Where the Devil Can't Go (36 page)

Kershaw checked her notes. “Her friends say she definitely owned a mobile phone, as well. I’ve got the mobile company digging out the records for me.”

Dave tipped his head toward the Thames. “If she jumped, maybe it went with her over the balcony.”

“What, with her laptop under her arm, too?” she asked, raising a sceptical eyebrow.

He just shrugged and, hunkering down again, started stroking the brush along the surface of the windowsill. Sensing a chill in the air, she remembered that the last time they’d met, at the Waveney Thameside, she’d rubbed Dave up the wrong way. She bit her lip, wondering if it would stop him going the extra mile for her now.

Kershaw suddenly saw her Dad, squatting to talk to her in the corner of some kids’ party. His eyes were kind, but the voice firm: if she didn’t apologise, they were going straight home. The details of her offence were long forgotten, but the memory of his disappointed silence as they drove back to the flat was as sharp today as it had been twenty years ago.

“Look, Dave,” she said. “I might have been...a bit out of order last time we met.” Frowning, he bent closer to his work. She grimaced, bunching her shoulders. “Scratch that – I was
properly
out of order. So, I just wanted to say, sorry for being such an arse.”

Dave shot her a surprised look. “Apology accepted,” he said.

“When Streaky told me you were down to do this scene, I was over the moon,” Kershaw went on. “He said, ‘
If someone farted in that room, Dave’ll get you a sample
.’”

Dave just grunted, but she could tell from the way his cheeks pinked up that he was chuffed at the compliment.

As Kershaw left Ela’s block, heading for Monsignor Zielinski’s office, she caught sight of a man’s back and a flash of fair hair disappearing round the corner ahead of her. She jogged after him, but by the time she got there, there was no sign of him. The guy had looked an awful lot like Timothy Lethbridge – which struck her as odd, because when she’d left a message on his phone earlier, hoping to fix up another chat, he’d texted her to say sorry, he was at the British Museum all day, doing research.

Monsignor Zielinski wore a dark grey suit today, a dog collar the only sign of his calling. The shoes poking out from beneath his trousers were the deep sheeny colour of a chestnut racehorse, almost exactly the same shade as his curly hair. He shook hands with his usual confident charm, but his eyes looked a little bloodshot – having the police crawling all over his campus was evidently proving an uncomfortable experience. Kershaw asked if he knew whether Timothy Lethbridge was in college today.

“Yes, I saw him in the refectory at lunchtime,” said Zielinski. “Would you like me to find out whether he has any lectures this afternoon?”

“If you could,” said Kershaw. “I need to ask him a few more questions.” So, Nice Timmy
was
avoiding her. She gazed out at the treetops, frowning. Had she allowed her focus on hat man to blind her to other suspects?

“You surely don’t think he could be in any way...
implicated
in Elzbieta’s death, do you?” asked the Monsignor. “Because I can vouch for Timothy absolutely. He’d be quite incapable of serious wrongdoing.” He looked genuinely aghast at the idea.

“I’m sure you’re right,” soothed Kershaw. “I just want to tie up a few loose ends.”

Zielinski appeared to accept her reassurances, and seating himself behind his desk, waved her into the chair opposite. “After morning mass, I told all the students – and the faculty – that they may be asked to provide fingerprints, or even DNA samples,” said the Monsignor, regaining his usual composure. “And I said I’d be the first to put myself forward for such tests should the police deem it necessary.” Taking a piece of paper from a tray on his desk, he passed it to her with a grave expression.

“Great, thanks,” said Kershaw. She’d asked him for a list of all the students living in halls, divided into those with rooms in Wronska’s block and those living in the other four blocks. She would start with those who occupied rooms closest to Ela, ask if they’d heard or seen anything.

“How are the ‘crime scene investigators’ getting on?” he handled the phrase delicately, as though wearing latex gloves himself.

“Nothing so far,” she said. “Apparently, the room has had a really thorough clean.”

“That’s our fault, I’m afraid,” said the Monsignor. Seeing Kershaw’s eyes widen, he smiled. “Forgive me. I simply mean that Mrs Rosiak, our cleaner, is a literal believer in the nostrum that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’. Which is good news for us, but must make things difficult for you.”

Kershaw stood to leave, but then remembered something.

“By the way, I’m going to be on Crimewatch tonight – mostly to talk about...another case,” she said. “But they might also show a photo of Ela, try to jog people’s memories, just in case anyone saw anything suspicious.”

His face fell, but he opened his hand in a gesture of resignation. “The trustees won’t like it,” he said. “But if it helps to discover the truth, then so be it.”

When Kershaw got back to the front door of Ela’s block, she cursed to find it locked. Earlier, she’d got lucky, sneaking in behind one of the studes, but now there was no one around and she didn’t have Dave’s mobile number. Then she remembered – she must still have the bit of paper with the access code from her first visit. It wasn’t in either coat pocket, and she’d just balanced her handbag on a windowsill ready to have a proper rummage, when she spotted a guy in a duffel coat approaching.

“Excuse me,” she said, flashing her warrant card. “I’m a police officer. Would you do me a favour and punch me in?”

“This isn’t my block, I’m afraid,” he said, squinting at the keypad. “I used to live here, last year – but they change the codes every few weeks. Sorry.”

As he walked off, Kershaw stood stock still, warrant card frozen in mid-air. Five seconds later, the contents of her handbag were spread across the doorstep and she was pulling a creased piece of paper from the debris. Smoothing it out, she replayed her first encounter with the Monsignor, remembering how he’d sketched this map to show her the way to Ela’s block and, at the last moment, added the front door access code. There it was, the numbers written in his round, confident hand. She closed her eyes, trying to remember. Had he opened a drawer, checked a file before writing it down? No, her recollection was crystal clear. He’d dashed it straight off from memory.

Zielinski knew the code for Ela’s block off the top of his head.

At the time, Kershaw hadn’t given it a second thought, assuming the campus had a universal pass code. Now, the discovery that each block had its own unique code, and a constantly changing one at that, put the Monsignor’s feat of memory in a new and sinister light. She couldn’t think of a single reason why the college principal would need to know pass codes to the student accommodation. No
appropriate
reason, anyway.

Kershaw decided that Zielinski’s curious failure to recognize the name of Ela Wronska, his former tutee, had just acquired a new significance.

A few minutes later, she was back in the corridor outside Ela’s room, getting suited and booted again. Ducking under the cat’s cradle of blue and white tape across the threshold, she saw that the girl’s bed had been stripped and pulled out from the wall.

CSI Dave, who was squatting behind the bed head, torch in hand, turned to give her a broad grin. “Come and have a look at this,” he said.

He shone his torch beam onto the rear surface of the bed head, its surface glittering with fingerprint powder. She crouched to bring her head level with his. “You don’t often see latents as perfect as that,” he said, his voice tinged with reverence. There, imprinted in the silvery dust, were the perfect impressions of four finger pads, their whorls and ridges as clear as the contours on an OS map.

“The front’s had a good wipe down, but the back got missed.” He curled his fingers over the edge of the bed head to demonstrate how the prints had been left, and met Kershaw’s eyes. The inference was clear: the fingerprints probably belonged to someone who’d been on top during a sexual encounter in Ela’s bed.

Kershaw sat on the edge of the mattress, her heart thudding. If her hunch about the access code was right, the prints could belong to the Monsignor. She didn’t quite buy him as the murderer – how would a Catholic priest get hold of an arcane street drug like PMA? – but it was still a hell of a lead. “I owe you a big fat drink, Dave,” she said grinning. “But right now, I’ve got an urgent appointment with a man of the cloth.”

Zielinski’s secretary told Kershaw that she would find Monsignor in the college chapel, preparing for afternoon prayers. The place was all blond wood pews and white paint, like something out of the IKEA catalogue, thought Kershaw. Zielinski, now wearing white robes topped with a cream-coloured silk poncho affair, knelt at the altar. She hovered by the front pew, but he must have heard her footsteps because a moment later he rose, crossing himself, and turned to face her.

His smile was as confident as ever, but Kershaw thought she detected a guardedness around his eyes.

“Good news,” she said, adopting a chirpy tone. “We’ve found some excellent prints in Ela Wronska’s room, so I’d like to take you up on your offer.”

“Offer?” asked Zielinski, his smile sagging a fraction.

“I’ll give you a lift to the station,” said Kershaw, “so you can be the first to give us fingerprints and a DNA swab.”

“Now?” he said, opening his eyes so wide she could see the red-veined white around his irises.

“We want to find out what happened to Ela as soon as possible, don’t we?” she asked.

Zielinski studied a roundel of coloured light on the floor, thrown by the stained glass window over the altar. “Where did you find these fingerprints?” he asked.

“On the back of the bed head,” she said. “Obviously left there by a sexual partner.” She jangled her car keys.

Zielinski hesitated. “I’m more than happy to help,” he said, with something of a return to his former confidence, “but as you can see, you’ve caught me just before a service,” he nodded down at his get-up. “Let me get Mrs Beauregard to check the diary and see if we can find a slot.”

Yeah, and next time I see you, you’ll be hiding behind a brief,
thought Kershaw. Then what? If the fingerprints
weren’t
his, that left only the access code, and he could probably construct some plausible reason for knowing that – given time. She needed to nail him right now – before he got his story straight.

Pulling a plastic evidence bag from her coat pocket, she held it up between them so he could see the map inside, and pointed to his handwriting.

“You must have been a very frequent visitor to Ela Wronska’s block to know the access code off by heart.”

He stared at it for a moment, then recovered his composure. “Certainly not. But as the head of the college, I am, naturally enough, entrusted with all the codes.”

“And you keep all six of them in your head – even though they change every few weeks?”

“I’m blessed with a facility for remembering numbers.”

Their eyes met.
Shit.
She felt the situation slipping away from her.

Then she remembered his spirited defence of Timothy Lethbridge.

As though conceding defeat, she returned the evidence bag to her pocket, and saw the muscles in his face relax, just a fraction.

“Excuse me,” she said, and pulled her mobile from her bag, as though it had just buzzed. She clicked on an old text message from her gym, which said her subscription was up for renewal.

She looked up at him, eyebrows raised, like she’d just had a revelation. “Guess who I’m going to see after I leave here?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Timothy Lethbridge,” she said.

Zielinski’s face slumped and he appeared to age a decade or two before her eyes. She’d guessed right – his earlier defence of Timothy hadn’t sprung from an instinct to protect a student in trouble, but from fear of
what he might say.

“The fingerprints you found,” he managed, after a long moment. “They don’t...
necessarily
have anything to do with Elzbieta’s death, do they?”

“Well, no,” she said, her tone considered. “But if their owner
lied to the police
about why they were there, I think a jury would draw its own conclusions.”

Zielinski groped for the round boss at the end of the front pew and let himself down gently onto the seat, his face as pale and sweaty as warm cheese.

Kershaw went to sit beside him. “When did the affair with Ela start?” she asked, keeping her voice matter-of-fact.

“On the orchestra tour,” he said, putting a hand over his eyes. “Last autumn.”

“More than six months. How did you manage to keep it quiet all this time?”

“After returning to England, we made it a rule never to speak, nor have any contact in the daytime,” he said, reflexively pleating, then smoothing the surplice over his knees. “I used to wait till every light had been turned off in her block before going up to... her room.”

“And nobody ever caught you?”

“Well, yes. Once.”

She raised an interrogative eyebrow. “Timothy?”

Zielinski nodded. “He knocked at Elzbieta’s door late one night when I was with her. He was quite insistent, tapping and calling her name. So, in the end, she went to the door, to get rid of him.” His voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper.

Timothy’s crush on Ela had clearly been of near-stalker proportions, thought Kershaw. “That was a bit awkward. So, did he push his way in?” she asked.

“No, no. Eventually she persuaded him to go away, but she said that he kept looking over her shoulder,” said Zielinski. He looked down at his hands. “We realised that he must have seen the chair at the foot of her bed...”

“Which was where you’d left your...” unsure what to call the fuchsia cummerbund he wore with his cassock, Kershaw gestured at her waist.

“My sash.” He closed his eyes, a tortured look contorting his face.

No wonder Timothy’s avoiding me, thought Kershaw – he doesn’t want to drop his principal in it. It also explained why he had seemed so angry when he revealed Ela’s rejection and her excuse of celibacy.