I let a couple of cars get between us as we drove down The Backs, then towards Chesterton, near where I live. The Merc was easy to keep in view, even in the rain, and we turned as if to go into town across Elizabeth Way but before the bridge he turned left at a petrol station, went down the road and turned right into a gated residential block. The gates opened slowly, to let the Mercedes in, and I managed to quickly turn into a small open-air car park opposite. The gates closed behind the Mercedes. I yanked the camera with the telephoto from the bag in the passenger foot-well. Through the lens I could see the driver of the Merc unfold a large umbrella before opening the rear door.
The Lucy Booker that stepped out of the car was not the one that had got in. First, her legs appeared, the skirt now unbuttoned to show some thigh. Then her head appeared. She had lost the scarf and her hair was fixed up in a bun. I zoomed in. She had applied red lipstick and black mascara. Her cheeks were rouged. Something sparkled in her earlobes. The most surprising thing though, as I zoomed out slightly when she fully emerged, was that she had taken off her raincoat and undone several buttons of her cardigan and blouse to create some cleavage.
9
BACK IN THE OFFICE I TOOK OFF MY DRIPPING COAT, POWERED up the computer on Sandra’s desk and wished I had a coffee machine. I waited for the computer to come to life – starting Windows was like waking someone with a bad hangover early in the morning. I connected the camera to it and waited for the photos I’d taken to upload. I had an interesting evening to mull over.
After watching Lucy go into the building and the driver walk over to a pub opposite, I’d wondered whether I should try to befriend the driver and pump him for info, or stick with Lucy. I decided to stick with Lucy. I went over to the pub and checked through the window; my friend was settled with a pint and a Daily Express. Once again he jogged a memory that I couldn’t place. I didn’t try too hard though; it would come to me at some point if it was there.
I went back over to the apartments. It was a new five-storey block, called River Views, and a plaque on the gate advertised it as being fully serviced and security monitored. The cars in the car park were all executive late models (no people carriers here), and there was no legit way in except with a key or by ringing someone’s bell in the panel of about twenty-five that was lit up beside the pedestrian entrance, also gated. Above the gate a camera swivelled slowly. It headed my way. Beyond the gate, in the wall beside the path leading to the lifts, was a mirrored window next to a door marked ‘Caretaker’. I studied the names next to the bells but they meant nothing to me. I was about to press them all in the hope that someone would buzz me in with the old pizza delivery trick, when the caretaker door opened and an elderly man came out. I knew him, or rather my father had known him. I’d even done a job for his daughter once. He shuffled over to the gate carrying a big set of keys and a torch.
“Can I help you, son?” he asked, trying to sound officious. He had a cheap uniform on with ‘Caretaker’ sewn onto the breast pocket.
“It’s Eric, isn’t it? Eric Partridge?” I asked. He studied me with watery eyes. My father had said he was a drunk and his face seemed to confirm that; the drink had made his capillaries burst and his skin sag. But he did recognise me.
“You’re George Junior, aren’t you? How are you, son? What’re you doing here?” Before waiting for an answer he opened the gate and I was in. I pointed to the door he’d come out of.
“You got a kettle in there?”
* * *
Once we were squeezed into his tiny cubby hole he filled the kettle from a tap over a sink so small he had to fill a mug to pour into the kettle. He sat at a small metal desk, gesturing to a small two-person sofa that was designed, size-wise if not quality-wise, for hip-less supermodels. A phone was mounted on the wall to save space and the small electric kettle sat on a two-drawer filing cabinet. Notices on the wall proclaimed various fire and security warnings around a shallow metal cabinet. A small black and white screen on the desk showed a swivelling picture of the car park, then alternated with a view of the outside of the gates. The room smelled of booze and stale farts and I couldn’t wait to get out.
“How’s your old man, son?” I gave him the low-down on George Senior’s state. He became subdued, perhaps brooding on his own mortality. He checked the door was locked and opened the bottom filing cabinet, fishing out a flat half-pint bottle of Johnny Walker from behind some files. “Let’s drink to him.” I had a sip from my mug and let him have another on his own. He’d forgotten to care about what I was doing here in the first place; he was just glad of the company. I gestured at the little screen when it switched back to the car park.
“Nice Merc. Is it the S-Class?” He looked out of the one-way window and I realised we could see the car through the glass.
“Yeah, the 320. Sixty grand new. More than what I earn in four years.” He looked at me. “You still doing that snooping stuff, son? I never thanked you for exposing that shit of a son-in-law. You saved my daughter from wasting her life on a worthless prick.” He shook his head and sipped from his mug. “I mean stealing from his own wife’s business. It’s like stealing from yourself, isn’t it? She’s done alright now, she has. Runs a restaurant with her new fella. He cooks, she does the books. You should go and eat there, George.” I waited while he wrote the name down and elicited a promise that I would go there and tell them I was a friend of his so I could eat for nothing. I bet his daughter loved the fact that he was so free with her business.
I remarked that it was a bit ostentatious for Cambridge, the car – you might see its sort parked outside a new detached executive home in one of the villages. The kettle noisily filled the small room with steam and then it clicked off. Eric had forgotten all about making tea though and offered me more whisky. I let him put some in my mug so he didn’t feel so bad putting some in his own.
“Yeah, you’re right there, son. That’s Mr Boyd’s Merc. Comes up every week from London for a few nights.” I pretended to sip my whisky.
“A hit with the ladies, I bet.” I noticed a shallow cabinet on the wall, slightly ajar, the sort that held keys. Eric sipped and nodded.
“Right you are. He brings a girl every Friday or Saturday night. But always the same girl on Wednesday nights, always driven here by Mark and always driven home. She never stays more than an hour. She’s not a looker, not like the ones he has over on Friday and Saturday nights. They’re usually different – sometimes there are two of them; sometimes there’s a bloke as well, a thin guy. And sometimes,” he leant forward and I got a blast of JW, “Mark and this guy go upstairs with them.” He settled back and closed his eyes and I thought he’d gone to sleep. Then he opened them and leant forward again. “Mr Boyd likes ’em young, let me tell you.”
“Like how young?” I asked. He sat back and unfocussed his gaze. He was making me dizzy with his constant shifting.
“In my day you could tell when a girl was, well, ready, you know?”
I nodded encouragingly.
“Nowadays they look ready when they’re not.”
Since he couldn’t tell an eighteen-year-old from a thirteen-year-old I moved on to safer ground. “And do they stay the night?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes they leave on their own and Mark drives them home, sometimes he leaves with them. Mark and this skinny guy had to carry one of them out last week, she was pissed as a newt.”
“Quite the gentleman, this Boyd. Do you know what he does?”
Again with the head shaking. “I just do nights, son, don’t get to speak to the residents much. I just see them come and go, that’s all. There’s a big turnover here; it’s not the sort of place people settle down in, you know? In my day you bought a place and that was it…”
I jumped in before he could continue. “So where’s he from, this Boyd?”
“Boyd? He’s American,” Eric said, nodding, as if this explained everything. He went to the filing cabinet and pulled out a file.
“Quintin, his name is Quintin Boyd. He’s got the whole top floor to himself.”
* * *
I’d tried to get more out of him but too many reminiscences got in the way and I wanted to be in my car when Lucy came out; according to Eric she didn’t stay for long. But Eric hadn’t even met this Boyd, just his driver, Mark, a pleasant enough fella apparently, but not someone who liked to chat. Outside River Views I crossed the road and looked up at the fifth and top floor. There were vertical blinds across the tall windows, the sort you see in offices, a soft glow coming through them. I went back to the Golf, watched Mark the driver go to River Views at nine forty-five, took some more photos of Lucy getting in the Merc and then followed them back to Selwyn College.
When she got out near Selwyn, Lucy’s makeover was gone; she’d reverted to her plain self – lipstick-free, buttoned up to the chin and down to the knee. I’d waited until her mother had picked her up and now here I was uploading her photos onto the computer.
I left for home, but not before leaving a note for Sandra to do a vehicle check on the Merc’s number plate.
* * *
At home I let a couple of cold Pilsners nurse me while I switched the computer on. I Googled Quintin Boyd and the top hit led me to the home page of the corporate law firm ‘Quintin Boyd’. It could have been a coincidence, a firm with the same name, but on the ‘about us’ page he was listed as the senior partner who had formed the company twelve years earlier. According to their own publicity they were earmarked as ‘fastest growing corporate law firm’ by some corporate law body. The page also listed the many mergers and acquisitions the firm had been involved in. There were sixty partners listed, in three different departments spread over London and New York. I could see no mention of a Cambridge office. I clicked back to the partner listings and brought up Boyd’s profile. A head and shoulders photo of him stared out, taken at some meeting, looking off at a slight angle. He was smiling, with the sort of teeth you see in Hollywood mouths, and dimples that, if you had them, would make you want to keep on smiling. He was handsome, no doubt, with slightly too much black hair (greyed at the temples), a little long but erring on the side of acceptable for a corporate lawyer. He had the usual dark suit, pink shirt and Windsor knot at his throat you expect to see on those types. He had no extra fat in the face, nothing hanging beneath the chin like I saw in the mirror each morning.
I clicked away from him and checked my email. Nothing there but invitations to spend money on enhancing what was between my legs. In my case this would be like souping up a rusty 1982 Ford Cortina, parking it in a garage and throwing away the keys. It did serve to remind me to look at the dating website where I half-heartedly filled in some details against my profile but could not think of a message to write that would make anyone want to contact me. “Middle-aged man who turned wife lesbian and makes living destroying marriages and photographing benefit cheats seeks cuddles and maybe more,” was not going to attract the ladies, and I was in no mood for bullshitting. The Pilsner had run out of nurse so I considered opting for the intensive, watch-you-while-you-sleep care only a large whisky can provide. Instead I stood over my chess problem for fifteen minutes until I’d cracked it. I slept like a baby.
10
LEAVING MY HOUSE TOO EARLY THURSDAY MORNING I WAS hailed in a fake friendly manner by the besuited man who lived next door. He drove a new Volvo estate that he washed and waxed every Sunday (and replaced every year) while his harassed-looking wife tried to cope with a couple of shrieking toddlers. I deduced, given his regular garb, that he was some managerial type. He had once complained when one of his precious offspring had scratched her face on a large bramble that had reached through the rotting fence onto his patch, although I don’t know why he couldn’t have clipped the offending plant himself. I don’t intentionally cultivate brambles – my mother was the gardener of the family, and after her death my father just let it go wild. And when Olivia and I had moved into the house after my father went into care, I hadn’t the skills or heart to tackle it.
By my neighbour’s hearty tone I presumed that he wanted to make some new neighbourly complaint, since it was the only time he talked to me. Sure enough he was asking me about the shabby fence between our gardens and wondered when, if ever, I was going to replace it; it wasn’t keeping the ivy and brambles from his clipped and snipped garden. He was trying to make light of it but things like this bother these suburban types. He probably tossed and turned over it at night. I made a promise to get someone to look into it.
“Would you split the cost?” I asked. He made a face and got in his car, my chances at being invited for Christmas drinks blown. I drove off myself, keen to get up to Cottenham before people started leaving for work.
* * *
Two butt-numbing hours later I was back in the office. No benefits cheat had left number thirty-two to go to work, and I wanted to type up my report and get together with Sylvia Booker. The case had gone quicker than I’d liked from a financial point of view, but sometimes things were just that simple. Besides, I could possibly get follow-up work with the unanswered questions: despite confirming Sylvia’s suspicions about her daughter, which is what I was being paid to do, I’d not really established the nature of her relationship with Quintin Boyd beyond the obvious. Who was this Quintin Boyd and why did he come up to Cambridge several nights a week? On the face of it he came to seduce consenting young women; as far as I knew, hardly a crime.
I was typing up my report at Sandra’s desk when Sandra came in, bearing fresh coffee and biscotti from Antonio’s.
“We should get married,” I said, as she placed the steaming cardboard cup on my desk.
“What, so I can bring you coffee? Sod that.” She looked over my shoulder at the screen. “Whatya doing?” I told her about the breakthrough with Lucy Booker. She wanted to see the photos so I relinquished her chair and she brought them up on the screen, studying Lucy’s transformation.
“She’s obviously tarted up for something or someone,” she said.
“There’s only one thing she would get tarted up for, isn’t there?”
She stared at me as if to check that I wasn’t retarded. “Don’t be an arsehole, George. A woman can get dressed up for a variety of reasons, not just ’cause she wants sex. She may do it to feel better about herself, or to fit in, or just to be glam for the sake of it. You think women go around dressing up just for your benefit?”
I kept quiet; I knew better than to argue with her, especially when she got that furrow between the eyes. I sat at my desk and Sandra insisted on finishing my report since she used ten fingers to type as opposed to my two. It left me free to ring Sylvia Booker to arrange a time to meet and update her. This time she sounded crisp and professional.
“Let’s meet up this lunchtime, George. Do you know Stanmore Barns in Shelford?”
* * *
I bumped into Nina on the way out of the office. She was looking harassed and attractively flushed. The cloth of her white coat sounded satisfyingly crisp and freshly starched.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, before I had time to think about whether it was a good idea. “We should do something, maybe catch a film. What do you think?” She shrugged. I saw some wriggle room in the shrug and tried a different tack.
“I know a place that knows how to undercook a steak,” I pursued. She glanced over my shoulder and crossed her arms.
“I’m a vegetarian,” she said.
Shit. I was fucking it up and losing confidence like water from a colander. I took heart from the fact that she was still standing there, albeit with crossed arms.
“Then pizza. We can do pizza; I know a place where they make proper pizza.” She considered me as if deciding. “You can choose your own toppings,” I said, and she smiled. “Would tomorrow night be OK?” I asked. She squinted to consult a mental diary.
“Tomorrow is good.”
11
STANMORE BARNS IS A COLLECTION OF UPMARKET SHOPS: AN organic butcher, an overpric
ed grocer, a couple of nostalgia stores that sells knick-knacks such as 1950s teapots, wooden clothes horses, tin bread bins and laundry mangles. I could make a fortune as I had inherited many of these things when I took over my parents’ house – but I still use them. The car park had a good crop of shiny top-of-the-range SUVs with top-of-the-range baby seats in the back. It was a favoured venue for diet-thin leather-trousered mums who left their children with the au pair while they went out for a bite. The au pair would eat a sandwich at home and maybe rifle through her employer’s bedroom drawers and then have a cry because she was homesick. I’d had occasion to come into contact with some of these nannies (parents wanting them checked out to protect their precious ones), and they were not a happy bunch.
There is a café at Stanmore Barns that sells you homemade soup and a hunk of bread the price of which would buy you a passable steak and chips in a pub, as well as a pint to wash it down with. I didn’t have the place pegged as Sylvia Booker territory (too artificial, too ladies-who-lunch) but perhaps that was why she’d chosen it, so she wouldn’t bump into her own kind. The cars towered over my rusting, diminutive Golf and also Sylvia’s red Mini, which was parked three cars down from my own. I walked towards the café checking my suit for stains and wondering whether I should do up my tie. The driver window on the Mini slid down with electric ease – some detective I was; I hadn’t seen Sylvia sitting inside.
The Bursar's Wife Page 5