Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

‘I’m glad to see you’re thinking, Wilson. For a moment back there, I was beginning to wonder—’ She trailed off, and now in turn took a sip at her coffee. Then she looked across at Fox.

‘Well, Fox. Marks out of ten for Wilson’s analysis?’

Fox looked back at her. ‘Well, Guv, in the circumstances, I think I’d give him a nine.’

‘Nine? Why nine?’

‘We don’t want him getting big headed now do we, Guv?’

Holden shook her head gravely. ‘Certainly not, Fox.’

‘So, team, who’s our prime suspect?’ Holden asked the question as if asking a class of five-year-olds what the capital of Uzbekistan was. There was no immediate answer. Outside, a particularly noisy lorry, piled high with scrap metal, rumbled up the incline of the road, heading for the ring road.

‘What about Blunt?’ she suggested, unwilling to wait.

‘Well worth an interview,’ Fox said, ‘based on what Les Whiting told us, but my instinct is that Danny is a more likely killer—’

‘Why?’ Holden responded sharply. ‘If Jake’s complaints had been upheld, Blunt’s job, even his career is in jeopardy. He looks a tough bastard to me, so when Jake complained he was a bully, maybe he decided to get his retaliation in first.’

‘Like I said,’ Fox admitted, ‘he is worth an interview, but Danny is the key, in my book.’

‘Why?’ Holden snapped again. ‘Because he’s a nutcase? Because if that’s your criterion, there are plenty of suspects down at the day centre.’

‘Because he is linked to both Sarah and Jake. He was devoted to Sarah, and he didn’t like Jake. Jealous maybe that Sarah relied more on Jake than himself. So when Sarah tops herself, he blames Jake for letting her down and—’

‘Wilson, what do you think?’ Holden said sharply, still in combative mode. ‘Which of them should we target?’

Wilson swallowed. ‘This may seem like a cop-out, but why not target them both.’

‘Both of them?’ Holden asked out loud. Then she laughed. ‘Is your father, or even your dear mother, a politician, Wilson? Because if so, you’ve clearly learnt a thing or two from them.’

Fox chuckled. ‘Nine out of ten again, I think Guv.’

The idea had first formed in his head just after the school secretary rang back. ‘Hello,’ she’d said in a tone which exuded briskness, ‘St Gregory’s School here.’

‘DC Wilson,’ he’d said. He had intended to continue with some pleasantry, but Miss Hegarty was steaming remorselessly forward on her mission to connect her head teacher and the Oxford police without hindrance or delay. ‘Please wait, while I put you through.’ Wilson waited several seconds while Miss Hegarty’s mission encountered some invisible hitch, but in that interval the idea materialised, like some speck of grit. One moment the eye is fine and unnoticed, the next there is a speck in it which you can’t not notice. And like all respectable specks of grit, it resolutely refused to be dislodged by a metaphorical rub of the eye.

Wilson had first rung St Gregory’s fifteen minutes earlier. Once he had explained his requirements to Miss Hegarty, she had promised to call back as soon as the head was available. In the meantime, Wilson had determined to get a firmer grip on the evidence, such as there was, of the death of Sarah Johnson. He had retrieved the case folder from Fox’s meticulously tidy desk. The Detective Sergeant had ‘popped out’ to the chemist, to get himself some painkillers for his still-sensitive teeth, although Wilson had his theory – with little firm foundation, if truth be told – that his superior had developed an interest in the recently separated Doreen, who served behind the counter there. Wilson took the folder and looked through its sparse contents. His attention was immediately drawn to Fox’s interview of Ed Bicknell. Reading it through, he felt immensely irritated – as he had while witnessing the interview – with the laid-back, upper-middle-class self-confidence and indolence which emanated from every pore of Bicknell’s body. He wasn’t anti-student as such, Wilson told himself, but how could a man get up at 11 o’clock in the morning and still think the world owed him a living. He, Wilson, knew that only hard work, bloody hard work, would get him anywhere in life. And besides, what sort of man was Bicknell that he could view the suicide of a woman as nothing more than an opportunity to gain money, publicity, and professional advancement. Wilson pushed the folder away, in disgust, not just with Bicknell but with himself, too. He was meant to be looking into whether Sarah Johnson’s death was suicide, not jumping to a whole set of half-baked conclusions. He gave himself an almost physical shake, as a dog might after scrambling out of a river, and he reached for the CD onto which Bicknell had copied his photographs. He picked it up, inserted it into his PC, and took hold of the mouse.

The photographs were in chronological order, with a date and time on the bottom left-hand corner of each picture. He began to flick through them, spending a second or two on each one until he came to the first photo of Sarah Johnson. 8:42:33. About twenty minutes before she jumped or fell or was pushed to her death. He sat and examined the image. She was standing looking at the plaque and her face was fully in profile. She was wearing a fawn mackintosh, mid-calf in length, and below it jeans and black ankle boots. For several seconds Wilson studied the picture. One part of his brain, a part not concentrating on the image of Sarah Johnson, became aware that outside the room, down the corridor, there was a sudden running of feet. He ignored it, and clicked onto the next picture. Another one of Sarah Johnson, but this time two other persons had joined her. She had turned her head towards them, but this had caused shadow to fall across her face. Was she talking to the man or woman? Wilson could see only their backs. The man was dressed in a mid-blue denim jacket and somewhat lighter jeans. The woman was dressed in a dark jacket and skirt, and a white line around the neck suggest

ed a white blouse too. Office clothes for her, more casual for him. Separate people or a couple of some sort? Wilson wondered. How easy would it be to track them down? Not impossible, despite the photo showing only their back views. Was she perhaps walking to her office in town as she did every day? Was he perhaps a student with less regular habits. But even if they could be found, what could they remember that would be useful?

Outside the police station, in the car park, a siren was turned on. Wilson registered the fact, but again discarded it as irrelevant to him. Then there was another noise, much closer to home. He stretched out a hand and picked up the phone. ‘Hello,’ a female voice said. ‘St Gregory’s School here.’ In the several seconds it took Miss Hegarty to connect her head teacher to the Oxford police, the idea which was to plague Wilson for several days came into existence. Tiny, as yet barely formed, but nevertheless unquestionably there.

‘Dr Adrian Ratcliffe, here,’ a voice said tersely. ‘Head teacher of St Gregory’s. To whom am I speaking?’

Wilson winced at the grammatical precision of the question. ‘Detective Wilson,’ he replied, taking a split-second decision to obscure his own low ranking. ‘Oxford Police, sir. It is very good of you to ring back so promptly.’

‘What do you want,’ Ratcliffe cut in, ‘precisely? I do have a very exacting day in prospect, so if we could just cut to the chase.’

Wilson made a face down the phone line. ‘We are just trying to complete our investigations into the death of Sarah Johnson.’

‘Terrible thing,’ the head teacher broke in. ‘Such a terrible thing.’ Wilson could almost see the man shaking his head as he spoke. ‘Poor Anne, her sister, was quite distraught. You aren’t wanting to speak to her, are you? I do hope not, because I have given her compassionate leave. No other family you see. I expect she is across in Oxford now, sorting out Sarah’s flat. I suggest that you could always try contacting her there.’ For someone who had a very busy day in prospect, it was surprising, Wilson reflected, how Dr Adrian Ratcliffe, Header Teacher of St Gregory’s, appeared to have time to talk. It wasn’t as if he, Wilson, had yet had the opportunity to ask a question yet. ‘There must be so much for her to do,’ Ratcliffe was saying. ‘I had to do it for my mother. There were six large bin bags of clothes alone to take to the charity shops, let alone anything else. But doing it for a mother is one thing. That is somehow natural, part of the order of things. But to do it for your sister when you are in your mid-thirties, well that is just ... just terrible.’

‘So,’ said Wilson, taking the opportunity offered by the lull in Ratcliffe’s monologue, ‘I suppose Anne is the sole heir and beneficiary? ’

‘Well, I imagine so,’ said the busy head teacher. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s no other family. But you can always ask Anne herself. As I said, she’s probably in Oxford.’