Chapter 1
Lottie
Every kid has a moment in their childhood when they realise just how terrifying the world can be. A moment when they realise there are far scarier things out there than Big Foot and boogeymen and monsters hiding under beds. For my parents’ generation, it was the Cold War. For my younger cousins, it was the Lockerbie bombing. For my friend Shannon, it was the unconscionable existence of Mr Blobby.
For me, it was when a girl from my hometown died in the North Tower murders.
Janie Kirsopp was a quietly intelligent violinist in her first year at Carvell Academy of the Arts. Her parents had driven her the hundreds of miles from Sevenoaks to rural Northumberland, said tearful goodbyes to their shy, uncertain daughter, and promised they’d have the best Christmas ever to make up for their time apart. Janie had begged them to take her home, said she’d made a mistake and that she didn’t want to be so far away from them, that she’d request a transfer to one of the elite music programmes in London instead. They had kissed her on the forehead and told her to stick it out for a couple of months and see how she felt then.
But before Christmas came, Janie was dead.
Her pretty, hook-nosed face dominated newstands across Sevenoaks. Photos of her on holiday in the Canaries as a child, of her toothless primary school picture, of her performing at the Royal Albert Hall with the National Youth Orchestra. Splashy headlines about hot new leads, about prime suspects and grisly forensic evidence.
Yet the notion of murder was still completely abstract to me until I saw my own parents crying at her funeral. They knew the Kirsopps from church and had attended Janie’s christening eighteen years earlier. They could still remember her white tulle dress, her ivory sandals the size of seashells; her shining, cherubic eyes as she was baptised. And now her body was shattered at the bottom of a cold stone tower hundreds of miles away.
That was my before and after. I was only nine, yet my whole understanding of reality shifted on its axis.
Janie’s death was the second in a string of unsolved murders that ultimately lead to Carvell’s closure. So my parents understandably had reservations when I announced, during my last Michaelmas term of sixth form, that the soon-to-reopen arts academy would be my first choice of university.
Well, ‘reservations’ is putting it mildly. My mother threatened to saw my legs off if I so much as mentioned it again.
At first they thought I was winding them up; playing the kind of cruel joke only teenagers have the genuine apathy to execute. Then, when I was invited to interview, they flatly refused to drive me up. I’d always been bloody-minded, so I caught two or three trains until I was within throwing distance of the campus, then got a taxi the rest of the
way.
A shiver had run down my spine as the North Tower came into view from the end of the sweeping driveway, its spires and crenellations silhouetted against a grey autumn sky. There was something so alive about the old convent building; something that swooped and pulsed like a murmuration of starlings. I’d always romanticised the place, despite its history; it brought to mind old parchment and knee-deep piles of crunchy red leaves, cellos and dark windowpanes and snow.
The thing that made me truly fall in love with the campus, swiftly and irrevocably, was the immortal cat. Salem wasn’t immortal in the traditional sense – her body changed with each reincarnation, from scrubby ginger to slender Siamese – but her soul was said to be the same as it was hundreds of years ago, back when the convent was still in operation. She stalked the same route around the priory every day, visited the same wooded glade every afternoon to bathe on the sun-dappled branches, and curled up in front of the same log fire every evening after a little nip of brandy and milk. When I saw her slinking along the windowsill of the chapel on my campus tour – she had been a sleek Bombay black for the last few years – I felt as though I was witnessing something ancient and sacred, something tapped into a supernatural pulse. I wanted to be part of that more than anything.
Be careful what you wish for, as my beloved Goosebumps books used to say.
Almost a year later, I could practically feel Dad’s apprehension as we pulled up that same sweeping driveway on my first day as a Carvell student. His knuckles gripped the stitched-leather steering wheel so tightly they turned white. I knew he was thinking of Janie – tulle dress, tiny sandals, cherubic eyes, dead body. I knew he was thinking of how he would never survive if that was me. I knew he was wondering if it was too late to fetch my mum’s hacksaw.
After I was offered a place, my parents had eventually come around to the idea of me attending Carvell. They weren’t happy about it, exactly, but nor were they expressly forbidding it. Despite a ten-year closure, Carvell still offered one of the most prestigious and competitive English literature programmes in the country, with published novelists and internationally acclaimed academics among the glittering faculty. There was one eccentric lecturer, Professor Sanderson, who taught a Gothic literature seminar that was rumoured to send students mad. I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about that one.
Plus, the nightlife was practically non-existent – there was just one students’ union and a couple of old-fashioned parlours on the campus – so the chances of me choking on my own vomit or drowning in a river were slim. Then the hockey scholarship sealed the deal.
Still, now that we were actually here, traipsing around Willowood Hall in search of my dorm, I could tell Dad was having second, third and
ninth thoughts.
‘Are you sure about this, kiddo?’ he asked, hands gripped tightly around a box of books.
He looked up at the North Tower, squinting against the late September sun, teeth working at the corner of his mouth like they always did when he was nervous. He’d worked in construction for decades, so was no stranger to physical risk of his own, but it was different when it came to me. He couldn’t even stomach watching me play hockey. So now, to be leaving me on the site of Janie’s death, on the day of my nineteenth birthday – the same age she was when she died – was a little too much for him to handle.
I grinned, hoisting my hockey bag further up my shoulder. ‘Of course I’m sure, you goof.’
In truth I was nervous too, but I didn’t want to show it.
The apprehension wasn’t just about the school’s bloody past, or what would happen if old demons came back to haunt it. I was also afraid that I would fail under the lofty academic pressure. Because the reality was that I’d lived in the same small house in the same small town all my life.
What if I didn’t rise to whatever challenges were in store for me at Carvell? What if I was only a great hockey player – and a great writer – in the small world of Sevenoaks?
CHAPTER TWO
ALICE
Within fifteen minutes of arriving at Carvell, I already wanted to slit someone’s throat.
The tweed-clad woman in front of me glared at her clipboard as though it had personally wronged her. ‘Name?’
I shifted on the heels of my Doc Martens. They squeaked conspicuously on the chequerboard floor of the cavernous entrance hall. ‘Alice Wolfe. Philosophy.’
Judging by her disdainful expression, I got the feeling she’d been roped into these tedious welcome greetings in the absence of any student volunteers. Which made sense, because I was one of the first students to walk through the doors in ten years.
Her watery-blue eyes scanned a list. ‘You’re not on here. Did you submit your enrolment paperwork before the deadline?’
Through gritted teeth, I replied, ‘Yes.’
She gave a terse schoolmarm tut, pushing her half-moon glasses further up her nose. ‘You mustn’t have, because you’re not on here.’
Anger snapped across my chest like an elastic band; a hot, familiar sting. I couldn’t keep it from my voice. ‘Well, I definitely did. So it must be a cock-up on your end.’
At this the women inhaled sharply, as though the unsavoury word had caused her physical pain. Eyelids fluttering with distaste, she replied quietly, ‘There’s simply no need to be so rude. I assure you this is no fault of our administrative staff. I’m afraid you’ll have to resubmit your paperwork.’
I’d spent hours on that godforsaken paperwork the first time.
Deep in my blazer pocket the obnoxious Nokia ringtone blared, echoing around the cold stone entrance hall. The queue behind me was growing restless.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I lowered my voice and said, ‘I’ve already done the paperwork. Please would you check again?’
She issued a tight grimace. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to step aside and complete another set of forms. There are a lot more students I have to see.’
She looked down her nose at me, smug with self-importance, and the dam holding back my anger crumbled.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I snapped. ‘Would it kill you to check one more time?’
She blinked sharply, as though a loud bang had gone off. Then, lips curling, she disappeared into a small office behind her welcome desk.
As usual, there was a soft ebb of pleasure as I let the anger out, followed by the cold tide of guilt and self-loathing; a deep undertow of shame.
Then came the acute sensation of being watched.
Following the paranoid tug, my gaze landed on a tall, bespectacled man in a walnut-coloured corduroy suit who was staring impenetrably at
me. I recognised him as head of philosophy; his headshot had been in the prospectus. And he’d witnessed my outburst.
Hands folded over his sloping stomach, he gave me a chastising head shake, like a disappointed grandfather.
‘Such wrath isn’t very becoming of a young woman, you know,’ he said in a crisp academic tone. He adjusted his mustard-yellow tie. ‘And I would prefer you not to speak to our faculty members in such an unpleasant manner.’
I glared at him, momentarily speechless.
Did he actually just play the ‘unbecoming of a young woman’ card?
Before I could sling a low and dirty retort in his direction, the woman reappeared from the office, cowed. Without meeting my eye, she said, ‘We found your paperwork. Accommodation office is in the Jerningham building. Inauguration speech is at four p.m. in the chapel. Attendance is mandatory.’
The victory felt hollow. She handed me a dark green lanyard that cheerfully proclaimed ‘I’m a new student!’ and I scurried out of the entrance hall, head down to avoid the cold glares of the other students.
The campus was built in concentric semicircles around the grounds of a former convent; a proud stone building of stained-glass windows and ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and pointed arches, spires and towers and intricate tracery. The cobbled walkways were lined with black Victorian street lamps and gnarled trees with branches like crooked bones.
Outside the entrance hall was a statue of Sister Maria, one of the last nuns to live in the convent before it was converted into an academic institution. Her stone hands were clasped in prayer as she stood vigil. The folds of her habit draped down to her ankles in rough-hewn ripples, and her chiselled features bowed in a way that made her eyes sink into shadows. The beads of the rosaries snaking around her wrists were fat, glimmering rubies, surrounded by shallow scratches where many a desperate thief had taken a chisel to the precious jewels. The attempts were fruitless; they may have been worth a fortune, but the rubies were embedded in the stone as though by some greater force.
Sister Maria had been the original North Tower victim, falling to her death a little over a hundred years ago. Whether she jumped or was pushed, nobody has ever known.
Laying down my briefcase on the cobbled forecourt, I stood against the statue for a few minutes, taking in great gulps of the late September air and trying to gather my emotions.
Northumberland had always been home for me, and yet being here already felt all wrong.
I’d applied to the elite philosophy programme as soon as Carvell had reopened – if I was going to practice law one day and be a judge, if I was going to play God in the fates of murderers and victims alike – where better to cut my teeth than a place so famously steeped in death?
Plus, it was less than twenty miles from the town I grew up in; where my parents and brothers still lived. My mum had suffered from lupus since I was twelve, and it was getting worse every year. Even the prestigious universities in Edinburgh and Durham felt too far away. What if she took a turn for the worse and it took me hours to get home? What if . . .?
I tried not to think like that.
After composing myself by Sister Maria’s statue, I headed back to the car park and yanked my suitcase out of my beat–up Ford. I frowned down at the campus map. Willowood Hall, where I’d be living for the next year, was adjacent to the central priory. Right opposite the North Tower, with its turrets and crenellations and dark, dark past.
Nerves writhed in the pit of my stomach like adders, but not because of the proximity to the site of the murders. I’d been on edge about my new roommate all summer – about what it would be like to share a bedroom with another person after eighteen years of my own space. Another person who could well be the devil, or worse, a snorer.
Friendship, for me, was a long game. Something that could not be rushed or fast-tracked. My affections were not the quick flint of a forest fire, but rather grew like ivy; a slow creep over many years, difficult to destroy with a barbed comment or a careless joke.
Ever since my best friend Noémie moved away, the thought of getting to know new people felt overwhelming. Noémie and I had known each other since primary school, and become properly close in sixth form. She’d moved back to Canada to study in Toronto, and I was already daunted by the crater she’d left behind. There had been an almost-romantic layer to our relationship. Limbs tangled as we slept, though we never kissed. Love-yous exchanged with a kind of fake casualness. I’d never entirely unpacked what I felt for Noémie, and I was a little afraid to.
Anyway, now it was too late. She was gone, and we didn’t talk any more, so what was even the point of it all?
Back in high school, I never felt like I belonged. It was cool to look like you hadn’t tried, like you’d just tossed on whatever novelty tee and dirty Converse you had lying around. I was scorned for trying too hard, for being too serious, for thinking too highly of myself. So I hoped my new roommate would be like me. I wanted someone I could discuss Sartre and Foucault and Nietzsche with, while drinking red wine and whisky. To speculate about the afterlife and the occult, and exchange beloved books and films. Someone who would make Northumberland feel so much larger than it was. Because if I couldn’t go and study at Edinburgh or Harvard or Cambridge, Carvell had to be the next best thing.
When I found the room, it was still empty; no sign of my roommate yet. There were two single cabin beds bracketing a central arched window, each with a little roll-top desk tucked beneath the bunk. The
carpet was a dark green tartan and the walls were high and white. The window was open a sliver, and the smell of moss and rosemary and wild garlic drifted in on the breeze. It was at once achingly familiar and achingly sad. A connection to the Alice who used to make dens in the woods with Aidan and Max, before Mum was diagnosed, before Max left for London.
It smelled of home, and yet I was not home. Not any more.
CHAPTER THREE
ALICE
Within fifteen minutes of arriving at Carvell, I already wanted to slit someone’s throat.
The tweed-clad woman in front of me glared at her clipboard as though it had personally wronged her. ‘Name?’
I shifted on the heels of my Doc Martens. They squeaked conspicuously on the chequerboard floor of the cavernous entrance hall. ‘Alice Wolfe. Philosophy.’
Judging by her disdainful expression, I got the feeling she’d been roped into these tedious welcome greetings in the absence of any student volunteers. Which made sense, because I was one of the first students to walk through the doors in ten years.
Her watery-blue eyes scanned a list. ‘You’re not on here. Did you submit your enrolment paperwork before the deadline?’
Through gritted teeth, I replied, ‘Yes.’
She gave a terse schoolmarm tut, pushing her half-moon glasses further up her nose. ‘You mustn’t have, because you’re not on here.’
Anger snapped across my chest like an elastic band; a hot, familiar sting. I couldn’t keep it from my voice. ‘Well, I definitely did. So it must be a cock-up on your end.’
At this the women inhaled sharply, as though the unsavoury word had caused her physical pain. Eyelids fluttering with distaste, she replied quietly, ‘There’s simply no need to be so rude. I assure you this is no fault of our administrative staff. I’m afraid you’ll have to resubmit your paperwork.’
I’d spent hours on that godforsaken paperwork the first time.
Deep in my blazer pocket the obnoxious Nokia ringtone blared, echoing around the cold stone entrance hall. The queue behind me was growing restless.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I lowered my voice and said, ‘I’ve already done the paperwork. Please would you check again?’
She issued a tight grimace. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to step aside and complete another set of forms. There are a lot more students I have to see.’
She looked down her nose at me, smug with self-importance, and the dam holding back my anger crumbled.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I snapped. ‘Would it kill you to check one more time?’
She blinked sharply, as though a loud bang had gone off. Then, lips curling, she disappeared into a small office behind her welcome desk.
As usual, there was a soft ebb of pleasure as I let the anger out, followed by the cold tide of guilt and self-loathing; a deep undertow of shame.
Then came the acute sensation of being watched.
Following the paranoid tug, my gaze landed on a tall, bespectacled man in a walnut-coloured corduroy suit who was staring impenetrably at
me. I recognised him as head of philosophy; his headshot had been in the prospectus. And he’d witnessed my outburst.
Hands folded over his sloping stomach, he gave me a chastising head shake, like a disappointed grandfather.
‘Such wrath isn’t very becoming of a young woman, you know,’ he said in a crisp academic tone. He adjusted his mustard-yellow tie. ‘And I would prefer you not to speak to our faculty members in such an unpleasant manner.’
I glared at him, momentarily speechless.
Did he actually just play the ‘unbecoming of a young woman’ card?
Before I could sling a low and dirty retort in his direction, the woman reappeared from the office, cowed. Without meeting my eye, she said, ‘We found your paperwork. Accommodation office is in the Jerningham building. Inauguration speech is at four p.m. in the chapel. Attendance is mandatory.’
The victory felt hollow. She handed me a dark green lanyard that cheerfully proclaimed ‘I’m a new student!’ and I scurried out of the entrance hall, head down to avoid the cold glares of the other students.
The campus was built in concentric semicircles around the grounds of a former convent; a proud stone building of stained-glass windows and ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and pointed arches, spires and towers and intricate tracery. The cobbled walkways were lined with black Victorian street lamps and gnarled trees with branches like crooked bones.
Outside the entrance hall was a statue of Sister Maria, one of the last nuns to live in the convent before it was converted into an academic institution. Her stone hands were clasped in prayer as she stood vigil. The folds of her habit draped down to her ankles in rough-hewn ripples, and her chiselled features bowed in a way that made her eyes sink into shadows. The beads of the rosaries snaking around her wrists were fat, glimmering rubies, surrounded by shallow scratches where many a desperate thief had taken a chisel to the precious jewels. The attempts were fruitless; they may have been worth a fortune, but the rubies were embedded in the stone as though by some greater force.
Sister Maria had been the original North Tower victim, falling to her death a little over a hundred years ago. Whether she jumped or was pushed, nobody has ever known.
Laying down my briefcase on the cobbled forecourt, I stood against the statue for a few minutes, taking in great gulps of the late September air and trying to gather my emotions.
Northumberland had always been home for me, and yet being here already felt all wrong.
I’d applied to the elite
philosophy programme as soon as Carvell had reopened – if I was going to practice law one day and be a judge, if I was going to play God in the fates of murderers and victims alike – where better to cut my teeth than a place so famously steeped in death?
Plus, it was less than twenty miles from the town I grew up in; where my parents and brothers still lived. My mum had suffered from lupus since I was twelve, and it was getting worse every year. Even the prestigious universities in Edinburgh and Durham felt too far away. What if she took a turn for the worse and it took me hours to get home? What if . . .?
I tried not to think like that.
After composing myself by Sister Maria’s statue, I headed back to the car park and yanked my suitcase out of my beat–up Ford. I frowned down at the campus map. Willowood Hall, where I’d be living for the next year, was adjacent to the central priory. Right opposite the North Tower, with its turrets and crenellations and dark, dark past.
Nerves writhed in the pit of my stomach like adders, but not because of the proximity to the site of the murders. I’d been on edge about my new roommate all summer – about what it would be like to share a bedroom with another person after eighteen years of my own space. Another person who could well be the devil, or worse, a snorer.
Friendship, for me, was a long game. Something that could not be rushed or fast-tracked. My affections were not the quick flint of a forest fire, but rather grew like ivy; a slow creep over many years, difficult to destroy with a barbed comment or a careless joke.
Ever since my best friend Noémie moved away, the thought of getting to know new people felt overwhelming. Noémie and I had known each other since primary school, and become properly close in sixth form. She’d moved back to Canada to study in Toronto, and I was already daunted by the crater she’d left behind. There had been an almost-romantic layer to our relationship. Limbs tangled as we slept, though we never kissed. Love-yous exchanged with a kind of fake casualness. I’d never entirely unpacked what I felt for Noémie, and I was a little afraid to.
Anyway, now it was too late. She was gone, and we didn’t talk any more, so what was even the point of it all?
Back in high school, I never felt like I belonged. It was cool to look like you hadn’t tried, like you’d just tossed on whatever novelty tee and dirty Converse you had lying around. I was scorned for trying too hard, for being too serious, for thinking too highly of myself. So I hoped my new roommate would be like me. I wanted someone I could discuss Sartre and Foucault and Nietzsche with, while drinking red wine and whisky. To speculate about the afterlife and the occult, and exchange beloved books and films. Someone who would make Northumberland feel so much larger than it was. Because if I couldn’t go and study at Edinburgh or Harvard or Cambridge, Carvell had to be the next best thing.
When I found the room, it was still empty; no sign of my roommate yet. There were two single cabin beds bracketing a central arched window, each with a little roll-top desk tucked beneath the bunk. The
carpet was a dark green tartan and the walls were high and white. The window was open a sliver, and the smell of moss and rosemary and wild garlic drifted in on the breeze. It was at once achingly familiar and achingly sad. A connection to the Alice who used to make dens in the woods with Aidan and Max, before Mum was diagnosed, before Max left for London.
It smelled of home, and yet I was not home. Not any more. ...
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