The Pact (7 page)

Parva
found herself having to tiptoe between piles of discarded clothes. The two drawers in the desk in the corner had been pulled out, their contents spilled on the floor. There were books everywhere, some with the covers torn off, the spines bent back, pages torn out. A diagonal tear ran the length of the denuded mattress from top right to bottom left.

The
carpet was stained with something. Parva had to kick several broken glasses out of the way to see what it was.

Someone
had drawn a five-pointed star in something that was red and still slightly sticky on the beige pile. Now she was closer to the window, Parva could see solid blobs of black candle grease on the sill.

Is
that really what they were up to in here?

If
she hadn’t know better she would have thought there had been a fight in here, a struggle so ferocious that everything within reach had ended up broken and torn.

Or...

That was what it was meant to look like.

Parva
frowned. She had always learned to listen to her gut instinct, and right now it was telling her that something else had happened here. Not black magic rituals or angry struggles, not violence so extreme it smashed glasses and ripped a bed apart, and not just the suicide of four young girls.

Someone
had been looking for something.

And,
she guessed, just like in the Sherlock Holmes story where broken china was used to disguise the fact that it was busts of Napoleon that the villain was interested in, the room had been wrecked to disguise that fact.

Had the girls been killed for the same reason? Just to distract attention?

Parva shook her head and made sure she wasn’t mumbling to herself as she thought - it would only upset Jocelyn and Emily.

The
girls must have known something about the mystery object, something so important that they had to die, which meant the object itself had to be worth killing for.

Or
worth killing to keep secret.

And,
of course, Parva reasoned, it could be that only one of the girls knew about it, or where it was.

But
the killer didn’t know which one.

It
also made sense that the object wasn’t here. Either the killer had found it when they had searched the room after murdering the girls, or their search had proved fruitless.

Which
was why they had to burn down that charity shop for some reason.

It
seemed ridiculous, and yet at the same time Parva’s instincts were telling her that the two events were definitely connected. Besides, why else would the authorities be so keen to keep everyone away from both places?

The
revelation came to Parva so suddenly she felt as if she had been dealt a rabbit punch to the back of the neck.

The
authorities wanted to keep everyone away because it concerned them. The deaths of these girls concerned them. It was so obvious, and so terrifying, that Parva hadn’t allowed herself to consider it before, but there it was. No wonder Jack Willoughby had had to send her in undercover, no questions asked, no help available should she need it.

She
was way out of her depth and Parva knew it. Dizzy with her realisations, she stumbled back to the door. The first thing she had to do was stop involving Emily and Jocelyn. If they said a word to the wrong person they could end up dead too. Who knew how many people at St Miranda’s, both teachers and pupils, were actually here under false pretences, here to hush up whatever it was that one of the dead girls must have unwittingly revealed? If nothing else, the one thing Parva had to do before getting out of here was to warn Emily and Jocelyn to stay out of her investigations from now on.

And
she would have done, but when she got to the door and peered out into the gloom of the corridor beyond, the two girls had vanished.

12

Parva resisted the urge to call out. Wherever the two girls had gone it couldn’t be far. She headed left in case they had decided to take the fire escape, only to be met by more tape and a firmly locked door. Parva looked back down the corridor.

Nobody.

Of course it was difficult to see because it was so dark. Parva frowned. They had to be close.

“Emily?”
Even though her voice was no louder than a whisper, it cut through the silence like the crack from an air rifle.

No
reply.

“Emily?
Where are you?”

By
now Parva was back at the stairs. The opposite end of the corridor was empty too, and so she descended, slowly, the pen torch held ahead of her like a weapon.

The
second floor corridor was just as deserted.

Perhaps
the girls had panicked? Perhaps even now they were running for their rooms, swearing never again to have anything to do with that mad biology teacher who had broken into a crime scene while they stood and watched.

No,
that was ridiculous.

So
where were they?

By
the time she had got to the ground floor foyer, Parva was wondering if perhaps she had gone the wrong way. The two girls must have been scared by something and gone to the next floor up.

Then
she saw the piece of paper stuck to the handle of the block’s door and realised, with a chill, that she hadn’t gone the wrong way at all.

Parva
detached the note from the cellotape attaching it to the aluminium and unfolded it with trembling fingers.

Time to teach you a lesson, Dr Corcoran.

The words caused a chill to penetrate her soul. It wasn’t enough that she had placed herself in danger. Now two more lives were at risk because of her foolishness. She had no doubt that the writer of the note had somehow caused the disappearance of both Emily and Jocelyn. It was also highly likely that the girls were still with that person.
The question now
, thought Parva as she tucked the note away,
is where might they all be?

She
gazed out through the glass to behold a campus riddled with a thousand shadows, each capable of concealing three people. They could be anywhere.

Parva
shook her head. That wasn’t the point though, was it? The writer of the note wanted her to come to them, wanted to ‘teach her a lesson’. Where would the most appropriate place for that be?

Parva
almost groaned. It was obvious. Of course.

*

The science block was in darkness but Parva knew she was in the right place as soon as she pushed at the main entrance and found the door had been left unlocked. The battery in her pen torch was starting to run low and as the beam flickered along the hallway Parva was tempted to turn on the lights. On the other hand, she reasoned, there was no point in giving her opponent advance warning of her arrival, and so instead she switched the torch off and put it away.

There
was a dim light emanating from beneath her classroom door.

Someone
had covered the glass, draping something like a coat over it to ensure privacy. Parva wished she had brought something with her she could use as a weapon. She took a deep breath and opened the door.

The
long tables at which the students usually sat had been pushed aside to clear an area in the middle of the room. Now all that occupied the space were two high chairs to which had been tied to two terrified-looking young girls. The gags in their mouths prevented them from crying out, the ropes around their wrists and ankles held them fast.

“This
is what you get for interfering with matters that don’t concern you,” said a voice from the shadows at the front of the room. If Parva squinted she could just make out a silhouette in front of the board, black standing before grey. She resisted the urge to shine her torch at it in case there were weapons trained on Jocelyn and Emily.

“No
one told me I shouldn’t,” Parva replied, trying to keep the defiance out of her voice. “In fact I was sent here...”

“...you
were sent here by someone who should have known better. Someone who does know better now.”

Had something happened to DCI Willoughby?
“What do you mean?”

The
figure emerged into the light. Parva wasn’t sure who she had been expecting - Miss Arbuthnot, one of the girls, perhaps even Sergeant Wilkins.

It
was none of those, but it was someone she had already met.

Amanda
Plumridge reached into the pocket of her tweed jacket, pulled something out, and tossed it to Parva.

“I
must confess I’d forgotten that silly bloody woman would have confiscated your mobile,” she said.

Parva
thumbed the ‘On’ button, noticing at the same time the gun Amanda was holding in her other hand.

“Take
a look,” said the other woman. “You’re not going anywhere. Not right away, anyway.”

The
screen lit up and Parva typed in her PIN. She scrolled through the list of missed calls and text messages from Jack Willoughby, all of them basically saying the same thing.

Mission over. You can come back. Wild goose chase. Nothing to investigate after all. Come home now.

Some of the phrases were repeated in other messages, but only one was on all of them.

Come home now. Come home now. Come home now
.

“But
you didn’t, did you, Dr Corcoran?” Amanda took a step forward. “Admittedly that’s not really your fault, but not my problem, either.”

“And
what exactly is ‘your problem’?” said Parva.

“Why,
the three of you of course.” Amanda gestured with the gun to the two struggling girls. “There’s no point in doing that,” she shouted to them. “You’ll never get free. Those knots have held spies from the Eastern bloc while our agents have interrogated them in the most gruesome ways. Believe me, they’re good and tight.”

“Your
agents?” Parva pocketed the phone. “You’re a spy then?”

Amanda
gave her a cool look. “Spy is such an old-fashioned term. Besides, that’s not what I do. I am what is known in our business as a sleeper. I can go for years under an assumed persona, never breaking character, behaving in exactly the same way as you might expect some closeted, almost institutionalised middle-aged woman to behave, even though I spent my youth negotiating arms deals in South America.”

“Wales
must be something of a comedown for you, then.” Parva tried to edge towards the door but Amanda spotted it instantly and turned the gun in her direction.

“Not
really,” she said. “Besides, you get a bit tired of having high velocity weapons pointed in your face while you’re trying to do your best to avoid a civil war. After that a private girls’ school actually came as a bit of a relief.”

Parva
tried to keep her talking while she figured out what to do next. “How long have you been here?”

Amanda
appeared to consider this before answering. “A few years,” she said eventually. “We always knew something like this would happen eventually.”

And now we come to it
, Parva thought. “Like what, exactly?”

“Oh
of course. You still don’t know, do you?” Amanda actually looked surprised. “Now, should I tell you, in which case I really will have to kill you?” She looked at Jocelyn and Emily. “All three of you.”

“If
it’s a choice between one or the other, I’d rather you release us,” said Parva.

“The
question is - how much do you know?” Amanda took another step forward and trained the gun on Parva. “Or rather, how much do you think you know?”

How
to answer this one? Parva glanced behind her. It seemed highly unlikely that the cavalry was about to save them at the last minute, and she had never been good at making things up under such conditions. So she decided to start off being honest and try to wing it from there.

“Four
girls died,” she said.

Amanda
sighed. “We all know that already,” she said.

“A
verdict of suicide was returned, but at least one of the girl’s fathers wasn’t convinced, so he asked DCI Willoughby to send someone - me - in to find out what had really happened.”

Amanda
rolled her eyes. “I can guess who that would have been,” she said, “and all this was his own bloody fault for not keeping his daughter on a shorter leash.”

“So
all four girls were killed to cover up the fact that only one girl needed to die?” Parva frowned. “Isn’t that a bit excessive?”

“More
like an accident,” Amanda admitted. “The intention was to drug them and then find out how much each girl knew. Unfortunately I didn’t count on them getting up to no good with various illicit substances I would imagine they purchased from Jocelyn here.” She kicked Jocelyn’s chair and the girl gave a little grunt. Parva drew breath.

“Oh yes,” Amanda gave a wry smile. “Did she have you convinced that she was a pupil here? She’s been chased off the grounds more times than I can think. Utter bloody nuisance. I can only imagine she came with you to try and find if the police had discovered the hiding place of their stash, which of course she would then have tried to sell on to some of the other girls here. And the teachers. You won’t believe some of the things people get up to in this place. It might be Wales but sometimes it reminds me of Venezuela.”

Parva
still couldn’t believe it. “So the girls’ deaths were accidental?”

Amanda
nodded. “And it was why the coroner was able to return a verdict of suicide. I kept telling them they should have called it death by misadventure but I was shouted down as usual. Apparently a suicide pact was more believable. Honestly, sometimes I wonder how my bosses get to be in the positions they are.”

“Influence,
family, bribery and a lot of corruption I suspect,” said Parva.

“Oh
you’re probably right,” said Amanda. “To give them fair due, in one of my weekly reports I’d mentioned that girls had formed this club and called themselves the Suicide Blondes. Seeing as only one of them was actually blonde I always thought it was admirably eccentric, while at the same time playing to the downbeat sensibilities so many teenaged girls seem to harbour. Like young Emily here.” Now it was Emily’s turn for a kick. “You’re a bit of a Goth, aren’t you? No idea about circle theorems but you know how to keep your fingernails painted perfectly black, don’t you?”

Parva
detected a note of something there. Something she might be able to play to her advantage.

“You’re
not jealous of these girls, are you?” she asked.

Amanda
looked shocked. “If you must know I despise every single one of them. Wealthy, privileged, self-obsessed. None of them has a future worth talking about. They will all leave here to live off their parents’ money, have numerous affairs with boys from similarly obscenely rich families, and live out lives of worthlessness before succumbing to a death brought on by some manner of hedonism so excessive it’s too much even for their young pampered bodies.”

“So
let me guess,” said Parva, “all the black magic stuff that Miss Arbuthnot found was your doing?”

Amanda
nodded. “I thought it was a good idea at the time. Nothing puts people off the scent better than something that might be even juicier. A suicide pact was one thing, but black magic rituals at an exclusive school leading to death was quite another. The minute I thought of it I knew I’d solved the problem of how to get Miss Arbuthnot to do her damnedest to keep everything quiet.”

Parva
felt the phone buzz in her pocket. The last text message she had read had been sent yesterday. Was it possible that somehow Willoughby’s team had managed to locate her via GPS?

“It
all sounds a bit over the top to me.” She knew she was taking risks, but anything that distracted Amanda would give Parva a chance to get closer to the door.

“I
do my job,” said Amanda, “and I do it very well. That’s all that matters. And right now my job is to take care of the three of you.”

“It
must be difficult, though, working for the government like this,” said Parva as her phone buzzed again. “Doing its dirty work, covering up mistakes.”

Amanda
raised her eyebrows. “Did I say I worked for the government?”

No
, Parva thought,
you didn’t. But I’m trying to get you to admit that you do.
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” The phone buzzed again. Parva decided to press harder. “You’ve already admitted the girl you wanted to interrogate was the daughter of the man who got me sent here. Jack Willoughby’s a lot of things, but he’s not friends with gangsters, and I can’t think of anyone else who would have ex gun-runners in their employ.”