Martin riffled through the paper. ‘What does it say in a nutshell?’ she asked impatiently.
‘Nothing untoward. Depression, they say. Anxiety brought on by stress of the college presidency and exams.’
Martin whipped her head up to look at Jones, amazed. ‘He’s not a zoomer?’
Jones shook her head. ‘Not according to this.’
‘Do they mention anything to do with his mum’s death?’ Martin asked quietly, flicking through the report.
‘Maybe it was all an act?’ Jones said.
‘But then why confess in the first place?’ Martin asked, thinking. She swung her chair round in a circle, her arms behind her head.
‘He confesses, pulls a fruit-loop act, then withdraws the confession, meaning we’ve got nothing on him. Boom – he gets himself out of college to recover from stress and gets Daddy’s attention at last?’ Jones said, thinking out loud. She glanced at Martin to see if she was agreeing.
‘Daddy’s attention I can buy. But have we really got nothing on him without the confession, Jones? We’ve got the photo Emily took of him and Mason and emailed to herself the day she was killed. What would happen if Daddy saw that? Saw his son flirting with Mason. It’s a small step to then finding out about the parties. If Mervyn Rush is the bully I think he is, Simon would want to do anything to avoid having to face his reaction to that. Does that include confessing?’ Martin sighed. ‘We’ve still got Brabents on ice.’ She looked at her watch before rubbing her hands over her face. ‘Brabents, Rush, Shepherd, Nick Oliver,’ she mumbled. ‘One of those fuckers did it.’
Jones waited for more, but nothing came. ‘Boss …’
‘Yep,’ Martin answered, her head down, glancing back through the papers.
‘Speaking of Nick Oliver, I think we should get him in now. Talk to him with a spotlight in his face. He admits himself he was down at the boathouse the night Emily was murdered. He says he left not long after her. Also, we haven’t got to the bottom of that video of him with Emily. He’s lied to us already about the level of his involvement with her, it might …’
Martin jumped up from her seat and turned to head towards the door. ‘Jones, you are a friggin’ genius!’
‘What, boss? I’m sorry, I …’
‘Come with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘We’ll get Nick in first thing in the morning and we can start the process of getting Rush back in for a chat. No reason not to now. So let’s get to the evidence room, go through it all again. The photos, the video.’ She turned back to look at Jones, who was rapidly following her along the corridor. ‘And while you’re doing that,’ Martin grinned. ‘I’m going to have a wee dram with that journalist, Sean Egan.’
46
I borrowed Mother’s car most days, during the Easter break. It was the coldest Easter that had ever been known in a zillion years, so they said. And it was cold. Milder down in the south than the bitter rub of Durham, but the sharpness of the wind matched the ice in my spine. I wanted to see my breath in the air; I needed to remember that I did actually exist.
I drove down to Brighton a great deal. I’ve always thought the beach unattractive there but I needed ugliness, and the water is greenish so I could relate to it, my gills were the same. I was accompanied on these trips by waves of nausea that never seemed to leave me. I couldn’t eat. I would have to hold my nose and breath as I walked past the few hot dog stands open on the promenade, the smell of frying onions pulling bile through me like a digestive magnet.
Despite the cold weather, Brighton is always full. I needed people. I would put my headphones on and walk the beach, watching my feet pound the shingle in a cocoon of sound. I didn’t read a single book in four weeks.
I imagined Nick in Africa. Bouncing along in a jeep, laughing loudly, holding a rifle, pinning a gazelle to the ground with his bare hands. His skin would be tanned, his hair lightened by the sun, flopping into his face. He would wear white T-shirts and khaki shorts. Drink Tusker beer out of bottles, play pool in the safari camp as giraffes bent their elegant necks to the watering hole in the distance. As I thought about him, I would find myself running. I couldn’t help myself. All the hatred I felt towards him would rush upwards in me, a fountain of loathing frothing at my mouth. I would have to spit bitter phlegm out on to the beach pebbles and run on them, pounding them, tearing my ankle ligaments to shreds.
Often I would stand and look at the fragments of the West Pier, its burned-out shell. Everything about Brighton reminded me of myself. I would imagine flying through the breaks in the wooden frame, swooping down on to the blistered struts, running my hands over the scars of the flames. She would come into my head then. Her face, swimming above the water in the clouds. Her beautiful face with the kind eyes. My eyes would burn at the injustice of it all. To be so shut out.
Fuck off. I want nothing to do with you ever again, understand?
Over and over again, interminable waves crashing on to the shore, no chord change ever again. I would scrape and scrape at it, whittling it down inside my head, sometimes lifting my face and opening my palms to the beach in bafflement. How could this have happened? How could I have got it so wrong? My tears of self-pity could fill up another five fucking oceans. I disgusted myself.
My mother would look up at me from the kitchen table when I would eventually bang back into the house. She would put cups of tea in front me that remained untouched. It broke my heart a little bit more, those cold cups of tea. The utter rejection of them, which I did, knowingly. After a while, she would pick the cup up and tip its contents down the plughole in the kitchen sink. I would watch her do it.
We didn’t speak, really. I couldn’t think where to start, and she didn’t have the necessary words. There were no words in reality, so I can’t blame her. She would have had to climb down into the mining shaft of my brain, scout around in the blackness without a torch, decipher the cave drawings on the walls, translate the foreign images into something she could understand before she could find the right words. I needed to do the same. Except I had no energy for it. I lay listless on my bed after my drives to the sea. I strummed imaginary chords on my stomach. Remembering.
It was a clear Wednesday morning when I sat up abruptly in bed. For some reason an old Chinese saying that my dad used to mutter to himself on grey Saturday mornings when he’d have to leave the house for an emergency call-out came into my mind: when events develop to the extreme, the trend will be reversed. He was always a bit of a hackneyed philosopher, my dad. My bedroom curtains were drawn, and I jumped out of bed to open them. Light doused the room, and for the first time in weeks I felt invigorated.
I clapped my hands together and sat at my desk, lifted the lid of my laptop. I opened up the chat website I knew most of Durham belonged to. I paused, my fingers delicate over the keyboard; light shone from their tips. I picked a pseudonym and created an account within five seconds. I found Emily’s profile easily. It was then that I paused for a second, seeing her face; her hair was wind-tousled in the picture. She was so pretty. But then a beat pulsated through me, a confident cadence at last. I typed five words as a comment under her profile photo and pressed send without thinking any more about it. I buzzed. Finally, I was doing something.
47
Wednesday 24 May, 10.42 p.m.
Egan was one of only three people still in The Royal Oak, already sitting at the bar on a stool when Martin got there. The barman frowned at the lateness of the hour as the pub door opened but, recognizing Martin, he gave her a nod as she headed to the bar and rested her foot on the brass rail which ran along the bottom of it.
‘Bottle of Bud, please,’ she said to the barman before turning to Egan. He tilted his whisky glass in her direction before taking a drink. ‘Cheers.’
She slid a fiver along the top of the bar and took a lug from the bottle in front of her. She sighed appreciatively. ‘Ah, I needed that,’ she said, with a smile.
‘What can I do for you, Martin?’ Ega
n asked. ‘Seen so much of you lately, anyone would think you were stalking me.’
She inclined her head. ‘Whatever, Egan. I just wanted a quick chat after our little talk earlier – iron out a few things. Our relationship,’ she swung her hand between the two of them, ‘reminds me of that kids’ story. You know, the one about the tortoise and the hare?’
Egan looked at her, his hand still cradling his glass.
‘There you are,’ she said, ‘bounding along, fast as anything, dashing this way and that. And then there’s me. Slow and steady. Taking it all in. Thinking things over, working out everyone’s rightful place in this little drama.’
Egan gave a surprised laugh. ‘Little drama?’ he said. ‘It’s not little, Martin. The stuff happening at Joyce amongst the students is big. It’s blowing up big time. I’ve got recorded interviews with people. Kids are coming forward, talking about what was going on. The bullying. Sexual bullying. People other than the Brabents girl were victims of it.’
‘But how do you know all of that, Egan?’ she asked lightly. ‘Where have you been digging? Seems to me, you’ve raced yourself up a storm here. A storm in a teacup.’ She smiled at him. ‘Where’s your evidence for all of this?’
He smirked, shifted confidently on his seat. ‘I have evidence. As I said.’
She nodded and took another pull of her beer. ‘It makes me wonder.’
‘What does it make you wonder?’
‘Where you appeared from, out of the blue. How you knew so much, so early.’ She shrugged. ‘Makes me suspicious. After all,’ she put her chin in her hand, ‘that’s my job, right? To wonder about things?’
Egan took another sip of his drink, keeping eye contact with her.
‘So there are three things that I think are definite possibilities in this case,’ Martin continued. ‘The first is that you’ve been trying to wheedle your way into the lives of a few of the students here for quite a while now – Annabel Smith for one. I think you got some information from her about the trolling, the parties. And then she texted you the morning Emily’s body was found, making you race out of your hole and into the fray like a little rat.
‘Second, I think it was you who sent an anonymous email to Rebecca Brabents attaching the video of her daughter in a, shall we say, compromising position.’
Egan said nothing.
‘I’m almost certain that that was you, and I have no doubt we can prove the technology of it. But if that is the case, the question remains, how did you get access to the video? We’d already closed down the student media site, Emily’s social media. We were the only ones with access to that information.’ She carefully put her beer down on the bar top and leaned forwards, closer to Egan. ‘Which leads me to my final conclusion.’
Egan’s eyes darted away from Martin, to his glass and then to the mirror behind the bar. She looked up and met his eyes in the reflection, her head still bent to his. ‘That conclusion, Egan,’ she whispered, ‘is that you have been in contact with someone who has a copy of that video and that that contact was made before any recent events took place. In other words,’ Martin’s lips grazed Egan’s earlobes, ‘before Emily was murdered.’
Egan retreated, leaning back and glancing down, away from Martin. She looked at him calmly with a cool smile before finishing off her beer and putting it back on the bar.
‘I think it’s your round, Egan,’ she said, gesturing to the barman.
Egan got his wallet out of his back pocket reluctantly. Put a note down on the counter. ‘I was sent it by a student about a month ago,’ he said.
‘And … ?’
‘He got in touch with me. Said he had a story about what was going on here. Kids were out of control. Fucking each other, posting stuff online. He said he could show me. The thing is, Martin,’ Egan said, turning to her, mustering some confidence. ‘Durham’s old school, right? The blue-rinse brigade love to come here, have a little look round the colleges, go to the cathedral, watch the young and the beautiful walking in and out of their ivory towers.’ He took a sip of his drink. ‘Doesn’t match up with the image, does it? If what’s really going on is a bunch of animals copulating in their own shit.’
Martin waited, knowing he would continue. He loved the sound of his own voice too much.
‘Especially not if it’s condoned.’ He nodded his head. ‘You know what I mean. This whole thing’s been swept under the carpet, and why? Because it suits the people at the top. People like Principal Mason. You know it as well as I do.’ He shrugged. ‘So don’t give me a hard time about it. I’m just trying to get the truth across.’
‘Oh, Egan,’ she sighed, folding her arms. ‘You wouldn’t know what the truth was if it gave you a lap dance.’ She paused. ‘What was the name of the student?’ Egan looked puzzled. ‘The one who sent you the email, Egan – come on, keep up. What was the name of the kid who sent you the video you then helpfully sent to Emily’s mother?’
Egan was silent.
‘On your conscience, is it? Her suicide?’
‘Fuck off, Martin.’
‘The name, Egan.’
He looked up at her then, mumbling into his glass as he took another swig. ‘Kid was called Daniel Shepherd.’
48
Thursday 25 May, 9.18 a.m.
Martin sat opposite Nick in the interview room. Jones was next to her, fiddling with the tape machine. Nick had asked for a lawyer, and she sat beside him, her hands folded in her lap, her Joseph suit too thick for the early heat of the day, yet she looked perfectly groomed, the ends of her sleek ponytail fringing her padded shoulders, pale-pink fingernails encasing her hands in a study of relaxed repose. Martin ran her fingers through her own unruly red hair. She had looked at herself in the mirror this morning, ignoring the other side of the bed, which remained unslept in. Jim had stayed in Newcastle the night before. With whom, she didn’t know. She had tried to cover up the dark circles under her eyes and then given up, dashing out of the front door with no breakfast.
‘We’re just going to let you listen to this tape, if that’s okay, Nick? And then we’ll ask you some questions afterwards.’
Nick glanced at his lawyer, who nodded. He looked back at Martin. ‘Fine,’ he said sullenly.
Jones turned on the tape, and Emily’s voice bounced around the breeze-blocked walls of the small, hot room. Nick shuddered as he heard it, the Ghost of Christmas Past joining them at the table. Martin didn’t take her eyes off him as Emily spoke.
‘The night started well. It was really nice, you know? Everyone was in a good mood. Nick was being really sweet …’
Nick blinked slowly at this, his thumbs circling each other in a measured pace, a tiny red flush starting to creep across his cheeks from his ears. He knows what Emily is going to say, Martin thought.
‘Anyway. It was fun to begin with. We had dinner. Some people started throwing food. It got a bit raucous. After we’d eaten, we went through to the bar while they changed things around in the dining room. The bar looked really pretty. They’d put decorations up, fairy lights.’
‘Were you drinking much?’
Nick exhaled loudly at this.
‘I suppose so. I felt a bit – you know. Not too much. So then …’
‘Then, what? Emily?’
‘Then it all changed. We went back into the dining room. They’d set up the dance floor, there was a kind of DJ booth.’
Nick shifted and recrossed his legs. His thumbs kept up their rhythmic circling. He looked down at his lap, his eyes hidden from Martin’s stare.
‘When we walked in, I felt, you know, the atmosphere had changed. People were staring at me, looking at me up and down. I felt …’
Sound of quiet sobbing.
‘Here, Emily.’
Sound of a nose being blown.
‘Thanks. I felt, well, naked I suppose.’
Nick sat up in his chair, ran his hands through his thick head of hair, still refusing to look at Martin, who eyeballed him mercilessly.
‘W
hat was it? Why did you feel this way?’
‘I saw people looking down at their phones. They were laughing. Passing stuff around. I knew. It had happened before, I’ve told you.’ Pause. ‘I knew it was happening again. I went to Nick and asked him. Asked him why everyone was laughing.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Said I should chill out. That it was only a joke. He said …’ sound of sniffing, ‘ … that I shouldn’t get all lesbian on him. If I couldn’t take a joke then I shouldn’t be with him.’
Sound of a chair creaking.
‘And what was the joke, Emily? What were you supposed to find so funny?’
Sound of crying.
‘It was more photos of me. Me with Nick. Doing things with him.’
The voices on the tape paused, although it carried on rolling, the sound like wind swishing through long grass. Martin continued to stare at Nick, whose crimson flush had now spread across his face, up to his hairline, where it met with beads of sweat. Martin leaned over the table and switched the tape off. She sat back in her chair, bending one leg over the other in an expression of utter ease. She raised her eyebrows at Nick.
He said nothing.
‘What did you do, Nick?’ Martin asked after a while. ‘Get Emily on her knees, take a few happy snaps and then chuck ’em around your friends? Again?’
‘There’s no crime in passing around photos, as far as I’m aware,’ Nick’s lawyer said. ‘Emily wasn’t underage.’
Martin shrugged. ‘Agreed. And no right to privacy, that’s true. But what I’m interested in,’ she leaned forwards, ‘is a person who thinks that’s okay. Thinks that’s decent behaviour.’
Nick laughed until his lawyer shot him a look. He rubbed his hand over his mouth, imprisoning further indiscretions. ‘What do you know about decency?’ he muttered.
‘I’m not even going to bother answering that,’ Martin said. ‘This is what I think happened. I think you and Emily got into a fight that night. She went home for Easter and you went off to – God knows where. And when you came back from the holidays …’
Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Page 25