One Last Lesson (3 page)

With the meeting over, quiet contemplation was now called for, and he was about to go home and do precisely that with
a glass or two of Glenmorangie while relaxing in the easy chair that was placed beside the large sash window in his flat for that very purpose. First, he needed to make a final check on the team and ensure they were all set up for what was going to be a busy couple of weeks ahead.

They were now housed in the Murder Suite, a large area
occupying most of the space on the second floor of Sussex House, sub-divided by moveable screens to accommodate several investigation teams, whose numbers could expand or shrink to mirror the progress or otherwise on a case.

On the left, with windows running along one wall and overlooking the car park,
were the twelve desks currently allocated to Operation Jaguar but he wouldn’t know if that would be enough until the middle of next week, when initial enquiries would be complete and then he would have a much better idea which lines of investigation were worth pursuing.

He walked over and stood to gaze at the
single whiteboard that was already starting to fill up with a range of tasks and how they would be manned. Later, when more definite leads were added, this board would be joined by several others to show connections between the victim and potential suspects and hopefully, sporting a mug shot of the person or persons wanted for this crime.

It was day one, evening one to be more precise and with little concrete evidence to write-up, the board contained more questions than answers but he looked intently all the same, trying to memorise as much
detail as he could so he could mull it over later. Questions such as; ‘identify victim’ and ‘finish and analyse house-to-house enquires’ stood out. He turned to the group of detectives and was about to tell them not to work too late, as he wanted them fresh in the morning, when his mobile rang.

‘Hello Angus, Bill Graham.’
DC Bill Graham was a member of Pat Davidson’s SOCO team, the guys he left searching the bushes at Mannings Heath many hours ago.

‘Hi Bill, how are you doing? You still up at the golf course?’

‘Nah, I came back to the office around six to check on a few things and to warm up. It’s bloody freezing up there especially when it got dark. Being the diligent sort, I took the prints of the victim but given her age, which Dr Singh put at eighteen or nineteen, I wasn’t hopeful of finding a match.’

‘I can feel you’re trying to tell me something Bill, but you’ll need to hurry up or I’ll miss my nightcap.’

‘Lady Luck was smiling on
us, and no mistake as her prints are on the system. They were taken when she was arrested for a drunk and disorderly in November, following a rumpus at the taxi rank in East Street at three in the morning with a taxi driver who refused to take her and her mates. Her name is Sarah Robson and she’s a second-year Business Studies student at Lewes University.’

He opened the door to the lecture
theatre and almost immediately his ears were assailed by a cacophony of noise. Despite almost ten years in the job, that early morning shock to the senses never ceased to catch him out. In part, it was due to this modern intake of students who were much noisier than any previous generation with their mobile phones, laptops and mp3 players but also due to the amount of booze he downed the previous night, leaving him with a thumping headache and an aversion to anything bright or loud.

The hubbub decreased a notch or two as Jon Lehman made his way to the lectern
, and all but ceased by the time he dumped the large pile of folders and papers he was carrying, down with a loud thud. He turned to face their eager, fresh-faced expressions, slowly sipping water from a bottle that was rarely out of his possession.

‘Quiet please. Quiet please,’ Lehman said, his voice sounding croaky as it echoed around the large room, assisted greatly by a sensitive microphone and sophisticated sound system. While waiting for them to settle, he ran fingers through a mop of thick, black hair, a gesture he used to settle his nerves and noticed not for the first time, that his hands were trembling. He selected the relevant notes from the folder and placed them in front of him.

‘Ok people, better; thank you. Today, I am going to talk to you about a subject that is dear to my heart…and even dearer to my wallet that is, if you buy my latest book, Anatomy of UK Takeovers Since 1945.’ He paused as a mild titter wafted around the room, from those that were half-awake at least. ‘For the purposes of what we are going to be doing, you can also find it in Watson, chapters five and six. However take note, the greedy swine has pitched it at three quid more than mine and I would rather you bought a pint with that money than give it to him.

Despite the gnawing pain behind his eyes, which intensified when he turned to look at the glaring screen behind him, he began to speak with authority and enthusiasm. Even though he readily acknowledged
that he drank more than was good for him, there was no reason to change as he could always perform in front of his students and rarely missed a day’s work due to over-indulgence. Not that he wanted things to change anyway.

Home was a twee, stone-fronted two-bedro
om terrace house in a small road, off Lewes High Street that had been re-modelled into a modern show-home by his newly qualified interior decorator wife, Annabel. Three months before, it featured in a glossy three-page spread in Sussex Life, an up-market lifestyle magazine aimed at well-heeled homeowners. The house looked fabulous and drew envious comments from friends and colleagues but as someone who liked to relax after a hard day’s work with his feet on the coffee table and a couple of empty beer cans by his side, it could never be called home.

It didn’t help to realise that his wife was morphing into
one of the very women who inhabited the pages of such magazines, many of which were lying in strategic positions all over the house. He was sure it was her dream, nay her life’s ambition, to be photographed by one, standing inside her gleaming kitchen, in front of a newly polished Aga or majestically lounging on a lawn seat with four glossy red setters at her feet, dressed like the guest of honour at the Sussex Hunt Ball and wearing more jewellery than Kate Winslett on Oscar night.

If sex was good to middling in the early years of their six-year relationship, it was at hermit levels now and on the rare occasions she considered him worthy and allowed his grubby hands inside her pants, he rated the experience no higher than tedious. To a man
that prided himself on his prowess between the sheets, or on the bathroom floor or the car bonnet come to that, and the size and staying power of his manhood, her coldness hurt him deeply.

In the latest of their frequent arguments, she accused him of behaving like a pig
and messing up her beautiful chocolate box of a house by leaving dirty clothes beside the laundry basket and bath towels on the floor. In truth, his will to resist was all but exhausted but he must have said something derogatory, as she hadn’t spoken to him since. If his home life was crappy, it was just as well he worked at a university, a place where he could eat, drink and screw, twenty-four hours a day if he was minded to.

Returning to his office after delivering the lecture, his diary was clear until a tutor group at three and so continued to work on the manuscript of his latest book. He was the author of six
successful academic textbooks and with a growing reputation for taking dry and difficult subjects, such as company mergers, the actions of oligopolies and the development of business strategy, and converting them into colourful, witty books which were easily digestible by the badly read and poorly informed modern student who possessed all the concentration levels of a gnat.

If he was being honest
, that was all he did as none of his books displayed more than a modicum of original thought. He would never admit to that in public, of course but to his consternation, rumblings of discontent were beginning to appear in the academic press. The nub of their criticism was that a growing number of celebrated authors were simply dressing up the emperor in new clothes and even though his name was never mentioned, he knew they were talking about him.

It was easy for psychology and sociology professors to snipe at
him as they had all the ingredients of original research sitting in front of them in the form of fifty or sixty eager students, who were willing and able to participate in whatever crazy experiment they could dream up, as long as a free meal and a few quid were involved. In his world, he was forced to trawl through surveys published by the Monopolies Commission, the Department for Enterprise or independent data gathering companies, along with every other aspiring accountancy and business studies professor in the UK.

Why not, he
reasoned, read a large number of old and largely forgotten textbooks and re-hash their good ideas into something more suitable for a generation that seemed unable to concentrate longer than it took Sky to run the adverts during Monday Night Football. To halt the drones from the crones, who desired nothing more than his ignominious tumble from a lofty pedestal and an end to the triumphant back-slapping, crowd pleasing performances at conferences and lecture tours, and the donning of bright, garish bow ties, which seemed to get on the goat of one reviewer in particular; this new book would silence them for good.

After reading an article in the Guardian about soaring oil prices, he analysed as many oil industry surveys as he could lay his hands on, a job that took him the best part of three months, and now he was sure
he had found something that he could call his own. There were discrepancies in the ten-year forecast for oil consumption, a well-reported graph that suggested world demand for oil would eventually outstrip supply by the end of the forecast period, pushing the price beyond what could be afforded by dozens of poorer nations. This also affected the way major oil-consuming countries managed their economies, and was one of the main drivers behind multi-billion dollar investments currently being undertaken in renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal.

He was on a roll and writing furiously when his stomach rebel
led against a lack of food since seven o’clock the previous evening and so with some reluctance, he saved the document, grabbed his jacket and headed down to the cafe. He ignored the greasy steak pie, pasta bake and unknown meaty stew and looked instead for something more easily digestible. His poor stomach and liver had been subjected to a non-stop deluge of toxic substances over the last two days and deserved a break, and so he opted instead for the baked potato and tuna, with a small fruit trifle to follow.

After paying for his food, he stood
at the front of the cash desk for a few moments and surveyed the busy room. Close to the window, he spotted a table of sociology and psychology lecturers, all of whom he knew reasonably well and headed over to join them, before members of the accountancy faculty, seated over to his right, noticed he was there and waved him over.

He was not in the mood for talking, hence his choice of
dining partners and ate slowly while listening to a heated discussion about the recent changes made to the engine of the Honda Fireblade, and whether it would alter the characteristics of a machine they all clearly loved. He couldn’t contribute to the discussion, even if he wanted to, as he didn’t own a car, a motorbike or even a bicycle and travelled to and from the university by bus or taxi. In fact, only last week he struggled to change the wiper blade on his wife’s Mini and could only do so after first watching a ‘How to’ video on YouTube.

Henry Davis was making his way towards him and
unfortunately he was spotted too late, otherwise he would have feigned involvement with the ‘ologists and their bikes or moved to another table. Davis was a bright accountant with a string of degrees and many post-graduate qualifications to his name, but the poor sap didn’t have a political bone in his body and was soon fired from the aggressive American bank where he once worked.

He seemed to be in awe of
Lehman’s overblown pre-university consultancy career and his recent publishing success and clung to his coat tails like a leech, no matter how rude he was to him. From the moment he sat down, Davis was full of enthusiasm as he recalled his exciting weekend in Dorset before moving on to talk about the new book he was planning. He described the merits of different writing styles and the various research techniques with which he was experimenting, before realising Lehman was showing no interest whatsoever and soon there was silence between them.

He paused between mouthfuls and tried again. ‘What a bore my last seminar was Jon. I couldn’t get them to respond at all. I tried everything. The lights were on but there was no one at home.’

‘Oh really,’ he said, ‘and nothing to do with your boring delivery, I suppose?’ He gulped the last of the water before placing all the dirty cutlery and dishes back on the tray, and sat back waiting for his lethargic brain to issue the commands necessary and instruct his inert body to move.

‘I’m… working on that as you know but it wasn’t
because of that, I’m pretty sure. I think it was probably something to do with the death of that student. You know, it must have been the shock of it or something. I remember last year...’

‘The death of a student; which student?’

‘Where have you been Jon? It’s all over the campus this morning. No one’s been talking about anything else in the staff room and it was the main story on the local news on Sunday evening.’