about a car breakdown and Lynne had to cut her off. ‘I’m sorry,’ the Bishop woman said again. ‘We’ve been held up by Gemma’s – Dr Wishart’s – absence. I can give you the details of the report now, if you want.’ Lynne made notes as the other woman spoke. Katya, according to Wishart’s report, was from East Siberia.
‘How certain is she?’ Lynne’s geography was rusty, but she had a feeling that ‘East Siberia’ covered an area that was considerably larger than the British Isles. ‘Can she be more specific?’ If they could pinpoint the area more closely, they might be able to identify Katya, assuming her family or friends had reported her missing.
‘You’ll need to talk to Gemma if you have any specific queries, but…’ There was the sound of pages turning. ‘She says, “The accent is consistent with the area of north-east Siberia.”’ She rattled out some technical detail about vowels and devoicing and intonation. Lynne made minimal responses as she thought about it. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go with the information. She thanked the woman, cutting her off in the middle of something about acoustic profiles, and rang off on the promise that the full report would be in the post that day.
She put the Katya file to one side. She could think about it again when the report came through – Monday now, probably. It was irritating. Academics tended to operate on a different timescale from other people.
It was nearly a month since ‘Katya’s’ death. There was very little chance of getting a line on the woman’s real identity. When the pathologist’s final report came through, her death might be formally recognized as a suicide, and she and her unborn child would lie in an unmarked grave in a foreign country. Some corner of a foreign field that is forever…where? In the absence of any obvious cause of death, in the absence of any identification, there was very little that the investigating officers could do.
Sheffield, Friday evening
It was dark by the time Roz got home. She lived on the east side of the city, away from the expensive residential suburbs. Pitsmoor had trees and quiet roads, rows of terraces and big, detached houses. Burngreave Cemetery, the small park and a recreation ground provided green spaces among the shops and houses and roads. But the area was run-down. Shop fronts were boarded up. Low property values meant that landlords left their rentals to decay. As the streets became more unkempt, graffiti started to appear on walls and bus stops. The signs of regeneration struggling in the city centre had made no impact here.
Pitsmoor suited her with its varied and varying community. And she had fallen in love with the house from the moment she saw it. She loved the square bays of the double front, the high hedge of privet and bramble and rambling roses, the stone lions that guarded the steps, the wide entrance hall and wooden stairway, the huge, flagged kitchen with the old range, the labyrinth of conservatory and outhouses that led from the back of the house to the double garage that reminded her that Pitsmoor had once been a place where the wealthy, or moderately wealthy, of the city lived. She even found the house next door an asset; a house like the one she lived in, but one that had stood empty for too long and had been vandalized into dereliction.
Everyone had said Roz was crazy when she bought the house. She’d been in Sheffield for three months, and knew she was going to stay for a while. ‘Not Pitsmoor!’ they’d said, and ‘Wait until you’ve had a chance to look round.’ But the house had reminded Roz of the house where she had lived with Nathan, and Pitsmoor had reminded her, just a bit, of the place she had left. She was happy.
She stood at her back door now, looking at the derelict house. A tree was growing out of the oriel window, and fringes of ivy and dead grasses hung over the eaves. On summer evenings, she could sit in the yard and watch the pigeons flying in and out of the holes in the roof where the slates had been removed by weather, time and local children. She shivered. It was getting cold. The moon was nearly risen now, and she had things to do. She went back inside.
She put bread under the grill to toast, and opened some beans. She wasn’t in a mood to cook. She ate a spoonful of beans out of the tin while she was waiting, leaning against the side of the cooker, her eye on the bread to catch it in that moment of transition from pale brown to charcoal. She wondered if Gemma was going to phone her, or if she should try and make contact herself. She remembered the tape that Gemma had been working on. The recorded voice had sounded emotionless, probably because the woman was concentrating hard on finding the right words. But she knew…Shit! The toast! She turned off the gas. The toast was just about retrievable. She tipped the beans into a pan and put it on the hob, dumped a plate on the table and took the toast over to the sink to scrape off the burnt bits.
She sat at the kitchen table to eat, staring at the window that had become a square of darkness. Friday night, and here she was alone in her house, eating tepid beans on toast, planning an evening’s work, and happy, contented, to be doing that. It seemed such a short time ago that she had been a student, and Friday night would have meant clubbing, hitting the town with her friends, going to parties, having fun. Maybe she’d tried to recapture that time with Luke.
Then there had been her time with Nathan. Friday night still meant the weekend, still meant special times, but it was time that they wanted to spend together or sometimes with friends…And then there had been the isolation of his illness. Their friends had tried, but a lot of them had disembarked. They hadn’t been able to cope, and in the end, nor had she. She twisted her wedding ring round her finger. ‘You find out who your true friends are,’ her mother had said philosophically.
And now, she was a successful research academic, well on her way up the ladder, and Friday night was just another evening – an evening without the immediate demands of the next day’s work, so one that could be used to catch up with longer term projects. Her book, for example; unimaginatively titled An Introduction to Forensic Phonology. She picked a couple of stray beans off her plate. She could try and get that tricky fifth chapter sorted out. She licked the tomato sauce off her fingers, washed her plate and the pan and left them to drain, then collected her briefcase and went into the downstairs room where she usually worked.
Privet pressed against the bay window, shutting out the light. The room was cool and cavernous, a huge mirror illuminating its shadows. The mirror had been left in the house by the previous owner. It was old, the gilt chipped, the glass slightly distorted and marked. The reflected room looked drowned, softened in the dim light. Roz stood at the far end of the table and saw her face a white blur in the shadows. Her gold-rimmed spectacles reflected the light and obscured her eyes. She took them off. She didn’t really need them. She untied her hair, and let it fall round her shoulders. The imperfections in the glass made the light waver like a candle flame, made her reflection look as though she was swimming through deep water, pale face and fair hair floating in the brown shadows. Rosalind. If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind. Nathan used to say that to her, Mozart on the tiny cassette player that was all they could afford, the gas fire combating the draughts from the ill-fitting windows and rattling doors of their flat. You are my Rosalind.
Work, she had work to do. She turned on the desk light, its pool of illumination dispelling the shadows in the mirror. She had brought one of the laptops from work, more powerful than her own machine. She wanted to try out some new software that Luke had recommended, as well as work on the book. She switched the machine on, and sorted through her disks while she waited for it to boot up. She realized, as she looked at the files on the machine, that this wasn’t the laptop she usually brought home, it was the new one, the one that Gemma had been using. She’d thought that Gemma had taken it to Manchester. She must have taken the older one. Maybe she hadn’t wanted the responsibility of the more expensive machine. Roz tried to imagine what Joanna would say if it got stolen or damaged, and decided that Gemma had made the right decision. That made her uneasy about the security in her own house. Break-ins were not
