seeing fairies, elves, angels, even God.
The more I read, the more I couldn’t help a sense of irritation. Bryony had a family, a good education, an opportunity to study at one of the world’s most highly regarded universities. She had an awful lot more than me and I’d never been tempted to ruin a perfectly good Christmas party by getting high and setting fire to myself.
On the other hand, if Dr Oliver was right, this vulnerable, needy girl had fallen victim to a group of people who got their kicks from the emotional damage and ultimate destruction of others. Who believed they were clever enough to cause pain without even getting their hands dirty.
EVI WOKE WITH a start, convinced someone was tapping on her bedroom window. She lay still for several seconds. Nothing. Just a dream, one of the bad ones, the ones that started with a strange, misshapen creature banging on the window. She had to get back to sleep before she started thinking, because otherwise she’d be awake all night. She turned over in bed, just as the tapping noise began again. She raised her head from the pillow to listen properly.
Fully awake now, she knew it wasn’t coming from the window. The cedar tree didn’t even reach this side of the house. It was coming from right above her head. From the room upstairs. She reached out, found the light and sat up.
Tap, tap, tap. There was a phone beside her bed. The police, or university security, could be here in minutes. If she told them she thought someone was upstairs they wouldn’t waste time. On the other hand, she’d feel a proper fool if she called out several hulking men in uniform to investigate a squirrel infestation.
She sat still in the bed, unable to make up her mind.
Did squirrels make that insistent, shrill tapping noise? The beak of a trapped bird might. The sound stopped. A second later it started again. Tap, tap, tap for a few more seconds and then silence. Only two choices really. Call help and risk looking ridiculous or investigate herself. Evi got up, tucked her stick under her arm and left the room.
The house had been fitted with a stairlift but Evi hated using anything that made her feel both elderly and disabled, so she slept downstairs, using a guest bedroom and bathroom. She sat now on the chair and pressed the button that would take her to the top. When the mechanism halted, there was nothing but silence in the house. Evi realized she hadn’t brought a phone with her. If anything happened, she’d be trapped on the upper floor with no means of calling help.
The room directly above where she slept was at the end of the corridor. She could hear nothing. The door was closed. She pushed it open and switched on the light.
The room was empty. No en suite bathroom. Curtains drawn back. Nothing to hide behind. No sign of anything out of the ordinary, except stray ash and twigs around the fireplace. Knowing that a trapped bird or rodent could probably explain the sound she’d heard, Evi felt a small measure of relief. It would be a nuisance, getting the chimney swept, but hardly a big deal. She was halfway across the room when the tapping began again.
This close, there was no mistaking exactly where it was coming from. Not the chimney after all, but one of the beautiful fitted oak wardrobes to either side of the fireplace. The one to her right. Evi stepped closer. The sound was tiny, tinny. There was nothing to be afraid of, surely, from something that sounded so small?
Evi put her hand on the wardrobe door handle, knowing she was very afraid. Knowing also she didn’t have a choice. She pulled open the door.
For a second she didn’t see it. She’d been looking directly ahead, half flinching, expecting something to fly out at her. Then she looked down and saw the bone man.
BRYONY’S FIRST SESSION with the counsellor had been in the third week of term. Even that early in the academic year, she’d been struggling to cope, finding the rough and tumble of student life, the banter, the frequent practical jokes, difficult to deal with.
I finished my second glass of wine and wasn’t sure I could stay awake much longer. Then I got to the notes of Bryony’s third session with her counsellor and suddenly sleep seemed a very long way away.
During this session, Bryony had brought up her fear that someone was coming into her room at night and touching her while she was asleep. There were no transcripts of the sessions, so I couldn’t judge exactly how the counsellor had reacted to Bryony’s suspicions, but I had a sense, from her notes, that she wasn’t taking the girl too seriously.
On her fourth and fifth meetings with her counsellor, Bryony referred again to her fears, her belief that she wasn’t quite safe in her room. She’d suffered increasingly from sleeplessness and bad dreams, needing to catch up on her rest during the day. As she’d become more and more tired, her coursework had suffered. She’d gone on a downward spiral of exhaustion and anxiety.
In her notes, the counsellor used the word
On her sixth session, Bryony had said she thought her night-time intruder had progressed beyond touching her, possibly even to having full-blown sex with her. She’d talked about being able to smell a man’s sweat, and his aftershave, on her bedclothes. She’d found scratch marks on her body, even the trace of a small bite on one shoulder. All of which, the therapist had noted, could easily have been self-inflicted.
I got to the end of the file and sat back to think. According to Joesbury, I was going to Cambridge to keep a lookout for any unhealthy subculture that might be unduly influencing young people. It was to be a routine, low-key operation, not really expected to unearth anything. He hadn’t actually said it was being done to placate the head of SO10 but I was pretty certain that’s what he thought. Now, it seemed there might be more to it.
NO, NOT A bone man, it couldn’t be a bone man. Bone men were a silly, rural custom, in a place she’d left behind, hundreds of miles from here. This was nothing more than a child’s toy. A six-inch-high skeleton with a wind-up mechanism like clockwork. Just a simple, common toy, the sort that was popular around Halloween. Wind the key and let the toy go. It would walk across a hard surface until the mechanism ran out or it hit an obstacle.
Hardly knowing whether she was still frightened or not, Evi picked it up. A small piece of Blu-tack was stuck to one half of the key. It looked as though the toy had been wound up tight, then stuck to the inside of the wardrobe with the Blu-tack. When the mechanical force of the key trying to turn had become too great, the toy had broken free of its sticky blue handcuffs.
There had been a child here today, it was the only explanation. The cleaner, who had come on the wrong day, had brought a child. Maybe a child too sick for school and with no one else to take care of him. He’d played in the house, left a toy upstairs, put the fir cones along the path, left a heap of them on the kitchen table.
Evi looked through the rest of the upstairs rooms, found nothing, and let the lift take her back down. She left the skeleton toy on the hall table and made her way into the kitchen, knowing that even she didn’t believe her sick- child theory and wondering what on earth she was going to do about it.
