‘Can you come back another time?’
‘No,’ says Em. ‘We’re wall-to-wall this week.’
‘It’s all right,’ says the other girl. ‘I have to get to a class anyway.’
After a lot of coat-gathering and one final throw of the dice, Lulu’s friend gives her a big hug, and leaves. Lulu takes a photo of the board set-up, then starts packing away the pieces. From the box, the aim of the game appears to be to decarbonise the power grid while simultaneously avoiding blackouts and any investment in new nuclear. What’s wrong with Uno?
Eventually we have Lulu Harcourt to ourselves. She’s sitting in the tatty remains of a huge imperial wicker chair. Em and I are on a squashy sofa facing her. Nobody is sitting upright.
‘Thank you for your time, Lulu. I know this can’t be easy.’
‘If you’re here about Faisal, I told you guys everything I know. Then I told the police twice.’
I’m about to reassure her that we’re not here to talk about Faisal, like an idiot, and then I feel gentle pressure from my side.
‘I’m so sorry,’ says Em. ‘There was a burst tap at the office. Your notes got a bit mushy. Do you think you could bear to tell us again?’
Lulu sighs, Em clicks her pen, I surreptitiously hit ‘record’ on my Dictaphone app, and we’re off to the races.
Here’s how it went. Oh, incidentally, if you’re ever involved in this kind of situation, do try to sweep your phone for anything incriminating before your arrest. I have a hunch that a fifty-minute chat with the daughter of the deceased on my Voice Memos will make a pretty strong plank of circumstantial evidence at trial.
Lulu was just out of a relationship. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Students are always in or out of a relationship. If you’re over a certain age reading this, you’ll be thinking:Students these days, they’re all polysexual or something, aren’t they, not like when we were young, when our icons were normal, straightforward, male-presenting males and womanly women, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie and Grace Jones and … er … er …
Well, Lulu’s had been an old-fashioned hetero love match, or so she’d thought at first. Faisal was Iranian – sorry, Persian, she explained (about five minutes of my recording from the first mention of the P word is a severely garbled history of Middle Eastern politics) – and he was over here studying for a master’s.
I never went to university. I put York on my CV – I reasoned I should go Russell Group, but not get cocky and claim Oxbridge (partly because I’ve seen just how much other Oxbridge types enjoy quizzing you about exactly what sort of gown you wore to breakfast). So I have no experience of thisworld. But apparently, a master’s student seems very glamorous and worldly-wise to the average undergraduate. Looked at from the other end of the telescope, of course, you can see that all these people are basically twelve. But Faisal had impressed Lulu. He’d taken her to restaurants. He’d bought her a few presents: clothes from decent shops, jewellery a cut above the costume stuff most students can afford. He’d beenwooingher.
And then he’d turned.
One night, they’d been in her room. He’d come over around six, they’d slept together straight away, and then they’d spent the rest of the evening chatting, ordering a takeaway (more largesse by Faisal), and watching other teenagers play video games online. Faisal was religious, but he drank, and they’d both had a fair bit to drink when he fell asleep in her bed.
Lulu wanted to retrieve a photo from Faisal’s phone. Her bright idea was that she’d send herself some of the photos on his camera roll, then get them printed out onto some bunting to celebrate their six-week anniversary. (I know, I know. The sheer amount offree timestudents have.)
So she’d held up his phone to his sleeping face to unlock it and gone into the camera roll. Faisal was always cagey about handing over his phone during the hours of consciousness. To kids Lulu’s age, it’s like putting your kidney in someone else’s hand and hoping they don’t squeeze. She’d just assumed there was disgraceful filth on there and considered it no further.
The first thing Lulu saw on Faisal’s unlocked phone was herself.That’s sweet, she thought,he’s taken a photo of me while I sleep. Then she clicked on the thumbnail. She was asleep in the image, and he was awake. More than that, he was looking at the camera.
She scrolled back through the images.
They’d been going out five weeks by this time, but five pretty intense weeks, and they’d spent a lot of nights together in her room. His room, he’d explained, was some way out of town, and also it was in a disgusting shared house, so she’d never actually been back to his place. So maybe there had been twenty nights, tops, that they’d spent together, in her room.
Every single night, there was a photo of her in bed, asleep. The picture had been taken as a selfie, and by her side, in every shot, was a wide-awake Faisal, staring at the camera dead-eyed.
In one of them, he was holding a knife.
Now, Lulu was pretty scared at this point, but she was a smart girl, and she knew what she should do. She checked his sent messages, and found he was sending these pictures to a strange email address consisting of jumbled letters and numbers. Twenty of these messages, all sent off, to be used by someone else as … what? They weren’t nearly revealing enough to be pornographic. Erotica, then? Maybe. Power-play stuff. Or was it kompromat? Was she being set up as an acquaintance of this guy? Who, really, was Faisal?
A less together girl than Lulu would have deleted everything in the shock of the moment, woken her new ex, dumped him and kicked him out. But she poured herself a glass of water, went to the window, looked out at the cold light of theEnglish Channel, and worked out a better plan. Then, as he slept, she sent the photos to her own phone from Faisal’s, forwarded the emails, then deleted them from his ‘sent’ folder, put the phone back by his side, dressed, left, and walked through the night to the nearest police station.
Luckily for Lulu, the local police force was recovering from a recent scandal involving one of their officers, and were especially keen to ‘hear women’s voices’ right now. Before Faisal could wake up for a hung-over piss, Brighton’s best and brightest had set Tasers to stun, gone to the flat, and taken him into custody, and that had been that as far as Lulu was concerned. The wheels of – well, not justice, but university administration – had moved quickly. Within a few days she had been moved into alternative accommodation and had a new phone number. When offered the chance to go home for a bit, she hadn’t taken it. Silently, I reckoned that made sense. Charli Harcourt seemed to have many qualities, but I couldn’t see her playing the doting mum for long.
Lulu told us this with faint boredom, and I could hear in her voice the bits of the story she’d relayed half a dozen times already. Maybe that’s how people get over trauma – they just repeat the words until it’s banal. Or maybe her father’s death had put this incident in the shade. In any case, the Faisal Fiasco seemed to have already faded and assumed the importance of a rather dull old anecdote Lulu dug out occasionally because she knew other people might like to hear it. But we needed something else from her: which is why, when she’d finished, Em took her risk.
I’ve always hated the phrase ‘don’t change horses in midstream’. I mean, back in the day, were enough people really escorting more than one horse across a stream and finding it necessary to change, only for it to go wrong? Why would you even want to change horses in the first place? But it’s much more lyrical than my updated version, Rule 20.Stick with the story you’ve got.
Em breaks that rule in three … two … one …
She leans forward. ‘Thank you for telling us that, Lulu. It’s all very helpful. But the truth is, we’re not from Student Services.’
