Killing You Softly (9 page)

‘No,’ Marco contradicted. ‘I made a rule when I was a little kid – never do anything my father wants me to do.’

‘So how come you’re out here in the sticks?’ Jack shot back.

‘My mother. She chose this place because of Bruno Cabrini. I said OK, I’ll come for two terms.’

‘You sing?’ Surprise showed on my face and in my voice. It came out as ‘
Y’sing?
’ and reminded me of the trouble I had with my pronunciation when I first
talked to Jack. I lose vowels and run words together so I sound pissed – totally nerves related.

‘Yes. Bruno teaches me guitar and singing.’

I snuck a look at Marco’s hands – his fingers were long, definitely a guitar player’s hands. ‘Oh. Eug’nie h’s s’nging l’ssons w’th h’m
too.’ Stop, stop before you make even more of a fool of yourself!

‘So, anyway, the football team,’ Jack broke in to save me more embarrassment.

Marco ignored him and carried on holding a private conversation with me. ‘Yeah, I know Eugenie and Galina. We spent the summer together in Monte Carlo. Actually, I ran into Eugenie at
Christmas.’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘At a party. I was in London, staying at my cousin’s house. Then I came here to check out the school for myself. I thought, yeah, I can live here for a while, why not?’

‘And h’re y’are!’ I burbled.

This could have gone on for ages – Marco chatting, me slurring, Jack impatient – if we hadn’t been rudely interrupted by Galina.

She burst out of the Squinting Cat, leaving the door open and shouting over her shoulder.

‘My new roommate,’ I warned Jack. ‘Prepare for blast off.’

‘Leave me!’ Galina yelled at Mikhail, who was in hot pursuit. ‘I tell my father what you do!’ The rest was in Russian as she sprinted towards us.

The bodyguard started off in a hurry, but he slowed down when he saw us, his eyes still trained on Galina when she veered off across the road towards the churchyard. It was dark, remember, but
the street lamps were on, casting pools of light on the snowy pavements.

Something about the situation – beautiful girl running away from thickset man in suit and tie – kicked us into action. Even though the guy was employed by Galina’s dad, we felt
we couldn’t stand by and let it happen.

‘Back off, buddy.’ Jack stood in Mikhail’s way as Galina’s minder tried to cross the road.

Mikhail sidestepped Jack and followed Galina.

I quickly followed her under the lych gate. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

Marco meanwhile took direct action. He ran right at Mikhail’ intercepting him outside the churchyard and barring his way.

‘Galina, come back!’ I shouted.

Either she didn’t hear me or she did and chose to ignore me. She went on running, stumbling and staggering up the path towards the church porch. I followed and found her sobbing, sitting
on a stone bench, hiding her face in her hands.

Out on the road, Marco took a swing at Mikhail who sidestepped again and blundered into Jack, the whole thing happening almost in slow motion in a pool of orange light.

‘Galina, look at me!’ I knelt beside her and eased her hands down. Then I gasped. There was a cut on her bottom lip and a trickle of blood down her chin. ‘How did that
happen?’

‘He did it,’ she sobbed. ‘Mikhail, he did this.’

‘In the cafe?’

‘No. Outside the village, on small road. I run away.’

‘And he came after you? OK, I get it. He caught up with you and tried to stop you – that’s his job. You stumbled, you got this cut, right?’

Back on the street, Jack and Marco grappled with Mikhail. Eventually Jack wrestled him to the ground and Marco put a foot firmly on his chest.

Galina shook her head. ‘Not an accident. He punches me.’ She touched the bleeding cut with trembling fingertips. ‘He tries to kidnap me.’

‘No, hang on, that can’t be right. What do you mean, he tried to kidnap you?’

‘I tell truth. I take walk in school grounds, by lake into woods and he follows me. He wants to snatch me and take me away.’

‘Are you sure?’ Was this drama queen Galina hatching a plot to get rid of her bodyguards, or was it for real?

‘I am scared, but I escape. I run to village and hide in cafe.’

‘But he followed you?’ Whether or not he was a kidnapper after a big ransom from the Radkins, it was clear that punching his boss’s daughter in the mouth wasn’t part of
Mikhail’s job description.

‘I am very’ very scared,’ she insisted. ‘I phone Papa and tell him what Mikhail has done – in cafe I have time to make call, but it is Salomea who answers. She
doesn’t listen. She tells me I make up story. She goes off phone.’

‘But seriously – Mikhail did this on purpose?’ I checked as Jack and Marco rolled the bodyguard on to his stomach and pinned him down.

Galina nodded. ‘What do I do?’ she whimpered. ‘Who will believe me?’

‘Me,’ I decided. ‘I believe you, Galina. Don’t worry, we’ll call the police.’

‘They arrested Mikhail.’ Once we got back to St Jude’s, I told the whole story to Hooper, Will, Luke and Connie.

Marco had waited with Jack for the cops to get there. I’d asked for paramedics to check out Galina’s cut and they’d arrived at the same time as the police. The paramedics
decided that the cut needed a couple of stitches and they drove Galina to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Ainslee. I went with her. We had to wait two hours in A and E and it was 8.30 p.m. by the time
we got back to St Jude’s.

‘You know what this reminds me of,’ Connie decided as we sat around a table in the recreational area overlooking the vast sports hall. ‘It’s a gamekeeper-turned-poacher
situation. The guy is hired to protect Galina and instead he tries to kidnap her.’

‘If we believe her story,’ Luke said, feet up on one of the coffee tables.

Hooper agreed. ‘Remember, she hates the guy. Maybe she made this up to get rid of him.’

‘She wouldn’t exactly sock herself in the jaw,’ BWS pointed out. ‘She’s way too vain for that.’

Touche!

‘So where is she now?’ Will wanted to know.

‘Asleep in our room. She was knackered, poor thing.’

‘And where’s Jack?’

‘With Marco in the head’s office. The police are taking statements.’

‘Saint Sam won’t like that,’ Will tutted. ‘A visit from the cops is the last thing he needs.’

‘You know him – he’ll play it down.’ I pictured Saint Sam’s reaction – cool, calm and beige, assuring the police that security at the school was excellent and
if there was another attempt at kidnap and it took place within the school grounds evidence would be captured on CCTV.

‘Let’s hope he does play it down,’ Luke added. ‘Galina probably did make the whole thing up as an excuse to go to her dad and get him to take her out of
school.’

You can see how this was going – the girls tending to side with Galina, the guys not. Except for Jack, who said he’d picked up bad vibes from Mikhail when the cops arrested him
(‘Like he wanted to mow me down with a repeat-action rifle the first chance he got.’). I wasn’t sure about Marco – I didn’t have a clear picture of whose version he
believed.

Anyway, it was late so we left the sports centre to head back to our rooms and the jury was out until tomorrow.

I trudged through the snow back to the dorms with Will and we happened to run into lean and hungry Sergei outside the entrance to the quad. ‘Lean and hungry’ as in Shakespeare again.
Cassius in
Julius Caesar
– ‘he thinks too much – such men are dangerous’. I’m full of these quotes and I know they might annoy the hell out of you, but they
spring into my magpie mind and make the point way better than ever I could.

So, lean and hungry Sergei talked on the phone and watched us go by. I caught two names amidst the torrent of Russian – ‘Galina’ and ‘Salomea’.

‘What’s that about?’ I wondered.

‘You really want to know?’ Will asked as we walked on across the quad, our footprints the first to spoil the virgin snow.

I stopped in the middle of the lawn. ‘You speak Russian?’

‘Russian, Italian, French, a smattering of Mandarin.’

‘OK, my multi-lingual friend, what did Sergei say?’

‘He said things didn’t work out. He wasn’t happy.’

‘I could tell that from his tone of voice. Who was he talking to, do you know?’

‘Someone called Salomea.’

‘Really! What else?’

‘He said Galina had to go to the hospital but not to worry, they fixed her lip and now she was back at St Jude’s.’

‘You know that Salomea is Galina’s stepmother? Sergei definitely told her that things didn’t work out?’

‘Yeah, but what does that give us? He could have been talking about a plan to go to the movies, an appointment at the dentist’s – anything.’ Will carried on with the guy
thing of backing off from the day’s drama and I gave up trying to involve him.

I stared at him – at his guarded expression and the bruise fading from under his eye. ‘How did you get that bruise?’ I asked.

‘Hey, Alyssa,’ I hear him say again last Saturday afternoon. His hair is shorter, lighter. He looks in good shape.

‘Hey, did you hear about the Ainslee girl in the canal?’

‘Well, yeah,’ he drawls.
Everyone in Ainslee had heard about that.

‘You knew her?’

‘Yeah,’ he says again.

‘Did she fall or was she pushed?’

‘They’re not sure yet. Why?’

‘Just wondering.’

‘Quit that, Sherlock, while you’re ahead. You worked things out for Lily but you should leave this one alone.’

‘It was in the gym. I was lifting weights, training for a half marathon at the end of March,’ Will told me. End of translation, end of conversation. Goodbye.

For some reason he stayed in my mind and I replayed our short Saturday conversation all the way up to my room.
Quit that, Sherlock, while you’re ahead. You worked things out for Lily,
but you should leave this one alone.

Galina’s bed was empty. The duvet was thrown back and a pillow with small spots of blood on it was tipped on to the floor.

My stomach flipped – where the hell was she?

Then I saw a scrawled note on my own neat bed.

C
AN
’
T SLEEP.
A
M IN
C
ONNIE AND
Z
ARA
’
S
ROOM
. D
ON
’
T
WAIT UP
- G
ALINA
X

OK, Alyssa – chill. Take off your top, hang it in the wardrobe, do normal stuff to keep yourself calm.

I’d finished with my clothes and was checking to see whether or not Molly had got the guy in to fix the window when I came across another note, printed out in red ink on a sheet of A4, not
scribbled in felt-tip pen like the one from Galina. It was on the windowsill where the robin had been, folded then slotted between two bottles of my roommate’s miracle moisturiser. This one
was in verse and it was really weird.

I read the first verse of the old nursery rhyme then the first two lines of the handwritten message beneath.

Come on, Alyssa - they said you were smart! Why so slow to pick up clues?

My hand shook as I read the lines again, turned the paper over, saw that the back was blank, turned it over again and reread the verse. Then my freaky eidetic memory kicked in and I remembered
exactly how the rhyme went on.

There was a knock at the door and I jumped a mile, screwed up the paper and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.

Jack poked his head round the door. ‘Can I come in?’

‘You’re not meant to be here!’ I cried. The screwed-up paper fell out as I ran to the door. ‘It’s after eight o’clock!’

He kicked snow off his boots then pointed to the paper on the floor. ‘You dropped that.’

I stooped to pick it up, but he was there first. Straightening it out, he laid it flat on my bedside table and read the rhyme out loud.

‘Stop!’ I pleaded.

‘Who’ll make the shroud? . . . Who’ll dig his grave?

Jack came to the message underneath the verse.
‘Come on, Alyssa – they said you were smart! Why so slow . . .’

‘Stop!’ I said again. I knew there was more handwritten stuff – I just hadn’t had chance to read it.

‘Who’ll be the parson? . . . Who’ll be the clerk?’

‘Why so slow to pick up the clues?’
Jack read on.
‘Bad things are happening under your nose, Alyssa. It’s up to you to work them out, which I’m sure you
can do if you’re as good as they say.
Who the hell wrote this?’

‘Don’t ask me. I just found the note here on the windowsill.’

‘The killer is in plain sight – right under your nose. Love and kisses
. . . Why is this guy sending you love and kisses, Alyssa? What’s this about?’

My head spun. It was hard to get a coherent sentence out as Jack thrust the paper towards me.

‘Whose killer?’ he demanded.

My head spun, but in my heart I knew. ‘Scarlett Hartley’s, I answered. ‘I think the murderer left this note to challenge me. That’s what this is about.’

‘It takes a seriously sick mind,’ Connie decided.

Jack and I had gone along the corridors of the boys’ and girls’ dorms and called a late-night meeting in the coffee bar overlooking the sports hall. People had thrown on some clothes
and braved the snow to cross the quad and hear what Jack and I had to say.