by Danuta Reah
The paternoster was packed with students queuing to get to tutorials and seminars. Roz pushed through the crowds to the stairwell, aware again of the silence that surrounded her as soon as the doors swung shut. She climbed the stairs slowly, her feet dragging a bit. Her usual enthusiasm and sense of anticipation had gone. As she climbed the stairs, she tried to work out why she felt like this. Gemma’s death? That had reached into the calm centre of her working life and touched it, contaminated it. But the work had remained. Now…it didn’t seem to be enough.
The problem was still distracting her when she got to her office. She checked her in-tray quickly, but there was only some internal post, a tatty envelope, used and used again. She picked up the phone and rang the Department of European Studies. She got the secretary. Marcus Holbrook wasn’t in. ‘When would be a good time to catch him?’ Roz said.
‘I’m not expecting him in today,’ the woman said. ‘Just let me check.’ There was the sound of papers being moved around. ‘No, he’s got nothing on today, so it looks as though he won’t be in.’
‘OK.’ Roz felt that sense of frustration again. ‘If he does come in, could you ask him to phone Roz Bishop?’ She gave the woman her extension number.
There was a tap on her door and a cough behind her. A young man was standing in the corridor. She registered fair hair and an engaging smile before she recognized him as Sean. His hair was wet, his coat damp, but he was looking eager and pleased with himself. She felt depressed. She wasn’t in the mood for Sean.
‘Sean,’ she said, keeping her voice to the cold side of tepid. ‘Can I help you?’
‘It’s me that can help you.’ He gave her a cheerful grin.
Roz wasn’t playing any games. ‘Did you want something?’
He was silent for a moment, looking at her as though he was mulling something over. Then he said, ‘You asked me to look something up for you.’
Gemma’s search! He’d said he’d check and see what, exactly, she’d been looking for. Roz had assumed he would forget. She felt her face going red. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten.’
He had that slightly petulant look now. ‘You mean you don’t need it any more?’
‘No. No, of course not. I’d just forgotten that you said…’ That was probably worse. She was saying she’d forgotten him. ‘I didn’t expect you to find anything,’ she amended.
‘Actually…’ He looked rueful. ‘Actually, I didn’t. I know she had a look through the files, but if she found what she was looking for – there’s no record.’
‘And you came across in this weather to tell me?’ Roz was amused and a bit touched. ‘That’s worth a cup of coffee.’
‘There’s a new place in Broomhill,’ he said at once. ‘We could…’
She shook her head. ‘No, we’ve got coffee here. I’ll get us some. Milk? Sugar?’ Luke never minded Roz giving his coffee to visitors. She went along to his room, realizing that Sean was tagging along behind her. She got a shock when she opened the door. Some new equipment, still boxed, was stacked on Luke’s desk as though this was surplus space. The room had been rearranged to create two new work stations for the post-graduate students Joanna had mentioned, Roz assumed.
Sean looked round the room as Roz turned on the coffee machine. ‘You’ve got some good stuff here,’ he said. He wandered round looking at the machines, fiddling with the knobs on the digital filters, looking at the software manuals. He looked like a child exploring new and interesting toys.
‘It’s all fairly standard,’ she said. ‘We aren’t in the income bracket for real state-of-the-art.’ She poured out two mugs of coffee.
‘Is this where Luke Hagan works?’ He was looking round as though he expected Luke to pop out of a cupboard any moment.
‘Yes.’ Roz wondered how he knew Luke.
‘Gemma was seeing him, wasn’t she?’ He took the cup she passed to him. ‘Thanks. Hey, serious coffee.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Roz wasn’t discussing personal things with him.
‘Oh. Gemma talked about him,’ he said, still looking round. ‘She said he had a seriously cool bike.’
Roz said, ‘Mm,’ noncommittally.
‘A Vincent Black Shadow. There aren’t too many of those around. Gemma said he’d got it tuned up. She said it went like a rocket.’ It would be a case of bike-geek meets bike-geek, Roz thought, if Luke were here. ‘I’d like to see that,’ Sean went on. ‘I’m into bikes,’ he added, unnecessarily. ‘Is he around?’
‘He isn’t in.’ It was a pity, really. A bike conversation with Luke would have taken the pressure off Roz a bit. ‘So. Have you made any decisions yet? About what to do next?’ She was trying to make up for her earlier brusqueness, but she also wanted to find out more about Joanna’s plans – if she was really serious about Sean taking a research post with the Law and Language Group.
‘No,’ he said after a moment. ‘Still thinking. Why?’ He smiled at her, that flirtatious gleam in his eyes again.
Roz moved quickly on to neutral ground. ‘Are you seeing Professor Holbrook today? I tried to phone him, but he wasn’t in.’
He shook his head. ‘Not on Fridays. Do you want me to give him a message?’
‘No, it’ll keep.’ Roz wasn’t too sure how she’d word her query when she did see Holbrook. Why did you lie to me? seemed a bit…blunt.
He was holding his cup in front of him, looking down at it. ‘I’ve still got those tickets,’ he said, looking at her through his lashes. ‘If you’ve changed your mind.’
‘No,’ Roz said firmly. ‘I told you. I’m busy.’
That was a mistake. ‘We could go out for a drink,’ he said at once. ‘Sometime when you’re not busy.’
‘Sean,’ she said, ‘I told you: I’m married.’
He looked put out again. ‘You go out for a drink with Luke Hagan,’ he said.
‘What did you say?’ She felt a stab of real anger.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, unrepentantly. ‘Gemma told me. She said that he liked you a lot. Well, so do I. I’ve brought you a present.’
Roz closed her eyes. This needed nipping in the bud right now. She should never have encouraged him. ‘Sean, I don’t want any presents and my private life is none of your business.’
‘You’ll want this,’ he said. ‘It isn’t really a present. It’s work. I just thought you’d be pleased.’ He fished in his pockets and brought out a CD case. ‘It’s the pilot version of the archive. It isn’t going to be available for ages. So I brought you a copy.’
She rubbed her hand over her forehead. ‘Won’t Professor Holbrook mind?’
He smiled. ‘He won’t, because he doesn’t know. It’s OK,’ he added quickly, ‘It’s just that he wants to keep working on it. Here.’
She took it, against her better judgement. ‘Thank you,’ she said, uncertain what strings might be attached to this.
‘Anyway, if you don’t want to talk to me, I’d better go.’ He waited for a moment to see if she would respond to that.
Roz ignored the hint in his words and said, ‘Well, thank you for this.’
He waited for a moment longer, then said, ‘OK. I’ll see you around,’ and left. She gave him a few minutes to get clear of the section, then went back to her room.
The archive. She turned the CD over and over in her hands. She’d have a look at it later. She wondered if Greenhough had a copy, and if he’d found anything. She debated whether to give him a ring again, but decided that there was no reason. She couldn’t really justify the time she was spending on this. She’d look at the archive when she had an hour to spare, and see if anything jumped out at her. Other than that, there was nothing else she could do. She’d just have to forget it.
She checked the time. She had a lecture to give at twelve. She put her worries to the back of her mind and decided to spend the rest of the morning, what little remained, fiddling around with the program she had been devising with Luke. She made no progress. She just went over ground they’d alre
ady tested. She almost phoned him, but decided against it. She couldn’t concentrate. Luke and Joanna’s plans and her impending visit to Nathan warred for her attention. She’d phoned her mother-in-law the night before and told her of her plans, before she could change her mind. ‘I’m so glad, Roz,’ Jenny had said.
‘Jenny,’ Roz couldn’t bear to see false hope, to see the renewal of disappointment and pain. ‘I don’t think it will make any difference. I don’t think he’ll remember me.’
‘I know.’ But Jenny’s quick acceptance of Roz’s doubts didn’t ring true. ‘Listen, Roz, let’s give it a chance. And bring some of the photographs. Let’s try.’
Roz closed her eyes as she thought about it. She’d prevaricated about the photographs. Maybe she could find some. Maybe she could take the ones from Clifton Downs, the ones they’d taken the day they’d borrowed a friend’s dizzy young labrador and exhausted themselves playing chasing games, throwing Frisbees, having play fights on the grass. She remembered the dog – what was its name? – grabbing Nathan’s foot in its mouth and dragging him across the field, growling with simulated fierceness. Roz had laughed so much she had barely been able to hold the camera.
It was a relief to go into the lecture theatre where her most pressing problem was likely to be inattentive students. She hadn’t reviewed her lecture notes – something she almost always did – but the subject was at the front of her mind. She was talking to them about identifying a person’s location from the way he or she spoke. She always started this lecture with the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, the tape that began with the dead voice saying – or reading, Roz always thought – the words ‘I’m Jack…’ She talked about the accent on the tape, and the subtle differences that located the speaker north or south of the Tyne. She saw a hand go up and nodded to the questioner. It was always encouraging when students spoke up in lectures – it showed they were listening and interested. ‘Isn’t it right,’ the lad said, ‘that they managed to pinpoint him to just a few streets.’
‘That has been claimed,’ Roz said carefully. ‘I’d prefer to see some corroborative evidence – like the person who actually made these tapes. I’m not convinced that these days you can pinpoint someone as closely as that.’
‘I thought they caught him?’ Another student, female this time, from the front.
‘Not the person who made the tapes,’ Roz said. ‘And it’s something to remember. You can be spot-on right, but it may do no good. These tapes actually held the investigation up – and the person who made them is still out there.’
When she got back to her office, her phone was ringing. She dropped her lecture notes and grabbed it. It was Marcus Holbrook. ‘Elizabeth told me you were trying to contact me,’ he said. He sounded querulous. She could see the thin, discontented face in her mind.
Roz thought quickly. She’d rather do this face to face, where it would be more difficult for him to refuse to talk to her. ‘It’s about Gemma Wishart’s query,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the letter, by the way.’
‘Which, as I told you, contained nothing you didn’t already know.’
‘Yes. Professor Holbrook, I need to talk to you. It’s a bit complicated. I wonder if I could come across now?’
‘I’ve only come in for a meeting,’ he said. ‘It was rescheduled at the last minute. Most inefficient. I have no time this afternoon.’
‘I’ve got a copy of your archive,’ Roz said. ‘And I’d really like to go over it with you. Would you have any time after your meeting?’
There was silence for a moment, then she heard him sigh. ‘I really do have better things to do than…Very well. I don’t know what time the meeting will finish, but this department will certainly have closed by then. I have some business in the Arts Tower, so I’ll come to your office, but don’t expect me much before half past six.’ And he rang off, leaving Roz with the prospect of some unplanned overtime.
Hull, Friday afternoon
It wasn’t hard for Lynne to play good cop with Celia Fry. She had announced herself to the receptionist – Inspector Jordan from Central – and Mrs Fry had come scurrying out of her office looking tense and rattled. She relaxed a bit when she saw Lynne – she had probably been expecting Farnham, who had, if Lynne was reading correctly between the lines, given her a hard time. Fry was a small woman, a bit dumpy, heavily made up. She clearly thought that Lynne would not be the problem to her that Farnham had been. She looked at Lynne with some calculation and said, ‘Can I help you, Inspector…?’
‘Jordan,’ Lynne held out her hand and smiled.
‘Inspector Jordan. I’m really very busy and I don’t think there’s anything I can add to what I told your colleague.’ She was looking Lynne unblinkingly in the eye.
Lynne smiled sympathetically. ‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘But there are some complications with this cleaner of yours, this Anna Krleza.’
Fry’s face tightened with annoyance. ‘I really can’t help you any further with that, Inspector. Anna was here for less than a fortnight. We’re short-staffed in the kitchen. I really don’t have time…’
Lynne waited for the woman to run down, keeping her smile of conspiratorial sympathy in place. Fry subsided into silence, and Lynne said, ‘I can quite see how these things happen, but we just need to make sure we’ve got all the paper in the right place now. Is there somewhere we can talk?’
Celia Fry took her into a cramped office behind the reception desk. She pushed the door shut and gestured Lynne to a chair. She lit a cigarette. She didn’t offer one to Lynne but looked at her watch and said, ‘I can give you five minutes. I’m sure all this paperwork can be dealt with at another time.’
Lynne had ignored the invitation to sit down. She took out her notebook and said, ‘Can you give me an exact date when Anna Krleza was first employed by this hotel?’
The phone on the desk rang, and Fry picked it up. ‘What now?’ she snapped. Internal phone, Lynne surmised. ‘Well, he’ll just have to cope,’ Fry said. She listened for a moment. ‘Tell him he’ll have to manage.’ She put the phone down. ‘Short-staffed,’ she said, looking sour.
Lynne smiled politely. ‘The date for Anne Krleza?’ she said.
‘I’ll need to check the records.’ Fry looked at Lynne and added, with a sudden burst of aggression, ‘Well, I can’t remember everything!’
‘Let me see,’ Lynne said helpfully. ‘She’d worked for you for, what, a couple of weeks? Now you found the body just…’ she checked in her diary ‘…Friday. And that was the last day Anna Krleza worked. So we go back two weeks…Did she start work on a Monday?’
Celia Fry took a long pull at her cigarette. ‘I can’t remember,’ she said again. ‘I’ll need to check the records. I told you.’
Lynne sighed. ‘I have a problem here, Mrs Fry. I have information that tells me Anna Krleza had been working at this hotel for several months.’
Celia Fry picked a piece of cigarette paper off her lip with her nail. ‘I can’t imagine who told you that,’ she said. She kept glancing at the phone. She seemed distracted.
‘Maybe your receptionist will remember,’ Lynne said.
‘She doesn’t have anything to do with the cleaners.’ Fry was starting to look uncomfortable.
Lynne’s voice was brisk. ‘I have three separate identifications of Anna Krleza at this hotel on…’ She flicked back through the pages of the notebook, saying as she did so, ‘You see, Mrs Fry, there are two investigations underway now involving Ms Krleza. There’s the investigation into the murder, of course, but there’s also the investigation that the immigration authorities are carrying out in the light of…’
‘Employing the cleaning staff isn’t something I do, normally,’ Celia Fry said, her assumed indifference becoming defensiveness.
‘I’m sure.’ Lynne waited to see where this was going.
‘There’s an agency we use, but the people they send aren’t very reliable. Anyway, Anna turned up when I’d been let down badly and I just forgot to ask her for
all her details.’ Celia Fry looked at Lynne, read her expression and amended, ‘It seemed like a couple of weeks. We’re very busy. It just crept on for longer than I’d realized, and then suddenly there was all this.’
And so you lied in the middle of a murder investigation. And the woman was lying now. ‘So it seemed easier to say that Anna hadn’t been here very long.’ Lynne needed the next bit of information now, so she smiled understandingly. ‘I know how these things happen, but knowingly employing an illegal immigrant is a serious offence. Now, I’m sure that you were acting in good faith and if I can go to the immigration authorities and tell them that you co-operated fully as soon as we alerted you to the fact there was a problem, then I don’t think they’ll take it any further.’
Celia Fry watched her narrowly, waiting to see what she wanted. ‘How did Anna know you needed a cleaner?’ Lynne said. ‘How did she know to come here?’
The other woman shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Someone must have said something. I told you, I didn’t ask. They know their way round, these people.’ The phone rang again. Fry picked it up. ‘Not now,’ she snapped, and put it down. She seemed to have made her mind up about something. She picked up a diary from the desk and flicked through it. ‘There,’ she said, showing it to Lynne. ‘Anna Krleza. She started in August. Second week in August.’
Lynne made a note. ‘Thank you, Mrs Fry.’
‘Is that everything?’ Celia Fry stood up. ‘I’ll have to go and sort out this kitchen thing. This won’t go any further?’
‘Probably not.’ Lynne followed the other woman out of the office. Fry, for all her anxiety about whatever was happening in the kitchen, saw her to the door of the hotel. She wanted her off the premises. Lynne waited until the other woman had vanished in the direction of the basement stairs, then went back in again and rang the bell on the reception desk. After a minute, a woman in an overall came along the corridor.