I laughed again. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine. They definitely have central heating these days. I’m sure of it.’
She smiled in response. She was pretty, I thought. Her lips were small, like a bow. I liked her, despite the fact she was nothing like me. She was the antithesis of me. She would be popular – you could see it in her bones. She would go out with the captain of the rugby team; she would start to turn her collar up instinctively; she would play some kind of team sport – lacrosse maybe.
We continued to talk until the train shunted slowly in to Durham. As the station sign came into view, I felt a mixture of excitement and apprehension, a growing knot in my stomach that would harden in me as time went on. Emily and I stood in the train corridor with our bags in our hands, our suitcases waiting to be hefted out of the luggage compartment nearest to the train doors: mine a terrible grey fabric – hers was some kind of designer label, I could tell. The train jolted to a stop beside the platform. The last of the day’s early-autumn sun streamed valiantly through the grimy plastic roof overhanging the tracks. I helped Emily down out of the carriage with her luggage, and then we trundled towards the taxi queue together.
‘Shall we share?’ she asked me.
‘Okay, if you’re sure,’ I answered, grateful not to have to fork out the cost on my own. ‘We’ll drop you first.’
We stood for a few minutes in the queue, in the biting north-east wind, in from the sea and the salt marshes. I could smell brine on the air and a vague scent of petrol, of bitter fruits. I could smell the working classes nestled in the hills surrounding the station, hosting these young brains, funded by older money. I could smell that too.
I asked the taxi driver to drop Emily up at Joyce first and then on to Nightingale. With his reply, I had my first taste of the accent I would come to love. At that time, however, it was incomprehensible to me, and Emily and I looked at each other in cahoots as I gave a small shrug. It was a surprise to us both, then, when the taxi stopped first at the bottom of the hill, outside my new home, and not Emily’s.
‘Why have you stopped here?’ I asked.
The driver looked steadfast out of the windscreen, refusing to attempt to communicate with us kids any more. I looked apologetically at Emily.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said kindly, patting my hand. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She rooted around in the handbag on her lap. ‘Let me take your number and I’ll give you a text later to say I’ve arrived.’
I gave it to her and then reluctantly shifted out of the cab. The driver popped the boot and I retrieved my case before handing in some money to Emily through the passenger window. ‘Good luck,’ I said uncertainly.
She smiled bravely, her chin up in the air. ‘You too!’
The cab sped its tyres, off and up the hill, leaving me in its wake. Nightingale College, to my left, waited for me to enter.
4
Monday 22 May, 9.11 a.m.
Martin and Jones stood outside the principal’s study door. ‘You take him in, Jones,’ Martin said quietly. ‘We’ll need to get what he says down in writing before we make any kind of decision on an arrest. Get him looked at by the medical examiner. I don’t want his brief chucking inadmissibility at us. I’m coming right behind but I want to have a look at Emily’s room before the SOCOs crawl all over it. Call Butterworth on the way and fill him in.’ She looked at her sergeant for a moment. ‘Can’t say I was expecting that.’
Jones shook her head. ‘Nope. What do you reckon?’
Martin breathed in sharply. ‘Hard to tell at this stage. He certainly acts like a zoomer. If he is, we may need an appropriate adult.’ She turned back towards the door. ‘Treat him carefully. These are kids after all,’ she said with an apparent softness, before opening the door, ‘Simon? We’d like you to come with us now please. DS Jones here will accompany you to the station.’
‘I want to go with Simon, if that’s okay,’ Principal Mason said from where he stood with his hand on Rush’s shoulder. The boy sat wordlessly in the chair which Martin had vacated to give to him after his outburst. His mouth hung open, his eyes glassy, staring into nothing. Jones helped Simon up and propelled him gently by a hand on his back, steering him out of the door and into the corridor.
Martin watched them descend the college stairs and head out of the building. Her thoughts were rapid, drinking in what had just taken place. This college was so different from anything she had experienced herself at school or university, the students so confident, so sure of their place in the world. Taking a breath and turning headlong into the squall of the case, she followed them down at a distance and stepped into the lobby, where Mrs Earl stood in front of mahogany panelling bathed in the flickering blue lights of the police cars outside. The receptionist looked perplexed as Rush passed her flanked by two uniformed constables.
‘I’d be grateful if you could show me Emily’s room,’ Martin said to her. Pulling herself out of her daze, Mrs Earl reached back into the reception cubby hole for a bunch of keys. She led Martin outside the main entrance of Joyce on to the Bailey, where two white police vans edged the roadside. Due to an abrupt meander in the River Wear, which encircled the city, the north and south ends of the cobbled street curled like a peninsula around the medieval hub of the castle and cathedral. The oldest university colleges, of which Joyce was one, flanked the cathedral, their buildings facing the reddish stone walls of its boundary. The sky had lightened to a pigeon-grey by this time, and the cathedral bells tolled the quarter-hour as Martin and Mrs Earl walked briskly up the road.
As the women headed past the police vans, their back doors opened and numerous white-suited figures jumped out to follow them up the narrow street. Mrs Earl gasped a little as she realized they were being tailed, but Martin guided her on with a hand on her back, after nodding to the SOCOs and asking them to wait outside when they got there. One of them threw Martin a plastic-wrapped packet, which she caught with one hand. After a minute’s further walk, the receptionist stopped and punched a code into a black door set into a white stone building.
‘Do all the student residences have security systems?’ Martin asked.
‘Yes, the main doors all have private codes, and then the students have keys for their rooms.’
Mrs Earl opened the door and stepped inside. As she made to go in after her, Martin noticed a tracksuited figure wearing a hoodie drawn down over their face on the other side of the street. Whoever it was ducked behind a car as soon as she noticed them. She waited for a moment, but the figure didn’t reappear. Following Mrs Earl with a frown, she ascended the stairwell to the first floor, sweating in her jacket despite the cold outside. ‘Did you know Emily well?’ she asked as they approached the door to Emily’s room.
The receptionist shook her head. ‘Not well. Just to see around the place. It’s a small college in comparison with some of them, but there are still five hundred or so students.’ She looked up at Martin. ‘You’re not from the city, are you?’
Martin shook her head. ‘Not from Durham itself, no.’
Tears sprang into Mrs Earl’s eyes. ‘We’re close to each other here,’ she said. ‘It’s murder, isn’t it?’ She looked wide-eyed at Martin, who said nothing. ‘It’s a terrible thing to happen in a place.’ She wiped her eyes disbelievingly. ‘To think that Simon, of all people …’
‘Don’t make assumptions,’ Martin said, patting her on the arm. ‘We don’t know what’s what just yet.’
Mrs Earl sniffed and nodded. ‘Here you are, then,’ she said, gesturing at a door covered in stickers and posters. There was a notebook stuck on the door with a pen attached with a piece of string. There was no message, but as Martin peered closer, she could see that the last page of the notebook had been ripped off, leaving a jagged edge. A faint impression had also been left on the page underneath, a note of some sort. Martin made a mental note to tell the SOCOs to bag it.
‘Thank you, Mrs Earl. You can go now if that’s all right.’ Martin smiled at her with her back to the door. After a
short pause, Mrs Earl nodded again and walked away back down the corridor. Martin opened the packet she had been thrown and carefully put on the required protective clothes. She pushed open the door slowly, a pile carpet halting its progress. She wanted a moment alone in there to try and sense who Emily was – get the nub of her – before the room was turned upside down by the SOCOs, before she became subsumed in the tunnel of the investigation.
She also wanted time to think through what had just happened – thoughts shuttling through her like headlights over tarmac on a dark country road. What was behind Rush’s confession? Was it the truth? She wasn’t sure. Why would he confess outright? Was he indeed a zoomer – insane? What was his relationship with Emily? She sighed and began to look around the room. Maybe something here could provide a clue to it all.
It was a large room yet stifling hot as the radiators appeared to have been turned up to full. The windows were covered in condensation, undrawn curtains either side of them. A sink had been drilled into the right-hand wall next to what looked like the door of a built-in cupboard. Two big windows faced the door through which Martin had entered and looked down on to the street below. She went to stand over the desk, which sat under the left-hand window. If she craned her neck, she could just see the central tower of Durham Cathedral to the left. To her right, the road curled away downhill, towards the hub of the city centre. If you squinted, you could imagine carriages and horses trotting down its streets instead of the BMWs and Range Rovers which glided noiselessly over the cobbles these days.
On the desk sat a small MacBook. Martin let her gloved fingers touch the top of it lightly. She turned away from the desk. There was a lull in time; silence heavy in the air as Martin scanned the room, her eyes resting on every item for a millisecond, considering, was this relevant? There appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary about the room, a space which told of a female inhabitant, a young girl. Different, though, from Martin’s own room as a teenager, which had been more an obstacle course around huge stacks of books than a pretty-in-pink sanctuary.
Against the left-hand wall of the room was a single bed. A heart-shaped cushion and blue teddy bear sat on the pillow, a patchwork quilt pulled up over it and the duvet. The bedside table held a small lamp and a book, I’m OK, You’re OK. Martin looked up at the walls over the bed: posters of people Martin could not have named and an old movie poster of The Philadelphia Story. She walked over to the wardrobe and looked inside. Jeans were hanging folded alongside some black cocktail dresses; a hockey kit bag sat on the floor in front of it.
Martin stood in the middle of the room and breathed, her eyes closed. Who are you, Emily? She could smell – what was it – Estée Lauder Beautiful? An old choice for a young girl. She half-opened one eye and was proved right as she spied a bottle of it on the dressing table next to the sink. What else? A feeling permeated the room, cloyed as it was with over-heating and hormones, what was it?
She opened her eyes wide and strode to the cupboard. It was large, and as she opened the door she could step inside, where shelves lined the walls. In there were about thirty pairs of shoes thrown carelessly in a pile at the bottom; on the shelves were heaps of crumpled T-shirts advertising some college fundraiser; suitcases and tens of handbags. That wasn’t what interested Martin, though. Feeling the sting of tension in the back of her neck, she whirled round, and there, on the back of the door, was a mass of photos – tacked on the wood in a jumble, stacked on top of each other, hundreds of them. They were of parties and balls, cricket matches, picnics, a theatre trip it looked like. And all of the photographs featured one particular boy. Sometimes with Emily and sometimes not. A hundred or so photos of this boy, smiling, laughing, his arm draped over Emily’s shoulders. His face looming out from the back of the door. Over and over again.
5
‘I’ll call you later,’ Emily breathed down the phone to me. She was whispering, hurried. I rolled over and glanced at the blinking red light of the digital clock on my bedside table. 3.18 a.m.
‘Really?’ I said, almost crossly. Not too askance though. I was never irritable with Emily.
‘I’ve got to go, he’s coming.’ She spurted the words, frothing with excitement. ‘I’ll call you back. You won’t believe the night I’ve had!’
I lay flat on my back again.
‘I’m sure,’ I said, irrelevantly it turned out, as the phone was put down on me. I sighed and switched on the bedroom light. There was no hope of going back to sleep now, so I wearily picked up My Ántonia and opened it where I had turned down a corner of a page about a third of the way through. The Americans weren’t doing it for me. Hawthorne, perhaps. But James? And as for Cather. Well really, all her descriptions of making hand-crafted Christmas presents just weren’t cutting the mustard. Nevertheless, I picked it up at Mr Shimerda’s funeral but found I couldn’t concentrate.
I knew Emily was at Nick’s house. They’d all have gone there in a crowd after leaving Sixes. I hadn’t been there. The idea of pushing into the barn-like room at the top of two flights of concrete steps, almost vertical in incline, ordering a concoction of tropical fruits and booze by which to get smashed, dancing to jungle beats accompanied by waving hands and screeching voices, well, let’s just say I would rather have stuck with Jim Burden and Antonia. And that’s saying something.
That night, I’d watched her in the Joyce College bar with the others, before they tumbled out to go to Sixes. I had taken to wandering up there on occasion and would sit, nursing a pint of Guinness, and talk to Emily when she had time for me. We had been at Durham for two months now. It seemed an eternity. Mother and home were light years away. I walked the cobbles from my room at Nightingale, over the bridge shading the River Wear below, down to the lecture halls and back, day after day. Often I’d run past the weir, my trainered feet slapping against the sludge of wet leaves which inundated the path. I could hear my breath coming hard, the sky grey with the north, geese hovering and honking. I thought about W. B. Yeats and ‘Ephemera’.
I had been running on my third day there when I next saw Emily again after our train meeting. I was sprinting up the steps to Framwellgate Bridge and was going to take a left, past the cinema, and stop off at the newsagent’s to get a bottle of water. As I emerged up from the riverside, though, I walked straight into her.
‘Hi!’ she had exclaimed. ‘How are you?’
Her voice had already changed. Although she had been well-spoken previously, her sentences were now further punctuated by the ‘ah’ sound, the form of diction handed down in a thousand public schools across the country, swathes of their inhabitants congregating here in Durham, generally at Joyce College.
‘I’m good,’ I said, breathing hard and bending over, my hands on my knees.
‘Running,’ she stated the obvious. ‘Admirable.’
I straightened up, rueing my thin frame, my gawky chest. ‘Yep.’ I controlled my breath and managed to smile. ‘How are you? How are you settling in?’
‘Really well, thanks! I don’t know what I was worried about, really. Everyone’s so nice. I’ve made some great friends already.’
I continued to smile while at the same time thinking that any friends I made in the first three days of anything would never last the distance; they would be comrades in arms, a fellow body to walk in a room with, to pretend to laugh with. But they wouldn’t be friends, not really. Did Emily really think these people would be life-long compatriots? Or was her naivety genuine – a lone petal of innocence in a field of scrub?
‘Which way are you going?’ she asked.
I pointed towards the cinema.
‘I’ll walk with you. It’s a beautiful day for once.’
We walked together over the bridge. Emily was shorter than me, she only reached my shoulder. She had that petite frame I’ve always found attractive. I had some desire in me to put my arm around her or pat her on the back perhaps. A kind of contact nevertheless. I controlled it, and we walked side by side.
‘What’s yo
ur room like?’ she asked brightly. ‘Are you sharing?’
I described to her the shoebox I shared with a physics student named Zack. He had already put up numerous Doctor Who posters, installed decks at the bottom of his bed and situated a large collection of vinyl records along the only free wall. I wasn’t sure if this meant he was a pirate DJ looking for gigs or was planning a rave in our room at a later date. I had said nothing to him about it, though, and merely unpacked my box of books on to the shelves on my side of the room. My toiletries I kept in a wash bag under the bed, not wanting Zack to see my toothbrush for some reason. My only real problem was my towel, which never seemed to dry out. We had a small electric heater whose minimal effect was instantly negated by the fact that it was situated underneath the room’s only window. This wasn’t double-glazed and sucked the heat out of the room with all the vigour one might expect of a black hole. Zack had been at great pains to tell me, however, that the ‘suck’ of a black hole was an extreme gravitational effect, whereas what I was describing was merely a transfer of thermal energy.
Emily laughed. ‘He sounds a nightmare.’
‘No, he’s okay really. My towel, however, is growing mildew on it. Along with the bottle of milk in the downstairs kitchen which nobody wants to claim.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Emily said. ‘But I just give my towels to the cleaners. They wash them every day.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, that would be the difference between Joyce and Nightingale,’ I said sagely. ‘We don’t have cleaners –’
‘No cleaners?’ Emily interrupted, horrified.
‘No cleaners,’ I repeated. ‘Just a cupboard under the sink with a duster in it and an old aerosol of Mr Sheen.’
Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller) Page 3
