The Seagull

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘So I did.’ She stretched out a hand to take the paper.

  ‘I’ve been through the reports and these are the only three who were reported missing that summer and have never been traced. The others made contact with their families soon after they were reported.’

  ‘Great. Thanks.’ She wasn’t even aware of the man leaving the room.

  She looked at the paper half an hour later, after coffee and a bun in the canteen and the realization that she wouldn’t come up with a solution to the Mary-Frances mystery through willpower and imagination alone. Patty’s mother could have gone travelling, become a mature student, married and had a family. She could have died of natural causes. She’d had contacts in the shady world of John Brace and The Seagull, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult to steal an identity. Without a name, she’d be almost impossible to trace. But the dead St Mary’s woman might still have relatives who woke every morning wondering what had become of her. Vera had a responsibility to give her a name too.

  She made more coffee and considered the list in front of her. Three women aged between seventeen and twenty-six. The first on the list was the twenty-six-year-old. She’d lived in Wallsend, which rang bells because of the link with Robbie Marshall, and had worked at Parson’s engineering company as a secretary before having her first child. She’d suffered post-natal depression and had disappeared early one morning after leaving the baby with her husband. But there was an accurate description and she’d been a big woman, nearly six foot tall, and the bones they’d found couldn’t have belonged to her. The baby she’d left behind would be an adult now.

  The last two were teenagers, one seventeen and one nineteen, but they couldn’t be more different. The younger girl was Rebecca Murray, still at school when she went missing and living at home with apparently loving parents. A lot of effort had been put into finding her. She’d even featured on the BBC programme Crimewatch, without any result. Sharon Timlin, the nineteen-year-old, had been in care since she was ten, dumped out of the system at sixteen to fend for herself in a council flat in North Shields. Vera felt angry on her behalf. People like Alison Mackie put so much effort into finding alternative families for babies and younger kids, but the older ones seemed to be left to flounder without any support at all. The physical profile of both young women fitted the St Mary’s body.

  There was no contact number for any of Sharon’s relatives, and Vera couldn’t face another stand-off with social services, so she tried Rebecca’s parents first. They’d been in their early fifties when their daughter had disappeared, so they’d be retired now. The phone number still worked and it was answered briskly by a man. ‘Alan Murray.’

  Vera identified herself.

  A silence on the end of the line. ‘You’ve found Rebecca.’ He sounded breathless.

  ‘No!’ she said. The last thing she wanted was to give them false hope, or to dash the last little bit of hope they might have. ‘But I wanted to talk to you about her. Could I come to see you?’

  No hesitation this time. ‘Oh yes. Please do. Can you come now?’

  ‘Why not?’ She still thought Sharon Timlin, the girl who’d left care, was the more likely candidate for the second St Mary’s body, but the man sounded so eager to see her, so desperate, that she couldn’t disappoint him.

  * * *

  The Murrays lived in a small private estate in the village of Holywell, just north of Whitley Bay. It was the same house where they’d lived when Rebecca was a girl, and Vera could imagine it would be a good place to bring up a family: the dene for kids to run wild in, and close enough to the beach for them to get there on their bikes down the trails and bridleways. Meeting the parents, though, Vera thought it unlikely that Rebecca had ever been allowed to run wild.

  ‘She was an only child, you see.’ The mother was trying to explain, trying to justify the restrictions she’d placed on the girl. ‘It was only natural that we were anxious.’

  ‘So it was unusual – Rebecca going out in the evening as she did?’ The Murrays had taken her into the garden, their pride and joy, a replacement child perhaps, and they sat around a little wrought-iron table. There was still colour there, a heavy scent that Vera would remember as she tried to pin down the conversation later.

  ‘When she younger she was a lovely girl.’ The mother again. The woman was faded and so ordinary that Vera would struggle to recall anything about her. ‘Easy and obedient. She changed when she left the middle school and went to the high school. We pushed to get her into Whitley Bay because that had the best results and she was bright. Really bright. Wasn’t she, Alan? They said she could get into any university she wanted.’

  The father nodded.

  ‘But she met a different crowd there. More sophisticated, I suppose. Grown up before their years. She changed. Suddenly everything was a battle. It wasn’t enough to spend an evening in with us – she had to be out. Every weekend it was off to Whitley, coming back in the early hours in a taxi.’ A pause. ‘Drunk.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Vera said. ‘That sounds like most of the teenagers I’ve ever met. Rebellious. Doesn’t it come with the territory?’

  They stared at her. They had expected a police officer to be as shocked by their daughter’s behaviour as they’d been.

  ‘Tell me about the night Rebecca went missing.’

  ‘It was a Friday night. The 23rd June. She’d already finished school, because she’d been taking her Lower Sixth exams.’ The father had taken over now. ‘The week before, she told us she’d got a holiday job, waitressing. We thought that was a good sign. It showed she was growing up, taking some responsibility.’ He paused. ‘But it turned out she wasn’t working in a cafe, but in a club on the sea front. We didn’t think that was appropriate for a seventeen-year-old. I thought it might even be illegal. She said she wasn’t working in the bar, but in the restaurant; that she was old enough to make her own decisions and, if we didn’t like it, that was our problem, not hers.’

  ‘So that’s where she went on the Friday night?’

  The mother nodded. ‘She’d done two shifts the weekend before, but they’d been during the day, covering lunchtime and the early evening. That night she didn’t start work until eight o’clock. I gave her a lift. I didn’t want to fall out with her. I asked her what time she would finish and she said midnight. I said her father would pick her up. She told me there was no need for that because the club would provide a taxi. When she got out of the car she seemed very happy. She waved at me and blew me a kiss. There was no parking right on the sea front and there was a van behind me, honking its horn, so I drove away without watching her go inside.’

  ‘And that was the last time you saw her?’ Vera thought the woman had rerun that scene in her head hundreds of times, brooding, feeding her guilt.

  ‘Yes. Of course we couldn’t sleep. We could never sleep until she got home. When she wasn’t back by one, Alan got up and phoned the club. They said there must be a mistake, because Rebecca wasn’t working there that night. They never put the younger girls on night-shift. We thought she’d been lying because she was out at a party. Or with some boy that she knew we’d disapprove of. We thought she might roll in the next morning, full of excuses.’

  ‘But she didn’t and you contacted the police.’

  ‘Yes. I’m not sure they took us seriously, but when she still hadn’t turned up by Sunday night, even they started getting worried. By then we’d talked to all her friends. Nobody knew where she’d been going.’

  ‘Was she a healthy young woman? No broken bones?’ Vera hoped they’d say that Rebecca had been clumsy, that she’d broken her ankle skiing.

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘And her teeth? Did she look after them?’

  The parents were starting to look at her as if she was mad. In the tree above her, a collared dove was making its soft, mesmerizing call.

  ‘She had perfect teeth,’ the mother said. ‘Not a single filling.’

  ‘Just one last question, and then
I’ll try and explain why I’m here and what we’re going to do next.’ Vera could sense their panic and kept her voice very low, very calm. The sound that came out of her mouth echoed the call of the collared dove. Gentle and reassuring. ‘What was the name of the club where she was supposed to have been working?’

  ‘The Seagull,’ Alan Murray said. ‘It was called The Seagull.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Holly thought Vera had become obsessed with Professor Stephen Bradford, the mythical Prof., one of Hector’s Gang of Four. Vera was convinced of his guilt because somehow he was a part of her childhood, haunting her just as Hector had done. This was a wild-goose chase. In the real world, winners of the T. S. Eliot prize for poetry didn’t commit murder. She’d googled Bradford and recognized the title of his anthology – she’d studied one of his poems for GCSE English. In the car on the way south from Kimmerston she’d tried to talk to Charlie about her reservations, but he was a Vera loyalist and always had been. ‘Aye, it seems canny weird, but the woman’s probably right, you know. She generally is.’

  Holly had always loved Durham; the dramatic skyline of the cathedral and the castle, from the train, marked the beginning of the true North for her. The start of the strange and alien territory that had become her home. Charlie seemed to know his way around the city and slid into the last parking space in a street close to the college they were heading for.

  ‘I phoned ahead,’ he said. ‘Christine’s waiting for us.’ They were out of the car and he clicked the key to lock it. ‘She’s the lass who recognized the professor’s voice from the tape.’

  The woman was in her forties, which didn’t quite fit with Holly’s definition of a lass. She was willowy, straight-backed and very grand, in a twinset-and-pearls kind of way. It turned out that she was in charge of the college’s administration, as well as being an academic in her own right. But it seemed that Charlie had charmed her.

  ‘Why don’t we chat in the SCR? It’s usually very quiet at this time of day.’ They followed her into a drawing room with a view of a garden and the river, were handed coffee from the filter machine and a plate of biscuits. That was when the gentility ended.

  ‘You do realize it’s impossible for me to hand over information about a former member of staff without good reason.’ The voice was steely.

  Holly was about to speak, but Charlie was there before her, his voice very quiet.

  ‘He’s been closely linked to two murders, Christine.’

  Holly winced at the use of the first name. She too was probably a professor.

  ‘But no evidence that he’s implicated in any way. You don’t seriously think he’s a suspect.’ The woman raised her coffee cup to her lips.

  ‘He could provide useful information that would lead to the arrest of a dangerous killer.’ Charlie paused for a moment. ‘One of the victims was a young woman. The same age as some of your students.’ Another pause. ‘You wouldn’t want to be seen to be obstructing our investigation.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want the name of a prominent poet, linked very closely to this college, plastered all over the press.’ Her voice had become slightly shrill. Charlie had her rattled.

  ‘I can promise that won’t happen, Christine. We’ll be discreet. Unless Professor Bradford is charged, of course. Then it would be impossible to keep his name out of the press.’

  The woman looked a little ill and closed her eyes. Holly imagined her making rapid calculations about damage limitation, and finally deciding she couldn’t be seen to block the police investigation. ‘I’ll need to go to my office to find Stephen’s current address.’

  ‘That’s very kind, Christine.’ It was impossible not to believe in Charlie’s sincerity. ‘But before we do that, perhaps you could tell us about him. As a man, I mean. What sort of chap is he?’ He sat back in his chair, apparently as comfortable here as in one of the rough pubs in Shields where he usually met his contacts. Holly wondered how she could have underestimated him all the years they’d worked together.

  ‘Bradford’s a great poet. He’s brilliant on the northern landscape.’

  ‘All hills and sheep, then?’

  The woman looked at him, suspecting he was mocking but unsure. ‘There’s nothing sentimental about his work, Constable. It captures the brutality of the countryside, the contrasting ambiguity of secret hidden places and space.’ She got to her feet and pulled a slim volume from a shelf. ‘Please take this. It might help you to understand what I mean about Stephen’s work.’ She handed the book to Holly, obviously thinking that she would appreciate the poetry more.

  Holly glanced at the cover, a photograph of Hadrian’s Wall stretching across a ridge towards the horizon, with dark clouds behind it. The collection was called Walls and Freedom. She recognized it from her schooldays. There was a flattering quote from the Observer.

  Holly held the book up for Charlie to see. He gave it a quick look and then directed his attention back to the academic. ‘Aye, but that’s more like a review of his work, if you don’t mind me saying, Christine. And anyway, I’m not quite sure what it means. It doesn’t tell us much about the man. How did he fit in with his colleagues, for example? Was he liked in college?’

  ‘He was a very charismatic lecturer,’ the woman said. ‘His students adored him, especially the postgrads.’

  Charlie didn’t speak. He was waiting for more. Holly sat very still, frightened to break the tension.

  Christine drained the coffee and set her cup carefully on the saucer that lay on the polished table. ‘He could be a little arrogant. At meetings he liked the sound of his own voice. That didn’t always make him popular.’ Another pause. ‘I don’t think he had any close friends in college. He was rather a performer, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘A bit showy.’ Charlie’s voice was diffident.

  ‘Perhaps. And I had the sense that most of his life was away from here. For lots of our staff, college is the centre of the universe. It wasn’t like that in Stephen’s case. Some members thought him rather flippant, that he didn’t take his role here seriously enough. He was paid a reasonable salary, but he’d think nothing of cancelling tutorials at the last moment.’ Christine must have thought she was giving too much away because her tone changed. ‘Of course he was in great demand in the literary world, festivals and conferences, book tours, and all that reflected well on college. Not everybody realized the importance of his work away from Durham.’

  Charlie nodded to show that he, at least, understood. ‘Any family?’

  ‘Divorced, I think, many years ago. He never mentioned children to me, but, as I’ve explained, he didn’t discuss personal matters. He could have a whole brood. He’d breeze in, perform for his adoring audience, object to a perfectly reasonable proposal at a college meeting – just, I suspect, to cause mischief – and then disappear again. I think he had a flat in Tyneside somewhere, but his main residence was in North Northumberland and it was almost impossible to reach him there.’ Suddenly she smiled. ‘Sorry, that’s probably unfair. As you can possibly tell, I found him a difficult man.’

  ‘You weren’t sorry when he retired then?’

  The smile grew wider. ‘That, Detective Constable, is the understatement of the year.’

  Charlie stood up. ‘We’ve taken up a lot of your time. If we could just have those contact details for Professor Bradford.’

  But now Christine seemed reluctant to let them go. She got to her feet, but stood for a moment staring out of the window. ‘I love autumn in Durham. The undergraduates will be back soon. It’s always a time of promise, the start of a new academic year.’ She turned back to face them. ‘Perhaps that’s why I resented Bradford so much. He didn’t care about the place. He saw it as a meal ticket. As I said before, his passions lay elsewhere. In the countryside. Or his books. His real life had nothing to do with us.’

  * * *

  They sat in the car. In a few weeks’ time the street would be busy with students, but it was quiet now. In the distance a chu
rch clock chimed. Charlie was behind the driving wheel, and Holly held in her hand a slip of university-headed paper with Professor Stephen Bradford’s address and phone number.

  ‘What do you think?’ Charlie had turned in his seat and was staring at her. ‘Go back to the station and present this to Vera, or head straight up there and give her a ring afterwards?’

  It seemed almost a test of loyalty. But Holly couldn’t work out if it was her loyalty to Vera that was in question, or to him. She decided to hedge her bets. ‘Head straight up there, but we should give Vera a ring on the way. I don’t think Christine would warn him that we were looking for him – she didn’t seem much of a fan – but someone else in the uni might have got wind of the fact that we were sniffing around, and it’s clear he has his admirers. Best to speak to him before they do.’ She hesitated, decided to be honest. ‘I’d be scared to see him without telling Vera first, though.’

  ‘Ha! So would I.’ He started the engine. ‘You phone her then, pet. Give her the glad tidings. Make her day.’

  * * *

  The house was a detached villa just south of Seahouses. Only the road separated it from the dunes and a view of the Farne Islands, and the whole street looked sand-blasted, shuttered against potential gales. Approaching it down a street of similar properties, Holly thought it looked rather conventional, almost suburban, for what they knew of the professor, but when they pulled up outside she saw it was quite different from the rest. The first storey had been rebuilt and extended, so that there were two huge glass windows fitted at an angle, jutting out towards the sea like the prow of a boat. A telescope had been set up on a tripod in the room beyond and pointed out towards the bay.

  Vera had been in a strange mood when Holly had phoned, almost subdued. ‘There’s news at this end too. I think we’ve got an ID on the second body. It’s definitely not Mary-Frances. I’ll fill everyone in at the briefing this evening. Bring the professor in for questioning. His voice on Gary Keane’s answerphone, and the fact that he was one of the last people to see Robbie Marshall alive, gives us enough to do that.’