Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

‘8.45 p.m. Or thereabouts.’

‘Wow!’ she said, taken by surprise.

‘Actually, it’s not particularly clever,’ she said with a thin smile. ‘His watch stopped. Presuming it was the fire that did it, then I reckon that ties it down pretty tight. Certainly it is in accordance with the forensic evidence.’

Holden made no reply. Silence hung between them, but – perhaps surprisingly – it wasn’t an oppressive one.

‘Does it clarify things?’ Pointer asked.

Holden wasn’t sure that it did. She had been trying to weigh up the possibility of Whiting getting from his gallery to the allotment in time to commit murder, and all in all she reckoned he could have, albeit without much time to spare. But in any case Pointer’s question only lightly registered on her consciousness, for something else was oppressing her. This was an opportunity – with no one else here to witness it – that she ought to take. She cleared her throat noisily. ‘I’d like to apologize.’

‘Apologize?’ Pointer was puzzled.

‘For slapping you.’

‘Hell!’ she replied, and her eyes now locked with Holden’s. Then, curiously, she smiled. ‘I probably deserved it.’

‘Yes,’ Holden said, rather too firmly for Pointer’s liking. ‘Nevertheless,’ Holden continued after a brief pause, ‘I’m not sure I needed to do it with quite so much force.’

Pointer smiled again. Her hand moved up to her left-hand cheek and stroked gently across the skin. ‘I can still feel it,’ she said.

‘Sorry!’ Holden said, and stood up to go.

‘It’s taken, love.’

The woman, dressed in jeans, pink T-shirt and denim jacket, had just sat down. She turned and looked at the large man in the seat next to her. She smiled. ‘By me. Seat F28. That’s what it says on my ticket.’

She was a looker, no question, maybe 22 or 23 to his 35, but the man felt uncomfortable. She was on all counts out of his league. Women like her just didn’t open conversations with him, eye him up, flirt. He felt himself getting flushed, and that made him aggressive. ‘It’s my mate’s seat!’ he insisted loudly. ‘He’ll be here any minute.’

The woman smiled again. ‘Who’s your mate?’

‘What’s it to you? This is his seat.’ The man in the seat beyond him leant forward. Even though he was sitting down, it was obvious to the woman that he was shorter and altogether a less imposing a specimen of male, but he placed his hand lightly on his companion’s shoulder as if to calm him down. ‘He doesn’t mean no harm, dear, only we always sit together – him, me and Martin. So why don’t you just show us your ticket and we’ll sort out where you’re meant to be sitting. All right?’

‘All right,’ the woman said with a shrug. She unbuttoned the breast-pocket of her jacket, pulled something out of it, and then discretely displayed it for the two men. ‘If it’s all right by you, my governor would like a word.’

‘Fuck!’ they said, in perfect unison.

‘So what’s this all about?’ Al Smith demanded fiercely. ‘The game starts in ten minutes, and I’m not missing it, not for you and not for anybody!’

‘I’m not asking you to,’ the dark-haired woman said. ‘Just answer my questions, and you can get back to your seats.’

‘Is Martin all right?’ Sam Sexton asked. His eyes flicked around the room, alighting nervously on the face of each of the four inquisitors, only to move on to the next almost immediately – but if he was seeking reassurances, he sought it in vain. The blonde who had flirted with them in the Oxford Mail end was now standing by the door, all cheer wiped off her face. A young man – a detective constable presumably, though hell he hardly looked old enough – was standing in the corner on the opposite site of the room. His face, too, was swept clean of emotion, and his arms hung loosely by his sides. Immediately opposite Sexton and Smith – across a wood-effect table – sat the woman who had introduced herself as Detective Inspector Holden and a sour-faced man whom she had introduced as Detective Sergeant Fox. He was a big man, imposing even when seated, and Sexton felt himself shudder involuntarily. He moved his attention onto Holden, glad it was her who was calling the shots.

‘Why do you ask that?’ Holden replied.

‘He’s never bloody late for a game,’ Smith butted in. ‘And here you are asking bloody questions. So the fact is we reckon something must have happened to him. It stands to reason, don’t it.’

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Martin Mace is dead.’

‘I knew it!’ said Sexton, his voice shrill with hysteria. ‘I bloody knew it!’ Holden’s eyes, though, were fixed not on Sexton, but on Smith. But whatever emotions Smith was feeling at the moment, he wasn’t showing them. His face was not so much blank as bored. He looked at his watch ostentatiously, then looked up at Holden. ‘So are you going to tell us what happened? Because if so,

perhaps you can get on with it.’

Holden twitched her head. Fox leant down to his right, thrusting his hand into a bag, from which he drew out a newspaper. He placed it carefully in the middle of the table, so that the two men opposite could see its front page.

‘Didn’t you see Monday’s Oxford Mail?’

‘Only the back pages,’ Smith said casually, but his eyes were anything but casual. For several seconds there was silence, as Smith and Sexton took in the somewhat arch headline (‘The Allotment of Death’), the gloomy photo of the charred remains of the garden shed, and the first few lines of the article which accompanied them.