Foxton Girls: A British Boarding School Crime Thriller (Annie O'Malley Crime Thriller Series Book 2) Read online

  Silently cursing Evans, the pathologist, under her breath, Annie took out her phone and pretended to be engaged in something really important to take her mind off the dead teenager covered over on the gurney in the middle of the room. Even the smells as they’d pushed open the double doors and walked through the plastic flaps had old memories resurfacing, and Annie knew her breakfast wouldn’t be too far behind. Luckily it had only been coffee!

  “Didn’t take you as squeamish,” Swift said with a twinkle in his eye.

  Annie gave him a withered look and went back to Twitter and an argument she had stumbled upon about a recent celebrity encounter with the law. Just as she was getting to a juicy bit about said celebrity’s unravelling sexual proclivities, Evans burst through the door with a folder in one hand and a half eaten Double Decker in the other. Soft nougat oozed from the centre and Annie swallowed furiously to try and dislodge the uncomfortable clod sitting in her throat. It didn’t work.

  “Swift,” Evans boomed over the echoey morgue. “Good to see you again.”

  “I’d like to return the welcome, but, you know,” Swift replied, nodding at the lump under the sheet.

  “Of course, of course,” Evans said, taking a bite of the chocolate bar and handing Swift the file before turning to look at Annie. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.”

  Annie winced when Evans held out his hand.

  “It’s okay,” he laughed. “It’s clean.”

  Annie flushed and felt like an idiot, taking his hand and shaking it.

  “I’m Annie O’Malley,” she said. “Psychotherapist.”

  “Ahh,” Evans said, as if that explained her screwed up nose and altogether rather green pallor.

  Evans shoved the last of his snack in his mouth and wiped away the crumbs from his lab coat. Annie had never met anyone like him. To look at he was a large brute of a man with a square chin and a shock of pink hair, and in any other situation, Annie would have crossed the road to avoid him. But he was actually a teddy bear, weirdly, given what he did for a living.

  Swift moved closer to the trolley as Evans peeled gloves over his fingers and lifted the sheet covering Emily Langton, folding it down delicately to her chest. She looked like she was asleep, her eyelids blue and fragile, her face pale. It was only the red welt of rope marks around her neck that gave away her cruel end.

  Annie’s breath stuttered and Swift was by her side in an instant, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you sure you want to be here?” he whispered; all sense of his earlier mocking gone.

  She nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak yet. This wasn’t the first dead body she’d encountered out of the walls of the university dissection room, but there was something heart breaking about seeing a girl just about to start her life lying prone on a cold cutting table.

  “Strickland said you had something for us?” Swift asked Evans, moving back to the trolley.

  “Yup.” Evans nodded to the file in Swift’s hands. “It’s all in there, but the gist of it is, Emily Langton had traces of Rohypnol in her blood.”

  “What?” Annie said, her stomach gaining a lining of steel with the revelation.

  “Yeah.” Evans nodded, he walked to an old looking computer in the corner and wiggled the mouse to fire it up. “Three hundred and fifty micrograms of Flunitrazepam.” He read. “Taken from a blood sample at least three hours after her death.”

  “What does that mean in layman’s terms?” Annie asked as the two men exchanged knowing looks.

  “That whoever gave Emily this drug wasn’t just worried about retrograde amnesia,” Swift answered, his eyebrows knitted together. “That’s a lethal dose.”

  “So, she didn’t die from hanging?” Annie said, shocked.

  Evans came back to the trolley shaking his head.

  “She did,” he said. “Cause of death is still asphyxiation from complete hanging. But what we know now is that she would have been unconscious before she was up there.”

  “So, we’re looking at homicide?” Swift said. “Why didn’t the chief say that?”

  “What did he say?” Evans was moving the sheet further down on Emily’s body, and lifting out an arm.

  “That you’d found something suspicious!” Swift replied.

  “Hmm, that’s what you get,” Evans said. “He’s bosom pals with the headteacher and I can’t imagine either of them want the press associated with the homicide of a student, let alone a Foxton student!”

  “Rohypnol’s a date rape drug, isn’t it?” Annie asked, trying not to imagine Strickland being bosom pals with anyone. “If she was drugged, were there any signs of sexual assault?”

  “Weirdly,” Evans said, holding up Emily’s right arm. “There were signs of sexual activity at least a few hours prior to her death, but no signs of assault. It’s almost impossible that Emily was under the influence of the Rohypnol when she was engaged in sexual activity either, as timescales would indicate she would have been dead from the overdose and not the hanging if that was the case.”

  Swift scratched his chin with his knuckles.

  “So, let me get this straight,” he said. “Emily had probable consensual sex; she then took or was given a date rape drug, but not assaulted, then was strung up to hang. Why drug her after sex? Why drug her at all if she’d already been given a lethal dose?”

  Annie was only half listening to the men talking. She’d noticed something on the arm of the murdered girl that Evans was holding up carefully in his huge hands.

  “What’s that?” she asked, edging as close as she dared.

  “This,” Evans said, turning the arm gently so the girl’s palm was facing up. “You need to see.”

  Littered along the inside of her arm, the smooth, alabaster skin was punctured with red scratches. Annie looked even closer; the smell of the cleaning fluids itched her nostrils.

  “Are they words?” she asked, taking a huge step back, her head spinning. “What on earth?”

  “Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble.” Evans put the arm gently back down and lifted the sheet back over Emily’s face and head.

  “What is that?” Swift asked.

  “I ran it through the database, turns out it’s a proverb, or a take on a proverb anyway.”

  “Did she do it herself?” Annie asked.

  Evans shook his head. “The chief thought it might be her suicide letter to start with, made no great deal about it. In fact, he was pleased to see it because he thought it made the suicide nice and neat and tied up with a bow.”

  Swift muttered expletives under his breath and Evans gave him a wilted smile.

  “Yep,” the pathologist continued. “That was my first reaction too. But on further examination there was no way she could have done this to herself.”

  “Why?” Annie blurted.

  “She after your job?” Evans asked Swift with a raised eyebrow.

  “She’s currently the best part of our team!” Swift said, and Annie couldn’t tell if he was being facetious.

  “Emily was right-handed.” Evans addressed Annie now. “This was written on her right arm. Not only that, but there are also no half starts, no difference in the depth of the cuts. If you were doing this to yourself you would have at least a few attempts before you really went for it, no matter how suicidal you were feeling. And no-one would be able to cut themselves at such a deep level without panicking and stopping at points.

  “No, whoever wrote those words on Emily’s arm, did so with a bold swift movement that was definitely not self-inflicted.”

  “We need to talk to that headmaster,” Swift said, as he shouted goodbye to Evans and marched out of the room. “O’Malley, with me.”

  Annie waved to the pathologist and ran after Swift.

  They took Swift’s car. As Annie sat in the passenger seat of the large 4x4, classical FM blaring out of the speakers as they sped down the dual carriageway to the very southern tip of the county, she couldn’t help b
ut glance around at the back seat and the very feminine coat she’d spotted strewn there as she had climbed in. Maybe Swift’s wife had made a miraculous return. Annie made a mental note to ask Tink about it when they were back in the office. DS Belle Lock, or Tink as she was affectionately known, made up one quarter of their team. DC Tom Page the other. They had both welcomed Annie to their team with open arms in the middle of the last case. Tink knew all the gossip, as did Rose, the station receptionist and long-term friend of Annie’s. She’d hit them up for it later. Right now, there was a dead teenager to deal with so Annie turned back to the front of the car and started thinking about what they had so far.

  “So,” Swift said, overtaking a lorry. “What are your first thoughts?”

  Annie took a moment, letting the warm air from the car’s heater run over her frozen toes. It was almost Halloween and the days had started drawing in before they’d even started, the grey mist very rarely lifted from the ground anymore. Swift pulled the car back into the slow lane and drove on at exactly sixty-nine miles an hour.

  “So many things,” Annie said eventually.

  Swift laughed. “Can you narrow it down a bit for me, O’Malley? Let me get my money’s worth!”

  “Cheeky sod,” Annie said, walloping him on the upper arm, her hand bouncing back with the tightness of his muscles. “You don’t pay my wages.”

  “Nope,” he replied, clicking the cruise control button and relaxing back into the leather seat. “But I brought you into our little team, I don’t want to lose you now.”

  Annie smiled. “You’re just worried they’ll pair you up with an actual police officer, so you have to start toeing the line!”

  When Annie had been dragged into the case of the missing girls over the summer, it had been obvious then that Swift worked in his own unique way. A way that she’d never have guessed now, from the fact he was driving slower than her granny.

  “Possibly!” He grinned.

  “Okay,” she conceded. “I think it’s weird that our Chief wants this handled as quietly as possible and was ready to write off that proverb as Emily’s suicide note. I mean, come on!”

  “Agreed,” Swift said, checking the sat nav.

  “Do you think the school knew?” Annie continued, unzipping her boots and putting her feet up near the heaters, avoiding Swift’s look of contempt at her Snoopy socks. “Not who did it, or anything like that. I’m sure they would have come straight to the police if they knew that. But maybe they knew it was a homicide and didn’t want to push the fact for fear of parents finding out.”

  “God forbid their income drops because of a dead teen!”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  They drove on in silence for a while, the thumping of the wheels over the tarmac rhythmic and steady. Swift took them off the dual carriageway and onto roads that became narrower and windier as they went. The 4x4 was built for this kind of terrain and took the corners far better than Annie’s small Golf would have. And the heated seats were a bonus too. Annie still hadn’t gotten around to finding out how Swift drove a 4x4 and lived in a mansion on a police wage.

  “I also wonder,” Annie went on, drawing herself back to Swift’s question and picturing the red ragged line around Emily’s neck. “How much her friends know about what’s happened. And how it’s affecting them. Who could possibly have that big a grudge for a posh teenage girl? A grudge that makes them drug her and string her up by the neck? Maybe her friends are worried that the same is going to happen to them? Do you think they’ll talk?”

  “I guess that’s what we’re about to find out,” Swift said, as he flicked the indicator on the wheel and turned into a sweeping, gravel, driveway flanked with conifer trees and the neatest box hedge Annie had ever seen.

  Three

  Foxton’s School for Girls was just as Annie had imagined it to be. It was right there at the pinnacle of the sweeping driveway in all its Georgian glory. A grey stone staircase, a symmetrical main building of matching grey stone, wings on either side that looked like later additions, and a bloody fountain. Annie thought back to her comprehensive school with its pebbledash exterior and broken bike sheds with a weird mix of nostalgia and envy. Swift whistled through his teeth.

  “How the other half live, hey?” he said, pulling into a space in the small carpark to the side of the gravel driveway.

  Swift’s house was like a miniature version of this, only more Victorian gothic. Annie had thought he belonged to the other half he was whistling about.

  Annie opened her door and stepped down onto the gravel. She reached her arms up to the dark grey clouds and stretched out her legs from the car journey, taking in the rest of the surroundings. Behind the school was a large grass playing field and beyond that woodland. A small bandstand perched at the edge of the trees, two younger students sat inside it, watching her with their perfect French plaits and fixed gazes. Annie pulled her coat around her body and followed Swift to the front of the building and up the stone stairs.

  “It feels very quiet,” Swift said, as he pushed open the wooden door and they stepped inside.

  “Half term,” Annie replied, her voice quiet in the large space.

  The entrance hall could fit Annie’s whole life in it three times over. The stone steps outside were mirrored in here, leading in both directions from a marbled floor, to a balcony around the room. Either sides of the steps were dark corridors, small signs depicted the way to classrooms and dorms. Annie shivered.

  “May I help you?” A tall, thin woman, probably in her forties, with a greying blond chignon approached them.

  “DI Swift and Annie O’Malley,” Swift said, flashing his police badge. “We’re here to see Mr Haversham.”

  The woman looked the two visitors up and down, her face impassive, though Annie felt immediately a sense of unease behind her watery blue eyes.

  “Professor Haversham,” she said, turning on her stiletto heels and leading them down behind the left-hand side of the staircase. “Follow me.”

  Swift raised an eyebrow at Annie, and they followed the woman’s lead through a dark panelled corridor. Past a room marked staff room, and a couple of classrooms, and onto a thick oak door with a brass plaque that read Headmaster.

  “Wait here,” the woman pointed to the wooden chairs lining the corridor by the headmaster’s office and then disappeared inside.

  Swift giggled like a schoolboy as they sat down on the hard seats. “This takes me right back. But I bet this is the first time you’ve sat outside the head’s office, isn’t it? I get that good girl vibe from you.”

  “Hmm,” Annie said, noncommittally. “Almost a perfect record, except for the time I slammed Jimmy’s hand in the door because he wouldn’t stop pinging my bra strap.”

  Before Swift could answer the door swung open and a dark shadow fell over the corridor. The headteacher took up most of the doorway, he was broad in all directions, and his puce cheeks reminded Annie of a better dressed version of DCI Strickland.

  “Professor Haversham at your disposal,” he said, amiably, holding out his sausage fingers to Swift. “You can call me William.”

  Swift and Annie stood to attention. Swift took the headmaster’s hand and shook it.

  “DI Swift and Annie O’Malley,” he said. “Thanks for taking the time to see us.”

  “Not at all, dreadful business.” William Haversham stood back from the door and ushered them into his office.

  The woman who had met them at the reception was so still, she blended into the corner of the room.

  “Coffee, please,” Haversham said to her in a slick voice, then patted her backside as she left the room. Annie watched her flinch, but the smile never slipped from the poor woman’s face.

  In the office, the desk took up most of the space, bookshelves laden with works covered the walls. There were two small chairs set up on the opposite side of the desk from where the headmaster had taken residence, and Annie and Swift took their cue to sit.

  “Don’t arrest me for l
ewd behaviour,” Haversham joked as he stretched out into his own chair, his body spilling over the sides. “Hetty’s the wife. Makes a great PA with all the extras.”

  The man burst out laughing, spittle flying everywhere. Annie perched on the edge of her chair, her legs bouncing on the balls of her feet. Haversham peered at Annie with dark eyes through unruly eyebrows, he ran a hand through his thick, greasy hair, pushing it back off his forehead. Annie didn’t smile back at him. She didn’t look away. But she did feel a crawling sensation creep up her spine and nestle in her hair.

  “Professor Haversham, William,” Swift said, looking non too amused either. “What can you tell us about Emily Langton?”

  Haversham’s jowls were shaking. He steepled his fingers together, tapping at his lips with his forefingers.

  “Her loss has carved a very deep hole in our small community,” he said, lowering his eyes.

  “Yes, I’m sure it has,” Swift said. “How was she as a student?”

  “Emily was a grade A student,” Haversham continued, his eyes finding Annie again and running over her body. “Joined us here when I took over as Head, about thirteen years ago. She was part of my first cohort of boarders, I know her parents. It was a small cohort then, only ten or so students. But Emily was always top of the class, even of the day pupils too. Never gave any of the teachers any trouble, just went about her business like a good girl.”

  Annie didn’t like the way he referred to this young woman as a good girl. She got up out of her seat to get away from his gaze and started looking at the photographs littering the only wall not covered in books. Unread books Annie guessed, the more time she spent in Haversham’s presence.

  The photographs were school photos, the kind where the girls were lined up in height and year order and told to smile, the building imposing behind them. Each picture looked almost exactly like its predecessor, neat uniforms, even neater hair. The year groups weren’t huge like Annie’s had been. Her own school photograph had been of forms rather than the whole school, because there wasn’t a wall big enough in the parents’ homes that could take a picture of the entire student body.