Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

‘Christ, what sort of question is that? A loud cry. Maybe terror, or maybe it was a war cry, giving herself courage to jump. How the hell should I know?’

Again Fox scribbled, but his eyes and attention remained focused on Bicknell’s face. ‘What did you do then?’

Bicknell gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘I rang you lot, didn’t I? On my mobile.’

‘Then you took some more photos. Of Sarah Johnson, lying there dead on the pavement.’

‘It seemed like an opportunity.’

‘Did it now?’ said Fox. This time his voice was louder, and harsh, and he was half on his feet. ‘An opportunity for what? To make some money out of a wretched woman’s death? A few sensational photos for the press.’

Bicknell leaned back, his eyes fixed unblinking on Fox’s face. He smiled. ‘Carpe diem, detective.’

‘Carpe what?’ Fox said, momentarily thrown off balance.

‘It’s Latin. Seize the moment. Carpe diem. Otherwise, detective, in this life you just get left behind.’

Fox stood up, straightened his back – it had ached since he had woken that morning – and walked over to the window. He looked down at the featureless strip of grass that masqueraded as garden and wished he was somewhere else, anywhere else. He wasn’t fussy. Just not here. Not investigating the death of a woman whose answer to the problems of life had been to jump off the top of a six-storey car park.

‘Can I see the plaque?’ he said at last.

‘It was in the papers,’ Bicknell said. ‘Didn’t you see it?’

Fox ignored the question. ‘I need the plaque, as evidence, and copies of all the photos you took that morning. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?’

Bicknell got up and went over to the large desk sited under the window. He leafed through a pile of paper sheets until he found one he was happy with.

‘This is a copy,’ he said, placing it on the coffee table in front of Fox. ‘I’ll have to burn all the photos onto a CD.’

Fox looked at the plaque. It was a strong blue colour, with white writing. Paper card it might have been, but the first impression was strikingly realistic, even this close. It was no surprise that it attracted attention when it was up on the wall. No surprise that Sarah Johnson chose to stare at it for so long.

‘When you put your plaque up, did you know that two people had jumped to their deaths from that car park in the last six months?’

‘It was hardly a state secret, now was it?’

Fox’s eyes were still on the plaque, as if scanning it might somehow bring him a blinding revelation. When that didn’t work, he read it out loud: ‘26 April. Jo Smith stood here while contemplating suicide.’ When he looked up, Bicknell had moved back to the desk and was turning on his computer.

‘Who was Jo Smith?’ he asked quietly.

‘Jo Smith?’ Bicknell snorted. ‘Jo Smith was a figment of my bloody imagination. All right?’

Fox spun round with a sudden spurt of anger. Who the hell did Bicknell think he was? For a second he imagined the pleasure to be gained from punching the cockiness out of him. Fuelled by the thought, he strode over to the desk and leant with all the physical threat he could muster across Bicknell’s personal space.

‘Don’t you regret what you did at all? Hasn’t it occurred to you that it might have been your smart-arsed project that tipped her over the edge? That if you had bloody well stayed in bed that day, she might still be walking around Oxford today?’

If Bicknell was taken aback by Fox’s burst of anger, he wasn’t going to show it. ‘If I did tip her over the edge,’ he snarled back, ‘so fucking what? Who are you to pass judgement, detective? How the hell do you know that she isn’t better off dead than alive? Maybe life was, for her, just too bloody shitty to be worth carrying on.’

‘And maybe she was just having a bad day,’ Fox responded. ‘Maybe if she had made it to the next day, she would have felt better.’

‘Maybe you missed your vocation as social worker, detective.’

Fox stood up straight again. Again pain shot across his lower back, but he kept his eyes full on Bicknell. ‘You’re quite a cool bastard aren’t you?’ he said, his voice now under control.

‘Look, detective, let’s just get this straight, then you can stop trying to lay all this shit on me.’ Bicknell’s computer had come to life. He started to tap away on his keyboard as he spoke. ‘She’s dead, right? She chose to jump. Right? No one – unless, of course, you know any different – pushed her. She just climbed up to the top, looked out across the dreaming spires of sunny Oxford, and jumped. As a consequence, I got some great publicity – not to mention some cash from the newspapers. I’ve already had two galleries on the phone wanting me to exhibit my work. Sarah Johnson’s death was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. So if you want to know if I’ve any regrets, the answer is not many. If you want to know if I lie awake at night wondering if I behaved properly, I don’t. Now, if you’ll give me a couple minutes, I’ll burn these photos for you. Then, if you don’t object, I’ve got some phone calls to make. All right?’

CHAPTER 2

When the door of Sarah Johnson’s flat was pulled back by a woman with brown shoulder-length hair, blue-grey eyes, slightly up-turned nose and a thin oval-shaped face, DS Fox felt as if he was seeing a ghost. He was a down-to-earth, sceptical man, but in the moment in which the door opened and he looked into the face of Anne Johnson, he was – however briefly – a believer. His logical approach to life should have prepared him for the facial similarity of the two sisters, but if less than an hour after scanning the blank features of a corpse in the morgue you come face to face with the living embodiment of that corpse, it would be easy for logic to get submerged by emotion.