Blood in Grandpont (DI Susan Holden 2)

They had to park some distance beyond the Tulls’ house and walk back. Even at this time of day, when those who work are at work and the decreasing band of ladies who lunch are still prolonging their outings with a drawn-out coffee, there were few available parking spaces. The sky above was a uniform grey – cloud as opposed to clouds – a blanket of dampness that offered no hope of relief. Holden put her hand up to see if she could feel any actual rain, then touched her cheek. She grinned to herself, recognizing a behaviour left over from childhood. Please let it not rain today.

Dr Alan Tull opened the door. The smile of greeting on his face evaporated as soon as he saw them. ‘Gosh, you have come in numbers.’

‘We’ll be quicker that way.’ Holden tried to sound matter of fact, and upbeat. She didn’t want to alarm him. ‘Anyway, may we come in?’ Tull was still standing in the doorway, and had been showing no sign of allowing them over the threshold.

‘Sorry,’ he said. Even under stress, he was courteous. ‘I do apologize. Come in.’

‘Thank you.’ Holden led the four of them in. She felt bad. When she had rung him to arrange their visit, she’d made out that what she was proposing was merely a chat and a clarification of a few details, only one step up from a social visit to see how he was holding up. Now his decency and acceptance of the circumstances made her feel deceitful and cheap. He didn’t deserve it. Unless, a little voice whispered in the back of her brain, unless he had killed his wife and her lover, and indeed her ex-lover if that is what Dominic Russell had been.

Holden tried to make it as non-threatening as possible. In fact, as they drove over the four of them had discussed where they should sit. When Alan Tull gestured towards the sofa, Holden moved towards it, and Fox joined her. Tull seated himself in an armchair opposite them, while Lawson and Wilson sat to the side, at a distance, in his eye-line if he chose to glance at them. ‘Whatever you do, don’t just hover,’ Holden had insisted. ‘It’ll spook him.’

Alan Tull leant forward, his interlocked hands twisting slightly as he spoke. ‘So, have you made progress? I take it you haven’t arrested anyone yet.’

She nodded encouragingly. ‘Yes, we’ve made progress, and no, we haven’t arrested anyone. But there are a few details we need your help with.’

‘Of course.’

Holden looked down at her notes. ‘On the night your wife died, you came home just after six o’clock.’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you say what time she actually left the house?’

He scratched the crown of his head. ‘She was finishing off her meal when I arrived. Mackerel salad. She was quite rigorous about what she ate. And about what I ate, in fact.’ He sniffed. ‘I poured myself a whisky and asked her if she was organized for her lecture, and she told me I had spilt some food down my shirt and I should give it a soak in cold water and salt.’ Again, he sniffed. ‘Then I went through to my study to make a phone call. I was still on the phone when she called through that she was leaving, and then the door slammed and she was gone.’ He sighed, a deep, heavy sigh that seemed to Holden almost theatrical in its intensity. She remembered suddenly Sarah Russell’s account of her visit to him on the morning of her husband’s death, and she shivered. Was all this an act? The courteousness, the sadness, the sense of bathos wrung tight. Was he playing them for fools? He was keen on the theatre, after all.

‘Could you give a time?’

‘Maybe 6.15 p.m. I’m not sure, to be honest. But I do remember thinking she had plenty of time to get there and get organized, so it can’t have been much after that.’

‘And do you rememb

er her receiving any phone calls before she left?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry. I wish I could be more help.’

‘Thank you.’ Holden smiled. She too could do polite. A mobile phone rang. Damn. It was hers. She opened her bag, saw it was her mother, and killed the call. Then she powered the phone off. Her mother would only try again. ‘Sorry!’ she said sheepishly.

Tull smiled sympathetically back.

‘Karen, my dear. What a pleasure!’ Geraldine smiled broadly and directed her towards the chair with a wave of her hands.

‘Not for me!’ Karen Pointer hated dentists. Not personally. She and Geraldine still got on well when they encountered each other, as they inevitably did, on their social network. But the thought of going to the dentist, any dentist, made her shiver. Literally. There had been Mr Miller. That had been the name of her dentist when she had been a child. Miller the Killer, her brother had called him. For fun. At least her brother thought it fun. After the dentist they would always get a treat, a trip to the cinema or a visit to WH Smith with money to spend, but despite that she could never recall a time when, for her, visiting the dentist had been fun.

‘You’ll thank me afterwards,’ came the cheery reply.

‘Maybe.’ Karen lay back in the chair and tried to pretend she wasn’t there.

‘Sorry I couldn’t fit you in at the end of the day, but someone cancelled this spot only this morning.’

Karen said nothing. As far as she was concerned, the dentist was not the place for small talk.’So how is my favourite pathologist?’ Geraldine pressed a button and the seat began to rise. ‘Up we go!’

‘Up we go! What do you think I am? A three-year-old?’

‘At least five, my darling,’ she replied instantly. ‘Now, let’s take a look at this filling. Ah, yes, now there’s the hole! Still, it’s nothing that can’t be fixed.’

Geraldine Payne’s chatter, designed to distract, continued as she got to work. She made the silent decision, based on her past experience of her patient, to skip the injection, and reached cheerfully for the drill as she recounted a recent and rather exaggerated incident involving herself and a traffic warden. She worked deftly and quickly, conscious of the mounting anxiety in Karen. She had had patients turn and walk out of the surgery at the prospect of a filling, so she took these feelings very seriously. She prided herself on making the experience as tolerable as possible. She knew she couldn’t make it a happy one, but for people like Karen smoothness and speed were her watchwords.

At first Karen tried not to think, but that was hopeless. It blotted out precisely nothing. She tried then to think about Susan. She was worried about her, but lying there worrying achieved nothing. So she thought instead about the case, that is to say her bits of the case. The dead bodies and their manners of death. The clinical knife wounds and the exploded mess caused by the gun. She thought about Dominic Russell lying on the loft floor and the painting of Judas and the two mothers, and the neat slashes in the canvas, two parallel cuts on one diagonal and two on the other. So precise! What the hell was that all about?