All Things Nice

by Sheila Bugler

  And then, with no warning, the beast woke up and wham! The attack every bit as powerful as those awful early days. It hit her now. The way Eilish moved, the song that was playing, all of it got mixed up in her head with memories of Vinny until she couldn’t breathe. The wrongness of it, the unjust, unfair bloody fucking wrongness. It was unbearable.

  She pushed past Sean, out of the open-plan living room and onto the balcony. Breathing in big mouthfuls of cold, grimy London air, vaguely aware of a barge drifting past on the river below as she clutched her hollowed-out stomach and howled silent howls to an uncaring world.

  ‘Mum?’

  Pat. Her very own mini-me. As much Ellen as Eilish was Vinny. Standing beside her, a worried frown creasing his perfect little face. Her beautiful, complex, perfect boy. She nearly told him she was okay. Nearly told him to go back inside and not to worry about her, that she was fine and she’d be back inside in a moment. Something stopped her.

  ‘Sorry, darling. I was thinking about your dad and I needed a moment, that’s all.’

  The frown cleared and Pat nodded.

  ‘That happens to me sometimes as well. Like, I’ll be in the park watching a dad playing football with his kids and I remember Dad doing that with me. He wasn’t very good, was he?’

  And just like that, the beast drew back, defeated by the compassion of an eleven-year-old boy and the power of a mother’s love.

  ‘He was rubbish,’ she said. ‘But it never stopped him trying. And you know what, Pat? I loved him for that.’

  ‘I wish he didn’t die,’ Pat said. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Ellen said. ‘And I hate it too. But we have each other. And Sean and Terry and Eilish and Gran and Granddad. We’re lucky.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Pat said. ‘I know.’

  But he didn’t sound like he knew it. Didn’t look it either, scowling his anger at her. Ellen opened her arms and he let her hug him. She kissed the top of his head.

  ‘Your hair needs washing,’ she said. ‘Again. Hormones. Happens when you get to your age.’

  ‘Mu-u-um!’ He squirmed his way out of her arms. ‘Will you stop going on about that? Please?’

  But he was smiling, mock-anger replacing the real thing. Ellen smiled back and suddenly they were both laughing.

  On the river below, the barge stopped right beneath their balcony, almost as if it couldn’t bear to pass without pausing and sharing this perfect moment.

  Tuesday

  One

  The main campus of the University of Greenwich was based in three baroque buildings designed by Christopher Wren and situated on the south bank of the River Thames.

  Ellen had arranged to meet Abby by the entrance, across the road from the Trafalgar pub. She arrived early but Abby was there already, standing by the wrought-iron gate, ignoring the looks from several male students as they passed her.

  ‘Beautiful morning,’ she called as Ellen approached. ‘Spring is certainly in the air. I can feel it.’

  ‘What’s got you so cheery?’ Ellen asked. The sky was grey and overcast and the best that could be said about the weather was that it wasn’t raining. Yet.

  ‘This way,’ Abby said, leading Ellen across the courtyard to the building closest to the river. ‘Sociology Department is in here. I’ve already checked.’

  As Abby bounced ahead, Ellen realised why the FLO was so chipper this morning.

  ‘Your date,’ she said, catching up. ‘Went well, then?’

  Abby tapped the side of her nose and grinned. ‘I’m saying nothing. Oh okay then, if you insist. He was amazing, Ellen. We really hit it off. I expected him to be really dull. I mean, a City lawyer. I thought he’d be an arse.’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’

  Abby beamed. ‘He’s adorable. His name is Sam and I’m seeing him again this evening. He’s taking me to the Shard. There’s a champagne bar at the top, did you know that?’

  Ellen remembered a night in the same bar six months ago. She hoped Abby would have more luck after a date there than she had.

  ‘I know it,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll have a great time. Ah, here we are.’

  She stopped at a door marked Sociology.

  ‘Sorry for going on about Sam,’ Abby said. ‘I won’t do it again. Promise.’

  Ellen smiled. ‘Don’t be silly. Come on. Let’s go find this Professor Holmes.’

  Wrongly, Ellen had assumed Professor Holmes would be a man. She had formed a vague picture in her head of a middle-aged, stuffy academic with frizzy grey hair and glasses. When they finally tracked the professor down to a large office on the second floor, Professor Holmes turned out to be a petite bombshell with long, luscious red hair and a cartoonishly curvaceous body.

  Her office was an airy, tidy room with a huge window that looked out across the river.

  ‘Thanks for seeing us,’ Ellen said, eyes flickering past the professor’s fiery hair to the amazing view behind her desk.

  ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Professor Holmes said. ‘I’m sure I’d have left Greenwich long ago if it wasn’t for this office. Please, sit down.’

  Two chairs had been placed side by side opposite the professor’s big wooden desk.

  ‘I’m afraid I left my glasses behind this morning and I can’t see a bloody thing without them,’ she said. ‘Would you mind pulling the chairs closer so I can see your faces? That’s better. Thanks.’ She looked from Abby to Ellen. ‘I assume you’re here about Kieran?’

  ‘We’re trying to build a picture of the sort of person he was,’ Ellen said. ‘We’ve spoken to his girlfriend, of course. And our colleagues have been busy interviewing students on campus. As you were Kieran’s course tutor, you must have formed a pretty good impression of him. We want to know what he was like and if you can think of any reason at all that someone would want to hurt him.’

  All the while Ellen spoke, Professor Holmes stared at her intently, eyes squinting as if she was looking for something she couldn’t find on Ellen’s face. Ellen knew it was the lack of glasses but she found it disconcerting nonetheless. It was a relief when the professor sat back in her chair and relaxed her face as she considered Ellen’s question.

  ‘I didn’t like Kieran very much,’ Professor Holmes said. ‘Sorry, I’m sure it’s bad manners to speak ill of the dead but I’d rather be truthful with you. I can’t see the point in this conversation otherwise. He thought he was terribly charming and I suspect a lot of the younger students, especially the women, fell for his act. I’m a bit too long in the tooth. He made my skin crawl quite frankly.

  ‘He was popular enough, I suppose. I never understood why. He was the sort of fellow to switch the charm on for someone he was interested in – the pretty young girls, especially. But if you weren’t important to him, he didn’t care how he behaved. He could be quite nasty to people when he wanted to.’

  ‘Nasty how?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘So there’s a girl called Marina in his tutor group,’ Professor Holmes said. ‘She’s overweight and painfully shy. Whenever she built up the courage to ask a question during a lecture, Kieran would start sniggering and whispering about her. I’ve had to pull him up on it more than once. And I’ve watched him in the canteen too. He’s the sort who sat there with his mates for hours, making snide remarks about anyone unlucky enough to pass their little group. Horrible.’

  She stopped talking and smiled at Ellen – a wide, inviting smile that hid absolutely nothing. Ellen decided she liked this woman.

  ‘Maybe you think I’m cruel, Detective. I promise you I can be quite lovely when the situation requires. But you did ask.’

  ‘I did indeed.’ Ellen returned the smile. ‘What about Kieran’s girlfriend? Did you ever meet her?’

  The professor frowned. ‘Girlfriend? I didn’t know he had one. Well, there’s Cosima, of course, but I don’t think there was anything going on there. If you ask me, Cosima couldn’t stand Kieran any more than I could. Besides, she is way out of his league. No. I ca
n’t see a girl like that falling for someone like him.’

  ‘Cosima?’ Abby asked.

  ‘Cosima Cooper,’ Professor Holmes said. ‘She’s a Psychology student here at the university. Kieran was taking Psychology as one of his options. They were in the same class. He was forever sniffing around her but, like I said, she never seemed the least bit interested.’

  The name rang a bell somewhere in the furthest reaches of Ellen’s mind. She tried to focus on the connection but Abby was speaking again and she had to concentrate on that instead.

  ‘Kieran’s girlfriend is called Freya,’ Abby said. ‘They shared a flat together in Hither Green.’

  Professor Holmes shook her head.

  ‘I had no idea. Well, if that’s true, all I can say is that he didn’t act like someone who was in a relationship. Poor woman. She may be better off without him.’

  Ellen thought of Freya – dumpy and unattractive – and agreed with the professor. Which left Ellen with two questions. One: what the hell was a Lothario like Kieran doing hooking up with someone like Freya Gleeson? And two:

  ‘This Cosima Cooper,’ she said. ‘Can you tell us where we might be able to find her?’

  The professor smiled again. ‘That’s easy. She’ll either be at the Psychology Department. I can give you directions. Or else she’s still at home. She lives in Blackheath. In one of those whopping great Georgian houses right on the heath. Cosima lives in her father’s house. He’s Pete Cooper. Maybe you’ve heard of him?’

  Two

  Professor Holmes offered to gather Kieran’s tutor group together so Abby and Ellen could speak to them. Ellen wanted to go directly to Cosima’s house so she left Abby to deal with the tutor group.

  Being on campus was a strange experience. Abby was part of the new generation of police officers who’d gone to university first. Something she was careful not to brag about in front of her colleagues. Raj was the only other person in their team with a degree. She’d spent three very happy, uncomplicated years at Sussex University, not learning very much about English Literature but an awful lot about relationships, particularly with the opposite sex. She’d had a steady string of boyfriends, none of whom she’d felt more than a passing affection for. Apart from a handful of female friends, she had lost contact with most of her uni pals.

  Coming here today brought a rush of memories. For the first time since leaving Brighton she felt a flicker of nostalgia for that brief time when life seemed infinite and full of possibility. It was only six years ago but it felt like longer.

  The students milled around her as she crossed the open courtyard with Professor Holmes. In one corner, a group of girls had gathered, giggling over something on a mobile phone. There were four of them in total. Each one, tall and slim with shiny hair and an air of confidence Abby remembered working hard to replicate, copying the other girls around her.

  She’d never planned on joining the police. It was towards the end of her degree, when the future loomed ahead exciting and uncertain, that she considered it. They had a careers day. People from different businesses came and talked to the students, told them about the different opportunities open to them if they joined this bank or that public sector body or … Every single one had bored Abby beyond belief. Until the final speaker stood up. A tall, distinguished-looking man with silver-grey hair and a look of George Clooney about him. He was a senior detective in the Met. He spoke about the police, his job and, as she listened, Abby felt something she hadn’t felt throughout the rest of that long day. A glimmer of excitement. The sense that maybe, just maybe, this might be for her.

  Then two months later, her brother was killed. After that, joining the police became her only option. Six years on, she didn’t know any more if she’d made the right choice. The problem was, the longer she stayed, the more difficult it became to consider doing anything else.

  ‘They’ve just finished a lecture,’ Professor Holmes explained as they walked. ‘I called my colleague, Richard Blakely, and I’ve asked him to keep behind the eight students you need to speak to. These are the ones who knew Kieran the best, I think.’

  The lecture hall was in an old part of the building that was once part of the naval college. Following the professor along endless winding corridors, Abby knew she had no hope of finding her way out again without help.

  Nine people were waiting for her inside the lecture hall, seated in a semicircle, chatting quietly to each other. Nine faces looked curiously at Abby as she entered the room behind Professor Holmes. Eight of them were young. The other one, an older man, walked over and held out his hand.

  ‘Richard Blakely,’ he said. ‘Senior lecturer in Social Psychology. I’ll introduce you to the students and leave you to it, okay?’

  His smile was as fake as his teeth where white and he held Abby’s hand for too long after shaking it. Late forties, Abby guessed, with pale skin, shoulder-length dark hair and ice-blue eyes that stared intently at her.

  Abby withdrew her hand, resisting the urge to wipe it on her trousers, and didn’t bother to return his smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Professor Holmes, I wonder if you’d mind waiting with me while I interview the students? I’d be more comfortable having someone from the university staff sitting with me.’

  ‘No need, Harriet,’ Blakely said smoothly. ‘I can stay.’

  He took Abby by the elbow and started to steer her across to the group of waiting students.

  ‘Come and let me introduce you.’

  For the second time in under a minute, Abby pulled a part of her limb out of his grasp and turned back to Professor Holmes, who was looking at Blakely with undisguised disgust.

  ‘I’ll stay if you’d like me to,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, please.’ Abby looked at Blakely. ‘That will be all. Thank you.’

  He frowned. ‘You don’t need me?’

  She wished Ellen was here. Abby wasn’t able to express her dislike for people quite as obviously or as vocally as her boss.

  ‘Really,’ Abby said. ‘It’s fine.’

  She turned her back on him before he made another attempt to engage and smiled encouragingly at the students.

  ‘My name is Abby Roberts,’ she said. ‘I’m a detective with Lewisham CID. You all know why I’m here. I’m investigating the death of Kieran Burton. None of you are under suspicion or anything like that. And I know most of you have already spoken with some of the uniformed officers who’ve been on campus since yesterday. I’m here to get a better insight into what Kieran was like – the sort of person he was, who his friends were, the sort of things he was into; anything at all that will bring me closer to finding out how he died.’

  She looked along the semicircle, making eye contact with each student, hoping to show she was being sincere. One of them – a slender brunette with huge, soulful eyes and an elfin haircut – looked past Abby to Blakely, still standing where Abby had left him.

  ‘Mr Blakely,’ Abby said. ‘I’d like you to leave now.’

  He started to say something but she spoke over him, channelling her inner Ellen.

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got something to tell me, then I’ll come and find you afterwards. I can arrange to take you to the station where you can give a full statement.’

  One of the students sniggered and Blakely’s face flushed red. It wasn’t like Abby to deliberately antagonise people and she wondered what it was about this man she found so irritating.

  ‘Don’t let yourselves be intimidated,’ Blakely said, speaking over Abby to the students. ‘Remember, you’re not obliged to say anything if you don’t want to. If you feel uncomfortable …’

  ‘Richard!’ Professor Holmes’ voice was sharp. Several people in the room, Abby included, jumped.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ the professor said. ‘Just go. Now.’

  After he left, Abby and Professor Holmes sat down facing the students, who stared silently at them.

  ‘Maybe we could start with a difficult question,’
Abby said. ‘Could you tell me your names?’

  That got a few smiles. It was a start, at least.

  ‘Bethan,’ one girl volunteered.

  ‘Hi Bethan.’ Abby smiled and the girl smiled back. She was a sturdy, attractive kid with a freckled face and shiny dark hair cut in a tidy bob. She looked the sort of no-nonsense girl who, Abby hoped, might give her an objective view of Kieran.

  ‘How about the rest of you?’ Abby said. She nodded to a long, lanky boy with long, lanky hair and a scruffy beard, who sat at one end of the row. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jed.’

  She said hi to Jed and moved along the row, one by one, getting each person’s name. An overweight girl with short hair and thick glasses introduced herself as Marina; the girl Professor Holmes had mentioned earlier.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ Abby said when they’d all given their names. She smiled at Marina. ‘I know this isn’t easy for any of you. You’ve lost a friend in horrible circumstances and I’m sure sitting here speaking with me is the last thing you feel like doing right now. But it’s really important.’

  This was met with silence and Abby was starting to wonder if she’d ever find a way of getting some conversation going. Finally, Bethan said something.

  ‘It’s just so horrible. How are we meant to, like, process something like this?’ She looked at Professor Holmes. ‘I know you said yesterday we should think about setting up sessions with the college counsellor but you know what? I don’t see how that helps. I’m sorry, it’s just … I mean he was here with us, just like this, a few days ago. And now he’s, like, dead?’

  ‘It’s totally unreal,’ the boy called Jed said. ‘I keep expecting him to walk in, you know?’

  He looked along the row and several of them nodded in agreement. Even Marina looked sad, Abby thought.