S. Bolton - Dead Scared

Joesbury rubbed his eyes. He’d been on some stakeouts in his time.

She was out of the car again and the dog was beside itself with excitement. Joesbury watched as Lacey bent down and pulled a small square Styrofoam box from a large paper bag. She opened it, picked something out with her finger and thumb and popped it into her mouth. The rest she put on the ground and let the dog help itself.

Three minutes later, when the dog was licking the grease off the empty box, Lacey reached into the car again and brought out a half litre of bottled water. She poured some into the carton and let the dog lap it up. When it had done, she walked it up and down the small patch of grass until nature took its course and the dog stopped and squatted.

OK, that was it. If she left it there he was arresting her for allowing her dog to foul a public space and to hell if it blew both their covers. She didn’t. She bent, scooped the shit up into the takeaway carton, and dumped it in the nearest bin before disappearing with the dog into the college buildings.

Perfect excuse to follow her, ask her what the hell she thought she was doing sneaking livestock into a Cambridge college. He’d invent some reason for still being in town. She’d offer coffee, try to talk him round. They’d be alone. Joesbury’s hand was on the door, the ignition key in his hand, when he came to his senses.

He replaced the key and started the engine.

SMUGGLING A LARGE, over-excited dog into a college bedroom wasn’t the easiest challenge of my career but I managed it. I bumped into three boys at the foot of the stairs but none of them looked sober. ‘Mascot,’ I said to them, when they stared at the dog. None of them thought of an answer in the time it took us to run up the stairs and disappear along the top corridor.

Joesbury, it went without saying, would be livid if he knew what I’d done. He’d argue that drawing attention to myself without good reason was stupidly compromising my cover. I could always counter, of course, that students were known for doing daft things, and if anything it could even cement my cover. Whatever, I really didn’t care. I just didn’t want the dog to be shot. The following morning, I’d report it to the dog warden and drop it off at the local dog rescue centre.

Talaith wasn’t in our room, no surprise there, and the dog spent ten minutes exploring the various smells before turning on the spot three times and settling down on the rug in front of my desk. I made myself tea and spent an hour updating Joesbury on everything that had happened that evening and, in particular, my worries about Evi. Then, more because I wanted to show willing than because I believed I’d find anything, I started my daily trawl around the Cambridge websites. Someone called Jessica hadn’t been back to her room for the past two nights and her friends, Belinda and Sarah, were wondering if they should let her tutor know. Otherwise, nothing.

All the time I was working, the dog didn’t once take his soft brown eyes off me, as though he found every movement of my fingers on the keyboard completely fascinating. Oddly, it was comforting to have him there.

When I’d been on every website I knew of, I sat back to think some more about Danielle Brown. As soon as I’d prompted her to use the word scared, it seemed she couldn’t stop. Danielle had spent her last weeks at Cambridge afraid. Scared of failing, she’d told me, of letting down her parents who’d been so proud that she’d got into Cambridge. Scared of not keeping up with the others. Of being proved not good enough. Ironically, it seemed, the more scared she became, the more her work suffered and it all became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Not really thinking what I was doing, I typed Danielle Brown and Cambridge into Google and pressed Return just to see what would happen. Several references came up, some of which were from newspaper archives I’d seen before. One was about her being part of a winning sailing team in her first year. One reference was on YouTube. Not really expecting anything I clicked on it.

This footage has been removed as it breached YouTube’s publishing code .

Mildly intrigued, I typed Danielle Brown and YouTube into Google and pressed Return again. I found one chat-room discussion, mainly about YouTube’s policy on removing offensive material, with a brief reference to the case of video footage, taken on someone’s mobile phone, of the attempted suicide of Cambridge student Danielle Brown.

Earlier, Joesbury had speculated that Danielle’s suicide might have been a practical joke that went too far. That the kids who’d cut her down and phoned for help might actually have helped string her up in the first place. So had they filmed her dangling before stepping in? I sent another quick email to Joesbury asking him if he was aware that Danielle’s attempted death had been filmed.

At half past midnight I brushed my teeth, took my make-up off and went to bed. Sniffy-Dog followed me into my room, gave everything a good checking out with his nostrils and then settled down on the rug next to the bed. Realizing I was actually quite glad of the company, I let him stay.

Shortly before I dropped off, someone screamed outside. It was followed by giggles, a yell and running footsteps. Youthful high spirits, nothing more, and certainly nothing like the scream I thought I’d heard earlier at Nick’s farm, but it meant that, as I fell asleep, the sound of a woman screaming for help was uppermost in my mind.

Just after one o’clock in the morning, Joesbury walked into his office in Scotland Yard. Not entirely to his surprise, the room wasn’t empty. Two of his colleagues, currently assigned to other cases, worked quietly at their desks, a third was on the phone. His boss, DCI Pete Phillips, whom everyone called PP, but only behind his back, was in his glass-walled room in the corner. He glanced up as Joesbury settled himself at his desk and held up one hand, fingers splayed. He was asking for five minutes. Joesbury opened his laptop.

Four cheerful pings as emails arrived. The first from the accounts department, the second from his younger brother. The third to arrive was from DC Flint. Joesbury clicked it open and blinked at the sheer amount of text in the message. She’d sent it just forty minutes ago, which meant she’d gone straight back to her room and started work on it immediately. He began reading.

The most ordinary of sounds can twist themselves round when they enter your dreams, or so I’m told. Not being a dreamer, I have little experience of such things, but I’ve heard, for example, that the sound of milk bottles being put down gently on a doorstep can, in the dreams of the sleeper upstairs, take the form of bones rattling; that the gentle rat-a-tat of the postman can sound like a troll trying to break its way into the house.

It was the opposite for me that night. The sound I heard in my dream wasn’t threatening. It was quite pleasant in its way, but when I woke and heard it properly I knew immediately it wasn’t raindrops that I could hear running down the window pane. It was fingernails, scratching against the glass.

I lay there, my heartbeat getting faster, telling myself it would be a joke, just another student prank. All I had to do was sit up, open the window and shove the bozo off his ladder.

Except I couldn’t move.

Halfway through Lacey’s account of the academic soirée at that tosser Bell’s country pad, Joesbury’s smile had disappeared. He got up, crossed to the coffee machine and pressed the button for double-strength espresso, knowing she was trying to wind him up and knowing also that it was working.