A few days after that, we were back in school again. Half-term had been so fun it felt like it was only a weekend; being with my friends and being able to walk around London with William, holding hands and having fun, was amazing.
The next day after we arrived, when we woke up, we were told that we had been confined to our quarters and all classes had been cancelled for the day. As usual, rumours started flying in the dormitories, and I was sure the information was coming from the older children, whose rooms were on the first floor and had windows facing the school. From what we were hearing, the police were all over the building; apparently, a body had been found in the forest adjacent to the school.
After a while, we were allowed to leave our houses, but we were told that we were not allowed anywhere outside the school. Curi-osity is a plague, because the road to the dining hall felt like forever. As soon as we got there, we saw the boys and ran towards them.
I was desperate for someone to tell me anything about what had happened, and my heart jumped when I saw William, but my joy didn’t last long. Sitting at the same table was Pollard and her gang as usual. Hogan, Alex, Tristan and Hassan were there, as well as Scarlett, and I sat next to them, and we found out from the boys about the killing. As horrible as the crime was, I couldn’t help a sense of excitement at the thought that our investigation would be animated with such a tangible situation.
Luckily for us, the groundkeepers were expert gossips and were doing their job admirably. One of them had apparently ventured into the forest for some unknown reason and had stumbled onto the chopped-up body of an undressed woman.
Obviously not wanting to be upstaged by the death, Pollard started with a fake scared cry and jumped into William’s arms, saying, “Oh my God! It’s so horrible, so horrible.”
I thought, Really, Pollard, really? Into your ex’s arms and in front of his girlfriend? I just couldn’t believe it.
William saw that I was staring at them. I really wanted to leave, but pride was one of my biggest sins, and it was gluing me to the spot. I could tolerate a lot of things, but being able to remain indifferent to that kind of obvious nonsense was beyond my strength, so I rolled my eyes. Obviously, Walker and Morgan saw me, but I couldn’t have cared less. Hassan saw me too, and he burst out laughing, which attracted the attention of the mother of fake tears, Pollard.
Unsurprisingly, he told her, while still laughing, that I was rolling my eyes and that no one on the table was buying her damsel-in-distress act. I was frozen. All I knew was that Pollard was in William’s arms, and it was driving me crazy.
The worst part was that I wasn’t even mad at Pollard. I didn’t like her, but it had nothing to do with her relationship with William. Actually, I had heard from her friends that she was a pretty loyal friend when you were part of her circle. The one I was really angry at was William. We were a couple; he had declared himself to me, so he should have pushed her away and tried to avoid upsetting me. I knew it was partly my fault. I had nothing to be jealous of; they were friends and I was beating myself up about my reaction to the situation, but I was only human. I really wanted to leave, but then someone touched Tristan on the shoulder.
It was William. Tristan smiled and switched places with him. I didn’t know what to say. I was overwhelmed with emotions, so when he took my hand and pulled me towards him and hugged me, I just let go. I put my head on his chest and closed my eyes; then he kissed me on the forehead.
Love is a strange thing; it makes you crazy one second, and the next it sends you to heaven, and this was where I was, in heaven with the boy I loved. For some reason, Pollard, who was watching us, turned red, and it looked like she was about to lash out at us when Pam came in running.
I was surprised; she was extremely late, so late that I thought that she had decided to stay in bed because she had just gotten her period that day, but it turned out that wasn’t it. She actually had new information for us. The best part came when Pam insisted that we followed her to another table because she did not want to talk in front of Pollard and her friends. They protested, but everyone knew Pam’s temperament – she was very much a “cross me at your own risk” individual. I could have kissed her.
The second she said that the information she had was for Yan ears only, I froze. William wasn’t a Yan, but he was part of us. More specifically, he was a part of me. Hassan, of course, couldn’t have been more thrilled. If it had been December, he would have begged Odin to bring Pam a boat in recompense for that move. Anything that excluded William was good as far as he was concerned.
Tristan and Alex were getting up as well, but I saw Hogan’s hesitation. He was in love with Scarlett, and spending time with her mattered a lot to him. Pam was a great girl, but she could be very automaton-like sometimes and was not a fan of a useless crowd. She had no intention of backing down, but luckily, Alex, being the happy-go-lucky person we all knew and loved, convinced his twin to allow Scarlett and William to follow us.
Pam turned towards me and raised her eyebrows at me. I knew that she was asking me to have the last say, so I told them that Scarlett and William were welcome to join but that the others would have to remain seated. A very shady move on my part, but I wasn’t above passing up an opportunity to annoy Pollard and her gang.
William and Scarlett got up to join us, and we went to a table at the back of the dining room. I could sense William’s anger at me and slowed down, giving him a chance to talk to me alone, and he took it. He grabbed my arm. At that point, I was seriously thinking of charging an arm tax because clearly that was his favourite move towards me every time he was upset with me.
He looked me straight in the eyes again and said, “Stop that. I am asking you to stop that. She is not with me any more, and you might not like her, but she is a good person and she deserves a chance.”
I said, “Oh, really, Will? And why should I? Stop forcing me to make nice with her, and by the way, she is not my only problem. I want them all gone. I have no sympathy for any of them. I promised to be civil to them and I have been, but I do not want to be friends with them. Accept it or not, your choice. Either way, I am done arguing with you about it.”
That was a cheap shot, but it felt amazing. I had finally given him a piece of my mind. I wanted the formerly fabulous, or whatever their nickname was at the moment, out of my life.
When we were done, we realised that we had been screaming at each other, and everyone near us had heard us. We were standing there in silence when Hassan said, “Ooh la la la la,” and everyone started laughing. Hassan was known for his colourful vocabulary, and he used it every time a girl went off at a boy.
I felt bad for losing my composure with William and being humiliated by Hassan, the neighbourhood douchebag, as well, so I apologised. He accepted and followed me to Pam’s table, where she told us what she had found out.
According to her, what had actually happened was that one of the groundkeepers would sometimes go into the forest with Arnold and meet with a friend of theirs who liked making his own wine. They would be in the woods, picking up some of the ingredients for his wine, and in return he would always carry a bottle for them.
The only catch was that they would have to look for him in the forest if they wanted to get their bottles, because he was a nomad. Our winemaker was a hermit, and after he had found every ingredient he needed for his brew, he would go back to one of his sheds and not be seen for a week or more.
The groundkeeper had apparently explained that since Arnold’s disappearance, he was struggling to find Dunbar, the eremite, and was getting desperate when, just as he was about to turn around and go home, he saw something that looked like a foot. He was unsure if he should go towards it – he was not a man who liked to intrude – but what he liked even less was someone intruding in his life.
He decided that it was in his best interests to go and have a look in case he could see something valuable that he could take from what he thought was the drunken body of the missing Arnold. However, when he got closer, he realised that it wasn’t Arnold drunk, sleeping it off. It wasn’t some rough sleeper either. It was a pentagram facing down, made out of the body of a woman, with the head in the middle, replacing the head of the goat.
He screamed in fear and ran towards the closest road he could find. He started calling for help, grabbing anyone he could see and mumbling, “A body in the forest, a body in the forest.”
Eventually, someone decided to have a look while a passer-by made the poor man sit and take some water. The man quickly came back. He was white and shaken; he could barely speak. All he could say was “Oh my God, oh my God.”
A woman asked him if he had called the police, and all he could manage as a response was to nod yes.
After hearing Pam’s story, I felt confined, and not knowing anything was driving me crazy, so I decided to sneak out. I knew that the boys, being the goody two shoes they always were, would try to stop me, except for Hogan and Hassan, of course. I wanted to let Hogan know about my idea, but he was sitting too far away from me, so I had no option but to leave him out of my plan.
I pinched Hassan, turned to him, smiled and said, “I need the loo. I’ll be right back.”
I hoped that it was enough of a clue for him to follow me discreetly, but I had forgotten that, as girls, we loved going to the loo together, and when I got up, so did Pam and Scarlett. I thought, Darn, that’s the last thing I need – the rule follower and the bible pusher. Pam could be convinced to follow me – she was adventurous – but Scarlett would never agree to sneak out to have a look at a dead body. I decided to risk it; my curiosity was way too strong to resist.
We got to the lavatory, and I told the girls what my plan was. To my surprise, Scarlett was up for it. I guessed being religious did not mean that she was a wuss. Pam agreed to follow us, but I knew that she was only doing it to prevent me from doing something stupid. Hassan walked in and, without a word, went to the window and jumped out. That answered the question of how Hassan knew all the gossip from the girls’ dormitories; simple, he sneaked in our part of the dormitories and used the ground-floor lavatory to go in and out unseen. We jumped as well and rushed straight into the forest.
Gateway Hill only had one community officer, Theresa Smith, and one constable, Nigel Anderson. Neither of them, I thought, had the expertise and the knowledge required to conduct an investigation of that sort. Yet they were the only ones around, plus some special constables from Gateway Hill, not exactly what I would call the crème de la crème of Surrey Police.
Interestingly enough, Constable Anderson seemed that day like someone who had seen more than his fair share of murder. I had never seen him so calm and composed. Officer Smith, however, looked nervous, very nervous actually. She was white as a sheet. It looked like she was struggling to hide her inner turmoil, probably provoked by what she had seen, but since she was still standing, we could only speculate that she was desperate to prove herself.
I got closer to the police cordon – it’s amazing how being a teenager allows you to go places unnoticed and unheard. Clearly, Officer Smith was out of her depth, because she kept giving her much older colleague a “what the devil?” look. She kept asking her partner, “What do think we are going to find? What do you think we are going to find?”
That little exchange between the two representatives of the law made me think that Gateway Hill’s finest officers had not been near the crime scene, even if everybody in the village already knew what was in the forest.
I could see how annoyed Constable Anderson was with his colleague. If I hadn’t known better, I could have sworn that he was itching to slap her and was trying hard to remain calm. He just replied that good things happened to those who wait, and I thought, How cheeky! Talk about being patronising.
I had seen enough. We needed to get closer and see the body for ourselves, and we wouldn’t be able to do that from where we were, so I called out to the group, and we went back to the school grounds. We came out behind the boys’ quarters and followed the line where the school walls were the lowest, and climbed over.
We then rushed into the woods and finally got to the clearing and froze. We saw Officer Smith making the sign of the cross, and her colleague was seriously pale. We looked at each other, and I nodded, signalling to them that we were going in.
We started approaching carefully. We could clearly see the so-called forensic team, but when they removed their glasses and their white plastic hoods, we recognised the local medical team from Gateway Hill.
It was quite clear that the sign of the inverted pentagram had been done in advance with a spray can, then the body parts placed later. One of the people dressed in white plastic suits was saying that he thought that it must have been the work of either a deeply disturbed mind or a ritualistic, devil-worshipping killer.
Either way, it did not end well for that lady, I thought.
I then looked behind me and noticed that Scarlett and Hassan had disappeared. I turned towards Pam, and she opened her left palm and used the index and middle finger of her right hand to simulate legs running, signalling to me that they had run away, so I turned around and stared at Hassan. Luckily for me, he turned around, and I pointed towards him and Scarlett and gave him the tangent sign. He rolled his eyes. Clearly, he was unhappy about it, but he followed through anyway.
I must say that seeing a dead corpse in real life was not what Pam and I had expected. Since coming to J.C., I had become a fan of horror movies and thrillers with gruesome death, and so had Pam, but what we saw was worse than anything we expected.
Suddenly I noticed that Constable Anderson was making his way to check on Officer Smith, who was vomiting nearby. She was sweating and shaking, which both Pam and I couldn’t help but relate to. We wanted to vomit as well.
Constable Anderson helped her up and sent her back to the car to compose herself and have some water. He then got on his phone and explained to whoever he was talking to that he was worried a crime of this severity would require more than a two-person team to solve. The answer must have been negative, because he then said that although it wasn’t technically his job, he would still do his best to find out what had really happened.
While I was spying on the corpse, Pam spied on the people in front of the school and followed Officer Smith to the car. From what she told me later, the officer came out of the forest and found a local Gateway Hill journalist bombarding everyone with questions, and after seeing the officer, she descended on her as soon as she saw her, like a zombie.
We knew that all of this was going to be all over the local gazette by the next morning and that the pressure to find out what had happened was on, which made our attempt to approach the body difficult, so we decided to create a diversion. While we were arguing about who would be the decoy and who would get to approach the body, we felt small stones being thrown at us. When we turned around, we saw Hogan, Alex, William and Tristan.
Tristan and Alex were trying hard to contain their hilarity, while William and Hogan looked furious. I knew why Hogan was angry – I had dragged his precious Scarlett here, and she must have run in crying – but I couldn’t understand why William was angry. They approached and blatantly ignored me. William asked Pam to tell them what we had found, so she narrated everything to them, as well as our plan to approach the body.
In the end, we agreed that William would go in with his phone and record as much as he could, while we would attract the attention of the team around the body in the hope that they would chase us down, leaving the body unattended.
It worked. We started making noises, and they noticed us, so we spread out, running, and they followed us. While we were running, being chased around by adults, William took as many pictures as he could and, as soon as he was done, started running towards the school.
Realising that they had left the body unattended, the adults stopped chasing us and ran back to their previous position, allowing us to get back to school. I was thrilled. We had pictures and would probably get into a lot of trouble for it, but it was worth it.
As soon as we got there, William was waiting for me. I thought, Great, now it’s my turn to be hammered, and I was right. He was furious that I had not asked him to join us.
He was right, and I was sorry about it. I apologised and told him that he was my first boyfriend and I didn’t really know how relationships worked. Luckily for me, he mellowed down, kissed me and hugged me. He simply asked me never to do anything without him. I promised to always include him. That answer seemed to satisfy him, so he grabbed my hand, and we went and joined the others to have a look at the pictures.