‘That morning, when Turk was here – that was the first time you and I . . . got together and then you vanished. I thought that if you knew there hadn’t been break-ins after all, you might think it didn’t matter so much, my being here.’ She felt the flush rising up her neck. ‘I wanted to see you again.’
They moved to the sofa, and Adam put his arm around her shoulders. He told her how he’d broken the news to Jacqueline, and Rowan related her brief run-in with Georgina Parry. ‘She was gone when I arrived,’ he said, ‘she didn’t come after me, anyway, but if she’s back tomorrow, I’ll ask Theo if there’s anything he can do. Not that there will be.’ He drained his glass. ‘I still can’t believe it was Peter who was taking the sketches.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you know where he was selling them?’
‘No. We didn’t get that far before he told me I was mad and stormed out.’
Adam smiled. ‘Have you still got the sketch Cory made of you? I was looking for it down here this morning, thinking about him, but I couldn’t find it.’
A single drumbeat of alarm in her chest. ‘I put it away. It made me feel strange, knowing he’s gone.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, but don’t get up – I’ll go and get it. Where is it?’
‘No.’ She put her hand out, keeping him in his seat. ‘It’s okay. You stay there, I’ll fetch it.’
Thirty-nine
She fell asleep as it started to get light and it felt like only minutes later that she was woken by the sound of the doorbell. Sitting up, she found Adam’s side of the bed empty again but when she stumbled to her feet, she heard him on the kitchen stairs. As she came out on to the landing, pausing briefly to pull her jumper over her head, he was unlocking the front door. Her first thought was of the journalist – bad enough – but as she came down the stairs, she saw Theo and DS Grange on the doorstep. She could tell from their faces that there had been a development.
In the sitting room Theo took a seat but Grange stayed standing. He had the air of someone who’d learned to discipline the energy that kept him so lean. There was a controlled quality to his stillness but his eyes moved constantly, looking at everything with a focus that said they were taking it in, recording.
‘We’ve had the results of the post mortem on Michael Cory this morning,’ said Theo without preamble. ‘It’s a murder inquiry now.’
Rowan turned cold. For a long moment, several seconds, she – her mind – seemed to detach itself from her body. She felt as if she were hovering over the scene, there but separated from everyone else by an infinitesimal screen, the thinnest plate of glass. Theo’s voice reached her as if from a distance. ‘. . . position of the wound too high on the head – near the crown – to be easily seen as an injury sustained by falling backwards. Tiny fragments of slate in the wound, not naturally occurring along the riverbank here.’
Fuck.
‘Also telling,’ said Grange, pulling her focus in his direction, ‘are traces of blood on the collar and back of his coat. It looks like the blood ran down, which suggests he was standing when he was injured. If he’d fallen, it likely would have pooled around his head, and if he’d fallen directly into the water, there might have been no direct staining at all.’
Adam’s face was white. He sat on the edge of the sofa, elbows planted on his knees, fingertips pressed against his mouth.
‘What we also have now,’ Theo said, ‘is an approximate time of death. The pathologist is telling us it was sometime on Friday afternoon.’
‘Likely mid-afternoon,’ said Grange.
‘So we have to ask you both, I’m afraid, where you were at that point.’
‘Are we suspects?’ said Rowan and her voice floated away from her, a frail thing, disembodied.
‘Not suspects, no,’ said Theo. ‘Not as such.’
‘Cambridge,’ said Adam. ‘I had a supervision for an hour at two o’clock with two of my undergraduates – they can confirm. Also, actually, the college handyman – a sash window in my rooms was jammed open, over-painted, and he came to sort it out just afterwards. That took about ten minutes. Then I left college – there’s CCTV in the lodge and the porters saw me. I cycled home then I got in the car to come here. Oh – I filled up with petrol just outside St Neots. The receipt’s probably in my wallet but if not, I’ll be on their CCTV, too. And I paid on my credit card. It would have been about four, quarter-past – I can tell you which garage.’
‘Thanks, we’ll check all that out,’ said Grange. ‘But it’s just a formality. Due diligence.’
‘Rowan?’ Theo fixed his eyes on her and the sentences she’d formulated while Adam had been talking disappeared from her head. The closest thing she had to an alibi was being seen by Martin Johnson before she left and after she returned but now she saw that if she gave those details, she’d only be drawing attention to the large lacuna of time in between. Theo raised his eyebrows, prompting.
‘Sorry.’ She shook her head as if she were having difficulty refocusing after the shock. Better, she decided, to give an answer that sounded honest even if it didn’t get her off the hook. ‘I was working,’ she said. ‘Studying.’