The walker, p.8
The Walker, page 8
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Rita. ‘Covent Garden. We can look at the markets there. Or we could do both — take the Piccadilly Line to Covent Garden, then walk back to Trafalgar Square.’
‘Can’t we walk all the way?’ asked Nell.
Rita rolled her eyes to heaven. ‘This isn’t little old Exeter, you know. You can’t just start walking one side of the city and expect to come out on the other half an hour later. It could take two hours to walk to Covent Garden.’
‘So?’
‘So we’re catching the tube.’
It was all right in the tube, really. Nell felt a bit tense, especially when a great crowd of people got in at Knightsbridge, but she concentrated hard on the advertisements opposite her. One was for the Brooke Street Bureau. It showed just the feet of two girls talking to each other, but wearing beautiful knee-length boots and maxi coats.
‘What would you pay for a pair of boots like that?’ she asked Rita.
‘Oh — twelve quid at least. I know this place where you might get a pair for ten. I’ll take you.’
‘Okay. Maybe when my grant comes in.’
‘You’re going to have to buy clothes for university, you know. Anyway, you used to love shopping.’
Nell pulled at her old navy T-shirt. ‘I suppose I can’t go through the autumn term in this. Perhaps I should get one of those coats, do you think?’
‘In a few weeks. But it’s still summer. I’ll find something for you in the markets that won’t cost much. I know what you need.’
Rita was true to her word. When they got to the markets, she went to work in earnest, flipping through racks of droopy shirts on wire hangers and turning over piles of jumble. Julie stopped to watch a busker who was eating fire, bending his head back at an alarming angle as he pushed the flaming stick into his mouth. Nell wandered over to the flower stall. When her mother bought flowers in Adelaide, they were tied into neat little bunches of carefully mixed colours, so that you could take them home and just stick them in a vase on the table. Here, they were piled up in dense heaps, tumbling onto the floor, where they got tramped on and shredded. She picked one up to rescue it, then collected several more, choosing them one by one from the chaotic mass on the table. They were white carnations, with tinges of pink on the petals. Soon she had a great armful of them and had just paid for them when Rita came bounding up.
‘Perfect, absolutely perfect!’
Nell saw a flash of brilliant red, before something was pushed over her hair. Rita turned her by the shoulders so she faced a reflecting window, in which she saw a girl in a red beret with clouds of dark hair around her shoulders and an armful of white flowers.
‘See?’ said Rita. ‘Oh, I wish I had a camera!’
‘You wanna picture, eh?’ A tubby American in a safari suit and white hat, grinning from ear to ear, made his way up to them.
‘Here. I’ll take your picture. Just wait while I put a new film in here, because I can’t let you take this one away with you — my wife wouldn’t be very happy about that, not when it’s got the one of her on London Bridge that she’s busting to show to all the neighbours when she gets back home. Okay now, get happy!’
The flash went off several times.
‘The two of you together? Oh, three of you, eh? Say, are you sisters?’
Julie giggled. ‘Well, as a matter of fact—’
‘Yes,’ interrupted Rita. ‘Now—you must let me pay you for the film.’
‘Oh no, I couldn’t let you do that. How about you just let me have my picture taken with you, eh, girls? Come on now, huddle.’ He handed the camera to the boy serving on the flower stall. ‘Here. Would you mind? Before my wife comes back and finds me with the ladies. Shame to waste the rest of the film. It’ll be a souvenir for you, right? Very good! And now a couple more of the one in the red beret. You know what, you look a picture holding those flowers. You should be in Paris!’
He wound the film on, opened the camera and handed over the little yellow cylinder.
‘Here y’are. Worth a thousand dollars. You made my day, ladies.’ He raised his hat in farewell as a woman with bright gold hair and spectacles to match bustled up and grabbed his arm.
Nell was transformed by the flowers and the beret, which kept the ragged corkscrews of hair back from her face. Everyone looked at her and she found she liked it. She felt like a completely different person.
12
The residence hall was an ugly red brick building with patterns of paler brick set into it, but this was the only attempt Briony could see at any kind of decoration. Inside, the place was bleak and brutally functional: no carpets, rugs, curtains or pictures; just bare concrete floors and badly plastered walls showing several generations of paint. It looked as though you could do the cleaning with a firehose.
A flight of narrow concrete stairs with a rusting metal rail led up to the next floor. High-spirited undergraduates were not going to be sliding down that. At the top of the stairs was a crossroads of narrow corridors, with the way ahead of her leading to a dark wooden door that had WARDEN painted on it in bronze letters and, underneath, the name S J Perrin written in large italics on an ancient square of cardboard. She knocked and watched the shuffling movements of the inmate’s approach through its milky glass panel.
The warden was an elderly man — over sixty, Briony guessed — and his heavily lined face seemed to be working in several directions as she introduced herself and her business.
‘Detective Inspector, eh? My word. So you’re the police, are you? I thought there was supposed to be some bigwig from Scotland Yard in charge of the investigation. Cup of tea?’
‘Do you have any coffee?’
‘Oh yes. I should say so.’ Breathing heavily, he reached down to forage on a low shelf. ‘I should have guessed. The younger generation don’t drink tea any more, do they? Here it is. Gone a bit sticky, I’m afraid, but if you give it a good scrape with the spoon it should come out all right. Do you mind putting your own in the cup? I never know how strong to make it. Sugar?’
‘Just one. What can you tell me about a student called Alan Logan?’
‘I can tell you he’s not here very much for a start. Supposed to be studying for exams, but if he is he doesn’t do it in his room. Shall I put some hot water in that for you? He failed his second year but they let some of them resit at the end of the summer vacation, which means they can go on into third year when term starts. I’m pretty sure the milk’s all right, but give it a sniff before you pour, just in case. My guess is exams are the last thing on his mind at the moment.’
‘Why would you say that?’
Slurping his tea noisily, the warden sat back heavily in his chair, then fixed on her with his faded blue eyes.
‘You’re young to be a detective. Do they have many women detectives?’
‘A few. Women are a very important part of the Met — the Metropolitan Police Force.’
‘I know what the Met is. Women’s Lib, eh? Seems to be everywhere, but I didn’t think the coppers would be so quick to take it up.’
‘Women were being recruited into the Met long before Germaine Greer hit the headlines. Haven’t you heard of Superintendent Becke?’
‘Who’s he, then?’
‘She. Shirley Becke. The most senior woman in the British police. Retired a couple of years ago. She spent her whole career recruiting women. But I’m getting you off the subject, Mr Perrin. You were going to tell me about Alan Logan. You said exams would be the last thing on his mind. What did you mean by that?’
‘Not much, tell you the truth. If you want my honest opinion, he’s not the person you’re looking for. I get to know them pretty well, the young fellers around here. He’s a mixed up kid, Alan. Lazy. Gone a bit off the rails. He’s the type who needs a job with strict hours and simple responsibilities. He can’t cope with the degree, so he smokes that funny stuff all day long. Pot. And he can’t cope with the fact he’s going to disappoint his father by failing. His father was here before him, in 1948 — I been here since just after the war, you see, twenty-five years — which is why I know the story a bit. But I tell you, it’s a common enough story.’
‘What about Eddie Cannel?’
‘How many names you got on that list Miss, er — sorry — Inspector Williams? You see, I think you may be wasting your time. Like I say, I get to know the lads here pretty well and I can tell you there’s no one on the residence list now who would be capable of doing what was done to Professor Godwin. I heard about it from Colin Oldroyd. He was in a terrible state, poor man.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘Oh, none of the gory details — he said he’d been asked to keep them to himself. But he said it was the work of a sadist. There’s no one like that here. Not now.’
Briony wondered how shrewd the warden’s judgment was on this. Good natured people often had difficulty believing anyone around them could be dangerous and, as she’d learned at Hendon, it was common for murderers to be people well trusted by those who knew them. She decided to try another tack.
‘You said there’s no one on the residence list now who might commit a crime like this. Has there ever been, that you can remember?’
The old man suddenly got up from his chair and started looking about him, patting the pockets of his jacket as he did so.
‘Matches. What have I done with them? Mind if I have a cigarette?’
‘Not at all. Take your time, Mr Perrin, but if there is anyone you can think of…’
‘Well, there is, as a matter of fact. Now what did I do with the darn things? Just a minute. I’ll have to see if I’ve got some in here.’
There was another pause while he raked through a drawer and fished out a squashed box of matches, then lit a cigarette from a pack of Players Number 6 on the table.
‘Since Colin came and talked to me — day before yesterday, that was — it’s been bothering me. There was someone a few years ago. 1967 was when he left. Yes, I’m pretty sure. He took his exams in June that year and failed. Never heard any more of him since. I expected to, mind. For a couple of years I was afraid he’d turn up again, but he never did. Touch wood.’
Briony had written down the date and sat with her pencil poised as Perrin frowned at the desktop in front of him. She decided to prompt.
‘So his name, Mr Perrin?’
‘His name was Mathew Quin. He’s the only one I’ve ever had here who I’d say had a really nasty streak. Well, maybe I should put that a bit more strongly. A lot of young lads have got a nasty streak, but it’s just like a dash of pepper in the system. On balance, they’re all right, unless they’re the worse for drink. I’d say Quin was a nasty piece of work. He was a bit young for university. A bright boy, you know. Got his A levels at sixteen and did so well he persuaded them to take him in the following year.’ Perrin dragged slowly on his cigarette. ‘He certainly was bright, I’ll say that for him. Used to spook me the way he knew everything.’
‘What kinds of things?’
‘Well, all the comings and goings round here, for a start. He seemed to know everyone’s business and remember everything about them. I reckon any time of the day or night, if you’d asked him he could have told you exactly who was in and who was out. And half the ones who were out, he’d know where they’d gone.’
Perrin stopped and the pause grew longer as he sat staring ahead of him. Briony wasn’t sure if he’d lost the thread or decided there was something he didn’t want to tell her and she knew that it was important to keep the casual tone in her voice as she prompted.
‘What first made you see him as different from the other students?’
‘There was an incident put the warning lights on for me not long after he came. I used to do the night patrol sometimes. Now it’s done by a security officer because I’m the only warden here, but then we had two junior wardens and the three of us used to alternate so there’d be someone on duty twenty-four hours. We did patrols about one o’clock and then again about three or four in the morning. The lads aren’t supposed to be out after midnight without permission, but of course some of them break the rule, and then they sneak back in through the side door and go up number four staircase, without turning the lights on. And we don’t know anything about it, supposedly. But we get a pretty shrewd idea of who’s up to what. It’s pretty dark down that end of the building, so they have to grope their way, but you wouldn’t hear from the office here. Well, this young lad Mathew, he evidently intended to play a sort of practical joke on another student who was sneaking in late. In the passageway near number four staircase there’s a row of old brass hooks where a lot of the students leave their coats. Anyway, Mathew Quin took one of these coats — a great bulky thing from the army surplus stores — and I suppose he waited till the lights were all out and he laid it on the stairs, near the top. I don’t know if he invented that trick, but it was pretty effective. The other student was drunk and he tripped on the coat and fell back down the stairs.’
There was another pause, as the faded blue eyes stared at the whirl of smoke rising from the cigarette he held between finger and thumb. Some ash fell on his shoe, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Anyway, what seems to have happened next is he vomited as he fell — fine mess there was everywhere — and knocked his head on the stair rail at the bottom. Lucky for him I came by with the torch and heard this funny noise, which was him struggling to breathe through the vomit in his nostrils. I had to do mouth to mouth, which wasn’t very pleasant in the circumstances. When I’d got him breathing again and cleared some of the muck out of the way, I sat back there for a minute to get me own breath before going to phone the ambulance, and this voice spoke — right close by “Well done, warden”. I looked with the torch and there was Mathew Quin, right there near the bottom of the staircase, smiling.
“What are you doing there?” I said. “Don’t just stand there, phone the bloody ambulance.” But he didn’t move. He just went on smiling. When I came back from calling the ambulance, he’d gone.’
‘How do you know it was Quin who put the coat there?’ asked Briony.
‘He admitted it. There was an inquiry and he admitted it. Said it was just a joke, not meant to harm and all that kind of stuff and nonsense. But the ambulance men reckoned the other student had lain there a good ten minutes before I got to him. So what was Quin doing in that time?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’ll tell you what I think. He stood there listening to the other feller struggling for breath — it was an ugly sound, I’ll tell you — and waiting for him to die. And he was smiling about it. Course, we couldn’t prove that. He said he was worried about what might happen and crept down the stairs to see. But that’s not true. I would have heard him. He was right there within a few feet of me, all the time. Well anyway, the inquiry let him off with a warning. They took into account that he was younger than the others — barely past his seventeenth birthday — and might be having a bit of trouble adjusting to the new environment.
‘After that he always used to grin at me in this knowing way. Sometimes he’d stop to tell me something, or ask me a question, but it was like some kind of a provocation. Usually it was something nasty — he wanted to see my reaction, I suppose.’
‘Can you give me an example?’
‘He’d tell me about some corpse that had come into the anatomy lab — what injuries there were on it, what had happened to it. I used to pretend I wasn’t listening, but you can’t not hear, can you? He had all these drawings pinned up on the wall in his room.’
‘What kinds of drawings?’
Perrin looked at Briony, then at the cigarette still burning in his hand.
‘Anatomy.’
‘But surely all the medical students do anatomy drawings. We had to do them for our anatomy course at Hendon.’
‘Oh, yes. Sketches. I seen that type of thing. Technical drawing, they call it here. All the medical students have to study that. But these were different. There was often something about them that made your flesh crawl. He’d show the face of the person being cut up, looking out at you with open eyes. Sometimes he’d draw animals. Then the cleaners complained about a set of drawings of a woman with her skirts thrown high, showing the lower half of her all cut up. Quin said an artist friend had given them to him. Didn’t look much like art to me. I seen a few things in my time, but I was shocked, I tell you. I made him take them down.’
He took off his glasses and began to clean them with a grey looking handkerchief. He seemed to have come to a halt. Briony drew breath to start the next question, then heard the voice in her head. Hold it. Bide your time. Perrin stuffed the handkerchief back into his jacket pocket, held the spectacles up to the light, then used both hands to position them back over his ears. He looked at Briony.
‘It’s no work for a woman, in my opinion. Investigating murders. I don’t like talking about this kind of thing to a young lady.’
This time Briony did rush in. ‘Mr Perrin, I can assure you I—’
‘Tough nut, are you? That what you’re going to say? I suppose you must know what you’re doing. See that window? Get up and take a look out, because you can’t see the courtyard from where you’re sitting.’
The window ran the full length of the outer wall, but started at chest height. It was badly stained. Streams from this morning’s rain had dried against a patina of old dust. Looking out, she saw a large paved square with a stone fountain in the middle — a couple of hundred years old, she guessed. It must have been there before they built the hall. A student was sitting on a bench reading some papers, and two others were crossing.
‘Any birds out there?’ asked Perrin.
‘A few pigeons.’
‘I like the birds,’ he said. ‘I go out and feed them in the mornings, ‘specially in winter. I’ve always done that. And they get to know who their friends are. They never run away from me, the birds out there. Quin’s room was on this side of the building. Well, one morning when I was crumbling up a bit of loaf I had with me, I had this distinct feeling that I was being watched. You know they say your spine creeps — well, I pretty much felt that something was crawling up my back. I looked up and he was staring at me through his window.
