Blood in Grandpont (DI Susan Holden 2)

‘We’ve got plenty of patients a lot worse than you,’ Lucy added, conscious that that her comment needed some explanation. ‘Late, rude, and always moaning about the cost. And stuck-up gits to boot. Only don’t quote me on that.’ She grinned and poured boiling water into one of the mugs.

‘Milk?’

‘Please.’

She added milk, two sugars and stirred. ‘There, that should do the trick.’

‘Lucy!’ Geraldine Payne’s voice rang out. ‘If you don’t mind, I need some assistance.’

‘Or even if I do mind!’ Lucy winked at Karen. ‘That’s Mrs Pearson. She’s always a two-person job. Take your time. I’ll pop back as soon as I can.’

Karen sipped at her tea and shut her eyes, leaning as far back as the upright back of her chair would allow. How stupid she was. How bloody, bloody stupid she was!

Back in Bainton Road, Lawson and Wilson had left the living room to go in search of laptops and diaries and whatever else that might be of interest. And DI Holden had decided it was time to change tack. ‘On Saturday morning, Sarah Russell came to see you. Can you tell me what that was about?’

‘Poor Sarah.’ The words of sympathy slipped smoothly out of Alan Tull’s mouth. ‘And poor Dominic. I met him as an undergraduate, you know. Keble men we were. No women in those days. Still, that’s of no interest to you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Sarah came to see how I was. At least that was what I thought. But I should have known better. Sarah isn’t exactly the tell-me-all-about-it-and-cry-on-my-shoulder type. Not that that’s a fault. No criticism intended. She was concerned about me in her own brusque way. But what she really came to find out was whether I wanted to pull out of the J.B. Priestley play. You probably know it: An Inspector Calls. Such a good play. A touch old-fashioned, maybe, and the inspector is a male, I’m afraid, but it always goes down well!’

He chuckled, pleased at his own obser

vation, but Holden did not respond in kind. ‘So she arrived when?’

‘Ah, times again. You police, you’re worse than my receptionist!’ He shook his head. ‘I would guess she arrived about nine-thirty and left maybe an hour later, maybe a bit more than an hour. Sorry, that’s the best I can do.’

She opened her eyes and looked around. She must have dropped off for a moment. She looked down at her mug, cradled in her hands and took a sip. It was still pretty hot. Not even forty winks. When she had finished she would go. Maybe by the time she had walked home she would feel better.

She looked around the room again, and her eyes alighted on the magazines, this time staying there. She put her mug down, and knelt down on the floor. There must be something to read, something to distract herself until she could face going home. The magazines were, of course, old, rejects from the reception room. Peter Andre stared out at her from the front cover of the top one. Karen made a face, and looked at the one underneath. Different name on the magazine, similar picture. There was easy reading and there was trash. She moved halfway down the pile, to Lewis Hamilton, delayed briefly, and then moved to the very bottom. She yanked it out – an Arts magazine. Nine months old – but then art doesn’t go out of date much. Or does it? It must be one of Geraldine’s. Or do dentists have a budget under the heading ‘Reading material for the distraction and entertainment of customers’? She eased herself back on to the chair, took a sip of tea, and began to leaf through her find. An article on the origins of Art Deco seemed promising, but the first paragraph was of such deadening dullness that she abandoned it, glancing only at the pictures before flicking onwards. Gilbert and George were next, but even at the best of times she couldn’t work up enthusiasm for them, and she moved quickly on. And then she saw an article that stopped her dead. It was entitled ‘Zeus the Serial Seducer’. She read the text slowly, for it was in a sense topical. It traced the Greek god’s sexual adventures through mythology and art. Some of it she felt she knew and some of the paintings illustrated were definitely familiar. She had seen Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, but even in her befuddled state the theme struck her with fresh force. The painting whose photo had been on Jack Smith’s mobile and that the police had found at Dominic Russell’s wasn’t illustrated in the magazine, of course. It was far too insignificant, but its theme was the same: seduction or rape, whatever you might prefer to call it. Now what the hell was that all about?

‘How are you feeling?’ She looked up guiltily, like a child caught raiding the sweet jar. Geraldine Payne was standing at the doorway, with Lucy Tull at her shoulder. She wondered if they had been there long, for she had been quite oblivious of their presence until Geraldine spoke.

‘Not too bad.’ She shut the magazine and put it down, picking up the half-drunk tea instead. It was cold. She hated cold tea, but she drank it down nonetheless.

‘Don’t tell me you found something worth reading?’

‘It passed the time.’

‘You looked engrossed.’

‘You’ve been very kind. I’d better go.’ She stood up, but as she stepped forward she wavered, as light-headedness struck her again.

‘Hey!’ Geraldine and Lucy both grabbed at her. ‘Steady!’

Karen felt ridiculously foolish. ‘Sorry!’

‘Don’t be,’ Geraldine said sharply, taking charge. ‘Lucy is going to call a taxi, and she will go with you and see you back to your flat.’

‘There’s no need,’ Karen replied, but there was no conviction and no strength in her words.

‘There’s every need,’ came the firm reply. ‘There’s absolutely every need.’

The Tulls were a three-computer household. Not that Lawson and Wilson found three of them that afternoon. Joseph’s laptop, like Joseph, was absent, though a plugged-in power cable suggested that wherever he had taken it, he wasn’t planning on spending the whole day working on it. Lucy’s tower PC was on the desk in her bedroom. It was an old one, at least three years, which in computing terms was verging on the unusable, Wilson reckoned. He tried to log on, but it was password protected, so he powered it off, unplugged the tower from its multifarious connecting cables, and tucked it under his arm. ‘You never know what might be on even a museum piece like this,’ he admitted, as they trudged down the stairs in search of the study. Here they found, as Dr Tull had said they would, a much newer laptop. ‘I hardly ever use it myself,’ he had insisted. ‘It was Maria’s really. I get quite enough of the damn things at surgery. Mind you, Lucy’s pretty much taken it over now. She’s been moaning for months about how slow hers was, but I wasn’t going to replace it. She’s been earning good money, so I didn’t see why she couldn’t buy one herself. But now she won’t have to.’

The laptop was not password protected, and Wilson gave a whoop of excitement as soon as he realized. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

A flash of irritation lanced through Lawson. How was it that Wilson had assumed the role of IT expert? She wasn’t exactly a computer dimbo herself, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. At least, not now.

‘Yeah, and I’ll see what I can find too!’ she threw over her shoulder as she headed out of the study. It wasn’t just an idle parting shot. If she was a murderer with an even half-functioning brain, and she had got sensitive, incriminating photographs, she wouldn’t leave them sitting on a computer. She’d copy them off on to a pen drive and hide it somewhere safe. Lucy or Joseph – whose room to search first? Well, on the basis of who was most likely to have killed Maria, she’d have to go for Lucy, the stepdaughter. The stepdaughter. It was a term that in these days, when reconstituted families are commonplace, had rather dropped out of fashion. But the concept of the evil stepmother was one that had been implanted in Lawson at an early age when her father had read her fairy stories at bedtime. The story of Hansel and Gretel had always been, for her, the fairy story that had most fascinated and disturbed her as a child. It was the stepmother, not the witch, that was the most disturbing character for her, a manipulative, ill-defined character who schemed to separate a father from his beloved children. She was the figure of nightmares.

So, it may have been entirely because of the Brothers Grimm that Detective Constable Lawson turned left at the top of the stairs and entered Lucy’s room. There she began to make a methodical search of the room: first the desk, then the chest of drawers, and finally the cupboards. Nothing. She looked around the room again. Where else? There was a glass-fronted corner cupboard with a few china ornaments. She opened that, carefully examining each of these, but there was no pen drive hidden behind or under or in any of them. If there was one, it must have been hidden with great care, maybe taped to the underside of one of the pieces of furniture, or, of course, she might carry it with her in her handbag, or hide it at work.