Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin

by Alice Clark-Platts

  ‘Oh the police,’ the receptionist said in reply, with a buttonholed misery. ‘You’ll be wanting Principal Mason I expect.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Martin and Detective Sergeant Jones, Ms … ?’

  ‘Mrs Earl. I’m the receptionist here. As you can see.’ She walked out of sight and then reappeared through a doorway along the wall. ‘I’ll take you to him,’ she continued, starting up the stairs. ‘Don’t suppose you’ll tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sure there’ll be an announcement at some point, Mrs Earl.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ the receptionist said as she made her way down a carpeted corridor along which several large doors faced a mahogany balustrade looking down on to the entrance hall. She paused outside one of the doors and seemed to steady herself before knocking.

  ‘Come in,’ answered an authoritative voice within.

  Mrs Earl poked her head around the door, saying, ‘There’s police here, Phillip. I think you’re expecting them?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Mrs Earl pushed the door wide, opening the view to a large office with a desk in front of a bay window. Phillip Mason was a man’s man, Martin thought, albeit with the long, delicate fingers of a piano player. In his fifties, he had the hard physique of a tennis player, tall and lean, with a buzz cut of grey hair and cool blue eyes. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top and he wore no tie. He had a distracted air about him but stood up as the policewomen walked in.

  ‘Detective Inspector Martin,’ she said again, holding out her hand as they approached the desk.

  ‘DS Jones.’

  ‘Phillip Mason, as you know,’ he said, waving a hand to the chairs in front of the desk. ‘Thank you, Julia.’

  Mrs Earl left the room despondently, calling out as she left, ‘I’ll be downstairs if you need anything …’

  They sat. Mason placed his hands in front of him on the desk in a prayer position, the tips of his index fingers grazing his chin. A steaming mug sat on his desk, and the aroma of just-brewed coffee hung in the air. He offered them nothing. He was the type of man in a position of power she’d seen before, Martin surmised, a man who would let a door slam in the face of the person behind him because he would always be unaware that there was anyone else in the world at that moment but him. She stored that thought and looked over at Jones, who leaned forwards.

  ‘We have a preliminary identification of a body found down at the weir past Prebends Bridge. I believe you’ve been informed of this … ?’

  Mason looked at Jones for a moment before moving his gaze in studied dismay to his desktop. ‘I was told the body of a student had been found. I haven’t been told who it is.’

  ‘Her name was Emily Brabents,’ continued Jones.

  Mason looked up, frowning. ‘Emily?’

  ‘Did you know Emily?’ questioned Martin.

  Mason shook his head, apparently bewildered. ‘She’s a Fresher.’ He stared at Martin, swallowing. ‘Was a Fresher. I wouldn’t have expected it …’ The principal appeared shocked. ‘She seemed very popular. I don’t know what to say.’ He paused. ‘How awfully sad.’

  Martin remained silent, giving the principal the opportunity to fill the quiet.

  ‘We have a big community spirit here. The Joyce spirit …’ the principal floundered. It sounded as though he were reading from the college prospectus. ‘It was the Durham Regatta weekend,’ the principal looked up at Martin, ‘as I’m sure you know. I remember seeing Emily only yesterday, down at the boathouse. She looked like, well, she just looked very happy, and everything was, you know, normal.’

  ‘Who was she with, when you saw her at the boathouse?’

  ‘Oh,’ the principal spread his hands out over the desktop. ‘Her usual crowd. Hard to say, there were lots of people milling about.’ Martin noticed a tiny twitch pulsate in the corner of Mason’s left eye. ‘You might want to speak to the college president of Joyce. He’s reading Politics here. I know he was down there for a while. He might know who she was with.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Martin asked.

  ‘Simon Rush,’ answered Mason. ‘His rooms are just down the road. In the same building where Emily lives actually,’ he paused uncertainly. ‘Uh, lived. He’ll be there now, given the early hour, I expect. Shall I get Mrs Earl to bring him here? I suppose, well, I should probably be with him when he hears the news.’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  The principal picked up the phone and muttered briefly into it. ‘She’ll go and find him,’ he said to the women afterwards.

  ‘We’ll need to interview all the students who knew Emily. Those on her course. Her friends. Enemies.’

  ‘Enemies?’ Mason laughed. ‘I don’t think she would have had any of those. I mean,’ he halted. ‘Why would that be relevant?’

  Martin and Jones were silent.

  ‘You’re saying her death was an attack? Not suicide?’ Mason searched the policewomen’s faces for clues.

  ‘Why would you think Emily would want to kill herself, Mr Mason?’ Martin asked, but the principal looked blank as he processed what he’d heard. ‘We’ll understand more after the post mortem,’ she continued eventually. ‘In the meantime, we have to cover all possibilities.’ She paused. ‘I should warn you that the press may come knocking on your door about this.’

  ‘My door?’ Mason gave a quick frown.

  ‘Well, the university’s door,’ Martin replied. ‘A young girl has died in a public place. Whether or not it’s under suspicious circumstances, there may be talk. Particularly given Durham’s academic reputation.’ She altered her position in her chair. ‘I just want to prepare you for that, sir.’

  Mason stared at her in a continuing reverie as a knock came at the door and an extremely tall – six foot three or four – wiry-framed boy came in. He had close-cropped dark hair and vivid green eyes behind silver-framed John Lennon-style glasses. He looked fresh, as if straight from the shower, although Martin could detect an underlying aroma. What was it? It may have been the reek of self-assurance as he came forwards and stood before the principal’s desk, resting both of his hands by their thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. He wore sandy-coloured desert boots, bulky in contrast to his general leanness.

  ‘You wanted to see me, Phillip?’ he asked the principal.

  Martin frowned. His attitude was overly easy towards someone with the principal’s clout in the university.

  ‘The police need to speak to you, Simon,’ Mason gestured to behind where the boy stood. Rush turned to look at them and gave a lopsided smile. Martin felt oddly uncomfortable being seated while he stood looking down on her. She shifted in her chair but couldn’t stand without relinquishing power to him.

  ‘Do you know Emily Brabents, Simon?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I know Emily well,’ he answered, still smiling with only one half of his mouth.

  Is he smirking? Martin thought, puzzled. Something wasn’t right here. She looked across at Jones, who was studying Simon Rush closely.

  Mason coughed softly. ‘I’m afraid, Simon, that I have some bad news.’ He leaned forwards over his desk, as if he wanted to hug his student. His hands stretched empathetically over the leather top. ‘Emily has, Emily was …’ He paused, seemingly stricken but with hard eyes. His words hung soft and close in the air. Mason’s lips were dry, Martin noticed. He and Rush were locked into each other, each set of eyes clamped on the other man’s.

  ‘Emily is dead, Simon. I’m sorry.’ Martin broke the silence at last. Rush appeared to inhale with a faint judder, wrenching his eyes away from the principal. Then he looked at Martin and Jones steadily in turn.

  ‘Emily is dead,’ the boy repeated tonelessly.

  ‘Yes, Emily is dead.’ He continued to stare down at them in their chairs.

  Martin could hear the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. Something about the boy’s reaction was a playact; it didn’t ring true. The silence continued. ‘I’m sorry if this is a shock for you,’ she forced h
erself to say, trying to wade through the swamp of quiet which seemed to have engulfed the room. Her voice sounded too loud within it. Keep calm, she thought. Let it unfold.

  Simon swallowed deeply, his Adam’s apple shifting visibly. His face changed, and at once a noise shot from him, the scream of a laugh. Martin jerked involuntarily, her hands instinctively reaching for the arms of her chair, ready to leap up and restrain him.

  ‘Oh, it’s not a shock,’ he said, barking laughter for a few seconds as he saw the effect of his behaviour on the women. He snapped the smile off his face. ‘It’s not a shock in the slightest.’ He tapped himself on the head violently with both hands. ‘It’s not a shock,’ he repeated for the third time, now staring again at Principal Mason. He began to move his head weirdly from side to side like a caged animal. As he did, the lenses of his glasses gave the illusion of turning white, their reflection bouncing back the light in the room, leaving him for a second eyeless, with blank spaces where the windows of his soul should be. He splayed his hands towards Martin and licked his lips. ‘Because I’m the one who killed her.’ His eyes seemed to bore into Martin’s. ‘And then I dumped her in the weir, just as she deserved.’

  3

  I came to Durham on a cold October morning, on the first train out of London. My mother had come with me to King’s Cross Station to see me off and she carried on standing forlornly at the ticket barrier, long after the train had pulled out of the station. I don’t know that she did this as I couldn’t see her, of course. But I imagine her doing it. It’s the type of thing she would do. Since my father had died of a stroke, she had whittled herself down to something constantly sad. She seemed even diminished in height, and the lines of her face cragged more heavily than ever before. She had turned-down cow eyes much of the time, often brimming with tears, which would drip into the teacup held in her lap as she watched daytime television more faithfully than any other activity she undertook in her life.

  By the time the train pulled out of the station, I had put on my headphones and was being blasted by indie rock, guaranteed to quell even the smallest emergence of sympathy for Mother. I couldn’t afford to be sympathetic to her any more. I had to escape. I was already a year behind my peers in starting university, thinking I would have to delay indefinitely to look after her. My sister, married with three children and living on an estate in a village twenty-five miles out of London, was no use to me or my mother. She had barely registered the sacrifice I was making when I rang her a year ago, shouting it down the phone over the rabble noise at her end. Sighing, I had put the phone down and reconciled myself to endless copies of New! magazine and cups of builder’s tea. I considered taking up smoking, but this seemed an unnecessary expense – even for someone who wanted to pretend they lived in Paris while living in Walthamstow.

  Mother and I bumbled along during that year. I took a part-time job in a local pub to make some money and contribute to housekeeping. Mother carried on watching overly tanned middle-aged men sell things for other people, and so it went on. Every Saturday, I would pop into the newsagent and put five pounds down for five lottery tickets for her. And then the unimaginable happened. She won. Two hundred and seventy-three thousand pounds on a rollover week. I was free. I was free.

  Mother paid off the mortgage on the house, and I employed a cleaner to come every day with some shopping. Evie would pop in for a cup of tea and she would watch Cash in the Attic with Mother before doing a cursory swish around the house with a duster. It was the company Mother needed, and once I could see they were friends, I made the call to Student Services. They were really very good about it and said I could start that October with the new Freshers. I would be a Fresher, I said to myself while looking in the mirror one morning. It didn’t seem real. I was travelling two hundred and fifty miles north of London. Away. It clenched in my stomach. Away!

  The train rattled on, and I nodded off to sleep for a bit. When I woke, it was almost dark outside. It wasn’t yet midday but a thick bank of cloud had built up in the sky, and the gloom pervaded the train carriage. The lights came on inside, warming us within – the calm of the carriage whistling through the wild and woolly landscape. I could see my reflection in the train window, the collar of my coat upturned, the briefest whisper of stubble on my chin. My hair was short with a sort of quiff at the front. I thought this effective.

  I began to look in my backpack for my book. I was obsessed then with Graham Greene and was two-thirds through The Power and the Glory. While not a Catholic – in fact, my parents had abhorred any mention of religion in our house – I had always been attracted to its rituals, romanticized those who gave up their life to accept its austerity. The martyr in me, recently demonstrated by my care for my mother over and above my own needs, relished its severity. I was gripped by Greene at this time and opened the book eagerly.

  It took some time, therefore, for the noise of crying to seep into my brain. It wasn’t loud sobbing, more a persistent sniffing accompanied by long sighs which caught at the beginning of each fresh bout of downpour. I sat up in my seat and looked around, straining my neck to look over the seats in front of me and behind. Two rows ahead was a girl about my age. She was sat at a table and faced me. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and wide-spaced brown eyes, which gave her a look of innocence. This enhanced her attractiveness in my opinion. She was wearing a pink button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone. She had an Alice band in her hair, black velvet as I recall. Her hair was thick and curled at the ends. She sat, looking down, crumpling tissues over and over again in her hands. The table displayed the discarded tissues like a monotonous collage.

  I sat back in my seat heavily. What was I to do? Should I just ignore her? I looked at my book in dismay. Yes, I would ignore her. I picked up the book. The priest was seeking refuge at Padre José’s house. It was a tense moment. The girl began to cry again, slightly louder. The diminuendo had altered, rising to an agitato. I saw her looking at her mobile phone in her hands. I sighed and rose from my seat. I sidled into the seat opposite her at the table and looked at her kindly.

  ‘I’m about to go to the buffet car. Looks like you could do with a cup of tea. Can I bring you one?’

  The girl glanced up at me in surprise, her crying stifled by my interruption. Her nose was red, and her face completely wet. She pushed the back of her hand across her face in a valiant attempt to rid it of dampness. She blinked slowly at me.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sorry …’

  ‘Don’t mind me. Can’t bear to see a damsel in distress, you know,’ I said to her, somewhat awkwardly. ‘Tell you what, I’ll get two teas and then, if you want one, you can have it. No questions asked. You just drink it on your own.’

  I stood up in the aisle, rocking slightly along with the movement of the train.

  ‘I’ll get you lots of sugar. Sugar’s good for a shock.’

  I returned some time later. There had been a reasonably sized queue, and the woman behind the counter was typically moronic. I placed a polystyrene cup before the girl along with three packets of white sugar, two miniature cartons of milk and a white plastic stirrer.

  ‘There you are. Nice and hot. That’ll make you feel better.’

  I returned to my seat, picked up my book and tried to immerse myself back in the world of Greene. A few minutes later, however, the seat next to me shifted as the girl pulled herself in to sit beside me, holding the tea in one hand. I drew down the table tray for her, and she put the cup upon it.

  ‘I’m Emily,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

  ‘Daniel,’ I replied. ‘Daniel Shepherd.’

  She smiled at me sadly. ‘It isn’t a shock.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Why I’m crying. It’s not that I’ve had a shock. I’m being silly really. I’m just on my way to something new and I think …’ She sighed again, and her body juddered with the effort of battening down the sob.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, patting her clumsily on the arm. ‘Yo
u don’t have to say. I don’t want to intrude.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I don’t mind. I just feel like an idiot, that’s all. It’s just that I’m going to miss my home. My family.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I understand,’ although of course I didn’t because I had raced out of my family home with all the excitement of a spaniel about to be taken on a three-hour walk across muddy moors. Then it dawned on me.

  ‘Are you starting at Durham?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded miserably. ‘I’m going to be in Joyce College.’

  I knew the name of Joyce. It was one of the colleges on the Bailey, in the heart of Durham. I had trudged up it when I had visited the city for my interview. My own college was up and out of the tiny city on a hill with the other newer colleges, a much less salubrious environment. It would certainly have more state school applicants than this Emily would be meeting in her new surroundings.

  ‘I’m at Nightingale,’ I offered.

  She smiled broadly. ‘You’re going to Durham too? That’s awesome!’ She beamed at me.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

  ‘French and History,’ she grimaced. ‘I only really wanted to do French, but Daddy said that was just an excuse to go travelling for a year and unless I wanted to end up as a primary school teacher, I’d need a subject with backbone.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘His words.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘This tastes awful,’ she said happily. ‘How about you? What are you reading?’

  ‘English.’ I shrugged, acknowledging the book turned face down on the table. ‘Anyway,’ I said, wanting to steer the conversation away from myself, ‘why are you sad? We’re going to have a great time. Everyone says university is the best time of your life.’

  Emily looked downcast again, as if she’d forgotten the reason for her sitting next to me. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She paused. ‘Do you think it’ll be awfully cold there? Mummy says the rooms won’t be heated. She made me pack all kinds of thermal underwear.’