The Bursar's Wife Read Online Free PDF

coffee. I got up to get my coat when the phone rang. It was Sandra. I filled her in on the Greene murder.
    “What’s the world coming to when you can’t meet a stranger in a car park for sex without being murdered?” she said. I pointed out that most people are murdered by someone they know.
    “Maybe so, but I met the husband, and I don’t think he was up to it. Too much of a lamb, bless him. If he was a brooder, then maybe, but he wore his heart on his sleeve.” I agreed with her and switched to the Booker case, such as it was.
    “Who do we know at Emmanuel?” I heard little Ashley in the background, demanding something in an annoying voice. Sandra’s voice went faint and I heard her tell him she wasn’t at home to Mr Grumpy.
    “Sorry about that. What about Jack, he knew your dad, doesn’t he work the kitchens there?” I told her Jack had retired. “There’s the girl next door but one to us, she makes beds there occasionally.” Sandra lived in an ex-council terraced house in King’s Hedges, an area of Cambridge that doesn’t feature in postcards of the city. Her ex-husband had seen fit to spend some of his drug-earned money on buying it outright from the council, then cladding it in what looked like crazy paving and putting it in Sandra’s name. Sandra didn’t care; it had no mortgage, three bedrooms and a strip of garden she had made bloom, in contrast to some of her neighbours who saw their gardens as somewhere to store old furniture and appliances they no longer needed.
    “It’s unlikely she knows Lucy,” I said. “She doesn’t board at Emma; she still lives with her parents at Morley.”
    “You’d think they’d have kicked her out, they could easily have wangled her a room right in the college. I’d have kicked Jason out long ago if he could afford anything in this overpriced city.” I told her I thought the same and she reminded me to water her plants. I wondered whether it was Lucy’s choice or her mother’s that she continued to stay on Morley premises. Initial impressions suggested the mother, but experience told me that despite their strong lure, initial impressions were usually wrong.
    * * *
    I watered Sandra’s plants, put on my raincoat and locked the office. I met Nina coming up the stairs.
    “Everything OK?” she asked. “A very rude policewoman was here this morning demanding to know where you were. It upset some of the customers. It’s not what they expect when they come for a massage.”
    “Yeah, sorry about that, she’s lacking in basic social skills.” We stood there awkwardly, me one step higher. “Listen, I’m going to get a coffee across the road. Do you want to join me?”
    She pointed over my shoulder up the stairs. “I have a client waiting. Besides,” she said, “I’ve had my caffeine quota for the day.”
    “Maybe some other time then, when you haven’t had your quota.”
    She smirked and shrugged. “Maybe,” then passed me. I wasn’t sure I liked the way she said ‘maybe’; it left me feeling that she knew I was desperate and was playing me. I was too old for such playground shenanigans.
    * * *
    Later, at home, after I’d heated something covered in plastic and sat with it over my chess puzzle, I was rung by Kamal, a friend who worked as a porter at Addenbrooke’s while he tried to make it as a writer. He wondered whether I wanted to go for a drink. I watched the steaming, spreading mess of dinner and said yes, even though I knew he just wanted to tap me for stories.

6
    PARKSIDE POLICE STATION IS A BRUTE OF A BUILDING STANDING in good company next to the fire station. They both look over the large square of green in the middle of Cambridge that is Parker’s Piece, drooled over by developers and protected by Our Lady and the English Martyrs, who watch over it from one corner. The lamp post in the middle used to be called Reality Checkpoint by some of the more toffee-nosed students to mark for them the end of the university bit of the town and