It was still horribly dark when the alarm clock summoned me. Not the sort of time to get up. Not after a late-night curry at Peter and Harvinder’s favourite Indian restaurant, with copious lager to temper the heat. At least, for the men. I wasn’t into macho heat or excess booze, so I’d been deputed to ferry everyone home. We’d deleted shop from the conversational menu, and we’d ended up having the sort of riotous evening that four serious-minded people can have if they set those serious minds on to it. An evening running till about 2 a.m., that is.
Come to think of it, the owner of one of those serious minds was still asleep in my spare room, a circumstance which afforded me no pleasure at all.
Angry with him for having got pissed, angry – no, furious – with myself for not having had the common sense, knowing he was pissed, to drive him to his place and tip him out there, I pulled myself into my dressing gown and headed for the bathroom. Furious. And upset. For both of us. Chris had been sufficiently drunk to be maudlin about our abortive relationship. And to be quite persistent about renewing it. Physically. I’d had to take action. Shit!
At least the bruising to his hand – where I’d had to bend the little finger hard backwards, a technique it gave me some satisfaction but no pleasure to recall he’d taught me himself – wouldn’t show. With luck, though, it should be tender enough to remind him of the incident at least until I flew to Australia. Except I didn’t want to remind him of anything. I wanted wounds to heal. Ideally we could go back to being friends. In the meantime we had to work together.
Except that was nonsense. He and I shouldn’t be working together at all. He shouldn’t even be working with Peter and Harvinder. He was the Commander of the whole unit, and should be merely taking an overview, just as he did with Traffic and Community Relations and Domestic Violence and everything else under his eye.
And I should be working on my thesis and for the next assignment.
Dream on, Sophie. You know you could no more drop out of this now than you could fly to Mike without wings.
In the circumstances I thought it better to be showered and dressed before yelling to him – from the bottom of the stairs – that it was time to wake up.
We drove in a silence that was both grumpy and offended to Piddock Road, where he now kept spare shaving gear, toilet things and clothes. Last night’s idea – it had seemed so good at the time – was that we should gather before normal working hours in Peter’s room, now fully equipped with whiteboard and pens nicked from someone else’s office. The four of us were to brainstorm, and the one with the neatest writing was to put the whole lot together on the whiteboard. Chris was the obvious choice. So he was doubly grumpy and no doubt about to pull rank. I kept my head down – I was on sabbatical, for heaven’s sake, from such duties! – and found a no doubt illicit fan heater (at least at William Murdock they were illicit!), which simply asked, on a cold morning like this, to be plugged in. What I had to do for everyone’s sake was make sure no one could even suspect a problem between Chris and me. I had to be myself. Perhaps me with a hangover (fictitious). Chris’s sense of duty and personal dignity would no doubt lead him to a similar conclusion.
If Chris was grumpy with a genuine hangover, not to mention his conscience, Peter – I inferred he’d slept on Harvinder’s sofa – was looking downright ill. Harvinder, who’d revealed an amazing repertoire of comic verse, most of it clean, took in what could have been the situation and announced that everyone was dehydrated and should drink at least a litre of the water from the CID chiller, conveniently located just outside Peter’s door. Whether it was the prospect of anything ice-cold on this bitter morning, or merely the thought of moving from the fan heater, this suggestion was deafed out. So Harvinder exited to make herbal tea. That’s never my favourite tipple, and at six thirty in the morning I wasn’t sure if I could stomach it at all. Peter and I peered with gloom at Chris’s chart. The centre was small and empty. Chris drew some lines radiating from it. In time he’d add words to the oval satellites he’d drawn at the end of each line.
Peter peered blearily at the board. ‘What’s that, Gaffer?’
Chris glared. ‘Come on, you’ve seen a sunburst chart before. It’s for us to fill in as we brainstorm.’
‘A sunburst. So that’s what a sunburst looks like. Looks more like one of those blasted spiders to me. Or a daddy-longlegs. You know. Long legs, tiny body.’
‘Big feet, whatever it is,’ Harvinder said, plonking a tray of mugs on the floor for want of anywhere else flat to put it. Peter ran Carla a close second when it came to office chaos. ‘Be very noisy, wouldn’t it – one of those clumping over your ceiling?’
‘Daddy-longlegs go for windows, not ceilings.’
‘Spider, then. Nice spider, Gaffer.’
Chris stepped back in revulsion. Ah, a closet arachnaphobe. I’d often suspected it. And now I suspected he’d never be specially keen on herbal tea again, not now he was standing in a tray clattering with overturned mugs and awash with the stuff. Still quite hot, I’d guess. Blackcurrant, sweetened, by the smell of it, with honey. Would sticky, wet trousers and socks improve the shining hour? Probably not. I was first on my knees, the others restrained by their clanging heads, perhaps. At least Chris’d not broken any of the mugs, just tipped one right over and knocked the other three. But it was a fair guess that neither his trousers nor the carpet would ever be the same again. Not unless quick action were taken.
Quite fun, telling someone on fifty thou to strip off his trousers so you can pour mineral water, icy from the chiller, over them. I poured some over his leg, too, just in case there were any scalding. His socks would have to sit on the radiator, once he’d wrung them out over a Christmas cactus that was failing to live up to its name.
Shaking, and keeping their backs firmly towards Chris, Peter and Harvinder found newspaper to stuff into the soggy shoes and mop the worst of the tea from the carpet, but there was still a very obvious stain.
‘Go and find a cleaner’s mop and bucket,’ I said, still sloshing with mineral water. OK: unnecessarily sloshing with mineral water. But, I confess, beginning to enjoy myself hugely, because Chris quite patently wasn’t. And he enjoyed it even less when the cleaner’s mop and bucket arrived, accompanied by the cleaner herself, who joined in with gusto when Chris mumbled a suggestion that he should go and dry his trousers under the hand-dryer in the gents’.
‘Hot air? On them? But they’re a nice bit of worsted. Don’t want them shrinking. You’ll have to turn that there heater on to cold, and hold them in front of it. There you go. Hmm, don’t often see worsted that quality, not these days. It’s all this Terylene, isn’t it? No body. Not like these. Very nice.’ At the time, however, she was not looking at the trousers.
It was nearly eight o’clock, the time Chris announced he had to head for his desk. We had established a number of action points. The IT experts would be asked to look not only at Carla’s computer, but at the UWM system too. Peter would take a role in whatever system were set up to pull together the Eastern deaths: no one had mentioned Chris’s original reservations. Meanwhile he was to investigate any premises where young Malaysian and Singaporean women might be found – from the massage parlour to the not especially hallowed portals of the University College of the West Midlands, with their spurious coat of arms.
‘There’s definitely something – er – fishy there,’ Chris said, looking at me for the first time. ‘But this isn’t the moment for you to turn into Superwoman, Sophie.’
‘Superwoman Sophie?’ Peter ignored the comma. ‘Nice one, Gaffer. Or would you rather be SuperSoph?’ He grinned a little shamefacedly; he’d once enraged me by abbreviating my name.
‘Just at the moment I’d rather be SafeSoph. I’m still worried by that spot of vandalism we had.’ I pointed to the words ‘CARS – PAINT STRIPPER, ETC.’ at the bottom of Chris’s sunburst. ‘Not to mention that little bomb.’ How had we come to forget that? It was not insignificant, after all!
‘Bomb!’
Having the grace to look embarrassed, Peter nodded. ‘Yes, Gaffer. Except it wasn’t, not really. No explosives. Just a tiny little charge of hydrogen sulphide. You know, the stuff they use for stink bombs.’
Chris, whose doctorate had been in astrophysics, might well have known that. But he never, ever, mentioned that part of his life, and I wasn’t about to either. If I’d been Peter, I’d have worried about Chris’s apparent forbearance. It could presage a bollocking later. For the moment, though, all Chris did was look at me quite hard. ‘Nasty stuff, if you happen to be asthmatic.’
‘Only the occasional attack.’
‘One a year’s enough. You’re still asthmatic.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, literally pulling my shoulders down, ‘I don’t want to take any risks, but I really need to spend time at UWM—’
‘So who knows about your asthma and would want to capitalise on it? Get you out of the action for a couple of days?’
‘Not Bowen – not if she’s cooking for him,’ Harvinder said.
‘Quite,’ I agreed, looking round for my coat. I hated talking about my asthma. I hated having it. ‘Now, I’ve got a three-hour evening class tonight, apart from an assignment to finish. Oh, and I’m teaching my English class today – the one with the floating population.’ I abandoned the idea of leaving just yet. ‘You know, it’s funny how the few men seem to be permanent fixtures. Now I come to think of it it’s only the women who change.’
Chris added that to the chart. ‘Harvinder, I’d like you to take someone over the UWM to check the students’ records out. There must be reasons for all these discrepancies. I know they might not be a police matter, so just keep it nice and low-key. That friend of Sophie’s sounds bright; have a natter to him.’
I raised a hand. ‘If you want to talk to Luke, please may I ask you to exercise the most extreme caution. He’s been beaten up once trying to help me – us – and I’d hate anything to happen to him.’
‘Come off it! How can anyone be put in danger just by talking to us?’ Peter objected.
I shrugged. ‘All I know is it happened before. People have seen me with him. If the attack on my car were more than vandalism, maybe someone thinks I know something I certainly don’t know—’
‘Let us not forget that bomb,’ Chris said drily.
‘Quite. And nothing must happen to Luke. OK? You may not look exactly like your classic policeman,’ I said, bending the truth, ‘but some of your colleagues are still identifiable as plods at thirty paces, however plain their clothes.’
Harvinder nodded. ‘I’ll talk to him first by phone. Unless you’re afraid that may be bugged, Sophie?’
‘I don’t joke about things like that,’ I said. ‘Now, just to go back to our massage parlours for a moment. And the University College of the West Midlands. How are you going to talk to the women involved? Not in my class time, by the way, if you don’t mind. They need all the practice they can get. And, come to think of it, I don’t want to be too closely associated with all this. Just in case.’
‘When else do you suggest?’
‘Some time when you can organise the interpreter you’ll need for your other inquiries to come to them. I keep telling you, their spoken English is minimal.’
‘“Spoken”?’
‘Some of them write quite well. But orally …’ I shook my head in despair.
Peter slapped his head. He looked at me meaningfully. ‘I suppose you couldn’t—’
‘You suppose right. Don’t you think that if I’d been able to speak their language, if I could even identify it, I’d have tried weeks ago?’
‘—find one of your best students to interpret for us?’ he concluded.
‘That’s a job for the university authorities. If they ask me, I’m sure I shall be able to recommend someone. There’s something else you should know, Chris. I told you that a fellow student needed information from Carla, and that Mike had offered to get it from her university in Melbourne.’
‘What’s his name? Jago? And that it wasn’t there,’ Chris prompted irritably, looking at his watch.
‘But he was. No, not in Melbourne. Running on the towpath near her narrow boat. That day we had our picnic.’ I nearly said, ‘I told Peter the other day.’ But I’d better remind him without a critical audience.
‘I wonder how he is on adhesive tape,’ Peter said, catching my eye guiltily. Oh yes, he remembered. ‘Not that the two types are the same. Forensic says the Sellotape scattered around at UWM is bog-standard, and the marks on the hull indicate something wider. No rolls of either sort on board the narrow boat.’
‘Jago? Tape?’
‘Some of his work was tangled up in tape, Chris. In our work-room. He was very distressed. Started asking for extra time to submit work as soon as a tutor appeared.’
‘Sounds reasonable. And the tutor was …?’
‘Bowen,’ I said.
Peter wrote.
‘What did you make of Bowen?’ I asked. ‘I presume he was in his room when you had a look at it?’
He spread his hands. Then grinned. ‘Do you remember those Posy Simmonds cartoons in the Guardian years ago? The family with the dad who was a poly lecturer? He reminds me of the dad. To look at, anyway. What was his name, now? Wibbly? Wobbly?’
Harvinder stared: had his boss totally blown it?
‘Webber,’ I supplied.
‘I thought that was something to do with carburettors,’ Harvinder said.
‘No, that’s Weber. Harmless old git, anyway,’ Peter said eventually. ‘Overworked, underpaid, that sort of thing.’
‘He may be underpaid, but he’s got a lovely house. Bostin’, we’d call it in Oldbury. Not far from the soi-disant University College. And as a teacher, he’s – lackadaisical.’
‘You mean he’s not hooked on the work ethic like you masochists at William Murdock,’ Chris suggested.
‘Or like you people here,’ I said sharply. ‘I’ve always believed in a fair day’s pay, but I’m happy to do a fair day’s work to earn it.’ Then I remembered what Seb from the union had said. ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to sound as if I’d known all the time, ‘his value to UWM may lie not in his teaching but in his research.’
‘Unlike Carla. Hmm.’
Peter said, ‘If he keeps his research work at UWM he won’t be a happy bunny. Not after the mess those vandals made of his room.’
‘Any news of the vandals? Any sightings?’ I asked.
‘Someone coming out of that pub – the Chalk and Talk – said he saw some thin kid running away. We’re talking to our regulars.’
Chris coughed and looked ostentatiously at his watch. ‘Time I wasn’t here. Keep me informed. And that includes you, Sophie. In fact …’ He shook his head and opened the door.
Peter’s turn to cough. ‘Excuse me, Gaffer. Haven’t you forgotten something?’
Oh, he’d been decently be-trousered for the last hour. He’d probably get rheumatism in his ankles, the trousers had been so damp when he’d insisted on putting them back on. But his socks were still baking on the radiator. He grabbed them, scowling, and perching on alternate legs, pulled them on. And then, desperate to add some dignity to his exit, he stuffed his feet hurriedly into his shoes.
Except the toes were still full of crumpled Sun. Muttering, he grabbed them and strode out carrying them. Pity it’s difficult to do a dignified stocking-foot stride.