The Bursar's Wife (5 page)

“That was Works and Pensions. They have another benefits sponger they want you to check out.”

“I hate that work, Sandra, you know that.”

“It pays bills.”

I tried not to look smug as I said, “There’s nearly a grand in the safe. A retainer from Sylvia Booker.”

She opened her mouth to say something that would no doubt burst my bubble when thankfully the phone rang and she had to answer it.

“Cambridge Confidential Services, how can we help?” she asked. Sandra always said ‘we’ when she answered the phone, insisting it sounded like there were lots of us, not one man and his part-time PA and her odd-job son. She listened and frowned. “Where are you? Why aren’t you in class?” I smiled as I imagined Jason doing some fast talking. Sandra gave a sceptical grunt and transferred the call. I put the handset to my ear. Hubbub formed background noise.

“Boss, why don’t you get a mobile, or use the office one? I wouldn’t have to go through Mum to speak to you.”

“Because you don’t own a mobile phone, Jason, it owns you.” Sandra made a derisory snorting sound. Loud uninhibited female laughter drowned out Jason’s reply. “Where are you?” I asked.

“The Flying Duck. Hang on, let me move somewhere quieter.” The laughter dimmed and Jason’s voice grew clearer. “Guess who I’ve just had lunch with?”

“I don’t know, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, by the sound of it.”

He laughed. “No, the complete opposite I’d say, now that I’ve met her.” He paused gratuitously for dramatic effect.

“Spit it out, boy.”

“Lucy Booker.”

JASON HAD EXAGGERATED THE NATURE OF HIS LUNCHTIME
tryst with Lucy Booker, as I discovered when we met later that afternoon at Antonio’s. Jason didn’t want to come in to the office since his mother was there and would no doubt question him about something or other he should or shouldn’t be doing. Antonio took his time making an espresso and a cappuccino while I quizzed Jason, who smelled of beer and crisps.

“So you didn’t actually speak to Lucy then?” I’d already established that he’d met with Rowena at the Flying Duck for a lunchtime drink, which explained why he was there in the first place – it was an undergraduate hangout only frequented by the likes of Jason to pick up girls or pick fights with male freshers philosophising in that annoyingly loud way freshers do when drinking.

“She came in with her rowing crew. It’s a favourite pub of theirs after practice. She drank half a shandy. The others had pints of bitter. She spent most of the time looking down into her beer and blushing at the jokes. You should hear some of the jokes these girls tell, boss – some of them make me blush. There’s this one about three men and an old lady with no teeth, right—”

“I’ve heard it, Jason, it’s disgusting.” Antonio came over with our coffees. He was fifty-something with a large paunch and impossibly thick and wavy hair lined with grey. It gave him the appearance of gravitas he did not possess.

“You want some almond cake, Georgio?”

“No thanks, Antonio, I need to watch myself.” I patted my stomach.

“Forget about it. The ladies don’t want sticks like young Jason here. They see your stomach as a sign of your appetite for life.”

“More like a sign of your appetite for cake,” said Jason. He started hooting loudly until Antonio walked away, shaking his head. I looked at Jason to show him I wasn’t laughing; I was, after all, paying him for his time.

He registered my face and settled down.

“Did you learn anything useful while boozing at my expense?”

“Yes I did, as a matter of fact.” He sucked noisily at his hot cappuccino without lifting the cup from the saucer and then smiled at me with a frothy moustache. “They belong to the same bridge club.” He wiped his upper lip with a napkin. He’d missed a bit but I didn’t say anything; sometimes I felt the need to punish his youthful cockiness.

“Excellent work, Jason.”

“Well yeah, boss, but this is the thing. I asked Rowena whether I could play bridge, you know, to like raise the subject, and that got the biggest laugh of all, like I’d asked if I could meet her parents, right? Anyway, she goes to Lucy like,” – and here he puts on a passable version of Penelope Keith in
To The Manor Born
– “‘Do you think Jason could master the subtleties of bridge, Lucy?’ and Lucy looks at me under her fringe and shrugs. ‘I don’t see why not, he doesn’t look stupid,’ she says. And then she asks me, as brazen as you like, ‘You’re not stupid are you?’ and all the while her eyes are flicking between me and Rowena, like the question was about me and her, not about bridge. Anyway, it got to Rowena cause I could feel her arse tighten on my hand.”

At this point Jason took in more of his coffee and I was left with the image of a tensing Rowena with Jason’s hand under her buttock. I waited for him to carry on, looking around the four-tabled place wondering how Antonio survived the saturation spread of coffee-shop multinationals. Only one other customer kept us company; an old man who was studying the inside of a Cambridge
Argus
. I could see the headline and my own buttocks tensed: DEAD WOMAN FOUND IN POPULAR DOG-WALKING SPOT. Jason was shaking his head, ready to resume.

“Quiet as a mouse she’d been up till then,” he said. “Then Rowena asks Lucy why she never goes to bridge club any more, and whether it was because she’d finally found a boyfriend, and Lucy goes the colour of a baboon’s arse and makes her excuses.” He shook his head and looked down at the table. “When she’d gone they all had a good laugh at her expense,” he said, in a low voice. There was hope for the boy yet.

* * *

I bought a Cambridge
Argus
on the way back to the office, where Sandra was typing on the computer. I sat at my desk and put my feet up.

“Any messages?” I asked. Sandra just snorted without breaking her flow and I started to read the inside page article on Trisha’s murder. It gave little detail, no mention of the belt. I’d just got to the bit about a man helping with enquiries when the soothing clickety-clack stopped.

“I rang Works and Pensions, told them you’d take the benefits case.”

I sighed and put the paper down. “I’ve told you I hate that work, Sandra. It’s bad karma, ask any of the women who work in the building.”

“Yeah, well, they have a long line of people ready to part with cash in return for some hocus-pocus. You, on the other hand, have a long line of bills waiting to be paid.” I sighed again, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to sack Sandra and replace her with someone younger who minded their own business and let me be. I heard the buzz-buzz of the inkjet printer spraying words onto paper. I went back to the murder story. Thankfully there was no mention of me or Al Greene, only DCI Brampton. It was early days though, and although the
Argus
was not celebrated for its investigative journalism, it was only a matter of time before the sexual nature of the crime came out and the potential quadrupling of sales made someone curious. My worry was being linked with the case; the last thing I needed was a reputation as some sort of sleaze-ball private eye whose clients ended up in jail. The printer stopped and Sandra placed a page on my desk.

“The details of the benefits case; he’s claiming he can’t walk. He lives out in Cottenham, so you could kill two birds with one stone.”

“He probably
can’t
walk.”

She switched off the computer and picked up her bag. She stood there fixing me with her big brown eyes and that disarming smile.

“You live in the clouds, George, you need to get a business head screwed on, like the girls in the building.” She leaned on my desk and it creaked dangerously. She’d lost the smile. “Jason tells me you’ve been sniffing round that skinny Asian bird.”

Jesus Christ.

“Skinny Asian bird, Sandra?”

“She’s not what you need right now.” Really? It seemed to me Nina was just what I needed: uncomplicated, attractive, sexy.

Sandra looked me up and down. “I know that you probably need to get laid, but believe me, Nina is not the answer. You need to get onto that dating website.” I took my feet down and tucked my bottom half under the desk in case of some embarrassing physical manifestation of my needing to get laid. She was going to say something else, then regained the smile and said she’d pop in the next day for a couple of hours. When she was gone I tried to fold up the newspaper but it got tangled up so I ended up screwing it into a giant ball and stuffing it into the waste basket.

I snatched the piece of paper from the desk and examined it. The address was indeed in Cottenham; if I left now I could get there half an hour before the end of visiting hours and then sneak a peek at my alleged benefits fraudster. I got my camera bag from the desk and went to the door. Then something about bridge club nagged me so I went back to the desk and took out the Booker file. On the list of Lucy’s activities Cambridge University Bridge Club was listed for eight o’clock Wednesday nights at Selwyn College, which was in town. Today was Wednesday. In fact it was the only club that took place in the evening; all the others were lunchtime or weekend meets. But according to Rowena, Lucy had stopped going to bridge. Sylvia Booker’s business card was in the file. It had grown dark outside so I flicked the desk lamp on, picked up the phone, dialled.

It rang seven times then she answered with a hushed, “Hello?” I imagined Sylvia Booker to be the sort of woman who removed her earring before answering the phone.

“Hello, Mrs Booker? This is George Kocharyan.” I could hear a man’s voice in the background, the sort of droning you hear at meetings or lectures. Perhaps she was at one of her charity board meetings. I heard rustling and the male voice faded.

“George?” Now her voice was breathless, like she’d been running, and I shook an image from my head of her parted lips next to my ear.

“Just a quick question, Mrs Booker. I was wondering how Lucy gets to bridge on Wednesdays since you live out at Morley College. Does she cycle in this weather?”

“No, I drive her there and pick her up. In fact I’m taking her tonight. Why do you ask?”

“Just trying to get a full picture, that’s all. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Not at all. Anything else I can help with?” Yes, you could talk softly in my ear like Grace Kelly.

“No. You’ve been very helpful. Goodbye.”

I hung up and went to kill two birds with one stone.

HALF AN HOUR WAS ABOUT AS MUCH TIME AS I COULD STAND
to visit my father in those days. When he first went into care two years ago I would sit for hours and he would have moments when he knew who I was and occasionally spoke, albeit laboriously. Those moments had grown shorter and more intermittent. I was glad my mother hadn’t lived to see his final deterioration (although she’d had to put up with worsening and uncharacteristic outbursts of verbal coarseness and the knocking on neighbours’ doors with no trousers on which in time morphed into silence and apathy) and relieved that at least now he had reached a stage where he wasn’t aware of his own mental state. Initially we’d assumed it was early-onset Alzheimer’s but one doctor had diagnosed Pick’s disease, which is rarer but was a better fit of his symptoms.

Inside the home a young care assistant I’d seen a couple of times before led me into the conservatory where the rain pelted down on the corrugated plastic roofing. It was very loud and the care assistant had to speak up.

“We like it when you visit, Mr Kevorkian, you always bring flowers. It’s not many men would bring flowers for their father.” She smiled at me and I forgave her for mistaking me for the doctor who helped 130 people kill themselves; she was young and since she worked here was probably still idealistic. She took my petrol-station flowers from me and walked off, leaving me with my father who was sitting and looking up at the plastic roofing as it held off the rain. The noise of it was probably what held his attention.

I sat down next to him and patted his hand and he looked briefly at me and smiled, but it was a smile empty of recognition. He turned his gaze back to the roofing and while he was occupied with the rain I surreptitiously checked what I could see of his translucent skin for bruises. I was paranoid about him being abused or manhandled in here, despite everyone that I’d met (and I’d made sure that I’d met everyone) being perfectly nice. Unfortunately, being perfectly nice, in my experience, was no indication of a person’s true nature – after all, I’m sure Dr Kevorkian was perfectly nice.

* * *

Ten minutes after leaving my father I was getting cold in my Golf watching the curtained house of number twenty-two, home to the supposed benefit fraudster. It was dark and still raining. At least I wasn’t conspicuous sitting in my car when it was raining. I was parked three houses down in the narrow terraced street of small drab houses. Satellite dishes were fixed to many of them, and old model Nissans and Fords, some as old as mine, lined the road. Nothing moved, and the flicker of TV screens came through the nets of houses that hadn’t yet had their curtains closed. I hadn’t come prepared for a proper stakeout: no flask of coffee, nothing to piss into, no snacks. I just wanted to check the place out, get the lay of the land. It was half-past seven. I started the car and headed for Selwyn College.

It was ten to eight when I turned onto Cranmer Road, drove to the end then U-turned and parked where I could see the entrance to the college. The rain had been downgraded to a faint drizzle, the sort that feels like being sprayed with a mister. I could see the building from inside the car, about ten car lengths away. I’d been near here before with Olivia, who’d tried to introduce me to classical music but had chosen the most booming and bombastic of symphonies which put me off going to another concert.

The streets in this part of Cambridge are wide and tree-lined, with buildings set back from the road behind walls and hedges. Surveillance work was a lot easier here than the pack-’em-in streets of ordinary folks, where front doors opened onto the pavement and loitering was difficult. I was soon rewarded with a young couple going in, exactly the sort of nerdy types I thought would be playing bridge rather than getting hammered and having sex. Mind you, Rowena seemed to combine both pursuits quite happily.