The Bursar's Wife (13 page)

Before Quintin got in he said something to Sylvia which made her cringe like a child at a raised fist. The car, with square-headed Mark at the wheel, took off. Sylvia stared after it. She was hugging herself, probably against the cold, but it could equally have been at what Quintin had said to her.

THE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE EVEN MY EARLY-BIRD NEIGHBOUR
left for work, I was in Cottenham and parked in sight of number thirty-two where the alleged benefits cheat lived. No one came out. If the guy was working he wasn’t doing a nine-to-five. Bored, I left, stopping by the nursing home to see my father. They didn’t encourage you to stop by at any old time but they didn’t forbid it and I liked to surprise them. Megan, the young care assistant, was clearing away my father’s breakfast tray.

“You’re here early. No flowers today?”

No, I had not brought flowers. I sat with my father as he stared out of the window into the garden. It wasn’t a bad view; they’d placed bird tables and feeders on the semi-circular lawn and a cold sun was out. I tried to recall his last year at work, the year Sylvia, Elliot and Quintin had graduated from Morley. There didn’t seem to be much significance to attach to this, except that he had retired early on full pension due to, as my mother put it, “Problems at work.” I never learnt what these were, but my father made no secret of his loathing of some of the students, who he said treated him like shit. Hence his endless asides to me along the lines of, “Never let anyone think they are better than you are, Kevork.” I hadn’t heard him speak for nearly a year, perhaps somehow realising he wasn’t making sense anymore.

Megan brought me a cup of tea.

“I think it’s lovely that you come and visit, you should see the number of people here that don’t have visitors.” She put the cup down on a side table. “It was nice of your cousin to visit your father.”

“Cousin?”

“Yes, a distant cousin I think it was, not a cousin.”

My heart skipped a beat – as far as I knew I didn’t have a cousin, distant or otherwise. “When was this?”

“A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday.”

“I wonder which cousin it was?” I asked, trying to sound casual. “Did he or she give a name?”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t on duty but we talked about it on the Monday because it was unusual for anyone else to visit. Sorry I didn’t mention it before. I didn’t think it was important.”

I shrugged. “I’m just curious, I hadn’t realised someone from the family had visited, that’s all, and it would be remiss of me not to thank them. Of course I don’t want to embarrass myself by thanking the wrong cousin.”

“I could find out for you.”

“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble; like I say, I’m just curious.”

She smiled. “It’s no trouble at all. I’ll ask Angela when she’s in tomorrow, she was on duty that Sunday.”

* * *

Back in Cambridge I got a coffee from Antonio’s and took it to the office. Nina was coming down the stairs as I started to ascend, dressed in her crisp white coat and the little pin on the lapel. I had to wait at the bottom to let her come down. Our aborted date seemed a distant memory now.

“Hello,” I said. I was half expecting the cold shoulder but she grinned at me and I swear she tossed her hair as she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I heard about your act of chivalry Friday night. You should have said something.” She brushed something from the shoulder of my coat, caressed it even. “Shall we try again? Perhaps you could come to mine. I’ll cook something healthy.” Now her voice was caressing
me
. I mumbled something, which she took as a yes. She said something about Friday night. I said something about how great that would be. She smiled and walked on. I checked my chin for drool.

I was pondering the ups and downs of dating as I went through the open door of my office. Sandra was sitting at her desk, typing fast.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, looking up at me without any discernible reduction in her words per minute. I sat at my desk, put my feet up and looked at my shoes – there was a little dried mud on the sides from when I’d found Elliot.

“Did you tell Nina about my brush with Lucy Booker?” The typing stopped.

“Trust me, George, I was doing you a favour. She was telling anyone who’d listen that you ran off with a young girl.”

“She said what?”

“She was telling everyone in the building about your date before it happened and afterwards, you arse. We’re women, we talk. Anyway, yesterday she was saying that you’d dumped her for a young girl in the pub. So I took her aside and explained that as it happens you were on a case and to stop badmouthing you. I may have used stronger language.” I could imagine Sandra taking Nina aside; that would have been worth paying to see. Sandra started typing again and her words per minute increased, a sure sign she was annoyed.

“OK, Sandra, I was wrong, you were doing me a favour.”

“Can I do you another favour?” I grunted at this rhetorical question. “It’s not my business, but she’s not right for you. Trust me. There, I’ve said it.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not your business.” Secretly I was worried that Sandra would find out that I’d just made another date with Nina. I was regretting it myself now having learnt that Nina liked to blab.

To break the awkwardness I gave Sandra a précis of yesterday’s session with the police and my heart-to-heart with Sylvia afterwards, ending with her confrontation of Quintin at the station.

“She’s really worried about this Quintin Boyd eh? Enough to pretend she doesn’t know him.”

I turned to her. “Show me where you found the details of Sylvia and Elliot going to Morley.” I scooted my wheeled chair over to her desk. She made room for me to see the screen as she brought up a bookmarked website.

“It’s a website of Morley alumni. You just type in a name, if you have one. At first I couldn’t find Sylvia Booker but then I realised she’d be under her maiden name.” She typed in ‘Sylvia’. Three of them came up. She clicked on Sylvia Jessica Patten. “And there she is. Quite a stunner she was, and so young looking.” Indeed. I didn’t say that she’d also aged very well. She’d been photographed in her graduation garb and it listed her course (Civil Law) and the societies she’d been in. The list looked like a straight copy of her daughter’s interests except for something called the Cambridge Blue Club. A small paragraph described her postgraduate achievements. In her case marrying Elliot Booker seemed to have happened immediately after graduation and Lucy was born the same year; they hadn’t wasted any time. There was a list of the charities she was currently a trustee of, a couple I already knew about. It looked like she’d never practised law in anger.

Sandra clicked on Elliot’s name. He had a first in Economics and apprenticed at the usual management consultancy firms before becoming bursar back at his old college five years ago. The only society he’d belonged to, apart from the debating team, was the Cambridge Blue Club.

“What do you reckon the Cambridge Blue Club is?” I said.

“No idea,” Sandra said. “Something Cambridge related.”

“Very good, detective. ‘Cambridge blue’ refers to the colour worn by university sports teams. Maybe it was a sports club.”

“You can also list people alphabetically,” she said, clicking on a button. “Boyd is just down from Booker, obviously.” She clicked on Quintin Boyd and a picture of a tousle-haired young man with the same strong jawline I’d seen on his company website and in the flesh from afar was at the top. “There’s something of George Clooney about him,” she said. My eye, however, was drawn to his society memberships. He seemed to belong to most of them, including something called Republicans Abroad and, guess what, the Cambridge Blue Club. But I wanted to check something else. Something that Sylvia had said yesterday when I’d met her outside the police station.

“Go back to the list of names.” She clicked back in the browser. There it was, four down from Boyd. Judith Brampton. I jabbed excitedly at the name. Sandra clicked. Brampton, Judith, graduated eighteen years ago. Read Criminal Law, joined the police fast-track graduate programme the year of graduation. A picture of a younger Brampton smiled out at us; it was the first smile I’d seen on her. I scanned for her club memberships.

Member of the Cambridge Blue Club.

“Bloody hell,” I said.

“What does it mean?” she said. I scooted back to my desk.

“It means they were all in the same club.” Sandra got back to work and I Googled the Cambridge Blue Club with no result. I chewed over things for a while, but the typing was having a soporific effect. I’d got up far too early. The typing stopped.

“Why don’t you go, I’ll lock up,” Sandra said. I picked my feet up off the desk.

“OK, I need to do some food shopping anyway.” She watched me put my raincoat on.

“Buy something healthy, won’t you, George?”

“Yes, Mum.” She looked suitably pissed off as I left.

It was only when I was downstairs that I remembered that I hadn’t told Sandra about the strange visitor to the nursing home, but I saw no point in worrying her.

ON THE WAY HOME I STOPPED AT THE SUPERMARKET TO BUY
ready meals, some steaks, frozen chips and peas. I also selected milk and fruit and eggs and coffee, enough for a week. I then wheeled by the drinks section and looked for bargains: 3 for 2 offers, bin ends, a litre for the price of 75ml. I had to move the food in the trolley to prevent it from being crushed by bottles and cans. I stood in the queue at the checkout replaying Friday night in my head, when I’d taken Lucy home and listened at the door to Sylvia and Elliot arguing. The woman behind the till was distracting me with excessive chat, asking me how I was and what did I think of the weather. She scanned my stuff coming down the conveyor belt with beady eyes as well as the barcode reader.

“Night in with the lads is it?”

“No. Just stocking up.”

“Not very healthy, is it?”

“What are you, a dietician?” She looked taken aback. I was a little harsh I admit, but sometimes a guy just wants to be left alone and not be told what to do by well-meaning women. She went quiet and avoided eye contact.

As I was leaving I heard her say to the next customer, “Some people! You try to be friendly…”

In the car park I opened the hatch of the Golf to put the shopping away and saw the black rubbish bag full of the Bookers’ recycled paper. After seeing Elliot dangling from his ceiling I’d put it in the car when I’d quickly left – not wanting to leave it for the police to find – and forgotten all about it.

* * *

As soon as I got home I spread out the Bookers’ recycling over the dining room table. Olivia had been keen on dinner parties and we’d been to several (all her friends) and hosted a few, despite her being embarrassed at the decorative state of the house, saying it was dark and stuck in the 1950s. She had wanted to knock downstairs through to create one enormous room, an idea I’d put the kibosh on, using the excuse that technically the house still belonged to my father and it didn’t feel right turning it into something else while he was still alive, even if he wasn’t capable of knowing the difference anymore. Secretly though, I liked the cosy claustrophobia of the rooms and the ability to shut out the knowing chatter of her book group while I watched TV or read. Sometimes I would open the front door to Olivia’s bookish chums holding the latest Stephen King or Dan Brown just to annoy her, until one day they stopped coming round, about the same time we stopped having dinner parties, and probably the same time she found intellectual and physical comfort with her new friend.

I poured three fingers of an amber liquid into a glass and sorted the pile of rubbish into envelopes, newspapers and flyers. The Bookers, or at least one of them, took
The Times
and the
Sunday Telegraph
. There were also some newsletters from various charities with Sylvia’s name on the address label. They’d obviously had a clear out: there were several issues each of the
Economist
and
Harper’s Bazaar
magazine, which seemed to be full of Sylvia Booker lookalikes. I ignored the flyers and turned to the letters and envelopes. I could find no personal correspondence; they were obviously very careful about what they put in the recycling. The only letters were generic marketing appeals addressed to the householder.

The Bookers were conscientious recyclers though; even the little plastic windows had been torn out of envelopes. Most of them had contained bills or statements that betrayed their origins either with a logo or a return PO box printed on the back – I’d done this enough times I knew the return PO boxes and towns of most credit card companies, banks and utilities. I found an envelope with a five-day old Cambridge postmark and Special Delivery sticker on it, which meant it had been received on the Friday. Most interesting was the spiral staircase logo I’d seen on the letter Elliot Booker had been holding when he’d opened the door to me. ‘Private and Confidential’ was printed in the bottom right-hand corner and it had Elliot Booker’s name and address printed on a label. I looked on the back for a return address but there was a just a PO box with a Cambridge postcode. I turned up nothing else of interest in the pile so I pocketed the envelope and went to the hall to answer the ringing phone – Jason.

“Boss, are we still on the Booker case?”

“Yes we are, my son. I’d like to pick up the tracker from the Merc; it’s served its purpose and the battery’s probably dead.”

* * *

The next morning Jason and I drove south out of Cambridge towards Royston, where Sandra had traced the registered address of the Merc to the firm that ran the luxury car rental company – Chauffeured Comfort Cars.

“I’ll settle up with you for the work you’ve done so far when we get back to the office,” I told Jason.

“Maybe I can get those headphones you mentioned.” Stuck behind a coach on a straight stretch of the A10 I contemplated pushing the Golf round it as I had a wake of cars behind me and could see clear road ahead.

“How’s that going?”

“Well, I thought about what you said, boss, about it being an acting job, and that sort of helped… Are you going to overtake that coach or what?” I strained the old Golf painfully past the dirty coach and we pulled in front of it with some relief.