Page 50 of Dead to Me

By the time I was back inside, with the door slammed shut behind me, my heart was in my throat.I almost felt like throwing the envelope away in anger at having been scared like this.

But the curiosity was too strong.And so I took a deep breath and peeled it open.

Inside was just one A4 photographic sheet, and I tipped it onto my hand.Someone had laid out three images in what could have been an attractive little triptych: only they were all images of me, taken without my knowledge or consent.

The first was of me heading into the station earlier that night, dressed for my meet-up with Cordelia in London.The second: me climbing into my Uber outside the club, on my way home.

And the third, Reid, was of me locking my bike up right outside the house as I’d arrived home, my stance uneven after the impact of that car, and my head half turned to look for any assailants.

I was looking out for people,I thought, all the hairs standing up on my arms.I was looking out for people, and I never saw them.

They’d been close enough to get my anxious expression as I’d bent down.Close enough to capture the way I’d tucked my trousers into my socks.

And worse than that were the words.There was one underneath each image, making up a single message in Arial typeface:

RUN AWAY HOME

And somehow all the triumph I’d felt evaporated.I didn’t feel like I was on the right track any more.I felt out of my depth, and scared.

I tried to shut out all the more painful thoughts and work out, rationally, who might have been driving that car.None of the group had so far mentioned having a vehicle in Cambridge, and it would be extremely unusual for an undergrad to have one.But that didn’t mean they hadn’t hired one for the night.

I also thought about Philip Sedgewick again.He’d apparentlyheard nothing at the Caledonian Club and wanted to help me, but had that been a pretence?

The only thing in his favour was the difficulty of him managing it.I couldn’t see how he could have ended up in a car in Cambridge at exactly the right time when he’d been going to a dinner.Unless he’d left the dinner and hung around the entrance somewhere without me seeing him.

But it was a big thing to do for a small pay-off, wasn’t it?Wouldn’t it have been easier to wait until a night when he was free and then follow me?Though maybe I was thinking too rationally and not like someone who thought their son’s secrets were under immediate threat.

It was while thinking over his possible guilt that I processed something his friend Max had said in the bar.

I’d better go and find Clarisse…

That had been it, hadn’t it?I was sure he’d said Clarisse.

And I was equally sure that Clarisse was the name of Esther’s high-achieving mother who worked for the UN General Secretariat.The sort of woman who could probably brush anything she wanted under the carpet and have me chased down and threatened by a driver if someone tipped her off.Maybe this Max had, or maybe she’d been in the bar earlier on, when I’d been talking to Cordelia.Maybe she’d heard way too much.

I hadn’t yet discovered a reason why Esther might have wanted Holly dead, but I was willing to bet that a woman who’d had Clarisse’s kind of career would not want her daughter going down for murder.I wondered if she might even be able to convince the police not to look into it too closely.

I’ll admit that this might have been a littlebig conspiracyfor daylight hours, but it was 3 a.m., and I was wired with anxiety by this point.Itcouldhave been a totally different Clarisse, or a similar name, but I couldn’t go back and check.I hadn’t hadmy voice recorder on because I’d been there to see Cordelia, not to spy.

The worst thing was not having anything I could immediately do.Not about this new threat, and not about Cordelia, either.

I’d had no reply to my message to my former ally, and I had no idea whether she’d already contacted Gael to complain.By morning, I might be pulled off this story, or I might be staying, and in more danger than I’d bargained for.

I must have spent a full half-hour pacing the house, going over all this in my mind, jumping any time I caught sight of my reflection in anything, despite having pulled the curtains firmly over every window.I needed someone to talk to, and in the end I realised that the only person I really wanted to talk to was you, Reid.

So I did the only vaguely rational version of that I could think of and started writing this down.It wasn’t exactly comforting to write to you but for a couple of hours I felt a little less totally alone.Imagining you reading it was… not comforting exactly.But it wasn’t the same as having nobody, either.

With at least most of it down, I scraped a little sleep– more out of exhaustion than anything else– and hauled my ass onto the river to work out some nerves in the scull.My leg was hurting like hell just walking there, having swelled further overnight, and it looked bruised and ugly where it was displayed by my Lycra one-piece.But I could move up and down the slide, at least, and as I worked it got easier to put pressure down.

I was obviously on the lookout for someone throwing a brick off a bridge onto me the whole way, or even for someone firing something off the bank.It did nothing to improve my already questionable steering on the bends, and whencombined with background pain from the leg I ended up seething with frustration at myself, reliving snippets of what Cordelia had said to me, and on the point of tears at my inability to just do something right.

It was humiliating.

I made it the five kilometres up to the lock and then back down to the comparative straight of the Reach before I’d had enough, and then pulled over close to the bank and lay back in my seat with the blades over my chest, trying not to feel like everything was falling apart.It was at least quiet enough to do that, out here beyond the city and on a day when few crafts were out.

The mantra ofYou just need more sleepdidn’t seem to be working as well as it should have done, and I had a moment of wishing I could just abandon the boat, and Cambridge, and the whole investigation, and walk off somewhere.

During this admittedly pretty self-indulgent sulk someone yelled my name– well, Aria’s name– and I almost jumped out of my skin.I sat up, wobbly as hell, and was looking wildly for the threat when I realised that it was a cheerfully waving figure.Kit Frankland’s cheerfully waving figure, in fact, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, his face flushed and a pair of AirPods in his ears.It was clear that he’d been running.

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