Killing You Softly (2 page)

‘Who’s Connie?’ I asked as I trotted dutifully after her.

She led me out of the quad towards the new technology building tucked away behind a stand of copper beech trees. An icy wind blew. ‘Connie – Connie Coetzee,’ she said in a tone
that made me feel two centimetres tall.

‘Connie Coetzee?’ Catching up with Zara as we approached the entrance lobby to the steel-clad building, I repeated the name with an upward, questioning intonation.

Zara pursed her luscious lips. That’s all she needs to do to express the fact that she thinks you’re an ignorant, ill-informed bimbo with zero IQ, so what are you doing here at St
Jude’s, school for weirdly gifted kids? How come I didn’t know Connie Coetzee? She paused then relented. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot – you’ve only been at the school since
September. Connie went home to Johannesburg last term – family stuff. Her dad divorced her mum and stopped paying the school fees. Anyway the courts forced him to pay again so she’s
back.’

‘Is that good?’

‘That depends,’ Zara countered. We went into the technology centre, down the wide central aisle with banks of computers on either side. ‘If you’re Luke Pearson,
it’s good. If you’re Jack Hooper, not so good.’

‘Hooper doesn’t like her?’

‘No. Connie scares the crap out of him.’

‘Ah.’ Hooper was quiet and kind. I admired his sensitive, artistic soul so if he didn’t like Connie Coetzee I was tempted along that road with him before I’d even met
her. ‘But Luke thinks she’s cool?’

‘Yeah. Actually Luke was out there in Johannesburg over Christmas – getting over . . . y’know.’

I knew exactly. Luke’s family had obviously taken him on a trip to sunny South Africa to help him recover from what happened with Paige. I expect you think I’m dwelling too much on
past horror, but the way Paige died in the hospital with stents draining fluid from her injured brain will stick with me and Jack for the rest of our lives. And Luke had been going out with her at
the time, so it must have been twice as bad for him.

‘Alyssa, Zara – hi!’ Dr Bryony Phillips waved at us from the raised platform at the far end of the room. She was laying out papers on a table, getting ready for a staff
meeting. Bryony teaches English. I get on better with her than with any other member of staff. ‘Welcome back to the rhubarb farm,’ she said.

‘Rhubarb farm?’ I queried.

‘Yeah, where we force rare, tender intellects into precocious fruition,’ she called. ‘Like rhubarb shoots under terracotta cloches – Temperley Early, Stockbridge Arrow,
Cawood Delight.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Varieties of rhubarb, obviously.’ Zara wasn’t interested in the chit-chat and cut it short. ‘Have you seen Connie?’ she asked.

Bryony pointed to a bay set back from the main aisle where we spotted an unfamiliar figure sitting behind a computer screen. The figure didn’t stop what she was doing even when we went
right up to her.

‘Connie – hey!’ Zara didn’t care that she was interrupting, naturally.

‘Wait just a second,’ came the reply.

Which gave me time to decide whether I would have the crap scared out of me like Hooper or join Luke and Zara in the Connie Coetzee Appreciation Society.

You too can make up your minds.

Connie Coetzee speaks down her nose with clipped vowels and consonants. She was sitting down but it was obvious she was tall – I mean if I’d had to guess right then and there I would
have put her at over six feet. Tall and sporting a boy’s haircut – short at the back and sides with a longer sweep on top and down over her forehead. Her hair was dark, her eyes pale
grey. She had a small blue star tattooed high on her neck, just under her left ear, and she was wearing a black, chunky jumper, androgynous in its effect, but her wrists were slim and feminine and
her fingers tapered with long fingernails painted dark blue as she tapped at the keyboard.

OK, like Hooper, we were one sentence into a conversation with her and I was shit-scared.

Zara gave Connie ten seconds to finish what she was doing. ‘Bad news,’ she pouted. ‘They moved me out of Twenty-two. We’re not roommates any more.’

‘They can’t do that,’ was Connie’s calm response.

‘They did. I’m in Twenty-seven with Alyssa and a Russian kid called Galina. By the way, this is Alyssa.’

Connie flicked a glance in my direction and said hi. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix it,’ she told Zara.

‘But not with D’Arblay. There’s a new bursar – Molly Wilson. She organized the room switches.’

‘Why – what happened to D’Arblay?’

‘He’s in jail. Don’t ask.’

Connie didn’t but I’ll explain anyway. A quick resumé – D’Arblay was the previous bursar at St Jude’s and, as I discovered, a dirty little fascist. I was the
one who found out that he was a member of the group who put pressure on Lily Earle’s media-baron father to stop him exposing their racist activities. The pressure involved threatening to harm
Lily, which indirectly is how she ended up in the lake and he landed in prison, awaiting trial. That’s it in a nutshell.

So now we have a new bursar called Molly Wilson working for Saint Sam. Dr Sam Webb, school principal – he steers our elite group of gifted, hothouse Temperley Earlies towards future glory.
From St Jude’s we all go on to Oxbridge or Harvard and any high-flying career you care to think of – financiers, top civil servants, traders in utilities, stuffers of dead cows and
sharks suspended in formaldehyde tanks, in other words zillionaire concept artists. You name it – the worlds of science, finance, politics and the arts – St Jude’s alumni are
there at the heart of things.

‘OK, I’ll fix it with this Molly woman. You do want to share a room with me again?’ Connie checked with Zara.

‘Doh – what do you think?’ Zara didn’t care that she was simultaneously hurting my feelings and abandoning me to the mercies of a Russian oligarch’s daughter.
‘Cool tattoo,’ she told Connie.

I was busy studying Luke and Connie later that day when they sat together at lunch.

Hooper came and sat next to me. ‘Jeez,’ he muttered, following the direction of my gaze.

‘I know. Luke moved on from Paige pretty damn quick,’ I agreed.

‘To the Black Widow – I mean, jeez!’

I asked, ‘Why the nickname?’ and it turned out that Black Widow Spider was Hooper’s nickname for Connie. BWS for short.

From what I learned in a biology class when I was twelve, the Latin name is
Latrodectus hesperus.
The female spider eats the male after mating. Nature’s weird. And so’s my
eidetic memory. I have total recall and I never forget. This too must have some Darwinian advantage, though like the black widow’s sexual cannibalism I have yet to work it out.

I mean, I can be slow to make friends sometimes – I think it’s because people find me and my memory too weird.

‘So, Hooper, how was your vacation?’ I asked.

He shrugged and ate.

‘What did Father Christmas bring you?’

‘We don’t do Christmas at our house,’ he told me through a mouthful of honey-roasted ham. ‘My mother’s a pagan and my dad’s a mean bastard.’

‘Hah! Well, I got money from Aunty O and in a fit of extravagance I blew it all on January-sale bargains. Is your mum really a pagan? I thought she was a photographer.’ I knew from
Paige that Hooper’s mother took society portraits of the Earl of this and the Marchioness of that, plus the occasional superannuated supermodel. And everyone knows without having to be told
that his tight-fisted novelist dad, Martyn Hooper, has won the Man-Booker Prize
twice.

‘She’s both. She worships the natural world so she asks famous people to dress in green robes and wear flowers in their hair. Then she takes pictures of them in forests and up
mountains.’

‘What we’d both give for normal parents, hey?’ Or, in my case, for any parents at all. I sighed as I watched Luke offer Connie a spoonful of the Eton mess he was eating. Yummy
crushed meringue, whipped cream and fresh raspberries, so why did I flick back to thinking of sexual cannibalism?

Here’s an explanation about my parents. They died in a plane crash when I was three, which is how come I sit with Aunt Olivia watching the Queen’s speech every Christmas Day, closely
followed by a DVD of
The King’s Speech
starring Colin Firth.

‘They put me back in Room Twenty-seven,’ I confided in Hooper.

‘The one you shared with Lily and Paige?’

‘Yeah, but I guess the new bursar doesn’t know that.’

‘You could ask to change.’

‘I could.’ Connie ate the mess hungrily, I noticed, and Luke fed her another spoonful. I pulled a sad face. ‘Jack can’t get back before Tuesday. He’s stuck in
Denver.’

‘How will you go on living without him?’

‘I have no clue.’

‘Maybe I could stand in for him for seventy-two hours,’ Hooper offered with a hopeful look.

I laughed. Hooper’s cool – we joke along and say all kinds of stupid things.

‘No?’ he asked.

I shook my head. Hooper’s amazing but he’s not my type. Jack is. End of.

Talking of types, there’s a new kid on the block.

All Saturday afternoon people arrived with designer luggage. I knew most of them even if I haven’t mentioned them before.

Eugenie Clifford, Charlie Hudson, Will Harrison – don’t bother to remember all these names right now since they’ll come up again soon enough.

Will was the one without the Louis Vuitton bags. This is explained by the fact that Will is a scholarship pupil, like me. We’re the only two out of an intake of sixty in Year Twelve, which
makes us classic outsiders, though I felt it more than him at first. He used to go to the local comp with Tom Walsingham, Alex Driffield, Micky Cooke and the rest (likewise with the names), until
his French teacher realized he was a linguistic genius and persuaded his parents to put him in for the St Jude’s entrance exam. His family still lives in nearby Ainslee.

‘Hey, Alyssa,’ he said. He’d had his hair cut shorter over the holiday, I noticed, and it had been dyed a couple of shades lighter. He’d also acquired a bruise under his
right eye and put on a few pounds of solid muscle, both thanks to working out in the gym he later told me.

‘Hey. Did you hear about the Ainslee girl in the canal?’ was my opening gambit. Obsessed with dead girls –
moi
?

‘Well, yeah,’ he drawled. Meaning, how could anyone who lived in Ainslee not have heard?

‘You knew her?’

‘Yeah,’ he said again.

‘Did she fall or was she pushed?’

‘They’re not sure yet. Why?’

‘Just wondering.’

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

‘So I’m going to take your advice?’ I quipped with arched eyebrows, surprised that he’d taken this line with me.

‘No?’

‘Correct.’

‘Just make sure it doesn’t mess up your head,’ Will said as he went off to find his room in the boys’ dormitory wing.

I like Will, but, like I said about Hooper, he’s not my type.

‘Hi, Alyssa!’ Eugenie hardly paused as she noticed me out of the corner of her eye and got her driver to wheel her cases across the quad. Eugenie Clifford – daughter of Sir
Roger and Lady Mary Clifford, musical prodigy, wannabe opera diva with masses of amazing red hair against a porcelain-white complexion. People say I look like her, but I disagree. Her hair’s
darker and mine’s wavier for a start.

Charlie Hudson showed up next and gave me a little bit more of her precious time than Eugenie did. ‘Who is that?’ she exclaimed, looking over her shoulder. Each short syllable
contained a world of wonder, like Miranda in
The Tempest
– ‘Oh, brave new world that has such creatures in it!’ – ‘
Who . . . is . . . that!
’

I followed her lust-struck gaze. ‘I have no idea.’

OK, at last the new kid. Starting with the eyes – very large, very brown with thick black lashes. Then the lips – wide and full. The bod – six-three, sporty and perfectly
proportioned. The car he parked in the car park reserved for staff – metallic silver Aston Martin. Do I even need to mention the custom-made bags or that he’s more my type because
he’s built exactly like Jack?

‘Marco Conti,’ Zara informed us as we stood open-mouthed. She was busy carrying her stuff from her car to Room 22, knocking into me with her pile of party frocks and pairs of Manolos
stacked high on top.

Again, we were obviously meant to know the name. Since Charlie and I didn’t have a clue, Zara spelled it out for us. ‘Son of Paolo Conti, Azzurri centre back from 1994 to 2001, most
capped player since Luigi Riva in the 1960s, now a casino owner in Monaco and director of a big online gambling company.’

‘Azzurri?’ Charlie echoed. She can be forgiven for not knowing because she holds dual American-British citizenship. Her family lives in Dallas (English mother, Texan father) and so
she does American football, not our football.

‘The Italian national team,’ I explained as Marco clunked his car door shut and strolled into the quad, hands in pockets, jacket collar turned up, a glimpse of something gold hanging
round his neck.

‘What’s he doing here?’ Charlie breathed.

‘Studying for his baccalaureate?’ Zara suggested smugly as she walked on and deliberately dropped a strappy Laboutin right in Marco’s path.

The gallant Italian picked it up for her. She smiled; he smiled. There was immediate chemistry.

Charlie narrowed her eyes and bit her lip. ‘Hmm,’ she said.

I was trying to look forward not back as I sat in my room after dinner.

I searched on my phone app for the temperature in Denver – still minus ten degrees centigrade so I texted Jack.

How are you dealing with the weather?

Freezing bollocks off. Miss you.

Me too :x

He’d promised Tuesday at the earliest for our reunion. I thought of the old saying – absence makes the heart grow fonder – and realized there wasn’t space in my heart for
even the tiniest scrap of extra fondness for Jack without making it pop like a balloon.

Who are you sharing room with? :x
he texted.