Hidden Depths (18 page)

‘I was thinking of meeting up with him on Friday afternoon,’ Vera said, turning the diary a week on, seeing the page was empty. ‘There’s nothing here. He doesn’t have a regular commitment? A lecture?’

‘Oh no,’ Marjorie said. ‘Dr Calvert never lectures on Fridays.’ She looked up, eager to help. ‘Shall I make you a provisional appointment?’

‘No thanks, pet. I’ll give him a ring later in the week if we need his assistance.’ Vera put the book back on the shelf, gave a little wave to the three women and returned to where Joe was still keeping watch in the corridor.

‘Well?’

‘He was free both afternoons. The Wednesday before Luke’s death and the Friday before Lily’s. He cancelled a tutorial at five o’clock on the Wednesday.’

‘So he had the opportunity,’ Ashworth said. ‘Along with fifty per cent of the population of the north east. But there was no motive. No connection, even. So far as we know he hadn’t ever met the victims.’

Vera was going to say she didn’t care. She didn’t like the man. But she couldn’t face a lecture from Ashworth about detachment and objectivity so she let it go.

Outside, it was still hot. There were students lying on the grass or sauntering into town in the shade of the Gothic buildings. They had more than an hour to kill before the next appointment and Vera had a sense of time passing, time wasted. She got on the phone to Kimmerston but there was no news. Holly had arranged to meet Lily’s flatmates later in the afternoon and Charlie was trying to prise information out of her bank. They had a news conference set up for the following day and local plods would be at the lighthouse in the afternoon to ask regular walkers if they’d seen anything. The press officer would take the news conference. Vera was pleased. Those occasions always made her feel like a performing bear. She switched off the phone.

‘Coffee,’ Ashworth said. ‘And a bun. I didn’t have time for breakfast.’ He could sense her frustration, knew food might calm her for a while. Vera thought he treated her as he did his daughter; he was distracting her before she threw a tantrum.

He sat her in the shade of an umbrella, on one of the seats set out on the pavement, while he went inside. The cafe was close to the university and seemed full of idle students. A couple of young women approached her table and she glared at them, hoping to frighten them off. Then she recognized them. They were the lasses from the lecture theatre, the ones Peter Calvert had been performing for.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘No problem. You’re welcome to join us. Let me move my bag.’

They looked at her uncertainly. As if she were a dangerous dog, she thought. Were the young taught any manners these days? Didn’t they know they should be polite to their elders? Then Ashworth turned up, all soft words and smiles, and she realized why she’d come to rely on him.

‘Let me buy you a coffee,’ he said. ‘You’re students, right? I remember what that’s like. Especially at the end of term when the loan’s run out.’

One of them laughed. ‘My loan disappeared a week after we started.’

‘I’ll get them,’ Vera said and she went inside to buy the extra drinks, leaving him to tell a story which would pull them in.

When she returned, carrying a tray, they were laughing, easy together. He could have been a student too, though she knew fine well that he’d never stepped foot inside a university.

They introduced themselves. Fancy southern names which she couldn’t remember five minutes after they’d told her. Camilla? Amelia? Jemima? It didn’t matter. Ashworth would have made a note of them.

‘This is Vera,’ Ashworth said. ‘My aunty.’

They sipped their frothy coffee and looked at him with pity. A duty day out, they thought. A treat for her birthday. Or maybe he was taking her to an outpatient appointment at the RVI. Vera gritted her teeth and let him get on with it.

‘So you do botany,’ he said. ‘A mate of mine did that a few years ago. What’s the lecturer called, the famous one? Calvin?’

‘Peter Calvert. He likes to think he’s famous but it’s years since he published anything.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘He’s a creep. Like, he’s
really
old, but he still comes on to you.’

‘Yeah, and everyone knows he’s got a wife and four kids. I mean, you’d think someone in his position would have a bit more dignity. The whole department knows what he’s like. But some people play up to it. You know, flirt, in the hope of getting extra marks.’

‘Just flirt?’ Ashworth asked, keeping his voice light. Like he was cracking a joke.

‘God, you’d have to be
really
desperate to go any further. Can you imagine him touching you? God, you’d just throw up.’

‘There was that rumour,’ the other said. ‘You remember, at the beginning of the term. Someone saw him out in town with a much younger woman. It got round that he was having an affair with a student.’

‘Oh?’ Ashworth said. Not really interested. Just being polite. I’ve taught you well, Vera thought.

‘It was probably just a story,’ the student said. ‘No one got any details. And we tried hard enough to find out what was going on. I mean, it could have been anyone. His daughter, even. It certainly wasn’t one of us. Not a botanist.’

And they floated off to the sound of the bangles clinking on bare brown arms, soft twittering voices.

Joe seemed happy to sit there in the sun, nursing his fancy coffee until it was time to meet Clive Stringer, but Vera was impatient and restless. ‘I’m going to see if I can track down Annie Slater, the woman who put up Lily’s flatmates the night she died. She was one of Lily’s tutors. And they lived in the same street. I’ll see you at the museum.’

And before he could argue or offer to come with her, she’d gone. She’d had enough of Joe Ashworth acting as her minder. She felt like a naughty kid bunking off school and wondered if her male colleagues ever had the same response. She found Annie in a staff common room, standing by the pigeonholes, reading a sheaf of mail. Lily’s flatmates had talked about her children; Vera thought she’d left motherhood until the last minute. She was mid-forties, well preserved. Her hair was very black, cut in a severe bob and her lipstick was very red. She took Vera into a small office and frowned at her. ‘I haven’t got long. I’ve a meeting in ten minutes.’

‘It shouldn’t take long. Just a few questions about Lily Marsh.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Poor Lily. It was a shock. One hears about these things happening, but it’s seldom to a person one knows.’ Vera thought the shock seemed well hidden. Her attention was still caught by one of the papers in her hand.

‘Would she have made a good teacher?’

Annie hesitated for a moment, focused for the first time on the conversation. ‘I’d probably describe her as competent but uninspired. And that’s more than I could say for most of the students in her group. She worked very hard, prepared the lessons, related OK to the kids, but I didn’t think her heart was in it. I couldn’t see her still being a classroom teacher in twenty years.’

‘Did she ever seem depressed or anxious?’

‘I didn’t notice anything, but then I probably wouldn’t. This is a short course and there’s not much contact time. You’d be better talking to her friends about that.’

I would, pet. But I’m not sure she had any.

‘How did she end up doing her teaching practice in Hepworth?’

‘She requested it. She said she’d read the school’s Ofsted report and thought she’d get a lot out of a placement there. I was pleased that she was showing some passion for teaching and tried to wangle it for her.’

‘How was she doing?’

‘Well. I had a chat with the head teacher a couple of weeks ago. She said Lily was making a real effort to build relationships with the kids. Before that, I’d felt her teaching had been a bit mechanistic. I was pleased.’

‘Did you know anything about her private life?’

Annie Slater looked up then, apparently astonished by the idea.

‘Of course not. We were never in any sense friends.’

‘You lived in the same street, you socialized with her flatmates.’

‘That’s rather different. There’s a family connection to Emma.’

You moved in different circles.
Vera had been at the wrong end of snobbishness, could sense it a mile off. Perhaps that’s what prompted her to persist. ‘You’d not heard any rumours, then, about Lily having a relationship with one of the staff here?’

‘I don’t listen to university gossip, Inspector.’ Which wasn’t any sort of answer at all. She turned back to the letter and left Vera to find her own way out.

Vera met up with Joe outside the Hancock Museum. They had to wait until a crocodile of small school children had been shepherded inside by teachers and parents. There was a dinosaur exhibition – reconstructed skeletons, models which moved. The adverts had been all over the city; tyrannosaurus heads leered out from posters on buses, the metro and shop fronts. The children were unusually quiet, overawed by the building, the thought of enormous beasts,
Jurassic Park
come to Newcastle.

Vera and Ashworth followed them in and stood in the lobby, enjoying the coolness of the museum, when Clive Stringer arrived to collect them.

‘Great, isn’t it?’ Ashworth said, watching the children disappear into the gallery. ‘Hooking the kids while they’re so young.’ A couple of years, Vera thought, and he’d be bringing his own lass here.

‘I don’t know.’ Clive blinked uncertainly behind thick round spectacles. ‘I don’t really deal with the public.’

His kingdom lay behind a wooden door, opened by a swipe card. There was a series of high-ceilinged rooms, rows of dusty cabinets. There seemed to be few other staff around. He led them into a workroom. It reminded Vera of the place in Wansbeck General where John Keating had performed the post-mortem on Lily Marsh. There was a long table in the middle, deep sinks at one end, the smell of chemicals and death. Though everything here was older, wood and enamel instead of stainless steel, and it didn’t have the scrubbed, sterile feel. The windows were so dirty that the light seemed filtered through them.

On a board lay the corpse of a black and white bird. Beside it a scalpel, wads of cotton wool, small metal bowls. Another sort of dissection.

‘Isn’t that a little auk?’

‘Yes. First winter. It was blown inland during those gales last November and found dead in a garden in Cramlington. The householder brought it in. I’ve had it in the freezer since then, but I want to do a cabinet skin.’ He looked at Ashworth, saw he didn’t understand the term. ‘We preserve the skin for research, not display. It’s kept here at the museum, a resource for students and scientists.’

Vera’s father, Hector, had been an amateur taxidermist. He’d worked on the kitchen table in the old station master’s house. He hadn’t bothered with cabinet skins, though. He claimed his interest was about science, but Vera had known he was deluding himself even then. He’d prepared mounted birds, always moorland species. Usually the object of his attention was a bird of prey, a trophy for whichever gamekeeper had killed it. That was art too in a way, she thought. At the end of his career the activity was illegal, but that had never bothered Hector. If anything, it had increased his pleasure and excitement. He’d been an egg collector too. When he died Vera had set fire to the whole collection. A huge bonfire in the garden. She’d drunk his favourite malt whisky and realized she wasn’t grieving at all. She’d just felt relief that he’d gone.

‘How long have you worked here?’ Ashworth was asking Stringer.

‘Since I left school.’

‘You don’t need a degree to do something like this?’

‘I started as a trainee.’ He paused. ‘I was lucky. Peter knew the curator and put in a word for me.’

‘That’s Dr Calvert?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve known him for a long time?’

‘Yes, he was my trainer when I started ringing. I was fifteen then.’

‘Ringing?’

‘The study of migration. Birds are caught in nets or traps and small metal rings are put on the legs. If they’re caught again or found dead, we can tell where and when they were first ringed.’

‘And Mr Parr and Mr Wright are ringers too? That’s how you met?’

‘We don’t ring so much now. I’m the only regular at the observatory up the coast at Deepden and I don’t go so often. The rest have other lives. More exciting lives. But we’re still friends. We still go birdwatching together.’

‘Sea watching?’ Vera asked, joining in the conversation for the first time.

Clive gave something approaching a smile. ‘Gary’s the passionate sea watcher. The right time of the year he’ll spend hours in the watch tower. I say it’s because he’s so idle. He doesn’t mind the waiting. He says it’s a form of meditation.’

‘It must have been a shock, coming upon the body on Friday night.’

‘Of course.’

‘But perhaps not so much for you as the others,’ she said. ‘You work with corpses every day.’

‘The corpses of birds and animals. Not young women.’

‘No. Not attractive young women.’ She paused a beat. ‘Do you have a girlfriend, Mr Stringer?’

When she’d first seen him at the mill, she’d thought he looked like an overgrown, prematurely balding schoolboy. Now he blushed, furiously, and the image came back to her. She felt almost sorry for him.