The Bursar's Wife Read Online Free

area has become gentrified with the type who drive people carriers and go camping in France when they can afford a beach holiday in Tenerife. It took me no longer than ten minutes to drive to the office and park on the small forecourt, because I avoided the nine-to-five traffic. I walked round the corner to Hills Road and bought a black coffee to go from Antonio’s, one of the few remaining independent coffee shops in the city. The clock on Our Lady and the English Martyrs told me that it was nearly ten, my usual time of arrival if I’m in the office. When I got back to my building an unmarked police car was parked on the double-yellows outside, hazard lights flashing. I could tell it was a police car because a plain-clothed copper was sitting at the wheel, and you can’t mistake a plain-clothes. They’d also removed the hubcaps, so they don’t come off in a high-speed chase. The driver was picking his nose, rolling his harvest into a ball before examining it and flicking it out the window.
    I was about to enter the building when a skinny woman in a blue trouser suit came striding out the door. She squinted at me with ice-blue eyes that were a bit too close together.
    “George Korkyan?” She had her hair pulled back painfully hard in what Sandra called a Croydon facelift.
    “No,” I said. She stepped forward, and I could hear a crackle of static in her shiny suit.
    “You’re not George Korkyan, private investigator?” She had a reedy voice high-octaved with tension.
    “No. I’m George Kocharyan, private investigator. And you are?” She whipped out a badge from inside her jacket; it hung on a chain round her sinewy neck.
    “I’m Detective Inspector Stubbing. Guv’nor wants to see you.” She made her way towards the unmarked car, expecting me to follow without question.
    “Well the guv’nor, whoever that is, knows where to find me,” I said to her back. I walked into the building and went upstairs. I left the door to my office open and sat at my desk. I’d just taken the lid off my coffee when she strode in, giving me a look that would strip paint. She put her palms flat on either side of the desk and leant over.
    “Listen, Kockerhead, or whatever your fucking name is, Detective Chief Inspector Brampton is waiting at a crime scene, and unless you come with me now, I’ll haul you over to Parkside to wait for her there, and she could be some time.” Her spittle sprayed my coffee and I looked at her to see if she was bluffing, but all I saw were the straining tendons in her neck and a throbbing vein in her temple.
    “You didn’t come through the fast-track graduate scheme, did you?”
    She gave me her paint-stripping stare and her lips quivered dangerously so I got up before she exploded.
    “Why didn’t you say it was Brampton?” I said. “She’s like a mentor to me.” I left the coffee on the desk.
    I sat in the back of the car alone as nose-picker drove and Stubbing sat silently beside him. Brampton’s and my paths had crossed last year, at some management seminar run by a management consultancy firm which was coordinating efforts to licence private investigators. Brampton was a speaker, introduced as a Cambridge graduate who was bringing industry management practices to the police force. Her speech was peppered with jargon that I didn’t understand and no one had bothered to explain.
    We drove south past the small city that is Addenbrooke’s Hospital towards the Gogs, the highest point outside Cambridge. I felt a tightening in my gut. It got tighter as we turned right towards Magog Down and then waved under the yellow tape held up by a uniform into the car park where I had photographed Trisha Greene and her friends, and was fully knotted by the time I saw the police cars and vans surrounding Mrs Greene’s little blue cabriolet, an exclusion zone round it defined by more yellow tape. A tent that had been erected to prevent the rain washing evidence away was being dismantled. Stubbing got out