One Last Lesson (10 page)

‘Any second now...’ Hobbs said. ‘There!’ His finger shot to the screen and the unmistakable, erect figure of Sarah Robson came into view, her light jacket buttoned up against the cold and
wearing a facial expression that looked like abject disappointment.

Hobbs
flopped back in his chair, looking exhausted. ‘It took three people about four hours to find all this.’

‘It
was worth it, the case has definitely moved further forward. Good work.’

‘I
’ll turn it off now as nothing much happens from this point on.’ His hand moved towards the mouse.

‘No, wait a sec. If Ferris
was involved in Sarah’s abduction, we should see him coming out of the club a few minutes later, wouldn’t you think?’

‘
Bloody Norah! I didn’t think of that.’

They watched the screen
for a full fifteen minutes but no one fitting Ferris’s description left or entered the club and so they decided to spool forward to two-thirty, when the club closed, and from that point on left the DVD running. They watched in amusement as a steady stream of drunk and boisterous youngsters spilled out onto West Street, and no little amazement at the number of people it disgorged, as neither of them had any idea how many the seemingly vast club could hold.

In
fifteen minutes the flood became a trickle and then nothing at all for at least three minutes, until the appearance of a ragbag of sorry individuals whose bedraggled posture and clothes made Henderson think they were found sleeping in the toilets. Their progress was being carefully monitored by a small posse of bouncers who looked alert and immaculate in dark dinner suits, in stark contrast to the scruffy and dishevelled appearance of the stragglers. Standing at the back was the tall, broad and unmistakable figure of Mike Ferris.

It was the end of a hell of a week for Jon Lehman
and now he needed a drink. Sober since his meeting with Alan Stark two days ago, he was in the mood for a real blowout. To live without the solace of a drink and the stimulating company of whoever was in the bar was bad enough, but after enduring a seminar with a bunch of dullards who were instructed to write an essay on, ‘Quantifying the Benefits of Takeovers,’ and to his annoyance, most couldn’t think of nine when at least fifteen were contained in the recommended texts, the booze now served a medicinal purpose.

True to Stark’s word and his reputation as a fixer, he smoothed things over with their business associates and life went on much as it did before. Sarah’s pictures were no longer appearing on the website and all traces of the work she did was expunged from the records, and as far as the business was concerned, she
had never existed. The same could not be said for the feelings that lurked at the back of his head like a hungry wolf, ready to pounce on his wounded conscience when he least expected it.

The enforced sobriety did however have some beneficial eff
ects as for a change, he spent some time working on the website’s financials, a job he was often loathe to do as working with numbers reminded him of what he did in his day job.

With the
latest business report from DeeZee in his possession, it didn’t take long to confirm the month-on-month growth in subscribers was a touch over thirty per cent and if that pace continued, each of the three equal partners would trouser a pay-packet of one hundred grand by the end of the month. Now that was something worth celebrating.

He walked into
the Ringmer Bar, a place frequented both by students and staff and began to look round for a friendly face. This was not an essential requirement as he was perfectly happy drinking alone but it usually made for a more satisfying evening as it was easier to eye up women in the company of others, than standing forlornly at the bar and looking to the rest of the world like a loser.

After picking up his order, a pint of lager with a whisky chaser, single if he was taking it easy, double if he was celebrating, he spotted a table with a smattering of psychology and politics lecturers and walked over to join them. If they were members of his own faculty, he would ha
ve avoided them like the plague as their talk would be about finance, accountancy and economics, the stuff he did all day and trying hard to forget, and invariably, once emboldened by drink, they would start to snipe at what they regarded as his facile publishing career.

The ‘oligists,’ as
he liked to call them, moved along the bench-style seating to make space for him and immediately resumed their discussion on how ill-prepared many of the first-year students were for university life, the results of which were now reflected in poor exam results for January and they all feared the summer exams would be a step too far for many.

They turned to him for the view of the ‘numbers people,’ and
despite sounding like a derogatory term, as if somehow ‘numbers’ equated with a subject that could be solved using a calculator or computer and was outside the exalted ‘thinking’ fields of psychology, sociology and politics, it didn’t bother him as he didn’t give a flying fuck what anybody thought and was only happy to oblige.

Thanks to a business idea that came to him when he possessed a little more hair and drank a lot less, he could now buy and sell the lot of them, with the exception of that arrogant Scots git, Robert bloody McLagan, a
Politics Professor who was sipping his double G&T and lording over the table as if he owned the place. On more than one occasion, he used the phrase, ‘if he fell in the Clyde he’d come out with a salmon’, referring to a student who effortlessly sailed through their exams without doing much work, but equally he could be talking about himself because if he fell in a river, he would come out holding a box of fresh fish, filleted, shrink-wrapped and ready to take home.

Chucked out by his second wife for serial philandering with various secretaries and interns,
he had calmed down since meeting Amanda on one of the many external training courses he was responsible for running, and which also brought a much needed boost to university funds. There followed a three-month whirlwind romance when they were married and moved in together but only five months later, her father kicked the bucket and left the happy couple several million pounds.

‘We don’t seem to have that problem, Robert,’ Lehman said clutching his whisky glass as he did a water bottle during lectures. ‘Many of our students studied Business Studies and Accountancy at A level and so at this stage, I think they are probably ahead of the game and should find the exams a bit of a
doddle.’ It was all a load of absolute tosh of course, as the performance of that dreary lot in his last seminar ably demonstrated, but to stick a pin in that pompous prick’s balloon was well worth it.

‘Well, we’re going to have to do a hell of a lot of work to get our people to pass. I’ve never seen such a bunch of lazy bastards, not one of them hands
their work in on time...’

Blah de blah, it was the same old record he had been spinning for years. With his new found status as Lord of the Lucky Rich Bastards, his colleagues and hangers-on were sitting
around with their mouths hanging open, gagging at his every word, hoping he would buy them a drink or holy of holies, invite them back to McLagan Manor or whatever the hell he called that enormous pile where he now lived.

He reached for
his drink but both glasses were empty. McLagan was still pontificating over some hobbyhorse or other and still with perhaps half a pint to go, he excused himself and went for a leak. When he came back, he decided to leave them in their mutual self-flagellation club and instead, joined a thick throng of students that were crowded around the front of the bar.

He stayed until twelve and would have stayed longer as he was enjoying the banter about Britain’s asinine energy policy on which a second-year Engineering student
was taking a radical line, but Art student, Megan Bartlett, with whom he was having a spirited conversation earlier about the impact of Impressionism on modern art, waylaid him at the cigarette machine and put her soft, moist tongue down his throat, he knew it was time to beat a hasty retreat.

They collected their coats and arm-in-arm, made their way across the wind-swept campus to
wards a student apartment in East Hill, which Megan assured him was empty as her friend went home every weekend. The Hills was amply named as even though the university was built on an area of flat land between the South Downs and the sea, the planners sited what was now the lowest grade of student accommodation on the only hill for miles around. This gave residents a fine view over the campus but separated it geographically from the rest of the university and as a result, it developed an individual, Bohemian atmosphere with a tacky, rocking bar and was often home to the wildest parties.

Standing at the door of her friend’s room, in a sloping, narrow alleyway between two rows of identikit buildings, h
e kissed her again as she fumbled for the key. She turned and pressed her hips close to him, her hand slipping down his crotch and undoing his zip.

‘Christ!’ she gasped in his ear laughing, ‘that’s a whopper. How do you
manage to keep it hidden while you teach?’

‘Why do think I
need to stand behind a lectern?’

She started to
giggle, a girlish snigger totally out of keeping with the serious proponent of Rothko and Hockney that he was debating with an hour before. He said something else and she started to laugh out loud, prompting shouts of ‘shut the fuck up’ from somewhere in the dense arrangement of hillside apartments. Despite the fog of booze, he could see it would end in tears if there were any altercation and he was spotted, so he took the key from her, opened the door and got her inside her before someone came out of their room and recognised him.

With no
attempt at niceties or polite conversation, they stripped off their clothes and bounced the springs of the small single bed so hard, he was sure it was a more intrusive noise than her short bout of laughing. The big surprise of the evening was she had a beautiful body hiding beneath her long hippy-style dress and cardigan, a bigger revelation than the one he received last Christmas when he opened his wife’s present to find a diver’s watch, the sort of timepiece he detested.

Thirty minutes later, after
attempting every sexual position their drunken minds could think of, he was lying in the darkness, his body hot and sweaty and listening to his own heavy breathing as it gradually decreased and regained its regular rhythm. In moments such as this, he would make an assessment of the girl beside him as to what her likely reaction would be if he suddenly broached the subject of making a tidy sum by posing naked for the web site, but almost as soon as he thought of doing so, he thought of Sarah.

Despite
her beautiful figure and her wholehearted approach to sex, it was unlikely he would share Megan’s bed again but he couldn’t keep his hands off Sarah. She took to modelling like a duck to water, loving all the attention it brought her, not only from the photographers who were slick operators and expert at putting young girls at ease, but from punters who sent her adoring emails. However, no matter how much she loved the work, she loved the money she was making even more.

Her parents were well-off an
d lived in a big house in Epsom but fearful of drugs or indolence or any number of weaknesses befalling the modern student, they kept her on a short leash with only enough money for essentials and there was little left over for her to enjoy herself.

Armed with the money she made from modelling, she set out to
party with a vengeance. He wasn’t so blind that he couldn’t see there was a gulf between them in age, experience, interests and motivation and she would only be attending university for as long as it took her to complete her degree, and so nothing would come of their relationship, but in many respects those months together were the happiest days of his life.

He finished a cigarette and turned to look at Megan, but she was sound asleep. If he wasn’t
feeling so melancholy, he would have woken her up to see if she fancied doing it all again, but instead he dressed and headed out into the cold night, wondering not for the first time, what life was going to be like without Sarah.

He
replaced the handset back on the cradle and removed his hand as if the device was hot. It was all he could do to stop crashing the little device down and smashing it into a thousand pieces or throwing it against the wall, but in truth Henderson couldn’t face another visit of Neil from Accounts and listen once again to a lecture about damaging taxpayer’s property. Yet again Chief Inspector Steve Harris succeeded in winding him up, this time about the level of overtime on a large and complex rape case he had worked on last month.

He was just about to emit a loud cry, usually
the precursor to smashing his fist into something less expensive than the phone, such as a filing cabinet, the in-tray or the piles of boxes that seemed to be breeding close to his desk like rabbits, when DS Harry Wallop breezed in. With a cheery, ‘hi Boss,’ he sat down at the meeting table and dumped a pile papers on the table.

When he did not receive
a salutary response in return, he looked up. ‘What’s wrong with you Angus, you look like you’ve seen a ghost?’