After my meeting with Peter Frame, I caught the bus back to Carvell. I climbed on to the faded single-decker Arriva to find Salem perched on the frontmost seat, peering out of the window at a nearby pub garden as though she were above it all. I tried to sit next to her, this supposedly immortal being, but she hissed when I got within a metre of the empty seat. Wary of angering a supernatural beast, I tucked myself away on the back row instead.
As we approached the university, the tower’s shadow fell over me once again. There was the tightness in my lungs, the lasso around my stomach, a sense of impending doom that lessened and lessened the closer we got to the school. As though something deep inside me was relieved to be going home.
The idea made me shiver. I knew something was horribly, horribly wrong. I knew I was not wholly myself any more. I knew the ruby in my throat was doing something inherently terrifying to me. And yet I couldn’t quite admit just how afraid I was, because I had to stay. For Janie.
Once we were back at Carvell – I could’ve sworn Salem nodded at the driver as she disembarked – I went to the Grandstand and sat in the corner furthest away from the roaring fire. I ordered a Fentimans ginger beer, then allowed myself to briefly unravel the pashmina, fanning my face with my notebook in a desperate attempt to cool down. The ruby was bothering me a lot; a deep, bright scratch whenever I swallowed.
Tuning out the drunken rumble of the men’s rugby team, I filled three pages of my notebook with every detail from the meeting. Most importantly, the revelation about Sam Bowey trying to have Janie Kirsopp sectioned.
That pearl of information filled me with unease. Had she been suffering from the same disquieting experiences as me? Had she been sleepwalking? Had she been washed through by a sense of impending doom, and found herself unable to cope? Had she opened up to Sam about her fears of possession, and he’d thought her undeniably insane?
I wished I’d kept Frame calm long enough to ask more questions. To be detained under the Mental Health Act you had to pose a serious and imminent risk to yourself or others. How had Sam gone about it? Had he told a school counsellor? Social services? The police? No, I thought – the police couldn’t have known, otherwise they never would’ve believed his death to be a suicide. Perhaps the revelation had come later, once Janie herself died.
I still couldn’t quite figure out how this nugget of knowledge fitted into the wider case. After all, Fiona and Dawn had died after Janie, so she couldn’t have been the serial killer. There was nothing to suggest they were even known to Janie. And besides, Frame didn’t seem like an especially reliable source. Had he exaggerated the extent of Sam’s concern for Janie? Maybe Sam had only chatted informally to a counsellor, and Frame had blown it out of proportion to make it seem like a bigger journalistic scoop than it was. That could be another reason his editor refused to print it.
And yet . . . this felt substantial, somehow. It reaffirmed my ideas about the tower’s sentience, about the luring, maddening effect it could have on people. There was a weight to the revelation that both unsettled and comforted me; I was not alone.
Then again, it could just be confirmation bias. I had found something that fitted my existing theory and shoehorned it in. That felt easier to believe, somehow.
Because if Janie really had gone through the same thing as me . . . what was to stop me meeting a similar end?
I sat there in the Grandstand for hours, working through all of these ideas and developments on paper. My hand cramped, and I had to replace my ink cartridge twice, and by the time I’d run out of mental steam I had finished half the notebook. Bleary-eyed but clear of mind, I looked up at the grandfather clock by the fireplace and realised with a start that it was nearly four in the morning. I was the only patron left in the parlour, which, like the Refectory, didn’t close until the last person had finished their drink. The young ginger barman stood polishing glasses with a tea towel, looking thoroughly pissed off.
As I got up to leave, I nodded my head in apology before I realised that I was not the only person still drinking.
Professor Sanderson, from my Gothic literature seminar, sat by the dying fire, staring grimly into its embers. The orange light danced in his onyx eyes as he sipped at something amber coloured in a crystal tumbler, the single cube of ice clinking against its rim.
Strange, I thought. The Grandstand was supposed to be for athletes only.
The first thing I noticed when I stepped outside was that it was not as quiet as it should’ve been at that hour. I couldn’t quite make out individual noises, but there were shouts and cries in the middle distance.
When I rounded the corner to Willowood, I saw the source of the commotion, and a trapdoor opened in my stomach.
Three police vans were parked around the base of the North Tower, blue and red lights flashing against the sinister old stone. There was already yellow and black tape forming a perimeter around the trees, and several clusters of people surrounded the scene; some police, some crying students. Dean Mordue was wrapped in her black peacoat, trying in vain to convince the onlookers to disperse.
I didn’t have to ask what had happened. I knew deep in my gut.
Somebody else had died.