Blood on the Cowley Road (20 page)

‘Speak of the devil!' she said, despite the fact that she had been silent for some minutes now. It was Les Whiting. But it was not the Les Whiting of previous meetings. Not the Les Whiting who offered elegant cappuccinos and politely humoured philistine policemen. The Les Whiting who stared at her as she got out of the car was a man on the very edge. His face was contorted with internal pain, and Holden thought immediately of Edvard Munch's
The Scream
. Whiting stood there, his left hand still attached to the back of the bench.

‘Good morning, Mr Whiting,' Holden said, while moving steadily towards him. She wasn't at all sure that he wouldn't bolt past her, but in the circumstances this seemed like an opportunity. ‘You haven't hurt yourself have you?'

‘Are you after that bastard Blunt? I do fucking hope so!'

‘Why should we be after Blunt?' Holden asked calmly.

Whiting looked at her as if he felt she was deranged for asking such a stupid question. ‘Because he's a bastard. A complete and utter bastard. And let me tell you, if anyone had a reason to kill Jake, it was him. I told you that when you came round to my flat, but you've obviously ignored it because it didn't fit in with your pet theory. Just because he's the head of a day centre, you think he's a model citizen,
caring for the least unfortunate members of society, incapable of harming the proverbial fly. Well that's ... that's ...' For several seconds Whiting sought the perfect word to express his feelings, but it failed to materialize. ‘Look,' he said finally, now speaking in a markedly calmer tone, ‘I'm going to tell you what Blunt did to Jake, and then you can decide for yourself what he is and isn't capable of. But in my book, he's capable of murder. I can't prove he killed Jake, but I reckon he did'

Holden nodded encouragingly. ‘I'm listening.'

‘I bet you always say that,' he snapped back, reverting to a theatricality that Holden recognized from her first encounter. But he got no response from her, and indeed seemed to expect none, for he plunged on without delay. ‘Blunt never liked Jake. And vice versa. I remember his first day at the day centre. He came home full of it. He reckoned he had found his niche. The work, the members, the other staff – they were all great. Except for Blunt. He wasn't sure about Blunt even then. “Not a man to cross,” he told me that night, and there was something in his voice when he said this that made me worry. Jake wasn't a tough nut. He was nice and most people liked him, but he lacked confidence in himself, and when push came to shove, he was the one to be shoved over. Hell, even I could push him around, so God knows it must have been easy for Blunt because he's a tough bastard.' Whiting paused, and looked around at Holden and Fox, as if to check that his audience was with him.

‘Have you got any hard information for us?' Fox broke in. ‘Because we're not here for a gossip. This is a murder investigation.' Holden looked across at her sergeant with alarm in her eyes. The last thing she wanted was for Whiting to shut up. But she underestimated Whiting's determination to tell his story.

‘This is hard information, Sergeant' he snapped back. ‘I'm providing you with motive, why Blunt might have killed Jake. And if you're not interested, then maybe you should go back to rounding up cycle thieves. But I'm going to tell you anyway. And hopefully your superior is prepared to listen even if you aren't.' He pointedly turned away from Fox towards Holden. ‘Blunt gave Jake supervision every three weeks or so. That's one-to-one, alone in a room after the day centre has closed. For about three months, there were no major problems. Jake passed his probationary period. But soon after that it all changed. There was an
incident in the centre. Blunt threw someone out. Jake criticized him in front of the rest of the staff team. Blunt didn't like that. Not one little bit. So he started to bully him.'

He paused again. This time Holden broke in, but carefully.

‘Lots of people are bullied. Can you be more precise?'

‘Imagine it. The two of them in a room. No witnesses. Blunt starts to give him the verbals. Calls him all sorts of names. Threatens him. Says he won't stop until he hands in his notice and leaves. Jake tries to stand up to him. Tries to ignore him. For a while it works, but then one day Jake needs to go to the loo in the middle of supervision. He makes his apologies to Blunt, but he walks over to the door, locks it and removes the key. “Not till we've finished” he says with a smirk smeared from one side of his face to the other – that's how Jake described it. So Jake tried to hold on, but Blunt drags the whole thing out. Supervision was usually forty-five minutes, or an hour maximum, but this one went on and on, and eventually Jake wets himself. And still Blunt carries on for another five minutes before unlocking the door. Then he just stands there, holding the door open, waiting for Jake to leave. Only as Jake reaches the door, he leans forward all confidentially and says: “You're waddling, Jake. You're waddling.”

Whiting stopped talking. His eyes were moist, and for a moment Holden thought he was going to cry. But she was wrong. For relating Jake's humiliation had released not only grief, but also an even more powerful anger.

‘That's why I came here today,' he said, his voice now raised to the level of a shout. ‘To confront the bastard. To force him to admit what he had done. For Christ's sake, can you believe it? I wanted Jim bloody Blunt to confess. I wanted to see him ask me for forgiveness. I must be stark staring mad. And of course, what he actually did was laugh at me.' And then, quite suddenly, Whiting started to laugh himself. A high-pitched see-sawing laughter that made Holden flinch and move back a pace. The noise continued for fifteen to twenty seconds, and then died as abruptly as it had taken life. But then Holden became conscious of another noise, or rather another set of noises. They were coming from inside the day centre, and so intense were they that all three persons standing there outside – Holden, Whiting and Fox – turned their heads as one towards the source of the noise. ‘Don't go, Mr
Whiting', Holden said, as she began to stride forward at speed towards the front doors of the Evergreen Day Centre. She pushed hard at the left hand door, and it swung back, admitting her to the main social area. The last time she had been there, it had been teeming with people, but this time she was confronted by a cameo of just three. In the foreground stood the two main protagonists, facing each other like wrestlers at the beginning of a bout, each sizing up his opponent and looking for a point of attack. To the right was Danny Flynn, crouched and swaying from side to side. To the left was Blunt. He stood more erect, but tensed and alert. Behind them, the sole spectator, was a woman Holden recognized as another day centre worker, Rachel Laing. The noise that had drawn Holden into the centre had stopped, and as the door banged shut behind her, both men turned to see who was interrupting them. ‘Wait there Inspector,' Blunt ordered firmly, before turning to face Flynn again.

‘You called the Police!' Flynn screamed. ‘You called the bloody Police!'

‘Don't interfer, Inspector,' Blunt demanded again. ‘This is between Danny and me. It's a private matter.'

‘Yeah, stay out if it!' Flynn was still shouting in a high-pitched, squealing voice. ‘Or it'll be the worse for you.' His hands were circling and floating in the air, up and down, side to side, and Holden suddenly realized that Flynn was holding something in his right hand. A knife. The blade was only short – a pen knife or small kitchen knife she reckoned – but even a small sharp knife could slice through an artery or puncture an eyeball in an instant.

‘Put the knife down, Danny,' Holden said firmly.

‘Let me handle this, Inspector!' Blunt snapped at her, but his eyes remained fixed on Flynn. ‘Now Danny, I know you're upset, but this has got to stop. If the police get involved, then it'll be out of my hands. So give me the knife and then we'll talk about this man to man, and that'll be the end of the matter.' And as he said this, he moved forward one step and held out his left hand, palm up. He was cool, Holden admitted to herself. He was taking a risk, but he certainly had balls. Mind you, maybe he had been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies, because in real life toughing it out sometimes backfired disastrously. Behind her, Holden felt another presence. She turned and
caught sight of Fox out of the corner of her eye. She stretched her arm out, palm face down, motioning him to hold back. There was no harm in letting Blunt try and do it his way – at least she hoped so.

‘Yeah, I bet you'd like this to be the end of the matter. It would suit you, wouldn't it? I put the knife down. You get me sectioned. No one asks any questions. Case closed, job done. And three cheers for Jim bloody Blunt. Yahoo!' As he shouted this last word, he lunged forward, swinging his knife in an arc through the air. Blunt swayed his head and upper body backwards, but his feet stayed fixed to their position, and his eyes remained locked on to Danny's eyes. Army training. Blunt had been in the army, Holden remembered. He could look after himself. But she knew she couldn't just wait and watch. It was time she intervened.

‘Danny,' she said firmly. ‘I've come here to try and find out about Jake's death. If you put the knife down, then you'll be free to go. Otherwise, I'll have to arrest you.' She advanced a step forward. ‘So put it down.'

‘Why should I believe you? You all tell lies when it suits you. Anything to shut Danny up. Lie, lie, lie!' His hand was waving erratically in front of him, and his eyes were swinging left and right too, for as soon as Holden took a pace forward Fox had himself started to move, circling round the other way. ‘Stand still!' Danny screamed, realizing that the situation was slipping out of control. ‘Or else!'

It was at that very moment that Blunt, adrenalin pulsating through his veins, pushed forward off his left foot. One, two paces, and he was within touching distance of Flynn. He made a sudden lunge towards his right wrist, but Flynn reacted faster, twisting away and then bringing the knife flashing down with such force that it cut deep into his own left wrist. A diagonal line of red sprayed through the air and across Blunt's white T-shirt.

‘Damn it!' Blunt swore, though whether in horror at the spoiling of his clothes or disgust at his own failure to stop Flynn, Holden never knew. Not that she was thinking about that just then.

‘Drop it, Danny!' she demanded. Like Blunt she had closed in on Flynn. With her left hand she grabbed his right wrist and twisted hard. There was no resistance. The knife slipped with a clatter onto the floor, and Flynn himself followed, falling limply onto his knees and emitting
a terrible despairing howl. Then he fell silent and collapsed forward onto the floor.

‘I'll call for an ambulance,' Fox said quietly.

Receiving a text message from a dead person is, one might reasonably suppose, an unnerving experience. Even Al Smith, a man who prided himself on being frightened of nothing and no one – and had the scars to prove it – felt a sudden rush of emotion that others would have described as fear. But it lasted only a few seconds. He shook himself, much as a dog does after it has been doused in water, and then another more familiar emotion – anger – took hold. For anyone close enough to hear (and there was just one such person), the evidence was obvious and incontrovertible: a string of swear words emitted at a volume and tone that told its own story.

Smith looked at his mobile. There it was at the top of his messages inbox. That four-letter word. Jake. There was no mistaking it. A message from the dead. Only, dead men don't send text messages. Which meant? Smith didn't wait to ponder what it might mean. He pressed his thumb hard on the central button on his mobile and swore again as his eyes and brain took in the three words that were displayed. ‘You are next'.

‘Is everything all right?' Sam Sexton was standing in the doorway of the kitchen extension, a screwdriver in his hand. He was anxious about the speed of progress on the job and the last thing he wanted was a disgruntled Smith not pulling his weight. They were being paid a fixed fee to fit out the kitchen, not by the hour, and the sooner they could get it finished, the sooner they could get on with the next and bigger job he had lined up, in Kineton Road.

‘Why shouldn't it be?' Smith snapped, staring aggressively at Sexton.

Sexton looked down at his feet. ‘Well, when you've finished, I need
your help in here.' And he withdrew into the shelter of the four walls.

Smith looked again at the message, then turned the mobile off and thrust it into his back pocket. The last thing he wanted was Sexton to know about this. He'd be straight off to the police, and then they'd be up to their eyes in shit. But he wasn't going to let that bastard killer call the shots. He was going to get him – not for bloody Jake, but for Martin. If there was one thing that Martin deserved, it was justice. Just let him get his hands on the killer and he'd show him. He'd be fucking next. Oh yes, he'd be bloody next. And once he was dead, there'd be nothing to worry about.

 

‘Hey, what's going on here?' Wilson was concentrating on reversing the car into a narrow space in the car park at the back of the police station. He pulled on the handbrake, turned off the ignition and looked to see what had prompted Lawson to say what she said. ‘It's Fox and the Guv,' she continued, ‘and they've got someone with them.'

‘Blunt,' Wilson said, feeling somewhat smug. ‘Jim Blunt, head of the Evergreen Day Centre.'

‘Have they arrested him?' Lawson said with a hint of alarm in her voice. The last thing she wanted was to miss out on the climax of the investigation.

Wilson shared her unspoken alarm. ‘Well, he's not cuffed.'

Holden, who had seen the two of them arrive, gestured Fox to take Blunt inside, and began walking briskly over towards them.

‘We've brought Blunt in for questioning,' she said, anticipating their thoughts. ‘We've had an incident down at the day centre.' She proceeded to bring them up to date, about both Flynn and Blunt, and also the conversation she had had with Les Whiting. ‘Danny was very distressed, and in view of what he said, we need to talk to him. He may just be paranoid, but he spoke as if he really did know something about Blunt. Whether it's relevant to the case, I don't know, but I want you both to visit the hospital and find out what you can. Wilson, I want you to concentrate on the staff, chat up the nurses, see what you can learn from them. But you stay away from Flynn. Lawson, you're female, and I want you to get Flynn talking. Be his friend, be his mother, be whatever. Just get him to talk about Blunt.'

‘Yes, Guv,' Lawson said brightly, her face revealing all too well her
delight at being given this task.

Wilson said nothing, and turned abruptly back towards the car.

‘Are you all right with that, Wilson?' Holden spoke sharply, irritated by his all too obvious change of mood.

He stopped and turned back towards her, though his eyes avoided hers. ‘Yes, Guv, you're the boss.'

‘You're spot on there, Constable, and just you remember it. Because if you can't take orders, you're no use to me.'

Wilson felt a tremor of humiliation running up his back. Memories of being bawled out by the PE master at school jumped into the forefront of his mind. He tried, but failed, to look her full in the face. ‘I always try to follow orders, Guv,' he said defensively.

‘Well that's good, then, Constable. We'll get along fine. But try one thing for me. Try not to sulk. That's the sort of behaviour I'd expect from a teenager.'

‘Sorry, Guv,' he said, this time almost looking her in the eye.

‘One more order before you go. Drive the scenic route to the hospital.'

‘Scenic route?' Both Wilson and Lawson stared at her, faces blank with incomprehension.

‘The scenic route via wherever it is that Lawson lives. Then, Wilson, you can give her no more than ten minutes to get out of that bloody uniform and into something more casual. The last thing we want is Danny knowing she's a cop as soon as she walks into the room. Or indeed thinking she's a shrink. So no white blouse, and no knee-length black skirt. The sloppier and more low key, the better. Right?'

‘Right!' they replied in unison.

 

‘I'm curious.' Detective Inspector Holden, supported by Detective Sergeant Fox on her right, was sitting opposite Jim Blunt in Interview Room 2. She was leaning forward, both elbows on the table, resting her chin on her linked hands and looking directly at the man before her. He was leaning back in his chair, as if to maintain a distance between himself and his questioner, and he had adopted an air of studied casualness, his hands cupped behind his neck.

‘Curious?' Blunt uttered the word as if he was tasting wine, swilling it around in his mouth while he analyzed its blend of flavours. ‘You say
curious,' he said preparing to spit the mouthful out, ‘others might call it nosey.'

Holden ignored the remark. ‘I'm curious as to what technique you use to cause someone like Whiting to hate you so much.'

‘I hardly know him.'

‘In that case, I'm even more impressed!'

Blunt looked at Holden hard, assessing which way to play it. ‘Is that why you've dragged me here. Because of Whiting's hyperactive rantings. '

Holden shrugged, and changed tack. ‘Jake Arnold's death is very convenient for you, isn't it?'

‘Convenient? What the hell do you mean by that?'

‘If his allegations that you had bullied him had been upheld, you'd have been out of a job.'

‘It was his word against mine. The complaint was going nowhere.'

‘In fact, your whole career would have been at risk.'

‘Bollocks. There was absolutely no proof. Just a load of hysterical whining.'

‘Les Whiting didn't think it was hysterical whining. You've got a bit of a reputation, haven't you? A hard taskmaster. You took against Jake Arnold by all accounts. Decided he wasn't right for the job. So you decided to force him out. Hard to prove, I agree. But easy enough lay the seeds of doubt. One or two more complaints, maybe an article in the local rag, and who knows, suddenly it might have been you that management decided to get rid of.'

If Blunt was worried by this line of questioning, he didn't show it. ‘Are you telling me,' he said with a grin across his face, ‘that you think I killed Jake Arnold because I was worried about my job?' He began to laugh then, shaking his head as he did so.

‘You don't have an alibi,' Holden said firmly. ‘As I recall, you claim to have been in your flat, on your own, watching a DVD. Not exactly the most original story.'

‘Are you accusing me? Or merely speculating out loud? Because if it's the former, I think it's about time you got me a solicitor.'

‘Tell me about Danny,' she replied, conscious that she had gone as far as she could down that particular avenue.

The grin returned to Blunt's face. ‘I don't discuss clients. It's a question
of confidentiality.' He leant back and crossed his arms. ‘Sorry!' he concluded, without, of course, meaning it.

‘Why did he come to the day centre and start waving a knife around?'

‘Maybe you should ask him.'

‘When you were trying to calm him down, you promised that if he put the knife down, you'd discuss it man to man. What exactly was it you were going to discuss?'

The grin, though becoming increasingly synthetic, was still plastered across his features. ‘When a man is threatening you with a knife,' he said evenly, ‘you'll say anything to calm him down.'

‘And why was Danny so uncalm?' she pressed.

The smile finally faded. ‘Either you let me go, or you get me a solicitor. '

Holden hesitated, but only briefly. She stood up, picked up the pile of papers, and moved towards the door. ‘Sergeant Fox will show you out,' she said without looking back.

 

Al Smith watched as Sam Sexton's van disappeared up the street. Sam had left his sandwiches at home, so even if he came straight back he'd be gone for twenty minutes at least. So he had plenty of time. He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, unlocked it, and flicked to his messages. He read again the one from Jake's phone. ‘You are next.' He muttered something inaudible to himself, rang the number and waited. If he hoped or expected someone to answer, he was disappointed. It went straight to the answering service, in fact to Jake's own voice, eerily telling him that right now he was busy, but that if he were to leave a message he would ring back as soon as possible.

‘It's Smith here. Al Smith.' As if it would be anyone else. He spoke calmly, though he wanted to shout and swear. He wanted to scream at the bastard at the top of his lungs, but he knew he had to keep calm. ‘It's me you want. Just me. I was the driver. It was my fault. So let's meet. Anywhere you want. Then we can sort it all out, one way or another.' He paused, but only briefly because he had planned what he was going to say. He needed to provoke the guy into a meeting, and he could think of only one way of doing that. ‘And just so that you know, I'm not scared of you.' He pressed the red button on his mobile and let
out a sigh. God, he hoped that would do it. He wanted just one chance to get revenge for Martin. He had to keep Sam out of it. The bastard was after him anyway, and what were his options? To go to the cops? And admit what he'd done last May? Or try to get the bastard out into the open? Because if there was one thing he could do, he could handle himself in a fight.

 

It took Whiting over an hour to walk from the day centre to his gallery. This was not because of some physical restriction. He had banged himself on the right thigh when he had stumbled against the bench in full view of the detectives, but it was nothing more than a bruise. Much more painful, however, had been the emotional assault he had received from Jim Blunt. So rather than go straight back to the gallery, he entered a trendy little café which stood on the right-hand side of Cowley Road just short of the Plain roundabout. Once inside, he selected a peppermint tea, a piece of carrot cake generously topped with buttercream icing, and a copy of that day's
Guardian
which the establishment provided gratis for its customers. Armed with these, he had sat in the corner, away from the window, and shut out the world.

Only a text, some half an hour later, from Ruth at the gallery asking when he would be back, woke him from his cocoon. He poured out the last few drops from his teapot, drained them, and reluctantly stood up. It was time to get on with his life.

When he got back to his gallery, Ruth met him at the door. ‘Where the hell have you been?' she hissed. ‘This guy's been waiting for ages. He says he had an appointment.'

One might have expected – and Ruth almost certainly did – that Whiting would have told his employee how brown she looked and asked if she had a fabulous holiday. But in fact Whiting pushed past Ruth without so much as a greeting, and instead gave half a wave and all of his attention to the man standing on the far side of the room. ‘Sorry, Bicknell,' he said. ‘I got held up. Just couldn't get away.'

Bicknell looked at him with a face that told both Whiting and Ruth that he was not impressed: ‘I hope you're not pissing me about, Whiting, because let me tell you that you're not the only fish in the sea.'

‘Come, come!' Whiting replied, as if he was soothing a small child. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was keep you waiting. Heaven forbid.
Now, why don't we go and discuss things over a drink. There's a new wine bar just opened up the road.'

 

‘Hello Danny.'

Danny Flynn was sitting on a red moulded plastic chair, looking absent-mindedly out of the window. The voice, a female one, seemed to come from somewhere away to his left. He didn't recognize it, so he knew it must be real. His own voices were, with one exception, always male, and nearly always harsh, demanding and insistent. This new voice matched none of these descriptions. For several seconds he continued to look out of the window while his mind – which seemed to have been operating in slow motion ever since he arrived here (wherever here was, he couldn't quite be sure) – processed his thoughts. Eventually, he turned to see to whom the voice belonged.

He frowned. The woman who stood there was no one he recognized. Her hair was short and blonde, she was wearing a bright pink T-shirt and jeans, and she had a small gold-coloured handbag dangling on a long strap from her shoulder. She looked a bit like the girl who sometimes served behind the bar in the Cricketers, but he was pretty sure it wasn't her. Or maybe she was the girl from the chemist, only she was always heavily made up, whereas the person standing in front of him was anything but. Not even lipstick, and certainly no mascara or whatever else it was that girls put around their eyes.