Blood on the Marsh (DI Susan Holden 3)

Birch led them some twenty metres down the road, before cutting right through a narrow gateway. As if to prove his last point, a passenger train hurtled past from right to left, on the way towards Didcot, Reading and – most likely – London Paddington. He, however, led them in the opposite direction, towards Oxford, keeping tight to the side. ‘We should be OK for ten minutes.’ He had gone about fifty metres when he stopped and turned round.

‘It’s hard to be sure exactly where the impact took place, but this is where we started finding debris. Human debris. The actual impact may have been a bit further up the track, but in my experience not a lot.’

Holden looked around, half expecting to spot a severed hand that Birch’s team had somehow missed. What had she come here for? She looked up the track towards Oxford, and tried to imagine how it might have been for Jim Wright, assuming it was him. It had been dark, of course, but trains had lights, and trains made a substantial amount of noise. It was hard to imagine that he could have been oblivious to the approach of the train unless he was drunk or unconscious or off his head on drugs. Or dead of course. There was no reason to think it was an accident. That much was pretty clear. Why would he have come here, except deliberately? Which meant he came here to commit suicide, or he came here to meet someone, and that someone ensured that he ended up in front of the London express.

She turned towards Fox. ‘Sergeant, do you see Jim Wright as the suicidal type?’

‘No, Guv.’ The answer was immediate.

‘So how easy would you reckon it is to murder someone with the assistance of a train?’

Fox sniffed, and looked around. At night it would be a fairly lonely spot. The road down here was going nowhere. How many people ever drove this way, especially at night? ‘There are easier ways, no question,’ Fox said, feeling his way. ‘But it is isolated. If I was the murderer, then I might have lured him out here with the intention of killing him. Then I might have dumped his body on the track just to make identification a lot harder.’

‘In which case,’ Holden replied, ‘why leave the guy’s wallet in his pocket, for us to find?’

Fox shrugged. ‘Panic maybe. Or maybe it all happened very quickly as the train was approaching. The killer wouldn’t want to hang around. So he pushed the body on the track, and scarpered.’

‘It might have been a she,’ Lawson commented, anxious to get a toe hold in the conversation.

‘If I can throw in my penny’s worth,’ Birch said, ‘my understanding is that the man was alive when the train hit him. The driver said he saw him on his feet.’

‘What?’ Holden spat the word at him. ‘How the hell do you know that?’

Birch held his hands up apologetically, as if fearful that DI Holden might pull out a gun and start shooting. ‘The driver spoke to a counsellor afterwards.’

‘So there’s a report somewhere, is there? Why haven’t I had a copy?’

‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. The report is probably being punched into the computer even as we speak. But it just so happens that the counsellor is my wife, and I rang her a few minutes ago.’

Holden opened her mouth to say something more, but bit back on the impulse. She suddenly realized she was trembling. She looked at her right hand, and tried to make it still, but it refused to co-operate. So she stuffed both hands in her jacket pockets, and took a deep breath in, and a long one out. Standing here, where Jim Wright had been mangled to death, where a train might hurtle by at any moment, it was no bloody wonder she was shaking. Had Wright been shaking? If he had been conscious and on his feet, why the hell hadn’t he thrown himself out of the way? Like Fox, she didn’t see him as the suicidal type. So what had happened?

She turned towards Birch. ‘Any chance of me talking to your wife, Inspector?’

He nodded, dug his hand into his back pocket, and located his mobile. Within moments, he was passing it across to Holden. ‘It’s ringing. And her name is Dr Eileen Birch.’

‘What the hell do you want now?’ Dr Eileen Birch did not, it seemed, like being rung at work by her husband, at least not twice within the same morning.

‘This is Inspector Susan Holden, Thames Valley Police.’

‘Bugger!’ came the reply. And then, almost as an afterthought. ‘Sorry! I thought you were my husband.’

‘He’s kindly lent me his mobile.’

‘Kindly!’ There was an explosion of laughter. ‘My husband doesn’t do kindly. Not during office hours, and not much outside them either.’

‘I understand you spoke to the driver of the train that—’

‘Mostly I listened,’ she broke in. ‘That’s what I do. Listen as much as I can and say as little as I need. More people should try it.’

Holden felt the rebuke like a slap round the face. ‘I understand the victim was standing up at the time of impact?’

‘Not that that did him much good!’

Holden paused, recognizing something of herself in the sharpness at the other end of the phone call. She’d like to meet her. Or maybe not. She took a breath and tried again. ‘I don’t want to be doing this, but the fact is that we have reason to believe that it may not have been suicide and—’

‘Look, I’m sorry.’ Again Dr Birch cut in before Holden had finished. ‘You caught me on the hop. It’s not something you get used to, listening to people’s trauma. Sometimes, I wonder if I shouldn’t go and run a B & B on the Cornish coast.’ There was a sigh down the phone. Holden waited for her to collect herself. ‘The victim was on his feet when the train struck. That really is as much as I can tell you.’

‘Was he trying to get out the way, do you think? Or was he maybe drunk, and just staggering along the line oblivious.’