Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [32]
‘So do lots of women,’ Goodhew pointed out. ‘Do you happen to have a photograph?’
Richard nodded. ‘Hang on.’
But Alice was already flicking through a small sheaf of papers that she’d taken from her handbag. ‘I’ve got one here.’
She slid a colour six-by-four print across the desk; Goodhew picked it up and held it midway between himself and Kincaide. Three people leaning across a restaurant table for the benefit of the camera: Richard, Alice and this morning’s corpse. ‘I’m very sorry, but this appears to be the woman we found earlier today.’
There was a moment of nothingness, no reaction from either of them. It was just a second, but it seemed to last longer.
Then Alice gasped, and her hand shot up to her mouth to suppress the sound. Richard gave a grunt, like all the air had been thumped from him. Then he pressed his face into both his hands, as if suddenly desperate for privacy. His shoulders rose and fell as he drew heavy breaths.
Kincaide looked at Goodhew, raising his hand in a ‘wait’ signal. Goodhew nodded and they silently waited.
FOURTEEN
The rest of the day passed slowly. It seemed like a huge contradiction: one person had killed, another had been killed, and yet there was no fast track past the everyday snags. No one filled out forms any faster, or made walking quicker, and the pavements never grew shorter. So, while each point of the investigation was important, the lines that joined the dots were the same old, same old.
Goodhew had accompanied Richard Moran to the morgue. Alice had waited there with her brother and, from time to time took his hand. Richard stayed composed, but Goodhew detected a greater restraint in Alice herself. It didn’t mean she was less concerned, of course; in fact, he guessed the difference between them had taken many years, possibly a lifetime, to forge.
When Richard reached out for his sister’s hand, it seemed to be an automatic movement, almost a reflex. And just as his facial muscles seemed accustomed to running through a gamut of expressions from doubt to fear, so hers ranged only from completely expressionless to a look designed to urge him to hold it in. Clearly she wasn’t the heart-on-the-sleeve type.
And the silence maintained had been heavy. Without any doubt, they all knew that the identification would be positive, and the certainty of that meant that Lorna Spence’s flat was already being searched. But talking about it as a fait accompli seemed like wishing her dead. Even though she was.
Goodhew turned his thoughts to Lorna’s flat. Kincaide would be there already, methodically working his way through her things.
Goodhew himself wished he could be in both places at once. He wanted the chance to absorb the feel of her there before her death fully settled in a dusty layer. It often struck him that the last breaths of a life stayed in the deceased’s home long after leaving the body. And, although in his conscious mind he knew it was illogical to assign human attributes to buildings and inanimate objects, his subconscious had never quite been able to let go of the idea that some places waited for a familiar footstep or scent or routine, and that the last remnants of the person were only lost when the feeling of abandonment eventually set in.
So he wondered what Kincaide was uncovering there, but he also knew that he wanted to be present, here, when Richard and Alice looked down at Lorna’s face and made the leap from being told she was dead to actually absorbing the reality. He knew that was the moment when spontaneous emotional responses often illuminated both the deceased and their nearest and dearest better than bright lights or an inquisition.
Eventually, they were called in to view the body, and afterwards Goodhew wondered what he’d really learnt from this. Alice stood further away, as if three extra feet of floor space would be enough to leave her detatched. Her spine was poker-straight and her arms were crossed, Morticia-style. The only change