Cambridge Blue Read online

  Marks waited until they were on the half landing to suddenly stop and turn to face him. The move was so abrupt; Goodhew almost piled into him and would have apologized had Marks not cut in first.

  ‘No, Gary, it’s more than hope so. I don’t want it to ever happen again, and if it does, I will root out the individual responsible and see that he’s thrown on the scrapheap – no matter how promising his career might seem.’ And it didn’t take an expert to identify the diamond hardness in the inspector’s eyes.

  Goodhew didn’t really believe that Marks knew anything whatsoever about the source of the anonymous letters, but he was curious as to why and how his boss had achieved such an accurate stab in the dark. Perhaps he would ask him sometime. But then again, perhaps not. Some things were best left well alone, especially if, as his grandmother suspected, he didn’t have the makings of a plausible liar.

  EIGHT

  Lorna loved the feeling of midnight: one day completed and the clocks restarting at zero for the next. Twenty-five minutes had passed since Cambridge had travelled through that magic moment and, even so, she still felt the buzz of opportunity that came with a fresh day.

  They’d arranged to meet on the Victoria Avenue Bridge, which in itself was unusual, but Lorna chose to take it as a sign that her own enthusiasm for night-time walks had finally sounded tempting enough to put to the test. And it was a good evening for it; so still, with patches of fog staining the air and hanging between the bridge and the tree-lined paths leading into the heart of the city. The moon glowed just enough, like its dimmer switch had been turned to minimum. The city itself was hushed.

  Lorna leant on the balustrade and tried to see her reflection in the water below, but it was too wide to look directly downwards, so instead she contented herself with gazing at the rippling reflection of the white walls and blue gables of a boathouse further downstream. Her freckled skin looked creamy against the grey stone of the bridge, and behind her, the streetlamps dropped pools of light on the railings and verges. She held the pose and listened. She guessed that she was already being watched, that two keen eyes were studying her through the mistiness.

  Within minutes, she heard approaching footsteps. They stopped beside her, and she only turned her head when she felt another arm slide alongside her own on the balustrade.

  ‘Why here?’ Lorna asked.

  ‘I liked the idea.’

  ‘You’re strange sometimes.’

  ‘Yes, a bit chilly, I guess. Any goosebumps yet? Let me feel.’ Lorna gave a bemused smile as the hand rubbed up and down the back of her arm. ‘No, you’re still nice and warm. Shame, because I brought us drinks.’ For the first time, Lorna noticed the two insulated beakers resting on top of the wall. ‘Coffee?’

  Lorna removed the lid and blew into the cup before sipping. ‘It’s Irish coffee,’ she observed.

  ‘Is it all right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ It must have been poured a while earlier because it had cooled to the point where it was easy to drink. She gulped a third of it immediately before becoming conscious of being closely watched. ‘I like a good swallow,’ she whispered, then giggled.

  Her remark went without comment. She pretended then to be apologetic, even though a suppressed smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. ‘You don’t approve of my double entendres, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘I think they’re more habit than cleverness. Or perhaps it’s your way of showing me how outgoing you are; say something daring and I’ll think you’re confident. Is that it?’

  Lorna refused to rise to this dig, and instead just snorted. ‘Impressing you isn’t something I’ve ever felt I needed to do. Perhaps I’m only trying to bring you out of your shell. Has that ever occurred to you?’ Then she reminded herself that she hadn’t come out here for an evening of gentle bickering. ‘Come on, let’s walk.’

  They strolled on towards the city with the common on their left and the roadway on their right, their two figures becoming synchronized again. Through habit, they both noticed the same things at the same time: a taxi in the distance driving from left to right, three students cycling from right to left, the echo of a bell chiming a late half past to the sleeping denizens of Cambridge.

  They were halfway to the next road junction before there was any response to Lorna’s comment. ‘No, I don’t think you could bring me out of my shell, actually.’

  ‘I thought we’d finished with that conversation.’

  ‘I don’t think sex is ever far from your mind, is it?’

  ‘You don’t let things drop, do you?’ Lorna sounded huffy. ‘Nothing wrong with a strong libido, is there?’ she continued and then cheered up when she saw that she was being smirked at. ‘You’re funny,’ she decided.

  ‘First strange, now funny?’

  Lorna sucked on her drink and shrugged.

  The railings that kept them from drifting on to the common ran away from them, like a black-painted railroad track, curving left on to Maid’s Causeway, before taking them towards their destination. Lorna’s fingers followed the route, skimming along the horizontal poles and rising and falling at each Victorian dome-topped post.

  ‘Do you know what I want to know?’

  ‘What it’s like to have no inhibitions?’ Lorna suggested.

  ‘Interesting, but no.’ Her companion had stopped walking, and Lorna guessed that they would soon arrive at the real point of the conversation. ‘I want to know exactly what you know about David.’

  They were quite alone, but Lorna whispered anyway. The little nods and sounds of encouragement she received spurred her into more detail than she had planned. Earlier in the day, hearing David’s name like that might have startled her, but not now. Now she repeated it with familiarity, as though he’d always been part of their conversations. Her words only dried up when she realized she was no longer being listened to. ‘And that’s it,’ she concluded.

  ‘I see.’ It was said in a way that told Lorna that this part of the conversation was over. Her companion leant on the railings and Lorna did the same, aware that the mood between them had become subdued. They both gazed back the way they’d come, towards the far end of the common. There was nothing visible, bar the faint glow of the boathouses and restaurants on the other side of the Cam. Nothing discernible, at least. They were alone together and still close enough for their elbows to touch. Her companion broke the silence first.

  ‘Finish your coffee and I’ll show you something.’

  Lorna finished the dregs of her coffee, then took the pen that was being held out to her. ‘So what am I supposed to do with this?’

  The marshy land between them and the river lay motionless, as though it held its breath.

  ‘I want you to write “I’m like Emma” on each palm.’

  ‘I’m like Emma?’ Lorna’s eyebrows twitched upwards. It seemed like nonsense, but she guessed it wouldn’t hurt to play along.

  ‘Yes, go on. It’s clever, I promise.’

  Lorna wrote in Biro on her left palm, the blue ink looking black under the thick light from the sulphurous streetlamp. She used capitals and the letters stretched across, from the heel of her hand to half an inch short of her middle finger.

  ‘Like that?’ She held out her hand.

  ‘That’s it. Now the same on the other one.’

  Lorna gave a short, nervous laugh. ‘These things always catch me out, so even when you get to the punchline, you’ll have to explain it.’ In truth, she hated looking stupid, and didn’t want to take part at all. But the atmosphere between them was curiously fragile; it made more sense to go along with this and avoid anything nastier. She wrote slowly on the other palm in jerky lower case. ‘This isn’t so good, it looks like a four-year-old’s written it.’ She forced a grin.

  ‘No, that’s fine.’

  ‘Now what?’

  They were facing on to Midsummer Common with their backs to the non-existent 1 a.m. traffic. ‘I love it here when it’s quiet and, once the weather’s warmer, that’s onl
y at night. And in the summer it’s never quiet – the fair’s here, then the circus and all those hippies camping out.’

  ‘So what about this writing?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Lorna squirmed like a child. ‘Can we go now?’

  ‘No, please, let’s stay here for a minute or two.’

  Lorna peered at the ground on the other side of the railings. ‘We’re standing right next to a load of rubbish sacks. And I’m getting cold.’ She sounded sulky.

  ‘I said you’d get goosebumps, didn’t I?’

  ‘Clever you.’ Lorna sniffed. ‘And when are you going to explain this?’ She waved her hand, palm upwards. ‘Why are you smiling? Have I missed something funny?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Lorna reran her last sentence in her head, realizing she’d slurred it, and for some reason ‘have-I-missed’ had coalesced into a single word. She straightened and turned her back to rest against the railings. She gazed in the direction of the Four Lamps roundabout and tried to work out what felt wrong. It couldn’t be just cold, fog and tiredness that were making her suddenly disorientated. She wanted to go home but her feet wouldn’t move.

  Instead of walking away, she stood fixed in the same spot, a look of mild bewilderment dawning on her face. ‘I feel ill,’ she muttered, but her companion never even replied. Lorna wanted to repeat herself, but was overtaken by the feeling that her brain could no longer connect with her mouth.

  She felt giddy and needed to steady herself. Her left hand moved, it rose from her side and drifted back towards the top rail. And like the slow topple of a felled redwood, the rest of her followed, staggering back, the railing all that stopped her from hitting the ground.

  It was then that she had a moment of clarity, an instant where she knew how and why she’d been drugged, and the enormity of her fatal miscalculation. She tried to reach out, to beg for her life. She managed to gasp, ‘I’m sorry,’ just as two hands flew forward and, with a single push to the sternum, sent her toppling over the railings and on to the pile of rubbish.

  She landed on her back in a crumpled heap, almost parallel to the footpath, with her head nearest the ground and her hair trailing in the mud. The other figure squatted and they stared at each other from either side of the bottom rung.

  Lorna heard the words hissed at her: ‘Do you know why?’

  She knew, but she couldn’t reply. She attempted to nod instead, but her head wobbled through an uncontrolled arc and her arms and legs twitched with a life of their own. Lorna tried to stay conscious, guessing she’d been overdosed and hoping that she would be found before it killed her. To stand a chance now, she just needed to be left for dead.

  But no one was going anywhere. Lorna watched as first a plastic carrier bag, then a length of string, were brought out of a pocket. A little more consciousness suddenly returned; her eyes widened and her breath came like the little huff children use to steam up windows. A pair of hands reached through the railings and dragged the plastic bag over the top of Lorna’s head, like a swimming cap.

  Lorna’s heart was beating so loudly that she barely heard the words spoken to her, the words that were merely intended to add to her suffering. Then the bag was pulled over her face and she felt the string being knotted at her throat.

  Inside her head she was screaming out, Oh, God help me. She breathed in and the bag was sucked into her mouth, then out again as she exhaled. I’m sorry. On her second breath, she knew the supply of air was already used up. Her chest rose and fell, burning with the effort. Please no more. Her heart beat louder. Please, please. Then, eventually, it stopped.

  NINE

  Goodhew woke at 5.25 a.m. and hoped that the early bird really would catch the worm. He had no desire to spend more time than necessary trailing around the back streets and squats of Cambridge, hunting for the elusive Ratty.

  He was pissed off with Marks, and too familiar with Ratty’s activities to believe that the mission he’d been sent on was any more useful than being sent to stores for the clerk’s long stand.

  Ratty was about five-five in height and somewhere between twenty-five and forty – Goodhew guessed nearer twenty-five, despite the pock-marked skin, receding hair and sunken eyes that argued older. Ratty had once boasted that he’d been on the stage as a child, and then attempted to prove the point by belting out the first lines of ‘Unchained Melody’. It wasn’t a bad performance, but his liquorice-stump remnants of teeth hadn’t done him any favours; in the end he’d merely been cautioned for disturbing the peace.

  From time to time, he vanished completely, and on the first few occasions his acquaintances had assumed he lay rotting somewhere after a fix too far. But he’d always reappear and, assuming the role of an oracle for the city’s nightlife, he would proclaim to have witnessed virtually every major event that appeared on the police station’s radar. Often his information was remarkably accurate, but Goodhew guessed that Ratty was no more than a top-class eavesdropper, sucking up drunken gossip the way some of his down-and-out cronies hoarded newspapers or carrier bags.

  OK, so in this case it was the rape victim who had identified someone resembling Ratty, but with the DNA match and the victim’s statement, Ratty – if found and if cooperative – would still be pretty redundant; he just wasn’t the kind of witness that juries trusted.

  Goodhew’s face tingled in the cold air; clear spring nights sucked the warmth from the flat open streets and left early-morning Cambridge encased in a frosty shell. He wiggled his nose, trying to restore the circulation there, hoping it would stop running. It didn’t, so he dabbed at it with the only square of clean tissue he could find in his jacket pocket.

  The 6 a.m. sun stretched gradually over the rooftops and touched the second storeys of the locked shops and cafés. At ground level, however, there was still no hint of dawn as he walked down the grey slab passageway of Bradwell’s Court towards the coach station: the master bedroom for the city’s down-and-outs.

  He kept to the centre of the pedestrian walkway, equidistant from the doorways on either side. Only the newsagent at the far end would reveal any official activity this early; all other signs of life came from the homeless.

  No one occupied the blankets heaped at the entrance to East Anglia Pet Supplies on his left this morning, but on his right, a blue nylon sleeping bag in the portico of the discount book store stirred and groaned. The black-and-tan terrier curled beside it scratched, turned over, then resettled itself against its master’s stomach. Even with the occupant’s head buried under the covers, Goodhew knew it wasn’t Ratty. Too tall for a start. The man and his dog were the only ones camped out in Bradwell’s Court itself.

  Goodhew came out the other side to find the bus bays empty, apart from the end space, where the first London coach of the day still waited for non-existent passengers, its engine idling.

  Logically, Goodhew should have turned right, past the first bus, and walked a circuit back to the shopping centre, via the smaller, edge-of-town stores. He glanced out, past the coach station and over Christ’s Piece, where tree-lined paths crossed the common land and late daffodils sprouted. The sun had melted the frost and the grass stood bright and dewy in the growing daylight.

  It was a much more appealing prospect than poking at cardboard boxes behind office outbuildings. He could check for sleepers on the park benches. He never understood how anyone could survive outside when the day’s warmth evaporated from the Fens, and he expected each curled-up body to have died in the night, frozen to its draughty slatted bed.

  But from where he stood, each bench appeared unoccupied, and he decided to check the public toilets instead before walking further.

  They were housed in an old red-brick square block with individual cubicles along each side, and had been recently refurbished with a range of gadgets, including cisterns that automatically flushed upon the opening of the doors, and soap and water dispensers that squirted and sprayed without any actual physical contact. It would only take a few more such
advances in technology, and bums wouldn’t even be touching seats.

  Goodhew checked the doors one by one and found that none were occupied, they were obviously too compact for even the dispossessed to spend the night in. It was as he turned the final corner that he finally found him.

  Ratty stood, tilted back, with his shoulder blades against the outside wall. He was smoking a roll-up, holding it between index finger and thumb as it sat in the centre of the tunnel made by his other curled-over fingers. Goodhew almost felt that Ratty was waiting for him, perhaps resigned to being tracked down and choosing to get it over with.

  Even when Goodhew spoke, Ratty continued to stare vacantly across Christ’s Piece and Goodhew quickly deduced that he hadn’t emerged from the cooperative side of his sleeping bag that morning. ‘Did you know I was looking for you, Rat?’

  Ratty spoke slowly, his voice rasping like bone against bone. ‘’Course I did.’

  Yeah, of course, thought Goodhew. ‘OK,’ he said, then paused, waiting for Ratty to turn his head and look at him. He didn’t. ‘We have a witness who saw you.’

  Ratty blew out a thin plume of smoke. ‘Oh yeah, doing what?’

  ‘Nothing, really, but you were out near the airfield. My guess is that you were heading for that lake off Coldhams Lane when she walked past. A few minutes later she was assaulted. Did you hear about it?’

  This time Ratty looked directly at Goodhew. ‘We’ve all heard about the Airport Rapist.’

  ‘Did you see a man following her?’

  Ratty shook his head.

  ‘That’s not an answer, Rat.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you have your code. When you mean no, you say no – shaking your head is merely avoiding the question.’

  Ratty shook his head again. ‘You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, you are, too. Lucky-fucking-you, that’s all I say. I’ll tell you about it, Gary.’ He had emphasized the ‘Gary’ and then stopped speaking which, word-wise, was more economical than saying I know stuff you don’t know. Goodhew waited, almost hypnotized by this macabre spectre trying to stare him out.