The Bursar's Wife (3 page)

“OK, I’ll do the bloody questionnaire.”

She laughed down the line, sounding like a train coming to a halt. “Sorry, George, but you do need a kick up the bloody arse.”

“I actually rang because I’ve got some work for Jason.” She calmed down.

“Is it marital stuff?”

“No, it’s a case of an overbearing mother unnecessarily worried about her offspring. You know the type.”

She snorted. “Are you taking the piss?”

“As if. Seriously though, it’s easy money.” She told me that as long as it didn’t interfere with his coursework then it was fine. “Tell me it’s not dangerous, George.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not dangerous.”

* * *

Later that afternoon I watched my 1970s Italian
poliziesco
film, one of only seven people in the cinema. I then drove home with a pizza for company. I made it a threesome with a bottle of Pilsner and we all got on just fine. I put on the Goldberg Variations (one of Olivia’s more successful attempts at improving me culturally) and then fired up the old computer to check my online vitals. While it was going through its interminable start-up routine I went round to the other side of the dining table where I had a chess problem set out on a large wooden board, the wooden pieces pleasingly heavy and tactile – a set that had belonged to my father. The board was out permanently now that Olivia was gone, and dinner parties a thing of the past. I’d also moved the computer down from the bedroom, thereby turning the dining room into my study. The chess problem was for white to mate in three, and the solution had eluded me for a couple of days. I made some half-hearted movements and returned to the computer.

* * *

Olivia had emailed me with another update of her restoration plans, which I couldn’t bring myself to read. Instead I found the email from Sandra with the witty subject header ‘Getting back on the horse’ and clicked on the link to the dating agency website. Eventually – I still connected to the Internet using a modem and my telephone line – a conventionally attractive couple (him brown, she white) appeared on the screen, grinning stupidly as they ran through a sun-drenched and daisy-covered meadow hand in hand. I sighed and brought up a blank search page and Googled Sylvia Booker. Her name appeared in links to a couple of local charities, and a quick scan of the sites told me she was a trustee of both. One related to homelessness, the other to rehabilitating ex-drug addicts. I also looked up her husband, who turned out to be one Elliot Booker, although I didn’t get as far as finding pictures of him. Then I got distracted and ended up checking out a few other women completely unrelated to the case, none of them as attractive as Sylvia, but all of them in fewer clothes. Like I said before, it was pathetic.

I LIVE NORTH OF THE RIVER CAM IN A HOUSE I INHERITED FROM
my parents which I could not afford today if I tried to buy it. The area has become gentrified with the type who drive people carriers and go camping in France when they can afford a beach holiday in Tenerife. It took me no longer than ten minutes to drive to the office and park on the small forecourt, because I avoided the nine-to-five traffic. I walked round the corner to Hills Road and bought a black coffee to go from Antonio’s, one of the few remaining independent coffee shops in the city. The clock on Our Lady and the English Martyrs told me that it was nearly ten, my usual time of arrival if I’m in the office. When I got back to my building an unmarked police car was parked on the double-yellows outside, hazard lights flashing. I could tell it was a police car because a plain-clothed copper was sitting at the wheel, and you can’t mistake a plain-clothes. They’d also removed the hubcaps, so they don’t come off in a high-speed chase. The driver was picking his nose, rolling his harvest into a ball before examining it and flicking it out the window.

I was about to enter the building when a skinny woman in a blue trouser suit came striding out the door. She squinted at me with ice-blue eyes that were a bit too close together.

“George Korkyan?” She had her hair pulled back painfully hard in what Sandra called a Croydon facelift.

“No,” I said. She stepped forward, and I could hear a crackle of static in her shiny suit.

“You’re not George Korkyan, private investigator?” She had a reedy voice high-octaved with tension.

“No. I’m George Kocharyan, private investigator. And you are?” She whipped out a badge from inside her jacket; it hung on a chain round her sinewy neck.

“I’m Detective Inspector Stubbing. Guv’nor wants to see you.” She made her way towards the unmarked car, expecting me to follow without question.

“Well the guv’nor, whoever that is, knows where to find me,” I said to her back. I walked into the building and went upstairs. I left the door to my office open and sat at my desk. I’d just taken the lid off my coffee when she strode in, giving me a look that would strip paint. She put her palms flat on either side of the desk and leant over.

“Listen, Kockerhead, or whatever your fucking name is, Detective Chief Inspector Brampton is waiting at a crime scene, and unless you come with me now, I’ll haul you over to Parkside to wait for her there, and she could be some time.” Her spittle sprayed my coffee and I looked at her to see if she was bluffing, but all I saw were the straining tendons in her neck and a throbbing vein in her temple.

“You didn’t come through the fast-track graduate scheme, did you?”

She gave me her paint-stripping stare and her lips quivered dangerously so I got up before she exploded.

“Why didn’t you say it was Brampton?” I said. “She’s like a mentor to me.” I left the coffee on the desk.

I sat in the back of the car alone as nose-picker drove and Stubbing sat silently beside him. Brampton’s and my paths had crossed last year, at some management seminar run by a management consultancy firm which was coordinating efforts to licence private investigators. Brampton was a speaker, introduced as a Cambridge graduate who was bringing industry management practices to the police force. Her speech was peppered with jargon that I didn’t understand and no one had bothered to explain.

We drove south past the small city that is Addenbrooke’s Hospital towards the Gogs, the highest point outside Cambridge. I felt a tightening in my gut. It got tighter as we turned right towards Magog Down and then waved under the yellow tape held up by a uniform into the car park where I had photographed Trisha Greene and her friends, and was fully knotted by the time I saw the police cars and vans surrounding Mrs Greene’s little blue cabriolet, an exclusion zone round it defined by more yellow tape. A tent that had been erected to prevent the rain washing evidence away was being dismantled. Stubbing got out and I followed her lead.

“This way,” she ordered. We walked up to where DCI Brampton was talking to an elderly woman cradling a small dog in a coat. We stood at a distance, waiting. I gathered from what I strained to hear that the woman had found the car early this morning. I noticed that underneath her open raincoat Brampton was wearing an expensive and well-cut version of what Stubbing had on, and also had her hair tied back, but less severely than Stubbing’s eyebrow-lifting effort. She was stocky and looked like she was on a richer diet than Stubbing. We approached when the woman had been led away by the uniform.

“George, thanks for coming up,” Brampton said, in that pleasant way of speaking educated middle-class people have even when they are shafting you. She did not offer to shake hands. She reminded me of my headmistress at secondary school – severity wrapped up in charm. Her round nose and pudgy cheeks were red with cold.

“DCI Brampton,” I said. “Thanks for dragging me up here. If it wasn’t for community-minded policing I’d never get any fresh air.” She gave me the sort of smile bad poker players give you when they know they are holding a better hand than yours. “Step this way, George.” Stubbing, grinning at me with gappy teeth, lifted the yellow ribbon surrounding the cabriolet. Brampton stepped under and then Stubbing let go of the tape as I was about to follow. I lifted it myself and caught up with them.

“You’re just in time, the SOCOs have finished,” Brampton said. We walked up to the car, me wishing that forensics still had several hours’ work to do and I could delay seeing what I knew I was about to see. Brampton shooed away a photographer in protective white overalls. The driver’s door was open and Trisha Greene, naked from the waist up, was slumped in the seat. I say slumped: her neck was fastened by a wide leather belt to the bars of the seat headrest, her head lolling forward in an unnatural position, her eyes still open, as if surprised at her own topless state. Her dress had been ripped open at the front and pulled down over her arms; it had also been pushed up her parted thighs and was bunched at her waist. Her body was relaxed, which made her neck look longer than I remembered. Brampton turned to me. “I think you come up here more than you make out, George. I think you might know this woman.” There seemed little point in lying about it; they obviously knew I had been watching her, although the swollen, purple face I saw now bore little relation to the pretty, animated one I’d photographed last week.

“Know is a strong word. I’ve seen her from a distance, through a camera.”

“Pervert,” said Stubbing. Brampton smiled.

“Detective Inspector Stubbing here has a strong moral streak,” said Brampton. “She disapproves of people spying on other people who are having sex.”

“I think that’s the idea, isn’t it? They come up here to be seen,” I said.

“By other perverts,” spat Stubbing. Brampton raised her bushy eyebrows and asked her to go and check something with a scene of crime officer.

“Would you mind identifying the woman in the car, George, just for the record.” I did the necessary, then tore my gaze from Trisha Greene and turned to Brampton.

“I’ll assume you’re holding the husband, since he’s not doing the identifying?”

She pulled her raincoat round her and shrugged to keep warm.

“He’s made a statement, we’re just confirming his story. He says he hired you to watch her and that she was having an affair.” I told her the truth about Trisha’s activities, omitting the fact that I’d advised her husband to confront her.

“He doesn’t seem the type,” I said, as we walked back to the cars.

“There isn’t a type, George, just motive and opportunity.” She signalled for the waiting forensics team to remove the body. “I’m not pleased about this,” she said, in a tone suggesting that it might be my doing. “I try to keep a clean patch, and this sort of thing is not good for Cambridge. The press are going to love it, especially if it involves private investigators and public sex.” She stared at me and I didn’t care for the way she linked the two things.

“The press won’t get anything from me, it’s your lot you need to worry about. And Mrs Greene didn’t die because of something I did,” I added, mainly for my own benefit. She said nothing, but studied the forensic team carefully removing Mrs Greene from the cabriolet into a black body bag, removing the belt that had been used to strangle her. I could now see that it had a brass buckle and tried to remember whether Al Greene had been wearing it when he’d been in my office.

“There must have been people up here who saw her.”

“You weren’t one of them, were you?”

“No. I was not. The case was over, as I’m sure the husband has told you.”

“You may have become infatuated with her, George. She was quite pretty, wasn’t she?”

“I was at home,” I said, alarmed at the direction this was taking.

“Alibi?”

“Do I need one?”

She ignored me and spoke to someone about getting the car picked up.

Stubbing came over and ignored me as well.

“We’re ready when you are, ma’am.” Brampton nodded at her and turned to me.

“Don’t go anywhere, George, we’ll need to take a statement and some DNA and see any other details you’ve collected while you were following her. Stubbing will liaise with you.” Stubbing leered at me as if Brampton had promised me to her sexually.

“I can’t wait,” I said.

“Play nice, George,” Brampton said. “By rights we can just seize your computer and files. But I prefer we all be singing from the same hymn sheet.”

“Come by the station first thing tomorrow,” Stubbing said, as if I worked for her. They walked over towards the unmarked car, one a cheap imitation of the other. Arse-licking Stubbing opened the door for Brampton. I obviously wasn’t getting a lift into Cambridge. Stubbing closed the door on Brampton and shouted to me, “You can go back with Mrs Greene, get one last gawp at her.”

She got into the driver’s seat and I watched her have a good laugh with the driver at my expense. As the car pulled out she stuck her hand out of the window and made a wanking gesture at me below window level where Brampton couldn’t see it.

I TRAVELLED INTO CAMBRIDGE IN THE BLACK VAN THAT TOOK
Mrs Greene to the morgue at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, upfront with the driver and his mate. From there I had to catch a bus into town, cursing Stubbing all the while.

Jason was sitting at his mother’s desk when I got into my office; he was logged onto her computer and moving the mouse about on its mat. It was one of those mats you could slot your own picture into and Sandra had put a photo of Ashley in it, a little brown kid with curly hair and a mischievous smile. Jason, on the other hand, was a pale long-limbed youth with wavy brown hair that he had to push back to see the screen. He was so engrossed he didn’t look up when I crossed to my desk. He wore his usual jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, always with the hood down. I sat at my desk and looked at my cold coffee, contaminated with Stubbing’s spit.

“I hope you’re not surfing for porn,” I said.

“I’m updating your virus software, and your system is riddled with malware. And another thing, when’s the last time you did a backup?”

“Ask your mum.” This is why I didn’t have a computer myself at work; I just couldn’t be bothered with all that stuff.

“I’ll do one now.” As he worked he wittered on about the importance of backups, and the technicalities involved, but I wasn’t listening. When I didn’t say anything he said, “You can thank me later.”