I should have despised myself for that thought, but instead it brought a grim smile to my lips. ‘And now,’ I said softly, my lips very close to his ear, ‘you’re going to listen very carefully.’
Chapter11
Mabel
Davie and I were back in the library, sitting at the desk by the big bay window. The rain was still pelting down outside. A grey veil had hung above the university since yesterday, and as it drifted past it left droplets of rain like fingerprints on the glass. When the downpour began, news had spread across the university as if washed through by the rain itself.A student jumped off the roof, a student killed herself, a student is dead. June Owens: the name was reflected in every puddle, beading on the clothes of hurrying students, trailing them like a soundless echo into the colonnades and lecture halls where they sought shelter. June was gone, and that meant she was everywhere.
Even here, in the small room in the library, where we’d been sitting for the last twenty minutes. We’d spoken on the phone yesterday but were only just meeting up now. I knew Davie had been using every spare second to keep digging. The weary, harassed look in his eyes spoke volumes: the news that had brought the university to a grinding halt was spurring Davie on. And judging by the way his gaze kept darting to the folder in front of us, he had found something.
‘Okay, what have you got?’ I asked at last.
‘I don’t even know where to start,’ he murmured, running a hand over his stubbly beard. ‘The photo you found’—he pointed to the torn-out page—‘I checked the names.’
Intrigued, I leant in. I’d tried to look them up online as well, but apart from Amelia, my search had turned up nothing. ‘Were you able to find an address?’
‘Not one that helps us.’
‘What do you mean? I thought we were going to try and speak to them?’ To find out if that bird brooch was just a fashion accessory or… something more.
‘I’m afraid I’m not spiritual enough to believe a séance will work.’ His tone was so dry that it took me a moment to understand what he was saying.
‘Hang on… they’re dead? All of them?’ The picture was only forty years old. They should have been in their sixties by now.
‘Yup. And that’s not even the crazy part.’ Davie turned the photograph so that I could look at it properly. ‘This picture was taken in 1982. Amelia Wallingford, as you know, died in a fire that same year. Arthur O’Brien died three months later, officially of a heart attack, but inside sources say it was an overdose. His dad–some bigwig at the ministry of justice, apparently–hushed it all up. Ellen Meester and Quentin Middleton died in 1985 in a car accident…’ Here Davie cast an uncertain look in my direction, but I deliberately did not return it. ‘And Cedric Wells killed himself in 1986 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.’ He paused, his fingertip resting on Wells’s face. The sight of it still gave me an odd feeling. ‘You see? Four years after this photo of five young people was taken, all of them were dead.’
‘And you think there’s a connection to the secret society we suspect they might theoretically have been members of?’ There was more than a note of scepticism in my voice. How could there not be: the whole thing was conjecture. If they really were all dead, then that was tragic, but not impossible. People died. Often, they died too young. It didn’t necessarily mean there was a conspiracy or some weird cult behind it.
Davie, on the other hand, seemed more convinced than ever. He nodded. ‘And it’s not a one-off. I’ve checked every name that’s cropped up in connection with the League, and it always leads to an obituary.’
‘So you’re saying… its members… have a tendency to die?’
Davie reached for the folder lying between us. ‘And so does anyone who gets too close to them.’
My stomach twisted. ‘How did you get all this information?’
‘Change of approach. When you’re looking for clues aboutasecret society, it’s obviously going to be pretty slim pickings– assuming they’re even remotely good at what they’re doing. So I took a closer look at what else was going on during the years when they were supposedly active at a particular university.’
‘And?’ I watched nervously as he leafed through the documents until he came across a plastic folder. I could see from the page at the top that it contained copies of newspaper articles.
‘I found a lot of… weird stuff, especially when I looked a bit further back. It was more than just vandalism, break-ins and illicit parties. I also found an unusually high number of deaths. I mean, sadly, we both know that the suicide rate at elite universities is comparatively high, but these were massive spikes in the statistical curve. So many students either took their own lives or had fatal accidents or went missing.’
He broke off, breathing heavily. By now I was too, as I struggled with the weight of what he was saying. Suddenly, everything seemed to be coming down on top of me, and I was buckling under the strain. ‘You’re telling me that June wasn’t an isolated incident.’
Davie nodded weakly. ‘It’s the start of a pattern, Mabel. A dangerous one.’
I wrapped my fingers around my forearms. ‘But… how? I mean, there were eyewitnesses who saw that June was alone when she jumped. That she did it deliberately. It wasn’t an accident, and nobody made her do it.’
‘Just because she wasn’t pushed, it doesn’t mean that no one made her do it.’
‘What are you saying? That the group had something on her?’ I was still sounding dubious, although when I thought of Victor, somehow I found the idea much more plausible.
‘Or they did something so awful to her that she didn’t think she could live with it.’
Neither of us had to say it out loud. There had been three events during freshers’ week alone on the topic of sexual assault, and what I’d read over the past few weeks while I was researching the connection between rape and student societies was enough to remind me for the rest of my life why I wanted nothing to do with them. And yet I’d been unable to connect any of it to the League of Starlings. Not at the library and not at their parties. Whatmightbe their parties.
God, it was all so confusing. My temples were pounding. I pressed a hand to my head and forced myself to concentrate. ‘So what now? What are we going to do?’ I tried to reach for the file, but Davie jerked it back.
‘Wearen’t going to do anything. You promised me you’d drop it if we found something really bad.’
