The Bursar's Wife (23 page)

“What a bastard. But let’s sort you out first. What’s it to be – coffee, bath, wound or painkillers?”

“I really came round so you could check the stitches. I’m worried they’ve come undone.”

“I’ll run you a bath while I look at it – you smell.” I relented to the idea of a bath, feeling too weary to trek home.

She put her hands on my shoulders as if to measure me.

“You’re the same size as my first. He left a couple of brand-new Armani suits when he scarpered to Spain. I was waiting for Jason to grow into them but it turns out he’s not built like his father. Doesn’t look like him either, come to think of it.” She winked at me and left. I gingerly took off my jacket and shirt while she ran the bath and fetched my overnight bag from the car – I always keep one in the boot. She came back dressed and with a first aid kit. I sat the wrong way round on a kitchen chair and she stood at my back. I could feel the bandage being pulled away.

“Are you going to the police about Quintin?”

“And say what? He’ll claim I got pissed and they helped me to the car; it’s not like they did anything to me. Anyway, if he gave me what I think he gave me there’ll be no trace of it in me anymore.”

I felt the bandage come away and fresh air hit the wound.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked, terrified of the answer.

“Nothing, just kidding. It looks fine to me. I’ll clean it with some disinfectant and put a new bandage on.”

* * *

Later I sat in the bath and lay back on an inflatable cushion between my shoulder blades, to keep the wound off the back of the bath. It felt good, especially when the painkillers I’d washed down with Sandra’s instant coffee kicked in. The pills killed the headache as well as the throbbing in my shoulder, and by the time I’d put on some new undies and a charcoal grey Armani suit I felt almost human. I emerged from the bathroom to the smell of cooking bacon and descended to find Sandra and Jason at the kitchen table. The sound of kids’ TV came from the living room where I assumed Ashley was plonked in front of the 42-inch plasma fixed to the wall.

“Morning, boss. Looking smarmy in Armani.”

Sandra got up and put bacon, tomato and a fried egg together on a plate.

“Have a seat, George. More coffee?” I nodded. Jason was managing to eat on his own, holding a fork in the palm of his hand with his thumb. His food had been cut up.

“Where’s Lucy?” I asked.

“Still asleep,” Sandra said, placing the loaded plate in front of me. “There’s a girl with problems.”

“You had a chat then?”

“As much as I could. She was in a state.”

“You find out anything?” I winced as she poured hot water into a cup and added instant coffee.

“Mr Boyd was taking photos of her.”

“Photos?”

“Yeah, not what you’re thinking. Just glamour portraits, that sort of thing. It’s a hobby of his, apparently.” I remembered the camera in his office, his visit to the camera shop in town when Jason and I had followed him last week. “Anyway, seems he turned her head with the attention. She found it flattering. Told her she was beautiful, the usual shit.”

“And she fell for it?” I asked.

“Jesus, boss, she’s not that bad,” Jason said.

“This from the guy who said ‘let’s hope she has a big personality’ when he saw her photo?”

“Well, it doesn’t do her justice,” he said, getting up and going into the other room. Sandra rolled her eyes at me.

“You think Quintin was grooming her?” I asked Sandra.

“She seems a little old to be groomed, but then she is childlike in some ways. That’s how it starts, isn’t it? Befriend children, take innocent photos of them, then gradually convince them to unbutton their shirt, then take it off. Before they know it they’re posing naked.”

I considered this scenario and sawed at overcooked bacon.

“Good morning,” Lucy said from the doorway. She was in a pair of Jason’s pyjamas that suited her boyish figure. I wondered if she’d heard our conversation.

Sandra offered her breakfast but she politely declined and settled for coffee.

“I can’t find my clothes,” she said.

“That’s ’cause I put them in the wash, darling, they had sick on them,” Sandra said.

Lucy blushed and looked down at her cup. Then she looked at me. “Thanks for coming to get me. Again.”

I shrugged.

“He’s a sucker for a damsel in distress,” Sandra said. She told Lucy to have a shower and that she’d bring her clothes up. Lucy went upstairs, seemingly unfazed about waking up in a council house dressed in men’s pyjamas surrounded by people she hardly knew. I looked at my watch.

“Thanks for breakfast, Sandra. I’m going to visit Dad then get some kip.”

“Oh my god,” she said. “I’ve just remembered. Jason has something to tell you.” She angled her face towards the sitting room doorway and shouted his name. He sauntered in, arms across his chest to protect his hands.

“What?”

“You’ve got something to tell George here, remember?”

Jason sat down and tried to look like he couldn’t remember what it was he had to tell me but he was too pleased with himself and couldn’t keep up the pretence.

“Well, you know the backups you weren’t doing in the office.”

I nodded. “Your mother was doing them and the backup drive was stolen.”

Both he and Sandra shook their heads.

“No, boss. Mum wasn’t doing the backups. The backups were done automatically online. I set it up like over a week ago, when I was in the office. They were incremental backups so were done in the background when the computer was on.” He sat back, looking smug. I tried to understand what it was he was telling me.

“You mean that everything that was on the hard drive is on the Internet somewhere?”

“Yep, Mum agreed the payment.” I looked at Sandra.

“Sorry, I’d forgotten all about it,” she said.

“It’s a pretty secure website though, no worries there,” Jason said.

“Let’s have the discussion about me being kept in the loop later. Right now I just want to know if you can download the bloody stuff.”

“Of course. I could try and do it onto our computer here, with a bit of tweaking ’cause it’s not the source of the original—”

I stood up.

“OK, then download the photos and the tracking info from the Trisha Greene case. Somebody wanted them badly enough to ransack the office, so I want to look at them again. Email them to me. And for God’s sake don’t tell anyone you’ve got them.”

“Like who?” Sandra asked, giving me a dangerous look.

“I’m just thinking of Brampton’s flying monkey, or Brampton. I wouldn’t put it past either of them to come sniffing round,” I said.

She walked me to the door and I told her I would pick Lucy up later to take her home.

“Be careful, George,” she said.

“You worried about me, Sandra?”

“You’re a regular source of income, of course I’m worried.”

* * *

I drove straight up to Cottenham to visit my father, stopping only for flowers at a petrol station, more for the benefit of Megan the young care assistant than Dad, who I wasn’t sure even knew they were there. Megan, who took them off me to put in water, was reading my mind or expression.

“There have been no more visitors, Mr Kevorkian. I’ve double-checked.”

I smiled and wondered how old she was – certainly not much older than Lucy, but younger than Cathy at McDonald’s.

“Thanks, and please call me George.”

Dad was sitting in his high-backed chair facing the window in his room. I sat on the end of the bed. He looked round and smiled, like you would at a stranger who had just sat next to you in the doctor’s waiting room, then returned his gaze to the bird table outside on which three or four small birds pecked at seed before being seen off by a large pigeon. Some sunshine broke through the layer of cloud and reminded me how quickly one became used to drabness.

I wanted to ask him about his days and nights at Morley College, why he had hated it so much. It was my loss that he hadn’t been much more talkative before the Pick’s disease had taken over, and less so after my mother had died, when I’d mistaken the early symptoms for grief and withdrawal. It is to my shame that at the time he had needed me most, after Mum’s death, I had still been obsessed with Olivia, and hadn’t spent the time trying to bring him out of the shell he had retreated into. And even though I now knew it was the illness that caused him to withdraw, it did not absolve me.

Now, making sure the door was closed, I told him all about the Bookers, Quintin Boyd and Trisha Greene. I told him about Jason having his fingers broken, me being knifed, the office being broken into. I told him about being drugged by Boyd and my confusion about the case. I also mentioned the Cambridge Blue Club several times to see if I got any reaction. But there was nothing except when he occasionally turned and smiled as if it was the first time he’d set eyes on me. I left when they were about to serve lunch.

In the car I put on the radio and then quickly turned it off when I heard people speaking in the same educated tones Sylvia did. As I pulled out of the car park the hole that had let the sun through was patched up, as if the weather had realised that it had slipped up and quickly corrected itself.

WHEN I TOOK MY KEYS OUT TO GET IN THE HOUSE I PULLED
Quintin’s – or rather Eric’s copy of Quintin’s – out with them. And once inside I emptied my pockets and found the DVD with the disc I’d half-inched from his apartment and my now battered and unopened packet of condoms. The latter reminded me that I ought to call Nina to try and explain why I hadn’t gone back to her place last night, but curiosity about what was on the disc trumped that. I would call her later, or go round with flowers and chocolates.

I made coffee and put on the Goldberg Variations while my computer started up. I put the disc in the drive and it churned for a while but nothing happened. I took it out and dialled up the Internet. My email programme beeped at me to let me know I had mail. Amongst the usual junk was one from Olivia headed “Restoration continues apace!” but my eye was drawn to two emails from Jason. The first just said, “Photos here, boss…” with a web link underneath. The other said, “Tracker details and map…” and had a Word document attachment. He hadn’t wasted any time.

I clicked on the link and waited. Images took an age to load with dial-up and I couldn’t do anything else on the computer while it happened. The screen slowly filled with postage-stamp-sized thumbnails, which I recognised as my photos of Trisha Greene with various blokes in the Gogs car park and whoever she had met over the few days I’d followed her. I could make out the ones I had picked out for the husband as evidence of her screwing around; I’d chosen the ones that were fairly innocuous. I started to download them all, but it took ages because of my slow connection. Jason was always banging on about me needing to get broadband – maybe he had a point; I tended to dismiss a lot of his recommendations as uncritical championing of technology, a lot of which exists because it can, rather than because it provides function.

There were about fifty photos in all, some in an eerie black and white that was a result of using the infrared Fuji camera, essential for car park shoots in the dark. I had time to make and eat a cheese and pickle sandwich before the downloads were all done.

I scanned through the ones I’d given the husband, to see if I’d missed anything. I hadn’t checked on the man’s identity – it hadn’t been part of the brief – and went through the others. There were several sets of photos I’d taken of her with various men, one set with a guy in a suit Trisha had hooked up with at the car park, who drove a Volvo estate with a kid’s seat in the back. Like the others they’d done the deed in her car, even though his was bigger – perhaps he’d felt bad about doing it where he could see his kid’s seat. Again, I hadn’t checked up on the guy, although his number plate was in one of the photos.

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, because I certainly wasn’t planning to investigate each of the men I’d taken pictures of. These were probably just a selection of the people she’d met up with, any one of whom could have been her killer. The point was that whoever killed her was worried about what might be in these photos, and what’s more had an inside at Parkside, someone who knew the killer, someone who could make evidence disappear, and could point them in my direction. Brampton was suspect for knowing Quintin, but in her favour I could not tie Quintin to the break-in or to Trisha Greene, so Stubbing was higher on the list. She just happened to be there when I’d discovered the office had been turned over, perhaps to see whether I would find anything that had been missed. She had even convinced me not to report it and all this business about Brampton finding out from someone else about the break-in could be a smoke screen.

I pulled up the last of the photos just because I’d started the process and needed to finish it for the sake of completeness. I’m glad I did.

Now I knew why he’d looked familiar before: because I’d seen him through a long lens. In the photos I was currently looking at he didn’t have his chauffeur’s cap on although he was wearing his uniform, but his cropped hair, square head and short neck were unmistakable. In the first sequence he was in the passenger seat and was talking to Trisha. In the next she was talking and then they both left the car and disappeared. I remembered that at the time I couldn’t see where they’d got to as they’d gone to a neighbouring bit of the car park that was separated by one of the large grassy ridges that divided it up. I had been about to come out of the bush I called home when a couple of men had climbed up nearby and engaged in some mutually pleasurable business. I’d stayed put, ironically worried about being called a voyeur and getting beaten up or being asked to join in. By the time they’d finished Trisha had come back to her car, doing up her jacket.

I hadn’t made much of the incident; after all, nothing much had happened in comparison to some of the other encounters I’d photographed. But here I had Quintin Boyd’s regular driver on film, consorting with a woman some days before her murder.