Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller) (9 page)

BOOK: Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller)
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14
 
Monday 22 May, 5.12 p.m.
 

Stephanie Suleiman woke up with a start. She had fallen asleep at her desk again, and now a silvery trail of dribble had pooled from the corner of her mouth on to a letter from a student’s parents requesting that they Skype her on Wednesday for a conversation regarding his recreational drug use. Stephanie wondered about the term ‘recreational’ drug use. What did it mean? That you could separate forms of drug-taking? Ah yes, you might say: I use marijuana in my work, but when I snort coke on a weekend, that’s just a hobby.

Stephanie wiped one hand across her mouth, removing the spittle, and looked at her watch on the other hand. She really needed to go home. She swivelled around in her chair and opened up a filing cabinet behind her desk. Stephanie put the Brabents file in front of her and opened it at the same time as picking up a half-eaten Daim bar and finishing it off. Emily Brabents. A sweet girl who reminded Stephanie of her own daughter in many ways. Rosena was
as naive, possibly as sexually precocious – although Stephanie would never say this out loud to her husband – and had an essence of Emily, a quality which had the effect of ensuring other girls hated her.

Stephanie sighed: why was it that girls turned on each other in this way? It never happened with boys. They could eke out their frustrations on a football or in a boxing ring. Girls found solace in coming top of the pile, it seemed. Rosena had had to be homeschooled for a time, the bullying had been so bad. And then there was Emily. Stephanie swung around in her chair, thinking about the last time she had seen her. They had been having regular sessions for the whole of the Epiphany term. Emily had come to her distraught one afternoon after a hockey match. She had been sitting outside Stephanie’s office door, quietly weeping, and had told her carefully and with no malice in her voice, merely a bewildered self-pity, that her life had become a living nightmare.

The last time they had seen each other had been only two weeks ago. Stephanie had felt confident that the cutting had waned, if not stopped entirely. Emily had told her about the self-harming just before the Easter holidays. She had been wearing a shirt with long sleeves but had reached up to push her hair off her face, and Stephanie had noticed the marks, raw and red down by her wrists.

‘Shall we talk about that, Emily?’ she had asked, gesturing towards the scars.

Tears had flooded from Emily’s eyes. ‘I can’t,’ she had sobbed. Stephanie had said nothing. Eventually the crying had ceased, and Emily had sniffed loudly, her tissue a sodden ball in her hand. She had taken a deep breath.

‘I do it because I deserve it,’ she had said.

‘Why do you deserve it?’

A shudder had passed through Emily, and she struggled to keep control.

‘Because of what I’ve done. With the photos. Bringing all this disgust on myself.’

Stephanie had remained silent.

‘I know, I know. I haven’t really brought this on myself.’ She had scoffed. ‘Whatever. I
have
, though, because I did it. I’m the one who’s responsible.’

‘And Nick?’ Stephanie had asked quietly, after a pause.

Emily had shifted in her seat, pulled her sleeves down further.

‘Yeah, yeah. I
know
he’s responsible too, But they don’t care about him. It’s all right for boys. If I had just kept control, I wouldn’t be in this mess. I wish I was just normal. A normal girl who’d never slept with anyone.’

‘Is that what normal girls do? Not sleep with people?’

‘It’s not just that, though, is it?’ Emily had said. ‘It’s like, it’s not enough, you know? To have them talk to me. To know they like me, or they fancy me or whatever …’

Stephanie had spun her pen slowly between her fingers, waiting for more, as Emily’s brown eyes had flittered from the counsellor to the window, trying to pin down the meaning of it all. Then Emily had looked closely at her hands, at her nails. She had spoken in a near whisper.

‘If they don’t like me, then I’m nothing. If I can’t get them to want me. And …’ Her eyes lurched violently to Stephanie’s, seeking a lifebelt which the counsellor refused to toss. At bay, Emily had continued, forcing the words out. ‘And that’s why I cut.’ She had swallowed. ‘Because I’m so disgusted at my neediness.’ Swallowed again. ‘You know Annabel, right?’

Stephanie had inclined her head. Annabel Smith was also a student she saw regularly. A prim girl with a closed mouth which she prised open once every two weeks to spit angry words inside this office because she couldn’t bring herself to direct them to the people she claimed to hate. Stephanie had said nothing of this to Emily; knowing that one of the targets of Annabel’s vitriol was Emily herself.

‘She’s supposed to be my best friend, right? But I know she’s slagging me off behind my back. They all
do. On Twitter or Facebook or whatever. They hide behind the screen like it’s a fucking … a … a … ?’

‘Shield?’

‘Yeah, right, a shield. ’Cause they know they won’t get caught. Annabel pretends to be on my side and be my friend, but if Nick clicked his fingers, she’d be getting off with him before you could blink twice.’

‘And how does that make you feel?’

‘How do you think it makes me feel?’ Emily had sobbed. ‘It makes me feel like shit. Like I can’t trust anyone, can’t rely on anyone apart from myself. Nick says he likes me, or whatever, and then he sits around looking at porn on the net, laughing at women. It’s frigging disgusting.’

The image of that had hung in the air, causing Stephanie to shudder a little. She had pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders.

‘But then … ?’

Emily had looked at her. ‘Then why did I take the photos?’

The counsellor had said nothing.

‘Because I knew it would get his attention.’ Emily had given a smile older than her years. ‘Because I’m a fucking idiot.’ At once, she had seemed to shake it off, had given a silly giggle as if she were speaking in front of her friends in the college bar – she’d been too serious and said too much. Emily had become mute and stared silently into space, through the
window, where a vista of trees and spring-green leaves danced in the wind.

Stephanie had seen the time and called it, and Emily had gone home for the holidays. When she’d returned, she’d seemed better, more sure of herself. And yet …

Now Emily was dead. Stephanie shivered. A vague notion of guilt lay within her. Could she have done more? She glanced down at her mobile phone. She had had a missed call from Annabel that very morning, which she had yet to return. These students were spinning around her like a cloud of electrons encircling a nucleus. The police would want to talk to her. And she certainly didn’t want that to happen. What was she going to say? Yes, the poor child was being bullied. Yes, she cut her arms to ribbons as a plea for help. No, she didn’t know who had murdered her, but maybe it was one of the bastard phantoms who were telling her to kill herself on a daily basis online.

No matter what anyone says, hurt comes with words; that was the truth. In a way, it didn’t matter who was saying it. Those words represented the world’s view of Emily Brabents. Which was that she was a slut.

She rose to her feet and looked at the Picasso poster on her wall. Innocuous primary colours put in a space either to soothe or to lull into a state of distraction – better for winkling out of their shell
their thoughts and their fears. The police were bound to look at her in judgement. She had let Emily down.

Stephanie had come to Durham after a three-year spell in Hong Kong, where she had followed her husband and his fund managing, training as a counsellor to quell the need for – what? For
something
at least. Her husband’s company had relocated him to the north-east, and so she had applied for a job here. She had thought it cosy, undemanding; a place where she could stretch her wings and find out what the job meant. It had been nothing of the sort. Stephanie had been bombarded with cases from the moment she set foot over the threshold of the university eighteen months ago. She was based in the main administrative building down on New Elvet and would watch the students stream along the pavements day in, day out and wonder, in God’s name, when would it all end?

She dealt with anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism, self-harming, drug addiction, failing in all subjects, criminal assault, theft – for pity’s sake, she had students who had
stolen
. Nothing was off limits. It was a cornucopia of debauchery, a Pompeii for our times. The problem was, she thought to herself as she sat at her desk, that nobody was relishing their freedom. They were, in fact, abhorring it. They turned in on themselves to destroy it, destroy themselves. Sometimes Stephanie thought that segregation was better. Let’s be truthful and let the elite have their time. Let the men rule the
roost. Bring women – girls – into the mix and there’s a confusion. You’ll have sex and messy sex at that. And the girls will think they have a right to something, which of course they’ll learn in the real world means nothing, and the boys will resent them for strutting around, tossing their hair like ponies, spouting nonsense about their so-called rights. It was no good, thought Stephanie. No good at all.

Ah, it was the end of a long day. She switched off her computer and picked up her bag. A late burst of spring sunshine burned valiantly at the window, as if putting her into a spotlight. She would go home and forget about this for now. She would try to put all of these nightmares outside of her mind.

THE
DURHAM CHRONICLE
NEWS WEBSITE ‘PURPLE PROSE’: THE SOCIAL COMMENT COLUMN BY SEAN EGAN MONDAY 22 MAY

 

Pop band Bastille have it right in their song ‘Pompeii’: the walls have come tumbling down.

There is a violent disease sweeping the student community. And it’s not something you get after a drunken liaison in the alleyway behind Sixes.

The disease is fame, and the cure is the internet.

Anyone can get it – it’s remarkably easy to catch. If you’re eighteen or nineteen, chances are, you already have.
All you need to do is switch on a variety of ON buttons – on your TV, your computer or iPhone – and the disease could steal into your brain.

Tragic victim Emily Brabents (18) had it. She had been parading herself online for months before her senseless death. She craved attention, was desperate to be popular. So she put photos online of her in sexual poses I suspect her mother would have been ashamed to see. In doing so, she became the latest victim of a culture of abuse and trolling that our children are all too familiar with these days.

The police are struggling to solve this
dreadful crime
which has terrified our community. It will prove a hard task – not just because they haven’t got a clue how it happened, but because of the sheer volume of online abuse Emily was suffering at the time of her death. In reality, if the cause of death is revealed to be murder, the perpetrator could have been any one of those trolls.

A culture has been growing for too long, its mould seeps up the walls of the oldest, most respected colleges here in the university. It degrades, not only female students, but boys too. It involves nude pictures online; videos of sexual liaisons and, perhaps the worst aspect of all, an ethos of students anonymously abusing each other.

A source who wishes to hide their identity told me, ‘It’s the law of the jungle. If you don’t join in, you’re seen as boring or weak. Basically, you might as well not exist.’

I think back to my university days (yes, Ed, I did go!), where we drank coffee until 3 a.m., listening to jazz. It all seemed so simple then.

‘If
you
don’t troll, they’ll get in first,’ my source said. ‘I’ve got a stash of material on tons of people – I don’t want to say who – but it could blow the roof off the place.’

These are interesting times, readers. Be aware of it. The world is different from the one my generation grew up in – it’s a battleground. And not just globally, but here, under our noses, under our skin. Clearly there will be more to come, more will be said. But in the meantime,
the tragedy of Emily Brabents remains.

Speaking of which, it will be interesting to see how the new detective inspector takes to the challenge of solving things for the community. Particularly, so I hear, when (Ssssh! Allegations only of course!) it seems an old romance may be lurking backstage …

For details of the proposed memorial service for Emily, please see the website at www.durhamchronicle.co.uk.

For any information regarding the above, tweet or email me at
@seganjourno
or [email protected].

 
BOOK: Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller)
5.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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