One Last Lesson

by Iain Cameron

  It was easy for psychology and sociology professors to snipe at him as they had all the ingredients of original research sitting in front of them in the form of fifty or sixty eager students, who were willing and able to participate in whatever crazy experiment they could dream up, as long as a free meal and a few quid were involved. In his world, he was forced to trawl through surveys published by the Monopolies Commission, the Department for Enterprise or independent data gathering companies, along with every other aspiring accountancy and business studies professor in the UK.

  Why not, he reasoned, read a large number of old and largely forgotten textbooks and re-hash their good ideas into something more suitable for a generation that seemed unable to concentrate longer than it took Sky to run the adverts during Monday Night Football. To halt the drones from the crones, who desired nothing more than his ignominious tumble from a lofty pedestal and an end to the triumphant back-slapping, crowd pleasing performances at conferences and lecture tours, and the donning of bright, garish bow ties, which seemed to get on the goat of one reviewer in particular; this new book would silence them for good.

  After reading an article in the Guardian about soaring oil prices, he analysed as many oil industry surveys as he could lay his hands on, a job that took him the best part of three months, and now he was sure he had found something that he could call his own. There were discrepancies in the ten-year forecast for oil consumption, a well-reported graph that suggested world demand for oil would eventually outstrip supply by the end of the forecast period, pushing the price beyond what could be afforded by dozens of poorer nations. This also affected the way major oil-consuming countries managed their economies, and was one of the main drivers behind multi-billion dollar investments currently being undertaken in renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal.

  He was on a roll and writing furiously when his stomach rebelled against a lack of food since seven o’clock the previous evening and so with some reluctance, he saved the document, grabbed his jacket and headed down to the cafe. He ignored the greasy steak pie, pasta bake and unknown meaty stew and looked instead for something more easily digestible. His poor stomach and liver had been subjected to a non-stop deluge of toxic substances over the last two days and deserved a break, and so he opted instead for the baked potato and tuna, with a small fruit trifle to follow.

  After paying for his food, he stood at the front of the cash desk for a few moments and surveyed the busy room. Close to the window, he spotted a table of sociology and psychology lecturers, all of whom he knew reasonably well and headed over to join them, before members of the accountancy faculty, seated over to his right, noticed he was there and waved him over.

  He was not in the mood for talking, hence his choice of dining partners and ate slowly while listening to a heated discussion about the recent changes made to the engine of the Honda Fireblade, and whether it would alter the characteristics of a machine they all clearly loved. He couldn’t contribute to the discussion, even if he wanted to, as he didn’t own a car, a motorbike or even a bicycle and travelled to and from the university by bus or taxi. In fact, only last week he struggled to change the wiper blade on his wife’s Mini and could only do so after first watching a ‘How to’ video on YouTube.

  Henry Davis was making his way towards him and unfortunately he was spotted too late, otherwise he would have feigned involvement with the ‘ologists and their bikes or moved to another table. Davis was a bright accountant with a string of degrees and many post-graduate qualifications to his name, but the poor sap didn’t have a political bone in his body and was soon fired from the aggressive American bank where he once worked.

  He seemed to be in awe of Lehman’s overblown pre-university consultancy career and his recent publishing success and clung to his coat tails like a leech, no matter how rude he was to him. From the moment he sat down, Davis was full of enthusiasm as he recalled his exciting weekend in Dorset before moving on to talk about the new book he was planning. He described the merits of different writing styles and the various research techniques with which he was experimenting, before realising Lehman was showing no interest whatsoever and soon there was silence between them.

  He paused between mouthfuls and tried again. ‘What a bore my last seminar was Jon. I couldn’t get them to respond at all. I tried everything. The lights were on but there was no one at home.’

  ‘Oh really,’ he said, ‘and nothing to do with your boring delivery, I suppose?’ He gulped the last of the water before placing all the dirty cutlery and dishes back on the tray, and sat back waiting for his lethargic brain to issue the commands necessary and instruct his inert body to move.

  ‘I’m… working on that as you know but it wasn’t because of that, I’m pretty sure. I think it was probably something to do with the death of that student. You know, it must have been the shock of it or something. I remember last year...’

  ‘The death of a student; which student?’

  ‘Where have you been Jon? It’s all over the campus this morning. No one’s been talking about anything else in the staff room and it was the main story on the local news on Sunday evening.’

  ‘I’ve been busy with… lectures and writing, I must have missed it.’ A bender started on Friday night and blotted out most of Saturday, while Sunday was spend in a pub in Lewes watching football and then it was back to someone’s house where he was involved in a drinking contest that lasted until two or three in morning. The resulting hangover was clouding his brain so much; it precluded any form of sensible conversation and the reading of newspapers or the watching of television until well into the afternoon.

  ‘Oh I see, right. Well,’ he said moving in closer and lowering his voice, ‘a girl from this university, in second-year, was found murdered on a golf course near Horsham.’

  ‘Bloody hell; murdered? That’s terrible news. Who was it; do we know what subject she was studying?’

  ‘She was one of ours, one of yours to be more precise. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. I would have thought...’

  ‘For Christ’s sake Davis stop shilly-shallying. Who the hell was it?’

  He pulled back at the senior man’s sudden vehemence. ‘Sorry Jon, I didn’t mean to be obtuse. I do apologise. Her name was Sarah Robson. You must know her; she was in your seminar group. At least I think she was because...’

  Lehman didn’t hear the rest. His brain seemed to do a little flip and suddenly Davis’s annoying nasal grating, the clatter and chatter of hungry diners, the dull colours of the bare trees in the winter landscape outside, all melted away into the background as grief gripped him like a vice.

  FIVE

  ‘Go on through Inspector Henderson. Would you like some tea?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mrs Robson,’ Henderson said.

  ‘Not for me either,’ echoed DC Sally Graham.

  The two police officers sat on the settee while Owen and Emily Robson faced them on two separate armchairs.

  ‘Have there been any developments in the case?’ Mrs Robson asked, her previously stoic face now suddenly bright.

  ‘No, I’m sorry to say there haven’t been. As I said when I met you both in Brighton on Sunday night, I’m not expecting any quick arrests. This, I think will be a difficult investigation.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The reason we are here today is to try and find out a little more about Sarah’s background and also to pass on some of the conclusions from the post-mortem, that is, if you want me to.’ Before you read about it in the papers, he could have added.

  ‘Yes, we want to know,’ her husband said, ‘we want to know what happened to our daughter. She was a good girl Inspector; we just can’t make sense of all... this,’ he said waving his hand vaguely towards the window where a phalanx of reporters and photographers were waiting at the end of the garden and who waylaid the two police officers when they first arrived.

  ‘That lot will lose interest after a day or two,’ Henderson said, ‘but if th
ey start becoming a nuisance, let me know and I’ll do something about it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Owen Robson turned and absentmindedly picked up a couple of coloured tickets from the mantelpiece behind him. ‘She was coming home next weekend, she was. I managed to get tickets for the Chelsea match against Manchester United. She wouldn’t miss it for the world, she loved her football.’ He turned his back to them, wiping away a tear.

  Henderson shifted uncomfortably on the settee. It was never easy meeting parents that had recently lost a child and in this case it was made more difficult as Sarah Robson was an only one, and judging from the photographs dotted around the living-room of father and daughter laughing, playing, hugging; she was also the apple of her father’s eye.

  Henderson slowly recounted in measured detail the extent of Sarah’s injuries but as soon as he uttered the R-word, Owen Robson abruptly got up from his seat and left the room. A few minutes later, they could see him through the conservatory at the back of the house pottering around the garden. It was early March and even he, resident of a third-floor flat in the middle of Brighton who didn’t own so much as a window box or a hanging basket, knew there couldn’t be much growing out there.

  ‘Looks like he’s not coming back,’ Emily said. ‘Maybe it’s for the better as he and Sarah were always very close. We’ll carry on without him.’

  Tall with short light, with dark brown hair, cut in a modern, shoulder-length style, Emily Robson looked surprisingly young to be the mother of a twenty year-old daughter. She listened attentively and spoke quietly and confidently, only pausing occasionally to wipe away a tear or cough discretely into a handkerchief that was being clutched tightly in her right hand. A marketing executive in her husband’s publishing business; she was well dressed and well groomed, echoing the styling of the room which was furnished with good quality items which weren’t too showy.

  The post-mortem took place on Tuesday morning and revealed that Sarah had been beaten and raped before being strangled, and not surprising for a young girl out on the town on a Thursday night, her body contained significant levels of alcohol. There was no evidence of recreational drugs use but the pathologist found traces of Ketamine in her bloodstream. Originally developed as a horse tranquilliser, it was now being used by animals of the party kind as a hallucinogenic and by the unscrupulous as a date-rape drug as it quickly incapacitated the victim and left few traces and even fewer memories. In many respects, they were lucky to find it.

  The bruises to her face and upper body were caused pre-death, as were extensive bruising and scratching along her upper thighs indicating a violent struggle with her attacker. In a scenario suggested by the methodical but pedantic Doctor Singh, now that she was sure of her facts, Sarah had been abducted, perhaps in an unguarded moment after having consumed more alcohol than was good for her, drugged with Ketamine and then beaten, raped and strangled.

  Revisiting the crime scene earlier in the week, he drove around the boundaries of the golf course and identified any number of places where the killer could have parked his car or van. The course, part of a country hotel and conference centre was only five or six miles from Gatwick Airport but the narrow lanes and rolling hills made him feel like he was in a much remoter part of the country.

  A large team of officers had been working there since the start of the week, stopping drivers to enquire about their movements on the night she went missing and showing them Sarah’s picture. They reported little traffic after eight o’clock in the evening and it seemed, certainly at this time of the year at any rate, the area only became busy if the hotel was hosting a wedding, golf tournament or a business conference.

  Finger-tip searches of the most likely parking sites failed to reveal anything useful and a microscopic examination of the branches and bushes nearby for fibres and body tissue was equally disappointing, causing a frustrated Henderson to flippantly remark that the killer probably carried her body to where it was found in a sterile body bag.

  After a short history of her daughter’s scholastics achievements and the progress being made in her Business Studies degree at Lewes University, Henderson asked if he could take a look in her room. Leaving the young, but highly competent DC to comfort Sarah’s mother, he climbed the deeply carpeted staircase alone.

  He was unused to entering the bedrooms of teenage girls, despite being the father of a teenage girl himself, but he left Hannah behind in Glasgow with her mother and brother when they divorced and he moved south to Sussex. Even so, he was struck by how grown up it all looked.

  Gone were the posters of Rihanna or Justin Bieber or any other teen-sensations he might have heard about and replaced with prints by Monet, Manet and Renoir. In the free-standing bookcase, he was expecting to see the odd Enid Blyton or Harry Potter book nestling amongst modern novels by David Nichols and Nicholas Sparks and a slew of accountancy books, but he was surprised to see there weren’t any. It was the same on the shelves above her bed, which contained numerous ornaments and photo frames but none of the photographs were more than a couple of years old.

  The Computer Analysis Unit at Sussex House were currently analysing Sarah’s laptop. It was found at the flat she shared with three other girls in Milton Road in the Lewes Road area of Brighton, a criss-cross warren of narrow terraced streets, the vast majority converted to flats to accommodate the burgeoning populace of three local universities, Brighton, Sussex and Lewes and numerous language schools.

  In his experience, a laptop and mobile phone were usually the most valuable sources of information in trying to understand the characteristics, preferences and proclivities of a young female murder victim but as yet only the laptop had surfaced. Sarah’s flatmates were understandably distraught when they heard the news and in time, would be helping to build a picture of her final movements, which everyone agreed was the previous Thursday, March 7th.

  Based on what they knew so far, she left her flat in Milton Road around eight and travelled into Brighton town centre by bus with two of her flatmates, Jo and Nicole while the other, Francine remained in the flat with her boyfriend. They visited the Pump House, a busy pub in the popular Lanes area of the city centre and stayed there for two drinks before moving on to the Heist Bar in West Street, where they remained until eleven o’clock before moving down the road towards the seafront and into a nightclub called Havana Bay.

  As usual, the girls entered the club together but it was generally agreed that if one of the group met a boy or some of their friends from university, they would split up and make their own way back to the flat. Around midnight, Sarah bumped into a group of people she knew from her Business Studies course and decided to join them. According to statements from the small number of clubbers they managed to track down and interview so far, Sarah left Havana Bay on her own at two in the morning as she had fallen out with the boy she fancied when he got drunk and fell asleep on one of the ‘chill-out’ settees.

  Due to a combination of faulty town centre CCTV cameras and bad street lighting, they could only track her movements from the top of West Street and down North Street but lost her at the Steine, one of the main thoroughfares in and out of the city with traffic heading into Brighton, north to London or east to Lewes.

  From there, Sarah could have walked the mile or so to her flat through a seedy part of town with more than its fair share of drug users and prostitutes, caught a taxi from a large stand at East Street, where five months earlier she collected her Drunk and Disorderly charge or jumped on a late night bus which at that time of the morning, were running every half-hour.

  Teams were currently canvassing bus garages and taxi ranks with Sarah’s picture, door-to-door teams were talking to residents and they were analysing CCTV cameras all along the Lewes Road and up to her flat in Milton Road, but nothing seemed to contradict his assertion that she was abducted shortly after arriving at the Steine. He was about to go downstairs and relieve Constable Graham when he heard a noise behind him.

  ‘Find anyth
ing seedy, Inspector, something you can tell to that gaggle of scum-bag reporters who’ve been hanging outside my house since Monday morning to convince them, if any convincing was required, that it was Sarah’s own fault that she was raped and murdered?’

  Henderson took a deep breath before he spoke. At six foot-two, he towered over the smaller figure of Owen Robson and took a step back from what might be regarded as an intimating stance. ‘I wouldn’t do that Mr Robson as it wouldn’t serve your interests or mine. I am simply trying to understand more about your daughter. No-one is drawing any conclusions at this stage and we will not do so until we know more than we do at present.’

  ‘Yeah, but it won’t stop that lot,’ he said, jerking a thumb behind him, ‘from speculating. Will it?’

  ‘You’re right but in my experience it pays not to fight them but to get them on board and get them working for you.’

  ‘How the hell do I do that?’

  ‘Well, when they have little or no information to go on, they speculate, make it up if you will. So what you’ve got to do is plug that gap. Give them a few pictures and some facts about Sarah and they’ll publish them. Do it every few days and it’ll keep her in the news, otherwise she’ll soon be forgotten when the next economic crisis comes along or the drunken antics of some celebrity takes over the headlines.’

  ‘I know what you mean. These X-Factor people are never out of the news.’

  ‘If you think you’re wasting your time, you’d be amazed at the amount of people that come forward in a week or even a month after the start of a major enquiry, completely unaware of the hullaballoo that has been raging and offering an absolute nugget of information which suddenly turns all our thinking on its head.’