Killing You Softly Read online

  ‘Hey, Alyssa,’ he said. He’d had his hair cut shorter over the holiday, I noticed, and it had been dyed a couple of shades lighter. He’d also acquired a bruise under his right eye and put on a few pounds of solid muscle, both thanks to working out in the gym he later told me.

  ‘Hey. Did you hear about the Ainslee girl in the canal?’ was my opening gambit. Obsessed with dead girls – moi?

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he drawled. Meaning, how could anyone who lived in Ainslee not have heard?

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said again.

  ‘Did she fall or was she pushed?’

  ‘They’re not sure yet. Why?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘Quit that, Sherlock, while you’re ahead,’ he advised. ‘You worked things out for Lily, but you should leave this one alone.’

  ‘So I’m going to take your advice?’ I quipped with arched eyebrows, surprised that he’d taken this line with me.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Just make sure it doesn’t mess up your head,’ Will said as he went off to find his room in the boys’ dormitory wing.

  I like Will, but, like I said about Hooper, he’s not my type.

  ‘Hi, Alyssa!’ Eugenie hardly paused as she noticed me out of the corner of her eye and got her driver to wheel her cases across the quad. Eugenie Clifford – daughter of Sir Roger and Lady Mary Clifford, musical prodigy, wannabe opera diva with masses of amazing red hair against a porcelain-white complexion. People say I look like her, but I disagree. Her hair’s darker and mine’s wavier for a start.

  Charlie Hudson showed up next and gave me a little bit more of her precious time than Eugenie did. ‘Who is that?’ she exclaimed, looking over her shoulder. Each short syllable contained a world of wonder, like Miranda in The Tempest – ‘Oh, brave new world that has such creatures in it!’ – ‘Who … is … that!’

  I followed her lust-struck gaze. ‘I have no idea.’

  OK, at last the new kid. Starting with the eyes – very large, very brown with thick black lashes. Then the lips – wide and full. The bod – six-three, sporty and perfectly proportioned. The car he parked in the car park reserved for staff – metallic silver Aston Martin. Do I even need to mention the custom-made bags or that he’s more my type because he’s built exactly like Jack?

  ‘Marco Conti,’ Zara informed us as we stood open-mouthed. She was busy carrying her stuff from her car to Room 22, knocking into me with her pile of party frocks and pairs of Manolos stacked high on top.

  Again, we were obviously meant to know the name. Since Charlie and I didn’t have a clue, Zara spelled it out for us. ‘Son of Paolo Conti, Azzurri centre back from 1994 to 2001, most capped player since Luigi Riva in the 1960s, now a casino owner in Monaco and director of a big online gambling company.’

  ‘Azzurri?’ Charlie echoed. She can be forgiven for not knowing because she holds dual American-British citizenship. Her family lives in Dallas (English mother, Texan father) and so she does American football, not our football.

  ‘The Italian national team,’ I explained as Marco clunked his car door shut and strolled into the quad, hands in pockets, jacket collar turned up, a glimpse of something gold hanging round his neck.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Charlie breathed.

  ‘Studying for his baccalaureate?’ Zara suggested smugly as she walked on and deliberately dropped a strappy Laboutin right in Marco’s path.

  The gallant Italian picked it up for her. She smiled; he smiled. There was immediate chemistry.

  Charlie narrowed her eyes and bit her lip. ‘Hmm,’ she said.

  I was trying to look forward not back as I sat in my room after dinner.

  I searched on my phone app for the temperature in Denver – still minus ten degrees centigrade so I texted Jack.

  How are you dealing with the weather?

  Freezing bollocks off. Miss you.

  Me too :x

  He’d promised Tuesday at the earliest for our reunion. I thought of the old saying – absence makes the heart grow fonder – and realized there wasn’t space in my heart for even the tiniest scrap of extra fondness for Jack without making it pop like a balloon.

  Who are you sharing room with? :x he texted.

  New girl, Galina Radkin. Am back in Room 27 :x :x

  What’s she like? :x

  Don’t know. Haven’t met her yet. :x :x :x

  Change rooms if you don’t like her he suggested, forgetting the kisses this time. Then he added: Change anyway?

  Maybe I replied. He knew Room 27 was full of painful memories and I loved him for realizing. Sounds of new girl arriving – gotta go :x

  Galina didn’t so much arrive as enter with a fanfare of trumpets. More Shakespeare here – this time from Antony and Cleopatra. Not quite purple sails and decks of beaten gold, but still Galina was impressive in every respect as she entered the room.

  She was tall with long, lustrous dark hair and a symmetrical oval face. She was slender and graceful, regal, happy in the knowledge that everyone who saw her would fall under her spell. No, it’s no good – I give up. Words can’t do it justice. The impact of Galina Radkin is impossible to convey. Here comes the actual Cleopatra reference – she beggars all description.

  ‘Put the bags on the bed,’ she told the two male assistants who accompanied her or, rather, trailed with the luggage three steps behind.

  The silent, muscle-bound lackeys were about to lift bags on to my bed by the window until I pointed across the room at two empty ones. They hesitated and looked at Galina.

  ‘Change with me?’ she asked in a heavily accented voice, ‘I hate small rooms. I think of gulags back home. I choose bed next to window so I can see sky.’

  ‘Course – that’s cool.’ Her playing the gulag card meant that I gave up my view of lawns, lake and oak trees without a whimper. ‘I’m Alyssa. Alyssa Stephens.’

  ‘Galina Radkin,’ she told me as she turned to bag carrier number one. ‘Raisa unpacks bags. You two can go.’

  I swear they backed out like gangsters from a Tarantino film – men in black with unsmiling, stubble-shadowed faces.

  ‘Mikhail and Sergei – they speak English not so good,’ she told me before the door was closed and she’d started to look around the room with the professional curiosity of an anthropologist discovering a lost tribe in the South American rain forest. ‘They follow me everywhere – my father pays them.’ Then she changed the subject to what was really fascinating her. ‘We live here – in a room so … small?’

  The rooms in St Jude’s dormitory block are tiny – I admit. The buildings are three hundred and fifty years old, built in the Jacobean style, which means long corridors and galleries, wood-panelled walls, oil paintings in gold frames and low, arched doorways. I believe people were shorter then and there’s firm evidence for it in the size of exhumed seventeenth-century coffins and the measurement of the bones inside. That’s not macabre – it’s just fact.

  ‘Three people stay here?’ she said, counting the beds and looking aghast.

  ‘No – just two.’ I explained that Zara had moved out into Connie’s room.

  ‘You and me?’ She paced the three-metre-square bedroom from the window to the door, sighed, paced again from the wash basin to Lily’s old bed. ‘At home my bathroom is bigger.’

  I nodded and went back to texting Jack on my phone. Russian roommate moved in. Delusions of grandeur. Nightmare.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the first thing Galina Radkin would do either tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest was to call her oligarch dad and demand to be taken away, back to their Knightsbridge mansion or to their holiday house in the Bahamas, say – anywhere but St Jude’s.

  Which would leave me alone in Room 27 – an idea that had left me feeling shaky.

  Raisa, Galina’s maid, expert in remaining invisible as she went about her work, arrived to unpack Galina’s bags while Galina meticulously laid out her make-u
p on the deep stone windowsill of our shared room. It ended up looking like the most expensive cosmetics counter in the world.

  Jumpers, shirts and dresses soon spilled out of the wardrobe we were meant to share. Lacy, racy balcony bras were left on the spare bed because the chest of drawers was full to overflowing with silk nightdresses, thongs and bikinis.

  ‘How do I live like this?’ Galina sighed.

  Raisa didn’t volunteer an answer. A round-faced, dark-haired, middle-aged woman in a high-necked grey jumper, black trousers and flat shoes, she went on silently hanging and folding until Galina said ‘Enough!’ and Raisa gave a resigned, obedient smile then quietly withdrew.

  ‘How do you do this?’ my new roommate asked me in total disbelief.

  ‘You get used to it, I guess.’

  Galina pouted then sat heavily on the edge of her bed. ‘My father – I hate him,’ she said.

  From this I guessed it wasn’t Galina’s choice to be a pupil at St Jude’s so I sympathized and tried to be nice. ‘I know it’s hard. This is only my second term and for the first few weeks I felt totally out of the loop. The others – Zara, Connie and Eugenie – have come through main school together.’

  ‘Eugenie – yes. My father knows the Cliffords.’

  ‘In London?’

  ‘No, in Monaco.’

  I worked it out – I’m thinking it was last autumn and Sir Roger and Lady Mary went to cocktail parties with the Radkins. They rubbed shoulders, standing in a balmy breeze and looking out from penthouse balconies at the yachts bobbing in the bay. ‘Our daughter goes to a school for exceptional pupils,’ Lady Mary tells Mrs R. ‘It’s way out in the country, in the Cotswolds, with no distractions. Eugenie is studying to be an opera singer under Bruno Cabrini. He’s her private tutor.’

  Mrs R says she likes the sound of a quiet, out-of-the-way boarding school for exceptional pupils. She thinks it’s time that Galina stopped acting the spoilt princess and learned how to develop her own talents, whatever they turned out to be. Mrs R is Mr R’s second or third wife, Galina’s young-looking stepmother, and Galina presents far too much competition when the paparazzi train their long distance lenses on the mega-wealthy Russian family aboard their super-yacht. It’s really the wicked stepmother’s idea to send her to St Jude’s, not Daddy’s.

  Lady Mary tells Mrs R that her husband will put in a quiet word with Dr Webb – he and Sir Roger were at school together – and she’s sure there will be a place at St Jude’s for Galina, whatever her academic talents may be.

  ‘She won’t like it,’ Mrs R predicts, ‘but it will do her good.’

  I’m surmising all this, of course, but I’d say I’d got this at least seventy per cent correct. ‘Give it a chance – you might get used to it,’ I told Galina, who was still pouting, but now skimming through contacts on her phone and starting to text.

  ‘Never!’ she vowed. ‘And why? Why does anyone who is not crazy want to stay here?’

  It’s difficult to get to sleep while your new roommate fumes and frets. Galina didn’t even do it silently. ‘Shit! … Stupid phone – what do you mean failed to send? Why doesn’t anyone text me back?’

  Maybe because it’s gone midnight, I thought, tossing and turning in my narrow bed. I turned out my light, hoping that she’d get the message. But no – she went from texting to making actual calls.

  ‘Papa – it’s me … Yes, I know what time it is … Yes, don’t worry. Mikhail and Sergei are with me. Listen, Papa, it’s horrible here – kids live in Dark Ages. I have to share room.’

  I turned my light back on, looked for something to read to send me off to sleep, found only the rolled-up copy of the Metro that Tom had given me. ‘Body Found in Frozen Canal,’ I read again. I studied the school photo of the smiling blonde girl who luckily at that point had no idea that her life was to be so short or would end so tragically.

  Her name was Scarlett Hartley. I knew hardly anything about her, only that she was seventeen like me, was a pupil at Ainslee Comp and she was Alex Driffield’s short-term girlfriend. I read that neighbours overlooking the canal had heard a disturbance on New Year’s Eve. A ‘disturbance’. Why the hell didn’t someone go out to investigate and possibly save Scarlett’s life?

  ‘Everyone is stupid,’ Galina complained to her dad. ‘Even Eugenie – all she likes is Rossini and Verdi. There’s nothing to do. I kill myself if I stay.’

  Why didn’t a neighbour open their back door on to the canal when they heard people yelling? What was so good on TV that they ignored a girl fighting for her life practically on their doorstep?

  ‘You can’t make me be student here – I run away,’ Galina threatened over the phone. ‘Mikhail and Sergei, they can’t stop me.’

  Didn’t they hear the screams and the splash when Scarlett Hartley went into the water? How did they feel now that they knew what had happened? Did they look out at plastic tape currently surrounding the crime scene and feel cut to the quick with guilt?

  Having recently learned a little bit about the darker side of human nature, I decided probably not.

  ‘Papa?’

  He’d cut her off.

  ‘Papa!’ Galina got no reply so she threw her phone across the room. It skidded under the spare bed, the one that Lily used to sleep in, while Galina buried her beautiful head under the pillow and started to cry.

  I put down the newspaper and pretended to fall asleep.

  Galina stopped crying and I drifted. I pictured Jack stuck in Denver International Airport and trucks sent out on to runways to de-ice the planes. Tuesday seemed so far away.

  My special eidetic memory brought back to mind the images of Lily in the lake, and of Paige slipping in the stable yard and falling under Mistral’s hooves. I saw them clear as day and I heard their voices.

  ‘You’d think,’ Paige mutters as she chucks a stinky pair of Lily’s jeans out of the window where Galina’s cosmetics are currently displayed, ‘you’d think just once in her life that Lily would have cleared away her dirty laundry before she left.’

  It was the last time we saw Lily – packing her bag and rushing out without explanation, leaving stinky, paint-spattered jeans on her bed.

  Four days later she was dragged out of the lake.

  I saw and heard Lily before that, at the start of last term, at Tom’s party.

  ‘There you are!’ she cries, slipping an arm round Tom’s waist and standing on tiptoe for a full-on lip kiss. Her eyes are staring, pupils dilated. ‘It’s ages since I saw you – at least ten whole minutes. Tell me you missed me.’

  Ex-boyfriend Jayden is across the room talking to Jack, my Jack – not Hooper. Lily totters to join them but collapses in a heap before she gets there.

  It’s the first I knew of Lily’s ‘issues’, before I learned about feral Jayden’s link with her, before I knew anything, in fact.

  My old, lost roommates came alive in my thoughts as I floated off to sleep.

  Then I dreamed a recurring dream I have of a cold, black river with a strong undertow, of abbey ruins under a starlit sky. I jerked awake, turned over and took an age to get back to sleep. But the nightmare returned – I felt the water close over my head and I woke in terror at 2.30 a.m. Afraid to go back to sleep, I listened to the silence.

  But even in the countryside, in the dead of night, silence is never complete.

  I heard the beep of Galina’s phone from under the spare bed as it received a message. I heard owls whoo-whoo in the copper beech trees that screen the technology centre.

  It’s no good – I’m never going to get back to sleep, I thought.

  There was the click of a door closing along the corridor – some other insomniac going walkabout? Then there was what sounded like a light tree branch rattling against the leaded window – ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ – totally Wuthering Heights, only I knew there were no trees that close to the building. What could it be, then? Was it worth getting up to find out?

  No, it was too cold. I decided to stay under m
y duvet.

  Guess what – Russian Princess Galina was a snorer. Who’d have thought it?

  Four o’clock came and went. Floorboards creaked in the corridor, there were other things in the ancient building that shifted and groaned and still the strange rattling at the window.

  OK, that was it – I had to get up and see.

  Yeah, very cold. I shivered as I tiptoed across the room and squeezed past Galina’s bed. I cupped both hands round my face to cut out the reflection and pressed them against the glass. Pitch black out there. Nothing moving. As I stepped back, my shaking hand brushed against a bottle of Clarins moisturiser on the windowsill. It toppled and fell on to Galina’s bed without waking her. I put it back in its place.

  And since I was up and wide awake now, I thought I might as well check the corridor. There was more creaking, squeaking and clicking as I opened the door and peered out. A safety light was on and I could see doors to either side of the corridor plus the gilt-framed portrait of Lady Anne Moore at the far end, complete with lace ruff and pearl necklace, plus lapdog.

  I tiptoed towards her until I came to the landing at the top of the stairs. It’s corny but the face in the painting has the kind of staring eyes that seem to follow you wherever you go. Lady Anne has hardly any eyebrows and a high forehead, which gives her a permanently surprised, almost scared look.

  ‘You and me both,’ I told her.

  But there was nothing on the landing and nothing, no one, on the stairs. Whoever was making the floorboards creak had moved off before I’d got there and by this time I was getting serious hypothermia.

  I turned and headed back to my room. At Number 22, the door was flung open and Connie Coetzee appeared in her knickers and a baggy black T-shirt.

  ‘What the hell?’ she hissed.

  ‘S-s-sorry!’ I stammered.