* * *
‘Show it to me again?’
Gis rewinds the footage and presses play. ‘See – where we ask him about the tattoo? He seems to almost stop breathing.’
Gow nods slowly. ‘It’s a textbook anxiety response. I suspect that was a question he hadn’t prepared for.’ He glances up at Gis, who has his arms folded, thoughtful. ‘Does that help?’
Gis starts a little; he was miles away.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It does.’
Gow gets up and reaches for his briefcase. ‘Well, if there’s nothing else, I shall return to my weekend.’
Gis grins. ‘Hot date with a steam locomotive?’
Gow winks at him. ‘Well, let’s just say you’re half right.’
He edges round the table towards the door, but just as he gets there Gislingham calls him back.
‘Did he do it?’
Gow turns, frowns. ‘I just told you –’
Gis shakes his head. ‘I’m not talking about Morgan. I’m talking about Fawley.’
Gow takes hold of the door handle. ‘No,’ he says after a moment. ‘I don’t think he did.’
* * *
The coffee shop the girl chooses isn’t one students usually go to and Ev suspects she picked it for exactly that reason. An old-style caff down one of the narrow passages leading off the High Street, with a nail bar one side and a Chinese takeaway the other, lino on the floor and a fad-free menu board where the only sort of coffee started life in a jar.
Ev sends the girl to a table in the far corner – largely so she can’t turn tail and scarper without her seeing – and queues up at the counter for two mugs of tea, shooting surreptitious glances at the girl all the while. She must be twenty-two or -three, with green eyes and soft auburn hair that’s only just long enough for the tiny ponytail at the nape of her neck. She was picking at her nails at the station and she’s fretting with the bowl of sugar now; Ev suspects it took a long time for her to make up her mind to come here at all.
Ev collects her order, goes over to the table and sits down. The red-and-white oilskin cloth is slightly sticky and the ketchup comes in a large plastic tomato. It’s like being inside an Alan Bennett.
She’s going to give the girl as much time as she needs to broach this her own way, but there’s only so much fiddling with the milk sachet she can do. Eventually, just as she’s about to give up –
‘My name’s Zoe. Zoe Longworth.’
Ev nods. ‘OK.’
She flickers a look up at Ev, then stares doggedly back at her tea. ‘I saw it online.’
‘The story about Professor Fisher?’
The girl nods. ‘I mean, it didn’t actually name her but it was pretty bloody obvious who it was. At least to me.’
‘You know her?’ says Ev.
There’s a pause.
‘Did she teach you?’
A longer pause then another nod. ‘She used to. I’m in London now. But I was here before, a couple of years ago. If I hadn’t seen it on Twitter I’d never have realized – I had no idea she’d done this to someone else.’
Ev nods. Every time there’s a controversy about identifying people charged with sexual offences the same rationale is trotted out: disclosing perpetrators’ names means other victims come forward – victims who might otherwise have remained silent. Or ignorant. But this girl can’t be a victim. Can she?
‘So why did you want to talk to us, Zoe?’
She’s stirring the tea now, almost obsessively. The clang of the spoon is setting Ev’s teeth on edge.
‘It was great to start with – having Marina as a supervisor. She was really supportive, got really involved. I couldn’t believe my luck.’
Caleb Morgan, remembers Ev, said exactly the same thing.
‘We both thought so.’
Ev frowns. ‘We?’
Longworth looks up briefly. ‘My boyfriend, Seb. Seb Young.’
So that’s it, thinks Ev. But she keeps it from her face. ‘Go on.’
‘One Friday night, out of the blue, she invited us for drinks at her house. We thought all her grad students were going but when we turned up it was only us.’
‘I see.’
‘Her little boy was there. Must have been ages after his bedtime but she didn’t make him go upstairs. She kept saying how well he took to us – how he was really shy with most people, but he’d taken to us straight away. You could have fooled me – he barely opened his mouth, but she kept going on and on about it.’
‘Let me guess – she started asking you to babysit?’
She bites her lip, nods. ‘And to start with, it was fine. Better than fine. She’d leave out wine and tell us we could raid the fridge, watch her Sky. We had sod-all money so it was like a night out.’
There’s a silence.
‘So what changed?’ says Ev eventually.
She sighs. ‘I didn’t realize it had, not at first. And then I started noticing that we seemed to be round there every Friday, and sometimes two or three other nights as well. It was all just a bit full-on. And when we did actually babysit, she wasn’t paying. Like she didn’t need to bother offering us money any more, and of course we were too embarrassed to ask. I felt like we were being used.’ She hesitates, puts down the spoon, looks up. ‘And then there was the thing with Tobin.’
‘What thing, Zoe?’
‘She had this huge vase in the sitting room – an ugly purple thing. I thought it looked like something out of some sleazy seventies cocktail bar, but apparently it was worth, like, a grand. Anyway, one afternoon we were there babysitting while she was at some event in London and Tobin had one of his meltdowns and it got broken.’
‘So?’
‘When she got back we told her what happened and she was actually quite nice about it – she said she knew Tobin could be a bit “lively” and it was OK, she was insured and they’d pay for it. Then she went upstairs to talk to him, and I just
