Cambridge Blue (11 page)

The sun was out this afternoon and he realized that it was the first time since seeing Lorna’s body on Midsummer Common that he’d been aware of anything unconnected with her. He could reach her flat with a brisk ten-minute walk along the edge of the pedestrianized shopping streets. As he passed the
Cambridge News
kiosk on the corner of Sidney Street and Petty Cury, the billboard announced ‘Latest on Midsummer Common Murder’. People walked along with the late edition under their arms or protruding from their bags. Soon her name would be announced, and shortly after that the whole city would be on first-name terms with her.

A few minutes later, he turned from the busy shops in Bridge Street, down Rolfe Place and towards Rolfe Street beyond. No one followed and, ahead of him, the pavements were empty. He could see two marked cars parked in the middle of an atypically empty row of parking spaces. Meanwhile, a lone uniformed officer stood in a doorway. Goodhew knew that every activity would be closely watched from one neighbouring house or another, but he was glad that her home hadn’t yet descended into a general gawping ground.

It was the type of street where the terraces had originally been functionally unglamorous, but now existed in a new incarnation of desirable and fashionable city living. Few had not been ‘modernized’, the term which currently implied adding period features alongside state-of-the-art gadgetry.

Lorna’s flat appeared to have once served as the living accommodation over a shop. The shop itself looked like it had ceased trading somewhere back in the 1970s, when aluminium window frames and stone cladding or pebble dashing were still options of modernization that left one’s neighbours on speaking terms. OK, so the conversion from shop to ground-floor flat had escaped any onslaught on the brickwork, but the metal replacement windows with brown-glossed windowsills were a dead giveaway, and now it stood forlornly empty with a faded ‘For Sale’ board in the window. By contrast, Lorna’s front door was solid wood: not one of those pseudo-traditional knock-offs but, the real McCoy; the two-inch-thick type made half an inch thicker by a century of gloss paint, and still with the original stained-glass panel set in the top.

He was now close enough to recognize that the constable standing in the doorway was Kelly Wilkes. She smiled in greeting, stepping forward and to one side as he came within a few feet of her.

‘Who’s here?’ he asked.

‘Just a couple of forensics guys and Kincaide.’

‘He’s the only one?’

‘Uh-huh. DI Marks was here earlier, but left Kincaide and DC Charles to finish off. Then, about twenty minutes ago, Charles said he was off too. I think they’ve pretty much finished.’

‘That’s fast going,’ he commented as he stepped through the door. ‘Must be a small flat.’

The hall had a floor laid with the familiar year-dot dark-red tiles, interspersed with black and white diamonds, and a few in cobalt blue for contrast. Four pairs of shoes had been bagged and left at the bottom of the stairs, which, beneath the protective plastic laid down by the forensics team, were carpeted. He ascended the centre of the flight, carefully avoiding touching either wall. Above him, the landing was partially visible, the banisters blocked in behind hardboard panels, but still low enough for someone to look over them to find out who was approaching. On this occasion, no one did.

A single unlit bulb, decorated with hand-painted swirls, hung from an overhead light fitting, and if that counted as an artistic touch, it was the only one. Immediately beside the top step stood a small dark-wood table. Goodhew’s attention settled on it for a moment before being diverted by the sound of Kincaide’s voice. But he had looked just long enough to see that the post contained nothing more than a few advertising brochures.

Kincaide stood close to the top of the stairs. ‘That stuff was on the mat when we arrived, so at least we know she left before the post came.’

Goodhew looked past him into the flat itself, noticing that the curtains were drawn shut and the lights were on. ‘How’s it going?’

Kincaide shrugged. ‘Just about wrapping it up. There’s not much left to do here.’

The living room was a reasonable size, and furnished with a few well-chosen items, mainly in pine. Both the chest of drawers and the bookcase looked like they’d been bought from local antique dealers, and the soft furnishings from a shop which specialized in neither cheap nor cheerful. Somehow he knew they weren’t Lorna’s own. By contrast, the television, mirror and a frame containing dried flowers had all arrived on a much more modest budget and looked pack-up-and-go convenient. One remote control, two pens, and a box of tissues were the most clutter she’d left lying around. Perhaps she’d been hooked on those sell-your-home shows which preach depersonalizing your living space – anyhow, it wasn’t hard to see why the police search hadn’t taken long.

Kincaide had now moved on, and Goodhew found him adding Lorna’s bedding to the inventory of items being removed.

‘I guess she rented?’

‘Guess so,’ Kincaide grunted. ‘Haven’t got that far yet, but who can afford to buy a place here, in the centre?’ He glanced up, raised an eyebrow, and added pointedly, ‘Don’t even know who can afford to even rent in this town; you’d have to be lucky enough to have it in the family.’

Goodhew ignored the personal dig. ‘Nice bed.’ It was a king-size, with an asymmetric headboard composed of wrought-iron gothic scrolls. Nice wasn’t the right word for it; more like quirky with a touch of the Gaudi-esque.

‘You serious?’ Kincaide looked from Goodhew to the bed and back again, clearly unsure whether he was being had.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Really? I think it looks tacky, like some shitty art college project.’ Kincaide couldn’t wipe the grimace of distaste from his face, in fact he made no attempt to. ‘It looks dodgy to me. Pervy in fact. And hideous.’

Kincaide wandered off again, but Goodhew stayed behind to study the curves of the metal, trying to see it the same way Kincaide obviously had. He found himself pulling that same expression, but still didn’t understand what there was not to like.

Finally, he walked over to the window and lifted the curtain briefly, then dropped it again. He turned back and ran his fingers along the topmost curve of the bedhead, then crossed the room and began opening and closing the wardrobe. There was nothing left inside, no essence of Lorna’s presence left for him to disturb.

Kincaide, meanwhile, was in the kitchen, leaning on the worktop and sending a text with some fast and ambidextrous thumb activity. ‘Hang on,’ he grunted to his younger colleague.

Goodhew flipped open an overhead cupboard, where he found the crockery. Apart from two mugs, the contents were all clearly from a standard issue everything-proof set. The taller mug was cream-coloured with the word ‘Chocolate’ curling across it, the other was brightly painted with the name ‘Lorna’. Not very revealing. He let the door snap shut.

Kincaide glanced up. ‘I’ve already done the cupboards.’

Goodhew took the hint and left the next one alone. ‘What about that calendar?’

‘Oh, yeah. Nothing much on it, but it can go with the other paperwork. There’s a box of it I’ve just moved to the top of the stairs.’

The calendar was the type with one square per day but no picture; it had come courtesy of Staples Office Supplies. The current month had only one entry, ‘Hair – 12.00’ on the 16th. If that was a good example of a month’s activity, ‘nothing much’ really would be an accurate description. Goodhew unhooked it from the wall and turned forward the pages from the back. When it came to their calendars, people were either flip and keep, or rip and bin, and he was pleased to see that Lorna had been with him on this one.

‘Oh boy,’ he sighed. Either her life was depressingly uneventful or she recorded her more interesting activities elsewhere.

He had turned right back to the start of the year before any entry caught his attention: 9th January – ‘Bryn to MOT car’. Goodhew read this just as Kincaide dropped his mobile back into his pocket.

‘Seen something?’

Goodhew frowned. ‘Don’t know, really. Did she have a car?’

Kincaide took the calendar, ‘I saw that too and checked with the others at the Excelsior, but they say no. She sold it apparently.’

Goodhew followed Kincaide out of the kitchen, and watched him drop the calendar into the document crate.

And later, as he walked towards home, he reminded himself that there could be numerous people called Bryn in this area. More than just the Bryn O’Brien who’d sat nearest the paint cupboard in primary school. He was the class practical joker, whom Gary couldn’t even remember speaking to, but had secretly admired. Bryn had made light of education, never buckling under the weight of expectation, always doing just enough to get by.

When Gary’s mother had switched him to a private school at the end of Year 6, he’d found himself reeling from the shock of going from the top of his state school class to being considered mediocre among his new peers. And, for the first couple of years, he gave Bryn credit for helping him through. Mentally he’d kept Bryn alongside him, imagining how Bryn would navigate the narrow ledge that was bottom of the class.

But the real Bryn was someone he knew next to nothing about. And the chances were it was a different Bryn, except that as he’d read that entry in the calendar, his memory had conjured up a single item of O’Brien family trivia: Bryn’s father had been a mechanic. And, when he factored that in, he knew that the odds narrowed dramatically.

The decision he therefore made, as he walked home, was a simple one: he would track down Bryn O’Brien. With any luck, he’d be meeting someone on first-name terms with Lorna.

FIFTEEN

Goodhew walked across Parker’s Piece towards home, a one-bedroomed, rooftop flat in Park Terrace. The building had once been a four-storey townhouse, but since the 1990s, the basement and first three floors had been converted into office space, so the only remaining living accommodation was Goodhew’s. He glanced up to his window, then walked down the short garden path and unlocked the heavy front door. It closed behind him with a solid and purposeful click, the sound always reminding him he now had the place to himself.

He took the stairs two at a time and, on reaching the final landing, opened a second door, which led directly into his flat. He paused, and despite instincts telling him that nothing had been disturbed, he let his eyes make their routine three-second sweep of the room. His scrutiny began at the far end, checking for three reassuring things: undisturbed bookshelves, his bedroom door still closed, and his beloved Bel Ami jukebox unplugged and unharmed. All OK. Finally, he made sure that his pile of papers still lay on top of the closed case of his laptop. He concluded that nothing had been moved, which gave him his cue to unwind one more turn.

He frowned, finding his own habit of double-checking things annoying, and acknowledging that it wasn’t far from bordering on compulsive. But, hell, everyone had their personal foibles, and it wasn’t like he wasted much time on it.

He changed into jeans and a t-shirt, poured a glass of orange juice, and set his jukebox on free-play. The mechanism clicked and whirred before making its selection and dropping the single on to the deck. The arm swooped, giving the stylus a bumpy landing on the run-in strip. The 45 crackled, then broke into the opening bars of Chuck Berry’s ‘School Days’. How apt.

Gary slid his Sony Notebook from one of the bottom bookshelves, pressed the power button and, as he waited for it to boot up, flipped open the Yellow Pages and flicked towards ‘Car Repairs’. He had expected he’d need to use search engines for electoral rolls and credit checks, and possibly even a visit to Friends Reunited, but the Notebook was not even in the running – by the time it had fully loaded Windows, Gary had already drawn a blue box around the name ‘O’Brien and Sons’ with his Biro.

He checked his watch. Ten past seven. He rang the number. No reply. No surprise there then. But it was within easy walking distance, just across Parker’s Piece and then a few streets further on, behind the swimming pool. His curiosity had been stirred and he decided to go there in any case. He waited for Chuck Berry to finish, then pulled the plug from the wall socket and left his flat again.

Gary saw Parker’s Piece as the no man’s land between two distinctly different parts of the city. He lived on the historic side, the tourist trap brimming with distinctive buildings and enough magnetism to draw people from, literally, all over the world. The other side was certainly poorer and less distinctive, with a criss-cross of any-town backstreets and a surfeit of struggling or vacant premises. Personally, he had no preference for either area, knowing that, like backstage and front of house, neither could function without the other.

He had no idea what to expect now from a visit to a locked workshop, probably nothing more than a sign saying ‘Closed’, and another indicating the phone number that he’d already tried. He walked on anyway.

Bryn O’Brien had heard the phone ringing; in fact it was impossible to miss the sound of the extension which made an outside bell jangle up under the eaves of the garage. But he made no move to answer it. He was sitting within reach of it too, and knew, without looking, that the handset was resting on the bench, less than two feet from his left shoulder. Only one item lay between it and himself: a face-down copy of the
Cambridge News
.

He stayed where he was, sunk into the improvised battered vinyl settee that had once been the bench seat of a ’62 low-line Ford Consul. He still wore his maroon overalls, and his steel-toed working boots were planted squarely on the concrete floor. Bryn had short blond hair and blue eyes, made brighter by the smudges of grease that he’d smeared on to his face during the day. One palm rested on each knee, and the first two knuckles of his right hand were grazed, pink circles left by a sudden departure of skin.

In front of him, his current project was elevated to full height on the ramps. It was another Mark II Ford, but this time a Zodiac, the fully equipped and subtly modified version of its deceased cousin. Bryn stared up at its underside, where he’d replaced the 2.5 litre straight six with a rebuild V6, and at the twin exhausts, each branching into two, their four chrome tailpipes protruding from beneath the bumper. The car was a clean black underneath, with low-profile tyres on Wolfrace wheels, wider than the originals had been.