Blood on the Marsh (DI Susan Holden 3)

Her once flushed face had now turned paler than pale. ‘No,’ she insisted, this time in less of a whisper.

‘So when did you last see Mr Greenleaf?’

She shook her head, and then kept shaking it, harder and harder until her whole body was twisting from side to side in time with some monstrous unheard music. ‘On Sunday,’ she wailed. ‘We spent the weekend at his house in Charlton-on-Otmoor. But we had a row, just as we were leaving for Oxford. It was a terrible row, and then we didn’t speak all the way back to Oxford. But yesterday, when I had calmed down, I thought maybe I should try to talk to him at work, but I didn’t see him, so in the evening I rang him on his mobile, but he never answered.’

‘What did you row about?’

‘Silly things.’

‘What sort of silly things?’

‘Private silly things.’

Holden leant forward, and raised her voice. She was confident that she only needed to apply pressure, and the woman would crack. ‘What did you row about?’

Ania Gorski lifted her head, and stared back at Holden. Their eyes met head on. She would not be bullied. Greenleaf had not been able to bully her, and neither would the detective woman bully her. No one would, ever. ‘It was private,’ she said loudly. ‘I will not tell you.’

Holden held the woman’s glare. Ania was, she realized, more formidable than she had first appeared. Had that nervousness been an act? Holden pressed harder. ‘I think you killed him, Ania. He always jogged on a Monday night, didn’t he? You knew that. You knew the path he always took. So you waited for him in the bushes in the dark, and when he reached you, you tripped him up with a wire stretched across his path, and then you beat his head to pulp. A very messy, bloody pulp!’

But Ania Gorski was having none of it. She stood up, her face a mask of outrage.

‘No,’ she screamed. ‘No I didn’t. No! No! No!’

Elm Cottage lies at the western end of Charlton-on-Otmoor. It is set back from the grandly named High Street, a two-storey Cotswold stone building with leaded windows and a thatched roof. There wasn’t, as far as Lawson could see, an elm tree in sight, but she couldn’t help her mouth gawping as Wilson eased the car to a halt on the gravelled driveway.

‘Wow!’ Wilson said, echoing her thoughts. ‘Not bad for a weekend hideaway!’

‘Not bad at all!’

Once inside, their task was, of course, to look for evidence, whatever form that might take – evidence of a hatred so intense that someone chose to

half garrotte Greenleaf with a wire and then batter him to death with the bluntest of blunt instruments. The two of them were used to working together, and with barely a word Lawson headed up the narrow stairway while Wilson gazed around the main living room, wondering where to begin. It wasn’t, as far as he was concerned, a difficult decision: the escritoire. He knew it was called that because his grandmother had had one and had told him off for calling it a desk. ‘It doesn’t give it the respect it deserves, calling it a desk,’ she had said. And for some reason, that brief exchange had stuck with him over the years, when thousands of other more important ones had faded. Wilson pulled out the two horizontal supports, and then lowered the hinged lid down onto them. Inside a series of little vertical panels created six cubby holes of varying width, plus a central one with a door, and underneath each miniature cupboard was a miniature drawer. He began to make his way methodically through each segment, leaving the central cupboard and its drawer till last. Leave the best till last. That was another thing he’d learnt from Gran.

Upstairs Lawson was looking through a wedding album, which she’d found stuffed in the long wide drawer at the base of a rather pretty walnut wardrobe in what she assumed must be his bedroom. The bed, she had noted, was a double. The wardrobe contained a single, dark-blue suit, two white shirts, and two ties, but beyond that the clothes were distinctly casual. There were not, however, many of them, which tied up with her understanding that he generally lived in the Sunnymede flat during the week, and used this at the weekends. It was, she thought, a bit odd. It wasn’t so far away, even at rush hour time, so why didn’t he use it more? Did he really have to sleep on the premises during the week? She had been pondering this when she found the wedding album underneath a spare blanket in the wardrobe drawer. He clearly wasn’t married now, so what had happened to Mrs Greenleaf – had she died or were they divorced? Still if he had been entertaining Ania here, it was no surprise that he had buried the album well out of view.

Half an hour or so later, the two detective constables were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. It was Lawson who had found the half pint of milk in the fridge, and there had seemed to her little point in not making use of it. So there they sat, exchanging first banter and then information. Not that either of them had learnt anything obviously important. The place was neat and tidy, equipped reasonably but not excessively. There were a few CDs, two shelves of books, and a limited amount of food in the kitchen cupboard. More like a holiday let than a home.

So they sat and whiled away twenty minutes, before reluctantly agreeing they ought to get going. And it was as they were in the very throes of getting into the car to leave that a man appeared in the gateway.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded. He was a big man, with a huge bushy beard which hid much but not all of a ruddy face.

‘We are detectives,’ Lawson replied, turning towards the newcomer.

‘So what are you doing in Paul’s house?’

‘We have a search warrant,’ Wilson said defensively.

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘We not required to answer it,’ Lawson said sharply. She pulled out her ID, holding it high for him to see. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

‘I’m his neighbour,’ he said, his belligerence waning. ‘I keep an eye out for him.’

‘I see.’ Lawson’s tone eased too. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you, but Mr Greenleaf was killed yesterday. We’re here conducting inquiries.’

‘God!’ Behind the beard, there seemed genuine shock. ‘How did he die?’

Lawson glanced across at Wilson, who shrugged. ‘All I can say is that his death is suspicious.’