Cambridge Blue (7 page)

‘I guess so.’

Lorna reran her last sentence in her head, realizing she’d slurred it, and for some reason ‘have-I-missed’ had coalesced into a single word. She straightened and turned her back to rest against the railings. She gazed in the direction of the Four Lamps roundabout and tried to work out what felt wrong. It couldn’t be just cold, fog and tiredness that were making her suddenly disorientated. She wanted to go home but her feet wouldn’t move.

Instead of walking away, she stood fixed in the same spot, a look of mild bewilderment dawning on her face. ‘I feel ill,’ she muttered, but her companion never even replied. Lorna wanted to repeat herself, but was overtaken by the feeling that her brain could no longer connect with her mouth.

She felt giddy and needed to steady herself. Her left hand moved, it rose from her side and drifted back towards the top rail. And like the slow topple of a felled redwood, the rest of her followed, staggering back, the railing all that stopped her from hitting the ground.

It was then that she had a moment of clarity, an instant where she knew how and why she’d been drugged, and the enormity of her fatal miscalculation. She tried to reach out, to beg for her life. She managed to gasp, ‘I’m sorry,’ just as two hands flew forward and, with a single push to the sternum, sent her toppling over the railings and on to the pile of rubbish.

She landed on her back in a crumpled heap, almost parallel to the footpath, with her head nearest the ground and her hair trailing in the mud. The other figure squatted and they stared at each other from either side of the bottom rung.

Lorna heard the words hissed at her: ‘Do you know why?’

She knew, but she couldn’t reply. She attempted to nod instead, but her head wobbled through an uncontrolled arc and her arms and legs twitched with a life of their own. Lorna tried to stay conscious, guessing she’d been overdosed and hoping that she would be found before it killed her. To stand a chance now, she just needed to be left for dead.

But no one was going anywhere. Lorna watched as first a plastic carrier bag, then a length of string, were brought out of a pocket. A little more consciousness suddenly returned; her eyes widened and her breath came like the little huff children use to steam up windows. A pair of hands reached through the railings and dragged the plastic bag over the top of Lorna’s head, like a swimming cap.

Lorna’s heart was beating so loudly that she barely heard the words spoken to her, the words that were merely intended to add to her suffering. Then the bag was pulled over her face and she felt the string being knotted at her throat.

Inside her head she was screaming out,
Oh, God help me.
She breathed in and the bag was sucked into her mouth, then out again as she exhaled.
I’m sorry
. On her second breath, she knew the supply of air was already used up. Her chest rose and fell, burning with the effort.
Please no more.
Her heart beat louder.
Please, please.
Then, eventually, it stopped.

NINE

Goodhew woke at 5.25 a.m. and hoped that the early bird really would catch the worm. He had no desire to spend more time than necessary trailing around the back streets and squats of Cambridge, hunting for the elusive Ratty.

He was pissed off with Marks, and too familiar with Ratty’s activities to believe that the mission he’d been sent on was any more useful than being sent to stores for the clerk’s long stand.

Ratty was about five-five in height and somewhere between twenty-five and forty – Goodhew guessed nearer twenty-five, despite the pock-marked skin, receding hair and sunken eyes that argued older. Ratty had once boasted that he’d been on the stage as a child, and then attempted to prove the point by belting out the first lines of ‘Unchained Melody’. It wasn’t a bad performance, but his liquorice-stump remnants of teeth hadn’t done him any favours; in the end he’d merely been cautioned for disturbing the peace.

From time to time, he vanished completely, and on the first few occasions his acquaintances had assumed he lay rotting somewhere after a fix too far. But he’d always reappear and, assuming the role of an oracle for the city’s nightlife, he would proclaim to have witnessed virtually every major event that appeared on the police station’s radar. Often his information was remarkably accurate, but Goodhew guessed that Ratty was no more than a top-class eavesdropper, sucking up drunken gossip the way some of his down-and-out cronies hoarded newspapers or carrier bags.

OK, so in this case it was the rape victim who had identified someone resembling Ratty, but with the DNA match and the victim’s statement, Ratty – if found and if cooperative – would still be pretty redundant; he just wasn’t the kind of witness that juries trusted.

Goodhew’s face tingled in the cold air; clear spring nights sucked the warmth from the flat open streets and left early-morning Cambridge encased in a frosty shell. He wiggled his nose, trying to restore the circulation there, hoping it would stop running. It didn’t, so he dabbed at it with the only square of clean tissue he could find in his jacket pocket.

The 6 a.m. sun stretched gradually over the rooftops and touched the second storeys of the locked shops and cafés. At ground level, however, there was still no hint of dawn as he walked down the grey slab passageway of Bradwell’s Court towards the coach station: the master bedroom for the city’s down-and-outs.

He kept to the centre of the pedestrian walkway, equidistant from the doorways on either side. Only the newsagent at the far end would reveal any official activity this early; all other signs of life came from the homeless.

No one occupied the blankets heaped at the entrance to East Anglia Pet Supplies on his left this morning, but on his right, a blue nylon sleeping bag in the portico of the discount book store stirred and groaned. The black-and-tan terrier curled beside it scratched, turned over, then resettled itself against its master’s stomach. Even with the occupant’s head buried under the covers, Goodhew knew it wasn’t Ratty. Too tall for a start. The man and his dog were the only ones camped out in Bradwell’s Court itself.

Goodhew came out the other side to find the bus bays empty, apart from the end space, where the first London coach of the day still waited for non-existent passengers, its engine idling.

Logically, Goodhew should have turned right, past the first bus, and walked a circuit back to the shopping centre, via the smaller, edge-of-town stores. He glanced out, past the coach station and over Christ’s Piece, where tree-lined paths crossed the common land and late daffodils sprouted. The sun had melted the frost and the grass stood bright and dewy in the growing daylight.

It was a much more appealing prospect than poking at cardboard boxes behind office outbuildings. He could check for sleepers on the park benches. He never understood how anyone could survive outside when the day’s warmth evaporated from the Fens, and he expected each curled-up body to have died in the night, frozen to its draughty slatted bed.

But from where he stood, each bench appeared unoccupied, and he decided to check the public toilets instead before walking further.

They were housed in an old red-brick square block with individual cubicles along each side, and had been recently refurbished with a range of gadgets, including cisterns that automatically flushed upon the opening of the doors, and soap and water dispensers that squirted and sprayed without any actual physical contact. It would only take a few more such advances in technology, and bums wouldn’t even be touching seats.

Goodhew checked the doors one by one and found that none were occupied, they were obviously too compact for even the dispossessed to spend the night in. It was as he turned the final corner that he finally found him.

Ratty stood, tilted back, with his shoulder blades against the outside wall. He was smoking a roll-up, holding it between index finger and thumb as it sat in the centre of the tunnel made by his other curled-over fingers. Goodhew almost felt that Ratty was waiting for him, perhaps resigned to being tracked down and choosing to get it over with.

Even when Goodhew spoke, Ratty continued to stare vacantly across Christ’s Piece and Goodhew quickly deduced that he hadn’t emerged from the cooperative side of his sleeping bag that morning. ‘Did you know I was looking for you, Rat?’

Ratty spoke slowly, his voice rasping like bone against bone. ‘’Course I did.’

Yeah, of course
, thought Goodhew. ‘OK,’ he said, then paused, waiting for Ratty to turn his head and look at him. He didn’t. ‘We have a witness who saw you.’

Ratty blew out a thin plume of smoke. ‘Oh yeah, doing what?’

‘Nothing, really, but you were out near the airfield. My guess is that you were heading for that lake off Coldhams Lane when she walked past. A few minutes later she was assaulted. Did you hear about it?’

This time Ratty looked directly at Goodhew. ‘We’ve all heard about the Airport Rapist.’

‘Did you see a man following her?’

Ratty shook his head.

‘That’s not an answer, Rat.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you have your code. When you mean no, you say no – shaking your head is merely avoiding the question.’

Ratty shook his head again. ‘You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, you are, too. Lucky-fucking-you, that’s all I say. I’ll tell you about it, Gary.’ He had emphasized the ‘Gary’ and then stopped speaking which, word-wise, was more economical than saying
I know stuff you don’t know.
Goodhew waited, almost hypnotized by this macabre spectre trying to stare him out.

Despite Ratty’s stillness, his eyes were dark and hollow, and he seemed even less substantial than he’d been the last time they’d met: he’d always been a shell of a man, but now the walls were thinner. Sooner or later, the drugs inevitably took their toll, and Goodhew could see that Ratty now viewed the real world from the other end of an ever-extending tunnel.

Ratty ground the half-inch butt of his cigarette between his fingertips until it flaked to the ground. ‘I’m not talking to you. Right now, I’m
nothing,
and when things go bad that’s the best thing to be.’ He fanned out his nicotined fingers. ‘Trouble is like poison. You go near it and you get infected.’

‘That’s deep.’

‘What, coming from someone like me who’s never been out of it?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Well, there’s trouble and there’s trouble. I always have some, but only my own. And I know all about other people’s, but there’s a line.’ He turned his face away and scraped his thumbnail down the wall by his shoulder. ‘Can’t see it, can you? But it’s there, trust me. On one side is me, and what’s mine, and over there is other people’s shit. What I don’t do is anything that takes me over
there.
I can see what’s going on, but I don’t visit, if you get my drift.’

‘You don’t get involved?’

‘People get possessive about trouble, so they only want help on their own terms. And if they don’t want it fixed, getting in the middle of it is dangerous, even if it looks safe. That’s another problem: it can seem like nothing, but then—’ He walked his fingers from his side of the line to the other, then rubbed his hand across the wall in a small circle. ‘The line’s gone and you’re fucked.’

Ratty pushed himself away from the wall, swinging his skinny body round until he faced Goodhew squarely. ‘So I look, but I don’t touch. I don’t let it seep over me.’

He didn’t seem high, he emanated nothing but stale tobacco and paranoia. ‘Touch it and it
stains
you, Gary. Remember that.’

Getting Ratty to make a statement was clearly not something to look forward to. Goodhew wondered if he could persuade Marks to drop the whole idea; this was unlikely to be the witness to swing a court case in any direction it wasn’t already headed. He sighed, but Ratty didn’t seem to notice.

What path had the younger version of Ratty stumbled down to end up in such a bleak cul-de-sac? Goodhew looked away from him, and the first person he saw was a distant cyclist, standing up out of the saddle, pedalling furiously towards him. He saw a flash of orange swing from behind his back and realized it was the paper boy from the bus station. The kid was short; he’d noticed him on other mornings, struggling with his sack and the high seat of his adult bike. Had that been Ratty once, striving to get somewhere in life?

Ratty was still talking, but Goodhew ceased to listen. The boy’s sack swung wildly as his shoulders swayed from left to right in an effort to move faster still. He was about a hundred yards away and his face burnt red from under his mop of blond hair. His mouth was moving. Shouting something, or just gulping air?

Goodhew made a single instinctive step in the cyclist’s direction, hairs rising on the back of his neck: he knew something was wrong.

At fifty yards, he heard the breathy squawk of the boy’s voice, all the words but one mangled to nothing in the gap between them. ‘Quick!’ was the one word he recognised.

At twenty yards, the boy became more clear. ‘There’s a body.’

He lurched to a halt next to Goodhew, wobbled as his foot reached for the pavement. Goodhew grabbed his arm as he toppled from his bike and held the boy upright until he’d disentangled his other foot from the frame. It clattered to the ground and lay with the back wheel spinning in the weak sunshine.

Sweat pinned a veil of hair flat across his forehead, while the rest stuck up at all angles. He waved his hand back excitedly in the direction he’d come, clinging to Goodhew’s jacket with the other hand as he fought to catch his breath. ‘I recognise you, you’re police, aren’t you? Up there,’ he gasped. ‘Up there, on Midsummer Common.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘This end.’

‘Hang on.’ Goodhew spun round to see Ratty retreating back towards the city centre. ‘I need a statement,’ he called after him.

Ratty turned and walked back several steps. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he shouted.

Goodhew turned his attention back to the boy, whose right arm was still partly raised in the act of pointing. The most obvious sign of distress was his trembling hands; beyond that he didn’t look too bad. Goodhew peered into his face: not quite ready to pass out from shock, he decided. ‘Can you show me yourself?’ he asked gently.