Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

‘Would you like a tea or coffee?’ Holden said pleasantly.

‘No!’ The reply was definite.

Holden looked down and opened the folder of paper she had placed on the table. She spent several seconds frowning over the first page. Then she closed the folder and looked up. ‘You’ve been lying to us, Miss Johnson?’

‘Have I?’ she replied, steadily holding the Detective Inspector’s gaze.

‘In fact, you seem to make quite an art of not telling the truth.’

Anne Johnson shrugged, but said nothing.

Holden flicked a glance towards Fox, who immediately opened a folder in front of him, and drew from it a photograph which he pushed across the table in front of him.

‘Is that your car?’ he asked.

‘It looks like it,’ she said grudgingly.

‘The number plate is quite clear,’ Fox said evenly. ‘For the sake of the tape recording, can you please confirm yes or no if this is your car.’

‘You obviously know it is,’ she said belligerently.

‘This photograph of a car which you have agreed belongs to you was taken at the entrance to the multi-storey car park at the Magdalen Bridge end of the Cowley Road. As you can see from the timestamp at the bottom, it was taken at 6.40 a.m. the morning of your sister’s death. Were you driving the car?’

‘I suppose I must have been.’

Holden leant forward. ‘In your original statement to DS Fox, you told him you hadn’t seen her for some weeks prior to her death.’

‘Did I?’ she said, as if she was genuinely surprised.

‘In fact, Miss Johnson,’ Fox said, ‘you told me you hadn’t even spoken on the phone?’

‘Look, what does it matter? My sister had jumped from the top of a car park. I was still very distressed. I might have said anything.’

‘We are trying to establish the precise circumstances of your sister’s death,’ Fox continued doggedly. ‘If you lie, it is a very serious matter. Now the fact is that we have photographic evidence of you arriving in Oxford and parking very near to your sister’s home less than two and a half hours before she died. We also know from Miss Sarah Johnson’s mobile phone records that she rang you up the previous night.’

Anne Johnson laughed. ‘Haven’t you been a busy boy! A gold star for you.’

Holden leant forward and took up the baton. ‘Why did she ring you?’

‘Why do you think? She was depressed.’

‘More so than usual?’

‘Well, I guess so,’ Anne Johnson said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, ‘given that she then committed suicide. It’s not the thing you do if you’re feeling on top of the world.’

‘But that’s something we are trying to establish. If she did indeed commit suicide, and if so, why. Because the evidence so far is circumstantial. ’

Anne Johnson’s attitude of bored intolerance disappeared. ‘What the hell do you mean? Of course she committed—’

‘There’s no of course in my book,’ Holden snapped, ‘merely evidence – good, bad or circumstantial. And so far it doesn’t add up to anything conclusive. There’s nothing that says she must have jumped rather than she was pushed by person or persons unknown.’

‘So,’ Fox cut in, ‘perhaps you can tell us in more precise terms what she said when she rang you up.’

Anne Johnson dropped her gaze, so that when she replied, she addressed her words towards the table.

‘She was very distressed. She said how she was feeling very low. How she hated herself. That she wasn’t sure she could carry on.’

‘What was making her feel that?’ Holden said.