Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [35]
Kincaide, meanwhile, was in the kitchen, leaning on the worktop and sending a text with some fast and ambidextrous thumb activity. ‘Hang on,’ he grunted to his younger colleague.
Goodhew flipped open an overhead cupboard, where he found the crockery. Apart from two mugs, the contents were all clearly from a standard issue everything-proof set. The taller mug was cream-coloured with the word ‘Chocolate’ curling across it, the other was brightly painted with the name ‘Lorna’. Not very revealing. He let the door snap shut.
Kincaide glanced up. ‘I’ve already done the cupboards.’
Goodhew took the hint and left the next one alone. ‘What about that calendar?’
‘Oh, yeah. Nothing much on it, but it can go with the other paperwork. There’s a box of it I’ve just moved to the top of the stairs.’
The calendar was the type with one square per day but no picture; it had come courtesy of Staples Office Supplies. The current month had only one entry, ‘Hair – 12.00’ on the 16th. If that was a good example of a month’s activity, ‘nothing much’ really would be an accurate description. Goodhew unhooked it from the wall and turned forward the pages from the back. When it came to their calendars, people were either flip and keep, or rip and bin, and he was pleased to see that Lorna had been with him on this one.
‘Oh boy,’ he sighed. Either her life was depressingly uneventful or she recorded her more interesting activities elsewhere.
He had turned right back to the start of the year before any entry caught his attention: 9th January – ‘Bryn to MOT car’. Goodhew read this just as Kincaide dropped his mobile back into his pocket.
‘Seen something?’
Goodhew frowned. ‘Don’t know, really. Did she have a car?’
Kincaide took the calendar, ‘I saw that too and checked with the others at the Excelsior, but they say no. She sold it apparently.’
Goodhew followed Kincaide out of the kitchen, and watched him drop the calendar into the document crate.
And later, as he walked towards home, he reminded himself that there could be numerous people called Bryn in this area. More than just the Bryn O’Brien who’d sat nearest the paint cupboard in primary school. He was the class practical joker, whom Gary couldn’t even remember speaking to, but had secretly admired. Bryn had made light of education, never buckling under the weight of expectation, always doing just enough to get by.
When Gary’s mother had switched him to a private school at the end of Year 6, he’d found himself reeling from the shock of going from the top of his state school class to being considered mediocre among his new peers. And, for the first couple of years, he gave Bryn credit for helping him through. Mentally he’d kept Bryn alongside him, imagining how Bryn would navigate the narrow ledge that was bottom of the class.
But the real Bryn was someone he knew next to nothing about. And the chances were it was a different Bryn, except that as he’d read that entry in the calendar, his memory had conjured up a single item of O’Brien family trivia: Bryn’s father had been a mechanic. And, when he factored that in, he knew that the odds narrowed dramatically.
The decision he therefore made, as he walked home, was a simple one: he would track down Bryn O’Brien. With any luck, he’d be meeting someone on first-name terms with Lorna.
FIFTEEN
Goodhew walked across Parker’s Piece towards home, a one-bedroomed, rooftop flat in Park Terrace. The building had once been a four-storey townhouse, but since the 1990s, the basement and first three floors had been converted into office space, so the only remaining living accommodation was Goodhew’s. He glanced up to his window, then walked down the short garden path and unlocked the heavy front door. It closed behind him with a solid and purposeful click, the sound always reminding