the CID report.
It was well after eleven by the time I finally pressed Send and put the laptop into sleep mode. It felt like I was alone in the block. I undressed, locked my door and crossed the corridor to the communal bathroom. Inside, I turned the taps on full pelt.
Evi had turned on the bath taps and begun the slow and difficult process of getting undressed when the phone rang. The first thought in her head, as always, was Harry. It was never Harry, though. Harry had probably forgotten all about her by now.
‘Hey, sweetie, it’s me.’
‘Hi, Mum.’
Her mother was so proud of her clever, brave daughter and was always such an effort to speak to because the need to seem fine was more important with her than with anyone.
‘How was your day?’
‘Pretty good,’ lied Evi. ‘Got lots done.’
Evi’s mother had been with her on the skiing holiday when Evi had seriously damaged the sciatic nerve in her left leg. Evi’s mother, the better skier of the two, had talked her daughter into taking a difficult black run. Evi had caught her ski on a rock, lost control and fallen into a crevasse. Any hint now that she was less than perfectly fine would be more than her mother could deal with.
By the time she said goodbye, Evi was getting anxious that the bath was overrunning. In the bathroom, the second thing she noticed was the message on the mirror above the bath.
THE NOISE LEVEL outside had picked up by the time I got back to my room. Sleep wasn’t going to happen any time soon. And sharing a bathroom with six other women wouldn’t be the least of the challenges I’d face for the next three months. At eighteen I could have coped – hell, there were times in my life when I’d have given anything to have access to a bathroom of any description – but over the last few years, it seemed, standards of hygiene had crept up on me unawares.
Two messages in my inbox. The first was from Student Counselling Services acknowledging receipt of the completed questionnaire. The second was from Joesbury.
From: DI Mark Joesbury, Scotland Yard
Subject: Field Report 1
Date: Tuesday 15 January, 23.16 GMT
To: DC Lacey Flint
You might want to learn the art of the precise, Flint. If I fancy a novel I’ll visit Waterstones. I’ll make discreet inquiries about the tyre prints, but I wouldn’t get your knickers in a twist. The rain finished around four in the afternoon. Police attended the scene around three in the morning. That’s eleven hours in which any number of inebriated, over-privileged, public-school tossers could take a detour off the road.
Does it bear repeating that you are not there to investigate Nicole Holt’s death, or any of them for that matter, just to be a good-looking fruitcake and observe? Sweet dreams.
Five minutes went by and not a single word passed my lips that could be repeated in church. I was just about to email him back – which, given my mood, wouldn’t have been wise – when the door opened. A purple-haired girl whose limbs looked too thin to hold her upright stood in the doorway.
‘Laura?’ she said, swaying on impossibly high heels. ‘Thank God, a room-mate as old as me. God, I’m rat- arsed. Is there coffee in that mug?’
There was, it was steaming on my desk. She stumbled over to me, picked it up and drank from it. She didn’t seem to notice it was hot enough to scald her.
‘Talaith?’ I said. She was a little older than I’d expected. Maybe twenty-two or three.
‘Toxic,’ she said as a trickle of hot liquid ran down her chin. For a moment, it seemed as if she didn’t much rate my coffee-making skills. ‘Or Tox,’ she went on. ‘Only the vicar calls me Talaith.’ Taking my coffee with her, she flicked the main door shut, staggered across the room, pushed open the door to her bedroom, put my mug on the floor and collapsed face down on the bed. She mumbled something in the pillow that I think was intended to express disbelief at how her evening had unfolded.
I stood up, not knowing whether I was amused or annoyed, and then the drumbeats started.
‘It’s not blood, Evi.’
Evi was sitting at her kitchen table, trying to make polite conversation with a young WPC. DI Castell stood in the doorway.
‘What, then?’ she asked.
Castell shrugged, looked apologetic. ‘Our kit’s not good enough to tell us that, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to send it off. Could be a couple of weeks before we know. But definitely not blood. Some sort of dye or paint would be my best guess.’
‘How did it get in my bath?’
‘Now that we can tell you,’ he said, stepping further into the room. ‘Someone poured it into your header tank. We’ve run it all out and it’s filled up clear again but you should probably get a plumber round to check it out tomorrow. Just to make sure there was nothing corrosive.’
‘I had the locks changed,’ said Evi. ‘No one should be able to get in here.’
For a second, DI Castell just looked back at her. ‘If people were working here today, it’s possible that’s when whoever it was got in,’ he said. ‘We’ll check with university maintenance, see if anyone turned up claiming to need a look at the water system or anything.’
‘Thank you,’ said Evi.
‘That message written in the steam.
Evi shook her head.
‘Creepy sort of thing to write in a bathroom,’ said the WPC.
‘Right then,’ said Castell. ‘We’ve checked the entire house, upstairs and down. Nothing out of place and we’ll get SOCs out here in the morning. Are you sure you don’t want me to phone Meg? She can be here in ten minutes.’
Evi shook her head again and thanked him. She stood, found her stick and followed them to the door. Castell hesitated on the doorstep.
‘You know where we are if you need us?’ he said.
She nodded. He’d already given her his card with his direct line and mobile numbers. He’d been both kind and professional, but was she imagining it, or was he finding it difficult to make eye contact? What if he was reasoning that, if she’d bought the skeleton toy herself, maybe she’d put the dye in the tank too?
Ba ba ba boom, ba ba ba boom. Someone was beating out a rhythm on a large drum right outside the block. There were voices too, hardly audible above the drumbeats. Men’s voices, urging each other on; girls’ voices, squealing and screaming. Then something hit my bedroom window. A split second later it happened again. Talaith pushed herself up on the bed and staggered into the main room.
‘They’re not serious,’ she said. ‘Not again.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked her. She didn’t reply, just muttered something about checking the front door was locked and ran from the room. The drumbeat went on. A bit like a heartbeat. Rather like my own heartbeat, which I could feel getting faster by the second. Stupid to be alarmed: students outside were just pissing about, the way students were supposed to do. They’d get bored and cold before long.
But there was something about that drumming that couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t just the volume, there was something purposeful about it. Something instinctively intimidating. Not for nothing, I realized, did armies march into battle to the sound of a drum.
