It was time to go all-in. I had to get as close to Alice as I could, lying in wait for her to put a foot wrong.
As I studied her, I realised there was something tangibly different about Alice since the murder. She still reminded me of the woods, vast and beautiful and dark, but it was as though all those prickly defence mechanisms – thistles and nettles and hogweed, poisonous mushrooms and gnarled roots – had been dug out at the root. An oddly vacant placidness I couldn’t quite name. Her anger and upset over the dorm transfer request seemed to have dissipated entirely.
At first, I put it down to guardedness; she must have known I was watching her carefully. She must have known she had to act like nothing had happened, to remain as neutral as possible to avoid arousing further suspicion.
Strangely, though, this misty dissociation made it harder to talk to her, not easier. It was like half of her was always somewhere else – or missing entirely. We chatted inanely about the weather and about what classes we had that day, but nothing like the textured conversations about imps of the perverse or kooky philosophers or even what we were respectively reading.
I couldn’t quite make sense of the changes; how they related to the murders, if they did at all. If I was to think the absolute worst of her, I’d say that she’d finally acted on her violent impulses, and it had quelled them for now. The idea chilled me to the bone.
And yet she’d left her bloodied shirt lying so candidly in the dustbin, and didn’t seem at all angry or worried that I’d handed it over to the police. Someone who’d just committed a murder wouldn’t have acted like that.
Her new-found impassivity did have some perks, in that her guard wasn’t up nearly so high. Whereas she’d usually hunch over her briefcase while opening it on the writing desk, angling her body in front of it so I couldn’t see the combination, she’d casually flipped it open on her bed one night and I’d caught the code without much trouble: 241 290.
The next night, I waited until she was asleep and opened the briefcase as quietly as I could.
Inside was a small leather pencil case monogrammed with her initials, a lined Pukka pad filled with scrawling notes on her lectures so far, a Merlot-red lipstick, a plastic water bottle filled with something that smelled like elderflower cordial, a blocky Nokia that was out of battery, and a course reading list I found myself copying down into the back of my own notebook. It wasn’t relevant to the investigation or anything, but I wanted to impress her with some casual knowledge of her subject area. It had felt really good to catch her off guard with my Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe quotes.
Whyexactly I wanted to impress her . . . I decided not to examine that instinct too closely.
There were a couple of other random objects in the briefcase I couldn’t make sense of. First was a small selection of glass vials, all empty. They were notched into the elastic pen loops on the roof of the briefcase. The other was a pair of gardening secateurs, whose sharp blades made my heart thump a little harder – until I remembered Poppy hadn’t been stabbed. And yet what use did Alice have for them? She had an oversized monstera plant on our windowsill, but I’d never seen her do anything more than half-heartedly spray it with water.
Unusual as these were, they were also dead ends. Short of asking Alice what she did with them – which would immediately betray the fact I’d raided her private possessions – there was no obvious way to figure out whether they were relevant. I just had to keep watching her and hope she slipped up.
In the evenings I often found myself staring out of our dorm window for hours on end, like the North Tower was a magnet my eyes were perpetually drawn to. It was during one of those mammoth staring sessions that I noticed something strange about the dimensions of the building.
Right next to the North Tower was the Sisters of Mercy library, which took up three floors. The tower had no windows apart from the open arches of the Observatory, but the library had large Gothic windows the height of multiple storeys. Inside the library, they started right at the edge, by the bookshelves, and spanned the whole way across the room. But from my vantage point in the dorm, I noticed that on the outside, it looked like the windows were a few metres away from where the North Tower curved outwards.
What was between the library and the tower? Was it just dead space?
I drew a sketch of that wing of the building as I saw it from my window, then compared it to the campus map I’d been given with my welcome pack. Sure enough, the campus map showed the library stretching right up next to the North Tower with nothing in between. It didn’t make spatial sense.
One Saturday morning when the main convent was quiet, I went into the building to scope it out. On the ground floor, through an ornate stone cloister bolting off from the main corridor, was the entrance to the library, fronted with security gates where you scanned in your student I.D. I had always found this hilarious. As if any non-student would have any interest in breaking into a dusty old library run by a white-haired, black-lipped villain from a film about Dalmatians.
In the dead space I’d identified next to the library, there was a storage closet which a cleaner had left slightly open. It was stuffed with damp mop heads and old bleach and many, many rolls of the industrial blue roll found in all schools and universities across Britain.
In the same place on the first floor, there was a varnished brown door with a gold-plated W.C. sign, but it was locked and looked like it had been for all of eternity; a brass key was jammed into it from the outside, and didn’t rotate when I tried it.
On the second floor, the space where another door should have been was bricked and plastered over.
The paint over the top – a pale sage green – looked fresh, but that in itself wasn’t odd. A lot of the old convent had been given a good old spit and polish before Carvell reopened.
What was odd was that it was bricked over at all.
What was behind that wall? And did it lead into the North Tower?