was my senior officer. I started the engine and drove along the road without looking back. As I turned the corner, my phone rang. It was Evi.
‘Can you meet me at the hospital?’ she said. ‘I’m on my way there now. Jessica’s turned up.’
I ALMOST WALKED past the woman in the wheelchair on the second-floor corridor before realizing that it was Evi. We both stopped and faced each other.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I asked, in a low voice.
In response, Evi blinked away tears and I knew she was searching for the right words. I crouched down so my face was on a level with hers. Her lovely creamy skin looked like paper and her eyes seemed to have lost all their colour. The frown line between her brows deepened.
‘She isn’t dead,’ she told me. ‘Physically, she’s not too bad. Mentally is another story entirely.’
Not dead? But that figured. Nicole had come back from her disappearance. For a while.
‘What has she told us?’ I asked. ‘Where has she been?’
Evi shook her head. ‘Let’s talk when we’ve seen her,’ she said. ‘Do you mind pushing me? I’m not feeling too great.’
Given how she looked, I’d have called that an understatement. She barely had the strength to hold herself upright in the chair. I stood up, took hold of the chair’s handles, and we set off.
‘She was found in her room at St Catharine’s first thing this morning,’ Evi told me after a few seconds. ‘The door was slightly ajar, one of her neighbours poked her head in and found Jessica fully dressed on the bed. She called me first. I called the ambulance.’
A little out of breath, Evi gave herself a minute.
‘She was conscious for the thirty minutes the ambulance took to arrive and said nothing helpful,’ she went on as we turned a corner and narrowly avoided running into a porter pushing an elderly woman along on a bed. ‘She claims to have no idea where she’s been or what she’s been doing for the past five days. She didn’t even know what day it was.’
We came to the nurses’ station and were directed to a door at the end of the corridor. As I let go of the chair handles to push the door open I caught sight of the people inside. A girl with fair hair asleep on the bed, and Nick Bell standing at its foot. He’d been staring down at the girl with a frown on his face. When he looked up and saw us, his face cleared.
‘Hi,’ he mouthed at me. Then he turned to Evi. ‘Everything stable,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s unduly worried. They’ve taken bloods and salivas like you asked. They’ve asked for results later today if possible. And a police doctor’s on her way to do an intimate examination.’
‘Has she said anything?’ asked Evi.
‘Got very agitated when she arrived here, apparently,’ he said. ‘Rambling about wooden clowns or something.’
‘She’s scared of clowns,’ said Evi. ‘Did they sedate her?’
He nodded. ‘Ten milligrams of diazepam intravenously. She’ll be out for a couple of hours.’
I had to bite my lip. We needed to talk to Jessica now.
‘I’m having her transferred to the psychiatric ward as soon as they have a room free,’ said Evi.
‘You’re admitting her?’ Nick looked surprised.
Evi nodded. ‘And putting her on suicide watch. She was a serious risk before she disappeared, in my view. I’m taking no chances.’
Nick looked at the girl on the bed and then back at Evi. ‘Her parents will be here later today,’ he said. ‘They might not be too keen on that idea.’
I opened my mouth and closed it again. An undergraduate student would not get involved in a professional disagreement between two medics.
‘Tough,’ said Evi. ‘I’m keeping this one alive.’
Nick looked at me. ‘Laura, can you give me a minute with Evi?’ he asked.
I gave Evi a don’t-you-give-in look and left the room. Leaning against the corridor wall, I could see Nick, through the room’s window, crouched in front of Evi, arguing with her. He did it gently, though, at one point putting his hand on her arm in a concerned gesture. She seemed to be trying to reassure him. I looked at my watch. I should have been on the M11 by now, speeding towards London.
In the room, Nick straightened up, patted Evi’s arm and opened the door. ‘I’m already late for morning surgery,’ he said to me, as the door to Jessica’s room closed behind him. ‘Any chance of seeing you tonight?’
Difficult to think of anything less likely. If I wasn’t in Scotland Yard arguing for my job by the time night fell, I’d be in my own flat in London looking through Situations Vacant. ‘If only,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a lot of notes to catch up on.’
‘I’ll call you at nine,’ he said. ‘See if I can’t persuade you over for a late supper.’ He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and disappeared off down the corridor. Pushing aside the nagging thought that I might never see him again, I went back into the room. Evi had pushed her chair to Jessica’s bedside.
‘We need to talk to her,’ I said. ‘I can stay with her until she wakes up.’
What was I thinking of? If I wasn’t in London before midday, my career was probably over.
‘Better if I do that,’ Evi said. ‘She knows me. But if there’s been no improvement on an hour ago, she won’t be able to tell us anything.’
I stepped closer and took my first real look at Jessica. At blonde corkscrew curls, skin like milky coffee, a slender, five-foot-seven-inch frame.
‘How are they doing it?’ I said. ‘How do they find the pretty, vulnerable girls in the first place and then know which buttons to press?’
Evi shook her head. Too quickly, it seemed to me.
‘They have medical expertise, don’t they?’ I said. ‘You’ve thought of that yourself, you just didn’t want to say. The drugs, the psychiatric history, it all fits.’
Evi sighed. ‘I have,’ she admitted. ‘And there’s something I haven’t told you.’
I looked round, spotted a visitor’s chair and sat in it. Even when my eyes were on a level with Evi’s she still found it difficult to look at me.
‘Fifteen years ago, when I was an undergraduate, there were five student suicides in one year,’ she said. ‘The only time until recently the figures have spiked at all. I mentioned it to Francis Warrener on Saturday and he remembered them. He also checked back through his old files. The authorities at the time were convinced bullying was a factor but they couldn’t prove anything.’
I waited, not sure where she was going. Fifteen years was a long time.
‘Three of the five were medical students,’ Evi went on. ‘From three different colleges, so the common denominator was the course they were doing.’
I waited some more.
‘I know of four medical students from those days who are still at the university,’ Evi said. ‘I’m one of them. My friend Megan Prince, like me a practising psychiatrist, is another. Nick Bell’s a third. Do you see now why I didn’t want to say anything?’
‘You said four. Was Scott Thornton the other?’
‘How did you …?’ Evi sighed and nodded her head.
‘Another friend of yours?’ I asked.
‘Not really. I didn’t know him at all fifteen years ago. We say hello if we bump into each other but that’s all. I know it looks bad but I just can’t see it, Laura. I know and trust both Nick and Meg. And Scott Thornton saved Bryony. He was the one who put the flames out and summoned help when everyone else was just in shock.’
Of course he was. I knew I’d heard that name somewhere before. I’d read it in the report Joesbury had given me the night he’d briefed me on the case.
