is walking in the opposite direction, and if one or two of the boys snigger – well, they’re young.
On heels that are too high and clothes that she has slept in, the woman barely sees the boys or their smirks. She is no May reveller, her studying days are long over, but her head throbs as intensely as that of any waking student, and for the same reason. Unlike the careless young, though, this woman’s heart hurts more than her head. Odd as it may seem, she is a senior police officer and a little over a week ago, a young woman was murdered on her watch.
The rough sleepers, because even a city as enlightened and progressive as Cambridge has them, don’t wake to see her staring down at each dirty, sleeping face. They don’t notice her counting, ticking them off on a page in her notebook. All present and correct; this morning at least. As she walks past a terrace of houses built by merchants in the seventeenth century, she glances up at a row of three windows on the top floor. Her steps falter, and the line between her brows deepens, before she walks on and passes out of sight.
Staring out of one of those windows, standing in a room full of sunshine, is Felicity. Morning light floods the yellow walls and pale orange carpet. The sofa, empty for the moment, is the salmon pink of a sunrise. From the top floor of the old house, she can see towers and spires, crenellations and turrets, all gleaming gold. It is the most beautiful city in the world, she thinks.
A male voice says, ‘Why do you think you’re here, Felicity?’
The voice is at odds with the feminine room. Surely no man bought vases the exact shade of apricot as the bon-bon bowl on the coffee table. No man would have chosen armchairs in a warm white, patterned with orange and crimson daisies.
‘Felicity?’
The man who almost certainly hasn’t decorated the room, because if he had, he wouldn’t be wearing frayed jeans, trainers and a Nike sweatshirt, is waiting for an answer. Dr Grant, who has asked her to ‘call me Joe’, is young, late thirties at most, although his dark brown hair is receding above his temples. Below the stubble of his beard, his neck is thin and pale.
Felicity says, ‘I like this room.’
She likes his eyes too, hazel green under dark brows. He smiles readily, but gently, and his voice is soft and low pitched.
‘Thank you.’ A blush warms his cheeks. ‘My wife decorated it. I was away for a week and she said leave it to me, I’ll have it all sorted by the time you get back.’
The corners of his mouth turn down as he looks from the swagged curtains to the plump cushions. ‘A month later, she asked me for a divorce. I should have seen it coming.’
Felicity is not sure how she is supposed to react, and wonders if perhaps he didn’t intend to reveal quite so much about himself. With a sudden insight, she sees that he too is nervous.
He says, ‘Why don’t we start with how you got those bruises on your face?’
‘I fell.’ She says it too fast. It comes out slick, rehearsed. Her first mistake. On the surface, Call-Me-Joe’s face doesn’t change; behind his eyes, though, something has shifted. It’s what beaten women always say. I fell. I walked into a door. I didn’t see the drawer was open when I bent—
‘Where was this?’ he asks.
‘The common. I live next to it. I must have gone out and … fallen.’
His face is still open, interested, but she no longer trusts it.
‘Must have?’ he says. ‘You don’t remember?’
He will know this already. The police were called to Midsummer Common that night. The people who found her had been scared at the sight of her torn clothes and bleeding limbs. She’d told the police and the hospital staff that she couldn’t remember what had happened. They didn’t believe her, and now Call-Me-Joe isn’t believing her either. She can hardly blame them, and yet she is telling the simple and complete truth. The events of that evening on the common are – absent.
‘That was quite some fall,’ he says. ‘According to your notes, you were bleeding and distressed, with concussion, a badly bruised face and lacerations on your arms and legs. You were kept in hospital overnight.’
Call-Me-Joe is drinking strong black coffee. Every time he sips she catches a whiff of its steam. She