The Bursar's Wife (28 page)

“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “Did you get what you came for?”

“He took it off me.”

It was all he got off me though. In between removing my stitches he’d kept asking me about Lucy and where I’d hidden her. I hadn’t told him anything, not because I was a hero, but because I’d been in too much pain to talk.

“Keep still,” Stubbing said. She ripped open a sterile dressing and placed it over the reopened wound then taped it down. She pulled my buttonless shirt and jacket gently back over my shoulders.

I got off the table and went to the sink. As I splashed cold water on my face and used the mirror to examine the damage between my eyes, Stubbing had a look round the room.

“So this is where all the action happens.” She moved to a narrow wall cupboard to my left and I heard her open the doors and whistle. I looked round. A variety of sex toys, a couple of which I recognised from the film, and one I’d posed with in the photo, were aligned neatly on a shelf in an upright position. Different colours, sizes and textures, they stood like a mismatched platoon of proud soldiers waiting to be given the order to stand easy. There were enough of them to play chess with. I’d once opened Olivia’s bedside cabinet to look for something and I’d found one of these things stuffed at the back of the drawer. It seemed odd that a lesbian would need one, but then maybe it wasn’t so odd, maybe it made perfect sense: all the benefits of a man without all the hang-ups.

“This would make your eyes water,” Stubbing said, pulling down a large pink specimen with nobbles along its length. She twisted the bottom and it started to judder obscenely. “He must spend a fortune on batteries.” She put it back carefully where she’d found it.

A noise made me turn to see the thin man getting awkwardly to his feet from his knees.

“Hey,” I shouted.

Stubbing was faster than me and in two strides had reached him and kicked him under the kneecap. I winced as he screamed and dropped back to the floor. He lay on his side making strange noises through his open mouth. I had to sit down again as a tsunami of pain spread over my shoulder. Stubbing was manipulating the limping prisoner out into the hall. I followed them to the living room. She plonked him on a leather sofa. I searched his pockets, pulling out my mobile phone, his mobile phone, some loose change, the wrapper from a Mars bar, his flick knife and a wallet containing several store cards (the man’s name was Kevin Chapman) and a wrinkled ten-pound note. There were no DVDs.

“I don’t know what he’s done with the DVDs,” I told Stubbing.

“DVDs, plural?”

I nodded. She bent down and stuck her face in Kevin’s. He sat back to create distance between them but she just followed, putting her hands either side of his head on the back of the sofa. If it weren’t for the narrowing of her eyes and lips and the throbbing veins in her neck you’d think she was about to tongue him.

“Where’re the DVDs, arsehole?”

“What DVDs?” He couldn’t control the small smile that flashed across his anaemic face. Stubbing stood up and kicked him under the knee that hadn’t been kicked. He yelled and bent over in pain.

“For fuck’s sake,” he cried, tears running down his cheeks. She pulled his head up by his hair and stuck her face back in his.

“Where’re the DVDs?”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Maybe you should break his fingers,” I said. “You know, like he did Jason’s.”

Stubbing looked at me.

“This was the guy?”

I nodded.

“Well why didn’t you say so? I wouldn’t have been so easy on the fucker.”

“You can’t do this,” Kevin whined. “You’re police aren’t you?”

“I’m off duty,” said Stubbing. “This is how I like to relax.” I was beginning to believe her as she yanked Kevin off the sofa and made him kneel on his damaged knees. She stood in front of him and leaned forward to pull up his handcuffed hands until his head was forced against her midriff. She grabbed hold of a little finger and held his arms up by it. He started to whimper. I didn’t like the look on Stubbing’s face, regardless of my disgust for Kevin, but then I remembered that he’d been alone with my father.

“Maybe he just put them back,” I said.

“Did you put them back?” she shouted, yanking his arms up.

He shook his head, tears streaming down his face.

“Just tell us where the DVDs are and this will stop,” I said, looking at Stubbing since he couldn’t see me.

Stubbing gave me a look to tell me what a wimp I was. “I flushed them,” Kevin said.

“You what now?” she said.

“I broke them up and flushed them.”

“Did Quintin tell you to do that?”

“Who?” Stubbing pulled his finger back and he yelped.

“Mr Boyd. Did Mr Boyd tell you to?” I asked.

“Why didn’t you say ‘Mr Boyd’? Yes, yes. He told me to. Please stop.”

“I interrupted him in the loo when I was let in by the caretaker,” Stubbing said. “He was standing over it flushing. I just thought he was trying to get rid of a floater.”

I went to the all-white bathroom and looked into the toilet bowl – nothing. Then I caught a glint of something on the floor behind the basin. There was one of them. He must have stashed it there when he’d been interrupted by Stubbing. I picked it up and went back into the living room. Stubbing was holding Kevin’s head to her midriff and stroking his hair like a mother who has reprimanded a child too severely and needs to comfort it. It was creepy but at least she’d let go of his fingers. I waved the DVD at her, then thought to check the date on it. It was the one from the day Trisha had died.

“You should have microwaved them, you moron,” she said to Kevin, cuffing him aside the head. Then, to me, she said, “I’m going to take little Kevin down to Parkside and book him.”

“OK, but can we talk in the other room?”

She moved Kevin over to the radiator, uncuffed his hands then recuffed one of them to the pipework. She patted him on the head and said, “Don’t go anywhere.” He scowled but it was half-hearted; he was a broken man.

We moved to the studio where Stubbing retightened her hair which had come loose in her manhandling of Kevin.

“He destroyed one DVD but didn’t have time to destroy this one.” She looked at it and I turned it so she could see the date.

“Bloody hell, George, you’re not as stupid as you look.”

“Well, it could contain something unrelated of course.”

“Yeah, but it’s more than a stab in the dark.”

“Are you going to Brampton with him?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“With what? I’ll book him for assaulting your boy, say I picked him up in a pub with that knife he’s carrying. He’ll play along ’cause otherwise it would be kidnapping and assault, but I’m assuming you don’t want to press charges?” I shook my head. “Good, my being in here would be a bugger to explain.” She rubbed her face. “I need more before I can go to Brampton. It needs to be watertight and undeniable otherwise she’ll fuck me with something bigger than all the toys in that cupboard put together. What I’m going to do is get this turd to give me something on Quintin, which might give me enough to come back here and seize his computer, which might give me enough for Brampton. In fact I’ll take the DVD from you; if there’s anything on it I’ll claim I found it on him.”

I reluctantly handed it over.

“Right now we need to leave before Boyd gets back.”

I hesitated. I hadn’t got Sylvia’s tape, but with Stubbing here it was impossible. And any chance to ask Kevin what he was doing in the nursing home with my father would have to wait.

Being Stubbing she sensed my hesitation. “After you, Kocky.”

* * *

Kamal’s flatmate was mortified when he saw my wound because at first he thought his stitching wasn’t up to much and it had somehow unravelled. It took as long as it did for him to restitch me for me to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault. But there was no way I was going to go to Addenbrooke’s and explain a knife wound that had become unstitched.

Kamal was not impressed with my story, telling me that I’d ‘gone rogue’ and needed to bring things back to the right channels. I let his voice wash over me, I was dog tired and spaced out on a cocktail of painkillers and whisky. My thoughts though, were on the fact that I’d failed to recover the tape for Sylvia. Quintin would most likely be back home right now and removing everything to somewhere more secure, although Sylvia hadn’t rung me to say he was leaving. Worse still is that Stubbing was planning on going back there if she got a warrant, and the police would end up with the tape, and this time Brampton wouldn’t be able to dispose of it.

The office mobile phone went in my jacket. It was Sylvia – it was also approaching midnight.

“Hello?”

“George?” Sylvia’s voice, urgent and low.

“Yes, is everything alright?”

“I have to be quick, he’s just gone to the toilet before he leaves,” she whispered. “Did you find the, erm, tape?”

“No I didn’t; I was waylaid by his sidekick.”

Kamal glared at me disapprovingly.

“But you have to get it, George, you must, you don’t know what it’s been like…” Her voice wobbled.

I wanted to tell her what I had been through already that night, that I needed to go home to bed and forget her sordid sex tape. But I recalled her face when I was round there earlier, recalled her smell when I’d given her a hug.

“Can you keep him there? I can go back but I need more time.”

Kamal threw up his hands and shook his head in despair.

“I don’t know, it’s difficult. He’d like nothing more than to stay but I can’t do it… not anymore…” She broke off.

“I need an hour,” I said. “I won’t get another chance, Sylvia.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”

And you’ve no idea what you’ve asked me to do, I thought. “It’s now or never,” I said. “Once he gets home he’ll remove the tape and store it somewhere else. He already knows I was there this evening, his sidekick called him.”

She went silent and I thought she’d hung up.

“Hello?” I asked.

“He’s coming back,” she whispered. “Just get the tape. I’ll keep him here, whatever it takes.” She hung up.

“You’re going back?” Kamal asked, wide-eyed in disbelief.

“Yes, I have to. Will you drive me?”

“No, I most definitely will not.”

THIS TIME I DIDN
’
T BOTHER WITH TRYING TO SNEAK INTO
R
IVER
Views. Fifteen minutes after hanging up on Sylvia I pressed the caretaker’s buzzer, and Eric, who was on duty, shuffled out of his small office, popping a mint into his mouth. As anticipated, he didn’t look pleased to see me. From my coat I pulled a quarter bottle of whisky I’d taken from Kamal’s kitchen. He shook his head but opened the gate, slipping the flat bottle into his jacket pocket.

“I suppose you want me to let you into the penthouse, like I did that bloody policewoman?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve still got the keys.”

His mouth fell open. “I got into trouble for losing those keys. I knew you must have taken them.”

“Borrowed them, Eric, borrowed them.”

I made to step past him and he said, “I had to pay for new copies to be made from my own pocket.”

We stood there for a second then I pulled out my wallet and handed him a tenner. He didn’t take it, saying, “Those keys aren’t like your normal keys you can get cut in a shoe repair shop, you have to send away for them to be done.”

I attached another tenner to the first which he took and folded into three then slipped into his back pocket. Then he shuffled back into his cubby hole without as much as a nod.

In the lift to the penthouse I became aware of my shoulder. It had felt like a frozen leg of lamb; now it was beginning to thaw, letting the pain back in.

Quintin’s apartment was becoming a home from home. I moved quickly to the office at the end of the hall, putting the lights on and going straight to the cupboard which contained the films. The computer was still humming, making the occasional grinding noise as the hard disk worked away at whatever it was doing. I opened the left drawer which held the video cassettes and looked at them more closely than I had before. There weren’t as many as the DVDs but they also had American dates on them, printed onto labels on the spines, and were organised chronologically like the DVDs. The earliest was the year he’d graduated. It was the only one for that year. I pulled it out. Then I checked in the DVD drawer to make sure that there were none dated the same year.

* * *

I was in spitting distance of the front door when it opened. I stepped back involuntarily. Quintin came in and closed the door behind him. He stood against it, his raincoat dripping onto the hardwood floor, glancing at the cassette in my hand and grinning unpleasantly.

“Do you take me for a fool, George?”

I shook my head in genuine denial.

“Did you think I wouldn’t be suspicious that Sylvia unexpectedly turns on the sex appeal and wants me to stay with her? I knew she’d been on the phone when I was in the john. And who else would she call but her Armenian knight in shining armour. She never wants me to stay, never wants to fool around. Not willingly anyway.” His full lips twitched momentarily into a brief smile as he took off his raincoat, carefully hanging it in a narrow cupboard next to the door. He was in his tuxedo, black tie undone at his throat, looking like he’d come straight from the set of a James Bond film. Then he moved to the drinks cabinet. “I’d offer you a drink but I suspect you’d decline.”

I glanced at the front door.

“Go ahead. Run to the lovely Sylvia with her sex tape. Everyone wants to do her bidding. Everyone falls in love with those eyes.”

I turned to look at him, pouring his poncy bourbon into a heavy glass. “You know it’s not going to help her – having the tape – it won’t free her from her past,” he said. He went over to the leather sofa and sat down, legs apart, leaning forward with elbows on thighs, glass cradled in both hands. He contemplated the golden liquid inside and took a pull. It looked good, the drink, so I went over to the cabinet and poured an inch of what he had poured – if he was drinking it, it couldn’t be spiked.