One Last Lesson Read online

  His face suddenly softened and he grabbed Henderson’s hand and shook it. ‘Thank you, Inspector. I’ve felt so helpless these last few days and now I feel I can do something useful to help catch my daughter’s killer.’

  SIX

  As a teenager from the backwaters of Woking, Jon Lehman was naive and unworldly when he suddenly found himself a student on the free and easy campus of Exeter University. For the first occasion in his life, unhindered by parental strictures and small-town sensibilities, he enthusiastically swallowed and smoked his way through all manner of illegal substances including ‘E’, marijuana and LSD. Now he was sure he was experiencing one of those nasty flashbacks his pissed-off ex-girlfriend at the time, Lisa Wilder vindictively hoped he would suffer.

  Time passed. With no idea how he got there or for how long, he was in the gents toilet, bent-double over a sink and as mysteriously as the motion in the world seemed to pause, in the next instant it suddenly came back into focus. He was immediately assailed by the sights and sounds of the loo, by the stark white sinks and tiling which hurt his eyes, the tinkling of someone pissing against the urinal which rattled his brain and the heat from the large wall radiator which was making him sweat. He felt sick.

  He turned and stumbled towards an open cubicle, his hair plastered against his forehead and his mind buzzing with the ferocity of a spinning fairground ride. He kicked the door shut and threw-up into the toilet bowl. On his knees, his head resting on the edge of the pan, he retched again and again but despite pressing the button until the cistern ran dry, he still couldn’t get rid of the nauseating smell of the curry he ate last night.

  He took off his thick, Elvis Costello-style glasses and wiped away tears that were now welling up in his eyes. ‘Oh Sarah,’ he moaned as he slowly rocked on his knees, banging his head against the hard ceramic. ‘Oh Sarah? Why you? Why did it have to be you?’

  Five minutes passed, twenty minutes, it didn’t matter and he didn’t care. There was a noise outside the door, a loud conversation between someone entering the toilet and someone leaving which roused him and wearily he got to his feet and made his over to the sink. The face in the mirror looked old, haggard even despite not yet hitting forty and the uplifting exhortations of friends who assured him the best was yet to come.

  He filled the basin and pushed his face into the warm water. It felt cosy, like a soft pillow or a large pair of breasts. Part of him wanted to stay there and drown in the dismal surroundings of a university toilet but another part of him said no, he had to go on. Slowly he walked out of the toilet, water dripping down his shirt and jacket and wiping his face with a paper towel.

  Unsure what to do next, he slumped against the nearest wall. It was almost as if he didn’t exist as he was jostled gently by groups of students, a noisy, happy throng, upbeat as they made their way to afternoon lectures, laboratory experiments or seminars without a care in the world. Two days had passed since he first learned of Sarah’s death, two days that fizzed by in a blur until today when all that was locked away inside seemed to bubble to the surface with the ferocity a tidal wave.

  Did these people walking by not know about Sarah? He wanted to say something, to go after them and reprimand them for their callousness, but soon they were gone, around the corner before the words would form. Wearily, he forced himself to move and headed upstairs.

  He walked unsteadily, as if drunk, using the walls of the narrow corridor to stop him from falling but gradually the dizziness disappeared and his sense of balance returned. When he reached the office at the end, he ignored the ‘Meeting in Progress’ sign and opened the door marked, ‘Professor Alan Stark - Department of Law’.

  ‘What the hell!’ barked an irritated voice in the enveloping darkness. Although he couldn’t see him, he knew it was Stark.

  A few seconds later, his eyes adjusted to the gloom and it was then he noticed the ample bottom of Helen Clements, Stark’s twenty-something secretary, astride him on his big leather chair and trying somewhat feebly to extricate herself. The vertical blinds were closed but there was enough light for him to see that her blouse was open and bra undone, exposing her rather generous breasts and her skirt was rucked up over her thighs, revealing glossy stockings that seemed to sparkle in the gloom.

  ‘Didn’t you read the bloody sign outside the door, Jon,’ boomed a big voice which could reach the back of a two hundred-seat lecture hall without a microphone. ‘Can’t you see we’re having a meeting’?

  ‘Yes, of body fluids if I’m not mistaken,’ he stammered. ‘I need to see you immediately Alan,’ he said, seemingly oblivious to the difficulty that statement would present if Stark followed his request to the letter.

  Perhaps it was the dejection in Lehman’s voice or the dishevelled look of his clothes but it halted the words forming on his lips, an angry ‘fuck-off’ most likely, and his demeanour softened. ‘All right, all right,’ he said carefully easing young Miss Clements to one side, ‘but wait outside for a minute or two until we can... um tidy up. And close the door on your way out.’

  Lehman did as he was told and paced the area outside like a hungry hyena searching for its next meal. It took him several moments to realise that Helen, the same sweet girl who answered the phone and smiled at him whenever he arrived for a meeting, was now humping that smooth-talking legal guru Alan Stark. At forty-five, he was at least twenty years older than she was and at the last count, still married with four children and another one on the way.

  He gazed at her desk on which were displayed photographs of Helen and her boyfriend on holiday to Pathos last summer, an advanced certificate for word processing from Pitmans and pad of reminder slips with little smiley faces drawn on the corner, and slowly shook his head. Dipping a wick into the student population or lecturer pool was one thing, but his own secretary? It was too close to home even by his own debauched standards.

  The door snapped opened and Helen breezed out, her straight, black hair neatly combed, in contrast to the tousled mess Stark’s fingers were running through a few minutes before. Her white blouse was buttoned to the half-way mark giving him the impression her breasts were still trying to escape from their confinement and the black skirt, previously concertinaed into a space small enough to fit inside an A4 envelope, was now smoothed out and he couldn’t tell if the creases and folds that remained, were a result of their improvised liaison or a characteristic of the fabric.

  She walked towards him and put her hand on his shoulder and leaned over, close enough for him to smell her perfume and feel the heat of her breath. ‘Professor Stark will see you now Jon,’ she said.

  He looked at her as if she had just arrived from Mars and hastily retreated into Stark’s office before slamming the door behind him. Stark was now fully clothed and groomed, and sitting behind his desk, writing.

  The desk light was on, the blinds were open and law books were spread before the Head of the Law Department as he meticulously prepared for his next important lecture. With his blue, pin-stripe suit jacket hanging from the back of the chair, his thinning salt and pepper hair combed neatly in place and the strong scent of Chanel aftershave filling the air, he radiated the aura of a government minister or a FTSE 100 chairman and not a senior tutor, albeit a well-paid one at a south coast educational institution.

  Lehman sat down. Stark was using the heavy Waterman gold fountain pen he always used but never let anyone borrow, and he watched as it sailed effortlessly across the page making a light scratching sound, like a bird digging for worms. It had been a gift from the third and current Mrs Stark, Morta, a spiky Lithuanian with long straight hair, piercing black eyes and a once-fine figure, now ruined by yet another pregnancy. Stark met her at a seminar in Vilnius and as long as the pen was still in use, it was safe to assume she had not yet been traded in for one of his third-year students or one of the secretarial sisterhood.

  ‘What do you want Jon?’ he said in a deep growl without looking up. ‘What is so urgent you needed to barge into my office and disru
pt my meeting with Miss Clements?’ He turned his blue laser beams on Lehman before he could say it didn’t look to him as if they were doing much talking.

  An old expression his mother used to say went something like, ‘the eyes have it,’ and having known Alan Stark for as long as he had, it could well have been written about him. To the student with the temerity to turn up to one of his seminars without being prepared for the rigorous discussion to follow, they were menacing eyes, terrifying eyes which bored into their very soul and made sure their recalcitrant behaviour would never be repeated; but to the impressionable young women that frequented the student bars, the sports hall, the halls of residence and now to add to that list, his outer office, they were dreamy, sexy eyes, mesmerising them into losing their inhibitions and dropping their knickers at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Alan, Sarah’s dead. Sarah Robson is dead.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, well...’ He was momentarily lost for words at the other man’s nonchalance. ‘What are we going to do?’

  He placed the Waterman down carefully on the page so as not to besmirch his masterpiece with a rogue drop of ink and his stern features softened as he assumed his, ‘I’m dealing with an idiot,’ face.

  Lehman didn’t mind. It was not like talking to Henry Davis who was just a bloody moron and didn’t know when he was talking up or down to anyone, but Stark was the boss, the ideas man, the man that knew what to do in every situation. He could talk to him any way he wanted.

  ‘We are not going to do anything.’ He held up his hand, the one with the gold watch, signalling that he did not want to be interrupted. ‘Sarah is dead. There is nothing you or I can do about it. My conscience is clear as I didn’t kill her and I assume you didn’t either, but as we don’t know who did, we can’t help the police.’ The hand appeared again just as Lehman was about to speak. ‘We go on as if nothing has changed; life goes on. We’re making loads of money, doesn’t that make you happy?’

  ‘Well yes, but I feel sort of... culpable.’

  ‘Jon, if you keep using words like that, you’ll end up in jail. Are you hitting the booze again, you look terrible?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he said looking down.

  ‘Take my advice and lay off it for a while. Buy yourself a car, a yacht, a big house, go to Lithuania and grab yourself a beauty, but I warn you now, bugger this up for me and the rest of the boys and it’ll not just be nice old Starkie you’ll have to explain yourself to.’

  SEVEN

  In a surprisingly large cottage with extensive views over a large part of Mannings Heath golf course, which could be seen through the kitchen window at the rear, DS Carol Walters and DS Harry Wallop sat on the only two empty chairs in the sparsely furnished living room while Mike Ferris ranted.

  Walters had only asked for some clarification about his alleged assault on the golf club secretary, a little gem gleaned from the Club Captain, but it not only opened the floodgates, it emptied the whole damn reservoir. If that wasn’t enough, he was now going on about golfers tramping over his garden last summer and destroying the broad beans, garlic and onions that were planted there.

  From the outside, two small windows flanked the entrance to Kingfisher Cottage and the low front door required even Harry Wallop, who was of average height, to duck down to avoid bashing his head. It suggested small, dark and pokey but to her surprise, it was Tardis-like inside. Walters had moved into a new flat eighteen months ago and could imagine her estate agent at the time, a smarmy lad of twenty-one with slicked-back hair, a nicely cut but cheap suit and a leering smile, describing it as ‘deceptively spacious with great rustic charm and old-world character.’

  Most of the space was provided by a large extension at the back of the house, which greatly expanded the living room and created a huge kitchen overlooking the golf course, but it was only half-finished with thick grey cables hanging from big holes in the walls where the appliances were meant to be.

  She always imagined that builders and architects lived in beautiful houses with not a brick out of place, but this was shattering her illusions and brought back unhappy memories of a feckless father, a man who started but did not complete innumerable household DIY projects as he was too often down the pub or sleeping off the booze in front of the television.

  A gap appeared in the odious man’s invective and Walters quickly interjected to explain that she and Wallop were there to go over his statement in a bit more detail, as it was now four days on from finding the body and some forgotten or neglected details may have crystallised; but he simply changed the DVD and now they were getting his life history.

  With sandy, brown hair that looked as if it had been cut by shears, Harry Wallop was everybody’s idea of a country cop. He possessed a ruddy face with an easy smile that frequently creased the craggy, lined face that had been aged prematurely, not through country walks in his home county of Norfolk but from frequent visits to an apartment he owned in Tunisia.

  However, the genial appearance and easy-going manner disguised a canny detective with the strength of a bull and the patience of a saint and in many ways, was an excellent foil for the impatient Walters who frequently gave witnesses the impression they should get a move-on as there was somewhere else she needed to be.

  The interviews conducted with Ferris’s neighbours mentioned the moody builder in Kingfisher Cottage and frequent rows that could be heard between him and his wife, Rosalyn and gradually they were piecing together a picture of the man before them.

  Once the owner of a successful building firm and involved in everything from house building to roof repairs, the last building recession struck hard and he only managed to stave off bankruptcy by selling his five-bedroom, two-million pound house in Itchingfield, complete with horse stables, home cinema and swimming pool.

  ‘Me wife took the downturn worse than I did,’ he said. ‘What made it worse was she blamed me for dusting meself down and just getting on with it. She couldn’t understand how I didn’t miss the bloody horses, the swimming pool or having a nice Polish bird to clean the house. I did, of course I did, but I didn’t let it get me down. No way. I needed cash so I just took any job going.’

  ‘I mean I wasn’t poor, down to my last penny like, but you’ve got to keep going, right? You see, I started with bugger all, so when the business went belly up and we moved in here, there was still a bit of money in the bank, a roof over our heads and food in the larder so it was enough for me to start again. I was ok wi’ my lot, but she wasn’t, she couldn’t handle it.’

  ‘We are still trying to locate your wife,’ Wallop said.

  ‘Aye but not on my account, mate, I’m fine on me own. See when she left…’

  ‘What was the final straw?’ Walters said, trying to head off another long sermon.

  ‘What d’ya mean, the final straw?’

  ‘You know, the thing that made Rosalyn up-sticks and leave. Was it something sudden like a big argument or the slow drip-drip of problem after problem.’

  He shifted his large bulk uncomfortably in the chair. ‘I suppose she got fed up with me drinking, coming home late, you know, spending good money, hanging about with a bunch of losers, all of that stuff.’

  ‘So, she’s gone off to Scarborough?’

  Several of his neighbours half-heartily suggested that their time would be better served trawling the pond at the bottom of the garden before heading off to Yorkshire on a wild goose chase, but for the moment Walters was giving Ferris the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Aye,’ he said scratching a face that hadn’t seen a razor for a few days. ‘She’s staying with that fucking bitch of a sister of hers, Hilary. She could turn a man’s pint to piss just by glaring at it, that one, got a face like a bashed up Ford Transit she has.’

  He launched into another diatribe about his wife’s odious family. Losing interest, Walters looked around. In her opinion, the house was lacking a woman’s touch as there were piles of unwashed dishes in the sink, the work-tops were clut
tered with rubbish, and bags of cement and boxes of electrical components were cluttering passageways. To the more discerning eye, there was also a large pile of dirty clothes beside an overflowing laundry basket, a thick layer of dust on most flat surfaces and marks on the wall where pictures and ornaments were removed but never replaced.

  His account of finding the body was retold again, but in even greater detail this time and corroborated with many of the statements given to them by neighbours who often saw him walking his dog on his way to the golf course or to fields nearby.

  ‘So where are you working now Mr Ferris?’

  ‘An outfit called Corey Building & Repair who’ve got a contract with Crawley Council to rip out the old kitchens and bathrooms in five hundred houses in Broadfield before they get rewired, re-plumbed and fitted-out to modern standards.’

  ‘It must have been a big step to come from owning your own firm to working for a contractor,’ Wallop said. ‘Was that a difficult adjustment?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Shit happens. I’m sure my time will come again.’

  Due to the nature of his work, ‘always covered in shit,’ and its location, ‘always in Crawley’ his social life revolved around a couple of pubs not far from his cottage, a dwindling number that still allowed the quarrelsome man to drink there.

  Walters was gradually coming to the conclusion that it was unlikely that Mike Ferris would ever came into contact with Sarah Robson who, according to her flatmates, only socialised in Brighton town centre and rarely ventured farther afield, except when returning home at the end of term. Not only was he much older than she was, but in her experience, students tended to socialise with other students.

  ‘Mr Ferris, do you know a girl called Sarah Robson?’

  He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and shook his head. ‘Nah, never heard of her.’

  ‘Do you do any other jobs, Mr Ferris,’ Wallop asked. ‘For example, do you do any homers for friends or neighbours?’