Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

She laughed. ‘Oops! Steady, Constable. Not the best way to impress Dectective Inspector Susan. Crashing in the car park on the way to arrest a murder suspect! You’ll be back on bike duty if you’re not careful.’

‘We’re bringing her in for questioning, not arresting her,’ Wilson said pedantically.

‘Whatever!’ she said, before lapsing into silence. Wilson, who was having trouble finding a gap in the traffic on the Oxford Road, was relieved about that, but no sooner had he slipped out in front of a Morris Traveller than WPC Lawson resumed.

‘Anyway, by virgin, I was merely thinking in terms of murder. Your first time investigating one. Nothing else. All right?’

‘All right,’ Wilson replied, who had hoped that this particular line of conversation had already ended.

‘Mind, you,’ she continued cheerfully, ‘there’s nothing wrong with a man being a virgin in my book. Nothing wrong at all.’

Wilson tried to concentrate on the road.

‘Not at your age, anyway.’

Wilson felt himself going red, and hoped against hope that she would stop.

‘So,’ she said, with an effortless change, ‘did she do it? This Anne Johnson. Did she kill her sister, do you think?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I do hope so. It would be so much more interesting than a suicide.’

‘Bloody tractor!’ Dr Adrian Ratcliffe was last in a queue of ten vehicles – eight cars of various colours and two white vans, to be precise – moving at twenty miles per hour behind the object of his fury. ‘Why can’t it get off the main road?’ he demanded of the empty passenger seat of his Saab. It had not been a very good trip; there were too many lorries on the road for that, not to mention roadworks at Shillingford which had delayed him for a full ten minutes. Even in a good mood Ratcliffe was an aggressive driver, always anxious to get there sooner (wherever ‘there’ might be). Today, though, he had a genuine reason for such anxiety: if he didn’t get to the Cowley police station by 10.30, then that bloody DI woman would be on the phone to school asking where he was or, even worse, sending round a pair of clodhopping coppers to cause maximum embarrassment.

‘Get on with it!’ he shouted, as the car at the front of the column pulled out and then passed the tractor. ‘And you!’ he urged as the next car edged slowly to the right, only to lurch back again as a BMW, having just escaped the 30 m.p.h. zone in Nuneham Courtenay, accelerated towards them. ‘Damn!’ he snarled.

In truth, Dr Ratcliffe still had some thirty minutes to get to his destination, which ought to have been more than enough given that the rush hour had passed, but he was finding it difficult to think rationally. For the fact is that he was worried. Very worried indeed. What if this went to court? What if his relationship with Anne Johnson came up. What if, God forbid, she used him as an alibi in open court? His imagination went into overdrive.

‘Miss Johnson, did you visit you sister the night before her death?’

‘No, My Lord, I was in bed.’

‘Can anyone vouch for that.’

‘My headmaster can.’

‘Really, and how is that Miss Johnson.?

?

‘Well, my Lord, we were fucking.’

‘Between what times?’

‘About 7.30 till maybe 11.00.’

‘Really. He must have a remarkable stamina!!’

‘Actually, it only took three minutes, but that’s men for you!’

The whole jury titters, while in the gallery the press hacks rub their hands in delight.

He tried to shake free of his imaginings, but cold reality was no better. If this came out, Alice would never forgive him. That would be it. Finished. Caput. End of story. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It was a cliché, but one which summed up Alice to a tee.

‘So, who do you want to be?’

Wilson, who had just pulled up in Marston Street, looked across at his companion with puzzlement writ large across his face. ‘Sorry?’

‘Good cop, or bad cop?’ WPC Lawson said flatly.

Puzzlement was replaced by alarm. ‘What on earth are you talking about? We are only going to bring her in for questioning, not force a confession out of her.’