A game most foul, p.10
A Game Most Foul, page 10
“Four,” Percy corrected. “Thierry’s only downstairs. Oh, hang on, Willem didn’t get the chance to—”
“What, wish Thierry well?” Suruthi scoffed, tossing herself down on the couch. “Don’t be daft, Perce. There’s no love lost there.”
“I’m sure Mr. Maes will have the opportunity to bid Thierry farewell if he wishes,” Professor Watson interjected quietly. “He won’t be going far.”
Professor Watson hadn’t moved from where he stood by the classroom door, also watching the thing intently, like he too was waiting for some sort of miracle.
“What do you mean, Professor?” Suruthi asked curiously.
Professor Watson waited until he had taken his regular seat at the head of our unusual circle of furniture to answer Suruthi.
“Regrettably, Miss Kaur, the police have not yet located Miss James, and as you heard Detective Constable Evans say earlier, he and his partner will be needing to ask you all some additional questions. This includes your classmate, Mr. Maes.”
“Because we’ve all got something to hide, don’t we?” Suruthi said with a sarcastic laugh. Then she sat upright, a panicked look crossing her face. “Wait. We’re not suspects, are we?”
“I believe the correct term would be persons of interest,” Percy said casually.
Suruthi managed to chuck a small throw pillow at Percy while somehow maintaining direct eye contact with Professor Watson the entire time.
Professor Watson did not look amused. “None of you are a suspect to my knowledge, nor are you a person of interest. This is merely standard operating procedure, Miss Kaur. The police need to know what exactly occurred in the hours leading up to Miss James’s . . .”
An interesting expression crossed the professor’s face as he lapsed into silence. He seemed to have forgotten the rest of what he was going to say and didn’t seem entirely present anymore. Maybe I was just projecting, but Professor Watson was currently seeing something that wasn’t visible to the rest of us.
It took both Suruthi and me saying his name a few times before Professor Watson returned to the present.
“I beg your pardon,” he mumbled. It was odd seeing him fidgeting with the cuff links of his shirt. “I’m afraid I did not . . . that is to say, my weekend was perhaps not the most restful.”
“I think we’re all in the same boat, Professor,” I said reassuringly.
“But Professor?” Suruthi leaned closer toward Professor Watson, almost hanging off the couch now. “You do think the police will find Ashley, right?”
It didn’t take him quite as long to answer Suruthi’s question. As he spoke, I didn’t believe a single word he said. I didn’t think the professor did either.
“Of course, Miss Kaur. I have every confidence that the police will find Miss James.”
Chapter 12
Anything You Do Say May Be Given In Evidence
As it happened, being questioned by the police for the second time was not really what the movies made it seem. This left Suruthi massively annoyed.
For one, Detective Constable Evans greatly miscalculated how long “a few simple follow-up questions” was actually going to take. It took hours—long enough to have to take a break for lunch.
While the rest of us sat around waiting to be questioned, Professor Watson made a valiant attempt at doing another writing exercise, but it was about the same as an act of Congress to get any of us to focus. None of the words that I actually managed to get down on paper were making any sense and every so often there would be an annoying burst of ringing in my ears that had me wincing.
“You okay, Jules?” Suruthi leaned over to ask the third time I stuffed a finger in my left ear to fiddle with my hearing aid.
“Yeah, I—I’m fine,” I said quickly, grabbing my pen for something to distract myself with. “My ears itch a lot.”
When it was my turn to be questioned, I followed Evans out of the classroom, downstairs, and into a private study room. Detective Constable Thomas was seated at the table with a notepad opened before him and a pen in hand that he kept rapidly clicking and unclicking. If I had to pick a word to describe his face, he looked bored.
“Have a seat, if you please, Miss Montgomery,” Evans instructed. “This won’t take long.”
I tried not to roll my eyes as I sat down. “Sure. And call me Jules, please.”
I got enough Miss Montgomery throughout the day courtesy of the professor; I didn’t need to hear it anymore from the police.
“Jules then.” Evans nodded, flipping his notebook open to a fresh page once he’d sat down across the table from me. “We’ll start from the beginning, shall we?”
“Beginning of what?” I asked carefully.
“Last Friday,” Thomas clarified. “Your trip to Oxford with your classmates. We need to know exactly what happened in the hours leading up to when you lost sight of the girl.”
“Oh, you mean Ashley,” I said. “Okay, yeah, we can start from the beginning.”
And start from the beginning we did. Because they were asking for it, I started to tell them everything.
“So we all had to wake up a little earlier than normal that morning, which, you know, none of us were really all that thrilled about, but we got here on time to catch the bus. I sat next to Suruthi—you met her upstairs, she’s great. Then we fell asleep on the way there even though I’d had two cups of coffee. I don’t usually do that, but that morning specifically I was really feeling tired, so I thought I’d—”
“Let’s pause for a moment here, Jules,” Evans said, raising his voice a smidge to speak over me. “We don’t need you to go back quite that far.”
“But you said—”
“Just skip to the part where you go off with the girl,” Thomas cut in, raising his voice to speak over me. “You wanted to see the Narnia door.”
“Yeah, Ashley was dead set on seeing it,” I said, leaning back in my chair, crossing my arms. “So was I, since we’d both grown up reading all the C. S. Lewis books. So, anyway, we left Suruthi and Percy sitting on a bench near a bunch of shops, I guess. Suruthi had been eating chips for lunch and Percy made me try steak and kidney pie with, like, mashed peas or something. A little gross, but still kinda good, I guess. Ashley had just gotten some tea because she said the bus ride to Oxford left her feeling sick, and I wanted another one too even though I really knew I didn’t need one, since three cups in a day is a lot of caffeine and all, but I still wanted to—”
“Jules.”
“Okay, anyway. Ashley and I went off to find the Narnia door, but we had trouble with the GPS on our phones,” I went on. “We ended up stopping to ask someone for directions, but they didn’t—”
“You spoke with someone?” Now Thomas looked interested, clicking his pen again. “Who?”
“Dunno,” I said, shrugging. “Some dude who had been riding his bike, I guess. He told us we were going the wrong way and sent us in the opposite direction.”
“Some dude,” Thomas repeated. I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or amused. “Did this dude happen to tell you his name?”
“Nope,” I answered. “After he told us where to go, he got on his bike and pedaled away down the street.”
Evans must’ve seen the way Thomas had rolled his eyes at my response and intervened before Thomas could say anything else. “And what did this gentleman look like?”
I took a moment to mull it over. The man who’d pointed us in the right direction of the Narnia door had been pretty nondescript, but I was mostly certain I could come up with a mental image.
“Stocky,” I settled on saying. “Balding, with some facial hair. He was wearing gray shorts and a red T-shirt with some sports logo on it. Red bike, with one of those little cup holder things on it where you can put your water bottle.”
Thomas quickly wrote my description down in tiny, chicken-scratch writing.
“Did anything else stand out to you about this man?” Evans asked. “His demeanor? The way he spoke, perhaps?”
I took even longer to think about the follow-up questions.
“No,” I finally said. “He was nice enough to help us out and that was pretty much it. The whole exchange lasted maybe like two minutes and then we went our separate ways.”
“I see.” Evans took his turn writing a few lines down in his own notebook before speaking again. “And when you did reach your destination with Miss James, what then?”
“We took a bunch of pictures on our phones,” I told him. “Geeked out a bit over how cool the door was. Then I tried to do a video call with my mom in California and Ashley said she was going to try and call her grandma so she could get a look too.”
The closer I got to the part in my retelling where Ashley was there one second and gone the next had my heart stuttering through a few anxious beats.
“And did Miss James speak with her grandmother?” Evans asked, back to scribbling down more notes. “Did you happen to overhear their conversation?”
I shook my head. “No. I ended up walking around a bit to try and get reception. The connection was crappy.”
“I see.”
Evans continued to write in his little notebook for the next minute, and when Thomas went back to scribbling in his own notebook, it was a struggle to keep still and not start bouncing my knee. Why was this taking so long?
I thought about trying to read their writing upside down, but another quick peek at Thomas’s chicken scratch and Evans’s tightly packed cursive made me a little nauseated. When Thomas tossed his pen aside and cut a look to Evans, some sort of silent exchange passing between them, I couldn’t bite it back anymore.
“She didn’t run away. Ashley, I mean,” I said. “This isn’t some case of a teenager running away while on vacation.”
Evans arched an eyebrow. “What makes you so sure of that, Jules?”
I started counting off on my fingers. “Because I was with her? Because I’ve spent every day of the last two weeks getting to know her? Because she wanted to be here. She’d saved up for ages to be able to afford the airfare. And she told me as much,” I added at the skeptical look that had taken over Thomas’s face. “Why would she lie about that? What reason would she have for throwing that all away?”
Evans was far quicker with his response than I was expecting, catching me off guard.
“Because you only met the young lady a fortnight ago,” he said, surprisingly calm. “Not a considerable amount of time in the grand scheme of things, no matter how good a judge of character you claim to be.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep from shrieking in frustration and scrubbed my hands over my face.
This was infuriating. Yes, I could understand that the police were just doing their due diligence, but it seemed like a massive waste of time to just be sitting here, answering questions I’d already been asked.
“How about a search party then?” I threw out, almost desperately. “We’ve already got a couple people here, why can’t we just—”
Evans held up a hand to cut me off. “I appreciate your concern for your friend, Jules, but we don’t need you wandering off either.”
“Excuse me?”
“This is your first time in London,” Thomas elaborated. “You’re a tourist. You don’t know the area. You’d wind up God only knows where, no matter how much you mean well.”
“What about her family then?” I said. I wasn’t ready to let this go; there had to be something we could do besides just sitting around waiting for the police to tell us something. “I bet her grandmother would come if you just—”
“The only emergency contact Miss James provided when enrolling in your writing seminar was her grandmother,” Evans said, his voice hardening. “When we contacted Miss Edith Longmont of Ontario to inform her of the situation, she stated that she is Ashley’s only living relative and her physician will not allow her to fly to London because she is in poor health.”
That information came as a slap to the face. My expression must’ve given that away with how Evans briefly looked mildly pleased with himself.
“I take it Miss James didn’t share that information with you, did she?” he asked.
“No,” I answered quietly. “She mentioned she lived with her grandmother and that they were close, but that was it.”
“Then I believe I rest my case.”
As if to purposely change the subject, Thomas reached into a bag on the empty chair beside him and slid what I quickly recognized as my cell phone across the table to me. Suruthi would be disappointed that it was in a simple sandwich bag instead of one marked in bold letters declaring it as evidence. “Your mobile, Jules. Thank you for your time.”
“We’ll be in touch,” Evans added as I picked up my phone.
He immediately went back to scribbling in his notebook and Thomas leaned over to mutter something to him in an undertone.
My dismissal was obvious, but I stayed seated. This couldn’t be over yet.
“Do you have any business cards?” I asked.
Evans didn’t even look up from his notebook. “Pardon?”
“Your business cards,” I said again. “Do you have any? I’d like to—”
“None on us at the moment, I’m afraid,” Thomas cut in. “Don’t worry though; we’ll be in touch if we need you.”
What was obviously left unsaid here was: we won’t need you.
Chapter 13
Now It’s Getting Really Bad
That’s the right time, yeah?” Suruthi said, peering up at the clock on the wall above the whiteboard.
Percy checked the time on his watch. “Half past nine.”
“Huh.”
I looked around at the wide-open classroom door behind me, half expecting Professor Watson to come rushing in with some apology about running late this morning. I’d been hoping that by being released early yesterday after being questioned by Evans and Thomas, we would come back today having had a reset. That didn’t seem to be the case.
Last night I’d managed to get a few sentences down in my manuscript before I’d fallen asleep early. It hadn’t been a restful sleep though; I kept having weird dreams about Ashley’s empty chair in Room 217 and a bunch of random letters floating around. If I had to guess, my subconscious was now squeezing Ashley and my lack of writing into the same box.
So for someone who’d arrived promptly at nine o’clock for the past two and a half weeks, it was odd Professor Watson had apparently picked today to not show up.
“Maybe the professor just overslept,” Percy suggested.
I appreciated the effort he was putting in to sound positive, but the expression on his face was telling a different story.
Thierry heaved an exasperated sigh from where he sat across the classroom, a new leather-bound journal open in his lap, pen scribbling across the paper. Suruthi and I exchanged annoyed looks.
Since he’d shared his rather morbid stance on Ashley’s disappearance, he’d been pretty tight-lipped. Other than to be a major suck-up to the professor or blab about how brilliant he thought the first few chapters of his political thriller manuscript were, Thierry kept to himself.
“Something you’d like to share?” Suruthi asked him sweetly.
“Not with you,” he answered without looking up.
Suruthi stuck her tongue out at Thierry and then threw herself backward into the couch, tossing an arm over her face. “Oh, what a shame. How will I ever go on knowing that Monsieur Thierry Garnier won’t bless us with his—”
“Suruthi.”
Percy’s sharp tone managed to silence Suruthi before she got any further into her rant and then she stuck her tongue out at him too.
“My apologies, class. It would appear I was rather . . . delayed this morning.”
We all looked around at the sound of Professor Watson’s voice and simultaneously tried not to gasp. If he’d looked haggard the other day, he looked awful now. He’d apparently decided to keep working on growing the beard, and he didn’t have his briefcase. As he crossed the classroom to his desk, I saw the deep circles under his eyes and the aura of pure exhaustion that followed him.
Professor Watson spent a moment at his desk rummaging around in the drawers, growing more and more frantic when he couldn’t find whatever he was looking for.
“Uh, Professor?” Percy said tentatively. “Are you alright?”
The professor kept at it, obviously not having heard Percy’s question. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it sounded a lot like Professor Watson was mumbling to himself. He swore loudly when he knocked over a pen cup with his elbow as he wrenched open another drawer.
Percy looked over at me with raised eyebrows and I shrugged helplessly. Obviously the professor was having . . . issues this morning, but what were we supposed to do about it?
“Professor?” Suruthi called loudly. “Watson? Sir? You alright?”
“What?”
I flinched at the professor’s loud bark of a response and the way it echoed uncomfortably in my ears. The others, even Thierry, were openly gaping at Professor Watson, and then I was doing the same too once I recovered.
I would’ve thought it impossible for Professor Watson to raise his voice like that. Just as quickly as the enraged look had darkened his face as he glared at us, it was gone.
He collapsed into the chair at his desk and sighed, passing a hand over his face. “I beg your pardon, Miss Kaur. It’s no excuse, but things have been rather . . . tense of late. My apologies.”
Suruthi opened and closed her mouth a couple times before she managed to come up with a response, mumbling something about how we all got a little tense now and then.
A little tense might’ve been an understatement though. Professor Watson looked way beyond “on edge” as he grabbed a fresh notepad from a desk drawer and came to join us, taking a seat in the armchair reserved specifically for him.
“Well then.” Professor Watson cleared his throat as he uncapped his fountain pen. “Where were we?”
“We ended yesterday’s discussion with character development,” Thierry supplied.
