Soul Beach by Kate Harrison

Author:Kate Harrison
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781780620336
Publisher: Indigo
Published: 2011-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

36

I’m fighting to stop my teeth chattering, because I don’t want Sahara to see.

It’s not as though I haven’t been there before. I even slept in that room when I came to stay with Meggie, sandwiched into the single bed between the wall and my giggling sister, listening to drunken punch-ups on the street underneath her window.

But now it’s different.

‘You can get in there?’

Her brown eyes are wide and proud. ‘No one’s supposed to. But Meggie gave me a spare key because she was always forgetting hers.’

Sahara is desperate to show me. But do I want to see it?

I find myself nodding, and she takes my hand and marches off along the Thames, then back through the college grounds, past the arched temples to learning, towards the modern halls. It’s still lunchtime – now I definitely know Adrian was lying about being late for a lecture – and students laugh and flirt across the campus, which makes the gravity of what we’re about to do seem even more obvious.

I’m out of breath by the time we’re back in the lift and going up to Meggie’s floor. It smells of hot engine in here, and on the walls there are posters for the Last Beach Party of the Season featuring tropical palms and hula-hula girls, and I wish I could magic myself out of here and back to my bedroom, and Soul Beach.

The lift takes an age to get going, and as my breathing slows I look at Sahara. She’s staring at the steel doors. Her jaw is locked in determination.

As the lift gears crunch, something slots into place in my head, too.

Could Sahara have killed my sister?

My brain seems to be working at treble speed. An argument before the murder. Sahara’s weird excitement at showing me this place. The fact she showed up just minutes after the body was found . . .

‘I want to get out,’ I say, in a whisper.

‘That’s fine, we’re here,’ she says.

‘Right.’

As we step out, I search in vain for a video camera. Even though I know there aren’t any, because the CCTV trail of my sister’s last minutes stopped three streets away. The uni rejected the whole idea of extending surveillance on the grounds of privacy, but surely the police have added cameras on the main road now. Cameras that might show my last minutes.

‘Are you all right? We can take our time.’ Sahara is smiling broadly, revealing her goofy teeth. Was she jealous of my sister’s effortless prettiness? Of her success?

I try to calm myself. It’s rubbish, of course it is. The killer was obviously a man. One who wanted Meggie all to himself. Tim or . . .

Sahara has taken my arm, and pushes me up a few carpeted steps. The wooden door to the flatlet is the same, but the glass panel in it is papered over from the inside, with a sign saying NO ACCESS. ‘They had to cover it up because all the freshers came here to gawp. Especially late at night.

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