Chapter 151: She Found Something

POV: Jess

The favour had taken four days to come through. I had asked for it carefully, framed it in the most neutral language I could construct, and presented it to Danny as a straightforward records request rather than the thing it actually was. Danny was a second-year IT systems student who I had tutored through a statistics module the previous semester, three sessions a week for six weeks, and who had told me at the end of it that he owed me one and to ask whenever I needed something. I had not needed anything until now.

What I asked for was a communication log from the faculty administrative email system for a specific period covering the months before and after Holt's appointment as a visiting academic. I told Danny I was working on a student welfare research project that required understanding the communication patterns around visiting faculty appointments. I told him it was for academic purposes and that I only needed metadata, sender and recipient addresses, subject line headers, and timestamps, not the full content of the emails.

Danny had said he would see what he could do. Four days later a compressed file arrived in my inbox with a message that said: this is the edge of what I can pull without triggering a system flag so please be careful with it and don't tell anyone where it came from.

I opened it at my desk on a Tuesday morning while Marcus was at training and the dorm was quiet and I had three hours before my afternoon lecture.

The log was extensive. Months of administrative email traffic, hundreds of entries, the kind of volume that made the relevant threads difficult to locate without knowing specifically what you were looking for. I had built a search framework before the file arrived, a set of keywords and name combinations that I expected to locate Holt's communications with the administration about the competition panel appointment, the complaint process, and Riley's academic profile.

I ran the search, The results were not what I was looking for. I found Holt's name in the log, which was expected. But the earliest appearance of his name was not in the period around his visiting appointment. It was eighteen months before that. Eighteen months before Daniel Holt had any official connection to this university, his name was appearing in the administrative email system in correspondence with a university email address.

I sat back in my chair, I looked at the screen for a long moment. Then I opened the entries one by one and began reading the metadata.

The subject lines were academic in framing. Consultation on student performance indicators. Advisory input on psychological assessment frameworks. Research collaboration inquiry. Each one individually would have read as entirely unremarkable, the kind of correspondence that flowed between academic institutions and external consultants without anyone looking twice. Taken together across eighteen months they formed something that was not unremarkable at all. Holt had been in contact with someone at this university about Riley before he was officially connected to this institution.

Not about the competition specifically. Not about the panel. The timestamps told me the conversation had begun before Riley was even enrolled here, which meant whoever was in contact with Holt had been discussing her as a future student, as a prospective target, before she had arrived on campus.

The administrative email address on the other side of the correspondence was not a generic departmental address. It was a named individual account.

I looked at the name, I did not recognise it immediately. I opened a second browser tab and searched the university's staff directory for the name and found the profile within seconds. A photograph. A title. A departmental affiliation. A list of responsibilities.

I read the title..Head of Student Welfare and Academic Support. I read the name again.

Dr. Serena Voss.

I sat with that for a long time. The welfare office, The place students went when they were struggling, when they needed support, when the pressure of university life had become more than they could manage alone. The place that held their mental health disclosures and their family background information and their academic vulnerabilities and their personal histories. The most confidential space on the entire campus. The space was specifically designed to be safe. Serena Voss had been in communication with Holt about Riley eighteen months before he arrived on campus.

Which meant the profiling document, the psychological assessment that Marcus had read aloud to the group in his apartment, the document that mapped Riley's vulnerabilities with the precision of someone who had studied her from the inside, had not been built from external observation alone. It had been built with inside access. With welfare office access. With the kind of detailed personal information that only existed in the records of a student's confidential support history.

My hands were very still on the keyboard.

I thought about Riley walking into that welfare office in her first weeks here, the way most students did, navigating a new institution, finding her footing, accessing the support structures that were supposed to exist for her benefit. I thought about what she had shared in those sessions. What anyone shared in those sessions. The things you said when you believed the room was safe.

None of it had been safe. I picked up my phone and called Riley.

She answered on the second ring.

"I found something," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"Tell me."

"Holt was in contact with someone at this university eighteen months before his visiting appointment. Before you enrolled here. They were corresponding about student assessment frameworks and psychological evaluation criteria." I paused. "Riley, someone here was building the infrastructure for what Holt was going to do before he officially arrived."

A silence.

"Who?" she said.

I told her the name. The silence that followed was longer than the first one.

"Serena Voss," she said quietly.

"Yes."

"The Head of Student Welfare."

"Yes."

Another silence. I could hear her breathing on the other end, the particular controlled quality of it that meant she was processing something that required a moment before she could respond to it fully.

"How far back does the email chain go?" she asked.

"Eighteen months before his appointment," I said. "Which puts the first contact around the time you would have been in your final year before university. Around the time your academic performance would have been becoming visible at a competition level." I paused. "Someone identified you before you arrived here and made sure the infrastructure to access you was in place when you did."

"She runs the welfare office," Riley said. It was not a question. It was Riley building the shape of something aloud. "She has access to every student who walks in for support. Every disclosure. Every vulnerability. Every piece of personal history that a student shares when they think they are being helped."

"Yes," I said.

"And she has been feeding that to Holt."

"The email chain suggests a sustained consultancy relationship," I said. "Eighteen months of it before he even arrived on campus and presumably more after."

Riley was quiet for a moment.

"Jess," she said. "How many students go through that welfare office every year?"

I knew the answer because I had looked it up that morning after I found the emails, in the same way I had looked up Voss's title, looking for the full shape of it before I reported any part of it.

"Roughly four hundred students per academic year access individual welfare support sessions," I said.

The line was silent. Then Riley said: "Four hundred students every year. And she has been in the welfare office for how long?"

I looked at the staff directory entry still open in my second browser tab.

"Seven years," I said.

The name in the CC field of every single email in the chain sat on my screen in the quiet of my room and the number sat in the air between us on the phone and neither of us said what we were both calculating because the calculation did not need to be said out loud.