endless pieces of paper, names of students written in thick felt pen, typewritten notes showing names of colleges, courses, ages, psychiatric history, photographs drawn from newspapers, student records and even Facebook. Any newspaper coverage they’d found of the suicides had been included. For the first time, it brought home to Evi the full scale of the problem.
Staring down at her were twenty-nine Cambridge students who’d attempted to take their own lives in the last five years. Most had succeeded. Only ten of them, starting with Danielle Brown five years earlier down to Bryony Carter just a few weeks ago, were still alive. Five of the women on the list had suspected they were being raped, several had reported bad dreams of a sexual nature.
‘Too many women,’ muttered Evi. ‘It’s flying in the face of all the statistics.’
On Laura’s laptop computer was a spreadsheet with exactly the same information and the two women had tried endless calculations in an attempt to discover a link between the victims.
‘There’s no link,’ said Laura. ‘The colleges they belonged to, the courses they did, they’re all random. They come from all over the country, a couple of them from overseas. They’re not all members of the sailing club, or the young Tories. There’s nothing that connects them.’
‘Seventy per cent had a history of psychiatric problems,’ said Evi. ‘But you’d expect that anyway with a group of self-harmers.’
‘HOLMES might have more success,’ said Laura. ‘That’s the police computer system I was telling you about. If they all had their ears pierced at the age of nine, it’ll spot it.’
‘Well, that’s not impossible,’ said Evi. ‘A lot of good-looking girls up there. Such a dreadful shame.’
Laura had stepped back to give herself a better look at the entire wall.
‘Not that it’s any less sad when a plain girl kills herself,’ Evi added quickly.
‘Hello,’ muttered Laura.
‘What?’
Laura had stepped closer to the wall again, was walking from one photograph to the next.
‘I think you’ve found a link,’ she said. ‘Look.’ She pulled a photograph off the wall and held it out to Evi. ‘Olivia Cutler,’ she said. ‘Second-year chemistry student. Churchill College.’
Evi looked down at a photograph of an overweight girl with lank hair. Laura had taken two more photographs down. ‘Anita Hunt,’ she said. ‘First-year Russian student. Bit horsey, wouldn’t you say? And Helen Stott, linguistics. Needed a serious skin-care regime.’
‘Laura, what …?’
‘Rebecca Graham, the classics student, was no oil painting either,’ Laura continued. ‘That’s the four uglies out of the way. Now, look at the rest. Hang on, let me just get rid of the boys. Look at the rest of the girls.’
There were nineteen photographs left. Judith Creasey, a striking blonde engineering student from Churchill College who’d self-asphyxiated; Kate George, from Peterhouse, with black shiny hair and sparkling eyes who’d lain down in a bath and dropped a hairdryer into it; Sarah Treen, of Magdalene, a beautiful black girl with glossy skin and braided hair who’d thrown herself on to a train track. Every photograph still on the wall was of a slim, attractive young woman.
‘I think he likes them pretty,’ said Laura.
‘HE?’ SAID EVI. ‘We have a he?’
‘Just think about it,’ I said. ‘If your first theory was right, that there are websites out there where the dangerously disturbed make contact with the seriously depressed, and then goad them into self-harm just for the fun of it, what are the chances of nearly 70 per cent of them being very pretty women?’
‘Well, slim,’ admitted Evi. ‘You think these girls were targeted?’
‘Not slim,’ I said. ‘Verging on non-existent. What I’m struggling with is how far are they going? If the victim won’t jump, does she get pushed?’
‘Laura, slow down. CID investigated all these deaths,’ said Evi. ‘If there was any suggestion that they were anything other than suicides, surely they’d have found it.’
‘You’d hope so,’ I said, thinking about the second set of car tracks at the site of Nicole’s death.
‘Your senior officers,’ said Evi. ‘The ones who sent you here. Did they hint that we might not be looking at suicides?’
‘Not for a second,’ I said.
‘Nearly two hundred people saw Bryony set fire to herself,’ said Evi.
‘No, they saw her stagger into the hall in flames,’ I said.
Evi’s creamy face visibly paled. ‘Oh, good God. Laura, you can’t think …’
‘I don’t know what to think right now. But even if she did strike the match, she was high on some powerful hallucinogen.’
Evi went behind her desk, pulled open a drawer and took out a file. ‘You’re right. Extremely high levels of dimethyltryptamine in Bryony’s system,’ she said after a few moments of searching. ‘Her blood and urine were tested shortly after she was admitted. Standard procedure.’
‘I know very little about hallucinogenic drugs,’ I said. ‘Can they make you do things you wouldn’t normally?’ I’d done basic courses on the most common street drugs as part of my training, all police officers do, but since I’d never worked for the drug squad my knowledge of the different drugs available and their effects was pretty weak.
Evi was nodding her head. I only had half her attention. She was still reading through Bryony’s notes.
‘There’s nothing about recreational drug use in her counselling notes,’ she said. ‘We always ask whether students have any sort of drug history.’
‘The paraphernalia for smoking it were found in her bedroom,’ I said.
Evi looked up and blinked. ‘She smoked it?’
‘According to the CID report,’ I said. ‘It’s the usual way, from what I’ve read.’
‘I was never shown the CID report,’ said Evi, her eyes going back down again. ‘That’s worrying.’
‘What?’
‘Well, two things, the first being that this is a very high concentration to have come from inhalation. I’d expect this sort of level to be administered intravenously.’
‘CID found a smoking bowl and pipe, not a hypodermic,’ I said.
We both thought about that for a moment. I didn’t want to say the word ‘staging’, but it was right up there on the end of my tongue. Maybe someone had wanted to make it look as though Bryony had voluntarily taken drugs, only not quite got the detail right.
‘If there’d been a post-mortem, would that discrepancy have been picked up?’ I asked.
Evi nodded. ‘Almost certainly,’ she said.
‘What else?’ I asked. ‘You said two things were worrying you.’
‘Bryony was taking an SSRI,’ she said. ‘That’s an antidepressant, in the same class as Prozac. There’s no way Nick would have prescribed that if he’d known she was using hallucinogens. So she must have lied to him and been pretty convincing.’
Or he’d known exactly what he was doing.
‘Because …’ I said.
‘Hallucinogens react badly with certain antidepressants,’ she said. ‘Taken together they’ve been known to create a dissociative fugue state.’
‘Come again?’
She looked up at me. ‘A state of temporary amnesia,’ she said. ‘When the sufferer forgets completely who he or she is and goes wandering, sometimes lost and frightened, sometimes imagining they’re someone else entirely. It can last for hours, or weeks.’
‘Nicole Holt disappeared for several days before she died,’ I reminded her. ‘She turned up in quite a state,
