The Girl Who Had No Fear. Marnie Riches

murk. But all she could see from the vantage point of the rickety desk where she had been reading was the glow from outside. The setting sun, pregnant with demonic menace, reflected on the Cambridge spires some way off to the east of the library, making the jagged rooftops look like the gaping, reddened maws of giant prehistoric beasts. Behind her were only the long shadows cast by the bookshelves; row after claustrophobic row, stacked to the ceiling with dusty old books. Anyone could hide among them in this twilight. The arsehole that had been following her … could he be lying in wait?

      ‘Who’s there?’ she shouted, her voice quivering. Her breath steamed on the sharp air.

      No answer.

      She picked up a heavy Old High German dictionary that had been left behind on the desk by some undergraduate. Held it high above her, poised to bring it crashing down on an attacker’s head, should she need to.

      The lights came back on suddenly, making her squint. She shrieked at the sight of a flustered-looking librarian, who in turn yelped at the spectre of a combative George, wielding the tome.

      ‘Dr McKenzie!’ the woman said, taking a step back and clasping her hand to her fleece-clad bosom. Almost tripping over her own feet, shod in the utilitarian leather flats that were popular with senior citizens and the bunion-afflicted.

      Horrified, knees buckling with embarrassment and relief in equal measure, George set the dictionary down on the desk beside her. She smiled apologetically at her would-be victim. ‘Mrs McMahon. I’m so sorry. The lights went out. I got spooked.’ She clutched her purple mohair cardigan around her, shivering with adrenalin as much as the cold. ‘You know how it is.’

      The ageing librarian pursed her lips and tapped on the face of her watch. Spoke with stretched out East Anglian vowels that belied her haughty attempts at received pronunciation. ‘It’s 7 p.m. The library’s closing in fifteen. And after all these years, a Fellow, of all people, should remember that the lights are on timers in the stacks.’

      ‘Sorry,’ George muttered, gathering her own books into a neat pile. ‘It gets pretty creepy up here when the sun goes down.’

      Mrs McMahon looked her up and down, eyeing George’s ripped jeans and wild curls with obvious disapprobation. Clearly the type of old-timer who didn’t think the University academic staff should dress like the students. But then, unexpectedly, her pruned mouth stretched into a kindly smile. ‘Ah, well Spring has sprung! It’s only going to get lighter of an evening.’

      George nodded. ‘Roll on summer, eh?’ Shovelled her books into her bag. Pulled on her duffel coat and slung her bag over her shoulder, glad of the librarian’s company on the long walk back down to the main entrance.

      By the time she had left the imposing phallic bulk of the University Library, the glow of the sunset had been replaced by a melancholy full moon that cast an eerie glow on the car park. That feeling of being watched still hadn’t abated, George acknowledged reluctantly.

      Unshackling her old mountain bike, she started the cycle ride back to St John’s College down Burrell’s Walk, feeling vulnerable as her malfunctioning bike lights flickered weakly in the darkness. No helmet, either. She was annoyed at her own negligence.

      Anyone could pull me off my bike down here and not a fucking soul would be any the wiser, George thought as she pedalled hard enough to make her heart thump violently and the sweat start to roll down her back.

      Scanning every dense evergreen bush for signs of the long-haired old rocker with those idiot mirror shades that covered his stalking, watchful eyes, George repeated the mantra in her head: If I see him again, I’ll kill him. Four sightings is more than just a bloody coincidence or paranoia. Nobody stalks George McKenzie and lives to tell the tale.

      Suddenly, she was blinded by a dazzling headlamp probing its way down the secluded path. A throbbing engine made the ground beneath her tremble. She felt like she was being sought out by an enemy searchlight. This was it. Whoever was after her was on a motorbike. Heading straight for her. He was going to take her out. Fight or flight?

      Wobbling and uncertain now, she steered her mountain bike into a bush, falling over painfully into the barbs of holly leaves. The motorbike was upon her. But its rider was not the long-haired rocker George was anticipating. In the saddle was a fairly elderly woman, wearing a crash helmet covered in graffiti, whom George recognised as an eccentric engineering professor from Robinson College … or was it Girton? Not her stalker.

      ‘Get off the path, you disease!’ George shouted after the Professor.

      With a defiant middle finger raised in the air, just visible in the red glow of the motorbike’s tail-light, the Engineering Professor accelerated away.

      George was safe, for now.

      As her breathing and pulse slowed to an acceptable rate, she continued her journey with nothing more than a dented ego. She checked her watch, realising she was running late. No time to stop off at college to grab a coffee with Sally Wright in the Fellows’ Drawing Room to discuss the imminent publication of their criminology tome. She’d have to make straight for the station if she were to catch the train to London. Aunty Sharon was expecting her before she went out to work. The bed in Tinesha’s old room had been made up as usual, making George’s regular scheduled early-morning journeys to HMP Belmarsh to conduct her research among its violent inmates that bit easier.

      The cycle ride along Trumpington Street was uneventful, with the Fitzwilliam Museum, spotlit in the darkness, the only thing of note, apart from the couple making for Browns restaurant. George ploughed on to the left turn at Lensfield Road, pedalling past the three-storey Victorian houses that comprised student accommodation, mainly owned by Downing College. It was only once she had reached the junction with Hills Road, where she paused to get special fried rice from the Chinese takeaway opposite the big Catholic church, that George felt certain a car had been following her. A VW Golf that she had noticed pull in as she had pulled in.

      Was that the long-haired rocker behind the wheel?

      She blinked. Blinked again and peered with narrowed eyes into the darkness. Considered approaching, throwing her scalding rice into the driver’s face.

      But what if she was wrong, as she had been with the motorbike on Burrell’s Walk? What if she was going mad and merely imagining that Bloom, the now-incarcerated transnational trafficking crime boss, known by his contemporaries as ‘The Duke’, had sent someone after her? As if he hadn’t already tortured her enough.

      ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ she muttered under her breath.

      With her foil container of food swinging in its plastic bag from her handlebar, she pedalled with as much haste as her out-of-shape legs could muster to Cambridge train station, praying the busy, brightly lit main road would afford her some safety.

      Finally, leaving her bike locked in the overcrowded bike racks, she boarded the train to King’s Cross. Two minutes to spare. And she even found a seat with a table.

      When persistent beeping heralded departure and the doors slid shut, George’s body was flooded with almost jubilant relief.

      ‘Jesus, man. This is bullshit,’ she told her laptop as she booted up. ‘I’ve got to calm down.’ She breathed in deeply; breathed out slowly. Conjured an image of her missing mother, Letitia, imagining her happily ensconced in a high-rise somewhere, maybe in Den Haag or Bruges or Southend-on-Sea, using some gigolo as a sticking plaster to nurse the wounds left by having been given a bad prognosis by that Dutch consultant. For all George knew, Letitia was bending this younger lover’s ear about her ‘pulmonaries’ and ‘sickle cell anaemics’ while she pounded his body with her middle-aged bulk. George reassured herself that the enucleated eye in the gift box in Amsterdam’s Vinkeles restaurant had just been a prank, care of Gordon Bloom, designed to freak her out and make her think that her mother was dead. Somehow, he’d got hold of Letitia’s phone. People got mugged all the time, didn’t they? She reminded herself that the emails from her father were crap, sent as a wind-up by one of Bloom’s lackeys, no doubt. She hadn’t genuinely heard from her father in over twenty years.