Cracking Open a Coffin

‘Just bucking myself up. I felt I needed it after what I’d been through.’

Philippa knew what was required of her, there had been a raid on a shop in Spinnergate Tube station and Lydia had been there. ‘Is that the Spinnergate thing? I heard you saw something.’

‘Saw something! I was there, my dear. I was just walking up to buy some tights in that little boutiquey place as you come up the escalator when I heard the noises and saw the assistant trying to fight off a youth, with another boy just coming up to attack.’

‘How awful for you. What did you do?’

‘Just stood still. One youth pushed past me, that one got away and the other would have done, but he was absolutely fallen upon by the most splendid girl in a kind of leather tracksuit, she hit the second boy and knocked him right down. Skull-cracking,’ said Lydia with some pleasure. ‘Ambulances and bodies all round.’

‘It must have been exciting.’ Lydia had all the luck.

‘Of course, I was worried for my voice.’ She touched her throat, draped in a silk scarf. A Dufy print in pink and blue, Philippa noted, and therefore probably from Hermès. Lydia always had the best. ‘That’s where the strain always shows. Otherwise, I should have run after our defender and offered her a lift home. But she cleared off … motorbike. Lovely young creature … not beautiful, plain of face, but a marvellous flow of muscles.’ Lydia gave the beaming smile that suited her plump face. ‘I shan’t say I saw her hit him, though, she might get into trouble if he dies, and she was such a creature.’

Philippa listened: her friends’ sexual inclinations were always a subject of interest to her, but she decided now, possibly with a shade of regret as she herself admitted with shame, that Lydia’s emotion was purely æsthetic.

‘I wonder if she can sing?’ she asked, her chorus line of Valkyries being always on her mind.

‘Shouldn’t think so, dear,’ said Lydia, ‘but I saw some marvellous soft leather jeans in Bond Street that would just do for Siegfried.’ Except that he was about six feet round the waist. ‘I must take my little snack home. What are you getting, dear, something nice?’

‘Pretty nice,’ said Philippa, not willing to admit to an economical choice.

From the back of the shop, Max called, ‘Here is your vegetarian terrine, Mrs Darbyshire.’

‘I thought you’d given that up, Phil,’ said Lydia, clutching her luxuries to her ample bosom. ‘Mustn’t stint on food, you need building up.’

Philippa ground her teeth and watched her Brunnhilde depart. Tired, she walked home. On the way she nodded and smiled at a passing young constable on the beat. You never knew, and with searching eyes like that he would make a very visual Hagen, and with such a chest, he must have a voice. She gave herself a shake, she was getting obsessed with Wagner.

That evening, that same young, sharp-eyed constable saw the blue and white sweater as he walked on the river path by the old foundry works. It was a well-known spot for the river to deliver its burdens.

The young man picked the garment up, saw the label and recognized it for an expensive article. Missoni, said the label, and a discerning girlfriend (she was a barrister and they had met in court) had educated him about the value of that name.

He knew at once it was something that could be important. When he saw the initial on the front, he connected it instantly with the missing girl Dean.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_eb434206-5342-5d70-b064-a6f82ffe36ec)

Day Three to Day Seven

Time passed, a slow, and painful passage for those closely concerned with the two missing students. Sir Thomas kept his appointments and tried to avoid the sympathetic comments of his colleagues as the story got out. He preferred not to discuss it. His wife, a distinguished physician, flew home from Berlin where she had been giving a series of lectures. He would have preferred not to discuss it with her too, but that was not to be.

She refused to be met at the airport and drove herself home in her own car.

‘I hope you had it in the long stay car park,’ said Tom Blackhall.

‘I won’t even answer that one.’ Victoria Blackhall travelled light, just one bag suspended from her shoulder.

‘Cost a fortune otherwise.’ This was about the level of their communication at the moment. If they got in too deep there were things that might be said that were better left unsaid.

‘You need therapy, Tom,’ she said, going into the hall. It was long and spacious, with an impressive stretch of carpeting and a few good pieces of furniture, all of which belonged to the university, but the pictures on the walls, a Freud and a Sturrage, belonged to Victoria and were probably worth more than all the furnishings put together. She disliked the furniture, calling it fake Georgian, which was unfair as one or two of the pieces had scraps of authentic old woodwork melded into their carcasses. ‘Speech therapy.’ She dumped the big soft piece of Louis Vuitton on the floor. ‘And if it had cost a fortune, it would have been my fortune.’ She knew it irked him that her income, all earned, was considerably larger than his. In the Blackhall household, money spoke. It defined status and pecking rights.

‘Can we have a truce?’

‘Done.’ She held out her hand. She was always the less aggressive of the two, though quick to defend her rights.

‘How was the conference?’

‘What I want to know about,’ said Victoria carefully, ‘is Martin. But since you’re asking, the meeting was great and I was great.’

‘Martin …’ Her husband hesitated. ‘No news.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

He hesitated again. ‘I don’t think it’s good.’

‘I don’t either … What do the police say?’

‘They don’t say.’

‘I must get unpacked. I need some clean clothes … I bought you some German brandy … it’s probably horrible but you used to like it.’

A long time ago that had been, before the honours and horrors of his position had fallen upon him. Fallen? No, not fallen like the gentle dew from heaven, but bitterly and fiercely struggled for. Part of the trouble, really.

The autumn sun poured into their bedroom. ‘Damn those thin curtains, they don’t hide a thing.’ Victoria yanked down a blind which had been installed at her own expense. Curtains in this house were a sore point with her. A later generation would discover that the handsome pair of red silk damask curtains in the large reception room downstairs were a fake, just for show, they could not be pulled together, money having run out when the decorators got to the curtaining. The light revealed the shadows under her eyes and the lines and hollows a sleepless night had brought her. Victoria was older by a little than her husband and the years had treated her less well.

As she unpacked, Victoria said: ‘He could be suicidal … I have wondered about it.’

‘Martin is quite normal,’ said Tom fiercely. ‘You’re not a psychiatrist.’

‘You learn to observe in my job.’

‘I know much more about students than you do, my dear. You think you do, but you don’t.’

‘I don’t want to believe he’s dead, but I just do. I think Martin is dead.’ She put her hands to her face. ‘Oh God, I can’t bear this. I do love him.’

‘I know you do. So do I.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and drew her head on to his shoulder. The truce was holding.

Suddenly she raised her head and looked. ‘You’re keeping something back, I can tell. What is it?’

‘Suicide might be the best of it,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Martin is suspected of doing away with the girl.’

‘She may not be dead … Who suspects him?’

‘James Dean for one … Probably the police too, but they aren’t saying.’

Or if they didn’t think it now, then they would as soon as they remembered about Virginia Scott. They must have remembered now, the police were good at remembering that sort of thing, their computers told them—would tell them—that Martin had been her friend too.