Blood on the Cowley Road (18 page)

Holden made no reply. Silence hung between them, but – perhaps surprisingly – it wasn't an oppressive one.

‘Does it clarify things?' Pointer asked.

Holden wasn't sure that it did. She had been trying to weigh up the possibility of Whiting getting from his gallery to the allotment in time to commit murder, and all in all she reckoned he could have, albeit without much time to spare. But in any case Pointer's question only
lightly registered on her consciousness, for something else was oppressing her. This was an opportunity – with no one else here to witness it – that she ought to take. She cleared her throat noisily. ‘I'd like to apologize.'

‘Apologize?' Pointer was puzzled.

‘For slapping you.'

‘Hell!' she replied, and her eyes now locked with Holden's. Then, curiously, she smiled. ‘I probably deserved it.'

‘Yes,' Holden said, rather too firmly for Pointer's liking. ‘Nevertheless,' Holden continued after a brief pause, ‘I'm not sure I needed to do it with quite so much force.'

Pointer smiled again. Her hand moved up to her left-hand cheek and stroked gently across the skin. ‘I can still feel it,' she said.

‘Sorry!' Holden said, and stood up to go.

 

‘It's taken, love.'

The woman, dressed in jeans, pink T-shirt and denim jacket, had just sat down. She turned and looked at the large man in the seat next to her. She smiled. ‘By me. Seat F28. That's what it says on my ticket.'

She was a looker, no question, maybe 22 or 23 to his 35, but the man felt uncomfortable. She was on all counts out of his league. Women like her just didn't open conversations with him, eye him up, flirt. He felt himself getting flushed, and that made him aggressive. ‘It's my mate's seat!' he insisted loudly. ‘He'll be here any minute.'

The woman smiled again. ‘Who's your mate?'

‘What's it to you? This is his seat.' The man in the seat beyond him leant forward. Even though he was sitting down, it was obvious to the woman that he was shorter and altogether a less imposing a specimen of male, but he placed his hand lightly on his companion's shoulder as if to calm him down. ‘He doesn't mean no harm, dear, only we always sit together – him, me and Martin. So why don't you just show us your ticket and we'll sort out where you're meant to be sitting. All right?'

‘All right,' the woman said with a shrug. She unbuttoned the breast-pocket of her jacket, pulled something out of it, and then discretely displayed it for the two men. ‘If it's all right by you, my governor would like a word.'

‘Fuck!' they said, in perfect unison.

‘So what's this all about?' Al Smith demanded fiercely. ‘The game starts in ten minutes, and I'm not missing it, not for you and not for anybody!'

‘I'm not asking you to,' the dark-haired woman said. ‘Just answer my questions, and you can get back to your seats.'

‘Is Martin all right?' Sam Sexton asked. His eyes flicked around the room, alighting nervously on the face of each of the four inquisitors, only to move on to the next almost immediately – but if he was seeking reassurances, he sought it in vain. The blonde who had flirted with them in the Oxford Mail end was now standing by the door, all cheer wiped off her face. A young man – a detective constable presumably, though hell he hardly looked old enough – was standing in the corner on the opposite site of the room. His face, too, was swept clean of emotion, and his arms hung loosely by his sides. Immediately opposite Sexton and Smith – across a wood-effect table – sat the woman who had introduced herself as Detective Inspector Holden and a sour-faced man whom she had introduced as Detective Sergeant Fox. He was a big man, imposing even when seated, and Sexton felt himself shudder involuntarily. He moved his attention onto Holden, glad it was her who was calling the shots.

‘Why do you ask that?' Holden replied.

‘He's never bloody late for a game,' Smith butted in. ‘And here you are asking bloody questions. So the fact is we reckon something must have happened to him. It stands to reason, don't it.'

‘I'm sorry to have to tell you that Martin Mace is dead.'

‘I knew it!' said Sexton, his voice shrill with hysteria. ‘I bloody knew it!' Holden's eyes, though, were fixed not on Sexton, but on Smith. But whatever emotions Smith was feeling at the moment, he wasn't showing them. His face was not so much blank as bored. He looked at his watch ostentatiously, then looked up at Holden. ‘So are you going to tell us what happened? Because if so, perhaps you can get on with it.'

Holden twitched her head. Fox leant down to his right, thrusting his hand into a bag, from which he drew out a newspaper. He placed it carefully in the middle of the table, so that the two men opposite could see its front page.

‘Didn't you see Monday's
Oxford Mail
?'

‘Only the back pages,' Smith said casually, but his eyes were anything but casual. For several seconds there was silence, as Smith and Sexton took in the somewhat arch headline (‘The Allotment of Death'), the gloomy photo of the charred remains of the garden shed, and the first few lines of the article which accompanied them.

‘So, you've not arrested anyone yet then?' Smith said, with a sneer in his voice. He was looking at Holden now, apparently having read and seen enough.

‘Where were you on Monday night,' Holden asked.

‘Oh, we're suspects are we?' Smith replied aggressively. ‘Just because we're his best bloody mates, you think we killed him?'

‘I don't think anything,' Holden said, her own voice louder in response. ‘But we need to know where you were at the time of Martin Mace's death. So just tell us where you were on Monday from, let's say, 6.00 o'clock onwards.'

‘I was working, wasn't I, till about 7.00. On a house in Cornwallis Road. Doing an extension out the back for them. With Sam. Then I went home, had a shower, had a pizza out the freezer, then went to the Wellington in Between Towns Road. Sam was there.'

‘When did you arrive at the Wellington?'

‘About nine o'clock I'd say.'

‘Yes,' Sexton said. ‘That's right; I had only been there a couple of minutes when he arrived.'

‘And where had you been before that, Mr Sexton?'

‘I was with Al in Cornwallis Road till about five o'clock, but I left him to finish off cos I had another job to price up. I got home about six – my wife will confirm that, but she went out about seven; she works nights at the hospital Monday to Thursday – and I watched the telly and did the ironing.'

‘So between seven and roughly 8.45, you were at home, but no one else was there? Is that right?'

Sexton, who appeared to have been starting to relax, suddenly lifted his right hand to his forehead and dragged it through his hair with such violence that he wrenched his head back. ‘Are you accusing me?' He squealed the words. ‘I was his mate. A good mate. Why should I want to kill him? Why should anyone want to kill him?'

‘That's what we want to know,' Holden said firmly. ‘But the fact is that someone wanted to kill him, and did so. If we can find out why, then the chances are we'll find out who.'

 

It is impossible to know who had the idea first. And later, when discussing it in the pub after the case had been closed, both Wilson and Lawson acknowledged the part the other had played in the genesis of the idea. But one fact is as certain as can be: that the idea came very shortly after the final whistle. After Holden and Fox had finished questioning Smith and Sexton, the four of them had had a short debriefing before Holden signalled that their working day was over. Fox offered to drop his boss off at her flat, but Wilson said he thought he'd stay and watch the game. Lawson, rather to his surprise, had said that she'd keep him company. But it was, unfortunately, a distinctly uninspiring game. Oxford scored a minute after half-time, and then conceded a goal two minutes later. And that, in terms of goals and excitement, was pretty much that.

‘If that doesn't put you off football, then nothing will,' Wilson said to his companion gloomily. The two of them were still sitting in their seats, as they waited for the other spectators to disperse. Wilson opened his programme and began to read through the manager's notes again.

‘Do you always buy a programme?' Lawson asked.

Wilson, engrossed, appeared not to have taken in the question. Over the tannoy, a disembodied voice reminded fans that there was another home game the forthcoming Saturday. As silence returned to the echoing roof of the stand, Wilson looked up and turned his head towards Lawson. ‘Why do you ask?' he said warily.

Lawson was equally cautious in her reply. ‘I was just thinking,' she said.

Wilson looked down at his programme, folded it carefully shut, and looked at her again.

‘About programmes?'

‘Yes.' The thought, or maybe two identical thoughts, had now entered or been created within their separate brains.

‘Mace had loads of programmes in that room of his,' Wilson said quietly, as if afraid that saying it loudly might somehow reveal a fatal
flaw in his thinking.

‘So did Arnold,' said Lawson. ‘On the bookshelves in his bedroom.'

They looked at each other for several seconds in silence. The stand in front of them was now almost totally deserted except for a couple of stewards at the bottom of the steps.

‘What about Sarah Johnson?' Lawson asked.

Wilson tried to think back to the search he and Fox had made after Fox had interviewed Anne Johnson. The problem was they hadn't been looking for anything like football programmes. Drugs and signs of depression and that diary that they had found, but football programmes? ‘I just can't recall noticing,' Wilson admitted. ‘And besides, there's no real reason to believe she didn't just commit suicide and—'

‘It would be a connection, wouldn't it,' Lawson said assertively. ‘Another connection besides the day centre. Suppose they always sat together—'

Wilson, aware that Lawson was half a step in front of him, cut in angrily: ‘A programme won't tell you that!'

Lawson pursed her lips, while she considered her next sentence. A look of innocence emerged from her features, and from her mouth there came an equally innocent tone of voice. ‘When I was a kid and went to watch something – a pantomime, or an outdoor Shakespeare play, or once I went to Wimbledon – I always kept my programme and my ticket. Didn't you?'

He was eating breakfast when the call came, and he swore involuntarily. He was not a morning person. He would have admitted as much if he had been asked, though he would have expressed it differently given that he was a call-a-spade-a-bloody-shovel type of person. He slurped at his still-hot black coffee and grimaced. Only then did he flick open his mobile to see who the hell was calling him. A number flashed up on screen, a number which neither his mobile nor he recognized. His first impulse was to ignore it, but his curiosity was aroused, and instead he leant forward and picked it up.

‘Yes?' he demanded.

‘It's me!'

‘What the fuck are you doing?'

‘I'm ringing you up.' The familiar voice spoke calmly. ‘I'd have thought it was obvious.'

‘We agreed, didn't we. No bloody phone calls. If they were ever to check my mobile—'

‘I'm ringing from a phone box. I'm not an idiot.'

‘Where from?' His voice was raised now and angry.

But the caller ignored his question. ‘Can't we meet?'

‘You must be fucking mad! We agreed. In six months time, maybe.'

‘I didn't mean Oxford, stupid. But London or Bristol. Or Paris even. Where's the risk in that.'

‘I'm not taking any risks for you,' he said coldly. Then he pressed the red button on his mobile and swore again.

 

Meanwhile, not so far away across the streets of Oxford, Detective
Inspector Holden had just slumped down at her desk in the Cowley Police Station. On automatic pilot, she powered up her PC, and waited as it struggled into some semblance of life. She had slept badly, waking at 2.30 and again at 4.15, and then sleeping through the alarm. So she'd got to the station later than she'd wanted and tired. The logon screen had just appeared in front of her when the phone rang. She picked the receiver up, placed it against her left ear and spoke. ‘DI Holden here.'

‘Good morning,' came the reply. She recognized the high-pitched voice, and immediately wished she had let her voicemail handle the call. It was Don Alexander, from the
Oxford Mail
.

‘So what do you want this morning?' she asked tartly. ‘Short of copy are you?'

He laughed. ‘Just want to keep the public informed. That's all, Inspector.' Then the laughter had disappeared from his voice. ‘Look, people are worried. Hell, I'm worried. Even my cat is worried. So the question we need an answer to is, when are you going to arrest someone? '

‘How long is a piece of bloody string?' was her instant response, and immediately regretted it.

‘Is there a prime suspect?' he pressed.

‘No comment,' she replied. ‘And don't quote me about pieces of string.'

‘What leads are you working on, Inspector?'

‘I can't comment on that either.'

He paused. Then continued more caustically: ‘Inspector, just for the record, how many more deaths have to occur before you do comment?'

Holden had to choke back the impulse to scream into the phone. When she did speak – and this was very much to her credit – it was in an only slightly heightened tone. ‘Look, Don, I really do have a lot of work to do, so if it's OK with you, or even if it isn't, I'm going to put the phone down now. Good bye.'

 

It took Wilson and Lawson most of Thursday morning to search again the accommodation of Martin Mace and Jake Arnold and Sarah Johnson. Mace's was the quickest since his small third bedroom had been devoted to his sacred team. Football programmes, home and away, were carefully organized in date order on the shelves that lined
the walls. Labels on each shelf indicated the season. They placed the programmes for the current season and all of the previous season into two cardboard boxes. Tracking the actual tickets Mace had bought and used proved no more difficult. A shoebox on the top shelf contained envelopes. Each was marked – ‘2001-2002 season' for example – and inside each were two wadges of tickets, each with an elastic band around it. As a brief glance revealed, one consisted of tickets for home games, and one for away.

‘Talk about making things easy for us,' Wilson grinned.

But Lawson said nothing, for she was already walking back down the stairs, a box under each arm, and a small but as yet untested idea in her head.

 

At much the same time, Danny Flynn stood in the middle of his room and looked critically around. He lived in a bed-sitter on the top floor of a four-storey house on the south-eastern side of the Iffley Road. It was a large room, taking in the full depth of the building, though the eaves of the roof had the effect of making the room seem somewhat smaller than its official dimensions. Danny walked across to the front window, which afforded a view across the Iffley Road towards the university running track, the very one on which Roger Bannister had been the first man to break the four-minute barrier for the mile all those years ago. But this feat was not at all on Flynn's mind. As he peered out of the window, it wasn't across the road that he was looking, but rather down at the road, and in particular at the pavements on either side. He stood there for several minutes, hardly moving, but assessing the individuals, couples and groups who were walking up and down them. A grey-haired woman and small child – grandmother and granddaughter presumably – made their way very slowly from right to left as he looked, hand in hand. Two men in dark suits strode past them in the other direction, walking together but not, as far as Flynn could see, talking together. Next into Flynn's view came a group of five students. Dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and trainers, they rapidly overtook the woman and child, before turning right down the private road, bound perhaps for the running track and Bannister's footprints.

None of these moving people held Flynn's attention for any length of time. What did, however, was first a car, and then a woman. The car
was pulled up on the far side of the road, facing the city centre but ignoring all the parking restrictions clearly indicated by the double yellow lines running along that side of the road. A man was sitting in the driving seat and he was talking into a mobile phone. This carried on for over a minute – Flynn kept checking his watch every ten seconds or so – before the car moved jerkily off, the mobile phone still clasped to the man's right ear. Instantly, Flynn's attention was transferred to a woman leaning against the railings. For Flynn realized with a start that he hadn't noticed her before. He hadn't seen her stop. He hadn't seen her walking along the street. It was as if she had materialized on that paving slab. Anxiety surged around his body, and his hands, hanging down in front of him started to move from side to side, as if controlled, like those of a marionette, by strings. How long had she been there? She was in the shade created by the overhanging branches of the large beech tree that stood on the far side of the railings. She might have been there ages. Watching. Watching his window? Watching out for him? But her face, the position of her head, told another story, and as he realized this the anxiety began to slowly seep from his body. She was not looking up. She was looking down the road now, to the left as Flynn saw it, and every movement of her body suggested that she, too, was anxious. She looked nervously at her watch, she pulled abstractedly at a lock of hair, she looked back up the street, and then back down the street again. She was waiting for someone, and he – or she – was late. Flynn watched her intently. His hands had stopped moving, and his breathing now eased. She hadn't looked up towards him even once. So, maybe she wasn't a spy. Maybe she wasn't one of them after all. Then, all of a sudden, the woman took another final glance at her watch, before turning and starting to walk back towards the city centre, first slowly, even reluctantly, and soon more purposefully, her legs striding out as if she was determined to leave this embarrassing place behind. She had been stood up. Flynn grinned in relief. But as he watched her disappear from view, he found himself feeling sorry for her, and even angry on her behalf. How dare he stand her up? For a he it must have been, Flynn decided. What had she done to deserve that? Bastard! Flynn watched where she had disappeared for several seconds, in case by some chance she should turn around and retrace her steps. But when she didn't, he let out a deep breath and sighed.

 

There was no one watching, of that he was certain – well almost certain. He was safe. Flynn stepped back from his window, turned round, and reviewed the state of his room again.

The first thing that would have struck a visitor was the neatness of the room. Apart from the slightly faded pattern of the duvet cover, the bed might have been part of a window display: the two pillows were plumped, the duvet was rumple free, and a towel lay folded into a square at its foot. On the small chest of drawers next to the bed there stood a lamp with a pale-green lampshade and a small black alarm clock. Nothing else. A three-door wardrobe dominated the wall to the right of the bed (as Flynn looked at it), and the long mirror on the central door showed not a single mark (Flynn had cleaned it just before going to sleep the night before.) Next to it was a doorway that led to the shower room and toilet, as well as to the front door of the bedsit. And next to that were bookshelves that covered the wall right up to the front of the room. Flynn frowned, and moved forward. He peered at two wooden figures, Norwegian trolls, which stood in the centre of the shelving as if they were guardians of all the books and magazines that were stacked above, below and to either side of them. They were squat figures, with cheerful faces and bulbous noses, but Flynn was not satisfied. He grunted, and then moved the male figure a few millimetres backwards. He stepped back a pace, grunted again, stepped forward, and this time moved the female figure slightly to the right. He stepped back again, surveyed the figures, and this time nodded in satisfaction. He continued then with his 360-degree sweep of the room, looking for anything that had gotten out of place. Eventually he nodded again, before advancing towards to the side of the wardrobe closest to the doorway. He removed a ring with three attached keys from a hook screwed into the wood and thrust them deep into his right-hand pocket. There was a second hook. On this there hung a Swiss Army knife. Flynn ran the thumb and first finger of his left hand down its red casing. When Fox had visited, he had noticed it hanging there; in truth Flynn rarely removed it from its place. But on this particular morning Flynn picked it gently off its hook and examined it closely. Then without a sound he put it into his left-hand pocket, before flicking the two light switches upwards and opening his door to leave.

Jake Arnold's flat was a mess. Even before the intruder had been in and tossed things around it had been a mess, and no one had been allowed to put anything back. Although it was smaller than Mace's house – a double bedroom, a small guest bedroom, a very snug bathroom, and a large open space that served as a sitting and dining area, with galley kitchen off to the side – finding football programmes and other memorabilia proved a much more exacting task for Wilson and Lawson. He had bookshelves, built in either side of the fireplace, but most of the contents of them were on the floor.

‘Maybe you could sift through these,' Wilson suggested, with a wave of his hand, ‘while I go through his drawers.'

‘Of course,' Lawson said mildly, but with a flash in her eyes. ‘Whatever turns you on.'

The drawers did not, however, prove in any sense exciting. They had already been half ransacked, and it didn't take Wilson long to discover that Jake Arnold hadn't stashed his football programmes under his pants or his pullovers. A box at the bottom of the wardrobe briefly offered hope, but it turned out to contain a collection of gay magazines much too explicit for the rather prudish detective constable. Wilson found himself wishing he'd chosen the shelves.

‘Nothing here,' Lawson called through.

‘Nor here!' he shouted back, and shut the wardrobe door firmly. He walked back through to the living room where he found Lawson standing with hands on her hips and a frown on her face. ‘Do you think he threw his programmes away?' she asked.

‘It's possible, I suppose,' Wilson replied with a shrug.

‘Maybe he didn't bother buying them. Maybe he just borrowed someone else's,' Lawson suggested, and then added dryly. ‘In my experience, men can be very tight with their money.'

‘And in my experience,' Wilson said, trying not to rise, ‘men who go to football like to buy a programme. They like to make a note of who played and who came on as a substitute, and who scored. And then they keep those programmes. For a while, at least.'

‘So where are Jake Arnold's?' Lawson demanded.

Wilson shrugged. ‘Well, unless there's a roof space that I haven't spotted, there's the kitchen and the bathroom.'

‘I'll take the bathroom,' Lawson said hastily, conscious that she had
drunk too much coffee that morning. ‘If that is OK with you, that is?' she added.