Thankfully Kristina had taken Misha with her so I pressed the key fob to unlock the car with a satisfyingly engineered thunk. I opened the door with my sleeve and took a moment to appreciate the luxurious interior before checking the door pockets. I found an open bag of dog treats (organic, no less) and an almost full bottle of sugar-free Coke. Some scrunched-up chewing-gum wrappers covering hard balls of discarded chewing gum littered one of the pockets, as well as some blackened cotton wipes, the type women use to remove makeup. I closed the door and went round to the passenger door. The glove compartment yielded a mess of receipts, old parking slips like the one in the window now, empty Weight Watchers snack bar wrappers and some leaflets advertising her salon. I took out the receipts and parking slips, spread them on the passenger seat and snapped them with my phone – she parked at the station a lot. I put them back and checked the door pockets but all I found was a compact umbrella and a small black plastic bag tied at the top. Curious, I lifted it up to examine it – one of Misha’s turds, now gone hard. I replaced it and had a look in the back but it was pristine, like nobody’s arse had ever made contact with the seat. Next I opened the tailgate, releasing the aroma of fabric cleaner. There was nothing in there but an open cardboard box, inside of which were the remains of the old turntable. Otherwise it was clean carpeting that looked brushed and unused. I started to pull down the tailgate and the interior of the glass bounced the sunlight inside and something at the back, where the floor carpet met the back seat, caught the reflected light. I lifted and lowered the tailgate until the light caught it again. I heard a cough behind me.
I turned to see Maggie standing next to her bicycle.
“New car?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. I pulled the tailgate down and closed it with my elbow.
“Not really my kind of thing,” I said, locking the car.
“No, I wouldn’t have thought so.” We stood there for a second, me grinning stupidly. I hadn’t spoken to her since the night I’d spent in her office with Aurora.
“I owe you a drink and an explanation, for the other night,” I said.
She shrugged. “When you’re ready,” she said.
I waited for her to go in then got back onto the ground and put the car key back in its place. I was dusting myself off as Kristina approached followed by a young man carrying a large cardboard box. I got into my own car without acknowledging her and drove to Byron’s Pool.
* * *
Parking on the road I walked up to the barrier at Byron’s Pool and examined the faded flowers. The place was empty in contrast to the weekend, just one car in the car park. I studied the underside of the barrier and my idea of checking the paint sample from the Range Rover with the barrier immediately seemed stupid. There were scrapes of all colours from drivers either not reading the barrier limit or just willing their SUVs or four-by-fours to be lower than they actually were – the white paint of the steel barrier had been almost stripped bare so trying to match paint had apparently been a silly idea. I walked back to the road where I’d parked and saw an elderly man staring at me from the end of a track near the Grantchester Road. There was a small house camouflaged in ivy down the track which I hadn’t noticed walking up to the barrier.
“You the police?” he asked. He was stooped but alert.
“No.” I pointed at the house. “You live here?”
He nodded. He was unevenly shaved and wore his trousers high up his waist.
“You must be glad the crowds have gone,” I said.
“Gawpers, the bloody lot of them. You a reporter?”
“No. Not very high, the barrier, is it?”
“Stops the wild campers,” he said.
“Doesn’t stop a lot of cars trying to get underneath,” I said.
He pointed to a large dirty blue bucket on his drive. “I pick up antennas that have been knocked off.”
“Do you mind if I have a look?”
He spat into a bush. “Depends who you are.”
“Insurance company. Investigating a claim of an antenna ripped from the top of a Range Rover. You seen one come down here?”
“I come out once a day to pick up the leavings, that’s all,” he said. I gestured to the bucket and he nodded. I went over to it and looked inside. It was half full with a collection of different types of car antennae.
“What’s the last one you found?” I asked him.
“Whatever’s on the top. I call the council when the barrel’s full and they come and take them away for recycling.” He spat into a different bush.
I picked up a black triangle-shaped antenna with a flat base from the bucket. It was dented at the sloping edge, where it had hit the barrier.
“Shark’s fin,” he said. “That could be from a Range Rover.” It looked like something in the picture when I’d checked the height online.
“Do you mind if I take it?” I asked. He looked dubious and pulled up his trousers. “It would help with the claim,” I said. “Once in a while we like to pay out.”
“Help yourself,” he said. As I walked off I heard him hawk and spit, presumably into another bush.
* * *
Back in the office I put the shark-fin antenna in an evidence bag on the desk and double-checked the phone to see if Rhianna had called. She hadn’t. Recalling Sandra’s news about the Toyota lease car I decided to satisfy my curiosity by bringing up the Cambridgeshire Constabulary website. Since I assumed Kristina’s lover to be someone senior I went through the site to see if I could spot him amongst the photographs of the good and the great. But he wasn’t to be seen, and since I didn’t know his name I couldn’t search for him.
I transferred the snaps of Kristina’s receipts from my phone to the computer and looked through them. On the night that Bogdana had been at the house she’d parked at the railway station at 11.25 p.m., which corresponded with what Aurora had said about her leaving to take a guest there. But why park if dropping someone off? Plus, looking at it more carefully, it was a twenty-four-hour ticket – why park for so long? I printed the picture of the ticket off and put it in a clear folder. I was about to check the antenna online when Rhianna rang.
44
“I’M HAVING LUNCH SO THERE WILL BE CHOMPING,” RHIANNA told me in her deep, slightly hoarse voice, and I could picture her, bespectacled with cropped silver hair, probably dressed in something shapeless that did her short stature no favours. She’d once told me that she was shooed away from the entrance of a court because, with her plastic carrier full of case files, she was mistaken for a homeless bag lady. “I’m at the magistrates’ court on St Andrew’s Street all day and have twenty minutes.”
I explained, as concisely as I could, Aurora’s situation.
“Blimey, you’ve got your hands full. Well, let’s see… She’s under no obligation to make any statement but given your relationship with the local police I wonder if you going to them with what she’s told you will be met with some scepticism, especially given we’re talking about a figure in the public eye here.”
“It is possible that I might not be taken seriously, yes.”
“So what’s your endgame?”
“Erm, I suppose it’s to get Aurora out of the country and point the police in the right direction.”
“Hmm.” There was the sound of chewing, but out of necessity Rhianna had mastered the art of talking with her mouth full. “There’s no reason that she has to go to the police to make a statement. I can take one from her; I do it all the time.”
“OK.”
“But, if it ever led to the situation that there was a case that the Crown Prosecution Service thought worthy of taking to court, and she was unable to attend a trial, any statement by her would be treated as hearsay and probably be deemed inadmissible by the judge. Having said that, if there’s anything worth taking to court, it would have to be based on a lot more evidence than what you’re telling me.”
“Even regarding the woman killed on the A14?”
“Hmm. Again, if she’s not a
round to testify then it’s hearsay, her word against his. Besides, she’s not saying he pushed the woman out, is she; the best you can do is use her statement to get the police to investigate, and maybe have a look at the house she was taken to. Look, I have to go to the loo before my next recidivist appears. When did you say she was due to leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Can you bring her to my office at five this afternoon?”
I agreed to do so, thanked her and hung up.
Back at the computer I double-checked Kristina’s model of Range Rover and revealed that it had the same shark-fin radio antenna on the roof that was now sitting on my desk. It wasn’t proof exactly but I wondered whether it could be forensically matched to the car – it had a distinctive jagged pattern where it had been ripped from the roof. Otherwise it was just a coincidence.
Aurora’s testimony about Bogdana being at the house, the scraped top of Kristina’s car, the missing antenna found at Byron’s Pool, the freshly cleaned luggage area in the Range Rover. It all added up to something, even though I wasn’t sure what. And was that a pearl I’d glimpsed in the boot? Maybe, but more likely it was wishful thinking. After all, I was prone to wishful thinking.
I rang Sandra and asked if she could find someone to look after Ashley so she could bring Aurora over to the office by taxi for four-thirty. She agreed, and I was about to go and get something to eat when Jason appeared at the door in the outfit he wore to snare tourists for punting: red waistcoat over white shirt, and navy shorts. He was carrying a straw boater.
“Boss.” He gestured towards the window as he sat at his mother’s desk and switched on the computer. “I see you finally managed to get rid of the redundant technology. Told you one person could carry it down.”
“You mean the fax machine? Yes, you were right, it was a doddle. How’s the rip-off punting business?” I asked.
“The council want to crack down on touts. They claim it’s getting out of hand and ruining the town for tourists.”
“Never mind the locals,” I said. I was fed up with being mistaken for a tourist and approached by a good-looking young person wanting me to go on a punting trip. I took some amusement in seeing how quickly they lost the charming smile when I told them to piss off. From the desk I retrieved the clinical audit report I’d brought from home and passed it to him.
“Can you scan that in for me?”
“Sure.”
“And you know that stuff you cobbled together on the Galbraiths?” I asked him. “Have you emailed it to me?”
“No, I put it in the Galbraith folder on the shared drive, boss. Remember we talked about this – no more emailing documents around?”
I rolled my eyes unseen and pulled the keyboard to me. Determined to find the folder without his help I embarked on a game of digital hide and seek.
“How’s things otherwise?” I asked, to distract from my file-finding struggles. He leant back in the chair and looked at the ceiling.
“I can’t get a proper job and so I’m still living with my mother who takes calls from perverts to make ends meet. Other than that I’m fine.”
“Excellent,” I said, finally pulling up the document he’d created. I read through it, concentrating on the section concerning Kristina Galbraith. Her previous nail salon, the one which had been closed down, had people living above it. Had Bogdana worked for her? Had she been living over the new salon? I thought about going down there since Kristina was busy with the turntable but if I turned up and started asking questions she’d be alerted immediately. I looked at her husband’s section. There were numerous online links. He had a Facebook page where people posted selfies with him and a Twitter account related to his TV show.
“Does Kristina not have any kind of online presence?” I asked Jason. “I mean for her salon or something?”
“If I found something it would be in the file. There’s no Twitter account, or Facebook page, no Instagram, nothing. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”
“Because you don’t exist if you’re not online.”
“Exactly, I’ve been saying we should at least have a website.”
“Sure, and people can leave star ratings,” I said.
He laughed. “The only thing I found relating to her salon is the reviews submitted by customers, mostly on TripAdvisor. The link should be there.”
“Found it,” I said.
I read through some of the reviews relating to shellac pedicures and the wonders of the massage chair. All positive. I had my suspicions about the veracity of some of them, but that’s just me sitting in cynics’ corner. There were some small photos submitted by customers, mainly of people’s brightly coloured nails, but there was one titled “friendly staff!!” and a selfie of some woman next to the receptionist, the one I’d met, although it was difficult to tell due to the size of the picture. She was wearing the same white coat and was blond.
“Jason, how do you make a photo bigger on here?”
He sighed and scooted over in his chair.
“Download the original file by right-clicking on it,” he said, as he did it. The photo filled the screen in high definition. I recognised the reception desk. But that wasn’t the young woman I’d spoken to when I was there, the one who Kristina said was new. I found the newspaper and held Bogdana’s photo next to the screen to compare them.
“Same girl you think?” I asked Jason.
“Definitely, boss. She worked at Kristina Galbraith’s salon?”
“Looks that way.”
He scooted back to the other desk. “I’ve scanned that report and put it in the Galbraith folder, on, the, shared, drive,” he said, with exaggerated slowness. He put his straw boater on and placed the physical report on my desk. I hadn’t really thought about how I’d get it back into Galbraith’s briefcase without him knowing it was missing. Since he was back today it was likely he would find out it was gone, ask Kristina about it and she’d realise it was me who’d taken it. Would she tell him? I decided I didn’t really care; besides, I had more important things to think about, as would they. I printed off the picture and put it with the parking ticket from Kristina’s car – it was amounting to a neat little package to give Stubbing along with Aurora’s statement and the antenna from Byron’s Pool. Not exactly evidence, any of it, apart from potentially the antenna, but it should be more than enough for Stubbing to start digging.
45
IT WAS NEARLY TWO WHEN I POPPED OUT TO GET A SANDWICH and spotted Maggie smoking by the bike shed.
“I hope that hasn’t become a habit?” I asked.
She ground the unfinished cigarette out with the heel of her flat shoe. “So do I.”
“To be honest with you it doesn’t really suit.”
“Does it suit anyone?” she asked.
“Smokers tend to have an air of desperation about them, like they’re trying to recover something they’ve lost.”
She laughed. “Well that sums me up at the moment, although I admit the smoking is an affectation.”
I moved off then stopped. “I’m about to get some lunch…?”
Fifteen minutes later we were sitting on the warm steps of the Fitzwilliam Museum with sandwiches and cold cans of soft drink, watching groups of tourists stand and stare at the impressive facade.
“So,” Maggie said, after we’d had a few bites. “What’s your excuse for sleeping with that woman in my office?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“I’m pulling your leg. I saw your face that night, I know it wasn’t that.”
“It was a case I was working on. She was in trouble, had been through a lot and was exhausted. I’d seen you had a sofa in your office and I had a feeling you’d be understanding.”
“Really? Because I’m a counsellor?”
“Because you’re the only person in the building who gives me the time of day.”
She affected to look bashful. “So what happened to her, the woman who slept on my sofa?”
�
��She’s trying to get home to her daughter in the Philippines.”
“And you’re helping her?”
“I’m not doing a brilliant job.”
“Is that what happened to your face?”
I felt my eye which I’d forgotten about. “I fell down the stairs,” I said, which was sort of true.
She laughed. “You might as well say you walked into a door.”
“Ah, you think I’m in an abusive relationship?”
She studied me. “No. I wouldn’t have said so. Not that it doesn’t happen to men, although it’s mainly the other way round, at least when it comes to physical abuse.”
“I read somewhere that what men most fear from women is being laughed at, while what women fear from men is being killed. Do you think that’s true?” I asked.
“If memory serves, last year forty-seven per cent of murdered women were killed by a partner or ex-partner, whereas for men I think it’s nearer five.”
“Damning statistics,” I said.
She tipped her head back and glugged her drink.
“Doesn’t it make you despair, dealing with failed relationships day in day out?”
“No, not really. They’re not failed, necessarily; in fact if they’re seeking help then there’s still hope. Don’t you find the same?”
“I’m trying to get out of marital work; when people come to me about a partner it usually means things have gone over the edge. You develop a jaundiced view of things.”
“You’re cynical when it comes to people?”
“I find I question people’s motives all the time, which I’m guessing isn’t healthy.”
“It’s bloody exhausting at the very least. But you’re right, it does become difficult to take some people at face value. Professional hazard, you might say.”
We ate and drank.
“So why have you taken up this new hobby?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
The Runaway Maid Page 22