MARK JOESBURY SWITCHED on the light and pushed back the bedcovers. The room was cold: he slept with the window open summer and winter alike. And it was full of light. His bedroom wasn’t directly overlooked and he rarely bothered pulling down the blinds. When he couldn’t sleep, most nights these days, he liked to watch the moonlight playing around the room, listen to the traffic outside, see the shadows ebb and flow around the walls.
He got up, used the loo and ran a glass of water. As he drank, he realized the usual headache had kicked in already. He’d developed a constant, niggling cough from the bottom of his chest that his doctor told him was a sure sign he was drinking too much. He’d stop, no problem, once he got back to work properly. Once he got over this stupid obsession with Lacey Flint.
And he’d made a good start on that last one, what with dragging her into his latest case.
The computer in his tiny spare bedroom was never switched off. He tapped the space bar to restore the screen and typed out a quick email. Two words.
The answer came back in seconds.
Joesbury picked up his phone and pressed speed dial 4. Speed dial 3 got him Dana Tulloch’s mobile, speed dial 2 the house where his eight-year-old son lived with his ex-wife. The man on the end of speed dial 4 answered quickly.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘She’ll do it,’ Joesbury replied.
‘Good stuff.’ Soft noises in the background, as if someone was eating.
‘I’m not happy,’ said Joesbury.
‘We’ve discussed this.’ A low-pitched moan.
‘We shouldn’t keep her in the dark.’
‘She knows as much as she needs to. Decision made. You been on YouPorn lately?’
Joesbury’s skin was starting to goose-pimple. ‘Can’t say I have,’ he told his boss.
‘Check out
‘You need to get a life, guv. And a girlfriend.’
‘Could say the same about you, buddy. See you in the morning.’
Joesbury put the phone down and walked back to his bedroom. Yeah, he needed a life. And a nice uncomplicated girlfriend. Someone like a nurse, or an air stewardess. What he wanted was Lacey. He was still carrying his phone. His finger hovered over speed dial 1. They’d spoken fewer than ten minutes ago. She’d be awake. He got into bed and pulled the quilt round his shoulders. The phone lay beside him on the pillow.
He knew he wasn’t going to call.
Sunday 13 January (nine days earlier)
THE GIRL AT the wheel of the Mini Convertible was staring straight ahead along an empty road. The trees on either side were very tall and thin, like long, skeletal fingers reaching to the sky. The few remaining leaves were still as stone. Wind that had earlier been racing across the Fens like a possessed soul seemed, at last, to have exhausted itself and the girl could hear nothing.
Except the voice in her head.
A sudden vibrating movement told her the car engine was running again. Her left hand reached down. The handbrake was off. This was it then.
Something, it could even have been her own foot, was pressing down on the accelerator. Tentative at first, and then with increasing pressure. More and more, until the pedal reached the floor of the car.
When the rope that had been firmly tied round a beech tree at one end and the girl’s neck at the other reached its full length there came a sound a little like that of a firework spluttering its last.
The Mini continued to speed forward for some seconds after the girl was no longer actively working the pedals. It stopped only when it collided with a food-delivery van heading the opposite way. The driver wasn’t injured, although what he saw in the driver’s seat of the Mini would feature in his nightmares for quite some time to come.
The girl’s severed head broke free of the rope, bounced a little way along the road, and came to rest amidst some nettle stumps.
Monday 14 January (eight days earlier)
‘AND THIS IS second court, Miss Farrow,’ said the porter, using the name that would be mine for the next few months. For the foreseeable future, I was to be Laura Farrow.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, knowing something was expected of me. What I really wanted to say was, it’s overwhelming.
I was finding the whole city of Cambridge overwhelming. The grandeur of the ancient buildings, the secret gardens and the name-dropping wall plaques; the boys on bicycles, college scarves wrapped carelessly round their throats, and the clear-skinned, plump-faced girls with their long limbs and intelligent eyes. Everything spoke of a world I would never truly understand, that I couldn’t even think of belonging to. And the red, navy and pale-blue college scarf I wore round my neck felt as though I’d stolen it.
With every step I took through these cloistered, medieval buildings, I could feel myself shrinking. It wasn’t going to be hard, pretending to be a vulnerable student, out of her depth in a new environment.
Minutes earlier, I’d presented myself at the main gate of the college I was to join. St John’s, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the university. The porter on duty, a middle-aged man with neatly combed hair and an impeccable uniform, who’d introduced himself as George, had been expecting me.
‘Most students don’t face this trek,’ he was saying as we passed through what looked like a castle gatehouse but was simply a passageway from one court to the next. ‘At the start of every term we have a drop-off system but it was easier just to help you carry your bags.’
I glanced behind to smile at a younger man who was carrying two of my bags. One of them, loaded up with books, was pretty heavy. The other contained my new student wardrobe. I was carrying the bag with my new Scotland Yard-issue laptop, plus personal effects and stationery supplies. George had insisted on carrying my gym bag.
‘There are a lot of porters,’ I said, as another man, as slick in his uniform as George himself, passed us and greeted George by name.
‘Lot of students,’ countered George. ‘We’re one of the biggest colleges in the university.’
I already knew that. Late the previous evening, DI Dana Tulloch had pitched up at Scotland Yard. After glaring at Joesbury, she’d attempted to explain the relationship between the university and the colleges, and how the Cambridge system differed from most other UK universities.
‘The university is like the umbrella,’ she’d explained. ‘It provides the teaching, mainly in the form of lectures, administers the examinations and awards the degrees. It also provides other communal facilities such as sports fields, the main library and so on.’
I’d nodded. So far, so good.
