Hidden Depths

‘This is Vera,’ Ashworth said. ‘My aunty.’

They sipped their frothy coffee and looked at him with pity. A duty day out, they thought. A treat for her birthday. Or maybe he was taking her to an outpatient appointment at the RVI. Vera gritted her teeth and let him get on with it.

‘So you do botany,’ he said. ‘A mate of mine did that a few years ago. What’s the lecturer called, the famous one? Calvin?’

‘Peter Calvert. He likes to think he’s famous but it’s years since he published anything.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘He’s a creep. Like, he’s really old, but he still comes on to you.’

‘Yeah, and everyone knows he’s got a wife and four kids. I mean, you’d think someone in his position would have a bit more dignity. The whole department knows what he’s like. But some people play up to it. You know, flirt, in the hope of getting extra marks.’

‘Just flirt?’ Ashworth asked, keeping his voice light. Like he was cracking a joke.

‘God, you’d have to be really desperate to go any further. Can you imagine him touching you? God, you’d just throw up.’

‘There was that rumour,’ the other said. ‘You remember, at the beginning of the term. Someone saw him out in town with a much younger woman. It got round that he was having an affair with a student.’

‘Oh?’ Ashworth said. Not really interested. Just being polite. I’ve taught you well, Vera thought.

‘It was probably just a story,’ the student said. ‘No one got any details. And we tried hard enough to find out what was going on. I mean, it could have been anyone. His daughter, even. It certainly wasn’t one of us. Not a botanist.’

And they floated off to the sound of the bangles clinking on bare brown arms, soft twittering voices.

Chapter Twenty-One

Joe seemed happy to sit there in the sun, nursing his fancy coffee until it was time to meet Clive Stringer, but Vera was impatient and restless. ‘I’m going to see if I can track down Annie Slater, the woman who put up Lily’s flatmates the night she died. She was one of Lily’s tutors. And they lived in the same street. I’ll see you at the museum.’

And before he could argue or offer to come with her, she’d gone. She’d had enough of Joe Ashworth acting as her minder. She felt like a naughty kid bunking off school and wondered if her male colleagues ever had the same response. She found Annie in a staff common room, standing by the pigeonholes, reading a sheaf of mail. Lily’s flatmates had talked about her children; Vera thought she’d left motherhood until the last minute. She was mid- forties, well preserved. Her hair was very black, cut in a severe bob and her lipstick was very red. She took Vera into a small office and frowned at her. ‘I haven’t got long. I’ve a meeting in ten minutes.’

‘It shouldn’t take long. Just a few questions about Lily Marsh.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Poor Lily. It was a shock. One hears about these things happening, but it’s seldom to a person one knows.’ Vera thought the shock seemed well hidden. Her attention was still caught by one of the papers in her hand.

‘Would she have made a good teacher?’

Annie hesitated for a moment, focused for the first time on the conversation. ‘I’d probably describe her as competent but uninspired. And that’s more than I could say for most of the students in her group. She worked very hard, prepared the lessons, related OK to the kids, but I didn’t think her heart was in it. I couldn’t see her still being a classroom teacher in twenty years.’

‘Did she ever seem depressed or anxious?’

‘I didn’t notice anything, but then I probably wouldn’t. This is a short course and there’s not much contact time. You’d be better talking to her friends about that.’

I would, pet. But I’m not sure she had any.

‘How did she end up doing her teaching practice in Hepworth?’

‘She requested it. She said she’d read the school’s Ofsted report and thought she’d get a lot out of a placement there. I was pleased that she was showing some passion for teaching and tried to wangle it for her.’

‘How was she doing?’

‘Well. I had a chat with the head teacher a couple of weeks ago. She said Lily was making a real effort to build relationships with the kids. Before that, I’d felt her teaching had been a bit mechanistic. I was pleased.’

‘Did you know anything about her private life?’

Annie Slater looked up then, apparently astonished by the idea.

‘Of course not. We were never in any sense friends.’

‘You lived in the same street, you socialized with her flatmates.’

‘That’s rather different. There’s a family connection to Emma.’

You moved in different circles. Vera had been at the wrong end of snobbishness, could sense it a mile off. Perhaps that’s what prompted her to persist. ‘You’d not heard any rumours, then, about Lily having a relationship with one of the staff here?’

‘I don’t listen to university gossip, Inspector.’ Which wasn’t any sort of answer at all. She turned back to the letter and left Vera to find her own way out.

Vera met up with Joe outside the Hancock Museum. They had to wait until a crocodile of small school children had been shepherded inside by teachers and parents. There was a dinosaur exhibition – reconstructed skeletons, models which moved. The adverts had been all over the city; tyrannosaurus heads leered out from posters on buses, the metro and shop fronts. The children were unusually quiet, overawed by the building, the thought of enormous beasts, Jurassic Park come to Newcastle.

Vera and Ashworth followed them in and stood in the lobby, enjoying the coolness of the museum, when Clive Stringer arrived to collect them.

‘Great, isn’t it?’ Ashworth said, watching the children disappear into the gallery. ‘Hooking the kids while they’re so young.’ A couple of years, Vera thought, and he’d be bringing his own lass here.

‘I don’t know.’ Clive blinked uncertainly behind thick round spectacles. ‘I don’t really deal with the public.’

His kingdom lay behind a wooden door, opened by a swipe card. There was a series of high-ceilinged rooms, rows of dusty cabinets. There seemed to be few other staff around. He led them into a workroom. It reminded Vera of the place in Wansbeck General where John Keating had performed the post-mortem on Lily Marsh. There was a long table in the middle, deep sinks at one end, the smell of chemicals and death. Though everything here was older, wood and enamel instead of stainless steel, and it didn’t have the scrubbed, sterile feel. The windows were so dirty that the light seemed filtered through them.

On a board lay the corpse of a black and white bird. Beside it a scalpel, wads of cotton wool, small metal bowls. Another sort of dissection.

‘Isn’t that a little auk?’

‘Yes. First winter. It was blown inland during those gales last November and found dead in a garden in Cramlington. The householder brought it in. I’ve had it in the freezer since then, but I want to do a cabinet skin.’ He looked at Ashworth, saw he didn’t understand the term. ‘We preserve the skin for research, not display. It’s kept here at the museum, a resource for students and scientists.’

Vera’s father, Hector, had been an amateur taxidermist. He’d worked on the kitchen table in the old station master’s house. He hadn’t bothered with cabinet skins, though. He claimed his interest was about science, but Vera had known he was deluding himself even then. He’d prepared mounted birds, always moorland species. Usually the object of his attention was a bird of prey, a trophy for whichever gamekeeper had killed it. That was art too in a way, she thought. At the end of his career the activity was illegal, but that had never bothered Hector. If anything, it had increased his pleasure and excitement. He’d been an egg collector too. When he died Vera had set fire to the whole collection. A huge bonfire in the garden. She’d drunk his favourite malt whisky and realized she wasn’t grieving at all. She’d just felt relief that he’d gone.

‘How long have you worked here?’ Ashworth was asking Stringer.