hour, nor had she sent herself the email. Which almost certainly meant she hadn’t poured red dye into her header tank and she probably hadn’t bought the skeleton toy either. She wasn’t losing her marbles, she was being stalked. By someone who had had access to her house. Thank God she’d had the locks changed.
And emails could be traced. Even if it had been sent from somewhere anonymous like an internet cafe or a public library, there would still be a record of it on her computer. She resisted the temptation to reply to it and carried on working.
Another email had arrived in her inbox. Great, more evidence. Evi flicked it open.
Purple makes you look sallow. Try another colour.
Evi stood up and walked as quickly as she could to the window. The curtains were drawn, no gaps through which anyone could see, but she pulled them a little closer all the same. She didn’t need to look down at what she was wearing. The cashmere sweater, the colour of lavender in bud, had belonged to her grandmother. Keep it from moths and cashmere lasts for ever, Granny had told her. It wasn’t quite true. It was looking worn and bobbly in places and she only ever wore it at home. She’d changed after the police had left. No one could have known that she was wearing purple right now.
Cracks in the mullioned windows might have been made by stray arrows, centuries ago, and the enclosed stone staircase looked old enough to have ivy growing on the inside. As I climbed, I left behind the smell of woodsmoke and cooked food, to have it replaced by that of fresh laundry and used towels, cosmetics and damp sports equipment. It was the smell of youth, with feminine undertones.
After speaking to Stenning, I’d accessed the university website and typed Scott Thornton into the search facility, realizing as I did so that there was something a bit familiar about the name. I found out that he was part of the medical faculty and a member of St John’s. He was also a Cambridge alumnus, having studied medicine here some fifteen years ago. It was probably all I needed to know for now. I still couldn’t remember where I’d heard the name before, but if it was important it would come to me. A more urgent priority was finding out a little more about Nicole Holt’s last days. The second set of tyre tracks I’d found near where she’d died was bothering me.
The room guide at the base of the stairwell had told me that Nicole lived in room 27. A single flower, pink and daisy-like, pinned opposite her name suggested that might not be strictly true any more.
I spotted Nicole’s room the minute I pushed open the door to the corridor. Cones of cellophane with flowers somewhere in their midst had been propped against the wall outside. Cards had been pinned to the door, addressed to Nicole, occasionally Nicky. Sometime in the next few days, I guessed, her parents might take them down, even read them if they could bear to.
At the end of the corridor I could hear female voices. In the communal kitchen four girls, caught in the act of making coffee, were passing a milk bottle between them. I stood in the doorway, waiting for one of them to notice me.
‘Hi,’ I said, a second later. ‘I’m really sorry to intrude.’
‘No worries,’ replied one. ‘You lost?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Actually I came about Nicole.’ This was the tricky bit. This was where I had to feign emotion for a dead girl I’d never met, in front of bright young women who might just have been her genuine friends. I dropped my eyes, brought my hand up to cover my nose, as though to conceal tears. Tears that weren’t actually there. I was obviously getting better at this acting lark because two of the girls had stepped forward. One of them had a hand on my shoulder, the other was steering me to a chair. I sniffed and realized the tears were there after all. My eyes had been watering in the cold most of the way over and now they were just flowing.
‘It’s OK,’ said a third girl, whose own eyes were damp now. ‘We’re all upset. Are you from the history department?’
I shook my head. ‘I knew her from the Blue,’ I said. ‘You know, the pub where she worked.’
They were nodding their heads. Nicole had worked two nights a week and one lunchtime in the Cambridge Blue, a pub on Gwydir Street. There had been photographs and a number of references to it on Facebook. ‘I just came to see if there was going to be some sort of memorial service for her,’ I said. ‘I know she went to church from time to time.’ Something else I’d discovered on Facebook.
The girls were looking at each other, faces puzzled, shoulders shrugging. It was far too soon for a memorial service.
‘Also, there was something she asked me to get for her,’ I went on, lifting my bag up from the floor. Its contents chinked softly together. ‘I’ve got a contact in the wine trade and I can get it quite cheap. She said somebody called Flick had a birthday coming up and she wanted to surprise her.’
I’d already spotted Flick, a gorgeous Amazon of a girl, nearly six feet tall, with an athlete’s build and long Nordic blonde hair. She looked like Eowyn from
‘It’s nothing special,’ I said, pressing home my advantage. I’d learned all about Flick, her imminent twentieth birthday and her love of all drinks sparkling on Nicole’s Facebook pages. ‘Just Prosecco, but quite a good one.’
I pulled three bottles of sparkling Italian wine from my bag. I’d bought them in a supermarket on the way over, making sure they were chilled. ‘If you could see Flick gets them, that would be great,’ I said, going in for the kill. ‘I’ll leave you in peace now. Sorry to be so pathetic. I’m still in shock, I guess.’
‘Would you like a coffee?’ one of the girls asked me. I feigned surprise and opened my mouth to accept.
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Flick. ‘Who’s got some glasses?’
Evi put the phone down, half expecting it to start ringing again any second. The sergeant she’d spoken to had been polite but distant. He’d told her to make a note of the number and times of the calls and to forward the emails on to him. He hadn’t suggested sending anyone round.
She stood up and went into the kitchen. If someone was watching her from outside, the back garden was where he’d be. She crossed to the door, double-checking that it was locked. She really needed to get blinds put on these windows.
‘I’ve seen you wear purple more than once, Dr Oliver,’ the sergeant had said to her. ‘Bit of a favourite of yours, isn’t it? Could be just a lucky guess. Send me the emails and we’ll have a look at them. I wouldn’t hold out much hope, though. If they were sent from a public building using an anonymous Gmail account, there won’t be a lot we can do.’
Evi sat down in her stairlift and pressed the button. The police weren’t coming and someone had to check her top floor. She’d never sleep otherwise.
Ten minutes later the phone was ringing again. She almost didn’t answer.
‘John Castell here, Evi,’ the deep voice with its faint Norfolk accent said. ‘The duty sergeant just called me at home to tell me about your emails. Are you planning to send them through tonight?’
‘I sent them fifteen minutes ago,’ said Evi.
‘Really? I checked with him not two minutes ago. Hang on, let me check again. The line will go dead for a few seconds.’
A short pause while Evi walked back to her desk.
‘Nope, nothing,’ said Castell. ‘Can you try sending them direct to me?’
‘Let me try.’ Evi opened her inbox and ran the cursor to the top of the list. The two emails weren’t there. She flicked open Junk Mail, Personal Messages and Deleted Items, in case she’d accidentally binned them or filed them away. Nothing. Finally, she clicked on Sent Mail. Nothing at all.
The two emails had disappeared from her system.
Two bottles of Prosecco later, we’d moved from the kitchen into Flick’s room. It was a study bedroom, with a large desk and a narrow bed. A crimson creeper was poking its way in through the open window. Flick had offered me the one chair; two more were brought from rooms nearby. Flick and a girl called Sarah lay on the bed.
‘I know it’s normal to wish there was more you could have done,’ I was saying as sympathetic faces nodded around me. ‘The last time I saw Nicole I knew something wasn’t right but I was in a hurry. I figured we could talk it through properly when I saw her again.’
‘We always think we have more time,’ said Flick.
‘I just knew, though,’ I went on. ‘I knew something wasn’t right. Did she say anything to any of you?’
‘What sort of not right?’ asked Sarah.
‘I didn’t give her chance,’ I admitted. ‘But a couple of times she mentioned to me that she thought someone was coming into her room at night when it was locked.’
One big thing bothering me, apart from the second set of tyre tracks on the B road, was Bryony’s reported
