‘You’re pregnant.’ His voice is dull. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Of course it’s possible, Rob.’ She flushes slightly. ‘I kept wanting to tell you. There never seemed to be a good time.’
‘You said you were on the pill.’
‘I was. I am. Sometimes it happens. You do science – you should know.’
‘That’s right,’ he says, his voice dangerously soft. ‘I “do science”. And that’s how I know that that kid you’re having isn’t mine.’
‘Of course it is – it has to be –’
‘Why?’ he says softly, coming towards her. ‘Because you haven’t slept with anyone else?’
‘No,’ she stammers, terrified now, ‘of course I haven’t.’
‘You,’ he says, standing over her, stabbing the air with each word, ‘are lying.’
She flinches back at the violence in his voice. ‘I don’t understand.’
He smiles a horrible smile. ‘No? Not worked it out yet? I can’t have children. That clear enough for you?’
Her cheeks are bright red. She looks down at the phone – more to avoid looking at him than anything else – but it’s the wrong thing to do. He reaches for it and hurls it across the room. Then he grabs her hard by the wrist and wrenches her to her feet. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you.’
His face is so close her skin is peppered with spit.
‘You’re hurting me –’
‘So who was it? Whose brat are you trying to pass off as mine – some random student? The bloke who reads the meter? Who?’
He takes her by the shoulders and shakes her. ‘Have you been doing it here – in my flat?’
‘No – of course not – I wouldn’t. It was only the once – it didn’t mean anything –’
He laughs. Nastily. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘I don’t love him – I love you –’
She bites her lip till the blood comes. There are tears now. She’s pleading with him.
Rob laughs. ‘Love? You don’t know the bloody meaning of the word.’
He pushes her back hard on to the sofa and walks to the door, where he turns. He watches her sobbing for a moment.
‘When I get back, I don’t want to find you here.’
‘You can’t,’ she wails. ‘What about Toby – who’s going to pick him up? Who’s going to look after him?’
‘I’m perfectly able to care for my own son. Leave the keys and go. I never want to see you again.’
***
29 Lingfield Road, Banbury. Semi-detached. Neat gravelled drive. Geraniums.
‘What do you think?’ says Gislingham, turning off the engine.
Somer considers. ‘Looks just like what it is – a schoolteacher’s house.’
Gislingham nods slowly. ‘Can’t see it featuring in a future episode of Unsolved Crimes, but you know what they say about still waters.’
At the gate she turns to him but he makes a gallant gesture. ‘After you.’
She smiles, a trifle tightly, then reminds herself that just because most men like to stare at her backside doesn’t mean Gislingham must be one of them.
At the door, she pauses then rings the bell. Then a second and a third time. Gislingham moves to the front window and squints in. Through a gap in the nets he can see a sofa and armchairs too big for the room, a coffee table with a pile of magazines, their edges neatly aligned.
‘No signs of life,’ he says. Somer joins him and looks in. Neat but uninspiring. Austere without elegance. They know from the records there’s no official Mrs Walsh but she’s beginning to suspect there’s no unofficial one either.
‘He obviously likes his knick-knacks,’ says Gislingham, gesturing at a cupboard on the far wall. ‘I mean, with those weird little shelves, that’s not for books, is it?’
Somer frowns slightly. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen something like that before.’ She shakes her head. Whatever it was, it’s gone.
‘Shall we try the school?’ says Gislingham. ‘I thought it was half-term, but perhaps those posh private places have different holidays to the rest of us?’
Somer shrugs. ‘You’re asking the wrong person. But yes, why not. It’s only ten minutes away.’
As they walk back towards the car a woman emerges from the house opposite, struggling with a pushchair and a toddler.
‘I’m just going to see if she knows Walsh,’ says Somer, starting towards her. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
Gislingham gets back in the car and digs his newspaper out of the side pocket. When a mobile starts ringing it takes him a moment to realize it’s not his. And when he reaches across to the glovebox and pulls out Somer’s phone the screen says ‘Gareth’. He’s grinning mischievously as he answers the call.
‘Hello? PC Somer’s phone?’
Silence. Three beats, four, five.
‘Gislingham?’
‘Yes, who’s that?’
‘It’s Quinn. As you know bloody well.’
‘Sorry, mate, didn’t expect it to be you.’
Another silence. A silence eloquent with ‘like hell you didn’t’.
‘I was just calling to see how it’s going,’ Quinn says eventually. ‘With Walsh I mean. I didn’t realize you’d gone up there too.’
‘We haven’t tracked him down yet. Shall I tell her you called?’
Quinn hesitates. ‘No. Don’t bother. I got what I was after.’
Yeah right, thinks Gislingham as he rings off. Like hell you did.
*
Petersham College is an Old School old school, at least from the front. Two Victorian Oxford-copy quads complete with dining hall and chapel and stained-glass windows. Gislingham parks in a bay marked ‘Visitors’, and they follow a large yellow sign to what announces itself as the ‘Porter’s Lodge’.
‘Just the one then,’ says Somer. ‘Wonder what they do when he’s off sick.’
‘Sorry, I’m not with you.’
She shakes her head. ‘Grammar nerd joke. Forget it.’ She spent two years attempting to teach English in an inner-city comprehensive before deciding that if she was going to spend her days dealing with drugs, knives and random violence she might as well get paid to do it professionally.
The porter, meanwhile, turns out to be a ‘she’ not a ‘he’. A middle-aged woman in a burgundy jacket and pleated skirt.
‘Can I help you?’ she asks, looking at them over her glasses.
They show their warrant cards. ‘Could we see Mr Walsh, please? Donald Walsh?’
She leans forward over the desk and points. ‘His room is in one of the new blocks – Coleridge House. Go through the archway on the far left. I could call him and let him know you’re coming, if you want to tell me what it’s about?’
Somer smiles at her; she’s clearly gagging for a whiff of scandal. ‘There’s really no need. Thanks anyway.’
They make their way across the quad. A couple of boys pass them, hands in pockets. Their voices are slightly too loud; rather like their blazers. There are teachers’ names listed on a board at the bottom of each staircase, and a little wooden sign that can be slid across to show ‘in’ or ‘out’. Gislingham moves a couple, just for the hell of it.
‘Blimey, they do all right for themselves here, don’t they?’ he says, glancing in as they pass at the leather armchairs, the shelves of books, the over-sized stone fireplaces. ‘Though it beats me why people pay through the nose to send their kids to places like this. Education’s education. The rest is just the bloody packaging.’
‘That’s the point though,’ says Somer. ‘It’s the packaging they want.’
But once through the archway it’s a very different story. A jumble of Portakabins encroaching on the staff car park and two heavy 1970s extension blocks named, rather incongruously, after Romantic poets. I bet they don’t bring prospective parents in here, thinks Somer, as Gislingham pushes open the door to Coleridge House. Harsh echoes and a smell of disinfectant. Walsh’s room is on the third floor and there’s no lift, so they’re both huffing a bit by the time they get to the door. The man who answers has a check shirt and a knitted tie and a pair of well-shined shoes. He looks very like the man Elspeth Gibson described.