Dead Scared

by S J Bolton

  Evi smiled. Women had been falling head over heels for Nick for as long as she’d known him. She looked down at the spreadsheet on her desk.

  ‘I have a list here of nineteen students who took their own lives in the last five years,’ she said. ‘Bryony Carter would have made twenty. Now we have another nine attempted suicides.’

  ‘I’m not getting a good feeling about this,’ said Nick.

  ‘Join the club.’

  The night outside had got even colder. I pulled my collar up, wrapped my new college scarf around my face and set off. I was heading for the site of the first suicide this academic year. In late October, Jackie King had drowned herself beneath a bridge belonging to Clare College. She’d been a third-year English student.

  The bridge was of pale stone, with three arches to let the boat traffic pass below. By the time I reached it I was having serious misgivings about my email to Joesbury. I probably shouldn’t have been so familiar. It was just easier, somehow, to talk to him when he wasn’t close.

  The whole bridge was shiny with frost. I stayed close to the stone balustrade on the left-hand side and stopped in the exact centre, just as Jackie had done. Only she’d brought a length of washing line with her. She’d tied one end to a baluster. The other she’d fastened securely round both her ankles. The exact length of the rope had been important. She must have worked it out beforehand, cutting it carefully. I have no idea what happened to her during the next few seconds. I can only guess.

  So here’s my guess. I think she must have sat on the stone rail and swung her legs over the side. She’d have looked down, just as I was doing now, seen the water black and slow-moving beneath her. She would have been cold. It was late in the year. It was also around four a.m.: she was caught on a CCTV camera making her way over here. She must have looked down at the water and asked herself what on earth she thought she was doing. She must have seriously considered giving it up and going home. She hadn’t. She’d jumped.

  Jackie, Bryony and Nicole. Three young women who’d chosen to end their lives in what Evi Oliver called very untypical ways. She was right. Each death, or near death in Bryony’s case, had been complicated, considered and violent. So what was happening to women in this city?

  ‘Twenty-nine students, twenty-three of them women, either killed themselves or tried to in the last five years,’ said Evi, leaning back against the chair and trying not to let the pain show.

  ‘Friggin’ hell, it doesn’t look good, does it?’ said Nick.

  ‘No,’ said Evi.

  Silence for a second.

  ‘I saw Meg yesterday,’ said Evi. ‘She mentioned a spate of suicides when we were here. Ring any bells with you?’

  ‘Can’t say it does. There was that chap who jumped off Great St Mary’s around exam time, but other than that …’

  ‘No, he’s the only one I can remember.’

  ‘And you’ve already spoken to the police?’

  Evi nodded, then gave a small half-shrug.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m think I’m beginning to have credibility issues with the local CID,’ she said.

  Nick frowned at her. Evi finished her wine and told him about her intruder, about the tricks that had been played on her, and the phone calls and messages from earlier.

  ‘And these emails have just vanished from your computer?’ he asked her. ‘I know nothing about IT. Is that even possible?’

  Evi pulled a face.

  ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Want to come and stay at my house tonight?’ he asked her. ‘Any number of spare bedrooms.’

  Evi shook her head. ‘Kind thought, but I think I might die of exposure in the night.’

  He laughed. ‘I could lend you a dog to cuddle, but you’re probably right. Look, why don’t I talk to my partners, show them this list? If I can get them on side, CID will have to listen to five of us.’

  She thought about it for a second. ‘It can’t hurt,’ she said.

  ‘I need to get going. I’ll see you on Friday, right?’

  Evi agreed that he would. ‘Actually, I thought I might bring someone with me after all,’ she said. ‘No, not a date. A new mature student who’s helping me out with some research. She needs to meet a few people. Would that be OK?’

  ‘Course. Now, want me to check the house for you?’

  Evi opened her mouth to say she’d done it herself earlier.

  ‘Yes please,’ was what came out.

  I looked at my watch. Nine o’clock. I headed back to college, let myself into the library and checked emails.

  Nothing from Joesbury. One from Evi, reporting modest progress. Her words, not mine. She’d found nine cases of students attempting suicide by various means. Medical confidentiality prevented her from giving me their names but it meant my list was approaching thirty.

  Now I’d learned that Nicole had disappeared for a few days. Had any of the others done the same? And this pathological fear of rats? Was that remotely relevant?

  I was about to close the laptop when a box popped up in one corner of the screen. Got the Cambridge Blues? said the text. The photograph was of a boy, in a college scarf, leaning against one of the bridges. I find it kind of spooky the way that happens. You’ll be searching the net for, say, party shoes, and suddenly all kinds of ads and boxes advertising shoes start appearing on your screen. I’d run several Google searches for information on suicides and, somewhere out in cyberspace, I’d been put on a mailing list for depressives. Curious, though, I clicked the box open and found myself in a blog about life in Cambridge, with an attached chat room. The Cambridge Blues, it was called, the survivor’s guide to the ultimate in academia.

  The site was well designed and quite appealing, and I began flicking through. Here was a community of people who felt as disaffected by Cambridge as I did, albeit for very different reasons. They were writing about their experiences with eloquence and compassion for others. Sometimes very movingly. To my surprise I found myself clicking on the button that would take me into the chat room.

  Quite a few people were online. I registered as Laura and began typing:

  Almost found myself in tears today down by the river. Difficult to imagine being anywhere more beautiful. So why did it make me sad?

  Within seconds I had a reply.

  Beauty never fails to move us. If we’re happy, great beauty makes us more so, if we’re sad it can be what tips us over the edge.

  I’m finding it difficult to imagine anything worse than being somewhere you don’t belong. (Me again.) Surrounded by people who will never know you. Never have the faintest clue who you really are.

  The people you need are out there, Laura. You just have to keep looking.

  OK, enough was enough. I came out of the chat room feeling guilty. If Joesbury knew what I’d just done, he’d tell me I’d taken the needy-fruitcake act that was Laura Farrow a bit far. Trouble was, I had a feeling it hadn’t been only Laura in the chat room just now. That had been Lacey, too.

  JESSICA CALLOWAY REGAINED consciousness slowly. Her mouth was dry and her eyes were sore. She swallowed and the back of her throat felt like the skin had been scraped away. Behind her eyelids she was aware of murky grey light in the room. Morning then. Her eyes opened before she had a chance to ask herself whether it was a good idea. Oh, thank God.

  She sat upright, letting the duvet fall down around her waist. She was wearing a tight yellow camisole and yellow striped pyjama trousers. What she always wore to bed. She pushed the duvet aside and swung her legs round to touch the cold linoleum of her bedroom floor. She sat there for a whole minute, not quite believing it.

  She was in her room in college. Her body was sore and stiff, but seemed otherwise OK. The back of her skull felt tense, as though a serious headache might be threatening but nothing a couple of aspirins wouldn’t sort out. On the table by her bedside was her clock radio. Nearly seven thirty in the morning. In just a few seconds it would be … it clicked on. H
eart Radio, what she always woke up to, even on the morning after the worst nightmare imaginable.

  The curtains of her room were drawn tight but outside she could hear the usual early-morning sounds of St Catharine’s College. The odd jogger running past. A cyclist. A delivery van on the road outside.

  Everything was exactly as it should be. The horrible, scratching things that had crawled towards her in the dark had been the result of something slipped into her drink. The shapeless forms that had banged on the inside of the wardrobe door to be let out had existed only in her own head. The cold, claw-like hands that had stroked … Jesus, she needed a shower.

  Jessica got up, on legs that weren’t too steady. She felt weak, as though she hadn’t eaten for some time, and a little nauseous. There was a bruise on her forearm she didn’t remember from the evening before. She reached for the gown on the back of the chair. Her work was where she’d left it on her desk. Her laptop was switched off but still open, her books on the bookshelf, her bag from the night before under the desk, spilling half its contents over the floor. Everything normal.

  Except that all the books on the shelf were upside down.

  Jessica reached out to the books, just to make sure they were real. They felt very real. So who had turned them all the wrong way round? Nearly fifty books. Why would someone do that? The song on the radio was speeding up. Like an old-fashioned vinyl record being played at the wrong speed. Jessica looked back at the radio, suddenly afraid. The song stopped. There was a second of silence and then a new tune began to play. Fairground music.

  No.

  Jessica half ran, half fell to the door of her room. It was locked, of course, she always locked it at night, but the key was right there, in the lock, all she had to do was turn it, take hold of the handle and pull the door open. The lock turned, the handle was slick with sweat and the door would not open.

  She tried again, checked the key – it looked the same – pulled on the handle, even banged on the door a couple of times. Then she turned and ran to the window. She half fell across her desk and pulled at the curtains.

  The window wasn’t there. In its place was a photograph of the head and torso of a circus clown, large enough to fill the entire frame. Jessica had always been scared of clowns, but even she had never imagined one like this. The huge red nose, red and white cone-shaped hat and royal-blue ruff could, at a pinch, have belonged to a clown who wouldn’t scare a child to death. But no parent would ever expose her child to a clown with a face that long, bony, yellow and old, with a grinning mouth so huge, so full of yellowing teeth, with opaque white eyes, rimmed in black and scarlet. No child could see this clown and keep its sanity. Jessica thought she was probably about to lose hers when she heard a soft tapping sound behind her.

  Still half lying across her desk, she turned. The door to her wardrobe creaked and swung open. Standing inside was another clown. This one was worse, far worse. This one wore a mask that was white as a winter coat, with a huge, animal-like mouth and hooked red nose. Only the eyes looked human.

  TO MY SURPRISE, Talaith was in our living room when I got back, her tiny bottom perched on the chair, feet up on the desk in front of her. She was dressed for bed and, judging from the relatively steady way she was painting her toenails black, was sober. Her hair wasn’t quite the shade of purple I remembered from the previous evening. More red, less blue, bit more of a plum shade. She waved a mug at me. ‘Coffee?’ she offered. ‘It’s instant shit but I’m broke as usual.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it, though. You’ll smudge.’

  While I filled the kettle, found a couple of mugs and put instant coffee in them, Talaith finished her artwork, raised her feet off the desk and waggled her toes in the air, supporting herself entirely by stomach muscles. She had to be sober. No drunk could manage that.

  ‘Someone asked me about Bryony today,’ I said, when we’d exchanged the usual social pleasantries about the sort of day we’d had and how I was settling in. ‘That must have been really grim for you.’

  ‘Worse for her,’ said Talaith. I inclined my head. Difficult to argue with that one.

  ‘Do you know how she is?’ I asked.

  ‘Better today,’ said Talaith. ‘I visited. I think she knew me. The nurse who came in said they thought she might pull through.’

  Something on Talaith’s face made me think that wasn’t necessarily good news.

  ‘She’s going to be very badly disfigured,’ I tried.

  Talaith shook her head. ‘She won’t cope. She was gorgeous before and she couldn’t cope. Take looks away from someone like Bryony and she’ll have nothing left.’

  ‘Sounds a bit harsh,’ I said.

  ‘Realistic,’ Talaith insisted. ‘You wouldn’t believe the hours she’d spend on her appearance. Or the money, come to that. She was paranoid about wrinkles. At her age, most girls are just grateful they’ve outgrown zits.’

  ‘Not sure I have yet.’

  ‘All the photographs she had around the place were of her,’ Talaith went on. ‘Not family, mates, boyfriends, just her. And they were all those arty-farty studio shots, you know, soft focus, tons of make-up. Sometimes I’d catch her just staring at herself in the mirror.’

  ‘Sounds like you didn’t get on too well,’ I said.

  Talaith shrugged and drank coffee. Mine was still too hot to touch. ‘She wasn’t too bad when she first got here,’ she said. ‘Bit highly strung, nervy. Easily bruised flower is what my mum would say, but to be honest, a lot of people here are.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘God yes. When you think about the pressure we’re all under to get a place at any decent university, let alone here, it’s a wonder we’re not all basket cases by the time we arrive. Bryony was bright enough, but she was no rocket scientist. I think she’d been coached and hot-housed and pushed all her life. Not too bad, though, no worse than a lot.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

  Plum-coloured hair danced around as Talaith shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t around too much. I was having a good time and it was obvious we weren’t going to be soulmates. She got a bit freaky, though, towards the end.’

  Freaky? Nicole had got freaky too, according to her college-mates. Or what was the phrase they’d used? Well weird.

  ‘Freaky how?’ I asked.

  Talaith looked as though she wasn’t sure how much to say. ‘She had bad dreams,’ she opted for.

  That didn’t sound too bad, until I remembered that Nicole Holt had also had bad dreams shortly before she killed herself. ‘Naked-in-public bad dreams or blue-lizards-crawling-out-of-the-walls bad dreams?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it, she couldn’t really tell me. When I was here – and you’ve probably noticed, I’m not here that much – she’d wake me up moaning and screaming. One time I found her in the room here.’ She nodded towards a spot on the floor. ‘Very early in the morning. She was stark naked, huddled up, crying and yelping. Woke the whole block up. It was like one of those night terrors you hear about kids having.’

  ‘Was she taking something?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, that’s what we thought, to be honest, which is why we didn’t call an ambulance. One of the boys sleeping over was a third-year medical student. He checked her heart rate, her pupils and everything and we put her back to bed. I sat in the doorway until I could see she was more settled.’

  ‘And in the morning?’

  ‘She felt like shit, couldn’t remember a thing. That was the worst episode, but I’m not sure she was getting any real sleep towards the end. Kept talking about noise in the night, people talking, phone calls waking her up. Have to say, it never bothered me.’

  ‘I heard the police found evidence she’d been smoking something pretty powerful the night of the accident. Did she do that a lot?’

  Talaith looked down at her toes for a second, then reached out and rubbed away an imaginary smudge. ‘Not that I saw,’ she said. ‘But she was pretty jumpy about people going i
nto her room, so she could well have had something to hide.’

  ‘Who would go into her room?’ I asked.

  Talaith shrugged. ‘She thought I was coming in at night, while she was asleep,’ she said. ‘She talked about how things were being moved round. How she’d go to bed leaving things in a certain way and when she woke up they were different.’

  I figured I’d pushed as far as I could for now. My room-mate was a long way from stupid. I sat back in my chair, finished my coffee and stretched my arms behind my head.

  ‘So why does everyone but the vicar call you Tox or Toxic?’ I asked.

  ‘Family nickname,’ she replied. ‘My older brother gave it to me on account of my unusual flatulence as a kid.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Don’t panic. I outgrew it.’

  ‘So what are you studying?’ I asked her, expecting something like psychology or sociology. Talaith (Tox) had shown a pretty thorough grasp of the human psyche.

  ‘Aeronautical engineering,’ she told me, then laughed at the look on my face. ‘I am a rocket scientist.’

  I laughed and we said goodnight.

  That was the night I started having dreams.

  Thursday 17 January (five days earlier)

  I WOKE UP late, feeling like I’d aged a decade overnight. I got out of bed and my body told me to get back in right now. Couldn’t be done. I had a lecture at nine and I’d have to hurry to make breakfast.

  Tox was just getting back from the Buttery when I opened the block’s front door, wondering how long it would take me to get used to walking through freezing January air to get hold of a bowl of cornflakes. She held eye contact for just a second longer than seemed natural. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Good,’ I replied. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she replied, emphasizing the I. At that moment, another girl left the block in a hurry and Tox stepped inside. I made my way to the Buttery, pushed open the door to the main building and joined the straggling remnants of the queue, wondering if getting out of bed had been the right decision after all. My mouth was dry, my throat felt as though I’d swallowed wire wool and my eyes could barely stay open. I hadn’t drunk alcohol last night but this felt like the worst hangover ever.