by Alex Walters
‘I thought he was Mr Moderate. That was how he always came across on TV.’
‘That was the image he cultivated. The king of the middle ground.’ Annie had heard that, in his younger days, Connell had been a troublesome and loud-mouthed Federation rep, though he seemed to have left that far behind.
‘And wasn’t he?’ Annie asked.
‘He was in dealing with employers. To the point where some of his colleagues thought he was a bit of a class traitor, too keen to sell them down the river for the sake of a quiet life. Chalmers wasn’t a popular figure in the union. He was subject to the internal disciplinary procedures on a couple of occasions. Fairly trivial stuff about inconsistencies in expenses, and Chalmers came up with some excuse, claiming it was an error. First time, they gave him the benefit of the doubt. Second time, they accepted the explanation but gave him a formal warning for negligence or some such.’ Connell was clearly leading up to his big reveal. ‘But there was at least one occasion when we were called in.’
‘The police?’
‘Aye, in the form of yours truly, initially. They reckoned Chalmers was receiving bribes.’
‘Bribes?’
‘From employers for soft-pedalling on industrial action or accepting suboptimal conditions for the members, that sort of stuff.’
‘Anything in it?’
Connell paused to sip his tea. ‘Difficult to be sure. My gut said yes, but it was difficult to make anything stick. We’d been called in by the local office, but it was clear the union at national level didn’t want us in there. If there was a problem, they wanted to brush it under the carpet. So it wasn’t easy to get anywhere. Chalmers had reasonable explanations for most of his actions, and there was nothing we could easily challenge. The national office didn’t exactly play ball in terms of sharing information for the relevant period, which made it harder. Chalmers claimed the whole thing had been maliciously motivated.’
‘But you felt there was something in it?’
‘Mainly just from the way Chalmers behaved, to be honest. I felt he had something to hide. But I was left with doubts about the whole bunch, to be honest. The culture in the regional office seemed poisonous. Chalmers might well have been right that the claims were malicious. In the end, I was happy to wash my hands of it and walk away.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘Not that long. Year or so back. Don’t know if anything’s changed since. Like I say, I spoke to Chalmers about the Matlock stuff, but he came in here for that.’
‘But you don’t think any of this would be a motive for murder?’
‘Who knows? Most of them struck me as armchair revolutionaries. I doubt they’d be capable of much at all. Though I have been wondering whether one of them was responsible for the damage to the car.’
‘One of Chalmers’ colleagues you mean?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. If they thought that Chalmers was on the point of doing some too-cosy deal with management, it might have been a way of sabotaging it. I don’t mean they’d have done it themselves, but I can imagine them inciting someone from the workforce to do it. It’s one of the lines I’ve been pursuing anyway.’
‘All sounds a long way from my idea of comradeship and solidarity,’ Annie said.
‘Always the way, isn’t it?’
‘Still seems a long way from a motive for murder, though.’
‘I’d have said so. Mind you, if Chalmers was involved in some kind of dodgy dealing, who knows where that might have led?’
‘Strikes me I need to know more about Chalmers,’ Annie said. ‘Anything else useful you can tell me about him?’
‘Not much. Bit of a loner. No close family, other than some son he didn’t see much of. He was one of those people who don’t give much away, but you’re never sure if that’s because they’re hiding something or because they don’t have much in the locker to start with.’
‘I suppose the next step is for me to stick my head into the vipers’ nest of the regional office.’
‘If you say so,’ Connell said. ‘In that case, all I can offer you is thoughts and prayers. And do send them my love.’
She smiled. ‘I’ll do that. And let’s stick close on this one, Jack. We don’t want to be tripping over each other, and there’s benefit in sharing resources where we can. I’m not sure if we’re pursuing exactly the same thing, but I’ve an instinct all of this is somehow connected.’
‘It certainly all seems to be part of the same awful bloody mess. Anyway, you had me at sharing resources. If you’re offering some extra resources from your vastly bloated team into my one-man-and-a-dog outfit to help conduct more interviews, I’m all for it.’
‘I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, Jack. But, yes, since you’ve asked so nicely, I’ll see what I can do.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘DS Everett?’
Zoe rose to greet the tall man heading in her direction. He was probably in his early forties, with neatly swept back greying hair and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles over which he peered at the world with undisguised curiosity. The overall effect was that of a Hollywood depiction of an academic. Zoe couldn’t decide whether or not the image had been consciously cultivated. ‘Dr Pascoe?’
‘Ian, please. Now, I was wondering whether we should go and grab a drink in our coffee shop. It’s more salubrious than my office and, given we’re still a few weeks away from the chaos of the new academic year, it should be fairly quiet. If we find a corner, we should be able to talk confidentially, if we need to.’ His manner of speaking matched his appearance.
‘Fine by me,’ Zoe said.
She followed him out of the reception and along a short corridor to a space laid out to resemble a high-street coffee shop. ‘If you sit over there in the corner, I’ll get us some drinks,’ he said. ‘What are you having?’
‘Just an Americano for me. No milk or sugar.’
‘Very ascetic. Is that because you’re on duty?’
Zoe smiled. ‘It’s mainly that I get intimidated by the range of choice in these places so I tend to default to the simplest.’
‘Fair enough. I tend to do the opposite, so I’ll probably end up with a chai latte with a shot of lavender syrup or something equally stupid.’
He returned a few moments later with her coffee and what appeared to be a straightforward cappuccino. He slid her drink across the table to her and said, ‘So what can I do for you? You said it was about Justin Wentworth. Terrible business. I only heard the other day. I understand the Vice-Chancellor’s written to his mother. I was wondering whether to contact her myself, but I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to add.’
‘You were Justin’s Director of Studies?’
‘That’s right. I taught him in a couple of classes too.’
‘What was he like? As a student, I mean.’
There was a long pause. Finally Pascoe said, ‘Do you want me to be brutally honest?’
‘I’m a police officer, Dr Pascoe. Not his mother. I’d much rather you were honest.’
‘Yes, of course. Well, the truth is Justin wasn’t much of a student. He wasn’t the brightest, but that’s all relative. He’d have been quite capable if he put his mind to it, but he never seemed fully engaged. Or even partially engaged, to be honest. I genuinely don’t like speaking ill of the dead, but he was basically bone-idle. My impression was that he’d managed to get half-decent A-level grades because he’d gone to an expensive school, been tutored to within an inch of his life, and been nagged by his mother to the point where it was slightly less effort for him to succeed than it would have been to fail. As soon as he got here and it was all down to him, it all went to pot. Literally.’
‘Literally?’
‘Well, drugs generally. I imagine pot was the least of it.’
‘You know this for sure? That he was taking drugs?’
‘My suspicion is that he was dealing drugs. Look, if I was talking in other circumstances I’d be a lot more equivocal. I’ve no
proof he was taking drugs. But I saw the way he behaved and I heard the rumours, and I don’t have much doubt it was true.’
‘It can’t be that unusual among students, surely?’ Zoe could even recall the odd mild experiment from her own university days, and she’d largely been a model undergraduate.
‘Depends what you mean. Yes, it happens of course and pretty commonly, particularly where the softer drugs are concerned. But it’s nothing like as prevalent as the tabloids would sometimes want you to believe. Cases like Justin are few and far between, thankfully.’
‘So did he get into trouble? With the authorities, I mean.’
‘He was suspended at the end of last year.’ Pascoe saw her expression and raised an eyebrow. ‘You didn’t know that?’
‘His mother doesn’t seem to have been aware of it,’ Zoe said. ‘Or if she was, she didn’t think to tell us.’
‘His mother knew full well. She was the only reason he hadn’t been thrown out.’
‘How do you mean?’
Pascoe leaned back and took a sip of coffee, with the air of a storyteller about to embark on a lengthy narrative. But then he paused. ‘I don’t know if I should be talking to you about this.’
‘Dr Pascoe, I’m a police officer engaged in a murder inquiry. If you have potentially relevant information about the victim, you have an obligation to share it.’
‘Yes, of course. But I don’t know if it is relevant, and my involvement was on a confidential basis. I’m wondering if I should set up a meeting with the Vice Chancellor or…’
Zoe could already envisage herself getting mired in a sea of bureaucracy. ‘As I say, Dr Pascoe, this is a murder inquiry and time is critical. If you have information about Justin, I’d urge you to share it with me now. If I think it’s not likely to be pertinent to our inquiry, I’m happy to treat our conversation as confidential. If I think it may be, then we can go through the appropriate channels as necessary before we release anything publicly. But that will at least mean we can begin working on the information immediately.’
‘Okay. The fact is that there’d been a number of complaints about Justin during his first year here. Complaints about his behaviour.’
‘What sort of complaints?’
‘Some were just complaints about generally boorish behaviour. We don’t get many Hooray Henry types here, but there’s always a handful. People from wealthy backgrounds who’ve been to the posher type of public school. It’s not fair to stereotype them, but there are usually one or two who think that their privileged background entitles them to treat others with contempt. Justin was one of those.’
Zoe looked surprised. ‘That’s not the impression of him we’ve gained from his mother.’
‘Mothers tend to see the best in their offspring, don’t they? In fact, when I met his mother and realised who she was, Justin’s behaviour made a lot more sense. I don’t want to play the amateur psychologist, but my guess is that Justin had felt a bit of an impostor at his school and probably embarrassed by his mother. For all her money, I suspect Justin was treated as an oik by his schoolmates. When he got here, he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself as the person he’d liked to have been at school. One of the upper-class lads. He found a couple of like-minded mates, and they went around being generally obnoxious.’
‘In what kind of way?’
‘I don’t think they actually set fire to banknotes in front of homeless people, but they’d have been quite capable of it. Most of it was trivial stuff. Being rude to the staff here. Acts of mild vandalism that they’d then pay to put right, just to prove they could. Some borderline racist and misogynist stuff. They were generally smart enough to know how far to push it. Enough to provoke people, but not so far that they couldn’t find a way of laughing it off. Usually just by claiming that whatever they had said or done was a joke, combined where necessary with some sort of apologetic gift or pay-off to smooth the waters.’
‘But you said Justin had been suspended?’
‘Justin was always the one who pushed it too far. That may have been, again, because he was the one with the biggest chip on his shoulder. But he was also probably the least bright of them, and certainly the one most under the influence of whatever they were taking. The others were only too happy to drop him like a stone if he started being a liability. I understand there were a few occasions when Justin got carried away and the others left him standing there to carry the can.’
‘They sound a delightful bunch,’ Zoe said.
‘Give them a few years and they’ll all be politicians and captains of industry and High Court judges complaining about declining standards among young people. I’ve been around long enough to see the pattern.’
‘So why was Justin suspended?’
‘I told you there was sometimes a racist or misogynist element to their behaviour. Justin was the worst of them for the latter. We had complaints about inappropriate behaviour. Initially just offensive comments. He claimed he’d been drunk, apologised profusely to the person he’d spoken to, and got off with a warning. But then we had a complaint about a possible sexual assault.’
‘Assault?’
‘One of the female students claimed that he’d tried – well, to grope her, for want of a better word. It had supposedly happened in the bar here, late in the evening.’
‘When you say “supposedly”…?’
Pascoe held up his hand. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending it or making light of it. I’m just recounting the incident as it ultimately panned out. The female student made the accusation. Justin, predictably, denied it. Because it had been a very crowded bar and everyone had had one too many, the victim was unable to produce any witnesses. Justin’s mates swore blind it had never happened. There wasn’t much we could do beyond give him a woolly reminder to consider how his actions might be interpreted. But, if I’m honest, we all believed it had happened.’
‘Do you think he’d have been treated differently if he’d been less well-off?’
‘To be fair, I don’t think so. We went out of our way to ensure it was all handled by the book. We accepted what the victim – and I’m calling her that quite deliberately because I know what I believe – was telling us. We provided every support to her in making sure her account was clearly presented and was listened to. We tried to help her find someone who might have been able to act as a witness on her behalf. A couple of her friends who’d been present were desperate to help her, but both had to admit that they hadn’t actually seen the incident. But Justin was very plausible, and his friends claimed they’d been with him at the time and had witnessed nothing. He smartly stopped short of calling the woman a liar, but claimed that either someone else had been responsible or she must have misunderstood or misinterpreted some accidental contact. In the end, we didn’t have a lot of choice.’
Zoe gave him a thin smile. ‘Welcome to our world. It’s so often like that. So that incident didn’t lead to Justin’s suspension.’
‘No. On the contrary. I wondered afterwards if the outcome had maybe led to Justin feeling invulnerable. After all, his experience to date had been that he’d succeeded in getting away with whatever he’d done. But we then had a much more serious complaint. Another female student accused Justin of a serious sexual assault. Attempted rape, in fact.’
Pascoe had been speaking very quietly to avoid any risk of their conversation being overheard, and that somehow made this revelation even more shocking.
‘I won’t go into the detail,’ Pascoe went on, ‘but the claim was that, after yet another heavy night in the bar, Justin had followed the woman back to her room in one of the halls of residence. He’d forced his way in there, dragged her on to the bed and – well, I don’t need to spell it out. The woman started screaming and people came out from various neighbouring rooms to see what was going on. She continued to scream, people started banging on her door, and fortunately Justin was stopped before anything worse happened. He came blundering out, half-cut or worse, babbling tha
t, yet again, it had all been a misunderstanding, that she’d invited him back, blah blah blah. No one believed him. To be honest, given the strength of feeling about these issues among the students, he was probably lucky someone didn’t take the law into their own hands.’
‘What happened next?’
‘The woman in question made a formal complaint. My impression was that she’d been reluctant initially but had been persuaded to by her friends.’
‘Again, all too familiar,’ Zoe said. ‘She was afraid of how it would be handled?’
‘I guess so. Again, I hope we did it scrupulously by the book. We’ve become very sensitive about the handling of these kinds of cases, quite rightly, and I think we were all acutely conscious of the needs of the complainant. We went rigorously through the process. My own view, which I think was shared by all those involved, was that it was an open-and-shut case. The woman was able to produce witnesses who confirmed that she’d left the bar on her own, telling her friends she was tired. There was no evidence either that she knew Justin or even that he’d spoken to her in the course of the evening, so the idea that she’d invited him back to her room seemed implausible. She claimed that Justin must have followed her, although she’d been unaware of him as she’d walked across to the hall. She said she’d been conscious of someone behind her in the corridor, but hadn’t thought much about it. She’d unlocked her door, stepped into the room just as Justin had appeared behind her, forcing the door open before she’d had chance to shut it. The next thing she knew, this unknown man had forced her back into the room, shut the door behind them and thrown her on to the bed. That was when she started screaming.’
‘Did Justin stick by his story that she’d invited him back?’
‘He didn’t really have much choice, unless he was going to admit the truth. He tried to bluff it out, but even he could tell it wasn’t cutting much ice. I don’t think anyone questioned that he ought to be slung out. The only question really was whether the woman in question wanted to take it further and make a criminal complaint.’