by Danuta Reah
He looked at her. ‘Marcus…he’s around. I don’t think he’s in at the moment, though. He doesn’t really…’
Holbrook was a consultant, Roz knew that. She also knew that he still kept up some research. She knew several people like that, unable to let go of the reins of academia, endlessly frequenting the Senior Common Room, occupying space in the libraries, agitating for rooms in the departments that had left them behind. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘I might be able to help.’ He was giving her his full attention now, half sitting on the secretary’s desk, the bundle of papers forgotten beside him. ‘I’m doing some work with Marcus. What was it you wanted?’
Roz didn’t want to discuss it with him. She felt a bit hassled, and her words came out more sharply than she’d intended. ‘I’d rather discuss it with Professor Holbrook.’
He looked put out for a moment, then seemed to remember something. ‘You work with Gemma…Worked with Gemma.’ He looked uncomfortable.
‘Yes.’ Roz looked at him. ‘What do you know about Gemma?’
His embarrassment seemed genuine. He wasn’t smiling now. ‘I didn’t make the connection at first. When I heard. She…was just Gemma from Linguistics. Then…’ He scuffed the toe of his shoe along the carpet. ‘She wanted to look at our archive. Marcus’s archive.’ He looked to see if she knew what he was talking about. ‘Russian. We’re putting together an archive of spoken Russian. It’s Marcus’s thing.’
The Holbrook Archive. That cleared up whether Gemma had contacted Holbrook or not. She remembered the unfinished letter on the laptop. According to the letter, the archive was being catalogued. ‘You’re writing the software?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘He asked my department for help. I was around, and I had these ideas, and Marcus thought they were cool so I decided, “Why not?”’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t get really stretched here, you know.’ Luke’s voice supplied the subtext: At a piss-poor hole like this. Roz kept her face solemn. ‘Now I’ve got into it, it’s good – computers and language – it’s something special.’ He smiled at her. ‘Your boss has been on to me about it. Says there might be a space with you.’ He met her gaze. ‘I’m beginning to think I might be persuaded.’
He was looking at her with a barely concealed interest. Roz felt irritated with Joanna, and her irritation extended towards Sean, which probably wasn’t fair. But, anyway, she wasn’t in the mood for flirtatious exchanges with young men. ‘I really need to talk to Professor Holbrook,’ she said.
He looked put out again. He seemed younger now than he had at Joanna’s party. ‘He might have gone for coffee,’ he said after a moment’s thought. He cheered up. ‘I know where he might be. I’ll walk across with you.’
‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘Just tell me…’
‘No. It’s no problem. I need to see him anyway.’ He seemed to have forgotten Elizabeth at the copier and his students’ marks. She decided it would be simpler to let him walk her across than argue any more.
Sean took her to the Senior Common Room where he spent five minutes trying to persuade her to have coffee with him. ‘Please?’ he said. ‘I’d really like to get to know you.’ Roz pleaded pressure of work, and rather reluctantly he pointed Holbrook out to her. He was sitting over coffee by a window, browsing at the papers. Sean headed over with Roz behind him. ‘Marcus, this is Rosalind…Roz Bishop. She was looking for you. And I need…’
Holbrook looked up from his paper, frowning. He had one of those small, thin faces that seemed designed to express discontent. ‘Sean,’ he said, ‘I was expecting you this morning.’
‘Got held up,’ he said unrepentantly. ‘I brought Roz over. She knows Gemma. Knew Gemma.’ Holbrook kept his querying gaze on Sean, ignoring Roz, who stepped into the silence.
‘Professor Holbrook,’ she said, ‘I worked with Gemma Wishart in the Law and Language Group. I wonder if I could have a word with you?’
He frowned slightly, and said, none too warmly, ‘You seem to be doing that now. What exactly did you want?’ He looked at his watch as he spoke.
Sean waited for a moment, then said. ‘I need to talk to you about that new material, Marcus.’
Holbrook nodded. ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’
‘OK. I’ll be across in the department.’ Sean looked at Roz. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said. He paused for a minute as if he wanted to say something else to her, then went, leaving Roz with Holbrook.
‘I can come and see you later, if you’re in a hurry…’ Roz said.
‘No, no.’ Holbrook was impatient. ‘I’m far too busy for appointments. It will have to be my break. What can I do for you?’
Roz stepped firmly on her irritation. Holbrook was a respected man in his field. He probably was busy, and she was, effectively, jumping the queue for his time. ‘Thank you, Professor.’ She quickly ran through the problem in her mind. ‘My colleague, Gemma Wishart…’ She looked at him to see if he had picked up the reference, but he showed no reaction, just continued to watch her with an air of slightly exaggerated patience. ‘I believe she consulted you about a tape she was working on. I just wondered –’
He raised his hand, stopping her. ‘There’s no need to go any further. I have already had to discuss this with the police today. Dr Wishart did not consult me. She merely wished to use my archive, and my assistant, whom you have met, told her in accordance with my instructions that it was unavailable as it was being catalogued.’ He folded his napkin and dabbed his mouth. ‘She then wrote to me, and I gave her access to it. She was interested in tapes from the eastern Siberian region. I had no knowledge at the time of what she was looking for, and I have none now.’
‘Oh.’ For a moment, Roz was silenced. She’d assumed that Gemma had discussed whatever her uncertainties about the tape were with this man. ‘She didn’t ask for any translations or anything?’
‘As I told you, Miss Bishop…’
‘Doctor Bishop.’ There was only so much Roz was prepared to put up with from a touchy prima donna.
He bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘Doctor Bishop, then. As I told you, she asked to consult my archive. I have collected a lot of material over the years and I am inundated with requests from researchers who…’
Roz listened with half an ear as she thought through what he was saying. Gemma’s letter, unfinished, had said something about a tape. She risked annoying him further by interrupting him. ‘Did Gemma give you any material for the archive?’ she said.
He stopped in mid-flow and looked at her. ‘Did Dr Wishart give me any material? I believe she offered me some. She had spent some time in…’
‘Siberia,’ Roz said.
‘That is correct. I don’t recall that there was anything she had that we needed for the archive. However, I could be wrong. You are welcome to look, if it will help you. Now, if you will excuse me…’ He began to stand up.
‘There is something else,’ Roz said. The exaggerated expression of patience reappeared on his face and he sat back in his seat. ‘I know that Russian is your particular field. I wonder if you could just look at these and tell me if they mean anything to you.’ She showed him the lines from the transcript that she had copied down.
He looked at them in silence for a minute. ‘It’s hard to be exact in isolation,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Roz said. ‘But there was no more. Those were the full lines on the transcript.’
‘I see.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Well, the first one is a colloquialism – it’s something you say when you’re irritated or frustrated. There is no exact translation.’ Roz made a note. ‘This one, jugun, is just a word for people. It’s found in Siberia, it’s a dialect word. And your third one seems to be a random syllable.’
Roz flushed. ‘Yes, I’m sorry, it was just that Gemma queried it and I wondered what it meant.’
He shook his head. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with, or may I return to my own work?’
‘You said that Gemma wrote to
you. What did she say exactly?’
‘She said what I have told you. I gave her letter to the police.’
‘Yes, I know, but if you could tell me exactly, I might be able to work out what Gemma was looking for.’
‘What she was looking for was obviously comparison tapes for this –’ he gestured at the piece of paper Roz had given him – ‘whatever it is.’
‘Yes.’ He was almost certainly right, and Roz wondered why she kept persisting. ‘I just want to know exactly.’
He sighed. ‘I’m very careful with my correspondence. I gave Dr Wishart’s letter to the police, but I kept a copy for my files. I can send one to you, if you want. Maybe that will satisfy you?’
‘Thank you.’ Roz smiled at him, trying to show that she did appreciate it, even if she couldn’t warm to the man. She remembered the papers that had gone missing from her desk. ‘Could you send it to my home address?’ She wrote it down for him, and before he could get up to leave, added quickly, ‘How would a Russian speaker pronounce “cat”?’ She couldn’t understand the reference to cats at the top of the transcript. And yet it had meant something to Gemma. Cats
Holbrook sighed. ‘In Russian? It’s something like korshka. Or kort, for a tomcat. It doesn’t sound a lot like the English.’
‘I meant the English word.’
‘Like the Russian word.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d get a pronunciation like kort. Something like that. Possibly. There are a lot of variations. Now, please…’ He got up determinedly and left Roz sitting at the table.
Hull, Wednesday afternoon
The records for the Angel Escorts cell phone landed in Lynne’s in-tray after lunch. With a sense of a legitimate reprieve, she abandoned the notes she was preparing for an impending meeting, and looked at what Farnham had sent through to her. He had scribbled a note: Come and talk about this when you’ve looked at it. She smiled at the addition: Shop
The phone was new. It had been bought about a week before Wishart’s death at a large retailer on the outskirts of Sheffield. It had been a cash transaction. The records showed just one outgoing call. On the night that Wishart had died, at seven forty-three p.m., someone had used the phone to call a Sheffield number. The call had lasted three minutes. Farnham had written next to the number: Hagan.
She checked when Farnham would be free, put together the stuff she had collected on Angel Escorts, and then went back to finishing the next section of her presentation. At four-thirty, she was in Farnham’s office addressing him with the formality of the work place, which seemed strangely at odds with the cautious way they had been testing the boundaries of their relationship the previous night.
They relaxed once the door was shut and they were on their own. ‘Bad briefing this morning,’ he said. ‘Forensics say she wasn’t killed at the hotel, but the scene was so messed up we couldn’t use it if he’d written his name on the wall in his own shit and left his calling card.’ He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. ‘One of the guests, the woman in the room next door, heard something.’ He pushed a statement across his desk to Lynne. She looked at the place he was indicating:
Something woke me in the night. I heard someone moving around in the next room. It sounded as if someone was bumping into things. And there was laughing. Someone kept laughing. It was like when you’ve heard a really funny joke and can’t stop.
She thought about someone in the hotel room with the dead Gemma, someone who killed, who had sex with a dead woman, who posed her in the bathtub. She thought about the laughter. Someone who killed women and destroyed their faces…Her eyes met Farn-ham’s. ‘It gives you a time,’ she said after a moment.
‘It hasn’t got us much further. We still haven’t tracked down the guy in the second room.’
‘The room with the whisky bottle?’ Lynne said. If the resident of the room had drunk that whisky, then it was unlikely he’d heard anything.
‘We don’t know for sure if the whisky bottle came from that room,’ Farnham said. ‘The Krleza woman had cleaned in there – and then all her stuff was mixed up. I’ve got the fingerprint people matching the bottle with the room. And a used condom.’ He grinned. ‘They love me.’
‘So there was someone else there?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Unless he was taking safe sex a bit further than most of us do. But no one saw anyone, of course. Only one person registered for that room. I’ve got the print people working on it.’
‘What about the phone? Are you going after Hagan again?’ If the choice were hers, Lynne would leave it for a while. She was interested to see what he had to say.
‘It isn’t enough. We put him through it, but his story holds together. He keeps appearing, does Hagan, but only in places where he has a legitimate reason to be. He’s the boyfriend. He’s been in the flat; he’ll have been in her car, if we ever find it. He’s got computer skills. He’s got no alibi. And now there’s this phone call, shortly before she was killed.’ He looked at Lynne. ‘How would a firm like Angel Escorts operate with the phones?’
‘It varies. Most places, you’d phone a central number and then you’d either book the girl and she’d come round to wherever you’d arranged, or she might phone you and make her own arrangements. Sometimes the girls operate a bit more independently – they have their own number and the clients phone them directly and book, but the clients would usually register with the agency first.’ She picked up the records Farnham had sent through. ‘Have you got a location for this call?’
‘Outside Glossop, to the east.’ The route to the Snake Pass, the route Wishart had planned to take.
Lynne had been thinking about this since she had seen the records. ‘So it could be Wishart’s phone. It makes sense. The card looked like a personal card. So the number would be Wishart’s business phone, for the escort work. If she’d just started out, that would explain why there’s so little action on it.’
Farnham nodded. He’d thought of that as well. ‘Hagan claims he didn’t get back until eight. He stayed late at work. One of the caretakers says he saw Hagan leaving at around seven-thirty.’ He tapped his pen on the desk. ‘That “around” makes it possible. Hagan’s got a fast bike. It’s a bad road, but he could get from the university to his house in five minutes if the roads were clear.’
‘OK. But if he wasn’t there, Wishart – or whoever it was – must have left a message, or talked to someone. It’s a three-minute call.’
‘Hagan says there was no message.’ Farnham shrugged. ‘I can prove someone phoned him. There are a hundred good reasons why there’s no message. I don’t want to pull him in and have him wriggle straight out. I want more to throw at him, and I want something he can’t get out of. I’ve got someone watching for that phone. If anyone uses it, we’ll be on to it like a shot. But in the meantime, I’ve got to wait.’
10
Sheffield, Wednesday evening
It was dark by the time Roz got home. The pavements shone damply in the light from the streetlamps and the breeze that was rattling the branches of the trees carried the threat of frost. It would be icy tomorrow. She picked her way carefully up the path, towards the stone lions that glimmered palely in the moonlight. She groped in her pockets for her key, and then impatiently in her bag where it had fallen to the bottom and was tangled up in a mess of old tissues, bus tickets, pens and loose change. She let herself into the house, and picked up the pile of letters that had landed on the mat. She flicked through them quickly, binning the junk mail before she could be tempted into looking at it. The rest looked tedious – bills, a bank statement that held no surprises, her credit-card statement – and a letter addressed in a familiar italic that she held for a few indecisive moments. She had been anticipating it for days. The letters always arrived – one in the spring, for Nathan’s birthday; one in early autumn, for her birthday; and one shortly into the New Year, their wedding anniversary. Nathan’s mother had never reproached Roz for abandoning Nathan, had never taken for granted the financial contributi
on that Roz made to keep him in the residential home where he spent most of his time, never intruded her own grief into Roz’s life. There were just the letters.
She put the rest of the post into the letter rack for dealing with, and went through to the kitchen, holding the envelope addressed in her mother-in-law’s distinctive italic. She made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table turning the letter round and round in her hands. It was dark outside, and here at the back of the house where the walls and high trees shut out the sound of traffic, there was silence. She opened the letter.
It began with the usual salutations and hopes expressed for Roz’s well-being. I’m starting to get a bit stiff and creaky, Jenny Bishop wrote, but I suppose it’s to be expected at my age. At her age. How old would Nathan’s mother be now? Only sixty, but the stresses of the past three years had taken their toll.
Jenny Bishop reported no change in her son’s condition – none was expected. He can’t understand why I look so old, she wrote. He tells me to take things easy or I’ll get ill. Why don’t you come and see him, Roz, the next time he comes home? I keep hoping that something like that might just be the trigger he needs.
There was always the plea in the letters, the hope that, somehow, Roz’s presence might work the miracle that Jenny still lived for. Roz had long ago given up that hope. She put the letter to one side. She would answer it at the weekend.
She knew what she wanted to do this evening. She wanted to have another look at the files she had copied from Gemma’s laptop. Her discussion with Holbrook hadn’t been very helpful, but maybe when she looked again she would see – something. It was academic now, really. DI Jordan had the report and it gave her the information she needed. But the puzzle, and the sense of a job not done, nagged at Roz.
So, what had she got from Marcus Holbrook? He didn’t seem to know much more than she did. Gemma had, apparently, consulted his archive. Tomorrow, she would try and find out which tapes Gemma had used, but for now, all she had were the letter, the report and the transcript. She read the report intently, but there was nothing there to help her. She couldn’t see any place where Gemma might want to add information. She read through Gemma’s discussion of the speech on the tape:…confusion of the /v/ and /w/ phonemes…devoicing of the final voiced consonants /b/ /d/ /g/…absence of auxiliary ‘be’ in present tense forms…and couldn’t see why Gemma would want to expand the report. It wasn’t an expert witness statement – she was simply being asked for an opinion and had given it, supported by pages of meticulous analysis.
