The Bursar's Wife (4 page)

“Have you been here long?” I put the lid on the cold coffee and placed it in the bin; I wasn’t ready to exchange bodily fluids with Stubbing.

“Yes,” he said, typing fast and looking at the screen. “Why are you so late?”

“I’ve been getting some fresh air,” I said. “Do you know how long you have to wait for a bus in Cambridge?”

“You should get a bicycle, boss.”

I got the Booker file out of my desk, and removed Lucy’s photograph. “There’s a student at Emmanuel College I want you to get some info on.” He scooted over on the wheeled chair and looked at Lucy’s picture.

“Let’s hope she’s got a big personality,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s not gonna win any beauty contests, is she?” I rolled my eyes. “What? It’s the truth, right?” I ignored him and gave him the low-down on Lucy and her mother’s worries. He shrugged and flicked his hair.

“I’ve been out with this girl Rowena from Emma a couple of times, but I think she’s a year ahead of this Lucy. There’s a group of the posher ones who like to mix it with the real Cambridge, know what I mean?”

“You mean they like a bit of rough?”

He laughed and his smile and big brown eyes made him look like his mother. I could see why he had no problem attracting girls. “That’s right, boss. They want to experience the real thing before they have to get hitched with people who speak like them. This girl even plays bridge and polo. Right la-di-da she is. Get this, her work experience was at that advertising firm that did those cool car adverts, the ones where the cars turn into trainers. Her dad arranged it for her.” Jason’s work experience had been as a plumber’s mate.

“You’re not saying Lucy is part of this group?”

He looked at the photo and shook his head. “No chance.” Something that Jason had said earlier nagged at me.

“Rewind, Jason, to what this Rowena does.” He shook his head. “Plays. You said she plays something.”

“Bridge and polo.” I skimmed through the details on Lucy Booker provided by her mother. Lucy was a member of the university bridge club that met every Wednesday night.

“Do you still see this Rowena?”

He nodded. “Not regular like. She’s a bit loud, if you know what I mean. But she’s coming to a gig this weekend.” He started to tell me about how the band playing were mates of his but I wasn’t really listening. My plan was for Jason to follow Lucy around for a bit, in his free time, since he would be less conspicuous than me in a student setting, while I would check out her extra-curricular activities. But his connection with the college might provide a quicker way in. I asked Jason to see if Rowena knew Lucy through the bridge club, find out a bit about her, which crowd she mixed with etc.

“Without arousing too much suspicion, that is,” I added. “I don’t want Rowena running to Lucy telling her someone is asking questions.”

He picked up the photo, studied it and said, “Don’t worry, boss. I’ll tell Rowena I know someone who fancies Lucy, she’ll get a kick out of that.” I gave him fifty quid cash and sent him on his way. I wondered whether I should have a chat with Jason about the birds and the bees, and how condoms were cool. But I wasn’t his father, and knowing Sandra she’d probably terrified him into putting one on every time he phoned a girl, never mind touched one.

* * *

I put my feet on the desk and thought about Trisha Greene held up by the neck against her own headrest. I could not believe that I’d been so wrong about Al Greene, who only yesterday had been sitting opposite, exceeding his quota of office tissues. The whole thing bugged me. Did he drive up there with her to understand what it was she was looking for, maybe try it for himself, and then flip? Or did he follow her up there and catch her at it with someone else and
then
flip? Brampton seemed to have the whole thing sewn up already, although she was keeping her cards close to her chest. I knew I shouldn’t worry about something I couldn’t influence, especially since I hadn’t had my morning coffee. I got up to get my coat when the phone rang. It was Sandra. I filled her in on the Greene murder.

“What’s the world coming to when you can’t meet a stranger in a car park for sex without being murdered?” she said. I pointed out that most people are murdered by someone they know.

“Maybe so, but I met the husband, and I don’t think he was up to it. Too much of a lamb, bless him. If he was a brooder, then maybe, but he wore his heart on his sleeve.” I agreed with her and switched to the Booker case, such as it was.

“Who do we know at Emmanuel?” I heard little Ashley in the background, demanding something in an annoying voice. Sandra’s voice went faint and I heard her tell him she wasn’t at home to Mr Grumpy.

“Sorry about that. What about Jack, he knew your dad, doesn’t he work the kitchens there?” I told her Jack had retired. “There’s the girl next door but one to us, she makes beds there occasionally.” Sandra lived in an ex-council terraced house in King’s Hedges, an area of Cambridge that doesn’t feature in postcards of the city. Her ex-husband had seen fit to spend some of his drug-earned money on buying it outright from the council, then cladding it in what looked like crazy paving and putting it in Sandra’s name. Sandra didn’t care; it had no mortgage, three bedrooms and a strip of garden she had made bloom, in contrast to some of her neighbours who saw their gardens as somewhere to store old furniture and appliances they no longer needed.

“It’s unlikely she knows Lucy,” I said. “She doesn’t board at Emma; she still lives with her parents at Morley.”

“You’d think they’d have kicked her out, they could easily have wangled her a room right in the college. I’d have kicked Jason out long ago if he could afford anything in this overpriced city.” I told her I thought the same and she reminded me to water her plants. I wondered whether it was Lucy’s choice or her mother’s that she continued to stay on Morley premises. Initial impressions suggested the mother, but experience told me that despite their strong lure, initial impressions were usually wrong.

* * *

I watered Sandra’s plants, put on my raincoat and locked the office. I met Nina coming up the stairs.

“Everything OK?” she asked. “A very rude policewoman was here this morning demanding to know where you were. It upset some of the customers. It’s not what they expect when they come for a massage.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, she’s lacking in basic social skills.” We stood there awkwardly, me one step higher. “Listen, I’m going to get a coffee across the road. Do you want to join me?”

She pointed over my shoulder up the stairs. “I have a client waiting. Besides,” she said, “I’ve had my caffeine quota for the day.”

“Maybe some other time then, when you haven’t had your quota.”

She smirked and shrugged. “Maybe,” then passed me. I wasn’t sure I liked the way she said ‘maybe’; it left me feeling that she knew I was desperate and was playing me. I was too old for such playground shenanigans.

* * *

Later, at home, after I’d heated something covered in plastic and sat with it over my chess puzzle, I was rung by Kamal, a friend who worked as a porter at Addenbrooke’s while he tried to make it as a writer. He wondered whether I wanted to go for a drink. I watched the steaming, spreading mess of dinner and said yes, even though I knew he just wanted to tap me for stories.

PARKSIDE POLICE STATION IS A BRUTE OF A BUILDING STANDING
in good company next to the fire station. They both look over the large square of green in the middle of Cambridge that is Parker’s Piece, drooled over by developers and protected by Our Lady and the English Martyrs, who watch over it from one corner. The lamp post in the middle used to be called Reality Checkpoint by some of the more toffee-nosed students to mark for them the end of the university bit of the town and the beginning of the ‘real’ bit. Nowadays of course a lot of students venture beyond the lamp post and into the real town, for cheap accommodation if nothing else.

I arrived at the police station having walked from my office through a mean drizzle, carrying my photos of Mrs Greene on a memory stick, along with a file containing her movements. When I wasn’t following her I’d captured her car journeys on a tracker placed under the bumper of her cabriolet. I had removed it a few days before giving her husband the low-down on his wife’s activities.

Stubbing, bless her, kept me waiting in reception after I’d announced myself and I spent the time watching unfortunates come and go – it was not a place people came to happily, unless they’d come to recover something they’d lost that incredibly someone had handed in. The ones who arrived under the insistence of the police usually did so round the back entrance, out of the way of the tourists who had strayed across the road from Parker’s Piece.

Stubbing’s face, pinched and pale, appeared at a glass window in a door. She caught my eye and snapped her head at me to follow. We walked without talking and Stubbing held open the door of a small interview room where a bored-looking young plain-clothes sat at the metal table reading a
Daily Mail
, which he quickly folded up when we came in. I could smell Stubbing’s cheap deodorant as I passed her. There was a small table in the windowless room with a tape recorder on it, much like you see on TV, but without the dramatic lighting, which in this case was overhead, harsh and fluorescent. We sat on hard chairs facing each other across the table. I felt like a suspect even though I was just giving a statement, a feeling reinforced by the fact that my chair would not sit on all four legs at once. The other detective pulled his chair up to the table and flipped open a pad. I half expected him to lick the end of a pencil but instead he took a fancy-looking ballpoint from inside his jacket.

Stubbing got straight down to business.

“This is Detective Sergeant Turner,” she said, tilting her head towards her colleague. “Mr Kocharyan, please tell us when you first met Albert Greene.” Stubbing’s hair was still pulled back in headache-inducing tightness and she was wearing the same nylon suit. A thin gold chain with nothing on it sat at her bloodless throat.

“I’d just like to say how pleased I am to be able to help the Cambridgeshire police in any way possible,” I said, trying to get my chair level. Turner coughed a word into his hand. I ignored him. So did Stubbing. “Albert Greene came to me three weeks ago suspecting that his wife Trisha Greene was having an affair. I agreed to investigate. I followed her on four occasions over two weeks and also tracked the movements of her car over the same period.” Turner scribbled onto the pad.

“Tracked her movements how?” Stubbing asked.

“Using a standard £200 GPS tracker you can buy in any electronics shop.” I gave her a breakdown of the exact times I’d followed Mrs Greene myself and then I took the USB stick from my pocket and pushed it across the table. “On here is a spreadsheet detailing all her car journeys over the two weeks the tracker was fitted.” Stubbing told Turner to make a note. “You’ll see that most of them are to her workplace or the gym but there are also regular trips to the car park, where you found her. That is where I took most of the photos I have of her; they’re on the memory stick as well. Mr Greene confirmed most of the addresses; there were a couple he didn’t recognise but I assumed they were friends or people she preferred to, ah, visit indoors.”

“You didn’t check those out?”

“I’d already confirmed the client’s suspicions at that stage. He wasn’t paying me to follow everyone she was sleeping with. I’d like the memory stick back, it’s expensive.”

She picked it up. “You can have it when the case is closed.”

Turner grinned and Stubbing handed him the memory stick, asking him to take it over to the high tech unit and to get a receipt. He left the interview room and she pulled the pad round and read the statement. She sat back in her chair, clasped her hands behind her head and glared at me. “It’s a grubby job you’ve got, Kocky,” she said.

“It pays the bills. Besides, yours isn’t exactly wholesome.”

She looked at me with disgust.

“Is Greene being held here without charge?” I asked. I checked my watch. “Surely he’s been here twenty-four hours already.” It was as if I hadn’t spoken; she was giving nothing away. I forced myself to maintain eye contact with her icy stare. She cracked first.

“He’s a detained suspect. Do you know what that is?”

“It means Brampton likes him for the murder.”

“DCI Brampton to you, Kocky.”

“It’s Kocharyan.”

“Yeah, whatever. What sort of name is that anyway?”

“Armenian.” She looked no wiser. “Is the belt his then?” I asked.

“You ask a lot of questions about things that don’t concern you.”

“I don’t think he did it,” I said.

She sat up in her chair and crossed her arms. “It’s a good thing that your opinion doesn’t matter then, isn’t it?” She turned the pad round and asked me to read the statement. I was reading through it carefully when DS Turner came back in and went over to Stubbing. He leant down and whispered something in her ear. She frowned and gave him a questioning look. He shrugged. “You’ll have to wait for that receipt,” she told me.

She leant forward, looked me in the eye, a hint of a sneer on her face. I thought she was going to say something but she very quickly stood up, scraping her chair legs on the floor. “We’ll have a look at your material and get back to you if we have further questions. Sign the statement. DS Turner here will show you out.” With that she picked up my report and left the room.

“Not even a ‘thank you for coming in’,” I said to Turner as I signed the statement, reassured that words hadn’t been put into my mouth.

“Not from DI Stubbing, sir. She’s—” He stopped, perhaps realising he was being inappropriate. “This way, sir,” he said, opening the door.

“She’s what then?” I insisted, following him into the corridor.

“She’s a good detective, sir.”

* * *

I got back to the office after stopping off for lunch to find Sandra at her desk and on the phone. She raised her eyes to the ceiling to tell me she was suffering a fool on the other end. Sandra’s telephone manner was brisk and businesslike. She used a slightly harsher one to chase up payments and I imagined it was the same one she used when talking to her premium-rate callers. She was big, or what women, when being kind, liked to call ‘curvy’. She called herself fat. Her killer smile could clear your worries like morphine and she had a penetrating brown-eyed gaze that worked like truth serum. She put down the receiver as I put my feet up on my desk.