Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

IN THE BEGINNING

The familiar figure was crossing at the pedestrian lights when Danny Flynn first spotted it. Standing outside the patisserie shop, looking in, he had been using the window as a mirror, to try to spot the man who he knew was following him. Flynn had been standing there for at least five minutes, stock still except for the occasional slight shifting of weight from one foot to the other. His eyes, however, had flickered ceaselessly from left to right across the glass, desperately trying to identify the stalker, until suddenly they had collided with the reflection of Detective Sergeant Fox. It wasn’t the face that he recognized – that was largely in shadow – but the overall shape and size of his body and the way he carried it. You don’t forget the person who deprived you of your freedom.

He resisted the temptation to jerk round and check he hadn’t been deceived. Instead, he watched the man’s reflection move across the road and turn right along the opposite pavement. Only then did he turn his head briefly to satisfy himself that he was correct, that the man who had been following him in the shadows was none other than that plain-clothes policeman who had entered that café on that terrible afternoon. He hadn’t realized who he was at the time, in fact he’d barely noticed him come in and sit down. The bloody manager had been pissing him off. The capuccino he’d ordered had been luke warm, and there’d been dead weavils on the sandwich. But the manager insisted they were stray poppy seeds. Danny had lost his rag at that point. Not that he was later able to remember exactly what happened, but he did remember the pain as the copper bent his arm around his back and shouted at him to calm down. He’d ended up in Littlemore Hospital for six weeks as a result, so of course he could remember Detective Sergeant Fox.

Danny turned back towards the window. He watched with mounting anxiety as Fox’s reflection stopped outside the music shop. Flynn had gazed into that window many times himself, admiring the guitars and drum kits. But how much could the policeman see in this light? Was he too using a shop window as a mirror? Was he watching him watching him? Inside Flynn’s head the voice was persistent now and urgent. Run it was saying. Run while you can. Before it’s too late. Run. But Flynn was rooted to the pavement. Because overriding all was the fear that if he moved first, if he, Danny Flynn, started to walk or run, then the policeman would see him, and follow him again, flitting in and out of the shadows, remorselessly, relentlessly, back to his flat, back to his home. And who knew what he would do then?

Quite suddenly, Fox moved on. He glanced briefly at the posters in the video shop window, walked a few paces further, then turned right and disappeared out of sight down James Street. Flynn emitted a gulp – but not of relief. The policeman had gone, yes, but where exactly had he gone? James Street was Danny’s street. His address was technically Iffley Road, but the house in which he lived stood on the corner, and from his second floor window at the back he could – and often did – look right down James Street until it bent to the left out of sight. If he was in the Cowley Road, he always walked up James Street to get home. James Street was his patch. But what if the policeman was waiting? In the shadows behind a hedge. Or suppose he had taken up a position of surveillance in one of the upper rooms? Danny was still using the shop window as a mirror, watching the corner of James Street in case Fox should retrace his tracks, but his heavy breathing was steaming up the glass. He knew he had to get home. If he could just get home, then he would be all right. He could lock himself in, and he would be safe. He looked at his watch, and decided to wait two more minutes. When they had elapsed – and the large policeman not reappeared – he took three deep breaths, and set off across the road. An oncoming car had to brake sharply, but he didn’t notice. Once over the road, he turned left as Fox had done, walked as far as Marston Street, and stopped. Then, he took another deep breath, turned right, and plunged fatefully into the darkness of Marston Street.

CHAPTER 1

Edith Brownwood paused at the pedestrian crossing, and looked right. Years of experience, plus one very close shave, dictated this behaviour. But it was not the car drivers that scared her. It was the cyclists. The bike riders of Oxford – she and all the members of her Tuesday morning coffee group were agreed on this – were a lawless and discourteous subspecies. Their core belief seemed to be that the streets belonged to them, and that by definition all the rules of the road were therefore irrelevant to them. Edith’s view of the cycling fraternity had been brusquely reinforced three years previously, when a middle-aged man clad in yellow lycra had clipped her as she was stepping out off the pavement and had sent her tumbling onto the tarmac. She had been lucky on that occasion: just a few bruises. But at the age of 81 she was only too aware of her mortality. One fall, one broken hip, and she’d be in hospital, and then a home, and then a coffin. She’d seen it happen to her friend Brenda, and she was damned if was going to happen to her.

There were no cyclists hastening carelessly towards her. A red Mini was approaching, but it was slowing obediently down. She nodded in approval, and advanced cautiously across the road. Once on the opposite pavement, she turned left towards the city centre. She had walked some fifteen paces when she suddenly stopped, and turned her head to the right.

She knew this end of the Cowley Road intimately – so she knew almost without looking that something was different. That something was a blue circle on the wall of the car park, and on that circle there was something that looked like writing. She screwed up her face as she tried to work out exactly what it was she was looking at, but it was no good. Not for the first time, she told herself that she really must go to the optician. Her sight was getting worse. She advanced towards the wall, squinting her eyes, until she was barely a foot from it. The object of her attention was higher than her head, and she stretched her left arm up to touch it. It looked, now she was close up, like one of those blue, round plaques that they put up on the buildings of the famous. There was one of Dorothy Sayers on the wall of Christchurch Cathedral School. Only this didn’t feel like one. They are metal, and this most certainly wasn’t.

Puzzled, she opened her bag to look for her glasses. Maybe plaques were plastic nowadays. Everything seemed to be plastic nowadays. But what on earth was a plaque doing here? Famous people didn’t live in car parks. Unless, it suddenly occurred to her, someone famous had lived here before it was a car park.

She had just got her glasses on when she heard a sound. It came from high above her, and it lasted barely a second, and it sounded like nothing she had ever heard before. Unless maybe it was a seagull in pain.

And then

there was another sound, much duller, but much louder because it was much closer. Something had landed at her feet, so close she felt a sudden gasp of wind as it struck the ground. Dead close.

It took a few moments for her eyes to readjust from the plaque to the large object at her feet, and a few more for her brain to assimilate the fact that the crumpled brown object with protruding black things was a body. A woman’s body. A woman in a long fawn mackintosh, black high-heeled boots, and shoulder-length brown hair.

Edith Brownwood felt herself wobbling slightly. She tried to tell herself to keep calm, but then she noticed two rivulets of red liquid emerging from under the woman’s head, and creeping slowly across the pavement toward her.

And then she fainted.

DS Fox paused at the door in surprise. For several seconds he stared at the sign on the door – ‘Detective Inspector S. Holden’. It must have been put there while he was away. He had known about the promotion – she had told him herself the day before he had gone on leave – but nevertheless he still felt surprised. He wasn’t sure why. He knocked, and opened the door. DI Susan Holden was on the phone. From the sound of it, it was her mother again. Holden looked up at him, shrugged a smile, and gestured with her free hand for a drink.

‘Coffee?’ he mouthed. She nodded.

‘No!’ she said sharply down the phone, as Fox began to retreat from the room. ‘I cannot come now. Nor am I responsible for my mother’s behaviour. But I will come over as soon as I can. I cannot see what difference half an hour will make.’

There was a babble of noise from the other end of the mobile, but Holden pressed a button and it went quiet. It was at times like this that she envied people who smoked. She leant back in her chair and imagined the relief to be gained by drawing smoke deep into her lungs and then exhaling. Breathe it down in one powerful intake, then slowly let it and all the anxieties of the moment out. In, then slowly out. In, and out.

She had smoked her imaginary cigarette down to the smallest of stubs by the time Fox reappeared, a polystyrene cup in each hand. She beckoned him to the chair.

He was a big man: around six feet four inches tall, broad across the shoulders, and with a square face. When he stood or walked, he did so with a slight stoop, like many a tall man. He had long arms that swung untidily from his shoulders, and his curly hair was a mixture of dark brown and patches of grey.

His surname had been a source of canteen banter from the very first day he took up the post of Detective Sergeant at the Cowley Office of the Thames Valley Police. This was no surprise, for anyone less like a fox was hard to imagine. A bear was the animal that came most obviously to mind for most people. A big cuddly bear. At first, that is. Later, people usually revised their comparison, for when push came to shove, he was more than capable of using his formidable bulk to great effect, and then comparison with a grizzly bear was more appropriate.

Detective Inspector Susan Holden, typically, saw him differently. He was for her a much smaller and more companionable creature – a dog in fact. Or, to be precise, a terrier: rough haired and showing signs of wear and tear maybe, but with a knack for doggedly (DI Holden smiled at her own pun) tracking down a quarry and never letting go once it was in his grasp.

They had worked together for nearly four years, and not once in that time had she had serious cause to regret their partnership. Once, she had had to suggest that his long dark coat might benefit from a clean, and she had long ago trained herself not to worry about the unruly nature of his hair, but for her those were mere bagatelles. What mattered was that, like any good dog, he was trustworthy, faithful and patient.

‘Have a good holiday?’ she asked once he was settled.