to muddy the waters,’ he said, ‘but I can’t offhand think of one. Cara Hobson – remember Cara Hobson, Tina? – Cara Hobson had been dead for at least six hours when she was found. Now, if the Eliot woman is right, and she heard someone in the flat at one – rather than midnight – then it wasn’t Cara Hobson.’
Tina felt her face flush. She hadn’t thought of that – it was so blindingly obvious, and she hadn’t even thought about it. She saw Farnham register her response. He knew.
‘If you screw up again, you’re off the case, right? You’re still on it now because I’m short-staffed. Understood?’
She nodded.
He kept his eyes on her, tapping his pen on the desk. Then he relaxed slightly. ‘Anything in the stuff from Hobson’s flat?’
The sudden switch of direction confused her for a moment, and she stammered as she tried to reorganize her thoughts. ‘There’s this,’ she said, holding out her notebook.
He looked at her. ‘Yes?’
She flushed. Get a grip, woman! ‘The flat,’ she said. ‘Cara’s flat.’ She told him what the woman from the Trust had said.
He frowned. ‘So she was living there unofficially?’ he said.
Tina nodded. ‘Like a squat,’ she said.
He thought about it and shook his head slowly. ‘Doesn’t make sense. She’d need keys to the outer doors. Someone must have given her those.’ He balanced his pen between his hands. ‘I wonder why no one spotted it…OK,’ he said after a minute, ‘find out who had keys, who had access to them. She must have got them from somewhere. Anything else?’
She showed him the reviews that West had found, with the scribbled note to ‘J’. Farnham read through them quickly and raised his eyebrows. ‘You know about this stuff, Barraclough,’ he said. ‘What’s all this death stuff got to do with anything?’ He looked irritated.
Tina hadn’t thought of herself as an art expert. ‘It’s…they’ve always done work about death,’ she said. ‘This kind of thing is fashionable, I suppose. You know, Damien Hirst and dead cows and things like that.’ Full marks for erudition, Tina.
‘OK.’ Farnham rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He looked like a man with a bad headache. ‘If these are Massey’s, we need to know what they were doing in her flat.’
Tina felt herself slump as she went back to the incident room. Her eyes felt heavy and her head felt full of cotton wool. She checked her watch. If she tried an artificial boost now, she probably wouldn’t be hit by the come-down too badly until she came off shift – only a couple of hours to go. She picked up her bag and headed for the ladies.
The classroom was noisy and it smelled of chalk. Kerry laid her arm across the desk and rested her head on it. She was bored. She yawned and sucked her pen.
‘Are we keeping you awake, Kerry?’ Mr Nixon. There was a flurry of giggles around her.
‘Sorry, sir,’ Kerry said, sitting up again. He was looking at someone else now, so she slumped forward over her book. The electronic beep of a mobile phone penetrated the voices and the scraping chairs. Kerry jumped, and felt her face going red. She’d forgotten to turn her phone off. Mr Nixon looked round. ‘Whose was that?’ he said. ‘Come on, you know the rules. Switch it off.’ He looked round the room. If he saw whose it was, he might confiscate it. Kerry had kept her head down, praying that another message wouldn’t come through. Then some of the lads started up, and Mr Nixon went across to deal with them. Kerry breathed again, and slipped her hand into her bag to switch off the phone. She saw Stacy looking at her accusingly, and glared at her to keep her quiet. The maths lesson dragged on.
At break, she went straight to the toilets. Stacy trailed after her. ‘That was your phone, Kerry, I heard it.’ Kerry looked in the mirror, pretending to be fiddling with her hair. ‘I saw Martin Smith at the bus stop this morning,’ Stacy said, and giggled. She wasn’t really interested in the phone. She wanted to talk about Martin Smith. She had been going on about the Year 12 boy for weeks. Year 12s didn’t look at the girls from Stacy and Kerry’s year, Kerry could have told her that. She stood in the queue in a jitter of impatience as Stacy checked her make-up in the little mirror she carried round with her, fiddled with her hair, talking on all the time. Kerry wanted to scream.
When a cubicle finally came free, she locked herself in and checked the phone. The message icon was flashing. She pressed ‘read’, her fingers clumsy with impatience. The words ran across the screen before she could take them in properly. She pressed ‘read’ again. ITS ABOUT YOUR DAD FDAY SAME PLACE 5.00.
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