‘But there were practical jokes played on her too,’ I said. Evi had given me a quick summary before I left.
‘Yeah, but we never saw who was doing it,’ said the one with brown pigtails wrapped, Princess Leia style, above her ears. ‘During the day this floor is pretty quiet. Anyone could come and go and never be seen.’
As the term had gone on, Jessica had become more and more withdrawn, sometimes not leaving her room for whole days at a time.
‘Do you think she might have been on drugs?’ I asked.
Around the room, eyes became evasive.
‘If she’s in trouble, you won’t help her by keeping quiet,’ I said.
‘I’m sure she was,’ said the cropped blonde. ‘You just had to look into her eyes some mornings.’
‘We don’t know that for certain, though,’ said the one with the yellow and purple scarf wrapped round her neck. ‘You’re just guessing.’
‘There were days when she could barely get out of bed and I never saw her drinking much alcohol,’ said the blonde. ‘She was on drugs.’
‘Do you know where she was getting them from?’ I asked. ‘Did you see anyone dodgy hanging around? Was there anyone she met, anywhere she went on a regular basis?’
They looked at each other, thought some more and shook their heads.
‘Did she have money problems?’ I asked. Drugs were invariably expensive.
‘She never seemed to,’ replied Princess Leia. ‘She spent quite a lot on clothes and make-up.’
‘Did you notice scars on her arms?’ I asked. ‘Or a constant sniff? Did you smell anything odd in her room?’
More blank looks, more head shakes. Jessica wasn’t coming across as a classic drug addict. Neither had Bryony. I thanked them for their time, made sure they had my number and Evi’s in case anything happened and told them I was sure Jessica would be fine. I was lying. I was becoming more and more convinced that by the end of the weekend, Jessica would be dead.
Leaving the building I had a text from Evi to say she was on her way to the coroner’s office. He’d agreed to look through his files. She asked me to meet her back at her house in a couple of hours.
So I had time to kill. What I wanted to do was speak to Joesbury. Or at least let him know what I’d found out. It was still little more than a theory, though, and he’d been very clear about not contacting him unless it was an emergency. Couple of hours. I decided to check on Bryony.
Evi looked at her watch. The dog had been alone now for three hours. It could have peed on the carpet, chewed the furniture, howled a hole in the roof. And had Laura actually fed it that day? Had it been walked?
‘Evi.’
Evi looked up to see Warrener in the doorway. He had a single sheet of paper in his right hand.
‘Anything?’ she asked.
Warrener glanced down at the sheet of paper and then back up at Evi.
‘I checked eleven post-mortem reports,’ he said. ‘Starting with the most recent, that of Nicole Holt.’
Evi nodded. When she and Laura had taken out the boys, the less attractive girls and the girls whose suicides had failed, the list had numbered eleven. She’d asked Francis to check if any of the women had been under the influence of drugs when they’d taken their own lives.
He handed over the sheet of paper. ‘I’ll be emailing this to the chief constable on Monday morning,’ he said. ‘What he makes of it is anyone’s guess.’
Bryony was just as I’d left her two days earlier, staring up at the roof of the tent that kept her free from infection. She heard the door and her head turned slowly in my direction.
Her resemblance to an animated corpse was strengthening. The skin covering her face looked waxier than it had, and there were patches of discoloration. It looked as though the process of rejection by Bryony’s body was beginning.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She watched me approach the bed.
‘Same rules,’ I said. ‘The minute you want me to go, just blink a few times and I’m out of here.’
I waited for the blinking to start. It didn’t. I pulled the chair forward and sat down.
‘Had a bit of an adventure after I saw you the other day,’ I said. ‘Got attacked by a buzzard.’ I told her the story of disturbing the bird, of it swooping down on me and how I’d run for cover in the adjoining woods. There were things I wanted to ask her but I didn’t want to agitate her too soon and, besides, I had a feeling she had very little company. I was just about to tell her about the woods and the scary farmer when a nurse came in to check her blood pressure and oxygen levels.
By the time the nurse had gone it was getting late and I knew I had to be back at Evi’s before the end of the afternoon. The spooky woods story would wait another day.
‘Bryony,’ I said as the door closed. ‘There’s something I want to ask you. It won’t be easy for you, but it’s important. Is that OK?’
I waited for Bryony to incline her head down towards her chin and then lift it again. Oh, Lord, I’d been half hoping she’d say no, because what I was about to ask seemed horribly cruel, but Evi’s comment earlier about two hundred people seeing Bryony set fire to herself had struck home. Because they hadn’t. Two hundred people had seen her in flames.
Someone else had been present when Nicole had decapitated herself. Danielle hadn’t been alone when she’d hung from that tree. Maybe Bryony hadn’t acted alone either.
‘Bryony, what I need to ask is whether anyone was with you when you set fire to yourself.’
Maybe all three of them had had help.
‘What I need to know, Bryony, is whether someone was helping you.’
Maybe these weren’t suicides at all.
‘Whether anyone else did that to you?’
Bryony’s hand was moving across the bed, had taken hold of the pen. She was moving it slowly across the pad. At that moment, the door opened and an orderly came in. He nodded at me and walked to the waste bin.
‘So there I am, half naked, soaking wet, chained by my ankle and with a video camera pushed into my face,’ I said, in as cheerful a voice as I could muster. ‘Talaith said they did it a lot last term.’
As I’d been talking, I’d leaned over the bed to see what Bryony was writing. The orderly was emptying the bin into a large plastic sack he’d brought with him.
I gave her a little nod, to show I understood, and a half smile to thank her. Giving me a dark look, the orderly left the room.
‘I’m going to leave you in peace now,’ I went on. ‘To be honest, I’m pretty whacked myself. Had some weird dreams last night. Must be something to do with that room.’
Bryony’s eyes had opened wide with alarm.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just that Talaith happened to mention that when you and she were sharing a room, you had bad dreams too.’
She started writing again.
Not dreams? What did that mean?
Her pen was still moving across the pad.
‘I know, you said,’ I told her. ‘Bryony, do you mean Nick Bell, your GP?’
Instant agitation. She started tapping the pen on the plastic. First above the word
Behind me, the door opened and a nurse stood in the doorway.
‘I think she needs some sleep now,’ she told me in a voice that brooked no argument.
Evi looked down. Toxicology screens were carried out on suicides as a matter of course and any unusual substances found in blood, saliva or urine would be noted on the post-mortem report. Warrener had lifted the toxicology reports from each of the eleven victims. Nina Hatton, the zoology student who’d died five years earlier
