Now here’s a mini adventure! Living in catered halls means eating at set times. I usually (well, always) eat at about 5pm, with a bunch of other people, some regulars, some not so regular. S is one of the regulars who eats at our table. She’s sat with us almost every day. The weekend before last she got a visit from her boyfriend.

Fair enough so far. We didn’t see her that weekend, which is understandable - she doesn’t see him much since he lives a long way away; in fact, they met on the Internet. Hmm. Both me and R saw her out walking with her boyfriend, and we independently came to the conclusion that he was a scary looking guy. Not too big, not too imposing, but he had a ponytail (uh-oh), and a look in his eye as if he was about to pull out a meat cleaver. S didn’t come to dinner for the next week and a half. Hmm.

Which brings us to today. Casual talk about dead bodies or something made us wonder whether S had been chopped up and sold to the hall for their Halal pork sausages. The question was asked: how do you find out when a person goes missing? If somebody is gone for a day without explanation, nobody worries too much. If they’re gone for a week, people start to worry. In this case, nobody worried because everybody had assumed she was just spending some time with her boyfriend. Those of us who’d seen him thought this was reason enough to worry. In the meantime, J arrived. We brought him up to speed. He said he’d heard that a policeman had been around asking questions about a student in Victoria Park who’d gone missing recently. Hmm.

Recap:

• S hadn’t been seen for a week
• Last we heard, she was meeting a bloke she met on the Internet.
• This bloke looked like a serial killer.
• Policemen had been asking about a missing student.

However:

• Hall sausages are unchanged.

What to do, what to do? What amount of circumstantial evidence is required to risk looking really silly? This amount! Me, R, and C went to her room to check if she was still alive. It sounds stupid, but us being stupid is better than someone else being dead. Of course, she would’ve been dead for more than a week, so we kept our noses peeled for that distinctive rotting corpse smell which we felt residents of this block might not be refined enough to notice. For what it’s worth, someone really did die here last year.

R claimed he could smell blood near the stairs, but that was the wrong direction. We marched in and found room 13 - huh! room 13! how unlucky! - open, with a guy sitting on the bed staring at us. He didn’t look like “S” or her boyfriend, but we couldn’t see any leaky binliners, so we assumed we had the wrong room. Maybe we misheard. Maybe it was 30. But that was upstairs! Maybe R, being a pharmacist after all, really had smelled blood!

On the way upstairs we stopped in a darkened common room to check for suspicious machetes, wood chippers and other implements of destruction. No need to worry though; all we found was what looked like a dangerously undermaintained portable grill.

Along we went and found the door of room 30, which was covered in pentagrams, runes and other satanic miscellany. Hmm. Oh, it’s OK, we remembered, she’d mentioned that she was a pagan. Maybe she had killed him! Her name was written in bright neon letters above the door handle, surrounded by smiley faces. That was more reassuring. We didn’t see any blood seeping out from under the door either, and everything smelled fine, unless we’d been in the block too long and had gotten used to it…

R knocked, then stepped back five or six paces, in case, he said, the killer slashed his axe down at us immediately after opening the door. Fairly unlikely, I thought, but the only reason we’re here is because of better safe than sorry, so why give up on that mantra now?

S opened the door and said hi, both to our relief and terrible embarrassment. Silence. Er. Umm. We asked if she wanted to come and see Kill Bill on Sunday. No, sorry, she said, her boyfriend was still with her (aaargh!). I mentioned (just casually, you know) that we thought he had murdered her. Bye then!

As we left, C raised the possibility that the killer had been right behind her, holding a knife to her; or even that we were looking at the corpse, the mouth being manipulated puppet style from behind, the voice being emulated by some kind of sophisticated electronic contraption built around her filleted larynx, but we couldn’t stop laughing for long enough to give this any thought, or return to good taste mode. Hmm. Makes you think…

Had one of those blinding flashes of holism today. Three modules this semester are Topology of surfaces, Metric spaces, and the unholy An introduction to measure theory, integral and dimension. It turns out that they’re really all the same thing! (except the last one, which will additionally give you the feeling of swimming in infinitely sharp razor blades)