Cambridge Blue

by Alison Bruce

  Alison Bruce is the author of two non-fiction crime books. This is the first Gary Goodhew novel.

  Alison lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband Jacen, and their two children.

  CAMBRIDGE BLUE

  Alison Bruce

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008

  This paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010

  First US edition published by SohoConstable,

  an imprint of Soho Press Inc., 2009

  This paperback edition published by SohoConstable,

  an imprint of Soho Press Inc., 2010

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  www.sohopress.com

  Copyright © Alison Bruce, 2008, 2009

  The right of Alison Bruce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-264-5

  US ISBN: 978-1-56947-877-6

  US Library of Congress number: 2008028447

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  For Jacen, Mum,

  Natalie, Lana and Dean

  PROLOGUE

  Jackie Moran opened her eyes and stared up at the underside of her duvet – pulling it over her head was the last thing she remembered doing the previous night. One of her pillows now lay cocooned alongside her; the only sign that she’d moved in her sleep.

  Unless someone else had put it there.

  The faint orange glow of her night light leached through the edges of the duvet. She guessed it was still some time before dawn.

  Motionless, she watched the graduated shades of ochre and grey, trying to persuade herself that there was no movement on the other side of the covers, but she was scared to look out, sure that someone would be waiting for her if she did. She listened, but the more she strained to hear, the more she was convinced that someone was breathing quietly in time with her. She held her breath and listened. Nothing.

  She waited until the sound of her heart palpitations filled her ears, then began to breathe again.

  Jackie moved slowly, turning her wrist just enough to see the fluorescent glow of her watch face. The trick would be to do it without disturbing the bedding. 4 a.m.

  It was no surprise; every night without sleeping pills went this way. The same fear and paranoia. The same cold sweat that drenched her neck and breasts. The same feeling that her world was flat and she was sliding ever closer to the edge.

  She shut her eyes and willed herself to sleep, counting her heartbeats and trying to ignore the familiar uneasy feeling that hovered above her, realizing that, today, it had become far more intense.

  She woke again at 6 a.m. with her hair tousled and tangled as though she’d tossed her head from side to side in her sleep. Her duvet lay on the floor. She couldn’t remember what she’d dreamt; she refused to dwell on her nocturnal self-torture.

  By 6.30 a.m., Jackie Moran had been out of bed for a full half-hour. She still wore her nightshirt; grey and thigh-length with the words ‘Personal Trainer’ across the front in pink lettering. She had been amused by the thought that she could one day be fit enough to work in a gym.

  Her cottage originally had two bedrooms, but she had decided to have the second refitted as a bathroom. She kept the first floor heated throughout the night – it was one of her luxuries in life, allowing her to pad around with bare legs and feet. Pulling on her jeans and thick socks was always the last thing she did before going down to the cold downstairs.

  She made up the bed, drew open the curtains, then crossed the small landing between the bedroom and bathroom. She called downstairs to her Border collie, ‘Bridy, walk in five minutes.’ She turned a blind eye to her dog spending nights on the settee.

  In the sitting room, Bridy uncurled herself and slid on to the stone floor. She dutifully took her place at the bottom of the stairs and waited for her mistress.

  Jackie’s clean underwear was drying in an orderly left-to-right queue on top of the radiator. They had come from the same home-shopping catalogue as her nightshirt. It was only the second time she had worn them, and already she could see that the quality wasn’t great.

  She ran the basin’s hot tap until the water steamed, then dropped the polished plug into place and left the basin to fill. She pulled off her nightshirt, folding it as she made her way, naked, back to the bedroom to leave it under her pillow. Jackie glanced at herself in the dressing-table mirror; she had no objections to her figure. She had long since accepted that it was her lot to be boy-like rather than womanly. Perhaps she would have paused longer if there had been anyone to see her naked. There wasn’t.

  Dressed in her ski jacket and jeans, Jackie opened the cottage’s side door on to the Fen Ditton morning and checked the weather for the first time. Not that it mattered: barring a change of boots for floods or unexpected snowfall, there was no British weather that would prevent her from taking Bridy on her morning walk.

  A damp chill hung in the air. She put Bridy on the lead, and the dog trailed at her heels, grey muzzle close to her left hand.

  This was the village at its best; fresh with a new morning and blissfully few people. Not that she disliked people, but they were likely to be a distraction, and she needed space to think.

  Bridy paused to snuffle in the verge. Jackie rattled the choke chain and made a clicking noise with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘Not yet, Bridy.’

  Bridy responded with a sneeze, then continued to trot alongside her.

&nb
sp; Jackie cast a concerned eye over the war memorial. A delinquent had defaced the ‘Lest We Forget’ by changing the ‘L’ to a ‘B’. The press had inevitably jumped to the defence of the youth. The Cambridge News had done a survey of local schools and reported a ‘commendable knowledge of the two World Wars amongst local teenagers’.

  Words are cheap.

  Mr Mills at the post office had actually done something about it. He had campaigned for a custodial sentence, which had apparently scared the lad witless in the process.

  She walked past the post office, its windows polished and paintwork immaculate; she had a great deal of respect for Mr Mills and his determination to care for the village. The idea of standing up in public like that was impossibly daunting and she’d been glad when the press’s brief interest had died.

  She checked herself. Wasn’t she suddenly sounding middle-aged? The point of her whole routine had been to make her daily life more efficient, but she could now see it had merely caused her to become set in her ways. She was touring the village complaining about other people, when perhaps she should look at her own life with the same critical eye.

  Jackie wasn’t about to dwell on all the things she’d once thought she would be able to accomplish by the age of thirty. She didn’t need to list them to know that she’d ticked none of the boxes, and with only one month to go they were most likely to remain unrealized. But was this it, then?

  Damn, what if it was?

  At the Plough public house, the road curved to the right with a tractor-width mud track diverging to the left. She let Bridy off the lead and followed this trail in the direction of the river path, walking between the tyre tracks on the raised strip of stones and divots.

  Once clear of the pub and its family gardens, she enjoyed her favourite view of the village: the mercurial Cam flowed on her left, grey and swift today; like cold, molten metal.

  On her right, beyond the paddock, stood a telegraph pole fanning out cables to the surrounding houses. Villages were still supposed to be places of community, even if the neighbours didn’t know one another anymore. For the umpteenth time in her adult life, Jackie wondered how different it would have been if her mother had lived; the cottage could have been less of a comfort and more of a joy.

  She diverted her attention away from the houses to where, in the paddock itself, a grey and a roan wore matching royal-blue head collars and New Zealand rugs. The grey raised his head and watched the pair of them pass. Jackie paused to pat Bridy.

  It started to drizzle, the tiny rain droplets making silent dimples in the river, adding to the waters flowing through from Cambridge and out towards Ely, and eventually the Wash.

  Two eight-oared boats nosed around the bend ahead, pulling upstream, rowing back to the college boathouses. They came and went in seconds, each man puffing warm white breath and breaking the peace with grunts of coordinated exertion. The oars skimmed and creaked past Jackie and she knew that they were concentrating far too much to notice the figure she had just glimpsed, standing in the shadows.

  The man waited in the drizzle, a quarter of a mile further along the banks of the Cam, leaning on the fence that ran beside the footpath, sheltering under the bare branches of the overhanging trees.

  As far as she knew, she was the only one who’d ever noticed him. The first time she’d passed him, she thought he looked strange, standing alone under a tree. He looked like a labourer waiting for the team van. Except there was no road; and she happened to know he had his own van.

  That had been three weeks ago, when she’d heard him trying to start it as she walked back home. It had taken several disruptive attempts before the van’s starter motor stopped rasping like a distressed saw and reluctantly allowed the engine to fire. It had driven past her as it whined and pinked its way back out of the village, puffing oil-tinged blue smoke from its exhaust.

  She’d written the registration number on her memo board, where it had stayed until she’d overwritten it with the date of her dental appointment.

  She was less than 100 yards from him when he glanced at her. Today he had his black woollen hat tugged tight over his cropped ginger hair. In fact, all his clothes were dark and, somehow, that made him loom larger on her path ahead.

  She turned to Bridy; it gave her an excuse to look away. Bridy snuffled in the hedgerow, interested in the smells drawn out by the rain.

  ‘Come on, Bridy.’ Her voice sounded unnaturally bright, brittle even. ‘It’s too cold to stop.’

  Britain, she decided, had become a country full of women looking for rapists and muggers down every alley, and she wasn’t about to become the next victim of a nation’s raging paranoia. But goose-bumps still rose on her neck and scuttled up on to her face. Suddenly she wanted to turn round and go home.

  He stared at her as she approached; he’d never made eye contact before but, she reminded herself, he’d never done her any harm before either. His face glowed moon-white, punctured by dark, dilated bullet holes for eyes and nostrils exuding short blasts of steam.

  She ignored the way her heart was thumping as though it wanted to escape her chest. Besides, she was not prepared to change her routine for anyone.

  Jackie forced herself to keep walking, even though every instinct told her to turn and run. She drew deep breaths, hoping they’d calm her, but the harsh chill in the air only felt like an in-draught of terror. Her muscles seemed to have atrophied. Her head felt giddy and all she could think was run, run, run. She thought it until she was too close to change course.

  She passed within two feet of him and heard a sharp crackle of movement from the hedgerow. She didn’t turn to face him, but the first wave of fear arrived even before she felt his hands at her throat. It paralysed her. Sucked her inside herself to a place where her body was no longer her own and where her last seconds would be torn from her as easily as tearing paper. His grip was ferocious, compassionless, crushing her windpipe, making the pain scream in her ears and silencing the rest of her world.

  She saw Bridy, just a tumble of black and white. Then a second wave washed over Jackie, but this time it was adrenalin that surged through her. And Bridy rushed again, barking and buffeting his shins.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snarled, and lashed out with his boot. Bridy was faster and dodged the kick. His grip slipped, and Jackie threw herself sideways, grabbing at the undergrowth; anything for escape. She tried to roll away, but he lunged at her legs, grabbing her at the knees, pulling her back to the ground. One hand reached up and his fingers grabbed the belt buckle on her jeans; he hauled himself on top of her, working his way up her body. His face drew closer to hers, his breath hot. She had no room to manoeuvre now, and for one long moment it seemed that neither of them moved. His weight pressed down on her, chest to breast, pelvis to pelvis, pushing her legs apart. With one free hand he reached downwards, and she expected to feel his fingers tugging at the zip on her jeans, but instead he felt for something in his own back pocket.

  Bridy renewed her barking, just as Jackie saw the knife in his hand. He lashed out his leg once more. This time the dog launched herself, grabbing the hem of the man’s trousers between her teeth. She pulled hard. He extended his foot and attempted another kick. ‘Fuck off,’ he yelled, but Bridy held tight and growled as she yanked at his outstretched leg.

  The knife sprang from his fingers, landing silently in the long grass. As he reached to grab it, Jackie wriggled one arm free, slipped her hand into her jacket pocket and grabbed for Bridy’s collar and lead.

  Still on the ground, the man hauled himself towards the knife, heaving the weight of Bridy along with him. His fingertips brushed the handle, but he was still not close enough to take hold of it. She knew that if he reached it, he would finish the job.

  The choke chain still ran in a loop and, with one movement, Jackie hooked it over his head. His reaction was delayed: it seemed several seconds before his body jerked, then he let go of her and his hands shot up to his own throat.

  She dragged on the lead and he
pulled it back towards him, slackening the chain momentarily. It’s him or me. Him or me.

  His eyes were still wild, but now they bulged with fear. Jackie kicked out. One leg, then the other, pulled free of him and the hard toes of her boots drove into his abdomen and chest. He hung on to the metal links of the lead, but she refused to release her grip. Then her knee connected with his jaw, cracking against the bone and sending his teeth into his tongue.

  Finally she found the foothold she sought and pushed hard on his sternum. Her body flexed rigid and she pulled the lead tight until the links slipped out of his fingers and the chain had all but disappeared into an engorged welt around his purpling neck.

  Bridy let go first, but by then the man was dead.

  Jackie Moran retreated. Standing with her back in the hawthorn, she stared down at the body. Two questions screamed at her. Who? Why?

  Bridy looked up at her, waiting for her to decide what to do next.

  Something bright caught her eye. She stepped past Bridy and looked down at it. It was the knife, its blade poking up at the angle of a shark’s fin. She knelt beside it; it was a kitchen knife, not an everyday folding pocket kind that some men carried.

  Jackie picked it up, holding it with the tip of its blade between her forefinger and thumb, before taking it by the handle and testing its sharpness. It would have been an efficient murder weapon. She stroked the flat of the steel. This man had deliberately brought it with him to use on her. She wasn’t surprised when a familiar nausea began to stir inside her. This had been no random attack. This had been the lingering and diseased fingers of the past clawing at her just when she’d dared to think about the future.

  The edge of the water was about eight feet away. Heavy tufts of grass topped the bank, and from there she knew that the eroded sides dropped sharply into the deep river just beyond. She threw the knife and watched it disappear below the ripples.

  She could have handed it over to the police, of course, but she pictured the familiar doubtful expression, and that look it turned into: part pity, part disgust. She closed her eyes and when she reopened them, she couldn’t locate the spot where the knife had sunk.