by Danuta Reah
They wanted to know if Luke could have wiped the data from Gemma’s computers. She shrugged her shoulders. Of course he could have done. A lot of people could. She told them about the report and the transcript, and the fact that the copies she had printed out seemed to have vanished. She didn’t tell them about the photographs. She would have done, she told herself, if they’d asked her something that led that way, but they didn’t. It wasn’t her business. She should never have seen those. She should never have had that information. That was the way she rationalized it. She left, feeling like a hospital patient who has been given the all-clear from some dread disease, but feeling no relief because she hadn’t mentioned one symptom that surely, surely didn’t count…
It wasn’t until she was at work, sitting at her desk, that it began to come into focus. She felt cold, and put her hand on the radiator. It was on. The coldness seemed to be coming from inside her.
The worst of the hangover had faded. Her headache had retreated under a hefty dose of Paracetamol and, though her stomach felt uneasy, the feeling of nausea had gone. She was starting to feel hungry. It seemed wrong to feel hungry, somehow. She thought about Luke on his way to Hull, in the interview room, facing hostile, intrusive questions. Would he lose his temper? She remembered her own indignation at the questions she’d been asked.
What’s your relationship with Luke, Roz?
Best to tell us about it, Roz.
Does he often spend the night with you?
And Gemma was dead. She tried to feel sadness, regret, but all she could feel was a kind of blank shock. Gemma, with the whole world in front of her if she wanted to take it; bright, talented, young. But how young could Gemma have been if she was days, maybe hours away from her death?
She listened to the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside. She hadn’t spoken to Joanna since she came in. She might be in her office now, and she would want to know what little Roz could tell her. She went to Joanna’s room and knocked on the door. She could hear Joanna speaking as she went in, and she saw that Peter Cauldwell was there, sitting in the chair opposite Joanna. ‘…confidential material that should be handled properly,’ she was saying.
Cauldwell looked at Joanna solemnly. ‘Joanna, this is a murder investigation. We must not only be seen to co-operate, we should want to co-operate. The police will be sensitive to any problems about confidentiality. It’s very possible, I’m afraid to say, that there is a link. This loss of data…’ Cauldwell looked pleased. ‘You really should have brought this to my attention as soon as you knew about it.’
Roz felt tired. She heard Luke’s voice in her head, ‘All the university brass out to watch Grey nail Cauldwell’s scrotum to the table.’ Peter Cauldwell was out to get his revenge. ‘I don’t think there are any confidential documents left,’ she said. Her voice sounded flat in her own ears. ‘Does it matter?’
Cauldwell looked round. ‘Roz,’ he said. ‘This is a terrible business.’
Joanna stood up. ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ she said to Cauldwell. He began to object, but Joanna said sharply, ‘This is neither the time nor the place, Peter,’ and Roz was aware of Joanna’s eyes flickering towards her. Cauldwell nodded and left the room. Joanna sighed and sat down. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she said. ‘Do you want some coffee?’
Roz slumped into the chair opposite Joanna. ‘No coffee,’ she said. She told Joanna about the morning visit, that Luke was helping the police with their inquiries. As she spoke, she could hear it all making a horrible kind of sense. Joanna had been worrying that she had employed a woman who’d made off with the confidential material the group held, and details of potentially valuable software they were developing. Now she must be worrying that she had employed the man who killed her.
Joanna sat in silence for a moment when Roz had finished. ‘I can’t believe that when I spoke to Gemma about the meeting, it was the last time I was ever going to see her. There was so much…the whole world.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, and took some deep breaths. She looked confused for a moment, then her eye fell on the papers on the desk in front of her. ‘Perhaps we ought to look at these,’ she said, with uncharacteristic tentativeness. ‘The new round of grant applications…’
Roz remembered what she had said to Luke: ‘She can cope with worrying about grants and things, and she can’t cope with worrying about people.’
‘Luke hasn’t been arrested,’ she said.
Joanna stood up. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but there’s been something about Luke since Friday – and don’t tell me that’s hindsight,’ she added. Roz, who had been about to say something, stopped. Joanna was a quick – and shrewd – judge of people. And she was right. There had been something wrong with Luke. Joanna’s office door hadn’t shut properly, and now it swung open as a man walked past with Gemma’s computer in his arms. Roz looked at Joanna, seeing the glint of anger in her eyes.
‘I know they’ve taken Luke in for questioning, Joanna,’ she said. ‘But they would. He was Gemma’s boyfriend.’ She found that hard to say. ‘He was the one making the fuss about her going missing. They have to question him.’ As she spoke, Roz felt herself relax. Of course they would want to question Luke. How could they not?
Joanna’s face remained tense for a moment, then she relaxed. ‘I know,’ she conceded. She closed her eyes. ‘I just…I need something to do. I can’t think about it, not now. It’s not a good atmosphere for work in here. It’s not a good atmosphere for anything. I’m going to work at home today. If I were you, I’d do the same, Roz.’
Roz didn’t need to think about it. ‘No, I’ll stay here. Keep an eye on things.’
Joanna looked relieved. ‘Thank you,’ she said, the genuine gratitude on her face reminding Roz of the woman who had befriended her and supported her when she first applied for a transfer to Sheffield. Roz picked up the grant application forms. ‘I’ll make a start on these,’ she said.
But when she got back to her room, she sat and stared out of the window at the grey winter sky and rain that was starting to spatter against the glass. The police must think that Luke had killed Gemma. Or that it was possible. It was something that her mind didn’t want to face, and she had to force herself to consider it. She thought of Luke as she had known him before Gemma came into their lives. His laconic irony had been a good foil for her seriousness. He’d stopped her from burning out in her first months as a research assistant, getting her to prioritize, to resist unreasonable pressure from her students: ‘They’re trying it on, Bishop. They know you’re on a temporary contract. Look, this department needs a researcher, not a teacher. Focus.’
He’d taught her to have fun again. Like her, he was prone to depressions and periods of dark brooding. They were good at lifting each other out of these lows with viciously competitive games of squash, dancing at insalubrious clubs, wild drives down the motorway on his bike. And he’d never asked her about Nathan, had respected Roz’s abrupt explanation, ‘My husband is seriously ill,’ as the Keep off sign that it was.
She remembered the first time she’d met him. She had just arrived in Sheffield to take up her contract, still reeling from the sudden and unexpected changes in her life. She felt like someone who had been sailing downstream on a calm and sunny stretch of river, and then found herself in the rapids, a storm lashing down and an ominous roar of water in the darkness ahead. At the time, she really hadn’t cared much whether she researched into the sound systems of the English language or worked a till in a supermarket.
She’d been familiarizing herself with some software, and was trying to install a program she’d used in her earlier research. The machine was playing up and she couldn’t get the program to run, but she wasn’t really concentrating, just staring out of the window wondering what she was going to do, not now, not immediately, but in the next months and years.
‘Are you doing that on purpose?’ A man was standing behind her, looking at her screen. She jumped, and swivell
ed round in her chair, angry that someone had interrupted her, angry at being surprised. ‘I’m only asking,’ he said, ‘because I have to account for this equipment, and when they want to know what’s happened to this one, I’d like to be able to give them chapter and verse.’ His tone was one of mild inquiry. ‘I’d hazard a guess,’ he went on, ‘that the program you’re loading was written for a different operating system, and what it is currently doing is overwriting the hard disk on that machine.’ He gave her a cheerful grin. ‘Doesn’t always work, but it’s infallible when you don’t want it to.’
She stared at him. For a moment…his smile, gentle and self-deprecating – it was so much like Nathan’s smile. But there, the similarity ended. His voice had a slight lilt to it that suggested Ireland in his background. His hair was dark where Nathan’s was fair, his skin had that almost translucent pallor that often came with Celtic blood, where Nathan had, or used to have, the colour of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and her voice sounded edgy and cold. ‘I wasn’t concentrating.’
‘No skin off my nose,’ he said. ‘You might need to apologize to the guy who’s been typing up his thesis on that, mind.’ He seemed to lose interest in the matter. ‘You’ll be the new research assistant,’ he said.
And that had been the start of their friendship. Until…They’d been out together to a jazz evening in Leeds. They’d travelled there on Luke’s bike. She could still remember the ride back, the road disappearing under the wheels, the bright moon, the speed, the silent intimacy of moving together to control the machine, the exhilaration of the cool night air rushing against her face. She remembered the car that had pulled out in front of them without warning, and the way Luke had laughed as the bike wove away from one disaster towards another, wove again, and again, and then the road was clear in front of them and he accelerated away as car horns dopplered into the distance behind them. The adrenaline was still singing through them when they got back to Roz’s, and they had made love for the first time, tumbled together on the rug in front of the fire. The sex had been almost violent in its intensity, and she’d felt as though the blood was effervescing in her veins. ‘I’ve wanted to do that since I first saw you,’ he told her in the silence afterwards, before they’d had time to think about what they had done.
‘Why did you wait six months to make your move?’ she’d said, not really believing him. And they’d laughed, and just at that moment, anything had seemed possible.
But she was evading the issue. Did she believe that Luke could have killed Gemma? She remembered Luke’s sudden anger as he slammed the filing-cabinet drawer shut. And she remembered the photographs with that disturbing overtone of violence. There was a darkness in Luke. It had seemed like a personal darkness, one she recognized, his tendency towards depressions, his drinking bouts and his wild behaviour – but what if it could also turn outwards? She remembered Nathan’s fist slamming into the side of her head as she grabbed frantically and futilely at the banister to save herself from falling. She didn’t think Luke had done it. But who was she to say what someone was capable of? How could she possibly tell?
Hull, Tuesday evening
A mist was rising from the river as Lynne let herself into the block of flats. The water had that slightly rotten sea tang that meant the tide was turning. She thought about the dark glittering water upriver, the towers of the Humber Bridge, the slender thread of the road vanishing into the distance, about Katya washed up on to a mud-bank and left there by the retreating tide.
She dumped her bags on the worktop, and checked quickly to see if she had everything she needed. She had invited Roy Farnham round, ostensibly to discuss the cases – and the possible link with the business of trafficking in people. He had left the restaurant last night as soon as she’d made her tentative identification of the Jemima picture, and must have put in a full night’s work, because he’d phoned her that morning to tell her she was right – Gemma Wishart had been reported missing to South Yorkshire Police on Saturday. Wishart’s mother had identified the watch that the Sleeping Beauty had been wearing, and a small, irregular birthmark high on her left thigh. ‘We’ll need to confirm from the dental records,’ Farnham had said. ‘But I don’t think there’s any doubt.’ She’d wanted to discuss the case more, to look for links with Katya’s death, but Farnham was tied up all day. That was when she had tentatively suggested an evening meeting, at her flat.
He wasn’t directly her senior officer – anyway, not part of the same team – so social contact shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but Lynne was wary. She had made the mistake once before of getting involved with someone from the job. She felt as though she still carried the scars from her few months with the austere and driven Steve McCarthy. It had been a turbulent relationship that had ended in bitterness and recrimination, and she had decided then that she would not let her work and her private life get entangled again.
But in that case, who could she have relationships with? Most of the men she met drew back when they realized what she did. Only fellow officers could understand the nature and the demands of the work. But a senior officer? People would say that she had earned her career on her back. A junior officer was impossible. Someone of the same rank? Then ambition and competition would step in, as she had found to her cost with Steve.
She checked the time. She had almost an hour before he was likely to arrive. She half expected him to call and cry off. She knew that Gemma Wishart’s boyfriend had been brought in for questioning earlier in the day. She wondered if Farnham had anything more than the relationship, and the obvious ramifications of that, to point at this man. If he had known about her escort work, if he had been involved in any way, then there was a whole range of motives for Wishart’s death there. Or if he hadn’t known…There was no point in speculating. She should get the details from Farnham shortly.
She hadn’t specifically mentioned eating, but he was coming straight from work. She put on some water for pasta and checked her supplies of tomato sauce, frozen at the height of last summer when the basil was fresh and fragrant. She’d bought bread on her way home, there was salad in the fridge and cheese and fruit. She could cover just about any eventuality. She had wine, if that seemed like the right thing. She took a quick shower, and was just pulling on a soft wool jersey when her entry phone rang. It was Farnham. ‘Come on up,’ she said, pressing the buzzer.
Sheffield, Tuesday evening
Roz planned to spend the evening working on her book. She needed to do something that would keep her mind occupied. But once she was sitting in front of her computer, she realized that she wouldn’t be able to concentrate. She needed to do something a bit more active, and she thought about the software she’d brought home with her the other night, something that Luke had recommended and that Joanna had asked her to evaluate. That would be a distraction. The problem was, her own machine wouldn’t run this particular program, so…suddenly she remembered.
She stood up and went through to the kitchen. She went to the locked cellar door and opened it. A puff of cold cellar air blew into her face. She looked up on to the top shelf and there, forgotten until now, was the laptop she’d brought back from the department on – when? – Friday night. The laptop that Gemma had been using until Thursday when she’d taken the less powerful machine with her to Manchester. And no one else knew that Roz had this. If the destruction of Gemma’s data files had anything to do with her death, then this machine was priceless. She wanted to phone Luke to tell him what she’d found.
But he wouldn’t be there. Her elation at her find had vanished. She needed to see what she had. There was no reason to assume that Gemma had left anything on this machine. She opened the carrying case and there, in one of the pockets, was a floppy disk and some sheets of paper. She looked at the paper – a few typed sheets with handwritten notes, symbols, scribbles – the transcript! Gemma’s working copy! She turned the machine on, put the disk into the A-drive and looked to see what she had got. Yes!
There was a folder marked ‘Gemma’. She opened it and was disappointed to see just three files: tapehull – presumably a clean copy of the transcript of DI Jordan’s tape. The second file was draftreport hull. Roz ran her fingers across the tight skin on her forehead. The hard copy of the report and the transcript had vanished from her desk. The other file was mholbrook. She opened it.
Dear Professor Holbrook
Re: Holbrook Archive
I contacted your assistant recently about access to the archive to do some tape comparisons. Apparently the collection is currently being catalogued and isn’t available at the moment. You’ll remember the tape I
The letter was unfinished.
Roz frowned. Was this anything to do with the tape and transcript? The Holbrook Archive? She racked her brains, but couldn’t think of anything. She dug around on her bookshelves until she found her copy of the university directory, but there was no Holbrook in the ‘current staff’ section. She found him in the section for visiting academics and consultants. Marcus Laurence Holbrook. He seemed to have been doing some kind of consultancy work with the Department of European Studies. He was a specialist in the languages of the old USSR, which she should have guessed. That was Gemma’s field. Had been Gemma’s field. The Holbrook Archive must be a collection relating to these languages. Gemma’s letter mentioned tapes.
