Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

He was eating breakfast when the call came, and he swore involuntarily. He was not a morning person. He would have admitted as much if he had been asked, though he would have expressed it differently given that he was a call-a-spade-a-bloody-shovel type of person. He slurped at his still-hot black coffee and grimaced. Only then did he flick open his mobile to see who the hell was calling him. A number flashed up on screen, a number which neither his mobile nor he recognized. His first impulse was to ignore it, but his curiosity was aroused, and instead he leant forward and picked it up.

‘Yes?’ he demanded.

‘It’s me!’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘I’m ringing you up.’ The familiar voice spoke calmly. ‘I’d have thought it was obvious.’

‘We agreed, didn’t we. No bloody phone calls. If they were ever to check my mobile—’

‘I’m ringing from a phone box. I’m not an idiot.’

‘Where from?’ His voice was raised now and angry.

But the caller ignored his question. ‘Can’t we meet?’

‘You must be fucking mad! We agreed. In six months time, maybe.’

‘I didn’t mean Oxford, stupid. But London or Bristol. Or Paris even. Where’s the risk in that.’

‘I’m not taking any risks for you,’ he said coldly. Then he pressed the red button on his mobile and swore again.

Meanwhile, not so far away across the streets of Oxford, Detective Inspector Holden had just slumped down at her desk in the Cowley Police Station. On automatic pilot, she powered up her PC, and waited as it struggled into some semblance of life. She had slept badly, waking at 2.30 and again at 4.15, and then sleeping through the alarm. So she’d got to the station later than she’d wanted and tired. The logon screen had just appeared in front of her when the phone rang. She picked the receiver up, placed it against her left ear and spoke. ‘DI Holden here.’

‘Good morning,’ came the reply. She recognized the high-pitched voice, and immediately wished she had let her voicemail handle the call. It was Don Alexander, fro

m the Oxford Mail.

‘So what do you want this morning?’ she asked tartly. ‘Short of copy are you?’

He laughed. ‘Just want to keep the public informed. That’s all, Inspector.’ Then the laughter had disappeared from his voice. ‘Look, people are worried. Hell, I’m worried. Even my cat is worried. So the question we need an answer to is, when are you going to arrest someone? ’

‘How long is a piece of bloody string?’ was her instant response, and immediately regretted it.

‘Is there a prime suspect?’ he pressed.

‘No comment,’ she replied. ‘And don’t quote me about pieces of string.’

‘What leads are you working on, Inspector?’

‘I can’t comment on that either.’

He paused. Then continued more caustically: ‘Inspector, just for the record, how many more deaths have to occur before you do comment?’

Holden had to choke back the impulse to scream into the phone. When she did speak – and this was very much to her credit – it was in an only slightly heightened tone. ‘Look, Don, I really do have a lot of work to do, so if it’s OK with you, or even if it isn’t, I’m going to put the phone down now. Good bye.’

It took Wilson and Lawson most of Thursday morning to search again the accommodation of Martin Mace and Jake Arnold and Sarah Johnson. Mace’s was the quickest since his small third bedroom had been devoted to his sacred team. Football programmes, home and away, were carefully organized in date order on the shelves that lined the walls. Labels on each shelf indicated the season. They placed the programmes for the current season and all of the previous season into two cardboard boxes. Tracking the actual tickets Mace had bought and used proved no more difficult. A shoebox on the top shelf contained envelopes. Each was marked – ‘2001-2002 season’ for example – and inside each were two wadges of tickets, each with an elastic band around it. As a brief glance revealed, one consisted of tickets for home games, and one for away.

‘Talk about making things easy for us,’ Wilson grinned.

But Lawson said nothing, for she was already walking back down the stairs, a box under each arm, and a small but as yet untested idea in her head.

At much the same time, Danny Flynn stood in the middle of his room and looked critically around. He lived in a bed-sitter on the top floor of a four-storey house on the south-eastern side of the Iffley Road. It was a large room, taking in the full depth of the building, though the eaves of the roof had the effect of making the room seem somewhat smaller than its official dimensions. Danny walked across to the front window, which afforded a view across the Iffley Road towards the university running track, the very one on which Roger Bannister had been the first man to break the four-minute barrier for the mile all those years ago. But this feat was not at all on Flynn’s mind. As he peered out of the window, it wasn’t across the road that he was looking, but rather down at the road, and in particular at the pavements on either side. He stood there for several minutes, hardly moving, but assessing the individuals, couples and groups who were walking up and down them. A grey-haired woman and small child – grandmother and granddaughter presumably – made their way very slowly from right to left as he looked, hand in hand. Two men in dark suits strode past them in the other direction, walking together but not, as far as Flynn could see, talking together. Next into Flynn’s view came a group of five students. Dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and trainers, they rapidly overtook the woman and child, before turning right down the private road, bound perhaps for the running track and Bannister’s footprints.

None of these moving people held Flynn’s attention for any length of time. What did, however, was first a car, and then a woman. The car was pulled up on the far side of the road, facing the city centre but ignoring all the parking restrictions clearly indicated by the double yellow lines running along that side of the road. A man was sitting in the driving seat and he was talking into a mobile phone. This carried on for over a minute – Flynn kept checking his watch every ten seconds or so – before the car moved jerkily off, the mobile phone still clasped to the man’s right ear. Instantly, Flynn’s attention was transferred to a woman leaning against the railings. For Flynn realized with a start that he hadn’t noticed her before. He hadn’t seen her stop. He hadn’t seen her walking along the street. It was as if she had materialized on that paving slab. Anxiety surged around his body, and his hands, hanging down in front of him started to move from side to side, as if controlled, like those of a marionette, by strings. How long had she been there? She was in the shade created by the overhanging branches of the large beech tree that stood on the far side of the railings. She might have been there ages. Watching. Watching his window? Watching out for him? But her face, the position of her head, told another story, and as he realized this the anxiety began to slowly seep from his body. She was not looking up. She was looking down the road now, to the left as Flynn saw it, and every movement of her body suggested that she, too, was anxious. She looked nervously at her watch, she pulled abstractedly at a lock of hair, she looked back up the street, and then back down the street again. She was waiting for someone, and he – or she – was late. Flynn watched her intently. His hands had stopped moving, and his breathing now eased. She hadn’t looked up towards him even once. So, maybe she wasn’t a spy. Maybe she wasn’t one of them after all. Then, all of a sudden, the woman took another final glance at her watch, before turning and starting to walk back towards the city centre, first slowly, even reluctantly, and soon more purposefully, her legs striding out as if she was determined to leave this embarrassing place behind. She had been stood up. Flynn grinned in relief. But as he watched her disappear from view, he found himself feeling sorry for her, and even angry on her behalf. How dare he stand her up? For a he it must have been, Flynn decided. What had she done to deserve that? Bastard! Flynn watched where she had disappeared for several seconds, in case by some chance she should turn around and retrace her steps. But when she didn’t, he let out a deep breath and sighed.

There was no one watching, of that he was certain – well almost certain. He was safe. Flynn stepped back from his window, turned round, and reviewed the state of his room again.