Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

‘Of course,’ Holden said, accommodatingly. She rose to her feet to indicate the interview was over. ‘Thank you for your help.’

Laing rose slightly awkwardly to her feet, suddenly feeling conscious of her own bulk. If she had been honest with herself, she would have acknowledged that she resented the rather trim figure that the Detective Inspector cut opposite her. With a curt nod of the head, she turned towards the door.

‘Just one last question,’ Holden said as the other woman’s hand grasped the door handle. Laing turned, but said nothing. ‘I was just wondering,’ Holden said, as off-handedly as she could, ‘whether maybe Jake was bisexual?’

Laing smiled, then uttered a single dismissive laugh. ‘All I can say is, he never came on to me.’ She laughed again. ‘Thank God!’

CHAPTER 5

‘Damn!’

Martin Mace was normally a dab hand with his hoe. He was a solidly built figure – just 5 feet 8 inches in his bare feet – and had once been solid muscle, the result of a ferocious commitment to a bodybuilding regimen. But three years of long-distance lorry driving had taken its toll, steadily turning solid muscle into less than solid fat. His hair was short and flecked with grey, and he sported on the back of his neck a tattoo of an ox and the letters ‘OUFC’, which reflected a lifelong commitment to Oxford United. But despite appearances, once he picked up his hoe and started to address the weeds that were a constant threat to his allotment, he became a man of subtlety and even grace. Like a ballet dancer spinning and pirouetting round the stage, the head of his hoe would flit between the rows of runner beans and carrots, amongst the Cos lettuces and the beetroot, and around the pyramid of canes up which his sweet peas were growing (his Granddad has always grown sweet peas on his allotment and so did he), and deftly but mercilessly it would destroy all interloping weeds. Sometimes, Mace would undertake this task even when no weeds were visible to the naked eye, for he found the very process of wielding his hoe both comforting and therapeutic.

But that Friday afternoon, the therapy was not working.

‘Damn!’ His dancing hoe had stopped still, as if appalled by the enormity of what it had done. It lay paralyzed in the soil, some three inches from the severed stem of a runner bean plant. With a single movement it had sliced carelessly through this green tube and terminated the life of those many green beans above that drew their life from it.

The hands which held the hoe tightened and stiffened. The knuckles turned white. And from somewhere above, Mace’s mouth repeated the same simple word in ever-increasing crescendo. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’

It had been a disturbing afternoon for Mace. He had gone to the Evergreen Day Centre to attend the Anger Management group which ran every F

riday at 3.00 p.m. He had missed the previous session because of a traffic jam on the M40 just south of Birmingham. As a self-employed lorry driver, he could to some degree order his working life to fit in with his own needs. When the Yellows had been playing at Shrewsbury two Tuesdays previously, he had managed to arrive at the ground at 7.00 p.m. precisely, time enough to park his loaded lorry, grab a pie and chips from a local café, and join his mates in the away fans end just in time to catch the players finish their warm-up routines. Normally, he could be back in Oxford early on a Friday, in time to attend the anger management sessions which his GP had recommended, but a pile-up of two lorries and four cars last Friday had brought him and several hundred other vehicles to a two-hour halt. The odd thing was that when he did finally get back home, he found he was frustrated at missing the session. It was odd because he had started the course reluctantly. He had expected his doctor to offer him some pills to calm him down when he had finally plucked up courage to attend surgery, but instead she had warned him that pills might affect his ability to drive. She had then suggested that if he was serious, then he should attend the anger management group that she knew was due to start at the Evergreen Day Centre. So he had gone, promising himself that after one session he’d be able to tell himself that it was all a complete waste of time and not bother again. But on his arrival he’d discovered that one of the people leading the session was Jake Arnold, and so when the following Friday came round he found himself going along so as not to upset Jake. And then the following week he had gone along because – not that he would have admitted it – he wanted to. But then there was the crash and the missed session, and then today he had got there ten minutes early only to be greeted by chaos, and by news that had hit him like a left hook to the solar plexus. Jake Arnold was dead. More than that, Jake had been murdered. He was told about it by Rachel, who ran the group with Jake, and a tall plain-clothes copper with the humour and charm of an undertaker presiding over the funeral of his own mother.

‘I’m sorry,’ the detective had said without sounding as if he meant it. ‘This may be a bit of a shock, but we need to ask you a few simple questions.’ The questions had started with the mundane – full name, address, telephone and mobile numbers – and had then moved on to the slightly more creative.

‘You first met Jake Arnold when you started this course, did you?’

Mace had been tempted to agree, but with Rachel sitting there he decided a lie was an unnecessary risk. He didn’t know if Rachel knew anything about him and Jake, but she might do. ‘No,’ Mace said. The copper looked up with sudden interest, but said nothing, waiting for Mace to expand on his single word response. ‘Jake was a fan of Oxford United, like me, so we’d seen each other at games. We weren’t mates or anything, it’s just that at away games you all get herded together. So when I came along to this course, well, we recognized each other, didn’t we.’

‘So you sort of knew him, but you weren’t mates?’

‘Yes!’ Mace said, and then ‘No!’ Again the copper fixed him with an expression that was intended to convey that (a) he wasn’t a man to be messed about with and (b) he was happy to sit here all day asking questions until he got replies that he was satisfied with. ‘Look,’ Mace continued, conscious that he wasn’t handling this very well. ‘What I mean is that I knew him by sight, but I didn’t actually know him until after I came here, to the group.’

‘So you got to know him since?’ the copper suggested eagerly. ‘You must see him at every game?’

‘No. Not every game. I don’t see him at home games, for a start. I always go to the Oxford Mail stand, he probably sits in the South Stand. And he doesn’t go to all the away games either.’

‘Did you see him at the last away game?’ The copper was relentless. ‘Where was it, by the way?’

‘Shrewsbury. The Tuesday before last. Nil bloody nil. We played rubbish, but so did they. Jake and me had a chat at half-time.’

‘About what?’ the copper broke in quickly.

‘About the football. What the fuck else? Hardly the time or place to discuss how I was getting on with my anger management, now was it?’

‘Just one more question,’ the copper had said then. Mace had felt relieved when he’d said this because inside he could feel himself getting more and more pissed off with the questions and the bloody copper’s attitude and even with Rachel standing there with her mouth closed for once, but her eyes taking every fucking last thing in. ‘Breathe deep!’ He could almost hear Jake say it, which in the circumstances was a right stupid thing to be almost hearing.

‘I need to ask you where you were last night,’ the copper was saying. Mace tried to compose himself. ‘I went to Lincoln in the morning. I got back about four o’clock,’ he said as calmly as he could. ‘Had some food. Went to the allotment. But it started to rain soon after I got there so I went home, watched the telly for a bit, and went to bed about 9.00 p.m. I had to be in Grimsby by 8.00 this morning, so I had to be up very early.’ He stopped, waiting for a response. The copper frowned, scribbled a few notes on his pad, and grunted. ‘OK, that’s all.’

The interview was over.

At much the same time that Martin Mace was contemplating his hoeing disaster, and less than half a mile away from where he was so doing, Detective Constable Wilson was striding the towpaths of southern Oxford in search of a murder weapon. Not that he expected to find a blood-coated implement lying abandoned in the bushes by the side of the river. But he did hope for confirmation of his theory that the weapon used had been a mooring spike. He started his search in Iffley. He parked his car in the village, then walked down the sloping side road that led to the lock, precisely the route that Peter Mellor had taken with his dog the previous night. He paused for a few moments at the weir where Jake Arnold’s body had shot suddenly into Mellor’s view, and stared down into the water as if waiting for inspiration to rise fully formed from its swirling waters. With a shake of the head, he moved on, across the lock gates, then turning north. He soon passed the Iffley Inn on his right, but he had no interest in revisiting it, and his stride lengthened as his eyes spotted a narrowboat moored a couple of hundred metres up ahead. A middle-aged man dressed in navy blue slacks, polo shirt and nautical hat was busy checking his moorings, and it took only the most casual questioning from Wilson to elicit the information that they had only just arrived, having spent the previous night at Wallingford. He pushed on, slowing briefly at Donnington Bridge in order to read its undergraduate graffiti, but then accelerating northwards, swinging with the river first left and then right, until suddenly before him there lay, as at any time of year, a spectacular view right up to the Head of the River pub, lying in its much favoured and highly profitable position by Folly Bridge. Wilson stopped and for a moment took in the view. On the right stood college boathouses, lining the river in a strict regimental rank, while opposite them – and little more than fifty metres from where he was standing – stood the university boathouse in solitary isolation. But it was not at these that the young detective was looking. He had fished these waters as a boy, and the buildings were remarkable to him only as the background to memories of fish that he had landed and fish that got away. Wilson was looking for moored boats (narrowboats or small cruisers), but surprisingly, given that it was sunny and the weatherwoman had promised a very pleasant weekend, there was none to be seen. A cyclist’s bell jangled unconvincingly behind him, but before Wilson could turn and look, the cyclist was past him, up and over the steeply humped footbridge in front of him, and away past the university boathouse, long hair flapping in the wind. Wilson did not follow. The bridge’s purpose was to allow pedestrians (and cyclists of course, it being Oxford) to cross a small tributary which entered the River Isis at this point, and it was along the southern bank of this waterway that Wilson now began to walk. This was not a path that was well used, and he walked with care. And with anticipation. Because a few hundred metres along the tributary, where it looped round to go under the Donnington Bridge Road, he knew he would find the boats of several river dwellers, and there he reckoned, with a bit of luck, he would find someone missing a mooring spike. As luck would have it, he never got that far. He had walked for barely a minute before he came across a narrowboat almost hidden from view behind a densely foliaged hawthorn bush which was flanked on either side by two graceful willows. As narrowboats go, it was short, fewer than sixteen metres in length Wilson reckoned, and perched on its roof, sipping something from a mug, was a small bald-headed man in dirty brown T-shirt and jeans.

‘Good evening!’ Wilson said cheerily. The man looked up, nodded briefly, and said nothing.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ Wilson continued, this time brandishing his ID card in front of him as a matador might brandish his cloak at a bull. ‘Detective Constable Wilson. No need to be alarmed, but we had some reports of thieving locally, and I just wanted to—’

The dwarf-man laughed. ‘Ah, you’ve got a very nice soppy class of yob in Oxford, haven’t you? Very genteel indeed!’ He took another sip from his mug, then waved it in the air in a manner that made Wilson wonder if it didn’t contain something a bit stronger than tea. ‘Now in Birmingham, they smash your windows. In Leicester they throw all your clothes into the river and smear shit on your bedding. But in Oxford, posh city of dreaming spires, all they steal is a mooring spike, but only one mind you not two, because they wouldn’t like your boat to float off down the river now would they.’