The Start of Everything (13 page)

“Yes,” I say. I blink. “I was just speaking with your colleague.” The other porter pops up from whatever he’s doing underneath the counter. Stacking parcels, fixing a chair leg?

“It’s the end of my shift. I was just getting my coat.” Louis’s eyes flick towards the back of the room, and a tall coat stand in the corner. That’s where he was, donning his coat. Nothing’s off except for me.

“Right,” I say. “Right. Louis? You said Mathilde Oliver’s not a student?”

“Oh, no, no.” The porters share a look. “She works at the Registrar’s office,” Louis says. “Part time.” He explains, in brief, her role with insufficient addresses. The Katja letter would almost certainly have been one of those. “And,” he adds, halfway out the door, “did you notice the name I starred? George Hart-Fraser?”

The page had gone into my pocket with the phone. I pull it out again and shake it open. There, in the middle:
George Hart-Fraser*

“George worked closely with Dr. Oliver, Mathilde’s father. And he was Grace Rhys’s supervisor. He would be a good person to talk to, if you want to know anything more about her time here.” His office and home addresses were written in neat block letters beside the name. Knew them both? That’s certainly of interest. And his address: Brookside,
one of the quiet streets parallel to the traffic of Trumpington Road. That’s where the hammer and shirt had been found.… “He was late,” the porter sniffs.

Dead?
No. Not that kind of late. I had to get it together.

“He was late to the memorial. It was incredibly rude.”

And he would have been wearing a dark suit. There’s going to be very little we can do to prove that Mathilde’s death was murder, but if it had been done because she’d got too close to the identity of the body in the fens, we could at least catch the man for that one.

I thank him, but it’s suddenly Chloe in the doorway, not Louis anymore. I flinch. Somehow I’m failing to follow transitions. My life has become a homemade animation, where the picture changes drastically, just once every second, instead of a hundred incremental times. “Where is he?” she wants to know. She means Stephen.

I look towards the Head Porter’s office. The door is shut, as I’d left it. The new porter—I check his name on the photo board; he’s Jonathan—says, “Louis tells me you have a guest with us.” He reaches out and turns the knob. The door falls open.

I blow out my pent-up breath. Stephen is still there, still in the rolling chair, now hunched over the desk, reading an open newspaper. He’s shaking.

“Stephen?” I prompt him. His head swivels round on his neck. The look in his eyes keeps me back.

“I lent her my red sweater. Blue-striped cuffs. I’d bought it at an Oxfam in Leeds,” he says. “It had been ‘lovingly knitted by June Marks.’ I always thought her son or nephew must have been a shit for discarding it. Jesus Christ.”

He looks like he’s going to be sick. Chloe and I pull him up to standing, and guide him outside to her car, to take him to Parkside station for questioning.

CHAPTER 12

GRACE RHYS
MICHAELMAS TERM, LAST NOVEMBER

T
here were a lot of locks.

The huge wooden doors at the college gate always shut at seven p.m., leaving a normal-sized cutout door within one of them for use until eleven. Then that’s locked. That’s what the college A20 key is for, and also for the post room and laundry room, and the door out the back of college onto Free School Lane. Then there was my room key, a key for my cupboard in the kitchen, and my uni card for getting into the new library. I had a key for my bike lock, which is one of those heavy D-shaped ones that can’t be cut. I had a key to our house at home in Milton Keynes, but, with Mum and Shep on a long-deferred honeymoon, that was rented out. Altogether my keys made a sharp, jangling lump in the corner of my bag. I could hear them.

I just couldn’t get my fingers round them.

I slumped onto a sliver of stone step in front of the college doors; November cold chilled my bum. I dumped out my bag—lipsticks,
phone, wallet—into the hammock my skirt made across my lap. I don’t usually wear a skirt, but it was an evening out. I’d made an effort.

A capless pen, four pound coins, a cluster of safety pins. Then the flimsier stuff: a folded photocopy of lecture notes, a hair slide, an emery board. Business cards from two men in the pub who’d bought us drinks. They’d given them round before we split up at the end, like passing out sweets. I don’t think they minded which of us might call which of them, but it’s not like any of us were going to. I scraped around the crumbs and scraps at the bottom; nothing. But I could still hear the metallic rattle of the keys.

At last my finger caught a rent in the cloth lining. The keys must have worked their way through there and got stuck between the cotton and the leather. I had to tear the hole worse to get them out, fingering it till it widened and pulling the sharp cluster through.
Victory!
I leaned back against the door, just for a minute.
Don’t sleep
. I hadn’t drunk that much. One pint and some wine. I just hadn’t been getting enough rest.

The CCTV camera hummed, swivelling to change its view. That’s the same camera as outside my room window. It’s been set to never look in; it aims at the Corpus College gate, the pavement alongside King’s College, and down towards Silver Street. Not ever into my room. It even looks down if it just has to sweep across from one target to another. It looked down and swept across me now.

I got up. The bolt made that hard
click
, and I eased open the cutout door in the main gate. My second foot caught on the lip and I landed hard on the first. Balance, hop, slippery stone. I got my feet together and swayed just a little.

No one noticed. That was the normal way of things.

I don’t know why people don’t see me. I don’t eavesdrop on purpose, but people talk in front of me. Katja thinks I like listening in because I didn’t watch enough television when I was a child. She’s wrong; I like listening because it’s easier than talking myself.

The courtyard spread out in front of me, all grass lawn and stone walls. I was lucky, right? I was a Cambridge girl. I was through the door. I was in.

CHAPTER 13

CHLOE FROHMANN

I
don’t remember feeling this way before Keene’s injury. Was he less pushy then? Or was I content to be his sidekick? Maybe it’s the promotion gone to my head, but I lean right past him and start in: “What makes you think Grace Rhys is the Katja you knew?”

Stephen sulks. He tugs on the ends of his hair. He doesn’t like being in the police station. “I recognised her.”

We have Grace’s family’s contact information from Louis the porter, but the phone at her family’s home has rung unanswered. We’ll be able to track down more about her in the morning. For now, Stephen is all we have.

We collect a sample of his hair to compare with the hairs found on the sweater. His hair is long for a man, and fair, which is consistent with the sweater being his. He confirms that her hair had been dark and shoulder-length, which is consistent with the hair on the hammer from Brookside. No chance of DNA from our waterlogged evidence
and body, so “consistent with” is the best we can do. “Consistent with” is a dressed-up way of saying “maybe.”

“I—I’ve been trying to get in touch with her. For a few months now. We met over Christmas. She was nannying, and I was borrowing my uncle’s flat. Look, can I have something to drink? Nothing fizzy. I have a sensitive stomach. Just—is there water? Do you have any water?”

“Sure,” Keene says. He nods at me to go get a plastic cup of water.

“Sink’s broken,” I say. I ignore Keene’s incredulous glare.

Stephen blows air hard out of his mouth, like he’s trying not to hyperventilate. “I really cared about her, right? I really knew her, and now she’s dead.”

“I’m guessing she deserved it,” I say.

“What the fuck?” Stephen explodes. “What do you know? No one deserves what happened to that poor girl. No one. What the fuck?” he finishes, leaning back in the chair and crossing his arms over his chest.

“It must have been an accident, then,” says Keene gently.

“I don’t know.”

“You just tell us what happened, and we’ll figure it out together,” Keene promises.

Stephen shakes his head. “I didn’t do anything. She was fine last time I saw her. She was happy,” he insists.

“Then what makes you think she’s the person we’re looking for?” I ask. “There are lots of red sweaters in the world. Lots of young women who wear them. Is it just that she didn’t give you her real name and number? A woman doesn’t chase you, and you think it must be because she’s dead? Is that a relief, better than rejection?”

“I wanted more than anything to see her again!”

“Yes, your letters make that quite clear. Do you make a habit of stalking women who don’t reply to you? We can check on that, you know.”

“I’ve never stalked anyone,” he insists. “Letters aren’t stalking.”

Keene interrupts, all good-cop: “Why were you trying to meet up with her?”

“We were friends. Maybe more than friends. I don’t know.”

I can’t let that by. “What do you mean you don’t know? Did she say no? Did she fight back?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Stephen says. “No! No. We met, and then I had to go to Cornwall. I wrote her letters and she didn’t answer. I figured she had a boyfriend. But I didn’t know. I just wanted to see her again.”

“You cared about this girl, right? So do we.” Ah, the pretence of intimacy.
Well done, Keene
. “We’re going to get the person who smashed her face in. We’re angry about it. And we have to know if we can trust you. We push you, because that’s how we find out what you don’t want us to know. If you did this to her, we need to know that. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want us to do what needs to be done?”

“I do,” Stephen says to Keene, still narrow-eyed at me.

“You passed, all right?” Keene says, but I’m not so sure. “We’re all on the side of the angels now, together. All right? Tell us about
her
.”

Stephen tells Keene, “I thought she was called Katja. I know she was! The children called her Katja. Every day.”

“Children?” I interject.

“She nannied over the Christmas holiday. We lived in East Deeping in a converted manor house. Not together,” he clarifies. “We weren’t living together. It’s flats now. I was staying in my uncle’s flat while he was in Tenerife. I’m working on my next book, and the first one isn’t quite paying the rent yet. He said I could use his place while he was away. She and I overlapped by only a month.” Face in hands, he gets himself under control. “I was supposed to work, but the climbing frame was right outside my uncle’s window. I’d see her playing with the children.

“The work wasn’t going well. I was stuck, and she was pretty. She was distracting. Finally, after a few days, I got up the nerve to write her a note, but she wasn’t interested.”

I snort. I didn’t mean to; it just came out.

“The last day I saw her, that day was a mess with the weather. It was a Saturday, with the snow, remember?” I know the one. Today’s had been just a flurry, but the one in January had been a proper snowfall, rare enough that it pinned a date precisely. “Everyone was stuck in together. The parents were with the kids, so she didn’t have to work. I invited her into my uncle’s flat for a cup of tea. I don’t know what had changed, but she … she took off her clothes.…”