Killing You Softly

  Contents

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter one

  It’s happened again – they found another body.

  Unlike last time, when we lost my best friends and fellow students, Lily and Paige, this recent killing has nothing to do with St Jude’s, thank God.

  They found another body – not in the lake, but it was a watery end like Lily’s and it was a teenage girl. So some things were the same – enough to make me shake and tremble and feel like life on this cold January morning was playing dirty tricks.

  I found out about the murder even before I got back to school for the start of term. It was when I stepped off the train from Paddington on to the platform at Ainslee Westgate and I ran into Tom Walsingham. Tom, you remember, is the kid who lives in the Old Vicarage in Chartsey Bottom. He doesn’t go to my school, but I clicked with him as soon as we met last September and I’ve got to know him pretty well.

  ‘Hey, Alyssa.’

  ‘Hey, Tom.’ We’d travelled on the same train but hadn’t known it – me with my heavy suitcase crammed with clothes from the Oxford Street sales (shopping therapy to help deal with the trauma of losing Lily and Paige), him with his small backpack stuffed with footie boots and computer games. ‘Good Christmas?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Me neither.’ I’d stayed with my Aunt Olivia in Richmond, we’d done the turkey roast and Queen’s speech without enthusiasm. Same old, same old. ‘Why were you in London?’

  ‘Catching up with mates, getting the hell out of Chartsey for New Year.’ Tom wore a black knitted beanie pulled low over his forehead and a black ski jacket. He offered me a lift out to Chartsey Bottom in the car he’d parked down a side street near the station. ‘What’s in the case?’ he asked as I heaved my luggage into the boot of his car. ‘A dismembered corpse?’

  ‘Ha ha, Tom.’ Not funny, given last term’s body-in-the-lake events.

  We finally got the case into the boot and ourselves into the car. ‘Talking of corpses – did you see this?’ He thrust a rolled-up Metro into my hand.

  ‘Nope.’ I unfurled the newspaper and read the front-page headline. Body Found in Frozen Canal.

  Tom choked the car engine into life.

  My heart faltered as the image of my roommate Lily Earle forced itself to the front of my mind. Lily, fizzing with energy, throwing her stuff around the room we’d shared with Paige Kelly in the girls’ dorm at St Jude’s. Lily the brilliant painter, Lily the rich-kid rebel, my beautiful, thin-skinned, up-and-down, bipolar friend whose body had ended up at the bottom of the lake.

  Pulling myself together, I read the article. ‘Police divers discovered the body of Scarlett Hartley, seventeen, late yesterday. Scarlett, a sixth-form pupil at Ainslee Comprehensive School in Oxfordshire, had been missing for two days.

  ‘Few details have emerged about how she died though residents in houses overlooking the canal report hearing a disturbance during the night of thirty-first December. The stretch of canal where the body was found has been cordoned off and is being treated as a crime scene.’

  I read the report once, twice, three times. I looked at the picture of a blonde girl, elfin-pretty. She was wearing school uniform, smiling straight at the camera. Retina registers image, brain processes information and stores it in prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe. That’s how memory works. With me it stays there forever whereas with you it fades. I’m not showing off – it’s just to remind you that I’m freakish that way.

  ‘You knew her?’ I asked Tom.

  ‘She went to my school,’ he said. ‘But, no, I didn’t really know her.’

  My heart faltered over thoughts of Lily then kicked back into life as I rode with Tom out of town, down Cotswold country lanes. I pulled out my phone and read a text from Zara, a girl in my year – Guess what – we’re roommates

  And one from my lovely Jack – Snow in Denver. Plane cancelled

  When will I see you? I texted back.

  Tuesday pm at earliest. Love you x

  Love you too. x Hurry back x x

  Today was Saturday. I counted the hours between now and Tuesday afternoon. It came out as way, way too many.

  Then I forced myself to stop thinking about Jack and replied to Zara instead.

  Is it just you and me sharing? I texted.

  No – you and me plus new girl, Galina, Zara texted.

  Galina who?

  Dunno. But she’s mega rich and Russian.

  Have you met her?

  Not yet. Where are you?

  Bottoms with Tom. Will call taxi from here.

  ‘No need for a cab, stupid – I’ll drive you all the way to St Jude’s,’ Tom offered when I asked him for the number of a taxi service. He passed his house in the village and carried on until we reached St Jude’s, which was fifteen minutes out of his way – bless. We chugged through the broad wrought-iron gates in his tiny white Peugeot, up the drive to the main entrance.

  And here I was at St Jude’s Academy – a school for exceptional students, ready to begin my second term.

  It was the same and different. The same ancient stone building steeped in history, looking out over lawns and a lake to oak woodland, but different because we were minus Lily and Paige after the tragedy of last year.

  ‘Thanks, Tom,’ I said as he drove under the archway with the Nihil sed optimus crest carved in local honey-coloured stone. Nihil sed optimus – nothing but the best. A school motto like this weighs heavily with someone like me. I mean, I’m not the world’s most confident person and genuinely struggle to see myself in the ‘optimus’ category.

  We stopped in the quad and I hauled my case out of Tom’s boot.

  ‘I didn’t really know Scarlett, but Alex definitely did,’ he said, a propos the dead girl in the canal.

  ‘They were – what – an item?’

  Tom nodded. ‘Pretty full on.’

  ‘Alex Driffield?’ I was finding it hard to picture the football-mad kid whose dad ran the car-repair place in Chartsey Bottom being full on with any girl, let alone a blonde, smiley-eyed, dead one.

  ‘How many Alexes do we know?’ Tom muttered.

  ‘Right. That must have happened since the end of last term.’

  ‘In the run up to Christmas, yeah.’

  ‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ I said. I was, but I was also glad that it still had nothing to do with St Jude’s, nothing directly to do with me, so I set my case on its little wheels, said goodbye to Tom and rolled my luggage across the empty, stone-flagged quad. ‘Thanks,’ I called again as he turned his car and set off back down the drive.

  Zara intercepted me before I reached the door leading up to the first floor dormitories. ‘Alyssa!’

  I was pleased to see her, although I have to say I hadn’t hit it off with her straight away, not like I had with Lily and Paige. She’d seemed too girlie and flirty for my taste and I would guess I’d been too shy and uptight for her. But those deaths last term changed things and we’d grown close. She sashayed towards me in a cloud of Chanel Mademoiselle.

  ‘Ditch the bag, come and say hi to Connie.’

  So I did – I ditched the bag at the bottom of the stairs because when Zara issues a command you obey. I’d learned that during my first term at St Jude’s.

  You need to be able to picture her. Tall, curvy, blond
e. Think of a young Kate Winslet – yeah, sickening. Plus an intellect the size of a planet. Today she was dressed in skinny jeans and a short chestnut-coloured, bomber-style jacket with a fur collar, brown leather boots to match. Her to-die-for hair was scrunched up on top of her head, ready to be shaken out in a cascade of golden curls.

  ‘Who’s Connie?’ I asked as I trotted dutifully after her.

  She led me out of the quad towards the new technology building tucked away behind a stand of copper beech trees. An icy wind blew. ‘Connie – Connie Coetzee,’ she said in a tone that made me feel two centimetres tall.

  ‘Connie Coetzee?’ Catching up with Zara as we approached the entrance lobby to the steel-clad building, I repeated the name with an upward, questioning intonation.

  Zara pursed her luscious lips. That’s all she needs to do to express the fact that she thinks you’re an ignorant, ill-informed bimbo with zero IQ, so what are you doing here at St Jude’s, school for weirdly gifted kids? How come I didn’t know Connie Coetzee? She paused then relented. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot – you’ve only been at the school since September. Connie went home to Johannesburg last term – family stuff. Her dad divorced her mum and stopped paying the school fees. Anyway the courts forced him to pay again so she’s back.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘That depends,’ Zara countered. We went into the technology centre, down the wide central aisle with banks of computers on either side. ‘If you’re Luke Pearson, it’s good. If you’re Jack Hooper, not so good.’

  ‘Hooper doesn’t like her?’

  ‘No. Connie scares the crap out of him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hooper was quiet and kind. I admired his sensitive, artistic soul so if he didn’t like Connie Coetzee I was tempted along that road with him before I’d even met her. ‘But Luke thinks she’s cool?’

  ‘Yeah. Actually Luke was out there in Johannesburg over Christmas – getting over … y’know.’

  I knew exactly. Luke’s family had obviously taken him on a trip to sunny South Africa to help him recover from what happened with Paige. I expect you think I’m dwelling too much on past horror, but the way Paige died in the hospital with stents draining fluid from her injured brain will stick with me and Jack for the rest of our lives. And Luke had been going out with her at the time, so it must have been twice as bad for him.

  ‘Alyssa, Zara – hi!’ Dr Bryony Phillips waved at us from the raised platform at the far end of the room. She was laying out papers on a table, getting ready for a staff meeting. Bryony teaches English. I get on better with her than with any other member of staff. ‘Welcome back to the rhubarb farm,’ she said.

  ‘Rhubarb farm?’ I queried.

  ‘Yeah, where we force rare, tender intellects into precocious fruition,’ she called. ‘Like rhubarb shoots under terracotta cloches – Temperley Early, Stockbridge Arrow, Cawood Delight.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Varieties of rhubarb, obviously.’ Zara wasn’t interested in the chit-chat and cut it short. ‘Have you seen Connie?’ she asked.

  Bryony pointed to a bay set back from the main aisle where we spotted an unfamiliar figure sitting behind a computer screen. The figure didn’t stop what she was doing even when we went right up to her.

  ‘Connie – hey!’ Zara didn’t care that she was interrupting, naturally.

  ‘Wait just a second,’ came the reply.

  Which gave me time to decide whether I would have the crap scared out of me like Hooper or join Luke and Zara in the Connie Coetzee Appreciation Society.

  You too can make up your minds.

  Connie Coetzee speaks down her nose with clipped vowels and consonants. She was sitting down but it was obvious she was tall – I mean if I’d had to guess right then and there I would have put her at over six feet. Tall and sporting a boy’s haircut – short at the back and sides with a longer sweep on top and down over her forehead. Her hair was dark, her eyes pale grey. She had a small blue star tattooed high on her neck, just under her left ear, and she was wearing a black, chunky jumper, androgynous in its effect, but her wrists were slim and feminine and her fingers tapered with long fingernails painted dark blue as she tapped at the keyboard.

  OK, like Hooper, we were one sentence into a conversation with her and I was shit-scared.

  Zara gave Connie ten seconds to finish what she was doing. ‘Bad news,’ she pouted. ‘They moved me out of Twenty-two. We’re not roommates any more.’

  ‘They can’t do that,’ was Connie’s calm response.

  ‘They did. I’m in Twenty-seven with Alyssa and a Russian kid called Galina. By the way, this is Alyssa.’

  Connie flicked a glance in my direction and said hi. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix it,’ she told Zara.

  ‘But not with D’Arblay. There’s a new bursar – Molly Wilson. She organized the room switches.’

  ‘Why – what happened to D’Arblay?’

  ‘He’s in jail. Don’t ask.’

  Connie didn’t but I’ll explain anyway. A quick resumé – D’Arblay was the previous bursar at St Jude’s and, as I discovered, a dirty little fascist. I was the one who found out that he was a member of the group who put pressure on Lily Earle’s media-baron father to stop him exposing their racist activities. The pressure involved threatening to harm Lily, which indirectly is how she ended up in the lake and he landed in prison, awaiting trial. That’s it in a nutshell.

  So now we have a new bursar called Molly Wilson working for Saint Sam. Dr Sam Webb, school principal – he steers our elite group of gifted, hothouse Temperley Earlies towards future glory. From St Jude’s we all go on to Oxbridge or Harvard and any high-flying career you care to think of – financiers, top civil servants, traders in utilities, stuffers of dead cows and sharks suspended in formaldehyde tanks, in other words zillionaire concept artists. You name it – the worlds of science, finance, politics and the arts – St Jude’s alumni are there at the heart of things.

  ‘OK, I’ll fix it with this Molly woman. You do want to share a room with me again?’ Connie checked with Zara.

  ‘Doh – what do you think?’ Zara didn’t care that she was simultaneously hurting my feelings and abandoning me to the mercies of a Russian oligarch’s daughter. ‘Cool tattoo,’ she told Connie.

  I was busy studying Luke and Connie later that day when they sat together at lunch.

  Hooper came and sat next to me. ‘Jeez,’ he muttered, following the direction of my gaze.

  ‘I know. Luke moved on from Paige pretty damn quick,’ I agreed.

  ‘To the Black Widow – I mean, jeez!’

  I asked, ‘Why the nickname?’ and it turned out that Black Widow Spider was Hooper’s nickname for Connie. BWS for short.

  From what I learned in a biology class when I was twelve, the Latin name is Latrodectus hesperus. The female spider eats the male after mating. Nature’s weird. And so’s my eidetic memory. I have total recall and I never forget. This too must have some Darwinian advantage, though like the black widow’s sexual cannibalism I have yet to work it out.

  I mean, I can be slow to make friends sometimes – I think it’s because people find me and my memory too weird.

  ‘So, Hooper, how was your vacation?’ I asked.

  He shrugged and ate.

  ‘What did Father Christmas bring you?’

  ‘We don’t do Christmas at our house,’ he told me through a mouthful of honey-roasted ham. ‘My mother’s a pagan and my dad’s a mean bastard.’

  ‘Hah! Well, I got money from Aunty O and in a fit of extravagance I blew it all on January-sale bargains. Is your mum really a pagan? I thought she was a photographer.’ I knew from Paige that Hooper’s mother took society portraits of the Earl of this and the Marchioness of that, plus the occasional superannuated supermodel. And everyone knows without having to be told that his tight-fisted novelist dad, Martyn Hooper, has won the Man-Booker Prize twice.

  ‘She’s both. She worships the natural world so she asks famous people to
dress in green robes and wear flowers in their hair. Then she takes pictures of them in forests and up mountains.’

  ‘What we’d both give for normal parents, hey?’ Or, in my case, for any parents at all. I sighed as I watched Luke offer Connie a spoonful of the Eton mess he was eating. Yummy crushed meringue, whipped cream and fresh raspberries, so why did I flick back to thinking of sexual cannibalism?

  Here’s an explanation about my parents. They died in a plane crash when I was three, which is how come I sit with Aunt Olivia watching the Queen’s speech every Christmas Day, closely followed by a DVD of The King’s Speech starring Colin Firth.

  ‘They put me back in Room Twenty-seven,’ I confided in Hooper.

  ‘The one you shared with Lily and Paige?’

  ‘Yeah, but I guess the new bursar doesn’t know that.’

  ‘You could ask to change.’

  ‘I could.’ Connie ate the mess hungrily, I noticed, and Luke fed her another spoonful. I pulled a sad face. ‘Jack can’t get back before Tuesday. He’s stuck in Denver.’

  ‘How will you go on living without him?’

  ‘I have no clue.’

  ‘Maybe I could stand in for him for seventy-two hours,’ Hooper offered with a hopeful look.

  I laughed. Hooper’s cool – we joke along and say all kinds of stupid things.

  ‘No?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. Hooper’s amazing but he’s not my type. Jack is. End of.

  Talking of types, there’s a new kid on the block.

  All Saturday afternoon people arrived with designer luggage. I knew most of them even if I haven’t mentioned them before.

  Eugenie Clifford, Charlie Hudson, Will Harrison – don’t bother to remember all these names right now since they’ll come up again soon enough.

  Will was the one without the Louis Vuitton bags. This is explained by the fact that Will is a scholarship pupil, like me. We’re the only two out of an intake of sixty in Year Twelve, which makes us classic outsiders, though I felt it more than him at first. He used to go to the local comp with Tom Walsingham, Alex Driffield, Micky Cooke and the rest (likewise with the names), until his French teacher realized he was a linguistic genius and persuaded his parents to put him in for the St Jude’s entrance exam. His family still lives in nearby Ainslee.