She looked up at me, her hands still busy on the desk. Her movements seemed nervous, uncontrolled, her eyes darting from me to the cardboard boxed scattered around the room. I caught glimpses of ring binders, books and desk supplies. The professor must have asked a department secretary to help him pack.
‘I’m afraid not,’ she said in a hollow voice, tossing a stapler into the box beside her.
Confused, I moved further into the room, stopping next to a round meeting table. ‘My name is Mabel Golding, I have an appointment, he?—’
‘Professor Edwards died last night,’ she broke in.
Comprehension descended like icy hands around my throat, squeezing. I clutched the back of a chair reflexively, trying to breathe. To understand. My gaze flitted across the chaos in the room, then back to the secretary. My heart was thudding. ‘What happened?’
‘They found him in the building next door, in the atrium. It seems he fell from one of the balustrades. The police said they found no evidence of foul play.’ Her voice cracked, and she fished a tissue from her trouser pocket to blow her nose. It was only then I realised she wasn’t emotionless, she was in shock.
And maybe I was, too. Because I knew what she’d just said but it hadn’t sunk in. Although I was aware of what that last sentence implied, I refused to contemplate the thought. I knew the building she was referring to: one of Trinity College’s crowning jewels, adorned with intricately carved wooden balustrades that overlooked the foyer below. A foyer paved with cool grey stone slabs. Nobody fell over a chest-high railing by accident. You were either pushed or… you jumped.No foul play. Presumably that meant the police thought it was suicide.
I was gripping the wooden backrest so tightly that a splinter lodged in my skin. I barely noticed it–all I could think about was Professor Edwards’s voice that night at the Christmas party.June Owens and Paulina Gallagher.
It’s a pattern, isn’t it?I had said.
It’s a pattern. I knew that now, and I felt like throwing up.JuneOwens and Paulina Gallagher and Garrett Edwards.This was no accident, and it certainly wasn’t a suicide. It wasthem.
I shook my head vehemently. ‘But that’s… no. He was just on the verge of retirement, he?—’
‘That’s all I can tell you,’ she interrupted in a wavering voice. Her eyes glistened with tears, her cheeks trembled. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ve got a lot to do.’
I was barely aware of the walk back to my room. The faces that passed me blurred into featureless planes of red cheeks and blue-tinged noses, the college to a picture book of winter colours.
I felt numb. How was this possible? How could the only person who might have held some answers die just one day before he was supposed to give them to me? And… if I was right, and the League really did have something to do with it, did that make it my fault? What if they’d found out he was planning to talk to me? But how could they…
I stopped halfway up the staircase to my room. Of course: someone had known. Blake had seen me with him that night, and he’d admitted quite frankly that he knew who Professor Edwards was. What if he’d told Ashton and the rest? What if they’d decided together to make sure we didn’t get another conversation? What if…
He wouldn’t do that.The thought pressed itself to the surface of my mind, a beacon of hope I clung to because everything else in my head was so dark.
I knew Blake. Not everything about him, but I knew what kind of person he was. He wasn’t like Ashton and the others. He had a good soul.
And if you’re wrong about him?the doubting voice inside me whispered as I fumbled for my key with trembling hands.How can you still believe you really know him after what Aspen told you?
At long last I fit the key into the lock and turned it. Pressed the heels of my hands against my throbbing eyes. I didn’t know if I was about to cry, to laugh in despair, or to curl up on the floor and stay there until it all stopped. Until it wasn’t real anymore–because it just couldn’t be. I felt too little, I felt too much. This was so crazy.
Resolutely I opened my eyes and took a breath. I had to pull myself together.First get the facts, then interpret them, as Davie had taught me. The fact was: Professor Edwards was dead. That was awful, but it didn’t necessarily mean someone had killed him. I could never know what had been going through his mind, so I couldn’t rule out the possibility that he had done it deliberately. Again, Davie’s voice shot through my head:Maybe it’s what you want to believe. You’re looking for an excuse to like him.
I wished I could deny it, but I knew it was true. I didn’t want to believe that the League had anything to do with his death. Not just because the thought itself was sick, or because it would mean they were more dangerous than I had ever imagined, but most of all because it would mean Blake was involved.
He wouldn’t do that.
I had to talk to him. First him, then Davie. As I opened my door, I reached for my phone to call Blake.
It fell to the floor the second I entered my room. A clatter on the wooden flooring that I barely heeded, because the moment that swept over me was louder. Paper sailing with a rustle off my desk, scattered by the beating of wings. The twittering that was not quite drowned out by my hammering heart.
Instinctively I closed the door behind me, although what I really wanted was to run. But I couldn’t. This was my room. My clothes over the chair, my books on the table, my notebooks on the floor. My little home, the place where I had always felt safe. Until this moment.
Because even as I stood pressed against the door, letting the scene sink in, I knew one thing: I would never feel safe or protected here again. Not when somebody had been in here and left it like this.
It was filled with birds. Real, live, flapping, chirruping birds, fifty of them, at least. Birds with black beaks and grey-brown feathers speckled with fine white dots. I knew this was their winter plumage, and that by summer they would have exchanged it for something much more splendid. Their feathers would turn black, with a sheen of greens and violets gleaming in the sun. The white flecks would fade, and their beaks would take on an intense hue. They would alter their appearance, just as they could alter their song to mimic other species. Just as they continuously altered the shape of their murmurations in the sky.
I knew this, because they weren’t just any birds.
They were starlings.
* * *
