Chapter 33
By the following day messages had started to arrive on Sasha’s phone, she told the court.
‘What kind of messages?’
‘Endless messages,’ Sasha says. She’s speaking almost in a whisper now, so tired she can barely form the words.
‘Photos of Christian, photos of a poppet that was made to look like me, a nail straight through its mouth. Threats. If I told, I would die. My mum would die. Even if I didn’t tell, I was cursed.
I was going to die. It went on and on, and on, for days.
I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I was feeling more and more ill the more it went on. ’
‘How many messages did you receive?’
‘I didn’t count them at the time,’ Sasha says. ‘It felt like my phone was going off every two seconds. I looked afterwards and it was three hundred and seventy-three messages that came through over four days.’
‘Is this a list of the messages you received?’ the advocate depute interrupts, holding up a piece of paper. It appears on the screen, showing dates and times written in blue biro.
‘Yes, I wrote that down after it all happened. I was worried something might happen to my phone.’
‘Did you know who the messages were from?’ He’s turned back to Sasha.
‘Isobel. Eliza. A few unknown numbers. I think it was probably them.’
‘Forgive me for asking, but why didn’t you just switch off your phone?’
Sasha looks at him blankly – her mum had said the same to her after it all came out.
No way to make middle-aged people understand how you couldn’t just disappear like that.
They’d never get it. ‘My mum was still away. I needed her to be able to get hold of me. I couldn’t turn my phone off like that.
Besides, it wasn’t just on my phone. They were writing notes to me, sending me emails.
The threats kept on coming.’ She stifles a sob.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Isobel suppress a sneer and her heart jumps.
Even now . . . it’s like she’s back in the dorm, waking up to find notes full of hatred stuffed under her pillow, or falling out of her school bag like charred confetti.
There was no one to talk to. Her mum was out of the country again; it was out of the question that she’d tell anyone at school.
Wherever she went she felt Isobel’s eyes on her, Eliza’s too, their dark gazes following her round the school, haunting her every moment. The pressure was relentless. Unceasing.
Once she got as far as the chaplain’s office, thinking that a clergyman might be best placed to help, but just as she was about to knock on the door the girls appeared as if by magic, one on either side of her, smirks on their faces like the one Isobel’s trying to hide now.
Looking for God, are we? Let us pray? Do you want him to tell you to kneel? Altogether now, kumbaya . . .
Then there were the dreams. The insects were back, the incessant feeling of bugs crawling under her skin, up her nose and into her ears.
The flying, falling into an infinite abyss.
Sleep was a torment, waking worse. She couldn’t even eat, everything tasting of dirt as soon as she put it in her mouth.
There wasn’t a corner of her life left untouched, untarnished.
‘I couldn’t understand it,’ she continues after a moment, her voice still low. ‘They’d be asleep, and my phone would keep buzzing. All day. All night. I didn’t know how they could be doing it. I was so scared. All the time. Then finally it came to a head.’
‘What happened?’
‘I went back upstairs to our dormitory at lunchtime one day, two weeks after Christian died. I couldn’t take any more. That’s when I found the map.’
‘This?’ the advocate depute says, holding something up to Sasha. She looks at it, nods. ‘What did it say?’
‘The map was of Arthur’s Seat,’ she says. ‘There’s a place near the top where they found a load of mini coffins that they think were something to do with magic. It’s always been associated with witchcraft. They circled the place on the map.’
She points at the screen, where the image has come up. A large-scale Ordnance Survey map with a circle written on it in black ink. Next to it is scrawled in big capital letters, JUMP HERE, a skull and crossbones scribbled alongside.
How to explain it, the sense of compulsion which drove her from the warmth of school up the slopes of Arthur’s Seat that Saturday morning last year?
She was so tired, the beeping from her phone so incessant, Christian’s face more and more visible to her, even as her eyes were open.
The guilt was overwhelming. She should have done more, she should have stopped it, stopped them, called them out for the bullies they were instead of being such a coward.
She was still being a coward, even after Christian’s death, letting them dictate what she should do rather than telling the truth.
Tell the truth and shame the Devil, that’s another thing her mother used to say to her.
Well, her mother wasn’t here now. No one was here to help Sasha, no one at all.
That Miss Waites had even asked if she was all right, but Sasha wasn’t going to talk to her. It was too late now.
‘I knew how to read the map,’ she says. ‘I did an expedition for Duke of Edinburgh. I knew exactly where they meant for me to go. So I went.’ She glances over at Isobel and Eliza but their heads are down, curtains of hair drawn against their faces.
‘I climbed up the hill, I got to the bit near the top.’
Wind in her hair, voices in her head, do it do it jump jump.
‘I just wanted it to stop. I wanted them to leave me alone. I don’t know if I wanted to die, but I thought that if I did what they wanted, they might leave me alone.’
Standing on the edge looking down at the steep hill below her. Not quite a cliff but enough of a drop. They’d chosen well.
‘So I jumped,’ she says. ‘And the next thing I knew, it was two weeks later, and I was in intensive care, with forty bones broken. Someone found me and called for help. I was lucky to survive.’
Mr Alexander nods at her, his face encouraging. She can tell he’s pleased with her, overall. She’s been a good witness. She tries to hold on to that thought.
‘Before you left for Arthur’s Seat that morning, did you write a letter?’
‘I did, yes.’ Sasha nods as he shows it to her, sealed in a plastic bag.
He turns to Sasha. ‘A copy will be given to you. Please will you read it out to the court.’
Dear Mum,
I’m sorry. I can’t go on like this. They keep on at me day and night, saying I’m next. They did it to Christian – they bullied her to death, far as I see it, telling her all the time that she was about to die. Now they’re doing it to me. I just want them to stop.
I love you.
Sasha
Sasha is blinking back tears as she gets to the end of the letter. It’s sealed in a plastic bag but she can see where it’s crumpled at the edges. She can picture it now, crushed in her mum’s hands.
‘I know this is a hard question to answer, but did you have a fully formed intention to die that day?’ Mr Alexander asks.
She knows he’s trying to phrase it sensitively, but the question feels probing.
She jumped off a cliff – what more does he want from her?
She opens her mouth to speak but finds herself hesitating.
He speaks again. ‘What I mean to say is that the letter does not make any explicit reference to death. Simply to the fact that you wanted them to stop.’
Sasha’s defensiveness drops, a little. Maybe she can reframe this narrative.
‘You’re right, you know. I don’t think I did want to die, not exactly.
But I was finding the pressure unbearable.
Isobel and Eliza just wouldn’t leave me alone.
They were on at me all the time, telling me that I would be next.
By the time I made the decision to go up Arthur’s Seat, it was more that I was completely exhausted. ’
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I know this is a difficult subject.’ The advocate depute leafs through some papers, a change in atmosphere now he’s past the worst. ‘You said that you regained consciousness two weeks later, to find yourself in intensive care, is that right?’
‘Yes. They induced a coma because they were worried about whether I might have a bleed on my brain, but I didn’t need a head operation in the end.
Only to my back. Once I was conscious I started to make a good recovery, though I had to stay in traction for a few more weeks because of the injury I did to my back.
I broke two of the vertebrae. My pelvis too. ’
There’s a little ripple of movement from the jury.
Sasha glances over. At least three of the older women have very sympathetic expressions on their faces, their eyebrows furrowed.
The two girls in the second row have their heads on one side, tipped in concern, and the older man next to them is scowling with concentration. At least, she hopes it’s concentration.
‘The police came to see me while I was in hospital. My mum had given them the letter and they wanted to know what I meant. That’s when I told them that we’d been bullying Christian.’
‘Did the police ask you whether you had any prior knowledge of Christian’s heart condition?’
‘They did, yes,’ Sasha says. ‘But I didn’t know anything about it. She never said anything to me.’