Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [101]
‘Who?’
He listed them: ‘Jackie, Victoria, then two I’ve just visited; Hayley Sellars and Wayne Thompson. I now wonder if the killer sent them to her as some kind of reminder. Maybe Lorna had done something to hurt all four of them.’
‘Does that put them on your list of suspects?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ he mused. ‘The killer would hardly include themselves in the mail shot.’
‘Who knows?’ she replied. ‘They say the best place to hide is in a crowd.
‘And what’s it got to do with what was written on her palms?’
‘Lorna probably wrote the words herself, you know?
‘Maybe,’ he muttered, as he abruptly found himself heading down another stagnant backwater. ‘That’s the problem: too many pissing maybes.’ He carried the tray through to the sitting room and his grandmother followed.
‘Now you’re swearing,’ she observed.
He sank into the chair again, and his tiredness returned. He smiled wearily. ‘I’m entitled to, it’s a belated attempt at misspent youth.’
She changed the subject. ‘Could that man Bryn have killed her?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Why not?’ she persisted.
Goodhew shrugged. ‘Gut feeling.’
She pressed him. ‘You’re adamant?’
‘Absolutely.’
She beamed. ‘And ten minutes ago I thought you were banging on my door because you didn’t know whether you could trust your own judgement any longer.’
Goodhew smiled tiredly. ‘Touché.’
His mind wandered and she left him uninterrupted with his thoughts. Ten minutes later, his grandmother left the room, although he barely noticed. In his mind he was reading the labels of the junk mail envelopes, flicking through them one by one.
Jackie Moran.
Victoria Nugent.
Hayley Sellars.
Wayne Thompson-Stark.
He added more envelopes, one for Richard Moran, another for Alice Moran and a third for Bryn O’Brien. That made seven.
He knew the police would soon be swarming all over Hayley and Wayne’s lives, dragging up all their worst memories. Hayley’s words drifted back to him; spoken in a quiet but determined voice. Lorna made everyone suffer. Her words rang with such certainty. Perhaps she was wrong, but she believed it.
He flicked through the imaginary envelopes again, but now there were ten. Colin Willis had one this time, so did Kincaide, and the tenth was for Mel.
Shit, it was like a Rubik’s cube, coming neatly together on one side, only to be jumbled up on another. Jumbled and blurred.
He shut his eyes and pictured the cube gently levitating and unravelling.
In the kitchen, Goodhew’s grandmother stared into the eye-level grill where the bread lay face up like a row of sunbathers catching the afternoon rays. She loved seeing the golden tan creep across the white slices. When the toast was uniformly brown, she stacked it on a plate, before stealing a glance into the sitting room. She watched until she was sure he really was asleep, then poured his tea down the sink and took her own mug into her bedroom.
She turned on the bedside radio, just loud enough to pick out the banter from the Heart FM DJ; at 5.55 a.m. there was no chance she was going to get back to sleep.
She glanced over at her late husband’s photo, then at the photo of Gary with his sister. What did he want to prove anyway? But she knew his trouble; he had inherited a little too much of his grandfather’s conscience. He had to learn to let go of the things that he couldn’t put right.
On hearing the jingle for the start of the news, she carefully turned up the volume.
‘A woman’s body has been found in the centre of Cambridge in what looks like a shocking repeat of the recent Midsummer Common murder of Lorna Spence. A student made the grim discovery in the early hours of this morning, and early unofficial reports are are not ruling out the possibility that the deaths may be connected.’
She swung her legs back off the bed and muttered under her breath, ‘So much for your sleep, Gary.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
As Marks spoke to the coroner’s office on his mobile, he turned away from the murder scene and found himself