The Bursar's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

the beginning of the ‘real’ bit. Nowadays of course a lot of students venture beyond the lamp post and into the real town, for cheap accommodation if nothing else.
    I arrived at the police station having walked from my office through a mean drizzle, carrying my photos of Mrs Greene on a memory stick, along with a file containing her movements. When I wasn’t following her I’d captured her car journeys on a tracker placed under the bumper of her cabriolet. I had removed it a few days before giving her husband the low-down on his wife’s activities.
    Stubbing, bless her, kept me waiting in reception after I’d announced myself and I spent the time watching unfortunates come and go – it was not a place people came to happily, unless they’d come to recover something they’d lost that incredibly someone had handed in. The ones who arrived under the insistence of the police usually did so round the back entrance, out of the way of the tourists who had strayed across the road from Parker’s Piece.
    Stubbing’s face, pinched and pale, appeared at a glass window in a door. She caught my eye and snapped her head at me to follow. We walked without talking and Stubbing held open the door of a small interview room where a bored-looking young plain-clothes sat at the metal table reading a
Daily Mail
, which he quickly folded up when we came in. I could smell Stubbing’s cheap deodorant as I passed her. There was a small table in the windowless room with a tape recorder on it, much like you see on TV, but without the dramatic lighting, which in this case was overhead, harsh and fluorescent. We sat on hard chairs facing each other across the table. I felt like a suspect even though I was just giving a statement, a feeling reinforced by the fact that my chair would not sit on all four legs at once. The other detective pulled his chair up to the table and flipped open a pad. I half expected him to lick the end of a pencil but instead he took a fancy-looking ballpoint from inside his jacket.
    Stubbing got straight down to business.
    “This is Detective Sergeant Turner,” she said, tilting her head towards her colleague. “Mr Kocharyan, please tell us when you first met Albert Greene.” Stubbing’s hair was still pulled back in headache-inducing tightness and she was wearing the same nylon suit. A thin gold chain with nothing on it sat at her bloodless throat.
    “I’d just like to say how pleased I am to be able to help the Cambridgeshire police in any way possible,” I said, trying to get my chair level. Turner coughed a word into his hand. I ignored him. So did Stubbing. “Albert Greene came to me three weeks ago suspecting that his wife Trisha Greene was having an affair. I agreed to investigate. I followed her on four occasions over two weeks and also tracked the movements of her car over the same period.” Turner scribbled onto the pad.
    “Tracked her movements how?” Stubbing asked.
    “Using a standard £200 GPS tracker you can buy in any electronics shop.” I gave her a breakdown of the exact times I’d followed Mrs Greene myself and then I took the USB stick from my pocket and pushed it across the table. “On here is a spreadsheet detailing all her car journeys over the two weeks the tracker was fitted.” Stubbing told Turner to make a note. “You’ll see that most of them are to her workplace or the gym but there are also regular trips to the car park, where you found her. That is where I took most of the photos I have of her; they’re on the memory stick as well. Mr Greene confirmed most of the addresses; there were a couple he didn’t recognise but I assumed they were friends or people she preferred to, ah, visit indoors.”
    “You didn’t check those out?”
    “I’d already confirmed the client’s suspicions at that stage. He wasn’t paying me to follow everyone she was sleeping with. I’d like the memory stick back, it’s expensive.”
    She picked it up. “You can have it when the case