‘And I never noticed that all the crucial changes were made by you four. I’m mortified.’
‘It was just a game,’ says Christiane. ‘We were a bit hysterical, I think. We didn’t sleep much those days.’
She gets up, brings Freda across to me and hands her over.
‘So now you know everything, what are you going to do? Will you tell the police?’
‘Will you let me?’
‘How can we stop you? Oh, do you think we’re going to say, Now you know too much. We can’t let you live?’
There’s a ripple of laughter and I say,
‘We haven’t talked about Valery. What happened to him? Did he know too much?’
Irina erupts from her chair in the corner, with a great sweeping gesture of her arm, so she looks like an operatic Valkyrie.
‘We don’t understand about Valery,’ she cries. ‘He was nothing to do with this. I loved Valery. We did nothing to him.’
‘How would we get a gun?’ Desirée asks softly from her place just across my desk. ‘We are not professional killers, you know.’
‘But you admit you killed Ekrem. If I tell DCI Scott and he questions you, will you confess?’
‘Oh no,’ Yukiko answers. ‘We shall deny. Because you have no evidence, have you? I threw away my winter coat is all. A weird thing to do, but not crime.’
‘I know one thing I didn’t know before,’ I challenge her. ‘I know that Ceren was carried out of the library in a halffainting state the night before the murder and the porter will confirm that. I also know, as you don’t, that Ekrem’s semen was found on the library floor. I think the police could use that as a starting point.’
Christiane, who is still standing near me, opens her eyes wide as she looks at me and says,
‘Would you do that to Ceren?’
Would I do that to Ceren? I look at her as she sits huddled in her chair, her knees drawn up to her chin. She would be so easy to break, and she knew it. Why else had she been so desperate to run away?
‘Where have you been, Ceren? Where did you go when you left my house?’
‘I went to Afrodite,’ she whispers. ‘Yukiko took me to Afrodite.’
She sees my surprise and gives the faintest of smiles.
‘You think we can’t get along together because I am Turkish and she is Greek? Well, Yukiko told me Afrodite has a loving heart and I found it’s true. ’
Of course she did, and she’d have been at baby Serafin’s baptism, thinking she was safe out there in Dungate, if Yukiko hadn’t sent her a text, warning her that I was on my way.
‘Tell me something,’ I say, looking round at them. ‘How is what you did different from the actions of a lynch mob?’
‘We knew he was guilty,’ Desirée says. ‘He was absolutely guilty.’
‘But you don’t believe in capital punishment, do you, Desirée? Not even for murder. Nor does Christiane. I’ve heard you argue against it. So how do you justify killing a man for rape?’
‘We really didn’t intend to kill him, Mrs Gray,’ says Christiane. ‘We wanted to hurt him and to scare him so much that he wouldn’t be a danger to any other women. Of course we would have preferred that he went to jail, but we couldn’t achieve that, so we did what we could and we went too far.’
‘Why? Why did you go too far? You could easily have stopped.’
‘Because we were angry, but more because we were frightened. If we let him out, what would we do with him? He was shouting and threatening. We could only keep turning. It’s like killing a snake. You find the biggest stone and you smash it over the head and then you do it again and again because you are afraid.’
I take a deep breath.
‘You’ll have to leave this with me,’ I say. ‘I need to think.’
I stand up and go to put Freda in her buggy.
‘There is one thing I can tell you,’ I say as I look round at their pale young faces. ‘Ceren doesn’t need to worry about an HIV test, or STDs. DCI Scott told me Ekrem was perfectly healthy. They did a blood test at the autopsy. He wasn’t HIV positive.’
Ceren gives an extraordinary howl and I see Yukiko almost lift her out of her chair. Then they are hugging and laughing and weeping and the others are there too, all of them hugging and weeping and talking in a babel of languages.
Am I going to tell what I know? Am I going to let David Scott know that Ceren is the weak point, that he can unpick his mystery by unravelling her first? Am I going to let Ekrem Yilmaz, drug-dealer, spy and sexual predator, cast his blight on these five lives? Am I going to let these five murderers walk free?
As I watch them, they remind me of sixth-formers getting their A level results. Only it’s no kind of success they’re celebrating; it’s just a reprieve. No glimpse for Ceren of a sunlit future, just the merest lightening of a lowering sky. I think about the quality of mercy. I have no right to be doling out mercy, I know, but it is twice blessed and we all have most need of blessing, so on the whole, I think, I’d rather go with mercy than anything else.
When they’ve gone, I cart Freda and the buggy downstairs again and smoke a cigarette as I stand in the morning drizzle and look across at the library’s emergency door. Then, it being Saturday, we set off for Sainsbury’s and the weekly shop.
30
MONDAY: Investigation Day Nineteen
‘So both the missing students have turned up safe and well?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And where had they been?’
‘We found Amiel living rough with a group of others, on the beach near Dungate. We brought them in and charged them with possession of heroin. Amiel’s mother has paid bail for all of them. As we thought, Yilmaz was his supplier and when he died, Amiel went where the new supply was.’
‘How did you find him?’
Scott hesitated.
‘A tip-off from a member of the public,’ he said.
He was sitting once again in the Chief Superintendent’s airy office at County HQ. He had plenty of positive news but was struggling to convey his lurking sense that the arrest of Direnç Yilmaz didn’t tie up the whole business.
‘That’s what we like,’ said the Chief Superintendent cheerily. ‘Outcome of good community policing, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the Turkish girl?’
‘Ceren Vural. She’d been staying with friends, as her note to her tutor said. We had a call from her tutor. Ceren had been into the college to see her.’
‘Any idea why she went AWOL?’
‘No. She was clearly upset by Yilmaz’s death, though she claimed she hardly knew him. I was always puzzled by that. It’s one of the things that makes me wonder still whether we’ve –‘
‘Whether you’ve got a double murderer in custody? I really don’t see what’s bothering you, Scott. You say you’ve got a confession to the Tarasov murder from this chap you’ve got, and plenty of forensic and ballistic evidence to back it up. You say Tarasov and Ekrem Yilmaz were definitely involved in Tarasov senior’s trafficking business and there’s a grudge with a Russian mafia boss. You’re not seriously trying to tell me that both of them getting murdered within two weeks of one another is a coincidence, are you?’
‘Direnç Yilmaz insists that his motive was personal – he wanted his former wife back and he thought Tarasov was her lover.’
‘But you don’t believe that, do you?’
‘No, I don’t think I do,’ Scott answered slowly. ‘Yilmaz isn’t over-bright, he doesn’t speak any English and he doesn’t seem to have a job. I don’t see how he could have found the money to get over here or known how to get hold of the gun without criminal connections. And I can see why he’d claim it was personal – he’d be terrified of retribution from the Belenki gang if he implicated them.’
‘Well, there you are then. You’ve addressed your own doubts, haven’t you?’
‘Not altogether, sir. There are some loose ends. There’s the matter of the semen – Ekrem Yilmaz’s s
emen, found on the library floor near where he died, but left there twenty-four hours or so before he died.’
‘From all you’ve said, he was a pretty unsavoury character. I don’t think it takes too much imagination to think what he might have been doing in the privacy of those stacks, does it?’
‘I suppose not, sir. But then there’s the question of the second man. There had to be two killers involved in Yilmaz’s death – one to hold him at knife-point, the other to turn the wheel.’
‘Surely that’s obvious.’ The Chief Superintendent looked at him in surprise. ‘He got Tarasov to help him. Tarasov agreed, hoping to save his own skin, and then he got what was coming to him.’
‘But why kill Ekrem Yilmaz that way, sir? That’s what really bugs me. He’d gone to all the trouble of getting hold of a gun. Why didn’t he shoot both of them? Why that complicated and risky business with the stacks?’
‘Come on, Scott, use your imagination. He thinks he can make these deaths look like accidents. No police investigation. Much less hassle. He has a gun because his paymasters provide one, but he’s keeping that for protection only. The first job goes fine, but he’s not, as you say, over-bright and he hasn’t recognised that no-one’s going to believe it’s an accident. Then Tarasov gets edgy and it’s difficult to get him into a situation where another ‘accident’ can be staged – hence the time lag between the two deaths. In the end he decides to cut his losses, shoot him and do a runner.’
Scott studied his face. Could a competent police officer of any rank possibly believe such an unconvincing farrago? Could he believe that even a complete idiot would think that he could make a credible accident out of a man’s apparently crushing himself between library stacks at dead of night, and acquiring self-inflicted knife wounds at the same time? Of course the Chief Super didn’t believe it. He simply wanted this case cleared up and a killer in the hand suited him very well.
As if to confirm his view, the Chief Superintendent spoke again.
‘You say he’s scared of being sent back to Russia, don’t you. Offer him protection here and he’ll tell you whatever you want to know, believe me.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Scott said rising. ‘Thank you.’
Outside, he thought about the other loose end – a literal one, he reflected wryly – which he had not mentioned. Those threads they found near the body. Pink, white and green cotton. He knew what they made him think of: that throw affair he had seen on Gina’s sofa, the one she had been so snappy about when he had asked about it. It had to be a red herring; he really didn’t think she was one of the murderers, did he? Still he wondered if he could drop in on her and get another look. Whatever rapport there had been between them seemed to have come unravelled recently, but it might be worth a try.
31
MONDAY: Finite Clause
I wake to the strange stillness of an empty house. It is a sensation so unfamiliar that I feel for a moment as though I’ve been deprived of hearing, like that temporary deafness you get after a loud explosion. I don’t think I’ve woken in an empty house for twenty years, but here I am now, on my own.
Ellie came by to reclaim Freda late yesterday evening and Annie is meeting Andrew at Leeds-Bradford airport at this very moment to fly with him to The Hague. I have no-one to tend to, no-one to argue with, nothing to get up for at all. Since it’s vacation and I haven’t even any students to teach, I could stay in bed and listen to The Today Programme, but instead I get up, go and rout the cat out from wherever she’s lurking in the garden and give her breakfast. Then I put on some old trousers and a sweater and do a burst of tidying round the house, which is looking more rumpled than usual after Freda’s weekend sojourn. After that, I get on my bike and cycle into college.
My intention, as I put it to myself, is to tie up some loose ends. I’ve tied up a few over the weekend, actually. I rang and told David I’d seen Ceren – I thought he deserved that, at least – and found him cock-a-hoop. Irina’s ex-husband killed Valery, apparently, on the orders of some Russian Godfather. Poor Valery. And David and his merry men think he killed Ekrem as well. So, as far as they’re concerned, the case is closed, which I ought to be pleased about, though I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that they can be so crass.
My loose ends this morning consist mainly of the pile of punitive forms sent to me by the Principal some days ago. As a stalling manoeuvre, however, when I get into my office, I log on to my e-mails, not checked since Thursday, and there, amid the spam and trivia, I find a message from Janet, the Principal’s secretary, with the subject heading, Recruitment.
I can’t handle this now, I really can’t. What with the dark secret I’m keeping buttoned up in my head, and the realisation that, before long, I shall be waking up to an empty house every morning, and the fact that I haven’t yet dealt with the Principal’s last piece of harassment, I just don’t feel up to it. I feel feeble and pathetic, in fact, and I want to throw in the towel. I could get weepy if I were that kind of woman, but instead I smoke a cigarette, make a cup of coffee and call Judith Roth.
‘I’ve had another e-mail from the Principal,’ I tell her.
‘What does it say?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t opened it.’
‘Gina!’ Her tone is bracing. ‘He’s got you rattled. You can’t let him get you rattled. I expected better of you. Now open the damned e-mail and call me back.’
I want to snivel that she doesn’t understand, that I’ve got all these other things going on in my life, but I still have some self-respect and I don’t. I return to my computer and after a bit of preliminary skirmishing – deleting spam, dispatching acknowledgments – I open Janet’s message. This is what I read:
Dear Gina,
The Principal has asked me to let you know that we can expect between eighty and a hundred students next year from the Fudan University of Shanghai. They will be taking a variety of courses, but all will include an English Language component. He wanted to inform you immediately so that you can start planning for such a large number, including taking on extra staff as necessary.
I should add that the letter which the Principal has received from the Deputy President of Fudan University makes a particular point of the presentations you made to Faculty Heads when you were in Shanghai with other representatives from the College last year.
The Principal hopes you will have a restful Easter break.
Yours,
Janet
There is a slight delay while the full impact of this message sinks in, then I’m on my feet, punching the air like an athlete who has won Olympic gold and dancing round the room bellowing, ‘Up yours, Norman Street!’.
I am just picking up the phone to call Judith Roth when there is a knock at my door. Irina comes in first, followed by the other four. They stand in a row in front of me, smiling, each carrying a wrapped parcel. They look different: they have all dressed up. For my benefit? And here I am in my baggy old cleaning trousers. Christiane looks older in a black trouser suit and white shirt; Irina is muted in a sage-green dress; Desirée is immaculate as ever but her face looks worn beneath the make-up; Yukiko looks older too, in a severe pinstripe jacket. And Ceren? Ceren looks startlingly Islamic, her scarf not loosely draped round her shoulders but wound tightly round her head.
Yukiko speaks.
‘We have come to say goodbye,’ she says, her voice high and formal. ‘We are all leaving tomorrow.’
‘And not coming back?’ I ask.
‘And not coming back.’
‘What will you all do?’ I look round at them. ‘Irina?’
‘I have no ex-husband to bother me now. I can go back to Russia. I can be doctor again.’
‘Christiane?’
‘My sister has just had a baby. I shall go and help her and then I shall start a Law course in Hamburg in the autumn.’
‘Desirée. What about Denis? Is he leaving too?’
‘No, he will stay. We are separating. Denis has been loyal and I can trust him, b
ut he feels differently about me now. I am not the woman he thought I was.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘I wrote a piece for a French magazine about the experience of being a student in England, and they published it. I am going to try to be journalist.’
‘Ceren?’
‘I shall go back to my parents now. Perhaps later I will take Master’s degree in Ankara. We shall see.’
‘What about you, Yukiko?’
Yukiko smiles.
‘I miss the cherry blossom,’ she says.
‘I shall miss all of you so much,’ I say. ‘And you’ll miss each other. Will you see each other again?’
It is Christiane who speaks.
‘No,’ she says, ‘we can never see each other again.’
In the silence that follows, Yukiko says, ‘We each have something for you.’
She nudges Ceren gently forward and Ceren says, gazing solemnly from the folds of her scarf,
‘I bring you a gift, Mrs Gray.’
Then Yukiko hands over her parcel.
‘And I bring you a present.’
‘And from me,’ smiles Christiane, ‘a token of esteem.’
‘And this,’ says Desirée, ‘is an offering.’
‘I looked for word,’ Irina says, ‘like Russian word, but I don’t know if is right. I bring you honorarium.’
‘An honorarium, Irina,’ I say, and as they laugh my eyes start to fill with tears.
‘You are good lady, Mrs Gray,’ Irina says, ‘and we honour you. We wish you good life.’
And they’re gone. I don’t open the parcels. They are for another day. I shall go home now, back to my empty house and my silent cat. More than anything I want to ring David Scott and invite him round for supper, but I dare not do it. I don’t trust myself. I don’t know what I might say after a couple of glasses of wine or, if I got lucky, in the heady relaxation of pillow talk. I can’t invite him round tonight. I’m not sure I can ever see him again.
I hear voices below, so I look out of my window and I see the girls striding off across the grass, arm in arm. I think, as I watch them, that they are capable of anything.
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