Blood in Grandpont (DI Susan Holden 2)

She sighed, turned and made her way out of the room and up the other end of the short corridor to Joseph’s room. If Lucy gave the impression of being organized and careful, then Joseph did the opposite. Maybe, if he had something to hide, he was the sort of guy to stick it in the bottom of his sock drawer and think it was safe and undetectable. So, she made her way straight to the chest of drawers next to his bed. The top drawer was indeed his sock drawer, but the expression sock drawer implies a degree of order – socks matched up two by two in neat piles, or rolled together in balls – which was entirely absent from Joseph’s drawer. A sock scrimmage, Lawson thought would be a better description, but at least she could move her hand around all four corners of the drawer without feeling she was making a mess. But there was no pen drive. The next drawer was pants, and the third and last was shorts. She pulled them out. Underneath were a couple of magazines of the sort young men prefer to keep hidden from their parents. On the cover of the uppermost one was a woman with remarkably large breasts pouting at the camera. Lawson didn’t bother to even look at the second, because as she removed them from the drawer she saw that they had been hiding something of much greater potential: a brown en

velope. It was plain, and unmarked, and it was sealed, though not tightly. Lawson carefully eased it open, and gave a grin of delight. ‘Yes!’ she exclaimed to the room triumphantly. ‘Yes!’

She knew she ought to report this to Holden ASAP, but she was aware that she hadn’t finished searching the room. She moved fast now, going through Joseph’s desk drawers and wardrobe, but as with Lucy’s room she drew a blank. Still, given what she had found, this was no big deal. She trotted quickly down the stairs, and breezed into the study.

‘How’s it going, Constable?’

Wilson’s frustration, as the tone his reply made clear, was reaching a crescendo. ‘Nothing,’ he snapped. ‘Absolutely, bloody nothing!’

‘Have you checked the desk for pen drives?’ She spoke calmly. ‘There aren’t any in Joseph’s or Lucy’s rooms.’

‘Yes I bloody have!’ His face was flushed. ‘Anyway, how come you’re so damn cheerful?’

Lawson was tempted to take him on, but she had found something and he hadn’t, and besides, there was more than one way to challenge him. ‘If I was wanting to hide a sensitive file on a PC, do you know what I would do?’ She paused, but only briefly. Wilson said nothing, but she was going to tell him anyway. ‘I’d rename the file something really meaningless, and I’d change its extension, and I’d hide it amongst the system files. Wouldn’t you?’

Wilson looked up at her for the first time since she had entered the room. What she had said made sense, but he had no intention of saying so. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the envelope that Lawson was carrying.

‘It may not be relevant to the case,’ she smiled. ‘But I think I’d better show it to the DI first, don’t you think? Anyway, keep at it.’

She turned and left the room, pausing in the hall in the front of a long gilt-framed mirror. She inspected herself, ran a hand through her hair, and puckered her face. Not bad, she mouthed silently. At which point, there was the noise of a key being thrust into the front door, and in came a tousled Joseph Tull. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘It’s nice to see you too,’ Lawson replied breezily.

The taxi trip took less than five minutes, with at least two minutes wasted, first waiting to pull out across the stream of oncoming traffic in Beaumont Street, and then queuing to turn right at the lights opposite Worcester College. The rest of the run was straightforward, apart from the speed bumps and a pause while another taxi executed a U-turn in the middle of Walton Street. Once at their destination, Karen paid the driver, and then led the way uncertainly to the lift. ‘I normally walk,’ she insisted. ‘But look, I really will be all right. If you want to go home or back to work—’

‘Geraldine will skin me alive if I don’t make sure you are okay. And besides, I need a pee.’

After a prolonged wait for the lift – how on earth could it be busy at this time of day, Karen wondered – and a swift ascent, Karen unlocked the flat and entered it, with Lucy in close attendance. While Lucy disappeared off to the loo, Karen moved zombie-like to the small rectangular space that represented her kitchen area. She filled the kettle, and turned it on. She ought to offer Lucy a cup of tea. But even though the kettle soon boiled, she got no further in the process. It was as if her brain was stuck in neutral and no amount of revving would get her body to move. Meanwhile Lucy, her bladder emptied, materialized in the archway that separated kitchen and living room, her head held at a slight angle. Karen wished, ungratefully, that she would go away, because she just wanted to lie down. But Lucy was showing no sign of moving.

‘How are things going with you and DI Holden?’

Karen looked at her, and for some reason felt uneasy. It wasn’t as if she and Lucy hadn’t been in the same room before. Obviously they had been in the same reception area several times, but this was different. ‘I’d rather not discuss it.’

‘Why not?’

She felt suddenly irritated beyond all reason. She didn’t expect to be given the third degree in her own flat, and certainly not by her dentist’s sidekick. ‘Because it’s none of your business!’ The words snaked across the short distance between them like the crack of a whip, doing their best to keep Lucy at a distance.

‘I was just trying to be friendly.’ She spoke in a tone of injured innocence. ‘Most people like to talk about their boyfriends. Why should it be any different with dykes?’ Karen flinched, but fought the temptation to react. Instead, she turned back towards the abandoned kettle, in the hope this might cause her inquisitor to withdraw.

‘OK,’ Lucy said suddenly, ‘let’s change the subject if it’s too sensitive for you. Where’s Susan got to in the case?’

Karen jerked round. ‘I can’t talk about that.’

‘I won’t tell. It’s just between you and me.’

‘It would be completely unprofessional.’ Karen spoke firmly.

‘I need to know.’ Lucy’s voice was low, but intense. Karen shivered. Why the hell wouldn’t Lucy just go? She needed to lie down, and she needed to talk to Susan, or at least to make contact with her. But Lucy was unrelenting. ‘I need to know who stuck a stiletto into my father’s wife. Was it Dominic Russell? Did he kill her and Jack Smith, and then himself. Is that what happened? I need to know. Tell me, and then I’ll go.’

Karen didn’t answer. She couldn’t have, not even if she had wanted to, because fear had taken hold of her throat with a strangler’s grip and it was squeezing hard.

‘We found this in your chest of drawers, Joseph.’

Joseph Tull was sitting in the same armchair as he had been a week previously, when questioned over his whereabouts at the time of his mother’s death. As before, DI Holden was doing the questioning – with DS Fox and DC Lawson attending, and Dr Alan Tull looking anxiously on – but the casual nonchalance which Joseph had displayed at that earlier meeting had disappeared.

The reason for this lay on the glass-topped coffee table that lay between interviewer and interviewee – a pile of £20 notes that Holden had just tipped out of a large brown envelope. The gasp that came from Alan Tull indicated the surprise it was to him that his son should have such a sum of money hidden away, but it was Joseph’s reaction that Holden was interested in. She thought she saw a brief flash of panic pass across his features, like a small cloud blown swiftly across the face of the full moon, but maybe that was merely in her imagination.

‘So?’ he replied, aggressively.