Although the work-room was now empty, the general bustle had convinced me that checking twenty pairs of minuscule signatures against another, each written with incredible neatness with a fine, fine pen, was beyond me. As for the photos, my eyes would hardly focus. Age. It must be age. I grabbed the web of flesh between thumb and index finger with the other thumb and index finger. If you pinched and it didn’t spring back, wasn’t that supposed to show how old you were getting? Or perhaps, since the skin zipped straight back to normal, it was some other part of the body? The triceps, they were where middle-aged flab really started. Without stripping off jumper and shirt, there was no way I could check. As for hips and thighs, I was proud to declare they didn’t know the meaning of the word cellulite. Unless they’d learnt it this morning. And I wouldn’t put it past them, the way the rest of me was going.
In any case, this was really a job I shouldn’t be doing here. I could take it home, spread everything on my dining table, boost the central heating and have that new CD of the Brahms Serenades on while I worked. That sounded much more attractive. I stowed everything in my briefcase – Mike had got so irritated with my penchant for using supermarket carriers till they shredded that he’d bought it for me from an Oxfam shop – and gathered my coat.
I was struggling into it when the door was flung inwards: Lola, magnificent in her anger, even if it seemed to be directed at me.
‘She’s gone! She hasn’t been to college since last Thursday! They must have arrested her! It’s all your fault. And you must go to the police to sort it out!’
A traffic policeman would have envied my stop gesture.
‘Oh, come off it, Lola. She may have a thousand and one reasons not to come in.’ I waved my hands around in airy irritation. ‘There’s a lot of flu around – she may have gone down with that. She may have broken her leg. Have you checked her digs?’
‘Digs?’
‘Flat, bedsit, whatever. Kulvinder, no, Kathryn will have the address. Ask her for it.’ Although I still couldn’t see any of this as in any way my responsibility, I wasn’t very proud of myself for running that hare. I was quite sure neither of them would violate the confidentiality rules, not even for the formidable Lola, and they might get their ears chewed off by her for their pains. With a bit of luck, however, I’d be out of the building before she got back to fulminate against me even further.
Anyway, I had those photos and signatures to check.
I was halfway through the main doors when I thought of Harvinder and his coincidences. All those Pacific Rim girls whose lives were over. Not just Pacific Rim. Specifically Malay. Just coincidence? OK, Lola probably wouldn’t get hold of the address, but I could certainly pull sufficient staff clout to persuade even Kathryn that I should. I was chasing one of my absentees, wasn’t I? Resplendent in my aura of conscious virtue, I toddled off.
To draw a blank.
Kathryn was at that meeting, wasn’t she? That all-singing, all-dancing quality assurance meeting. With Luke, Kulvinder and any other person with easy access to what I wanted. If only, of course, I’d had the student’s name.
Luke hadn’t exactly turned down my suggestion of using a police geek to sort out the computer system, and, of course, Piddock Road Police Station was pretty well on my route home. With a bit of luck Roger Taft, a detective I’d worked with earlier in the year, would be there. He was the nearest to a geek I knew, though he was inclined to be modest about his skills. He also had a reputation for living up to his first name. None the less, he was part of Peter Kirby’s team, and with Peter in his office and Harvinder probably in the room I’d be safe enough. Safe! A woman my age worrying about young men! He’d probably be offering me his mum’s knitting patterns, not a quick chat-up line.
Trying to be tactful, I asked at the police station reception desk for Peter or Harvinder. Harvinder appeared more quickly than I’d expected, and ushered me quickly into an interview room. Not one of the redecorated ones.
‘You shouldn’t be here. Chris Groom gave me the bollocking of my life when I dropped out that you’d had lunch with me.’
‘When was this? The bollocking, not the lunch.’
‘This morning.’
‘Well, the bollocking was nothing to do with you.’
‘But he tore a million strips off me for revealing confidential material.’
‘Chris and I had a row last night,’ I said simply. ‘Tell me, Harvinder, do you have a wife or partner?’
He stared, his neck stiffening. What had I said?
‘Neither,’ he said at last.
‘Well, until we can find a replacement for Helena—’
‘He’s got Bridget!’
‘Helena as girlfriend. Until he’s got a new love interest, Chris’ll be fancying himself back in love with me again. And you know what unrequited love can do to a man.’ The pun was unintended: I blushed from my stomach.
‘Not this Mann,’ he said, adding, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘In fact mine is not unrequited. I shall shortly be getting married. An arranged marriage, before you ask. From time to time I get the coldest of feet. But it’s time I was settling down, and all the years I’ve been on the loose I’ve never found the right woman. And a Mann must think of having children.’ He grinned to emphasise the word.
I grinned back. ‘I hope you’ll have a very happy marriage and enjoy your children. Congratulations.’ I reached to kiss his cheek.
He turned so he took it firmly on his lips. Oh dear. Nice enough to remind me of what I was missing.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘about your coincidences. I’ve got a few more. I don’t think I mentioned on Saturday that there was a glitch in the uni’s computerised information retrieval system. And one or two of the paper files had gone walkabout. Chris knows but he may not have deigned to pass on the info.’
He shook his head. ‘He truly doesn’t think there’s a case.’
‘Don’t you believe it. It’s just that he’s gone down with that dreadful terminal disease, managementitis. And complications have set in already: managing-a-tight-budgetitis.’ Was that the disease I was afraid of catching? ‘Anyway, I wondered if I could talk to Roger Taft; see if he could unglitch the system.’
‘Gone,’ he said. ‘Moved off to – let me think – Bournville Lane.’
‘But the man had a gift for the keyboard.’ Alfred Brendel might have envied his ability.
‘He’s taken it with him, then. Decentralisation is the flavour of the month. Get rid of all the specialised units! Put all the work out to OCUs like this! I suppose we’re all supposed to pick up each other’s skills via some sort of osmosis. And they’ve flattened management structures so – oh, sometimes I feel like chucking it in and going into teaching or something.’
‘Word of advice, Harvinder: don’t.’
Even if Chris was being petty, that didn’t mean I didn’t need a geek. As a member of the public I couldn’t wander round the place on my own, so Harvinder accompanied me – making himself as invisible as possible – to Bridget’s office. I’d wait there till I found out if Chris was too busy to be interrupted. If he was, I could leave a note. Bridget wasn’t there, but a plate of cheese scones to tempt angels waited on her desk. I sat on my hands. When she came bustling in, I could scarcely speak I was salivating so hard.
She pushed the plate at me. ‘Go on. Help yourself. There’s young Chris going down with some bug or other, I’m sure. Not so much as a peck at his food. And him no more flesh on his bones than … Not that you’re fat yourself, are you now, but you know what I mean. Go on. Just the one won’t hurt your figure.’
God, was my figure spreading already? It would be the gym for me every night this week.
‘As soon as I hear him come in I’ll be making him a nice pot of tea. And what would be nicer for him than to have you take it in?’
I could think of a lot of things. I didn’t do waiting on men. Especially Chris. But Bridget would think I was off my head if I said so. It would be almost as incomprehensible as if I suggested that Chris should make his own scones in future. So I waited for the kettle to boil, heard the slam of his door – we raised sisterly eyebrows in disbelief: Chris was not a slammer of doors! – and I staggered through with the loaded tray.
He was tucking his gloves into his cap when I laid the tray on his new table – a blessedly sensible height, this one, for which my back gave thanks. I expected him to say something offhand but kind – he wouldn’t take his petulance out on Bridget. Instead, he demanded sharply, ‘What now? I gather you’ve been talking to Harvinder again.’
‘You do indeed. I was hoping to rope young Roger Taft into helping Luke and me retrieve the files that have gone walkabout.’
‘Surely you’ve got your own experts. The Government’s always saying how much money it’s pumping into education. Our resources, on the other hand—’
‘To see why Carla’s files have disappeared, Chris. A matter of some interest to the police, I’d have thought.’
He grunted: the verbal equivalent of that door-slam. ‘And another thing: how come you were in Smethwick on Friday anyway, supposedly having dinner with Carla? I thought Friday night was your choir night?’
‘Spot on. They’re touring the States at the moment. It was a choice between going with them—’
‘And going to Australia.’
‘I was going to say, getting on with my M.Ed. And money did come into it. It would have been nice to go. William Murdock’s always prevented me going with them in the past. Maybe next year if I’m made redundant.’
He looked at me sternly. ‘Throwing up a chance of something like that!’
‘To take advantage of a different chance.’ I passed him the plate of scones. He took one, absently. So did I.
‘So what can’t you get off the computer?’
‘I told you. It’s not me. It’s Luke Schneider. Staff records.’
‘I can’t believe he hasn’t got hard copies.’
‘I told you on Friday: someone’s mixed them all up.’ I felt like some luckless witness under hostile interrogation. The difference was that Chris was supposed to be one of my closest friends. Or – wait a minute – maybe, just maybe, entirely straight-faced, he was leading me up a thistle-filled garden-path. I tried to suppress a smile. ‘I don’t suppose … no … Yes, could it be that the SOCOs have come up with something to persuade you that maybe she didn’t top herself in despair?’
Very casually, he said, ‘The post mortem may have done. And the SOCOs are checking it now. Her ankle and her knees. A long narrow bruise across one ankle. Both knees bruised.’ He drew lines across his immaculate trousers. Then he put his hands out, palms forward.
‘As if she tripped over something thin and fell on to her knees?’
‘And then went arse over tip into the cut, pissed out of her mind,’ he said, in a fair imitation of a Smethwick accent.
Another one trying jokiness to deal with the macabre. ‘Poor Carla. No marks on her hands?’
He shook his head. ‘The theory is that she hit her knees on the bulwark and grabbed for something to hold that wasn’t there. Straight into the cut.’
‘Jesus.’ I made an effort. ‘It’d be nice if the Scene of Crime team found evidence that she wasn’t drinking on her own.’
‘It wouldn’t. It would be too expensive.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘But that won’t stop them. They’ve made it a sterile area already. Sterile apart from that dogshit, of course.’
To celebrate my clear victory without the tiniest crow, I poured the tea. Just like the mud-tea I made when I was a kid. I held up half a cup for inspection.
Chris grimaced. ‘I wish she’d get it into her head that more isn’t necessarily better, when it comes to spoonfuls of tea,’ he said. ‘You see that parlour palm. She can’t understand why it’s wilting.’
‘Don’t tell me – tea dregs!’
‘If it does that to a plant imagine what it’d do to my insides.’
‘I thought the police were renowned for liking strong brews.’
‘Not in these days of accountability and budgets and—’ He gave up. ‘Imagine Ian trying to get that down him.’
‘Poor parlour palm,’ I observed, tipping. ‘More tannin for you. Will you ask her for fresh or will I?’
‘It’s a man’s job,’ he said, smiling for the first time. ‘A job for a leader of men. But even I’d better have some more scone crumbs round my mouth before I risk it.’
When he came back in, I was checking those signatures, sitting at his desk – I wouldn’t have dared use the Table – his executive light beaming down on them.
‘What are you up to?’ His tone wasn’t entirely friendly. Surely he knew me better than to think I’d have a quick shuftie at anything I wasn’t supposed to see.
I explained. And pointed. He fished out his reading glasses and joined me.
‘Better pour that tea first,’ I said.
He trotted obediently back to his fine new table – I’ll swear I caught him giving it a quick stroke – and poured. The brew would still have alarmed Ian, but it should at least kick my brain back into action.
Half an hour and two separate checkings later, I called Chris over from the table where he was working on a speech to the local Neighbourhood Forum. He’d nobly pointed out that I needed better light than he, but it was the call of that table, I was sure.
‘What do you think?’ I vacated his executive chair – willingly, as it happened, since it was designed to support an altogether longer frame than mine; my feet dangled like a kid’s on a bus.
He burrowed in a drawer and came up with an object I’d not seen him use before.
‘I don’t believe it. Chris, you’re not seriously going to use a magnifying glass! Where’s your meerschaum and your deerstalker?’
‘Magnifying glasses make things bigger,’ he said firmly, ‘and we, my dear Watson, need these signatures made bigger.’ He bent in concentration. At last he straightened. ‘I’m no expert, but I’d say – well, probably what you’d say—’
‘That at least five of those little squiggles on these register sheets don’t match the little squiggles on the original thingies – the application forms.’
‘I just love it when you talk technical,’ he said. ‘Let me get my head round this. We’ve got a sad crop of Malay women’s deaths. These are Malaysian—’
‘And Singaporean.’
‘—students who are not who they are supposed to be. We think. I don’t know if there’s any connection but we ought to float it as a possibility.’
‘What about your budget?’
‘Bugger the budget!’ He reached for the phone. ‘Time we brought Peter and Harvinder in on this. The Malay women are their cases, not mine, much as they intrigue me. And I owe young Harvinder an apology for something too.’
‘I may be jumping the gun,’ I said. This was now a Meeting, albeit extremely unofficial, and the four of us were seated at the Table. ‘After all, it’s not unknown for students to skip classes and sign in for each other. But these are serious students, who’ve paid serious fees to be here. Why should they want to skive? And we also have,’ I added, producing my list, ‘this list of students who are in my class but are not recorded on the main computer. Now, Kathryn assures me that you can’t even breathe the university’s air without being on the computer. You can’t get even a temporary ID.’
‘What if you’re a bona fide student and waiting for funds to come through?’ Chris asked.
‘No. According to Kathryn even those are computer-issued. Special code, or something.’
‘But how often are the IDs checked?’ Peter asked, tipping back on one of those new chairs.
Chris watched him anxiously, concerned, I thought, less for his senior officer’s back than for the chair’s.
I shrugged.
‘Well, Sophie, how often have you been asked for yours?’ Peter pursued.
‘Only once. When I was in Carla’s room, and she wasn’t there. I wanted to leave her an essay. There was a computer printout on her desk for me. But the security guard wouldn’t let me take it.’
‘Security guards are supposed to stop people taking things that aren’t theirs,’ Chris observed.
‘But this had my name on it. Wrongly spelt, as it happens. It’s probably still there. And there I had to put Kathryn to all that trouble to give me a new one.’
‘Issuing new copies to all and sundry isn’t usual?’ Harvinder asked.
‘Full-time staff get them as a matter of course. Students wouldn’t. But I teach an English Language group twice a week and I was so concerned about their lack of progress I wanted, I suppose, to justify to myself my lack of success with them.’
‘Any reason why the list shouldn’t be there?’ Peter put in.
I wasn’t sure I understood his question. ‘Every reason why it should.’
‘But it would be nice to check.’ He wrote in his notebook.
‘There’s another Malay thing too,’ I said, slapping my forehead in disgust. ‘This may just be a coincidence—’
Harvinder’s head shot up. ‘Another?’
I nodded. ‘One of the group was eating expensive food and has now disappeared.’ I told them Lola’s theory. ‘There may just be something in it. Why buy from Marks and Sparks when the refectory food’s cheap and good?’
This time Harvinder wrote. ‘I’ll make inquiries. I’ve a friend who’s a security guard at M&S.’
‘No! I don’t want them warned. I want her warned – not to do it! She may not realise the seriousness of what she’s doing.’
‘You know what the fines are for dropping litter out there? I’d reckon she’d know she wasn’t supposed to nick sarnies.’ Harvinder’s turn to rock back on his chair.
‘The thing is, she ought to because I did this whole class on the vocabulary of shopping, including all sorts of useful words like “shop-lifting”, “credit-card fraud”, “magistrates’ court” and “deportation”. What troubles me is that she hasn’t been back into uni since. Could be my fault – she could be bored silly, I suppose!’
‘Or scared. Let us know if she’s still out tomorrow. And Sophie, don’t go zapping round to her place to warn her.’
‘Couldn’t even if I wanted to. Haven’t got her name or her address.’ Yet.
Chris glowered: I must have sounded too innocent. He pulled himself into summing-up mode. ‘Now, I shall be at that conference in Toulouse from tomorrow morning.’
Toulouse! He hadn’t mentioned anything to me about leaving the country!
‘I fly out at eleven tonight. I’m quite happy for Sophie to keep a weather eye open for activity at the university which seems out of tune – provided that she reports back to you two. On the matter of Carla, I’m happy for you to keep her abreast of matters on which she might be able to shed light – we’ve still not come up with next of kin, I take it? – provided we have your word, Sophie, that you’ll maintain absolute confidentiality.’
‘Business as usual, gaffer,’ I said, as if I too were a junior officer and enjoying his frisson of mock shock.
He looked at his watch. ‘I have to go to a mayoral reception. I’ll see you all when I get back.’ Dismissed – me as much as the men – we left the room.
When he got back, eh? And when would that be? I couldn’t ask the others and betray my ignorance. And I was damned if I was flitting back to him to ask. But I would have liked to know. Weren’t we supposed to be friends? And weren’t friends supposed to tell each other when they were going abroad?