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‘I just wanted a word, Ruth.’
‘Of course. Take a seat.’ Ruth isn’t going to stand up. Besides, her trousers are covered in chalk.
‘It’s a bad business about your department.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘The university really values the work you do, Ruth, but student numbers are down.’
‘They’re down in lots of other departments too. Computer science, for one. I don’t see them facing the axe.’
‘There are lots of other factors.’
‘Tell me three of them.’
Colin sighs but doesn’t answer. Instead he says, ‘I’ve got a proposition for you, Ruth.’
It sounds very improper. Or maybe that’s just the accent again.
‘How do you fancy becoming Dean of Humanities?’ asks Colin.
Alice Ballard works at a charity shop in Ely. ‘Something to stop me from going mad when I retired,’ she said over the phone. Tanya arranges to meet her in her lunch break, grateful for the chance to explore Ely, a place that has begun to assume mythic proportions in the investigation. Tanya leaves her car at the station and deliberately follows the route taken by Emily as revealed on CCTV. She wonders why they didn’t do a reconstruction at the time, perhaps using Emily’s sister, Sophie. What did the boss mean by ‘ask about the sister’? It’s annoyingly cryptic but she’s learnt to trust Nelson’s hunches. Tanya has a sister and a brother. Joe is a teacher and Cathy does something nebulous in marketing. Joe’s biggest secret is that he was actually christened Boris; his name, like Tanya’s, inspired by their mother’s Russian ancestry. Tanya gets on perfectly well with her siblings but she doesn’t think that they impact her life in any way.
But she enjoys the walk. Emily’s route takes her along a footpath with fields on one side and the cathedral looming on the horizon. ‘The ship of the fens’ it is sometimes called and Tanya can almost imagine it surrounded by water, in the days when Ely was an island before the fenland was drained. She passes a children’s playground, a couple of dog walkers, an elderly man sitting on a bench and reading theTelegraph. The place could not be more innocuous if it tried.
Tanya goes through a gateway and passes in front of the great church. It really is incredibly impressive, a huge tower with stained-glass windows and battlements rising up to the sky. Tanya doesn’t know much about its history and hasn’t liked to ask in case the answer turned out to be boring. The bell is tolling midday as she passes.
Tanya turns into the high street. Topping’s bookshop is immediately visible, painted a tasteful blue with a blackboard outside advertising author events. Why would anyone pay to listen to an author talking about their books? thinks Tanya. People really are weird. The rest of the street looks slightly less prosperous, though, and there are several charity shops. A woman is standing outside one called Little Lives. She’s tall with grey hair in a shiny bob, neatly dressed in a white blouse and blue linen trousers.
‘Alice?’
‘Yes. Sergeant Fuller, I presume?’
‘Do call me Tanya.’ The boss told her to keep things informal. Besides, it’s Detective Sergeant.
‘Shall we walk in the cathedral grounds? We’ll have more privacy and I like to get fresh air in my lunch break.’
‘How often do you work in the shop?’
‘Two or three days a week. As I said on the phone, it’s something to keep me busy. Retirement’s not easy.’
Isn’t it? Tanya would have thought it was the definition of easy. Mind you, the boss seems hell-bent on putting it off for as long as possible.
They walk through another archway and the cathedral, the mother ship, is in front of them once more. Alice squints up at the towers. ‘We’ve got peregrine falcons nesting here. It’s very exciting.’ Tanya notices several people with binoculars trained on the roof. As with author talks, it’s a whole other world. Tanya and Petra go running in their spare time, they swim or play tennis. They don’t sit around staring at birds. ‘It takes all sorts,’ Tanya’s mother used to say but Tanya knows that her own nature is less tolerant.
‘As you know,’ says Tanya, ‘we’re reinvestigating the case of Emily Pickering. It’s now a murder enquiry.’
‘Yes,’ says Alice. ‘I heard that you’d found her remains. It’s very sad.’
They walk round to the back of the cathedral. There’s a sort of additional church on the side with arched windows at each end so you can see all the way through to the sky. Alice tells her it’s called the Lady Chapel and is devoted to the Virgin Mary.
‘It’s the largest lady chapel attached to any cathedral in Britain.’
Tanya has seen, on a previous case, where devotion to the Virgin Mary can get you. But there’s no doubt that the cathedral is impressive. If you like that sort of thing.
They sit on a bench and Tanya gets down to business. ‘Did you ever meet Emily?’ she asks Alice.
‘Yes,’ says Alice. ‘She used to babysit our boys.’ Emily’s parents said this too and Tanya had wondered about it at the time. Leo Ballard must have been at least in his fifties when he taught Emily. Rather old to have children who needed babysitting.
