Killing You Softly by Lucy Carver

punching his boss’s daughter in the mouth wasn’t part of
Mikhail’s job description.
    ‘I am very’ very scared,’ she insisted. ‘I phone Papa and tell him what Mikhail has done – in cafe I have time to make call, but it is Salomea who answers. She
doesn’t listen. She tells me I make up story. She goes off phone.’
    ‘But seriously – Mikhail did this on purpose?’ I checked as Jack and Marco rolled the bodyguard on to his stomach and pinned him down.
    Galina nodded. ‘What do I do?’ she whimpered. ‘Who will believe me?’
    ‘Me,’ I decided. ‘I believe you, Galina. Don’t worry, we’ll call the police.’
    ‘They arrested Mikhail.’ Once we got back to St Jude’s, I told the whole story to Hooper, Will, Luke and Connie.
    Marco had waited with Jack for the cops to get there. I’d asked for paramedics to check out Galina’s cut and they’d arrived at the same time as the police. The paramedics
decided that the cut needed a couple of stitches and they drove Galina to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Ainslee. I went with her. We had to wait two hours in A and E and it was 8.30 p.m. by the time
we got back to St Jude’s.
    ‘You know what this reminds me of,’ Connie decided as we sat around a table in the recreational area overlooking the vast sports hall. ‘It’s a gamekeeper-turned-poacher
situation. The guy is hired to protect Galina and instead he tries to kidnap her.’
    ‘If we believe her story,’ Luke said, feet up on one of the coffee tables.
    Hooper agreed. ‘Remember, she hates the guy. Maybe she made this up to get rid of him.’
    ‘She wouldn’t exactly sock herself in the jaw,’ BWS pointed out. ‘She’s way too vain for that.’
    Touche!
    ‘So where is she now?’ Will wanted to know.
    ‘Asleep in our room. She was knackered, poor thing.’
    ‘And where’s Jack?’
    ‘With Marco in the head’s office. The police are taking statements.’
    ‘Saint Sam won’t like that,’ Will tutted. ‘A visit from the cops is the last thing he needs.’
    ‘You know him – he’ll play it down.’ I pictured Saint Sam’s reaction – cool, calm and beige, assuring the police that security at the school was excellent and
if there was another attempt at kidnap and it took place within the school grounds evidence would be captured on CCTV.
    ‘Let’s hope he does play it down,’ Luke added. ‘Galina probably did make the whole thing up as an excuse to go to her dad and get him to take her out of
school.’
    You can see how this was going – the girls tending to side with Galina, the guys not. Except for Jack, who said he’d picked up bad vibes from Mikhail when the cops arrested him
(‘Like he wanted to mow me down with a repeat-action rifle the first chance he got.’). I wasn’t sure about Marco – I didn’t have a clear picture of whose version he
believed.
    Anyway, it was late so we left the sports centre to head back to our rooms and the jury was out until tomorrow.
    I trudged through the snow back to the dorms with Will and we happened to run into lean and hungry Sergei outside the entrance to the quad. ‘Lean and hungry’ as in Shakespeare again.
Cassius in
Julius Caesar
– ‘he thinks too much – such men are dangerous’. I’m full of these quotes and I know they might annoy the hell out of you, but they
spring into my magpie mind and make the point way better than ever I could.
    So, lean and hungry Sergei talked on the phone and watched us go by. I caught two names amidst the torrent of Russian – ‘Galina’ and ‘Salomea’.
    ‘What’s that about?’ I wondered.
    ‘You really want to know?’ Will asked as we walked on across the quad, our footprints the first to spoil the virgin snow.
    I stopped in the middle of the lawn. ‘You speak Russian?’
    ‘Russian, Italian, French, a smattering of Mandarin.’
    ‘OK, my multi-lingual friend, what did Sergei say?’
    ‘He said things didn’t work out. He wasn’t happy.’
    ‘I could tell