‘It’s no good, is it, Ivo, all this pissing around?’
Holding his peanut at arm’s length, he looked mildly offended by my language.
‘This business needs more than one woman and a gerbil. It needs the resources of the West Midlands Police, properly co-ordinated, and not at the mercy of Chris and his hormones or even Chris and his budget.’
Ivo left the husk where it fell and looked hopefully for more. Since a kitchen table isn’t a natural habitat for peanuts, he looked in vain. He turned his attention to the fruit bowl, then, once again defeated by the steep sides, stared at the apple I was eating.
‘Wait for the core,’ I said. ‘And don’t eat too much of that or you’ll get bellyache.’ To temper the words, I scooped him up and gave him a comforting nuzzle. He responded by first licking and then chewing my fingers. Apple juice. And blood. I shook him off, howling. And then wondered if I’d been too rough. I broke off a sliver of apple, but he turned his back on it and proceeded to wash parts of his anatomy best washed in decent privacy.
‘What I really need to do is put all this down on paper,’ I said. ‘Brainstorm myself.’
‘No, you don’t,’ he said, ‘you need to put me back in my nice warm home, go to bed, and dream of Mike.’
Such powers of thought transference amazed me. Agreeing, I scooped him back into his aquarium, made sure the lid was securely fastened, checked all the doors and windows, set the burglar alarm, and did as I was told. Except the dreams of Mike left me sad and lonely in what I’d come to regard as his half of my bed.
To my surprise, Peter Kirby appeared on my doorstep at 7.27 a.m. He was looking remarkably similar to how I felt. And saying much the same as I’d been saying to Ivo. That it was time for a co-ordinated attack on the whole business. Chris was due back at midday: he proposed to ask him to convene a meeting as soon as he’d got his head round returning to Smethwick. In the meantime, Peter’d get over to Forensics the notice that I’d retrieved from the bin near Carla’s door, and he’d chase the SOCOs to see if that list of entry results was still in Carla’s room. I forebore to ask why he hadn’t already done both.
And then, halfway through his second round of toast, he put his head down on my kitchen table and wept. Just like that. I don’t know how long I stood helplessly wishing there were something I could say or do. There’d been no emotional outburst – anger or anything else – to warn me. And – I still didn’t quite see us as friends – I didn’t know how to react.
Ivo paused in his destruction of a loo roll inner, looked at me as if he didn’t know why I didn’t do something, and then continued, his enthusiasm apparently unabated.
I poured coffee, grabbed kitchen roll which I thrust into Peter’s free hand, and eventually did what I should have done in the first place, hugged him.
‘She’s locked me out. She’s left me,’ he said at last. ‘Kaput. All over. Just like that. Says it was better living on her own knowing she was living on her own than living on her own thinking she was living with me. I’m never there, she says—’
God, and it was my fault he’d been home so late last night!
‘—and when I am home I’m worrying about work. Or asleep. Never take her out. No sort of husband to her.’
On the briefest of acquaintances with his wife, I couldn’t see why anyone would want to be with her in the first place, but I pushed such unsisterly thoughts away. If the man loved her, then spelling them out wouldn’t do any good, would it?
With a great sigh, he pulled himself free from me.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No problem. I’m just sorry this has happened to you.’ Then, aware how painfully inadequate I was being, I said things about talking to Welfare – it sounded as if his police hours and responsibilities had been at least part of the problem – and getting time off to see if their relationship could be repaired.
‘Repaired? She’s changed the locks.’
He’d come, he said eventually, to offer me a lift. But today I was going in a different direction, heading for the Oldbury campus, where I was going to closet myself with Luke in an attempt to sort out the files business – if no one had sorted them already, that is. I had been known to hack, in my time, but that was then, and in quite different circumstances. I’d rather not do it again. But I would if I had to, just to have something positive to show Chris on his return. Something more solid, less ephemeral, than the smell of lemons.
Luke seemed pleased enough to see me, but, he told me, there was someone working on the computer even as we spoke. And he’d got a couple of work experience students to sift through all the paper files, putting them in order.
‘If they know their alphabet, that is,’ he said gloomily.
‘This isn’t what you’re supposed to do with work experience students,’ I protested, forgetting myself. ‘You’re supposed to give them experience of the real world of work. Asking them to do valid tasks and evaluating their performance. Then you discuss all this with their tutor.’ Which once, a lifetime ago, I’d been for William Murdock students.
‘This is the real world of work. This is an emergency. I spent twenty minutes working with them. It wouldn’t hurt you to, would it? There are an awful lot of files to check! Unless you want to get under the geek’s feet.’
‘Luke, it’s not my job to do either. But since I owe you one I’ll help the geek. My days of playing with dusty files are over. Full stop.’
The geek wasn’t the pasty-faced overweight nerd I’d expected. She was a business-suited woman not long out of university, fresh-complexioned and with an excellent figure that brought home to me my own recent lack of weight-training. She welcomed me affably enough, and gave me a rundown of her efforts so far. ‘Whoever fixed this program knew their computers. It was a very sophisticated bit of work. I can’t sort it.’
There was nothing I could add. ‘So …?’
‘I’ll take the computer back to the lab. At least they’ll be able to use other computers on the system. It’s just they won’t be able to access those records.’
Feeling flat as ink, I went off in search of Luke, who was nowhere to be seen. I ran him to earth eventually, as I should have predicted, with the work experience students. The room was full of the sort of desks that I associated with exam rooms. Each had a letter of the alphabet on a sheet of paper and a large and unstable pile of brown card staff record folders. Luke was now checking that the files were in true alphabetical order, briefly inspecting the contents of each as he went.
‘Thanks, kids,’ he said. ‘You go and get yourselves cleaned up—’ they were indeed pretty dusty – ‘and then get yourself something from the canteen.’ He slipped them a couple of what looked like pound coins each. ‘I thought you’d prefer me to say this in privacy,’ he added after they’d gone. ‘Carla Pentowski’s gone as if she’d never existed. Someone’s removed her from the pay-roll program too. And her classes have disappeared from the timetable.’
‘It happened to her once before,’ I said. ‘She had a house fire – lost everything.’
‘That,’ he said, ‘was while she was alive. Doing it now, now she’s dead!’ His voice rang with a despair quite out of proportion to the case. ‘Eliminating her, expunging her from the face of the earth!’
For the second time this morning, I was shocked by the force of a man’s emotion. To me, Luke’s was quite OTT. But then, I hadn’t had all my family and all my family records destroyed. What could I say that was to the point? Very little. I sat down, waiting for his paroxysm to subside, and then said, as coolly as I could manage without sounding callous, ‘It doesn’t make sense, does it? If she’d wanted to disappear, it would have made eminent sense. If she’d been planning to do a bunk. If she had something major to hide. Say, she wanted to start a new life – as she says she once had to do before – then this might make sense. But if someone – if someone killed her, then it wouldn’t make sense.’ Bang went my promise to Chris of confidentiality.
Luke pulled a chair up and sat down not quite facing me. ‘Did someone kill her?’
I hated telling Luke anything other than the whole truth. ‘The possibility hasn’t been dismissed, as far as I know,’ I said, hiding behind police jargon.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe we could use a coffee. If you want to clean up, the ladies’ is just across the corridor from my room.’
‘My advice to you,’ said Luke, five minutes later, proffering biscuits to go with the excellent filtered coffee, ‘would be to get on the next plane to Australia. The very next one. Go and get your bloke to rub sun tan oil on to your back. From what you say there’s stuff going on in your life I wouldn’t want to be involved in, I can tell you, if I could avoid it. Your car, your house, your notes.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘What next? And now there’s problems here. What if you’re the next one to disappear? Your file, your teaching, your life! Just pack your bag and go!’ He pushed away from his desk and prowled round the room. ‘What’s stopping you? Oh, I know what that chin means. It means you’ll listen and nod, nod and listen, and then do exactly what you meant to do in the first place. Tell me, why stay if you’re at risk?’
‘It’s a matter of … of honour, isn’t it? Not letting go.’
‘Pride!’
I shifted. ‘Apart from anything else, I’m cooking a big supper for Tom Bowen on Friday. And my flight’s only a few days after that. In fact, I’ve already got my cases out and there’s a growing list of what I need right by my bed. Tickets. Passport. All I’ve got to do is arrange with Shahida when my lodger moves in with them.’
‘You’re not leaving him the run of the house then.’
‘Certainly not! Now, Luke, I have to go. I’m missing classes and lectures all over the place. Somehow I don’t think the university would see this as justifying an extension!’
‘Get yourself a doctor’s note – stress.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to complete the course this year. I couldn’t afford another year off or another year’s fees. Oh,’ I added, ‘you don’t know what part-time teachers’ contracts happen to look like, do you?’
‘Know what they look like? My department generates them, Sophie.’
‘How do you mean?’
He leant across to tap my temple with his knuckle. ‘Hello? Anyone in there? Generate – we tell the computer what to print on them.’
‘The computer prints them …? I wonder why mine was hand-written.’
‘Because some lecturer forgot there was a proper system and that he or she should follow it. Happened all the time last year. I thought people would have got used to it by now.’ He shrugged. ‘Time to start worrying is if you don’t get paid!’
It took more self-denial than I usually manage to drive past Piddock Road without checking to see if Chris’s car was back in the car park. But I did. I even went along to the afternoon lecture and seminar as if nothing at all was bugging me. But I did commit that greatest of twentieth-century solecisms: as I left the work-room and its phone, I switched on my mobile phone on. Lecture room or not, if Chris wanted to talk to me, about my letter bomb or about anything else, this time I wasn’t going to play hard to get.