‘What you mean is, how can I afford to live here when I’m wheelchair-ridden and should be living on a pension?’ He began to protest but she spoke over him. ‘You’ll get used to me, Jack. My grandmother left me everything in her will. She was my father’s mother and because Dad was her only child and died quite young, I was the recipient. I used it wisely you could say, but then I also had very good advice. And I started young.’
‘What about family?’
‘No brothers or sisters but my mother lives in Devon, in a picture-postcard cottage by the river in a place called South Molton that I helped her buy. It’s not especially old but it feels it because it’s built in stone, if you get my drift?’ He nodded. ‘She’s happy.’
‘Do you see each other often?’
‘Mum’s a bit fragile so she doesn’t travel, but I get down there as often as I can, which probably isn’t enough for her. I suppose I could easily do what I do from Devon but I’m a bit of a city girl. As you can see, I like London, the theatre, its restaurants. I’m selfish; I don’t want to live with my mother all of my life, and even though she doesn’t want to accept it, I’m really very independent. I like working out of here and it’s very central to where the properties are.’
‘So you buy in London?’
‘No, the prices are crazy, although I do restrict myself to investing only in the south.’ She noticed his look of query and shrugged. ‘I like to see what I’m getting.’
‘Well, congratulations, looks like you’re doing well on it.’
‘It’s lucrative, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t, but I think I’ve done alright because I started so early. I’ve inched into my forties now, so I’ve had plenty of time to make my money.’
He did a double-take. ‘You definitely don’t look it, if you don’t mind me saying so, Sophie.’
‘You can say it as much as you like!’
‘Do you eat a lot of parsley?’
She had a wonderfully infectious laugh. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Mrs Becker is convinced it’s what makes you sit so straight and gives you that brilliant white smile.’
‘Hasn’t Mrs Becker heard of good dentistry?’
He grinned, looked around. ‘I see you buy art. And they’re originals?’
‘Yeah,’ she said dreamily, following his gaze around the walls. ‘I’m investing in emerging artists, so you could say I’m speculating with art as I do with property, but I buy only what I like. I couldn’t possibly hang something on my walls that I didn’t enjoy looking at.’
‘For a girl who likes the city, you buy a lot of rural scenes.’
‘Well, I like vineyards.’
‘Oh, sorry, that’s a vineyard?’ he said, staring at one very bright, mesmerising painting.
‘Yes, done by a wonderful artist called Murray Edwards whom I can probably no longer afford, but I bought that when he was struggling so it came to me for a song. He sees colours that no one else sees.’
‘It’s magnificent,’ he said, staring at her sparkling dark eyes. Much as he liked it, he was referring to more than the painting.
‘Thank you.’
‘But I think I like these photographs best of all,’ he said, turning back to a series of monochromes. ‘All of the same place, obviously.’
‘Why do you like them?’
Jack shook his head as if to say he wasn’t sure. ‘They’re awfully lonely, very bleak. Despite that, I like the defiance of the place — probably because it’s a ruin rather than its once-proud self.’
She nodded, clearly impressed. ‘I love it that you see that. It’s exactly what makes them so poignant, and defiance is definitely the right word. You’re good — you could be an art critic!’ He smiled at her, disbelieving. Sophie continued. ‘Do you know that in its heyday it was the finest Victorian structure of its kind in Britain?’
‘Well, its pedigree and its loneliness aside, I think it’s beautiful because of its strength. It’s been battered by weather but it’s still standing, still trying to rear itself up out of the sea — to remain alive in a way.’
‘Yes,’ she said, sadly now. ‘That’s how I view it.’
Their eyes met in one of those moments that potential lovers sense. He felt it pass through him like an electrical current but this was not the time to act on that impulse. He should go, before his fatigue lowered his guard completely.
‘Well, you’re right. The Milo is working its own magic,’ he said. ‘Suddenly I feel knackered.’
He watched the spell break in Sophie’s gaze too. She smiled brightly. ‘Good. Off you go then. Don’t waste a moment — just climb into bed and fall asleep straightaway. Then you’ll be ready to save the world tomorrow.’
He stood from where he’d been seated on a stool near the fireplace, a newfangled gas thing that looked like a log fire and was very stylish. ‘Was this in here when you came?’
‘Yes. The previous owner shows good taste, don’t you think? One of the reasons I bought the apartment.’
‘It’s great. You make me feel as though I need to begin renovations downstairs tonight, and as for my singularly sorry, framed still life, I’m now planning on rushing out this weekend and finding it some company.’
She smiled. ‘You must never rush art, Jack.’
He stretched, put his cup in the sink to distract both of them from his sudden desire to kiss her. ‘Thanks for the bedtime drink. So, shall we try for Friday?’
‘Yes, but I can’t be certain tickets will be available. Friday night and all that.’
‘Good point. Let me write down my home number — can I use this pad?’ She nodded and Jack scribbled down the details. ‘I’ve given you my mobile as well as a number you can reach me on at work. That’s a direct line — not necessarily to me, but into the ops room where I’m based.’ He grinned. ‘Let me know which day you can get them for, but I’ll warn you that earlier in the week is useless for me.’
‘Okay.’ She raised her cup, still almost full. ‘Night-night, Jack.’
‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said.
Jack slept the sleep of the dead that night, his final thoughts of Sophie and how much he was looking forward to seeing her again.
9
She got home to their flat by six and spent half an hour, while she prepared some food, poring over a list of teachers from Hove Park Comprehensive that Dermot, one of the eager young staff attached to Danube, had compiled and emailed to her laptop. She began phoning people on the list after eight, when she thought they might have finished dinner.
The conversations all went much the same way: she explained who she was, and that their team was trying to track down old scholars who might have been friends with Sheriff. As she’d imagined, most teachers scoffed at the notion that anyone who had attended Hove Park Comprehensive was a scholar but Kate had used the word for courtesy and in the hope of playing to their individual vanity to encourage them to open up. She drew a blank on Sheriff. Two of the four teachers who did remember him couldn’t recall him having any particular friends. He was variously described as shy, a loner, punctual and neat, but she gathered that although they used the word ‘loner’, he wasn’t necessarily someone without people to ‘play with’ as they put it. Michael Sheriff had been no high flyer academically, although one teacher who remembered him quite well from his fourth form of senior school — because of his eczema — said he was a capable student, particularly at science, but didn’t apply himself with any vigour to his studies. All expressed similar pleasure at hearing he had become a teacher, and sadness at his death — they’d already heard from news reports; it seemed teachers never forgot a pupil. No one remembered anyone called Clive Farrow.
Kate moved glumly to the list of teachers who had taught at the secondary school Clive Farrow had attended, now called Blatchington Mill. She went through the same spiel, not getting much until the third call.
‘. . . and I was wondering if you’d be able to help me, Miss —’
‘Mrs.’
‘Er, Mrs Truro . . . if you could help with any recollection you have of who Clive Farrow might have knocked around with. Do you remember him?’
‘Very clearly. Knocked around with?’
‘Well, hung with . . . played with?’
‘Oh, I see. He didn’t have anyone I’d consider a real friend. Clive Farrow was a big lumbering chap with a retarded mind.’
Mrs Truro clearly hadn’t taught in the era when political correctness was insisted upon. ‘That’s a rather severe description,’ Kate said.
‘It’s precisely how I remember him,’ Eva Truro replied, her clipped, precise tone giving Kate a mental picture of a straight-backed old lady with grey hair pulled back tightly into a bun and pursed lips. ‘He was a difficult boy, bigger than most of the teachers and certainly intimidating. Clive was not clever but he was cunning. That got him by.’
‘You have a good memory, Mrs Truro.’
‘Thank you. I can recall all the children I taught English Literature to, Miss Carter, and Clive Farrow was not one to embrace the finer points of Wordsworth or Hardy, Keats or Shakespeare. But I’m very sorry to hear that he is dead. I always felt that given the right encouragement and the right people around him, Clive could have done so much better. I think we all let him down.’
‘Do you?’ Kate was surprised at the sudden tenderness.
‘Yes, but what do you do with classes that are so big? I had thirty-six children a class during the early seventies and it was impossible to do much more than teach to the average mind. There was no scope to offer remedial help — even though I seem to recall that Clive received this assistance in his junior school.’
‘And what do you mean by if he’d had “the right people” around him?’
‘Oh, Clive was a problem waiting to happen. He was frustrated, you see.’
‘I’m not sure I do, Mrs Truro.’
She heard the former teacher sigh. ‘Well, Miss Carter —’
‘It’s Detective Inspector Carter, actually,’ Kate said, annoyed with herself for being petty.
Mrs Truro carried on as if uninterrupted. ‘Clive’s appearance and his slowness tended to mark him as a potential victim. He came to us as an angry young lad who’d seen a lot of the cane at his junior school, and thus learned to use his size and his fists to ensure he didn’t become a victim at secondary school too.’
‘He became a bully, you mean?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean, and people with similar chips on their shoulders seem to find one another, don’t they?’
Kate sat up from the slouched position she’d fallen into at the kitchen table. Dan strolled by, rubbed her neck, but she held her hand up to tell him to stop, she was listening.
‘Go on, I don’t follow, Mrs Truro.’
She watched Dan open the fridge, spring the top on a can of soft drink and sip. He picked up the toasted chicken and salad foccacia she’d prepared and left silently, not even looking her way. She felt a pang of regret at her behaviour, and the fact he’d be eating alone again.
‘Clive Farrow and William — Billy — Fletcher became inseparable for a while,’ Mrs Truro was saying.
‘Billy Fletcher?’
‘A very good-looking boy with a stammer. An unfortunate affliction, for he was very bright, very capable, but we couldn’t police our playgrounds every minute of the day in a school of that size, Detective Inspector Carter, and Billy didn’t fare well with his stammer. This was the early seventies, after all. Children didn’t go running to the teachers as they do now; they tended to fend for themselves.’
‘Or become bullies,’ Kate said, tiring of the teacher’s high-handed tone.
‘I’m afraid so. Billy wasn’t so bad. He fell in with Clive, most likely as a fellow sufferer, but you wouldn’t necessarily put them together as friends. They just didn’t have anyone else at the time. Billy, I imagine — I hope — has made something of himself. He had brains. He took his O levels and three A levels, one of them English, which I taught. I can’t imagine he and Clive stayed in touch with one another, Detective Inspector, if that’s what you’re hoping? If my memory serves me right, Clive made it through to his exams and left at sixteen with a couple of CSEs under his belt. By the time Billy Fletcher was taking his A levels, Clive was long gone, and I don’t think I’d be steering you wrong if I said that even before Clive left school, they weren’t moving together as they had before. I can’t tell you anything else though, I’m afraid.’
‘Did Billy pass his A levels?’
‘I don’t know about his other subjects but he did well in English — got a solid pass. When the under-achievers leave at sixteen or younger, most of the wayward influence goes with them. Those left behind, who want to study, fare much better, and Billy was one of them. All the former bad behaviour we associated with him — including bullying — stopped, and I could be wrong but I think he might have finally got some help with the stammer, which would also have helped.’
‘It was gone?’
‘No, no, not at all, but he was certainly beginning to wrestle it under some control. Whether he succeeded, I can’t tell you. And I have no idea, before you ask, whether Billy Fletcher went on to college or university. I wasn’t the most popular person in his life.’
‘I wonder why?’ Kate covered her sarcasm with a charming tone filled with disbelief.
Mrs Truro obviously took it to be genuine. ‘Because I pushed him too hard. Billy liked to do only enough to pass. I wanted all my students to go to university and prove those silly examiners wrong who think a comprehension test at the age of eleven can tell us accurately how intelligent or capable the adult may be. Billy was clever, he’d just allowed himself to believe that he was stupid because of his stammer and the company he kept. I tried to make him see otherwise and that made me an ogre in his life.’
‘So you’d have no clue as to where Billy might be now?’
‘Are you mad? No, none at all, Detective Inspector Carter.’
Kate reined in her increasing irritation. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Truro, you’ve been most helpful.’
‘I can’t see how.’
‘Because we didn’t know about the link between Billy and Clive until now. Um, look, I’m hoping we might get a photo from either the Farrows or the Sheriffs. If we do, may I contact you again? We may get lucky and link Clive Farrow with Michael Sheriff. It would be helpful if you could take a look to see if you can identify Billy Fletcher as well.’
‘I’m happy to help the police if I can, but please give me plenty of warning if you’re coming to my home. I lead quite a busy life, you know.’
‘I’ll be sure to do that, Mrs Truro. Thank you so much.’
‘Please bring identification if you do come.’
Kate looked at the receiver with dislike. No wonder Billy Fletcher hadn’t kept in touch with the old battle-axe. Probably all the students had hated her. Mind you, Mrs Truro had obviously cared enough about Billy Fletcher to push him. Perhaps Kate was reading the old teacher all wrong.
More hours passed as she wrote up her findings on her laptop and emailed them through to her address at New Scotland Yard. Her dinner sat untouched on the kitchen bench. Instead she made herself a cup of tea, knowing there was no point in offering Dan one — he hated tea. She was tired, but too alert to sleep, so she sifted back through some other notes on the case, still chasing after the significance of the paint, then decided to do some research on the net.
Finally, delighted to have turned up some information that she felt might help, Kate got up and stretched and went to find Dan. He was slouched behind his computer in the room they called the study but which also served as the second bedroom. His eyes were fixed on the screen where a lone figure stood, its back to her, twisting and looking. Suddenly the weapon the figure was holding exploded into action and it was off and running after whatever it hunted, Dan controlling all its movements with frantic clicks on his keyboard.
‘Sorry about earlier,’ Kate said. ‘I
was on the phone to someone who was just beginning to tell me something interesting.’
‘It’s cool,’ he replied, not turning. ‘Your good-looking boss, I suppose.’
She yawned. ‘Come on, it’s late. Shall we go to bed?’ She smoothed his hair.
‘I’m not tired any more.’
‘I didn’t mean to sleep.’
He snorted a soft, mirthless laugh. ‘Your timing’s always so off these days, Kate. Save the amorous stuff for the office and lover boy.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Have you even noticed me since you started this Operation River thing?’
‘Operation Danube.’
‘Whatever.’
She felt her hackles rise — something that was happening too often these days where Dan was concerned.
‘That’s unfair, Dan. You know how important this case is — it’s the biggest one in Britain for years. We’re trying to catch the bad guy, remember?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it before. I don’t mean to be insensitive but I could die too and, let’s be honest now, I’m not sure you’d notice.’ He spoke without shifting his gaze from the screen, his fingers moving incessantly over the keys.
‘Well, this is a great way to lead up to a wedding, I must say.’ Kate’s tone was filled with injury now, readying itself for the inevitable argument.
But Dan’s voice was uncharacteristically cool. ‘I agree, Kate. Whenever I need you, you’re too busy, too preoccupied, too uninterested. But whenever Hawksworth says jump, you ask how high.’ He loaded Jack’s name with derision.
She looked at the back of his head, aghast. ‘Dan, that’s not true. Please remember that he’s my DCI and it’s my job to jump when he asks. Anyway, I could throw exactly the same back at you. If you’re not working overtime for your demanding boss, you’re playing childish games with your friends over the net. They’re probably all spotty teenagers!’
Dan pulled a weary expression to suggest he’d heard this many times before. ‘Well, at least they’re loyal and always there. I can’t say the same for you.’
Bye Bye Baby Page 10
