Blood in Grandpont (DI Susan Holden 2)

Holden continued to watch him for clues. The picture on the mobile was of a naked man, sprawled on his back on a bed, but apparently raising himself with one arm. The look on his face suggested he was not expecting to be photographed at that moment in time. Was it just a bit of fun, or blackmail? That was the question that Holden had debated with Lawson when her constable had discovered it while checking the mobile for recent phone calls. And that was what she was trying to divine now.

‘I appreciate this may have come as a bit of a surprise,’ Holden said gently, ‘but I do have to ask you about it. Do you know who the man is?’

‘Yes,’ he croaked. ‘He’s the plumber.’

‘I need a name,’ Holden pressed.

Tull cleared his throat. ‘Jack Smith. He put a new shower in for us only a few weeks ago, and redid our bathroom last year. Several of our friends round here use him. He’s very handy.’

‘Have you seen the photograph before?’

Tull looked at Holden as if she’d just asked him if he’d ever run naked down the High Street.

‘It must be a joke, a big joke. One of Maria’s friends must have taken it and sent it to her for a laugh. He does tend to charge a lot. I bet they wanted to cut him down to size.’

‘We think the photograph was taken with this mobile!’ Holden responded.

‘Rubbish!’ he exclaimed, his voice now shrill. ‘Anyone could have taken it.’

‘But the most likely explanation is that your wife took it,’ Holden insisted. However unpleasant it was to pressurize like this a man whose wife had just been murdered, she had no option. Unless Maria’s death turned out to be a mugging gone wrong, then this photo made her husband suspect number one. There was no room for sentiment.

‘She wouldn’t have,’ he protested, though Holden detected a buckling of confidence in his voice. ‘I mean, how could she?’

Holden removed the mobile from his eye-line and put it back into her bag. ‘I appreciate this is a difficult time for you, but you will understand that I have to follow this up.’

‘If this comes out. …’ Tull began, but his words dribbled to a halt.

‘I can assure you, Dr Tull, that I will be as discreet as I can. Only time will reveal if this is relevant to your wife’s death. For the meantime, if you could give me Jack Smith’s address and phone number, we’ll leave you in peace.’

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘Peace? Do you seriously think you’ll leave me in peace when you walk out the door? Are you absolutely deranged, Detective?’

It took Fox, four uniformed constables and a dog an hour and half to do a sweep of the southern side of the meadow, and of the bushes and shrubbery along the northern edge of the St Clement’s car park, an hour and a half in which they found precisely nothing. Although DC Lawson’s discovery of the handbag had earmarked the likely escape route of the killer, there was no sign of the weapon. Not that this surprised Fox. There were plenty of established waterways around here, he ruefully told himself, and if anyone had been intent on getting rid of the evidence, they would surely have used one of them, rather than just toss it into the nearby bushes. In addition, the rain of the previous night had continued for so long after the incident that any footprints made at the time had been greatly degraded, and indeed, early morning joggers had already squelched their way along the area, further reducing the chance of getting anything useable from the scene.

When the sky darkened, and more rain began to fall heavily from the low, grey clouds, Fox called off the hunt and returned to the Cowley station. There he found Wilson in a state of equal disgust. The CCTV had yielded nothing, because the CCTV in the car park had failed at approximately 7.00 p.m. the previous evening, and no one had been inclined to go out to see why. The only bright light in the gloom was a sheet of paper he had located in Maria Tull’s designer handbag, a list of all the people who had been due to attend her lecture, complete with contact phone numbers.

‘It was tucked away in this little zip compartment,’ Wilson said eagerly, demonstrating the zip as he did. ‘Lawson missed it.’

But Fox was more interested in the list than the intricacies of the handbag.

‘Maybe there is a God,’ he muttered, as he slumped down at his desk.

CHAPTER 3

After leaving the Tulls’ house, it was for DI Holden the work of a single call to Jack Smith’s mobile to track him down, and barely more than a single minute of conversation with him to establish that he would prefer to come down to the station rather than be questioned in the house of Mrs Anderson of Beechcroft Road. Jack had already realized Mrs Anderson was one of those women who liked nothing better than a good gossip, and the idea of being quizzed by the police anywhere near her was not one that appealed to him. How long would it take for her to ring his wife and casually mention that it had been such a surprise when detectives knocked on the door and insisted on questioning Jack while he was meant to be installing a new hot water tank? Hell, that was the last thing he needed. So, he made his excuses, telling her that he needed some extra piping in order to complete the job. With a bit of luck, the police wouldn’t want him for long, and he would be able to return to work with neither her nor his dear wife finding out anything about it.

About twenty minutes later Jack Smith was sitting in an interview room at the Cowley station. He declined DC Lawson’s offer of a coffee, insisting he just wanted to get the interview over and get back to his job, but Holden deliberately waited for ten minutes before making her way down. It wasn’t that she was sadistic – well, no more so than her job demanded – but it made sense to probe any weak spots, and if playing on Jack Smith’s anxiety to be out of the station meant she got better answers out of him, then that was what she would do.

When Holden, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Fox, did finally put in an appearance and sit down at the table opposite Jack Smith, she opened a file and begin to read through the first sheet of paper in it.

Smith gave a snort of impatience. ‘Look, why don’t you bloody well get on with it. I’ve got work to do, you know.’

‘And so do we, sir,’ Fox growled back, leaning his considerable bulk forward as he did so. He was pleased to be alongside his boss again. He hadn’t exactly minded leading the hunt for the knife in the rain, but he did resent the fact that Lawson had been the one to accompany Holden to the Tull’s house. Holden, he couldn’t help thinking, favoured Lawson, saw her maybe even as a protégé, and he wondered where that might leave him.

Jack Smith flinched instinctively before the sergeant’s aggression, and muttered something inaudible under his breath. But when Holden continued to read her file, he tried again, this time less aggressively. ‘Anyway, what is this all about?’

Holden looked up from her papers, and smiled thinly at him. ‘I’m sure you know, Mr Smith.’

‘Why should I?’