by Danuta Reah
‘She was telling me about voice prints,’ he said. ‘That you’re working on something that will produce voice prints, like fingerprints.’
‘Well…’ Roz was sceptical. This was the holy grail of forensic linguistics – to be able to draw up an acoustic profile of a voice that would say: This person, and only this person, could have spoken these words. But for the moment, the variability of the individual voice had defeated such attempts. Gemma and Luke had been interested in chasing up some money to pursue that line of research, but Roz thought that the possibility of producing anything that had the reliability of fingerprinting or DNA profiles was a long way off – if it were possible at all. ‘It was one of her things,’ she said. There was silence for a moment. ‘Listen, Sean,’ she said, ‘you might be able to help me. I really need to know what Gemma was looking for in Professor Holbrook’s archive. Did she talk about that at all?’
He thought for a moment. ‘She just wanted access. That’s all she said.’
Roz thought. If Gemma hadn’t talked about it, then she’d need to work it out for herself. She looked at Sean. ‘Tell me about the archive.’
‘What do you want to talk about that for?’ For a moment, he looked put out. He wanted her to be interested in him. Then his face cleared. ‘Listen, let me take you out for lunch. Then I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t got time,’ Roz said quickly, then realized that had been a mistake. She should have refused point-blank.
‘Tomorrow?’ he said.
‘Thanks, but I’m very busy just now. I need to get back. It would really help me, though, if you could tell me a bit more about the Holbrook Archive. If you can’t, I can always go back and talk to Professor Holbrook himself.’
‘And you’d rather talk to me.’ He looked cheerful again. ‘OK. But you’ve got to let me ask you something afterwards. Deal?’ He smiled at her again, still leaning towards her, their arms almost touching.
‘Deal,’ said Roz. She moved her position slightly. She didn’t mind being charmed by him, but she didn’t want to send out the wrong signals. She listened as he told her about the system that Marcus Holbrook had been working on for several years. The Holbrook Archive was, in fact, a database. Holbrook was developing it into an electronic corpus that would allow researchers to answer in minutes questions about spoken Russian that would take years if the analysis were done by traditional techniques. ‘But he didn’t have the coding,’ Sean said. ‘It worked, but it was slow, clunky, full of bugs. It was, kind of, his baby. He didn’t want anyone else near it, you know? But I’m sorting it for him.’ Now that he was talking about his work, he forgot his earlier uncertainties and was explaining enthusiastically what plans he had for further developments.
She chose her moment and slipped back into the conversation. ‘But Gemma never said what she was looking at?’
He looked disappointed, but said. ‘Not to me. I can check. See if she left any records.’
‘Thank you.’ Roz finished her coffee. ‘I’d really like to know. Now, I think I’d better get back.’ She slid off her stool and tucked her newspaper under her arm. Talking to the eager young man had been a pleasant interlude, but she could feel the pressure of the backlog that had built up over the past week.
‘Wait.’ He held up his hand. ‘Our deal, remember?’
Roz laughed. ‘OK. Go ahead.’
He stood up. Roz hadn’t realized before how tall he was. ‘I’ve got some tickets for the jazz festival at the Studio on Saturday night. Would you like to come with me?’
The show had been a sell-out for weeks, Roz knew. She’d tried to get tickets shortly after it was advertised, without success. But she also knew she didn’t want to blur any boundaries by going to a social event with Sean. ‘You’re lucky to have tickets,’ she said. ‘Never mind a spare.’
He looked pleased. ‘I’ve got contacts,’ he said. ‘You’ll come, then?’
Roz shook her head. ‘It’s very nice to be asked – and thank you – but I’m busy…’
‘Cancel it,’ he said.
‘I’m busy,’ she repeated. ‘And anyway, I’m married, so it really wouldn’t be such a good idea.’
His face darkened. ‘I don’t fancy you, or anything,’ he said.
That was so blatantly childish that Roz had to stop herself from laughing. ‘Then you won’t mind, will you?’ she said.
He looked a bit ashamed. ‘I do, actually,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Please come with me.’
To her surprise, she found herself considering it for a moment, but she knew it would be a bad idea. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’ She picked up her coat, and stopped as a thought struck her. ‘Can I access Holbrook’s archive from the Law and Language Group? Or the main library?’
He was still looking put out about her refusal, but he managed a civil reply. ‘No, it’s not on the intranet yet. Marcus wants to issue it as a commercial piece of software. He might put a limited version out for students here. But we’re putting together a pilot for detailed testing. You’ll have to have a look at it. It’ll be in the newsletter.’
‘OK. I’ll look out for it.’ She gave him a smile as she turned to go. ‘Thanks, Sean. That was useful.’
‘Lot of good it did me,’ he grumbled, but it sounded good-natured.
12
Sheffield, Thursday morning
Roz checked her voice mail when she got back to her desk after coffee. No message from Luke. Maybe he’d phoned her at home. The thought nagged at her like a jagged tooth, an irritation that would neither go away nor offer any immediate solution. If he’d wanted to contact her, why hadn’t he phoned her here at work? Perhaps he didn’t want to get Joanna. Perhaps he was still angry – Luke could bear grudges – and didn’t want to talk to her. Yet.
She tried to concentrate on the work that had been going so well in the morning, but her mind kept drifting away from it, sometimes brooding about Luke’s silence, sometimes worrying at the unsolved detail of Gemma’s report. She forced herself to concentrate until she’d finished the section she was working on and could run the data through the program to see if it could recognize the tags she’d used to mark the different features of the interviews. As her mind became engaged with the problem, the worry of Luke, the irritation that was Gemma’s unfinished report, retreated to the back of her mind. She keyed in the request and waited to see what would happen.
The program crashed. Shit! This was the problem of working on her own on a system that was incomplete. She needed Luke’s input. She was stuck without it. Joanna would just have to stop this ludicrous suspension, or she, Roz, would spend the next few weeks sitting on her hands and…If Joanna’s plans came to anything, she might find herself working with Sean. She wondered why she found that prospect so depressing. Sean was bright, interesting…but he wasn’t Luke. That was the problem.
She needed something to distract her. Gemma’s report. It was all very well for Joanna to say that the report was complete, and to talk about commercial viability, but Roz wanted to know. She knew she could sort it out if she could just give herself the time. And she had some spare time right now. But what could she do that she hadn’t already done? Sean had promised to check again to see what Gemma had been looking at, but Roz was pretty sure he wouldn’t bother, now she had so firmly rebuffed him. Try Holbrook again? She tapped the pen against her teeth. Luke’s voice spoke in her head: Christ, Bishop, are you trying to drive me insane or what? She put the pen down.
Joanna had said that someone else was looking at the tape. Bill Greenhough at York. Roz didn’t know him all that well, but she’d met him at conferences. He seemed a pleasant enough man, approachable. A bit of digging around in academic directories gave her the number, and twenty minutes later, she was talking to him on the phone.
She explained who she was, and then said, ‘I understand you’re dealing with a tape for the Humberside Police.’
‘Yes.’ His voice was cautious.
‘My colleague, Gemma W
ishart, was working on that tape,’ Roz explained. ‘She…’
‘She was killed, wasn’t she? I’m sorry.’ Brisk, professional sympathy. Then his voice changed. ‘God, it wasn’t anything to do with this, was it?’
‘No.’ Roz was quick to reassure him. ‘No, nothing at all.’ She thought about the police saying that Gemma had been working as a prostitute. ‘It was just – Gemma asked me to help her complete the report and then, well…it happened. I suppose I don’t like to think of her work left unfinished.’
‘I can’t really discuss it with you,’ he said, but he sounded uncertain.
‘I just wanted to know what you thought about the lines that Gemma queried. Did they tell you? It was…’ She flipped through the pages in front of her.
‘Yes, I’ve got those.’ She could hear the sound of papers being moved. He must have the transcript in front of him.
‘What’s special about those bits? I’ve got translations, but it doesn’t help.’
‘You’ve got translations?’ He sounded interested. ‘I haven’t managed to identify those. What do they mean?’ Surprised, Roz gave him the translations she’d got from Marcus Holbrook. Greenhough should have been able to translate them himself. ‘Where did you get those?’ he said. ‘What is it, anyway? I don’t recognize it.’
‘It’s Russian,’ she said. ‘Someone over here gave me the translations. He said that Ba-yi-n-sal –’ she spelt it out as she didn’t know how to pronounce it – ‘was a colloquialism for expressing annoyance, something like that.’ Holbrook hadn’t attempted to pronounce it either.
‘Is Russian your field?’ He sounded puzzled.
‘No, not at all. I was just trying to sort out the last queries that Gemma left. That’s why I went to someone else.’ She didn’t want him to think she was challenging his expertise.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well, whatever you were told, that phrase is not Russian. And jugun is not a Russian word for people. It’s not a Russian word at all. That “j” should tell you that. I’m trying to track it down, but I’ve had no luck so far.’
Roz was silent. Marcus Holbrook had been certain. She could remember his glance at the phrase and his instant identification. ‘Are you sure?’ she said after a moment.
‘Absolutely.’ His voice was cold.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Of course you are. It’s just that the person who told me – he seemed so certain.’
‘Who was it?’
Roz hesitated for a moment. She didn’t want to spread gossip about a colleague. On the other hand, Holbrook was a recognized expert. If Greenhough knew where the information came from, he might decide he’d been wrong. ‘Marcus Holbrook,’ she said.
There was silence at the other end of the phone, then Greenhough said, ‘I think you must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’
Roz was annoyed and was about to deny that, when she realized that she could, possibly, have done just that. Possibly. She had scribbled some notes on her transcript, but she hadn’t checked – had she? – that they were looking at the same things. She couldn’t remember exactly. ‘I’ll check again,’ she said.
‘You do that. I didn’t realize Marcus had seen these. I’ll give him a ring.’
His voice indicated that he was about to end the conversation. Roz said quickly, on impulse, ‘There’s one more thing, Dr Greenhough…’
‘Yes?’
‘How would a Russian speaker pronounce the English word “cat”?’
‘Cat?’ he thought about it for a moment. ‘You’d get something like an “e” sound, something like “cet”.’
Holbrook had said something different. She couldn’t understand. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for your time. If you find out what it is on the tape, will you let me know?’
‘After I’ve submitted my report to the police,’ he said. On that fairly friendly note, they rang off.
Roz was still short-tempered and irritable as she drove home. Everything seemed designed to annoy. The traffic was heavy in long stop-start queues. The car in front of her as she crept towards the Wicker Arches moved at a leisurely pace, even when a gap opened in the traffic in front of him. Roz wanted to put her foot down and close up each gap with a short, deceptive burst of speed. Prickles of tension and anger ran up and down her back, and she could feel her head starting to ache.
She finally escaped the main roads as she turned off towards the small recreation ground opposite her house. She found herself jerking the gear stick and slamming down the clutch in a stupid – and potentially dangerous – venting of her anger. She scraped the car as she turned into her driveway – something she hadn’t done before even though the turn was tight. She let herself into the house and dumped her bags on the floor. The message light on the phone was blinking. With a sense of relief, she pressed ‘play’, but it was only the bookshop telling her that the book she’d ordered was ready to collect. She tried 1471, but the bookshop was the last call that had been made.
Bloody Luke! He’d had time to think about her message. He’d know how she was feeling. He should have phoned. She kicked her bag out of the way, the childish gesture serving only to hurt her foot and make her feel both more angry and a bit foolish. She made a pot of tea and sat at the table letting the quiet of the house calm her down.
She would have to let Luke come round in his own time. She’d made the first gesture. Maybe he didn’t want to talk to anyone. She’d have to stop thinking about this. She made herself get out her briefcase and find the notes that she’d made when she’d talked to Marcus Holbrook. There wasn’t much – just the lines she’d copied down from the transcript and the translations he’d offered. But – there was no chance she’d made a mistake. No chance she’d got hold of ‘the wrong end of the stick’. She remembered now. She hadn’t shown Holbrook the whole transcript. She’d just copied out the lines Gemma had queried, and – she checked against her original – she’d copied them correctly. Marcus Holbrook had given her the wrong translations. Why?
She tapped her pen against her teeth as she thought. Holbrook was very touchy. Maybe he simply didn’t want her to know he didn’t understand something on the tape. That didn’t convince her. She wondered if she should go and talk to him again. She realized she didn’t know much about Holbrook’s main research areas – just that he was some kind of expert in the Russian language. She went to her computer and logged on the university intranet. It was quiet in the evenings and worked quickly. She went to the library catalogues and did a search for Holbrook’s name. It came back with a longish list of books and articles, plus some recent journal articles. The books had fairly opaque titles, and the journal articles seemed focused on the minutiae of changes in modern Russian. One recent title caught her eye: Influence of bilingualism on Nenets-speaking children: a case study. Nenets – the language that Gemma had studied for her PhD. The article had been written by Holbrook himself, someone called Stefan Nowicki and – Gemma Wishart. She looked at the journal date. It had come out last summer, which meant the article itself must have been written some time before that – while Gemma was still in Siberia. Holbrook and Gemma had collaborated on a journal article, and yet Holbrook had behaved as if he hardly knew her.
Then the other name on the article struck her. Now-icki was the Russian academic who had helped supervise Gemma’s research. That might explain it. The collaboration would have been between Holbrook and this man. They would have used some of Gemma’s work and ideas, which was why her name was on the paper – she may even have written some of it – but Holbrook would probably not have concerned himself with a young researcher. Still, it didn’t explain why he had misled her over the tape.
With the sense of frustration that always came from abandoning an unsolved puzzle, she put the stuff back in her briefcase. She’d gone as far as she could with it. She made herself something to eat, then spent an hour doing some much-needed clearing up, putting away books and journals that had crept off the shelves on to various surfaces, ru
nning the vacuum over the worst of the carpets, washing the dishes. As she cleared the kitchen table, she came across her mother-in-law’s letter, left there to remind her she had a decision to make. She almost put the letter into the file where she kept all of Jenny’s letters, but she picked it up and read it again. Jenny’s suggestion, almost diffident in its wording: 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. Roz knew that Jenny’s hopes were empty. Nathan was not going to make any recovery now, or not one that would restore his lost life. She could feel the decision firming in her mind, a decision she had pushed out of the way because it was one she didn’t want to make. But she had to do it. She had to go and see Nathan because she had put off any decisions about her life for too long.
And if she was going to do it, it couldn’t be postponed. She’d go at the weekend, on Saturday.
Hull, Thursday night
Lynne’s day had been long, and not very useful. She was unenthusiastically getting up to date with her paperwork, which had suffered a bit these past few days, when her phone rang, breaking her concentration. It was Roy Farnham, cheerful, friendly, wanting to update her on the Sleeping Beauty investigation. ‘What time are you leaving?’ he said. ‘I’ve got some stuff that might interest you.’
Lynne looked at the pile of work in front of her. ‘About an hour.’
‘OK. No point in hanging around. Let’s go and get something to eat. I can tell you then. Shop,’ he added. She laughed, and returned to her computer feeling more cheerful.
