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The gate was locked, as he’d known it would be. He stared through the bars into the street, then put his hands out experimentally to grasp them. They were very cold, running wet and dirty with the fog. He held on until his hands began to hurt, then turned.
Halfway up the garden, a side path ran behind the Master’s Gardens to the shadowy mass of Bascomb Wood, and he took that rather than threading through Summoner Quad and Old Quad. It was unlit of course, but he could have walked it blindfolded, and at least nobody would see him, since nobody would walk for pleasure in this. The freezing fog settled on Jem’s face in a clammy, dank blanket, colder where it met the tears.
He walked up to Bascomb Wood. The white trunks of silver birch glimmered faintly in the fog like a forest of bone. He ought to keep to the path that ran by the Master’s Gardens wall, but he plunged between the trees anyway, taking a perverse relish in the way his shoes sank into the mud and mulch of fallen leaves. They’d sat here in summer sometimes, taking advantage of the shade, with Nicky reciting Elizabethan love poems?—
He was not going to think of that. Toby had hated them all and Nicky had killed Toby, and there was nothing else.
The leaf-mulch was sodden and pliable. Jem’s footsteps made only a faint squelch, flattened like all sounds by the fog. He plodded towards Bascomb Stair and that hateful room, but then stopped. If he went back inside, he would have to decide what to do next, and he couldn’t.
He stood in the dark and fog under a dripping tree, despair twining through his blood and bones with every breath, and wondered if this bleakness was how Nicky felt every day of his life.
As he stood, there was a muffled clap from Front Quad, the sound of an incautious footstep coming down on an unexpected paving stone, and someone in front of him moved.
Jem wouldn’t have seen anything if he hadn’t been in the dark for so long. Bascomb Stair’s front door was shut against the fog, its edges limned in the gaslight from inside. A little yellow light from Front Quad leaked through the archway, tinting the murk. And between those two faint areas of light, someone was standing in the sodden air. Not under the arch or in the doorway, in the light where a friend to be met could see him, but in a pool of darkness outside Bascomb Stair.
Someone was waiting in the dark. Just as someone had spilled oil on the stair.
Jem hadn’t even thought about that. Nicky’s confession had obliterated every other consideration from his mind, and so he hadn’t said,Did you try to break my neck yesterday?
Nicky had confessed to murder: would he really have concealed setting a booby-trap? Would he have carried Jem back to his room and had his clothes cleaned, if he had been responsible? Would he have confessed at all, with Jem small and helpless and locked in his room, if he intended to get him out of the way?
Jem had known in his heart that Nicky was the killer, but he could not make himself believe Nicky had set that trap. It seemed too petty. Perhaps he was a gullible fool and Nicky was a monster.
Or perhaps someone else had poured oil on the stair, and that person was over there now, waiting for Jem in the darkness.
He needed to get out of here. That meant backtracking through the Wood, and round the end of the Master’s Gardens and the chapel, both dark and silent, to get back to the lights of Summoner Quad, and people, and help. It would be no distance at all for a man who could turn and sprint. Jem wasn’t even sure how fast he could walk. His pulse was thudding uncomfortably in his throat, echoed by the throb in his foot.
He retreated one step, and another, keeping his eyes fixed on the dim shape. If he moved slowly and quietly, perhaps he could fade into the fog and disappear. A small grey man, vanishing into the mists where he belonged. He took another step backwards, and this time his bad foot landed on something that wasn’t mulch, a stone or hard lump of earth that skittered away. It didn’t sound loud to Jem, perhaps because of the blood roaring in his ears, but the waiting man, now just a dim shape in the fog, looked up, and moved.
Jem turned and ran, in the childhood hopping gait everyone had mocked but which at least carried him along, heading back towards the gardens. He thrust himself onwards, stifled a cry of pain as his foot hit the ground with too much force, and realised that noise was exactly what he needed. He let out a yell that sounded terribly small and flat in the fog, like a scream for help in a dream, and managed another half-stride, and then the other man was on him, giving him a powerful shove that sent Jem stumbling into a tree trunk. He shouted out for help into nothingness, and was grabbed and thrown down, hitting the ground painfully, earth and leaves striking his open mouth. His assailant landed over him, his weight on Jem’s back knocking the breath out of him, grabbing Jem’s arm and twisting it up behind his back. His other hand came over Jem’s mouth, fingers digging into his cheeks.
Jem kicked his legs fruitlessly, like a child, pinned and helpless under the weight. He jerked his head, hard and sharply enough that the man’s hand slipped and he had the edge of a palm pressing into his mouth.
Jem bit savagely, clamping his teeth together and chewing with all the force he could muster. The man roared with pain and snatched his hand away, and Jem screamed, as shrill and carrying as he could. A solid blow sent his head snapping forward into the mud, and his arm was wrenched again, so high and hard he could feel the sinews tearing and thought, with odd clarity,No, don’t do that, it’s going to break.
‘Hoi!’ It was a deep voice in the distance, sounding over the dull buzz in his ears. ‘You there, stop! Hey!’ The newcomer came pounding through the trees as he shouted. The assailant pushed himself up off Jem, using a hand against his skull to grind his face into the clammy earth, then the weight was gone, and the man was running, spraying leaf-mulch as he sprinted away to the gardens.
‘Hey!’ bellowed the newcomer. ‘Come back!’ Jem, sprawled stunned in the mud, felt a warm hand on his shoulder. ‘Good heavens, sir, are you all—Jem?’
It was Aaron. Jem was lying on the cold, wet earth with a mouthful of leaves, and he couldn’t seem to get his breath back, and Aaron was right there. Of course he was.
‘Great Scott,’ Aaron said. ‘Did he attack you? Can you sit up?’
Jem managed to get to his knees with Aaron’s help, since his shoulder was on fire, and took a moment to spit out the dirt and fill his lungs. As he did, so another set of footsteps approached. He wasn’t even surprised to see Ella come picking her way through the trees.
‘Good God,’ she said, looking down at him.
‘Someone attacked Jem,’ Aaron said. ‘I saw him running off. Who was it, Jem?’
‘Don’t know. Second time.’
‘Second—He attacked you before?’
‘Someone did.’
Aaron and Ella exchanged looks, then Aaron took his arm. ‘Can you stand?’
It proved possible, leaning on Aaron’s strength. Upright, if filthy and freezing, Jem looked at them both. ‘How are you here?’
