The Bursar's Wife Read online

  “Money is not an issue, Mr… erm, George. I can even give you a retainer.” She opened the little handbag and retrieved a crisp white envelope, holding it by its edges as if tainted. It looked satisfyingly thick. “Would a thousand pounds be enough?” It was my turn to smile and I took the envelope, relishing its heaviness. I considered opening it, but counting money in front of her would have appeared cheap. Instead I put it down, opened a drawer and pulled out a standard contract with my terms and conditions on it. She shook her head and her hair swayed.

  “Must there be paperwork?” she asked. “I’m prepared to trust you.”

  “I’m flattered, but my assistant likes paperwork, it keeps her in a job.” She filled out her details on the form and I gave her a receipt for the money.

  “I hope we can resolve this quickly, George.” She pushed the form across the table. She’d put her address as the Bursar’s Residence, Morley College.

  “Shall we shake on it?” I said. She raised carefully shaped eyebrows but let me briefly hold her limp kipper of a hand. “I’ll need details of your daughter’s lectures, her regular movements, that sort of thing,” I said.

  “It’s all in the envelope. There’s her weekly schedule, the names of her tutors and a photograph.” That explained the thickness of the envelope.

  “I’m impressed. If only all my clients were so efficient.”

  She favoured me with her first real smile and stood up, putting on her silk scarf and glasses. I could see my reflection in each lens.

  “Is there some way I can reach you? Discreetly of course.”

  She hesitated before removing a card from her bag. In an elaborate cursive font it read ‘Sylvia Booker’ and a mobile number, no occupation, no address. I passed her one of mine. I suggested we meet in a week unless I had something before. She nodded guardedly, as if reluctant to make any commitment, then looked at a tiny gold watch on her wrist.

  I followed her perfume to the door.

  “By the way, why did you choose Cambridge Confidential, Mrs Booker?” She stopped and looked back at me through the dark glass.

  “I chose you, George, because I recognised the name on the website of your private eye association.”

  I could have asked her what she meant but she’d stepped into the hall. Besides, I knew what it meant. It meant that she’d known my father at Morley.

  3

  I COUNTED OUT TWENTY-POUND NOTES FROM SYLVIA Booker’s envelope as I ate my sandwich al-desko. I reached a thousand when the phone rang. It was Jason, Sandra’s eldest.

  “Boss, why aren’t you having lunch with the fit Nina?”

  “First, you can’t call her fit, I’m told it’s sexist—”

  “But she is fit, boss, she’s a nutritionist and she obviously works out.” I rolled my eyes pointlessly.

  “Second, I’m not a student like you, I can’t just ask women out.”

  “Really? So how does it work when you’re an old geezer? Do you have to fill out a form and apply? Like planning permission but for dating.” He chuckled at his own joke and I thought of the dating agency website Sandra had e-mailed me the link to; I couldn’t even complete my profile on there. It just seemed a bit desperate, which of course is what I was becoming.

  “Why am I discussing this with you, for fuck’s sake?”

  He laughed down the line. “Relax, boss. She’s just a woman, not an alien. She might even be into older men.”

  Jason was nineteen and doing a part-time music technology course at Anglia Ruskin University. His mother kept two jobs, one of which was with me and the other Jason knew nothing about, one which I had only learnt about a few months ago. I wished that I could offer Sandra more work but I struggled to pay her for the stuff she did and even that I could do myself if I could be bothered. But I’d known them a long time – ever since I’d established a few years ago that Jason’s father had skipped the family and country to concentrate on furthering his drug-dealing career.

  “What can I do for you, Jason, besides teach you some manners?” I unfolded the sheets of paper that were in the envelope with the money. A head-and-shoulders photograph was paper-clipped to the front: Lucy Booker. Lucy had not inherited her mother’s looks. She had a tense face that reflected little joy. She looked familiar, of a type, mousy with a nose too big for her face. I had a nose myself, so I knew what I was talking about. I was curious to see what her father looked like.

  “I’m just checking in, boss. See if you had any jobs going.” I glanced at the photo and then at the money. I could do worse than throw some of it his way.

  “Something has come in which might need a younger face than I can manage.” I looked at my reflection in the window. “My windows also need cleaning.”

  “OK, I can come by in the morning, but I’m not interested in cleaning windows.”

  “Choosy bugger, I’ll need to run it by your mum first.”

  “For fuck’s sake, boss, I’m over eighteen.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the arrangement she and I have.” He muttered down the phone. I sympathised, but Sandra did not compromise when it came to her kids. She was determined they would stay on the straight and narrow, and that Jason go to college and not straight into a job to support her and his young brother. Nothing was to get in the way of him finishing his course, not even any extra money that I knew they could use.

  Sandra and Jason had also been there for me when Olivia had gone over. Others had been sympathetic but also either embarrassed at the circumstances or unaware of the personal blow to the old machismo – I believed that I must have failed somewhere on the manliness front.

  “It was nothing you done, boss,” Jason had told me, a couple of weeks after Olivia had flown with the other woman – from her book group – to Greece to set up an artists’ retreat in an old farmhouse. I was still drowning my self-pity in beer at the time and Sandra would send Jason round to stop me from drinking too much. “She was probably into women all along but didn’t realise it,” he’d said.

  “Right, so I just tipped her over the edge, is that it?” He’d had to put me to bed that night, bless him, just as Olivia had done once or twice when she had started to wind down the heterosexual phase of her life. I don’t suppose getting pissed had helped put the case for men, but I hadn’t realised I was making a case at the time; just that she was drifting away.

  My train of thought was happily derailed by the thousand pounds in front of me. I returned nine hundred of it to the envelope and placed it in the small office safe. With my feet on the desk I read the neatly printed sheets Sylvia Booker had given me on her daughter. It was all there, the life of one Lucy Booker – daughter of Morley College Bursar – laid out in single-spaced, small-fonted detail, with her photo paper-clipped to the front, including a breakdown of her weekly lecture schedule – she was doing English Literature – and the societies she belonged to. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble putting it together, almost more trouble than I go to myself when tailing someone and writing a report.

  There was nothing contentious, political, or even mildly exciting about what Lucy did, at least on paper. In fact her interests outside the course looked quite boring, and I wondered if they had been picked by her mother: Cambridge University Debating Society, Cambridge University Bridge Club, Cambridge Christians, hill walking, rowing team. Jesus, I was surprised she had time to get up to anything that didn’t meet with her mother’s approval. I also noted that she still lived with her parents on Morley College grounds – I hoped I wouldn’t have to go there.

  I rang Sandra at home and prayed she wasn’t still asleep. She picked up on the third ring, sounding tired. She worked an adult chat line three nights a week and slept late the following mornings.

  “I didn’t wake you?”

  “No, you’re OK, I’m just on my way out to pick up Ashley.” Ashley was six years old and had a different father to Jason. Another bloke who didn’t hang around long. “Did you fill in your details on the dating site I sent you, George?�
� I decided it was easiest to lie.

  “Yes I have. No matches yet though.”

  She snorted. “You’re lying to me, George, I had a look last night for new entries. You haven’t filled anything in. One day I’m going to answer my premium rate line and you’ll be on the other end asking me what I’m wearing.” I felt my face warm at this image and didn’t know what to say. “Maybe you’re more of a webcam kind of guy, though. Thankfully I haven’t got the body for that sort of work. At least on the telephone I can wear my bathrobe and keep my legs hairy.” Now she was deliberately trying to embarrass me but knowing that didn’t lessen my discomfort.

  “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.

  4

  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.”