Killing You Softly (6 page)

Sleazy,
I’d texted.
Felt really embarrassed.

Poor baby,
Jack had written. He sent me lots of smiley faces and kisses.

But, anyway, the photos were gone and Tuesday was almost here.

I looked at the photograph of Scarlett on our screen and read that a police inspector in charge of the investigation had called a press conference for later that day. ‘Let’s
translate this piece about the girl in the canal,’ I told Hooper, hoping of course that I’d learn more details about Scarlett’s death.

‘Maybe something more cheerful?’ Hooper queried. But then he looked at my expression and saw that it wasn’t up for debate.

So we started with the headline –
Police Appeal for Help.

‘
Appel de la Police a l’Aide
,’ Hooper wrote.

‘
Oxfordshire police are to ask the public for information relating to the death of seventeen-year-old Scarlett Hartley
.’

‘Wait – slow down!’ he begged. ‘
La police Oxfordshire demandera au public d’informations relatives a la mort de Scarlett Hartley, dix-sept ans.
How does
that sound?’

‘Yes, good.’ I read on: ‘
The schoolgirl’s body was recently recovered from the Oxford-to-Stratford canal close to West Ainslee lock, and early forensic evidence
suggests that she had been killed by a blow to the head
.’

‘Slow down! Who do you think I am, Will Harrison?’ Hooper said again.

Across the room. Will was working with Eugenie on their chosen piece of text. At the mention of his name, he glanced across at Hooper and me.

Hooper sighed and went on with the task. ‘
Le corps de l’ecoliere a ete recemment pris de
. . .’

My heart rate accelerated as I finished reading the article. ‘It says here that so far no witnesses have come forward. The police are hoping that an appeal for information on national TV
will jog people’s memories. There’s an Inspector June Ripley leading the investigation. She says the murder was particularly brutal and there are worries that the killer may strike
again.’

‘Impossible – I can’t translate unless you slow down,’ Hooper complained as Justine stopped by our desk.

She saw my hand quiver over the mouse.
‘C’est trop horrible, Alyssa. Il fault choisir un autre sujet.’ It’s
too horrible, Alyssa. You must choose another
topic.

It was sound advice. I did know that thinking too much about Scarlett Hartley wasn’t good for me. Still, I couldn’t help it as I drifted through afternoon lessons
then took a stroll in the school grounds’ past the lake and into the oak woods beyond.

Scarlett had been going out with Alex Driffield and ended up dead in a canal. She had perfect recall of everything that had ever happened to her. The killer was brutal and might ‘strike
again’. Certain facts hammered away inside my head so I was too preoccupied to notice a mountain biker speeding towards me along the rough track.

Whoa! I only noticed him when his bike hit a tree root on the crest of a small hill’ and bike and rider parted company in mid-air then crashed to the ground. I’d run to help the
guy up before I recognized him.

‘Alex, are you OK? What are you doing here?’

‘It’s a free country,’ he mumbled as he brushed skeletal autumn leaves and dirt from the sleeve and shoulder of his neon-yellow cycling jacket. ‘I can ride where I
want.’

‘Not in private grounds,’ I reminded him, picking up his bike and handing it back to him. ‘You’re trespassing. Anyway, be honest. You didn’t just happen to be
here – you came looking for me.’

‘What if I did?’

‘Jesus, Alex, we can go round and round in circles for as long as you like.’ I noticed there were streaks of mud down his cheek and caked in his short, dark hair, but I
didn’t feel I knew him well enough to point it out.

‘OK, now that I’ve run into you . . .’

‘Literally!’

‘Don’t worry – I would’ve braked.’

‘So, now that you’ve run into me?’

‘I guess we could have a conversation,’ he mumbled.

I nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

‘First – I heard you were in the village, sticking your oar in as usual.’

‘Who told you – your granddad?’

‘No – Jayden.’

‘Typical. Anyway, I wasn’t sticking my oar in. I care about what’s happened. I thought maybe it would help to talk.’

‘ “Care”?’ he mocked. ‘Like the journalists who showed up on our doorstep? Or like the cops – “Where were you on the night of the thirty-first of
January, between the hours of midnight and three a.m.?” ’

‘Neither.’

‘And why would it help me to talk to you, Alyssa?’ Alex grew more hostile as the conversation developed, as if he couldn’t help blaming me for something, and I couldn’t
work out what. ‘Are we back to the same old stuff – teenaged super-sleuth with the amazing memory is on the case; she’ll have it solved before the end of the week?’

I dropped my gaze and stared at the tyre marks in the mud. Whatever the reason, if Alex Driffield didn’t want to talk, that was up to him. ‘You’re right. I’ll back
off.’

‘Cool.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yeah. Well, no. Second of all, it wasn’t me – I didn’t have anything to do with it.’

‘Who said you did? You’d only been going out with Scarlett for about a week. You weren’t even at the party, according to Ursula.’

‘Anyway, Scarlett?’
I remembered asking.

‘Yeah. Really clever but not geeky.’ Ursula is ready with the low-down on Scarlett, much more open and friendly than I expect. She takes me by surprise. ‘Everyone liked
her, especially the boys. Alex practically stalked her for a whole term before he found the balls to ask her out.

‘Exactly,’ Alex snapped. ‘I wasn’t even there.’

‘But you’d had a thing for Scarlett for ages before you started going out?’

‘What if I had? What difference does it make?’

I sighed and tried to take the tension out of the situation. ‘You’ve got mud on your cheek.’

Savagely he rubbed the wrong cheek with the back of his hand.

‘Other one.’

He rubbed again.

‘You actually knew her,’ I say to Ursula. ‘What was she like? Was there an old boyfriend who got jealous when she chucked him and started going out with Alex?
Where’d she been on New Year’s Eve? Was she at the party? Did she try to walk home alone?’

‘I’m telling everyone I wasn’t there, but no one will listen!’ Alex repeated, and his voice bounced off the grey oak trunks and fell to the cold, black earth.
‘The first I knew about it was the cops coming knocking at my door, not telling me what it was about, asking when did I last see Scarlett? I say, in Starbucks in the shopping centre at one
o’clock on New Year’s Eve – why? They asked me loads more questions and I felt sick to my stomach because I was guessing now what this might be about – Scarlett had gone
missing, or she’d had an accident and she was in hospital. But they still didn’t tell me. They asked did we have a fight, how long had we been together, why didn’t I go with her
to the party?’

‘That must have been really hard to deal with,’ I murmured, knowing that my pathetic comment would bounce right back at me because the words that were pouring out of Alex were like
a dam bursting, sweeping everything before them.

‘I’m saying’ what’s wrong, what’s wrong? And my dad is in the hallway behind me, dragging me back and telling the cops I was only a kid and they couldn’t
throw their weight around like this and why the hell were they asking all these questions? And then they said they were sorry to inform us that Scarlett was dead and it was like I walked off the
edge of a cliff and just fell and kept on falling.’

We stood in silence, listening to the wind in the trees until Alex got hold of his runaway emotions and reined them in. ‘How could she be dead? I’d only talked to her three days
before. We had coffee. We went shopping. She was fine.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You’re sorry; everyone’s sorry. And you know what, Alyssa? I’m sorry too. I should’ve been there and it wouldn’t have ended up like it did. I
should’ve gone with Scarlett to the party.’ This last thought brought him to another halt – as if his mind had hit one final bump and gone up in the air like the bike had done.
He came crashing down into permanent silence.

And I couldn’t think of anything to say in the dark wood. Instead, I brushed his dirty cheek with my fingertips, swept the mud from his jacket and let him cry.

Detective Inspector June Ripley was impressive in her press conference. There was the usual desk with its row of microphones, and she was flanked by fellow officers on both
sides.

In her dark suit with shiny buttons, with her glossy black hair neatly bobbed and her small, even features maintaining a steely, unemotional focus, it seemed she’d been destined to join
the police force since birth. You would have found no Cinderella tiaras or Tinkerbell wings in five-year-old June’s dressing-up box. No, she would have been a caped crusader with a
light-sabre, putting right all the wrongs of her tiny world.

I was alone in my room, lying in bed watching the press conference on my laptop. The scarily professional inspector gave us the facts all over again – Scarlett’s body had been
found in the canal close to the lock. A murder investigation was underway and evidence removed from the scene. An intensive search of the surrounding area was continuing in an attempt to discover
the murder weapons, believed to be a ligature plus a heavy, blunt instrument. Inspector Ripley spoke quickly but matter-of-factly. She appealed for witnesses to come forward.

‘We know that Scarlett attended a New Year’s Eve party at a nearby address and that she left alone at around one in the morning. There is evidence from CCTV footage that she
stopped outside The Fleece pub near to Ainslee Westgate train station to talk to a man judged to be in his late teens – Caucasian, over six feet tall, dressed in a dark jacket, knitted hat,
jeans and trainers. CCTV also tells us that Scarlett, alone again, approached a taxi rank outside the station, but was unable to find a cab. She then walked off in the direction of the canal
towards a path that would have been a shortcut to her home.’

I listened to the detective’s every word – learned that the police were satisfied that no one had left the party with Scarlett, which fitted Ursula’s account, but who was the
guy she’d talked to outside the pub? Had the camera caught him from in front or behind? Had anybody there actually seen her with him?

Then my personal line of enquiry was rudely interrupted.

‘Go away! I don’t want you! I hate you!’ Galina screeched from below the window. She lapsed into furious Russian and didn’t let up – so much so that I got out of
bed and went to look.

There she was, out on the front lawn, caught in a pool of yellow light cast by the lamp over the stone archway leading into the quad, waving her arms at Mikhail. ‘Leave me alone, stupid,
stinky idiot!’ she yelled in childish English after she’d run out of insults in her native tongue.

The bodyguard remained inscrutable throughout, hands behind his back, soaking up the abuse.

‘You hear me? Why don’t you and Sergei leave me alone?’

Because they’re paid not to, was my thought. I leaned over the array of expensive cosmetics for a better view and it was only then that I noticed that two of the small, diamond-shaped
panes in the leaded window were broken and a cold wind was whistling in.

‘What are you – peeping Toms?’ Galina screamed at Mikhail. ‘Do you watch me use lavatory? Are you there when I take shower? I bet. Yes, I tell Papa he has perverts
working for him. You and Sergei are finished, Mikhail – wait and see!’

The wind whistled in and I remembered the sinister rattling at my window, the small voice pleading, ‘Let me in!’

A girl’s fingers tap at the glass, her desperate voice sighs inside my head. Frantically she breaks a small pane and reaches through the jagged gap. ‘Let me in!’

A tube of moisturiser was leaking on to the windowsill. Galina was still yelling at Mikhail as I screwed the top back on to the tube then recoiled.

There was a small bird lodged between two aerosol cans, its wings spread wide, its neck limp and broken.

‘Let me in! Rescue me!’

The bird’s breast was red, its eyes glassy.

I gasped and backed away, heard the shouting stop and Galina’s footsteps enter the quad.

Poor robin dead on the windowsill, oozing blood on to the stone. A small bird lying in a crimson pool. Not imagined, but stone-cold and real.

‘No big deal,’ Galina told me. ‘It is dead bird – so what?’

She’d stalked in out of the cold and then immediately blocked the broken panes with a copy of
Vanity Fair
and chucked the feathered corpse into the metal waste bin.

The robin landed with a light thud.

‘Poor thing,’ I murmured, wondering whether it had been a bird’s wings fluttering against the window that had been the real ghost-child of my dream.

‘Stupid
thing,’ Galina insisted. ‘It flies at glass and breaks neck. Glass is old and cracked. Anyway, how long does it lie there dead if I don’t share a room with
you?’

She’d found me cowering in a corner, admitting that I daren’t touch it, that it creeped me out.

‘You’re weird, Alyssa. They tell me, oh she’s so clever and so brave, she finds killers of roommate. But no. You run away from tiny dead bird – what do you call
it?’

‘Robin,’ I muttered, and shuddered at the memory of almost putting my hand on the cold, feathered corpse. ‘Why were you yelling at Mikhail?’ I asked, quickly changing the
subject.

‘He’s so stupid – that’s why.’

Everything, everyone for Galina was ‘stupid’, pronounced with an explosive ‘p’.

‘You want to talk about it?’ I asked.

Slumping on to her bed fully dressed and with her boots still on, Galina glowered at her fibreglass fingernails. ‘These two men – Mikhail and Sergei – they follow me everywhere
like shadows. I’m not free.’