double bullshit. What was she, a trick cyclist? She balanced on bicycle pedals for long enough to tie a noose round her neck and the other end round a tree. Bullshit in triplicate!’

It was kind of nice, in a way, seeing her composure slip.

‘Yeah, I get the point,’ he said. ‘You hungry?’

‘She couldn’t have done that by herself. You heard her, she didn’t know her knots from her knitting. She had help.’

‘Possibly. Pub grub do you?’

‘What the hell do you mean, possibly?’

‘Danielle didn’t die because someone found her and cut her down,’ said Joesbury. ‘They phoned for help and then legged it. CID never found them. It’s possible it was some sort of black joke that went a bit too far.’

‘She couldn’t identify them?’

Joesbury shook his head. ‘Unconscious when they found her. The important point to take away from today is that websites don’t seem to have unduly influenced her.’

‘She visited them.’

Up ahead was a pub. The sign outside said it served food all day. It also said it offered overnight accommodation. Oh, if only. Steak pie and chips, a bottle of good claret and then upstairs for the rest of the afternoon.

‘Of course she did,’ he said. ‘Anyone semi-computer literate contemplating any major step Googles it first these days. What we don’t have is any indication that what she found online made a significant difference.’

Make that the rest of the week.

‘Guess not,’ agreed Lacey.

Joesbury indicated left and pulled into the pub car park. ‘So, you’ve had a day out of school and done some proper detective work,’ he said, as he switched off the engine. ‘Now, can you get on with the brief you were given or do I have to replace you with an officer who understands the meaning of the phrase do what you’re told?’

For a second, maybe two, they stared at each other. She’d kissed him once, last October, at around four in the morning, had pulled him gently towards her bed. And he really could have done without remembering that right now.

‘Is it a disciplinary offence to call a senior officer a patronizing bastard?’ she asked him.

She might never know what it had cost him to say no. What every second in her presence cost him when he couldn’t touch her.

‘Pay for lunch, Flint,’ he said, ‘and you can call me what you like.’

THE SUPPER PARTY at which I’d been invited to be Evi’s guest was in the middle of nowhere. Or, if you want to be picky, a tiny hamlet called Endicott, between two villages called Burwell and Waterbeach, some eight miles north-east of Cambridge. I was well and truly in the Fens now. I had a feeling that, had it been a clear night, the view would have been un-interrupted until the North Sea. I’ve spent my life in cities and I was finding the vastness of the East Anglian landscape disturbing. There was just too much of it somehow, too much emptiness. No place to hide.