Killing You Softly

by Lucy Carver

  ‘Jayden didn’t give me a good reason why you and he arranged to meet by the canal yesterday afternoon,’ Inspector Ripley said, quick and direct. ‘I’m assuming he’s a friend of yours.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘And a friend of Scarlett and Alex.’

  ‘They all went to Ainslee Comp together.’

  ‘Jayden told me Alex wouldn’t have had any involvement in Scarlett’s death. I guess you share that opinion.’ She said this without any rising inflection – a statement, not a question. ‘People who know Alex seem to like him. He’s very popular.’

  ‘I do like him – yes.’

  ‘And the meeting with Jayden at the crime scene – it was to show respect to Scarlett.’

  This time I didn’t have time to respond before suddenly and without warning the inspector veered into fresh territory. ‘Tell me about last night, Alyssa.’

  ‘What about last night?’

  ‘The missing iPad for starters.’

  ‘It’s OK – I lost it then I found it under my pillow.’

  ‘But there was a threatening message.’

  First Scarlett, now you. I’m doing all I can to join the dots, make the comparisons and point you in the right direction and you’re just not paying attention. I care about you, Alyssa. I want to warn you. I don’t want to hurt you … Killing you softly …

  I nodded at Inspector Ripley. ‘How did … ?’

  ‘…We know? Jack Hooper talked to Molly. He’s the one who ran to fetch her when Will Harrison was causing trouble. Jack thought the situation was getting out of hand, but from what I hear by the time Molly arrived things had calmed down.’

  ‘True,’ I told her. ‘I guess Hooper told you what the row was about?’

  ‘About Will concealing his relationship with Scarlett – yes. Don’t worry on that score either. I already knew about that …’

  ‘From Jayden?’

  She nodded. ‘Jack Hooper also told us he was worried about you.’

  I frowned and glanced up at Saint Sam who had stood in my sight line, just behind June Ripley.

  ‘Alyssa, Jack says that you’ve been the victim of some fairly unpleasant practical jokes, culminating in yesterday’s threatening message.’

  The lyrics of ‘Killing Me Softly’ blasted their way back into my mind and I shuddered.

  ‘Someone broke a couple of panes in your window,’ the inspector went on. ‘They left a dead bird on the windowsill. Molly brought the glaziers in to fix it. Apparently they told her the panes couldn’t have been broken from the outside and it couldn’t have been done by the bird accidentally getting into the room then trying to escape. Considerable force had been used to break the glass.’

  I took a sharp breath and glanced at the bursar.

  A series of images replaced the song lyrics. They flashed through my head, as clear and vivid as single frames from a movie – still photographs snatched from a fast-running action sequence.

  Poolside photos, shiny sunblock on tanned flesh, a red and gold bikini.

  Dead bird on my windowsill, poor little robin redbreast.

  Note between bottles scrawled in red felt tip – Who killed cock robin?

  Red hearts from an unknown number.

  A mislaid iPad, an intruder in my room, ‘Killing You Softly’, Galina’s red lipstick on my cabinet. And Scarlett! Knock off a ‘t’ from the end of her name and scarlet equals a vivid shade of red. This is what the killer had been teasing me about and telling me all along.

  A spike of fear ran through me as I made the connections.

  Inspector Ripley read the signals. ‘What is it, Alyssa?’

  ‘Every time he – whoever he is – does something, he leaves a signature.’ Grasping the edge of Molly’s desk, my knuckles turned white. ‘There’s a theme to all this – it proves that it’s done by the same guy and he’s playing a game with me.’

  ‘What kind of signature?’ Ripley’s attention was razor sharp.

  ‘More of a colour than an actual signature,’ I explained as I finally made the connection. ‘Red – he always leaves me something red. He makes the link with Scarlett’s name’.

  ‘I looked in my contacts list and I couldn’t recognize the number.’ That lunchtime Jack walked with me in the school grounds. With snow still on the ground, no one else was out there so we had the lake and the woods to ourselves. ‘Alyssa, did you hear what I said – I couldn’t find out who sent the hearts message?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, he was never going to make it that easy,’ I sighed. The snow had melted in random patches, uncovering areas of flattened, yellowish grass and there was still a film of ice on the lake. I was wrapped up in a big plaid scarf and heavy jacket, wearing my uniform with black tights and Uggs. Jack braved the weather without jacket, scarf or gloves.

  We were alone, walking with fingers interlaced, reluctant to talk about bad things but knowing that we had to.

  ‘You know what else Inspector Ripley told me – after I told her about the red theme?’

  Side by side, we walked on between the trees, raising rooks from the tops of bare trees, sending them flapping and cawing noisily into the leaden sky. ‘No, but you’ll tell me – right?’

  ‘She backed up what Ursula said – the principal at Ainslee Comp confirmed that Scarlett Hartley did have the same type of memory as me. We definitely shared the eidetic curse of not being able to forget a smell, a sight, a sound.’

  ‘So what are they implying?’

  ‘The similarity is too strong to ignore. It has to be significant.’

  ‘Are they saying that the killer’s finished playing his sick game with Scarlett and is moving on to his next victim?’ Jack stopped on the track close to where I’d run into Alex before they arrested him. ‘From Scarlett to you?’

  ‘It seems I’m his new target,’ I confirmed.

  ‘And they’re saying that he played these sick jokes on Scarlett before he killed her?’

  ‘I asked Ripley that but she wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, when you think about it, those are details of the Scarlett investigation that a cop isn’t going to reveal.’

  ‘So what is she going to do to protect you – anything?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing much. You know what the police are like – she said they can’t do anything until a crime has been committed. You can have a stalker following you around for months, and if you tell them about it that’s what they’ll say – no action until stalker guy moves in with actual threats, or else he breaks into your house to steal your underwear – whatever.’

  ‘This guy did break in,’ Jack pointed out. ‘He was in your room when you weren’t there – more than once.’

  ‘He didn’t touch my knicker drawer so it’s not serious enough, apparently.’ I gave Jack a hollow smile, shrugged then went on. ‘Dead bird, weird messages sealed with love and kisses – they could still be classed as minor bullying, and we all know how common that is.’

  Jack gave an exasperated sigh. ‘So what about Saint Sam – did he take any of this seriously?’

  ‘He was the same as Ripley – he underplayed it.’

  Dr Webb had acknowledged the crucial memory similarity between me and Scarlett, but then he’d pointed out that Scarlett’s death very possibly had nothing to do with her exceptional memory and, besides, our background circumstances were totally different.

  ‘Scarlett was permitted to roam the streets during the early hours of New Year’s Day but security here at St Jude’s is tight,’ he’d told the inspector. ‘Students have to be back by midnight. Each and every visitor has to report to Reception on arrival and we have CCTV cameras covering all areas of the school, both internal and external.’ Some of which isn’t reassuring when you stop to think about it – for instance, which killer in his right mind would present himself to Carol Jenkins in Reception?

  ‘He’s underplaying it because he doesn’t want the whiff of scandal getting up parents’ nostrils,
’ Jack realized. ‘In the end, what did Ripley say?’

  ‘That they’d definitely keep an eye on things, whatever that means. Then she said goodbye to me and asked Molly to send for Will. He’s still in with them, I guess.’

  With a slight shake of his head, Jack dropped my hand and walked on through the woods.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, catching up with him on the brow of a hill where we had glimpses between the bare branches of the frozen Cotswold countryside stretching out below us.

  ‘Will Harrison was way out of order last night,’ he acknowledged. ‘And I’ve got the bruises to prove it. Plus, he did go out with Scarlett and she did dump him, which gives him what looks like a motive.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I don’t know – somehow it doesn’t feel right.’

  I bit my lip and thought hard. ‘But we need more than a feeling.’

  ‘I mean – is he the type who would kill Scarlett and move straight on to targeting you?’

  ‘Yeah, is he weird enough?’ I knew what Jack meant – Will seemed like a regular guy and had plenty of social skills. True, he had a short fuse and went in for violent reactions, but he didn’t come across as secretive and psychopathic. Then again, Jack and I were no experts and, besides, there was the bruise under Will’s eye when he arrived at the start of term.

  ‘Did he really get that bruise from working out in the gym?’ I asked as we walked on.

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Or did he get it from a canal-side struggle with his ex-girlfriend?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jack sighed. ‘I just don’t have a clue.’

  It turned out, neither did June Ripley.

  She talked to Will for more than two hours before she let him walk out of Molly’s office. He wouldn’t tell anyone what they’d discussed but it seemed she hadn’t learned anything that would lead her to release Alex and take Will down to the station instead.

  So he was still walking around the school campus the next day, getting top marks from Justine for his translation of a Maupassant story, chatting with Marco and Charlie (officially now ‘an item’ according to her) over lunch, and later in the afternoon hurrying to get changed for the five-a-side football match against his old school.

  I know this because he bumped into Hooper and me as we made our way across the car park towards the sports centre.

  By the way, don’t imagine for a nanosecond that Hooper was in the St Jude’s team. No – the closest he ever comes to a pair of football boots is when he passes the window of the sports shop in Greenlea Shopping Centre, on his way to Waterstones.

  ‘Why do I have to watch two teams of five guys kick a ball around for no good reason?’ he complained.

  ‘Because!’ Because I wanted to pick Hooper’s brains while we watched the match and find out exactly why he’d decided to involve Molly in breaking up the fight between Will, Marco and Jack when it would’ve been more normal to let them sort things out between themselves.

  Will must have resented Hooper’s interference too because he jogged up from behind and swung his bag in a rising arc from his shoulder as he passed. The rucksack hit Hooper smack in the face and made him stumble sideways against me.

  ‘Oops, sorry – accident!’ Will said in a sing-song falsetto, stooping to pick up an aerosol can of deodorant that had fallen out of the bag. He didn’t linger to check if Hooper was OK.

  ‘Not big and not clever,’ I muttered, noticing as Hooper straightened up that a strap from the rucksack had brought up a red weal across his cheek.

  ‘No, it’s OK – no problem,’ Hooper mumbled as we reached the sports centre and climbed the metal stairs to sit in the mezzanine area. Down below, in the main playing area, Jack, Luke and a couple of other kids in St Jude’s kit of red shirt, shorts and socks were already practising passing the ball.

  ‘It’s not OK,’ I insisted. ‘Will can’t keep on throwing his weight around like that.’

  ‘He can and he does,’ was Hooper’s comment. ‘Anyway, look what fell out of his bag, along with the deodorant.’ He held up a phone for me to inspect. ‘I grabbed it before it hit the ground.

  I thought for a while about the implications of inadvertently getting our hands on Will’s phone. ‘Pity he didn’t hang around long enough for you to give it back, huh?’ I said with a significant look.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll do that later.’

  ‘So, Hooper, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking,’ he said with the shadow of a smile. ‘What I’m thinking is that there might be messages on his phone that would interest us, or if not there will be a list of contacts on this phone and it would be interesting to see if Scarlett is still there.’

  ‘Because that would suggest she and Will were still in touch.’ This was good, I decided – even if prying into someone’s messages and contact list was bad in the ethical sense, ‘good’ in this case was where the end justified the means. ‘And if they were, it means Will is being economical with the truth. It would prove he was still in the frame as far as the police are concerned.’

  ‘So shall I?’ Hooper asked, switching on the phone and letting his finger hover over the contacts icon.

  ‘Yes – check the messages first.’

  Which is what we did, scrolling back through messages from Will to Tom Walsingham about today’s five-a-side match, telling Tom that he, Will, had been picked to play against his old team, and asking who was going to replace Alex in the Ainslee Comp team. Further back, in early January, there was a series of messages to Will’s brother, Henry, about family stuff, plus a couple to Sammy, again about football, and further back still, sent on 28th December, Hooper and I found what we were looking for.

  Scarlett we read. Hooper dabbed his finger on the screen and opened the received messages.

  Really need to see u.

  Answer my texts!

  Where r u? We need to talk.

  ‘Twenty-eighth of December,’ Hooper said slowly and deliberately.

  ‘Scroll down,’ I told him, and he searched for any messages that Will had sent to Scarlett. We didn’t find any.

  ‘So she’s trying to get him to contact her and he’s ignoring her,’ Hooper commented. ‘Didn’t she ditch him? Wasn’t it that way around?’

  ‘Yes, last summer. So why suddenly does she want to talk to him just after Christmas?’

  ‘Maybe she realizes Will’s the one after all.’ Being a writer of fiction like his dad, Hooper likes the notion of big romance – rejection and repentance, broken hearts all round.

  ‘But at this point she was going out with Alex,’ I reminded him. ‘You’d think she would have kept the lid on any feelings she might still have for Will. Life gets too complicated otherwise.’

  ‘Unless …’ Hooper’s imagination fired up and he got a glint in his eye. ‘Unless something Alex says or does is screwing her up, making her really confused and unhappy.’

  ‘Like Alex telling her he can’t go to the New Year’s Eve party?’

  ‘Exactly. And so she turns to Will, who she still counts as a friend. But he’s smarting from the rejection – we all know Will has a big ego and a short fuse. It would take him forever to drop a grudge against his ex.’

  In the sports hall below, the Ainslee Comp team trotted out in their blue and white kit, Tom at their head. A referee in a black tracksuit soon followed them from the changing rooms.

  ‘So Will ignores Scarlett’s pleas for help.’ Taking the phone from Hooper, I scrolled through 29th and 30th December, on into 31st to double check that Will hadn’t replied.

  The referee blew his whistle and the match began. Trainers squeaked on the polished wooden surface; the ball was kicked out of touch and thudded against a side wall. Loud claims were made for the throwin.

  ‘No – there’s nothing from Will to Scarlett,’ I muttered as I scrolled on.

  Hey, Marco – fancy a game of footie? I read.

  Marco had sent a reply. Maybe. Wh
en?

  Friday. After school. Sports hall.

  So far, so normal, except that Marco had sworn to Jack and me that he refused to play soccer because he wanted to do the opposite of what his dad was pressurizing him to do. Anyway, the arrangement was made and the proof was in front of our eyes – Marco playing for St Jude’s alongside Jack, Will, Lee Irwin (IT prodigy) and Danny Wells (chemistry genius).

  ‘Here – pass to me!’ Lee yelled at Danny. He received the ball, trapped it under his left foot, turned towards the goal and took a shot.

  Goal! Our team swamped Lee with celebratory hugs.

  I glanced again at the texts between Will and Marco, and in a fit of curiosity switched from Will’s messages to contacts and found Marco’s name on the pale blue screen.

  Marco Conti. Mobile 07763 159080 Option boxes: Send message. Face Time. Share contact. Add to favourites 07763 159080. The synapses in my brain flashed into action and I felt my heart suddenly pump hard and fast.

  ‘What’s up, Alyssa?’ Hooper queried.

  I remembered without looking it up on my phone the row of red emoticon hearts, the unfamiliar number – 07763 159080.

  ‘I do not understand!’ Galina threw up her arms in wonder when I told her that Marco Conti had sent me red hearts. ‘Why are you sad, Alyssa? A boy like Marco – and you, so beautiful. English rose and Italian stallion – you are perfect together!’

  We were in our room. I’d gone there before the end of the five-a-side match to try and work out if Marco’s red hearts were still in the category of creep-Alyssa-out clues and found Galina examining her self-dissolving stitches in the magnifying side of her make-up mirror. ‘Why so sad?’ she said when I told her who had sent the hearts.

  ‘I’m not sad,’ I argued.

  ‘No? You look in bad mood.’

  ‘I don’t know if Marco is genuine or if he’s trying to spook me. Anyway, I already have a boyfriend. I’m confused.’

  ‘Why? It is simple. Marco comes to St Jude’s. He knows me and Eugenie, but no one else. He looks around at beautiful girls. He sees Zara and Charlie.’