Killing You Softly by Lucy Carver Page B

it.
    ‘Who’ll be the parson? . . . Who’ll be the clerk?’
    ‘Why so slow to pick up the clues?’
Jack read on.
‘Bad things are happening under your nose, Alyssa. It’s up to you to work them out, which I’m sure you
can do if you’re as good as they say.
Who the hell wrote this?’
    Who’ll carry the coffin?
    Who’ll bear the pall?
    ‘Don’t ask me. I just found the note here on the windowsill.’
    ‘The killer is in plain sight – right under your nose. Love and kisses
. . . Why is this guy sending you love and kisses, Alyssa? What’s this about?’
    All the birds of the air
    Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing
    When they heard of the death
    Of poor Cock Robin.
    My head spun. It was hard to get a coherent sentence out as Jack thrust the paper towards me.
    ‘Whose killer?’ he demanded.
    My head spun, but in my heart I knew. ‘Scarlett Hartley’s, I answered. ‘I think the murderer left this note to challenge me. That’s what this is about.’
    ‘It takes a seriously sick mind,’ Connie decided.
    Jack and I had gone along the corridors of the boys’ and girls’ dorms and called a late-night meeting in the coffee bar overlooking the sports hall. People had thrown on some clothes
and braved the snow to cross the quad and hear what Jack and I had to say.
    ‘Tell me again – what’s the link between Scarlett Hartley and Alyssa?’ Charlie asked. She sat down strategically between Marco and Zara, across from me, Hooper and Jack.
Eugenie, Galina, Luke and Will were there too, along with the Black Widow.
    ‘We’re not sure,’ Jack answered. ‘We know that Scarlett had perfect recall, a photographic memory – whatever you want to call it – the same as Alyssa.
That’s the one link we’ve made so far.’
    In the thirty minutes since he’d read the verse and the message, I’d shared with Jack all the details of the past few days. He’d dragged them out of me, every last one.
    ‘We’re together on this,’ he’d promised me, holding me so tight I could hardly breathe. ‘You don’t have to do this alone.’
    Zara turned straight to Will. ‘OK, scholarship boy – you went to school with Scarlett before you reached the dizzying heights of St Jude’s. So is that true – did she have
total recall?’
    Will looked as if he’d already been in bed when Jack had knocked at his door. His hair was messed up and he was wearing his sweater inside out.
    ‘Yeah,’ he acknowledged. ‘She came top in every exam she ever sat, right from the start of secondary school. We all hated her for it.’
    ‘Really?’ Charlie looked puzzled. ‘Jeez, I don’t get you Brits.’
    ‘I’ll explain some other time,’ Zara said. ‘The point is, somebody killed Scarlett and threw the body in the canal and it’s bringing up memories of what happened to
Lily last term. And now bad things have started to happen to Alyssa and this sick person is setting up a challenge – catch me if you can, signing off with love and kisses.’
    ‘Kiss-catch,’ Eugenie murmured, shuddering and pulling her jacket tighter across her chest.
    Connie stuck to the practical. ‘You need to find out if the sick bastard did the same thing to Scarlett – taunting her and drawing her in with his psycho games to the point when she
got too close to the truth, then he had to kill her.’
    My heart hammered against my ribs when she put it all out there, but I tried not to show the fear. ‘Let’s take this more slowly. It’s still possible that there’s no
connection between what happened to Scarlett and the stuff that’s going on here. It could just be someone with a warped sense of humour.’
    ‘Yeah, funny,’ Hooper commented. He’d hung back from the main group, but was listening intently to every word that was said.
    ‘He won’t be laughing when I get my hands on him,’ Jack muttered.
    I loved it that he sprang to my defence, though that small, independent part of me said, No, let me do this, let me work it out for myself.