Blood on the Cowley Road (DI Susan Holden 1)

‘And the others? Do you think they are from the day centre too?’

Alexander had made his way round to the desk and was himself peering at the PC monitor. ‘That’s from the funeral of Alice Smith. Up at the cemetery in Between Towns Road.’

‘What do you know about her?’ Holden had given up trying to keep Alexander at a distance.

‘She was a benefits adviser, or something like that. She used to go round the various day centres in Oxfordshire, handing out advice.’

‘And one of those day centres was the Evergreen one?’

‘I guess so.’

‘So,’ said Fox, ‘if these killings are about someone taking revenge for her death, then we’ve suddenly got a hell of a lot of suspects.’

‘Revenge killings?’ Alexander said, already writing the next day’s headline in his head. ‘That’s you’re theory is it? Can I quote you on it?’

‘No!’ both Fox and Holden said in unison.

It was then that the phone rang. Holden snatched it. ‘Holden here.’

It was Wilson, and he was in a state. Fox could hear a frantic buzz of fast-forward chatter from the other end of the line.

‘OK, Wilson,’ Holden was saying, ‘OK. Now just slow down and tell me from the beginning what the situation is.’

Wilson slowed down and explained, but even so he hardly drew breath as he did so. They were with Doreen Sexton, and Sam had not come home, and in fact he was late, and neither Sam nor Al Smith were answering their phones, but Doreen had spoken to Sam earlier and he had said he was going to meet a client at a place called Dingle Dell Cottage which was somewhere out of town on the way towards Stadhampton they thought, only Doreen was very worried because Sam had promised not to be late and normally he was very reliable. ‘Just a minute!’ Holden cut in noisily, and wondering why the hell Lawson couldn’t have made the call. ‘Wait while we check.’ And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it took less than a minute to track down Dingle Dell Cottage. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘we’ll meet you on the Garsington Road. Wait by the Bullnose. Don’t go after them on your own. I’m bringing armed back-up.’

Smith pulled out of the Bullnose Morris car park and headed south. He drove slowly along the thirty mile limit, much more slowly than usual. At the roundabout, he was used to turning right, along Grenoble Road towards the football stadium, but this time he went straight on. He was out of the restricted zone now, but he drove barely forty-five miles an hour. He watched carefully as the milometer progressed: point eight, point nine, one mile. There it was. A left turn. He carefully swung the car round, and peered ahead. It was less than three miles from where he lived, but he couldn’t remember ever having driven along this road. He glanced down at the dashboard. One point two miles. Not far now. One point three. One point four. There it was, on the right, a rough farm track, and a sign. Dingle Dell Cottage. He swung right, slowing his car as it bumped uncomfortably over the rugged surface. He changed down another gear and twisted hard right and then left as he tried to avoid – unsuccessfully – a deep rut. Lurching around, he nevertheless gently pressed down on the accelerator, anxious to get to the rendezvous. He kept his eyes fixed ahead, but with his hand he felt across the passenger seat, searching with his fingers until the found the reassuring presence of the baseball bat. He found it an easy weapon to handle: whether with a full swing of the arm or a short stabbing movement into an opponent’s face, it was bloody effective. And it was easy enough to hide too, slipped up inside the sleeve of an anorak. He was ready. He was ready for the bastard. It was now or never. And he was bloody fucking ready.

It was, for the time of day and year, extremely dark. Since Smith had left Wittenham Clumps, thick low cloud had thrust dramatically in from the west, gobbling up the blue sky until it was all gone. The wind which had brought it had then relented, leaving the grey billowing masses to mark time over Oxford and the countryside around, threatening, though not yet delivering, rain. Smith, suddenly noticing a large lump of stone in front o

f him, again swung the wheel abruptly first one way and then the other, before slipping down a gear for fear of stalling the car. It was at that moment that the smell hit him. It was the smell of smoke, though it wasn’t the comforting smell of wood smoke or the burning of autumn leaves. It was an altogether more unpleasant and acrid odour, an essentially unnatural smell.

He peered in front, looking for its source, but trees now pressed in from either side, scratching at the car and limiting his view. Up front, the track curved away to the right and out of sight, and he pressed his foot down again, briefly spinning his back wheels as they lost traction.

‘Shit!’ Up front the road was straightening out, forcing its way out of the clinging wood, and leading straight to a dilapidated-looking stone building that Smith assumed must be Dingle Dell Cottage. But his one-word exclamation had nothing to do with the building. Parked in front of it was a vehicle. And it was on fire. ‘Bloody fucking shit!’ Dark black smoke and blistering orange flames were erupting skywards from it. As he drew closer, the detail of the object started to register and its outline become apparent through the flames and smoke. It was bigger than a car. A van in fact. The sort of van beloved of builders. In fact, a make of a van that Smith recognized only too well. He lurched to a halt and jumped out, forgetting the baseball bat that he had been handling only seconds before. Or not so much forgetting it as leaving it, because the fact was that a baseball bat wouldn’t be any use at all in rescuing his friend from the blaze. ‘Sam!’ he screamed, but he knew there would be no reply. He ran forward, but after three of four steps, the heat of the blaze stopped him in his tracks. Reluctantly, he retreated. ‘Sam!’ he screamed again. ‘Sam!’ Because there was nothing else he could do. ‘Sam!’ Again and again and again he bellowed out his friend’s name, and he stopped only when something hard and heavy collided with the top of his head.

If Al Smith had not ducked very slightly before impact, he would almost certainly have died instantly. A sixth sense, a primeval survival instinct, or some undeliberate stumble – whatever it was that caused the sudden lowering of his head – the result was that the metal boating spike which his unseen assailant swung at his head missed the centre of its target and instead struck him a glancing blow on the top of the head. But glancing blows with heavy objects can still inflict severe damage, and before Smith hit the ground he had already entered a world of oblivion. His assailant stood over his inert body for several seconds, but when Smith half opened his eyes and gave a groan, the man, rather than hitting him again, merely smiled. ‘Still with us, you bastard?’ he snarled. There was no reply. Merely another groan. ‘Perhaps this will wake you up?’ he continued and he began to pour water over him. ‘Hello!’ he shouted. ‘Hello! Anyone at home?’

Smith groaned yet again and tried to raise himself from the ground with his left arm, cajoled into consciousness not so much by the shouting or the wetness as by the smell. It was a strong, unpleasant smell, as well as being a very familiar smell, and in the circumstances it was a frightening one. His clothes, he realized, were covered not with water, but with petrol. As adrenalin began to pump through his veins, he tried desperately to get himself upright, now using both arms to force his body upwards, but it was a pointless expenditure of his personal resources. His assailant calmly put the petrol can back down on the ground, picked up the metal spike again, and for a second time swung it in an arc through the air. This time, however, he aimed not at Smith’s head, but his left knee. He was a strong man, and fury added to that strength: the bar crashed unhindered into its target and Smith went down again in screaming agony.

His assailant sniggered. ‘Now you’re not going to get any ideas about running off,’ he mocked, though the snigger and words were wasted on Smith. Through the excruciating pain, which seemed to rip from the knee right up his side to the base of the skull, all his limited energy and concentration was focused on just one thing – survival – and if survival proved impossible, then at least revenge. He twisted his face upwards in an attempt to see more than just his attacker’s legs, but the act of trying to focus merely caused more pain to streak across his head. The man laughed loudly this time, and kicked him hard in the stomach, so that he collapsed again in a heap.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ Smith begged. And then again: ‘It was an accident! ’

If Smith hoped that these words would somehow stop his assailant, they failed. His attacker aimed another kick at him, this time at his left leg rather than his stomach. Smith screamed again.

‘An accident?’ his assailant shouted. ‘You didn’t mean it? What sort of idiot do you think I am. My girlfriend burns to death and you call it a fucking accident. Next thing is you’ll be begging me to forgive you, to turn the other cheek. Well, let me tell you, I’m no lovey-dovey Christian. If I believed in a God, he’d be the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-fora-tooth type. Vengeance is mine, you bastard, do you get it? Vengeance is mine! And you are going to burn, just like her.’ With that he bent down, picked up a second can and began to pour yet more petrol on Smith. He was curled up in a semi-foetal position, his left hand on his stomach, the other flapping around the smashed knee. But inside his head, his mind was remarkably clear. He just needed to get the bastard closer.

‘It was all her fault!’ Smith snarled. ‘The bloody bitch started it!’ The odd thing was that this was almost true. They had come together in the pub, the six of them on their way back from a peace protest, and the five of themselves on their way home after the game. Sitting at adjacent tables, they had got on all right at first. One of the peaceniks asked about the game; he was a Oxford United fan, and they, it turned out, were all from the Oxford area, but after a bit it got a bit political, and the woman – she had long, fuzzy hair, and circular glasses, and a stud in her nose – started to go on about war, and the army, and how soldiers were the stooges of politicians, and how no one in their right mind should kill people for a living – and that had really wound Al Smith up because his little brother Jo had joined up two years ago, and twelve months later had been blown up by a suicide bomber, so he didn’t want to be lectured by any hippie on the ethics of bloody war. ‘The frizzy haired bitch started it!’

That got his assailant’s attention. The empty petrol can was hurled away, and he stepped right up to Smith, so that his boot was almost touching his face. ‘You’re lying. You’re a lying piece of shit. You drove them off the road. I know that because Sarah told me, and so did Jake just before I killed him. So say what you like, because it won’t change a thing. Your time is up, arsehole!’

And then he struck a match. Not that Smith saw him do it – he could see only his legs, and the burning van beyond – but he knew it was coming, and he heard and recognized the tell-tale noise, so that he knew he was too late. Smith’s right hand, which had been flapping around his smashed kneecap as if in some vain attempt to assuage the pain, had moved further down his right leg, and had finally located what it sought, a short-handled knife strapped in a leather sheath just above his right ankle. It had then taken several critical moments of desperate scrabbling to pull up the trouser leg and grasp the handle, but then only a second to lunge through the air and strike deep into the man’s calf. The match fell pirouetting and reeling through the air, igniting the petrol vapours before it reached Smith’s jacket. The man fell to the ground, bellowing out pain. As the flames erupted into his face, he twisted violently to the left, trying to hurl himself away to safety, but two clawing hands had hold of his coat, and like rotweillers with their prey, they refused to let go.

When the police arrived some two minutes later, the smouldering corpse of Al Smith lay inert on the ground, all life thankfully extinguished. But under its blackened bulk lay the still twitching, and barely recognizable body of Jim Blunt.

It took Jim Blunt six days to die. He was in the John Radcliffe Hospital for almost thirty-six hours before he opened his eyes, and another twenty-four passed before he uttered any sound decipherable as a word. On day four he finally began to form sentences and to show awareness of his surroundings. DI Holden, who dropped by each day to check on his progress, was so encouraged that she brought Detective Constable Lawson with her the following afternoon. In the presence of Lawson and a prickly, protective nurse, Holden conducted a painfully slow interview with Blunt. The nurse terminated the exchange after only three minutes when Blunt feebly waved his questioner away and turned his head towards the window. For the remainder of the day Blunt slept desultorily. At six o’clock he took some soup with surprising enthusiasm, but then fell into a deep sleep from which he never awoke. At 9.05 a.m. the following day he was declared dead by the duty doctor. The transcript of the interview is reproduced here:

Holden: Do you know who you are?