Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

There was a silence while Fox waited for Jake Arnold to expand on this uninformative response. Wilson, who had yet to write anything in his notebook, noticed with interest that just before Jake spoke, his right hand pulled briefly at the lobe of his ear.

When Fox did finally break the silence, his voice had a much harder edge to it. ‘You’re not really being very straightforward with us are you, sir?’

‘Sorry,’ said Arnold nervously, ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Oh, dear,’ Fox said with theatrical weariness. ‘Have I got to spell it all out? On the morning of her death, Sarah made three phone calls. All those three calls were made to your mobile number.’ He stopped talking, and waited.

‘My mobile was turned off. I never spoke to her.’

‘I see,’ Fox said, taking a deep breath and wondering how hard it was worth pushing. ‘In my book, that makes you rather unusual. Most people seem to keep their mobiles turned on all the time – on the buses, in restaurants, while they are waiting for their nails to dry. My sister even takes hers to the loo,’ he lied.

Jake looked up then, and a flash of anger rippled across his feminine features. ‘Are you saying you don’t believe me? Are you calling me a liar?’

‘No, sir’ Fox said calmly.

‘I kept it turned off because I was fed up with being rung up by Les Whiting. Les was my boyfriend, right. Was being the operative word. Only he kept ringing me up, hassling me, so I’ve been keeping my mobile turned off the last week or so. That’s why Sarah couldn’t get hold of me.’

He paused, slightly breathless, giving Fox the opportunity to lean forward confidentially. ‘Still,’ Fox said quietly, ‘I expect she left a voice message?’

Jake Arnold chewed on his lip again. ‘Yes,’ he said, uncertainly. ‘She just said she was trying to get hold of me.’

‘But you didn’t bother.’

‘Look, I didn’t pick up the messages until that evening, and of course I had heard about her death by then.’

When Fox spoke again, his voice was even quieter. ‘Jake,’ he said, ‘The third phone call was over two minutes long. She must have said rather more than “Give me a call”.’

Wilson, standing to the side, couldn’t help but notice for a second time that Arnold’s hand plucked again at his right-hand earlobe. ‘She sounded a bit stressed,’ Arnold admitted.

‘Just a bit?’ Fox replied instantly.

Arnold, who had been hunched forward, now leaned back. ‘Very stressed. Very stressed indeed.’

‘Did she give any clues about what might be causing her to feel stressed?’

‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘What does it fucking matter? She was bloody abusive because I hadn’t rung her back. Maybe, if my mobile had been turned on, maybe things would have been different. Maybe she wouldn’t be dead. But it wasn’t. And she is. But at least she’s got some peace now.’

Anne Johnson and Ed Bicknell sat opposite each other in a poorly lit corner of the Moonshine pub and, for the first time since they had sat down, both fell silent. The overall impression given by the pub, Anne had thought moments earlier as she stood at the bar while waiting for a second round of drinks to be poured (Ed, rather to her surprise, had insisted on buying the first round), was one of drabness and ‘couldn’t-care-less-ness’, a word she liked to employ at school sometimes when work and attitude fell short of her expectations. The heavy red drapes and upholstery, which in their prime might reasonably have claimed to be sumptuous, were now worn and dirty. Looking down at the stretch of seating just to her right, Anne had identified no less than seven large stains. Had the lights been more penetrative, she had little doubt

that many smaller marks would have become apparent. The heavy pattern of the carpet helped to disguise some of the stains on it, but almost bare patches, where the pile had been worn down to the backing, could not be hidden. As she walked over to the table, she noted five cobwebs decorating the three windows which were in her view. She noted too Ed Bicknell, his eyes trained on her.

‘Here you are,’ she said placing a pint of Guinness in front of him, and sitting down in the seat she had vacated a few minutes earlier.

She took a long, slow sip from the top of her lager, placed it on the beer mat on her side of the table, and leant back. Bicknell’s eyes followed her over the white foam of his glass, but he said nothing. She watched his throat pulse as he slowly lifted the glass towards the horizontal. She watched his head as it ever so gradually tipped backwards. Finally, when there was only white froth on the sides of the glass, he set it carefully down on the table and grinned. Anne looked away. Over to the right, a short woman with loose-fitting blue tracksuit trousers and pale, tight-fitting T-shirt – its colour was hard to determine in the warped light of the Moonshine – pulled unenthusiastically at a one-armed-bandit with her right hand, while her left hand held a half-smoked cigarette. A jangling noise signified a small win, but the woman showed no excitement beyond taking a pull at her cigarette. Anne, whose eyes had been focused on the large fold of stomach that separated the woman’s trousers from her T-shirt, snorted audibly, and turned her attention back to Bicknell. His mouth, which had relaxed back into an emotionless slit, curved almost mechanically back into a smile. Suddenly, Anne felt irritated.

‘Do you have to stare?’ She leant forward aggressively, with the consequence that he flinched backwards so sharply that he almost fell off the little stool he was crouched on.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, once he had recovered. ‘I didn’t realize—’ He tailed off.

‘I find that hard to believe,’ she said firmly. ‘Very hard.’

There was a silence. Another jangle of coins from the direction of the one-armed-bandit announced another small win for the woman with the midriff bulge.

‘Just to satisfy your curiosity,’ Anne continued in slightly gentler vein, ‘I’m a 36D.’

Bicknell blushed and looked down. Anne leant back as far as her chair would allow. She consciously sat up as high as she could and pushed her shoulders back and down as she remembered being ordered to do as a school girl by a martinet teacher called Miss Knight. As a child, it had seemed a bore, but once she had reached sexual maturity and discovered that sitting very erect had the effect of accentuating her breasts, it had become altogether more interesting. A gentle smile flickered across her face, and she waited for him to look up.

CHAPTER 4