Killing You Softly

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

It’s happened again – they found another body.

Unlike last time, when we lost my best friends and fellow students, Lily and Paige, this recent killing has nothing to do with St Jude’s, thank God.

They found another body – not in the lake, but it was a watery end like Lily’s and it was a teenage girl. So some things were the same – enough to make me shake and tremble and
feel like life on this cold January morning was playing dirty tricks.

I found out about the murder even before I got back to school for the start of term. It was when I stepped off the train from Paddington on to the platform at Ainslee Westgate and I ran into Tom
Walsingham. Tom, you remember, is the kid who lives in the Old Vicarage in Chartsey Bottom. He doesn’t go to my school, but I clicked with him as soon as we met last September and I’ve
got to know him pretty well.

‘Hey, Alyssa.’

‘Hey, Tom.’ We’d travelled on the same train but hadn’t known it – me with my heavy suitcase crammed with clothes from the Oxford Street sales (shopping therapy to
help deal with the trauma of losing Lily and Paige), him with his small backpack stuffed with footie boots and computer games. ‘Good Christmas?’

‘Nope.’

‘Me neither.’ I’d stayed with my Aunt Olivia in Richmond, we’d done the turkey roast and Queen’s speech without enthusiasm. Same old, same old. ‘Why were you
in London?’

‘Catching up with mates, getting the hell out of Chartsey for New Year.’ Tom wore a black knitted beanie pulled low over his forehead and a black ski jacket. He offered me a lift out
to Chartsey Bottom in the car he’d parked down a side street near the station. ‘What’s in the case?’ he asked as I heaved my luggage into the boot of his car. ‘A
dismembered corpse?’

‘Ha ha, Tom.’ Not funny, given last term’s body-in-the-lake events.

We finally got the case into the boot and ourselves into the car. ‘Talking of corpses – did you see this?’ He thrust a rolled-up
Metro
into my hand.

‘Nope.’ I unfurled the newspaper and read the front-page headline.
Body Found in Frozen Canal.

Tom choked the car engine into life.

My heart faltered as the image of my roommate Lily Earle forced itself to the front of my mind. Lily, fizzing with energy, throwing her stuff around the room we’d shared with Paige Kelly
in the girls’ dorm at St Jude’s. Lily the brilliant painter, Lily the rich-kid rebel, my beautiful, thin-skinned, up-and-down, bipolar friend whose body had ended up at the bottom of
the lake.

Pulling myself together, I read the article. ‘
Police divers discovered the body of Scarlett Hartley, seventeen, late yesterday. Scarlett, a sixth-form pupil at Ainslee Comprehensive
School in Oxfordshire, had been missing for two days.

‘
Few details have emerged about how she died though residents in houses overlooking the canal report hearing a disturbance during the night of thirty-first December. The stretch of
canal where the body was found has been cordoned off and is being treated as a crime scene.’

I read the report once, twice, three times. I looked at the picture of a blonde girl, elfin-pretty. She was wearing school uniform, smiling straight at the camera. Retina registers image, brain
processes information and stores it in prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe. That’s how memory works. With me it stays there forever whereas with you it fades. I’m not showing off
– it’s just to remind you that I’m freakish that way.

‘You knew her?’ I asked Tom.

‘She went to my school,’ he said. ‘But, no, I didn’t really know her.’

My heart faltered over thoughts of Lily then kicked back into life as I rode with Tom out of town, down Cotswold country lanes. I pulled out my phone and read a text from Zara,
a girl in my year –
Guess what – we’re roommates

And one from my lovely Jack –
Snow in Denver. Plane cancelled

When will I see you?
I texted back.

Tuesday pm at earliest. Love you x

Love you too. x Hurry back x x

Today was Saturday. I counted the hours between now and Tuesday afternoon. It came out as way, way too many.

Then I forced myself to stop thinking about Jack and replied to Zara instead.

Is it just you and me sharing?
I texted.

No – you and me plus new girl, Galina,
Zara texted.

Galina who?

Dunno. But she’s mega rich and Russian.

Have you met her?

Not yet. Where are you?

Bottoms with Tom. Will call taxi from here.

‘No need for a cab, stupid – I’ll drive you all the way to St Jude’s,’ Tom offered when I asked him for the number of a taxi service. He passed his house in the
village and carried on until we reached St Jude’s, which was fifteen minutes out of his way – bless. We chugged through the broad wrought-iron gates in his tiny white Peugeot, up the
drive to the main entrance.

And here I was at St Jude’s Academy – a school for exceptional students, ready to begin my second term.

It was the same and different. The same ancient stone building steeped in history, looking out over lawns and a lake to oak woodland, but different because we were minus Lily and Paige after the
tragedy of last year.

‘Thanks, Tom,’ I said as he drove under the archway with the
Nihil sed optimus
crest carved in local honey-coloured stone.
Nihil sed optimus
– nothing but the
best. A school motto like this weighs heavily with someone like me. I mean, I’m not the world’s most confident person and genuinely struggle to see myself in the
‘
optimus
’ category.

We stopped in the quad and I hauled my case out of Tom’s boot.

‘
I
didn’t really know Scarlett, but Alex definitely did,’ he said,
a propos
the dead girl in the canal.

‘They were – what – an item?’

Tom nodded. ‘Pretty full on.’

‘Alex Driffield?’ I was finding it hard to picture the football-mad kid whose dad ran the car-repair place in Chartsey Bottom being full on with any girl, let alone a blonde,
smiley-eyed, dead one.

‘How many Alexes do we know?’ Tom muttered.

‘Right. That must have happened since the end of last term.’

‘In the run up to Christmas, yeah.’

‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ I said. I was, but I was also glad that it still had nothing to do with St Jude’s, nothing directly to do with me, so I set my case on its little
wheels, said goodbye to Tom and rolled my luggage across the empty, stone-flagged quad. ‘Thanks,’ I called again as he turned his car and set off back down the drive.

Zara intercepted me before I reached the door leading up to the first floor dormitories. ‘Alyssa!’

I was pleased to see her, although I have to say I hadn’t hit it off with her straight away, not like I had with Lily and Paige. She’d seemed too girlie and flirty for my taste and I
would guess I’d been too shy and uptight for her. But those deaths last term changed things and we’d grown close. She sashayed towards me in a cloud of Chanel Mademoiselle.

‘Ditch the bag, come and say hi to Connie.’

So I did – I ditched the bag at the bottom of the stairs because when Zara issues a command you obey. I’d learned that during my first term at St Jude’s.

You need to be able to picture her. Tall, curvy, blonde. Think of a young Kate Winslet – yeah, sickening. Plus an intellect the size of a planet. Today she was dressed in skinny jeans and
a short chestnut-coloured, bomber-style jacket with a fur collar, brown leather boots to match. Her to-die-for hair was scrunched up on top of her head, ready to be shaken out in a cascade of
golden curls.