Cambridge Blue

by Alison Bruce

  He moved on to ‘W. Thompson-Stark’. He guessed with a name like that, any match might be the only one.

  He typed ‘Thompson*’ first, in case the Stark had been added later. The screen immediately filled with Thompsons, so he started at the bottom and there, one entry below Z. Thompson (Shoplifting), was W. Thompson-Stark (Sexual Assault).

  He double-clicked the entry and waited a painfully slow one and a half seconds for the data to appear on the screen.

  The W., he discovered, stood for Wayne, who was now twenty-six years old. And the case dated back six years.

  Goodhew’s gaze scanned the information. Rape charge brought. Reduced to sexual assault. Assault occurred on 9th July, reported after five days. No forensic evidence. Defendant denied charges, but was sentenced to three years, released after two.

  Goodhew flicked on to the next screen to continue. Two words jumped out at once. ‘Lorna Spence.’

  He let go of his mouse like it was hot.

  He held his breath, reading the details slowly, making sure he read them correctly. His heart pounded. He printed the details and called a taxi.

  Wayne Thompson-Stark lived in Cutter’s Path in Ely, a pretty development of townhouses running from the river back towards the cathedral. The cab dropped Goodhew at the edge of the estate.

  ‘I’ll drive you round if you want,’ the driver offered. ‘I just don’t know which road it’ll be, not with it being too new for the maps an’all.’

  Goodhew shook his head. ‘Don’t worry.’ He preferred to find it on foot.

  The houses were actually too new for most of them to even display numbers yet, and it took several minutes for him firstly to find an entrance to Cutter’s Path, and secondly to work out which direction to head for number 71.

  The ‘path’ part of the name was appropriate; the cul-de-sac end of the road opened out on to a mock village green, complete with winding footpath. Cobbles, of course, and lit by faux Victorian lamp posts. Goodhew guessed it might stay looking pretty, until too many new owners began improving with white plastic doors, or adding porches and innovative garden features.

  Number 71 was the last house on the left and, like most of the others, its lights were out.

  Tough on Wayne, then, as murder and sleeping comfortably didn’t belong together.

  From outside the front door, there was little to be seen of the inside: just one distorted pane directing his gaze up towards a black blur of darkness beyond. He gave the bell a firm press, and heard it chiming from the hallway. An upstairs light was switched on within a second, so he knew he hadn’t woken anyone.

  The little pane of rippled glass revealed a view of a white handrail rising towards the top of the stairs. A man stepped into view. He stood on the landing while he felt his way into some sort of dressing gown. He was big built, and when he finally banged down the stairs it was as if he let gravity do all the work.

  The man opened the door to halfway, not bothering with the chain, so perhaps pre-dawn callers didn’t worry him. The light shone from behind him, making it hard to see his face, and Goodhew caught sight of a shadow moving upstairs. The man didn’t speak.

  Goodhew flipped out his ID. ‘DC Goodhew. Sorry to disturb you. I expect you’ve heard of a recent murder in Cambridge . . .’

  His sentence trailed away to nothing, as the word ‘murder’ finally opened the door.

  Wayne Thompson-Stark was at least six two and broad, like a rugby player but with a straighter nose.

  ‘Who else is in the house, Mr Thompson-Stark?’

  ‘The name’s just Thompson. My girlfriend, she’ll be down in a minute. Gone to the bathroom.’

  ‘You weren’t asleep?’

  Thompson shook his head as though the bags under his eyes hadn’t already answered for him. It looked like he probably hadn’t slept well for days. He spoke in a gruff voice, which made him sound older. But then he looked considerably older than twenty-six. ‘Come through, and sit down.’ He patted his towelling robe. ‘You don’t mind if I stay like this?’

  The front door opened directly into the sitting room, but Thompson led the way through to a narrow dining area at the back of the house and they chose chairs on opposite sides of a Formica-covered drop-leaf table.

  Upstairs, a door creaked and footsteps padded across carpet. Goodhew lowered his voice, ‘You realize I need to ask you some questions about Lorna Spence?’

  Thompson looked surprised. ‘You don’t need to whisper. Do you think she wouldn’t know?’

  Goodhew shrugged. ‘Can’t assume.’

  Thompson reached over to his left and pulled a chair alongside his own, ready for his girlfriend.

  ‘We don’t have any secrets,’ confirmed a woman’s voice.

  She stood a few feet back from the door, as if weighing up the situation before deciding whether to step into it. Her hair was gathered up in bunches and she wore pyjamas, pink winceyette covered in a jumble of numbered sheep. The fabric stretched tight across her belly and she looked about eight months’ pregnant. She turned towards Thompson and he held out his hand for her to join them.

  ‘This is DC Goodhew.’

  She nodded and sat in the empty seat.

  Goodhew waited for her to be introduced, then realized they had no intention of bothering. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  This time it was her turn to look startled. ‘Hayley,’ she said.

  ‘Sellars?’ Goodhew supplied and she nodded.

  Thompson laughed. It was short and humourless. ‘I thought you already knew. Like you said though, you can’t assume.’

  Hayley reached out her hand and slipped it into Thompson’s. He gave it a squeeze.

  Goodhew’s gaze wandered across to the clock, already ticking towards 3 a.m., then it drifted back to the couple facing him.

  Thompson didn’t look at all aggressive; Hayley looked neither scared for Thompson, nor scared of him. But they both looked sorry. For what though?

  Goodhew wiped his eyes. Something was clouding his vision and he needed to push it away. ‘I’ll be honest,’ he sighed. ‘Hayley, I don’t know what connection you had with Lorna Spence, but I know there was one. And, Mr Thompson, I need to know about your relationship with her too, about the assault and your conviction.’ He sighed again. ‘I know it’s now the middle of the night, but if you could explain it to me I’d be very grateful.’

  Their entwined fingers seemed their only means of communication. She wanted him to speak first and he knew it.

  ‘It was the week I was twenty and I only had a vague idea who Lorna was. I’d seen her and her mate Vicky around, but I just knew their first names, that kind of thing. I was out with some old school mates, having a few drinks, playing pool, and I noticed her having a row with her boyfriend. This was early that evening, not much after seven, and the next time I looked round, she was on her own. She looked really choked up by then.

  ‘Later on, she came and stood near the pool table, and asked if one of us would let her play. My mate played her and, between shots, I got talking to her. She’d split with her boyfriend, or that’s what she said. She seemed all right, so I had no reason to think she was lying.’

  Hayley was staring at her hands and chewing her lip. Goodhew wondered whether she was listening or had drifted somewhere else. Thompson released her hand and wrapped his arm around her instead. ‘By about ten, we were getting on fine and, when the others moved on, we decided to stay and talk for longer. I remember the bell rang for last orders, then she asked if I could take her home. I didn’t even own a car, so I walked her back, and before her house we started kissing. I honestly don’t remember whose idea that was, we just had one of those moments when we both paused and knew it was about to happen.

  ‘We were there for a while, and she was pressed up against me, and knew, I s’pose, that I was turned on.’ He paused to shrug in apology. ‘I’d just turned twenty, that’s what I spent most of my time thinking about.’

  He paused again.

&n
bsp; ‘And then you had sex?’ asked Goodhew.

  Thompson nodded. ‘Not sex like I expected. Not that I’d ever expected it. What I mean is, she had weird ideas. We went into the kitchen because she said everyone else would be in bed and no one would hear if we did it there. And it started off OK, just basic messing around. But then she took my hand and wanted me to shove it inside her, saying she wanted it to hurt.’

  Hayley kept silent, her eyes turned away, but cheeks turning red.

  ‘I didn’t like it, so I wouldn’t do it, but when we started having sex she wanted me to fight her for it and pretend that I was raping her.

  ‘Now, when I say it, it sounds too weird, and it’s obvious I should’ve stopped then. But she made it seem like I was being dull, so we did do it, and it was rough, but that was what she wanted. Oh, fuck it. I don’t mean that because she wanted it rough, it was OK. I just mean it wasn’t rape, or assault, or anything done against her will.’

  ‘So why do you think she pressed charges?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Thompson’s voice was replaced by Hayley’s.

  ‘Because Lorna liked to make everyone suffer.’ She looked up at Goodhew and tears brimmed in her eyes. ‘When we heard she’d been murdered, I wondered whether Wayne had done it, and he even wondered whether it was me. That’s how much she still affects us.’ She sniffed and pressed away the tears with the heel of her hand. ‘I wrote to Wayne when he was in prison, and I asked him to let me visit him. And he said yes. That’s how we met.’

  ‘But you knew Lorna?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I was on my lunch break one day, and decided to go down town and grab a sandwich. I swallowed it the wrong way and stood outside Marks and Spencer’s having a coughing fit. Next thing I knew, she was banging me on the back and sorting out a glass of water. We agreed to meet for lunch a couple of days later, and before long, she’d become my best friend. We went everywhere together, told each other everything, too. She told me about the rape, the trauma she’d been through with examinations and the court case, and the fear she felt at the thought of Wayne being released. And I believed it all one hundred per cent.’

  ‘We went out one night, though, and somehow I ended up drunk, much too drunk for what I’d ordered. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d been drugged, and I stood at the bar happily leaning on some guy. Probably telling Lorna how lovely he was, for all I can remember. Well, that’s what she said I said anyway. She said she felt really hurt at being ignored, then went home.’

  Hayley drew a deep breath, and new tears appeared and slipped silently on to her cheeks. ‘He broke my nose and four fingers, I had six stitches, an Aids test, a tetanus shot and a dose of the clap. And they never caught him. And as for Lorna . . .’

  Her voice trailed off as her face screwed up with the pain. Thompson held her closer and he kissed her hair.

  Goodhew wasn’t sure what to do now. ‘I can arrange for you to talk to a female officer if you prefer.’

  Thompson gave his head a small shake; it didn’t just mean ‘No’ but ‘Be quiet, wait.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It isn’t the man that bothers me. Lorna was racked with guilt afterwards, distraught that she’d left me alone with him. She kept me company, helped me deal with the police and cope with the medical problems.

  ‘The drug I’d been slipped left me with only bits of memory, and every day I tried to recall more about the attack. I had a vague picture of an alley littered with beer crates. Oil stains on the tarmac, grit and sludge in the puddles. And not looking at him, but turning my head away towards the narrow end of the alley, where it’s only wide enough for a bicycle, like I was pleading for someone to come and save me.

  ‘Every time I thought about it, I remembered looking towards that narrow end of the alley, not the other end where people actually might pass by. Why would I do that?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ll tell you, it was because I knew someone else was in that alley.

  ‘Then, after that thought, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that Lorna had been there. Hidden. Watching. And that’s been the greatest battle – having that idea in my head and not being able to get it out again.

  ‘I didn’t even know if I’d just invented that part, but I stewed on it. I had no proof and told myself I was being hysterical. But I couldn’t dismiss it. The feeling of those eyes on me . . . In the end, I accused her. She was outraged, of course, but she would have been, wouldn’t she? I didn’t see her again after that.’

  ‘So you had no real proof?’

  She shook her head. ‘None. Women’s intuition, maybe.’

  ‘But why would she do it?’

  ‘Why would anyone want to watch their friend being raped? I don’t know, but it makes her worse than him. Can you imagine what this has done to my friendships since? I couldn’t get over this feeling that I was raped by her too, then I remembered everything she’d told me about her own rape. That’s when I started to wonder whether she’d made that up as well.’

  It wasn’t anything to go on so far, and perhaps Thompson understood what Goodhew was thinking. ‘It may not sound much in the way of evidence, but when Hayley came to see me, I’d also spent months trying to grasp what had happened to me. I then realized she’d come with the answer.’

  ‘Where were you when Lorna died?’

  ‘Here at home, with Hayley.’

  ‘Just the two of you?’

  ‘You’re asking all the wrong questions. What you need to know is Lorna’s objective. What was she chasing, and who was she prepared to damage to get it?’ Thompson leant closer to Goodhew. ‘Lorna only did things for Lorna. She was the centre of her own universe. Everybody else just spun around her, and she made sure it happened that way.’

  Thompson fell silent and the pair of them looked across at Goodhew. He didn’t know what he might have expected, but it definately hadn’t been this. Maybe they were lying, concocting it all to cover for whichever one had killed her, but he threw out that idea at once. Instead he saw the truth of the situation: a light had been shone into the dark corners of Lorna’s life, and there she stood, quietly manipulating all the people around her. The drugs found at Lorna’s flat fitted the picture. Lorna had already sent one man to prison and manipulated a social situation until a young woman had been brutally raped. How much further had her game-playing needed to go before it had become an extreme and deadly sport?

  The only sound now came from the hand-me-down fridge freezer which gurgled and hummed from its cubby hole behind the door.

  Goodhew suddenly shuddered.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Hayley looked genuinely concerned.

  ‘Just tired,’ he answered and stood up hastily, keen to leave behind the sense of foreboding which had just draped its leaden arm across his shoulders.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Goodhew had lost all track of time, and he had no idea how long he’d been awake. He wasn’t even sure when dawn was due, although he could see from the light seeping into the sky from the east that it was on its way.

  The taxi hurried from Ely, past flat farmlands, and eventually into the fringes of Cambridge. There was one thing Goodhew had known earlier: he was too tired to drive.

  As the cab approached his flat he realized that his attention had drifted towards Parkside station. At the last moment, he directed the driver away and, several minutes later, he arrived on the doorstep of his grandmother’s apartment.

  She took what seemed an age to open the door, and when he saw her he wondered whether she’d paused to apply make-up or if she slept with it on every night. Her housecoat looked newly ironed, too, and he felt more dog-eared than ever.

  He frowned and she didn’t look too happy either. ‘You look like shit,’ she said.

  ‘You swore.’

  She held open the door for him to step inside. ‘It’s called communicating with the younger generation,’ she said drily. ‘I was making a valid point.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Besides, at 4.30 a.m. I�
�m entitled to swear.’ But she didn’t sound at all tired, was clearly more awake than he was. ‘What’s up? And why didn’t you use your own key?’

  ‘Sorry, I left it at home. Look, I can’t sleep, I need to talk.’

  He slumped into his favourite chair, and she perched on the edge of the chair facing his.

  ‘Well, well, I never thought I’d hear that coming from you, Gary. Not that I’m surprised, since you’ve pushed yourself to the limits to make detective in record time and now, correct me if I’m wrong, you seem to pressure yourself with far too much responsibility for every serious crime you touch.’ She paused. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘No? Look, you have yet to master the art of leaving work at work – it seems to follow you round all the time as if it’s hiding in your back pocket.’

  Goodhew shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, actually it’s the murder I want to talk about,’ he said.

  ‘Explain it to me.’

  ‘The case? Sure.’ He settled back in the chair, and she did the same.

  She listened without interruption.

  ‘I feel,’ he said finally, ‘as if we just don’t know anything. It’s too random, just a fog of possibilities and no clear direction through it.’

  ‘Of course there will be.’

  ‘Go on then, infect me with optimism.’

  ‘Of course, you know crucial pointers already, the problem is you have hoarded too many little gems of information and you can’t distinguish the ones that matter.’ She beamed at him.

  ‘Case closed then,’ he muttered.

  ‘Gary. Just pull in the slack.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘All these little gems – perhaps they’re all actually threaded on to the same bracelet. Pull in the slack and you’ll see how they all sit together.’

  ‘Oh God, optimism and analogy combined. Sorry, but I really am too tired for that.’

  But she was on a roll. ‘What do your instincts tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s why I came to see you. I haven’t got a clue any more.’