Dead Scared (32 page)

‘Hi,’ I said, before she had time to speak. ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’m here about Jessica.’

‘Nineteen dead women,’ said Evi. ‘It could be twenty by the end of the weekend. One of my patients hasn’t been seen since Tuesday evening.’

Dr Francis Warrener, the coroner for the city of Cambridge, lifted the corner of his napkin and dabbed his mouth. He’d been amenable enough to Evi’s suggestion that they meet for lunch and had sounded intrigued when she’d admitted she needed a favour. Now he was clearly regretting agreeing to see her. Well, tough.

‘It’s only a matter of time before the national press run with the story, asking very pertinent questions about what we’ve allowed to go on here. And before some parents start to get litigious,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about you, Francis, but when that happens I want to know all my boxes are ticked.’

Francis Warrener was small and slim and slick. All his movements were neat and precise. He had dark brown eyes, features that might have been pretty on a woman and very white teeth. He spoke little, but every word he uttered was precise and to the point. He’d stopped speaking a couple of minutes earlier.

‘You know the first question always asked in cases like these?’ said Evi. ‘Could anything have been done sooner? When I’m asked that, I don’t want to have to say, well, yes, actually, I was a bit worried, but I didn’t want to rock any professional boats.’

Warrener picked up his fork, speared a pea and put it carefully into his mouth. Most of his food was still on the plate, cooling rapidly. ‘If you’ve reported your concerns to the police,’ he said, ‘then surely you’ve done all you can.’

‘Yes, that might just save my career,’ said Evi. ‘And if it’s not enough by itself, then the fact that I met you, spelled out my concerns and asked you to look into it further will also help. Having both you and the police tell me to mind my own business will, at a pinch, exonerate me.’

‘And pass the buck firmly into my court,’ said Warrener.

‘I think you just mixed a couple of metaphors but, basically, yes,’ said Evi, forcing her cheek muscles into a smile. She waited, while Warrener pushed the remains of his chicken breast to the side of his plate and then put both knife and fork neatly down in the exact centre of it.

‘Why don’t you just look,’ suggested Evi, feeling sorry for him, but not enough to back down. ‘If you go through the reports and there’s nothing to substantiate what I’m saying, just tell me. I’ll
accept
your word for it. Then no confidences will be broken and no professional rules breached.’

‘And if I do find something?’ he asked.

‘Then you’ll be very glad you looked,’ said Evi, knowing he was going to do it. ‘And if you think that’s even a possibility, we shouldn’t be wasting any time.’

Nearly an hour later I’d learned nothing new. Except that it’s possible to feel seriously concerned about someone you’ve never met. I’d explained I worked for Jessica’s counsellor, and her friends had been happy to talk. After thirty minutes I felt like I’d known her myself. She was a girl with problems, that had been obvious from the day she’d arrived at the college. She was unnaturally obsessive about her appearance, in particular her weight, and hadn’t put anything in her mouth without carefully weighing up its calorific value. Sensing her vulnerability, people had begun picking on her.

‘Which people?’ I’d asked.

The girls had looked at each other for inspiration.

‘We never found out,’ said the one with cropped blonde hair. ‘Most people round here just don’t seem the type. Everyone’s pretty nice. A lot of it was on websites, you know, that sort of thing. Those things are completely anonymous.’

‘But there were practical jokes played on her too,’ I said. Evi had given me a quick summary before I left.

‘Yeah, but we never saw who was doing it,’ said the one with brown pigtails wrapped, Princess Leia style, above her ears. ‘During the day this floor is pretty quiet. Anyone could come and go and never be seen.’

As the term had gone on, Jessica had become more and more withdrawn, sometimes not leaving her room for whole days at a time.

‘Do you think she might have been on drugs?’ I asked.

Around the room, eyes became evasive.

‘If she’s in trouble, you won’t help her by keeping quiet,’ I said.

‘I’m sure she was,’ said the cropped blonde. ‘You just had to look into her eyes some mornings.’

‘We don’t know that for certain, though,’ said the one with the
yellow
and purple scarf wrapped round her neck. ‘You’re just guessing.’

‘There were days when she could barely get out of bed and I never saw her drinking much alcohol,’ said the blonde. ‘She was on drugs.’

‘Do you know where she was getting them from?’ I asked. ‘Did you see anyone dodgy hanging around? Was there anyone she met, anywhere she went on a regular basis?’

They looked at each other, thought some more and shook their heads.

‘Did she have money problems?’ I asked. Drugs were invariably expensive.

‘She never seemed to,’ replied Princess Leia. ‘She spent quite a lot on clothes and make-up.’

‘Did you notice scars on her arms?’ I asked. ‘Or a constant sniff? Did you smell anything odd in her room?’

More blank looks, more head shakes. Jessica wasn’t coming across as a classic drug addict. Neither had Bryony. I thanked them for their time, made sure they had my number and Evi’s in case anything happened and told them I was sure Jessica would be fine. I was lying. I was becoming more and more convinced that by the end of the weekend, Jessica would be dead.

Leaving the building I had a text from Evi to say she was on her way to the coroner’s office. He’d agreed to look through his files. She asked me to meet her back at her house in a couple of hours.

So I had time to kill. What I wanted to do was speak to Joesbury. Or at least let him know what I’d found out. It was still little more than a theory, though, and he’d been very clear about not contacting him unless it was an emergency. Couple of hours. I decided to check on Bryony.

Evi looked at her watch. The dog had been alone now for three hours. It could have peed on the carpet, chewed the furniture, howled a hole in the roof. And had Laura actually fed it that day? Had it been walked?

‘Evi.’

Evi looked up to see Warrener in the doorway. He had a single sheet of paper in his right hand.

‘Anything?’ she asked.

Warrener glanced down at the sheet of paper and then back up at Evi.

‘I checked eleven post-mortem reports,’ he said. ‘Starting with the most recent, that of Nicole Holt.’

Evi nodded. When she and Laura had taken out the boys, the less attractive girls and the girls whose suicides had failed, the list had numbered eleven. She’d asked Francis to check if any of the women had been under the influence of drugs when they’d taken their own lives.

He handed over the sheet of paper. ‘I’ll be emailing this to the chief constable on Monday morning,’ he said. ‘What he makes of it is anyone’s guess.’

Bryony was just as I’d left her two days earlier, staring up at the roof of the tent that kept her free from infection. She heard the door and her head turned slowly in my direction.

Her resemblance to an animated corpse was strengthening. The skin covering her face looked waxier than it had, and there were patches of discoloration. It looked as though the process of rejection by Bryony’s body was beginning.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She watched me approach the bed.

‘Same rules,’ I said. ‘The minute you want me to go, just blink a few times and I’m out of here.’

I waited for the blinking to start. It didn’t. I pulled the chair forward and sat down.

‘Had a bit of an adventure after I saw you the other day,’ I said. ‘Got attacked by a buzzard.’ I told her the story of disturbing the bird, of it swooping down on me and how I’d run for cover in the adjoining woods. There were things I wanted to ask her but I didn’t want to agitate her too soon and, besides, I had a feeling she had very little company. I was just about to tell her about the woods and the scary farmer when a nurse came in to check her blood pressure and oxygen levels.

By the time the nurse had gone it was getting late and I knew I had to be back at Evi’s before the end of the afternoon. The spooky woods story would wait another day.

‘Bryony,’ I said as the door closed. ‘There’s something I want to ask you. It won’t be easy for you, but it’s important. Is that OK?’

I waited for Bryony to incline her head down towards her chin and then lift it again. Oh, Lord, I’d been half hoping she’d say no, because what I was about to ask seemed horribly cruel, but Evi’s comment earlier about two hundred people seeing Bryony set fire to herself had struck home. Because they hadn’t. Two hundred people had seen her in flames.

Someone else had been present when Nicole had decapitated herself. Danielle hadn’t been alone when she’d hung from that tree. Maybe Bryony hadn’t acted alone either.

‘Bryony, what I need to ask is whether anyone was with you when you set fire to yourself.’

Maybe all three of them had had help.

‘What I need to know, Bryony, is whether someone was helping you.’

Maybe these weren’t suicides at all.

‘Whether anyone else did that to you?’

Bryony’s hand was moving across the bed, had taken hold of the pen. She was moving it slowly across the pad. At that moment, the door opened and an orderly came in. He nodded at me and walked to the waste bin.

‘So there I am, half naked, soaking wet, chained by my ankle and with a video camera pushed into my face,’ I said, in as cheerful a voice as I could muster. ‘Talaith said they did it a lot last term.’

As I’d been talking, I’d leaned over the bed to see what Bryony was writing. The orderly was emptying the bin into a large plastic sack he’d brought with him.

ME
, she’d written.
I DID IT

I gave her a little nod, to show I understood, and a half smile to thank her. Giving me a dark look, the orderly left the room.

‘I’m going to leave you in peace now,’ I went on. ‘To be honest, I’m pretty whacked myself. Had some weird dreams last night. Must be something to do with that room.’

Bryony’s eyes had opened wide with alarm.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just that Talaith happened to mention that when you and she were sharing a room, you had bad dreams too.’

She started writing again.
NO
, she wrote, and then
NOT DREAMS
.

Not dreams? What did that mean?

Her pen was still moving across the pad.
BELL
, she wrote again.

‘I know, you said,’ I told her. ‘Bryony, do you mean Nick Bell, your GP?’

Instant agitation. She started tapping the pen on the plastic. First above the word
Bell
then above
Not dreams
. The pencil slipped from her fingers but she carried on as though it was terribly important that I understood.
Bell
. And
Not dreams
.

Behind me, the door opened and a nurse stood in the doorway.

‘I think she needs some sleep now,’ she told me in a voice that brooked no argument.

Evi looked down. Toxicology screens were carried out on suicides as a matter of course and any unusual substances found in blood, saliva or urine would be noted on the post-mortem report. Warrener had lifted the toxicology reports from each of the eleven victims. Nina Hatton, the zoology student who’d died five years earlier after cutting open her femoral artery, had temazepam, a reasonably common sedative, and psilocybin, a hallucinogen, in her system. Jayne Pearson, the French student who’d stolen a family gun and shot herself seven months later, showed traces of another sedative called flunitrazepam. Its trade name was Rohypnol. That same academic year, the post-mortems of Kate George and Donna Leather showed traces of LSD and mescaline respectively. Both had also used the sedative drugs benzodiazepines. The following year, Bella Hardy and Freya Robin had died after taking ibogaine and DMT. Evi made her way down the list until she found the results of the post-mortem on Nicole Holt. She’d taken LSD before she died.

‘Other than the combination of hallucinogens and sedatives, there’s no real pattern here,’ Evi said, looking up at the coroner.

‘There isn’t,’ agreed Francis. ‘And there is nothing unusual in finding traces of drugs in the body of a suicide.’

‘No,’ said Evi. Claire McGann, fourteen months earlier, had taken mandrake, a rare herbal-derived hallucinogenic drug. Shortly afterwards, Miranda Harman had died after taking Benadryl.

‘I’m referring this to the chief constable,’ continued Francis, ‘and, against my better judgement, showing it to you, for two reasons.’

‘Some of these drugs are very unusual,’ said Evi.

‘They are,’ he agreed. ‘Not at all what you would expect the average university student to get hold of by themselves. My other concern is that by far the most common drug we would normally find in the system of a suicide is alcohol.’

Evi glanced down at the list again.