Trick of the Dark

by McDermid, Val

  Maria flapped a hand in front of her. 'Hello? Anybody home?'

  Charlie gave a weak smile. 'I don't know where to start,' she said.

  Maria shrugged. 'I've always believed in starting at the beginning.'

  'And in this case, the beginning would be…?'

  'The first instance we know about. The rowing captain's death.'

  'And where do I look?'

  Maria spread her toast, frowning. 'Oxford, obviously. This happened back before everything was online. You'll need to go and look at the newspaper archives. There must have been an inquest. Surely there'll be a record of that somewhere? And there must have been a police investigation. Maybe there's some old retired cop ready to spill the beans like you get in the best detective novels.'

  Charlie laughed. 'I think you're more into this than I am.'

  'You've got to admit, it's a hell of a tale. I expect full reports at every stage.'

  Charlie felt a twinge of guilt. There would be some aspects of her activities that she wouldn't be reporting to Maria. Maybe chasing Jay's history would turn out to be an antidote to her feelings for Lisa. She'd tried to convince herself that her illicit emotions had simply expanded to fill the space available, but it wasn't working. 'I'll keep you posted,' she said. 'I've not got any teaching till Wednesday, so I can go back to Oxford today.'

  'That makes sense,' Maria said. 'Will Corinna put you up?'

  Charlie shook her head. 'I don't think that's a good idea. If Magda came out to Henry yesterday like she was planning to, he's not going to welcome another lesbian under his roof. I'll get Corinna to book me into a college guest room. Back to the Spartan cell of the undergraduate.'

  Maria grinned. 'Nothing to distract you from the task in hand.'

  Charlie had the grace to feel ashamed. 'Not in Schollie's, no,' she said.

  Maria finished the last mouthful of toast and stood up. 'Take care,' she said, rounding the corner of the table and hugging Charlie. 'There might just be a killer out there.'

  That wasn't the only risk, Charlie thought, her smile wan. Not by a long chalk.

  12

  The numbers on the clock morphed from 4:16 to 4:17. Jay shifted carefully, anxious to avoid waking Magda. They tended to sleep with legs intertwined, their upper bodies apart. It had quickly evolved as a position they were both comfortable with. There was comfort in the contact, but it wasn't easy to extricate herself when she woke in the early hours, knowing there was no prospect of further sleep. That was the pattern of her life, had been since Kathy's death and the nightmares that came with it. Night after night, Jay woke sweating, body clenched. The dream was always the same: the swirling snow, the freezing cold, the monochrome mountain. Then the imagined scream, a scream there had never been in life, a scream that severed Jay from sleep every night.

  The nightmare had gone on for months before she'd finally accepted that she would be stuck with it until she sought help. There was one obvious persona therapist she'd known since they were students. Jay had been amazed at her susceptibility to hypnosis. She'd always imagined strong-willed characters like her would find it hard to let go. But she slipped easily into the altered state and had little recollection of what had happened while she'd been under. That didn't matter. What mattered was that the bad dreams stopped. She could go to bed secure in the knowledge that whatever she dreamed wouldn't rise up and destroy her sleep.

  But the period of nightmare nights had changed one thing for ever. Jay discovered that, like Margaret Thatcher, she could function perfectly well on less sleep than most people needed. Now, four or five hours was all it took to refresh her and set her up for another day. It was, she believed, one reason for her business success. While other people were still sleeping, she was already at her computer surfing the web, dealing with emails, making connections and playing with new ideas. Or writing.

  She'd wondered whether revisiting that terrible day on Sgurr Dearg would bring the bad dreams roaring back. Wondered, not in an anxious, frightened way, but more in a clinical, 'How does this work?' kind of way. But nothing had surfaced in spite of her emotional reaction to writing about that moment when she'd cut the rope.

  She'd been outwardly composed by the time Magda had returned from Oxford upset and angry. At Jay's suggestion, Catherine had joined them for dinner, a DVD and a bottle of wine. By the time her sister had left, Magda had calmed down and they'd gone to bed with all possible conflict dispelled. They'd made love with all the urgency of reaffirmation, then Jay had slept as if a switch had been thrown in her brain.

  Sunday had been a perfect day. Jay had gone out while Magda was still asleep and bought fresh pastries and newspapers. They'd lazed in bed reading and talking, eating and drinking coffee, Craig Armstrong's piano music in the background. When they'd finally dragged themselves out of bed, they'd walked along the river, ending up having an early dinner in an intimate little Italian restaurant near St James's Park. 'During the week it's packed with politicians and journalists, ' Jay told Magda. 'But on Sundays, it's got a completely different atmosphere.' She sensed her inside knowledge of London was one of the things Magda found seductive about their time together. It seemed that Philip, for all his money and his generosity, had moved in quite limited tram tracks.

  After dinner, they'd walked on through the evening streets to Magda's flat. They didn't often spend the night there, but tomorrow she would have to return to work, and Jay had suggested it would be less complicated if she set off from her own home. Exhausted by fresh air and exercise, Jay had fallen asleep more readily than she generally did in beds that were not her own.

  But now she was wide awake, two and a half hours before Magda's alarm clock would sound. Inch by careful inch she withdrew the leg that was trapped between Magda's thighs. Magda groaned in her sleep and shifted on to her side, allowing Jay to slide free. She padded across the room, grabbing Magda's dressing gown from the back of the door and heading for the little room Philip had used as a study. There was, she knew, a computer there she could use, and a memory stick in her trouser pocket to transfer whatever she wrote back to her home machine.

  While the machine booted up, Jay cast her mind back to where she had finished on Saturday, before the phone had rung and derailed her concentration. Sometimes, any excuse would do.

  I have very little memory of how I got off the In Pinn. All I know is that it took a long time. The pain in my knee took my breath away every time I had to put any weight on my left leg. More than once, I thought I was about to join Kathy on the valley floor. It wasn't just because of the dead weight of my leg. And it wasn't because of the weather; ironically, that had eased a little, certainly enough for most serious climbers to feel confident of getting off the hill in perfect safety. No, it was because I was emotionally shattered. I had sent my business partner and closest ally to her death. It didn't matter that I had only done it so that one of the two of us would survive. I was distraught. Probably borderline hypothermic. And almost certainly in shock.

  The whole thing had taken so long that the mountain rescue team had been alerted. Later, I found out that I'd been a couple of hundred feet below the summit of Sgurr Dearg when they'd come across me, dragging myself down the mountain with agonising slowness. They wrapped me in thermal blankets and in stumbling sentences I managed to tell them what had happened. One of the few things I remember is the look that two of them exchanged when I told them I'd had to cut the rope. The pity and sadness in their faces haunts me still. I knew that, in the outside world, I was going to be condemned and reviled. But these men who understood the cruelty of the mountains had no anger in their hearts for me.

  They formed a phalanx of support around me and got me off the mountain. If you ever have a chunk of money you feel like donating to charity but you're not sure who to give it to, please send it to the Glen Brittle Mountain Rescue. Those guys are amazing. To turn out without hesitation in the dark in a blizzard to help a stranger is a demonstration of the kind of courage we don't often see in the modern
world. If not for them, I could have died that day.

  At the time, though, it felt like a mixed blessing to be alive. Kathy's death was a terrible blow. The loss of her friendship, her business acumen, her company — all of that was hard to bear. But I had no peace to grieve. What had happened to us on the In Pinn was an instant media sensation. As the owners of one of Britain's leading dotcom companies, Kathy and I were accustomed to finding our names on the financial pages. We quite liked it — we were proud of what we'd achieved.

  This was very different. Any climbing accident where someone perished because of a cut rope would have made a page lead in most of the papers for a day. But because of who we were and because of when it happened, this was a story that was all set for a long run. So I had to contend with the perpetual attentions of hungry journalists who couldn't quite decide if I was a tragic heroine or an evil villain.

  As if that wasn't enough, I was in the thick of a major business deal. Really, Kathy and I shouldn't have sneaked away to the Cuillin when we did, because we were in the middle of the most crucial period of our entire professional life up to that point. What nobody except the parties to the deal had known when we went to Skye was that Kathy and I were in the midst of selling doitnow.com. I'd been having secret meetings with Joshua Pitt, the CEO of AMTAGEN, for weeks and the deal was on the point of completion when the weather had offered Kathy and me the perfect opportunity for the climb we'd always dreamed of. Now, with Kathy gone, for the sake of everyone who worked for us, I had to find a way to make the deal go forward.The problem was that Kathy owned half of doitnow.com, and though we both had wills leaving our halves of the company to each other, it takes time to process inheritances. The company lawyers had to persuade the executors of Kathy's will that selling her share of doitnow.com was in the best interests of the person she'd left her shares to. Even though that was the same person as the one who was trying to persuade them to sell the shares… There were times when I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland. I've never come under more pressure in my life.

  What was worse than the pressure was not having time to grieve. I wanted to rage at the loss, to weep at the waste, to curse the moment's inattention that had cost Kathy her life. But I had to be civil to the press, to the lawyers and to the people who were trying to buy my company.

  I sometimes feel I never got the chance to mourn Kathy properly.

  Instead, I concentrated on preserving the jobs of all the people who worked for us. I truly believed that I would be giving them the chance to scale new heights as part of a much bigger corporation, a company that had real ambition for the digital future.

  We completed the sale on 9 March 2000, three weeks after Kathy's death. And on 10 March the dotcom bubble burst.

  A month after I had sold doitnow.com, AMTAGEN had lost 90 per cent of its value.

  Jay ran a hand through her spiky bed hair. She was on thin ice here. She'd lost a business partner but at least she'd managed to hang on to her assets. Anyone who was interested enough to do a little research would soon find out she'd made PS237 million from the sale of doitnow.com. There was no need to turn her readers off by rubbing their noses in it. Time, instead, for a little judicious tweaking of the truth.

  By pure chance, Kathy and I had set up the sale of doitnow.com at the perfect moment. Thanks in part to her understanding of the dotcom world, I was a very rich woman.

  I'd have given it all to have Kathy back.

  'As if,' Jay said out loud, saving the file and transferring it to her memory stick before erasing it from Magda's machine. She pushed back from the desk and stretched luxuriously. If she woke Magda now, there would be time to make love before she left for the cancer ward. Jay smiled. Nothing like some early-morning work to waken those appetites.

  13

  Charlie had spent more hours than she cared to count inside libraries in Oxford. But she'd never crossed the threshold of the city library. Incongruously set down in the heart of the Westgate shopping centre, its seventies concrete and glass and steel were still more modern than most of the buildings where she'd studied. She didn't think the readers here suffered from tourists clambering up to take photographs through the windows, as happened regularly to students in the Radcliffe Camera. She didn't imagine she'd have to swear an oath before she could consult their stocks, either. Charlie still remembered being charmed by having to promise never to bring fire or flame into the Bodleian Library before they would give her a reader's ticket.

  Within fifteen minutes, Charlie was set up with a microfiche reader and the relevant films from the local paper. She already knew the date of Jess Edwards' death and some preliminary research online had pinpointed the date of the inquest. She began the tedious business of scrolling through the pages, trying to ignore the man at the next reader who alternated between sniffing loudly and scratching various parts of his body. His languid turning of the knob on his machine convinced Charlie he was only there to pass the time in a warm place. But when she found the first story about Jess's death, she soon forgot any distraction. There it was in black and white. STAR STUDENT IN TRAGIC DROWNING read the headline.

  A student was found dead in the River Cherwell at St Scholastika's College early this morning.

  Jess Edwards, a keen rower, was discovered in the water by the college boathouse by her fellow team members when they arrived for early-morning practice. Paramedics were unable to revive her at the scene and she was declared dead on arrival at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

  According to one of the students who found her, she appeared to have sustained a head injury. Police said her death had all the hallmarks of a tragic accident.

  Jess, 20, was a second-year geography student at St Scholastika's. She was captain of the college rowing eight and had already won a university Blue for the sport. She was a member of the Junior Common Room committee and was in the running to become student president of the college.

  A friend said, 'The whole college is in mourning. Everybody loved Jess. It's a terrible shock.'

  Charlie's mouth curled in a derisive sneer. That quote was such an obvious fabrication. If the reporter had spoken to any undergraduate from Schollie's, Charlie would dance naked down Westgate. What was even more annoying than the journalistic laziness was that the article told her nothing she didn't already know.

  She scanned the next few days but there were no follow-up stories. St Scholastika's would have been buzzing with Jess's death, but the accidental death of a student wasn't that big a deal for the non-academic citizens of Oxford. In that respect, Charlie thought, the university was as solipsistic as a small child — the centre of its own universe, bemused that the rest of the world didn't see things in its terms.

  Charlie removed the reel and loaded the one that covered the period of the inquest into Jess's death. When she found it, she was surprised to read STUDENT DEATH AVOIDABLE as the headline.

  The drowning of a promising student could have been avoided by a simple safety measure, the Oxford coroner told an inquest yesterday.

  Jess Edwards died in the River Cherwell after hitting her head on the edge of the boathouse jetty at St Scholastika's College last November. But if the college had installed a non-slip surface, the tragic accident might not have taken place.

  Delivering a verdict of accidental death, Coroner David Stanton said, 'We cannot be certain what happened at the boathouse that morning but, based on the forensic evidence, it seems clear that Miss Edwards slipped and hit her head on the edge of the jetty as she fell into the water. We have heard evidence that this blow would almost certainly have rendered her unconscious, which in turn led to her drowning.

  'While I attach no blame to St Scholastika's College, it seems clear that, had a non-slip surface been installed, this accident might never have occurred. I urge all colleges and rowing clubs to review the conditions of their jetties as a matter of urgency.'

  After the inquest, Terry Franks, solicitor for the Edwards family, read out a statement on their behalf. 'We are satis
fied with the verdict of the inquest. While we applaud the coroner's remarks, we do not blame anyone for what was a genuine accident.'

  When asked to comment on the coroner's remarks, Wanda Henderson, the principal of St Scholastika's, said, 'Jess Edwards' death has been a blow for this college. We have already undertaken a full review of the safety of the boathouse area and have made significant improvements, including the application of non-slip materials to all external areas. We would like to extend our deepest sympathy to Jess's family.'

  And that was that. Charlie was surprised by the reaction of the family. The natural impulse after the accidental death of a child is to want to find someone to blame. A lot of families in the Edwardses' position would be shouting about negligence and litigation, not quietly accepting that Schollie's wasn't responsible for their daughter's death. It indicated a remarkable maturity on the part of her parents. Or perhaps her mother was a Schollie's graduate herself, possessed of a powerful loyalty to the college that had nurtured her. Either way, it was no help to Charlie. Bitter resentment might have given her some leverage, even after all this time. Calm acceptance was the sane route, but for once, Charlie would have preferred the unbalanced response.

  With a sigh, she turned off the reader and returned the films to the librarian. Charlie walked back through the pedestrian precinct towards Carfax, its medieval tower a reproach to the disposable shopfronts surrounding it. She'd hit a dead end already. What she needed to see was the inquest report, but a call to the coroner's office had made it plain that wasn't going to happen without authorisation from Jess Edwards' family. Having no official standing had introduced Charlie to a level of frustration that was entirely new to her.