AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She moves a small mound of books and sits on the sofa. Bradley perches on the other end. Leo swivels his desk chair to face them.
‘So. . .’ he says. Tanya is willing to bet that he routinely starts his tutorials this way.
‘So,’ echoes Tanya. ‘As I said on the phone, we want to talk to you about Emily Pickering, a student on your course who disappeared in 2002.’
‘I’m assuming you have some new information,’ says Leo.
‘We have discovered the remains of a young woman who has been formally identified as Emily,’ says Tanya. She watches Leo closely. He meets her eye but one leg is trembling violently. She can almost hear the coins rattling in his pocket. Leo is more nervous than he looks. Also, who has loose change these days? Everything is contactless since Covid.
‘You’ve found her?’ he says at last.
‘We’ve found her remains.’ She deliberately doesn’t say where.
‘I hope that will be some comfort to her parents.’
‘I understand you sued them in 2008.’
‘I was very sympathetic to them. Iamvery sympathetic to them. But there comes a point where you have to defend your good name. There were some very damaging allegations.’
‘They accused you of killing Emily?’
‘They didn’t know what they were saying. They were grief-stricken.’
But you still dragged them through the courts, thinks Tanya.
‘We’ve reopened the case,’ she says, ‘and so we’re talking to everyone who saw Emily before she disappeared. I understand that she attended a field trip, led by you, on the weekend before.’
‘Yes. I made a statement at the time.’
‘I’ve read it,’ says Tanya. ‘I’d like you to go over that weekend again, if you don’t mind.’
‘It was twenty years ago.’
‘You might have remembered some extra detail in that time.’
Leo sighs and looks at the ceiling. ‘I took Emily and three other students on a field trip to Grime’s Graves. We had a chance to explore a deeper shaft– not the one currently open to the public. It was a great opportunity.’
‘How did you choose the four participants? There must have been lots of other archaeology students.’
‘They were my personal tutees. It’s a particularity of Cambridge. One-to-one tutorials. It’s a very special relationship.’
Bradley makes a sound that’s halfway between a cough and a laugh. Tanya says hastily, ‘I have the names of the students here. Emily Pickering, Amber Fletcher-Ellis, Thomas Westbourne, Emad Hussein. Who else was on the trip?’
‘A junior lecturer, Mark Oldbury. And a man called Cathbad. That wasn’t his real name. It was Michael something. He was a lab assistant at one of the new universities, but he’d studied archaeology. Interesting chap.’
Bradley and Tanya exchange glances.
‘Have you kept in contact with any of these people?’ asks Tanya.
‘I kept in touch with Mark for a while. He’s teaching at one of those northern universities now.’
One of those northern universities. One of the new universities. Academic snobbery is alive and well in the Ballard household, thinks Tanya.
‘So,’ she says briskly, ‘what happened on that field trip in 2002?’
‘We had a good few days digging. Some very interesting finds. Flint flakes, part of a wooden shovel, an antler that was probably used as a pick. We went down into the mine shaft. We slept in tents on site. On Sunday night, we had a barbecue and someone– I think it was Thomas– played the guitar. It was magical. Then, on Monday, we went our separate ways. I understood that Emily was going home to her parents for Easter, which was the next weekend. I drove her to the station, then I went to meet friends in Cambridge. I spent the whole day with them. I remember Emily waving goodbye to me. That was the last time I saw her.’
Tanya can’t remember if the detail about the lift to the station was in the original statement. Now, they would take Ballard’s car apart but she’s not sure how forensics worked in the early noughties.
