after cutting open her femoral artery, had temazepam, a reasonably common sedative, and psilocybin, a hallucinogen, in her system. Jayne Pearson, the French student who’d stolen a family gun and shot herself seven months later, showed traces of another sedative called flunitrazepam. Its trade name was Rohypnol. That same academic year, the post-mortems of Kate George and Donna Leather showed traces of LSD and mescaline respectively. Both had also used the sedative drugs benzodiazepines. The following year, Bella Hardy and Freya Robin had died after taking ibogaine and DMT. Evi made her way down the list until she found the results of the post-mortem on Nicole Holt. She’d taken LSD before she died.
‘Other than the combination of hallucinogens and sedatives, there’s no real pattern here,’ Evi said, looking up at the coroner.
‘There isn’t,’ agreed Francis. ‘And there is nothing unusual in finding traces of drugs in the body of a suicide.’
‘No,’ said Evi. Claire McGann, fourteen months earlier, had taken mandrake, a rare herbal-derived hallucinogenic drug. Shortly afterwards, Miranda Harman had died after taking Benadryl.
‘I’m referring this to the chief constable,’ continued Francis, ‘and, against my better judgement, showing it to you, for two reasons.’
‘Some of these drugs are very unusual,’ said Evi.
‘They are,’ he agreed. ‘Not at all what you would expect the average university student to get hold of by themselves. My other concern is that by far the most common drug we would normally find in the system of a suicide is alcohol.’
Evi glanced down at the list again.
‘None of them,’ she said. ‘Traces in Kate and Freya but only what would be consistent with a single glass of wine some time earlier. None of them had drunk to excess.’
‘Exactly. And it may just be me being fanciful,’ Francis said, ‘but it strikes me that, of all the incapacitating drugs, substantial quantities of alcohol would be the hardest to administer to someone else.’
Evi looked down at the list again. ‘It strikes me,’ she said, ‘that if there’s foul play going on, someone really knows his drugs.’
‘Are we done now, Evi?’ asked Warrener, and from the look on his face there was little doubt what he wanted her answer to be.
‘Not quite,’ Evi replied.
‘SO THEY ARE acting alone,’ said Evi. ‘Whatever might be leading up to it, in the end the decision to die is theirs.’
‘That would appear to be the case with Bryony,’ I agreed. ‘Danielle was very hazy about details but I’m sure she’d remember being lynched. Difficult to ask the others, of course.’
‘And not dreams?’ said Evi. ‘You’re sure that’s what she meant?’
‘Not completely, but it fits,’ I said. ‘Bryony herself never talked about bad dreams, remember, she talked about someone coming into her room at night and touching her. It was her room-mate, Talaith, who mentioned that Bryony used to scream in her sleep.’
‘Jessica was very clear,’ said Evi. ‘She was having very bad dreams. Although she was vague about the detail.’
‘With Nicole, it was her friends again,’ I said. ‘They heard her yelling at night.’
We were sitting in Evi’s kitchen, a lovely large room at the back of the house that overlooked the garden. A huge cedar tree stood in the centre of the lawn, with other smaller trees and bushes around the outer beds. A low brick wall with a centrally placed iron gate formed the boundary at the lower edge. Beyond it, I could see heavily pollarded willows. The sky outside seemed to have fallen lower, and had taken on the colour of clotted cream.
‘If these so-called dreams are actually vague memories of real abuse, why aren’t the girls waking up and screaming their heads off the minute the bedroom door opens?’
‘I’d guess they’re sedated,’ said Evi, indicating the coroner’s list. ‘Whoever’s doing this has a pretty good grasp of sedative drugs. We’ve got Rohypnol, ketamine. Get enough of either in your system and you’re going to be pretty submissive, with only the vaguest recollection or none at all the next day.’
‘Fits so far,’ I said. ‘But sometimes they do wake up screaming. Is whatever’s happening to them so bad it’s overriding the effect of the sedative?’
‘Unless there was actual pain involved, that’s unlikely,’ said Evi. ‘And these girls aren’t physically harmed, remember. I’d say there was something else going on as well.’
As if what we had already wasn’t enough. ‘Something else?’ I said.
‘There are a lot of hallucinogens on this list,’ she said. ‘Several of the victims had traces of psychedelic drugs in their systems.’
I must have looked blank because Evi gave a heavy sigh. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You’re aware that hallucinogenic drugs induce experiences that are different from those of ordinary consciousness?’
‘You mean not real?’
She nodded her head. ‘Yes, you could say experiences that aren’t real. But under that umbrella there is a huge range of possibilities, depending upon the type of drug taken and the circumstances of the user.’
The dog had followed us from the sitting room but had transferred his allegiance completely to Evi. He was lying at her feet now, on the hard tiled floor, gazing up at her adoringly. Which says something about the loyalty of dogs, it seems to me. I’d rescued him from a bullet, fed him, offered him shelter and now he’d fallen in love with the prettier face.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Hallucinogenic drugs are grouped into three basic types,’ said Evi. ‘First of all you have the psychedelic drugs. These don’t induce hallucinations in the true sense, they just alter the user’s perception of reality. Someone under the influence might see unusually bright colours, or inanimate objects move in some way. Often senses get mixed up, people talk about hearing colours and seeing sounds.’
‘Far out,’ I said.
Evi didn’t smile. ‘Psychedelic isn’t a hippy term, by the way, it’s from the ancient Greek,’ she said. ‘Psyche meaning mind or soul and delos meaning reveal or manifest. LSD is a psychedelic drug, so are DMT and mescaline. And what they do is to bring some hidden part of you to the surface.’
‘Hidden but real?’ I said.
‘Exactly. There were medical experiments in the late 1960s, the theory being that use of psychedelic drugs could bring to the fore-front of a person’s mind whatever they were keeping hidden. Risky, of course, because when people are keeping memories tucked away it’s usually for a good reason. Artificially forcing them into the open could be very dangerous.’
‘If someone had a dark secret, psychedelics could root it out?’ I asked, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. I had a few secrets of my own that I wanted to keep firmly in the closet.
‘Yes. Then you have the dissociative drugs,’ Evi said. ‘They induce a perception of the outside world’s being dream-like or false. You’re aware of what’s going on around you but you feel detached. People have reported a sense of watching themselves from a distance, even of seeing the world like a giant cinema screen. Are you with me?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘And typical dissociative drugs might be?’
‘PCP, ketamine again. Both initially developed as anaesthetics for surgery. Both on this list.’
‘And the third group,’ I prompted.
‘Possibly the most dangerous, the deliriants,’ said Evi. ‘These can cause hallucinations in the true sense. Users have conversations with people who aren’t there, see things that have no basis in reality.’
‘And these things they see, are they likely to be scary?’ I asked.
‘Depends,’ said Evi. ‘Someone in a good frame of mind, in a situation in which they feel safe, would be likely
