Blood on the Cowley Road (26 page)

(
Blunt began to laugh and after several seconds turned towards the window. At the staff nurse's insistence, the interview was terminated
.)

They decided to drive as far as the St Clement's car park, and then walk. Not that there was a lot of choice, it being Oxford. It was a clear, cold night, the first one of the winter, and after the rain and endless low cloud of the previous week, it came as something of a relief. For Lawson, the unexpected sunshine of that day seemed highly appropriate: her permanent transfer to Holden's section had been all but sealed (the paperwork was on the Chief Superintendent's desk, awaiting his signature), a small pay rise had been secured, and only that morning she had been allowed to sit in and witness the conclusion to the inquest into Sarah Johnson's death. Life was indeed good.

‘A good day at the office, Guv,' she said, as the two of them stood at the pedestrian crossing. Holden turned and stared at her constable with a look of incredulity. She had spoken barely a word since leaving the station. It was not that Lawson had found her silence sullen or gruff, it was just that Holden had brought every attempt at conversation to a gentle but firm closure. But this, Lawson kept telling herself, was a social outing, and therefore chat was essential.

Holden sniffed. ‘For you, Lawson, perhaps.' And she stepped onto the crossing as a yellow Mini pulled up to let them over. Another conversation strangled at birth. Lawson sighed silently. Well, maybe there would be people at the private viewing to talk to. A private viewing. It sounded so exclusive. The first she had ever been to, and hopefully not the last. She didn't move in the world of private viewings, and she had been delighted, and touched, when Holden had shown her the invitation: ‘DI Susan Holden and colleague' had been hand-written in the most elegant of scripts at the top of the printed card.

‘So, would you like to come, Lawson,' she had said. ‘Fox laughed
when I showed him, and Wilson said he was playing football, which seems a pretty feeble excuse to me, and—'

‘So I'm third choice, am I, Guv?' Lawson had chipped in, no longer feeling quite so touched.

Holden had looked at her with irritation. ‘It's a question of seniority, Lawson.' She snapped. ‘I could hardly ask you first.'

‘I was joking, Guv,' she had replied hastily, conscious she had overstepped the mark.

‘I don't think so, Lawson. I don't think so at all.' There had been a silence then, cold and hard. Eventually, Lawson had been forced to plead: ‘I would like to come with you, Guv. If you don't mind.'

Holden had given a half laugh. ‘Look, Lawson, do you think I couldn't have persuaded Fox to accompany me, or Wilson, if I'd really wanted their company? But I didn't want them. I wanted you, because I thought you'd blend in better. Fox is a philistine and would have stood out like a second-hand car salesman in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. As for Wilson, bless him, well he's not exactly socially adept. Whereas you, I trust, will just merge in. They know I'm a cop, but we are going as enthusiasts of art. You could be my young cousin, or half-sister from a second marriage, or even my innocent young lover. Just so long as we aren't obviously coppers. That way we might learn more.'

‘About art?' Lawson had said, eager to make amends.

Holden laughed again, but it was a louder and altogether kinder laugh, cut off only by the sudden need to negotiate the final road crossing. They were now on the approaches to Magdalen Bridge, the ancient eastern entrance to the medieval city. They walked briskly in a finally contented silence, along the slight curve of the High Street until they came to their destination.

The Bare Canvas gallery was certainly not as Holden had seen it when she had last visited it to interview Les Whiting. The garish, abstract, frameless canvases had disappeared. So too had the bright white walls on which they had been displayed, to be replaced by a network of oppressive grey partitions which mimicked the grim walls of the multi-storey car park. The wall nearest the door as they entered had a blue circular plaque on it. Holden expected it to be a copy of the one that she had seen, but it was not. In the middle was a single word followed by a question mark: ‘Why?' And round it, in smaller writing,
the words ‘Ed Bicknell and Ms Johnson invite you to ask the question'.

‘Welcome, Susan!' Les Whiting stood before them, arms held wide apart in full greeting mode, a mode which obviously involved dispensing with the formalities of police titles. ‘Les Whiting, gallery owner and entrepreneur, at your service!' He bowed theatrically.

‘Entrepreneur?' Susan Holden quizzed. ‘Is this a new departure?'

‘Art has moved on. Think Damien Hirst. Think Tracey Emin. And so the purveyors of art must move on too.'

‘This is my colleague, Jan Lawson,' Holden said quickly, conscious that Whiting had ignored her.

‘I guessed!' he said, but barely glanced at her. ‘You won't believe the Press interest. They were crawling all over the place this afternoon, and getting Anne to pose this way and that. They couldn't get enough of it.'

‘Is she here?' Holden asked, curious to know exactly what Anne's part was.

‘She will be soon. Ed Bicknell is somewhere. Would you like to have a chat? Honestly, he's like a schoolboy who's raided the tuck shop. Can't believe his luck.'

‘So you're all making a killing are you, out of a death? You and Ed and Anne?'

If she had hoped her aggressive questioning would throw Whiting off balance, Holden was disappointed. It merely spurred him on. ‘Does it all come back to money for you, Susan? I'm disappointed, I really am. I thought you were smarter than that. It's not just money – though that helps, of course it does. We all need money, even you, Susan dear. It's about being taken seriously. From now on, we will be known, and for that reason alone we will be taken seriously. In this world of celebrity, that's what matters. The unknowns are ignored. Tell me if I'm wrong?'

‘Sadly, Mr Whiting, I fear you are right,' Holden said, before moving forward past him, with Lawson close at her back. The exhibition was, as Lawson later told her mother, laid out backwards. ‘I'm not sure why. I suppose Bicknell thought he was being clever and artistic, making us take it all in backwards, but the whole thing was too clever by half if you ask me.'

The first images were of flowers: first an old woman, shapeless in her jumper and skirt, walking right to left, in her hand a Tesco carrier with the heads of flowers protruding; she was placed on the left-hand
side of the photograph, as if about to step out of it. Next the same woman holding a large bunch of flowers in her right hand and tossing a broken-stemmed one away with her left; then the woman picking up the flowers; then a dog, a rather mangy collie type cocking its leg over the flowers as they lay on the pavement; two youths in sports wear and baseball caps walking past laughing; an old woman with a stick labouring past and not looking; then a small girl, one hand firmly gripped by a woman (an older mother or a young grandmother, Lawson speculated) – the child was looking over her shoulder as the flowers passed all too swiftly by. The final image was of a smartly dressed woman, laying flowers on the pavement, while in the foreground a pair of trousered legs strode by.

‘Are they genuine or staged, do you think?' Lawson wondered out loud, but Holden didn't answer. ‘Come on,' she merely said, ‘let's go and see what's next.'

What was next was a body. In the first photograph, the body was almost incidental. Most of the picture was taken up by a policeman, hand thrust forward, obviously trying to block the photographer from taking shots of the body which could be seen sprawled in the background, taking up but a small fraction of the image, but unmissable because it was the only thing in the picture that was in focus. Holden sucked in her breath and pondered. Either Ed Bicknell was a very skilled photographer, or he was a dab hand at manipulating his images on the PC. In the next couple of photographs, the body again took a subordinate role, this time to the two policemen who arrived and began to cordon off the area. But the remainder – and there were a dozen of so of these – focused unreservedly on the body that only seconds earlier had been a living, breathing Sarah Johnson. She had landed on her back, or at least had finished up on her back, her head twisted violently at an angle. The photographs were displayed in a huge circle, and it was possible to trace anticlockwise the seconds after impact, as blood spread in a gradually expanding arc from the gaping wound that had been her face. The photos were snapped from a variety of angles and heights: one was so close up that the camera might have been laid on the pavement only a foot or so from the head, while another had been taken from directly above the battered head, as if from some miniature helicopter.

‘He must be a cool bastard.' Lawson literally felt her gorge rise as
stomach juices momentarily forced their way up into her throat. She was trying to imagine herself there at the time, watching this man clinically lining up his photos. Did he delay his 999 call so that he could have more time with the body? Indeed, was it he who called the police? She couldn't remember from the records. Maybe he was clicking away with his camera while some other bystander was ringing for an ambulance and the police. Did he have to ask people to move away from the body so he could have a clear view for all his shots?

‘Good evening, ladies!' Holden and Lawson were taken by surprise by the voice close behind them, and turned as one. ‘Are you enjoying it?' The voice belonged to Ed Bicknell, an Ed Bicknell who had scrubbed up considerably since Holden had last seen him. The scruffy Che Guevara T-Shirt and ripped jeans had been replaced by a dark brown velvet suit and glistening white shirt, and his hair and beard had been subjected to a very thorough make-over in honour of the media. He was, no question, a man determined to make his mark.

‘Ah, Mr Bicknell,' Holden smiled. ‘The man of the moment.'

‘I'm not sure “enjoying” is quite the right word,' Lawson said firmly. ‘Do we really need to see so many pictures of the poor woman? She was someone's daughter, you know.'

Bicknell smiled at her patronizingly. ‘Actually, both her parents are long since dead, so I doubt they will object, but nevertheless I take your point. Not that I would agree with you, however. There's no escaping death, not for any of us. We have to look at it how it is – final and brutal. But we all move on after the death of others. If we are very close to someone who dies, it may take us some time, but our own emotional survival demands that we do move on, that we learn to walk past those reminders of death just as in the first part of the exhibition those pedestrians walked past the flowers. But what interests me is why Sarah Johnson jumped. What made her decide that it was better to walk to the top of a car park one fine morning and plunge to her death, than to carry on living? Did that blue plaque really push her over the edge? That's the line the
Daily Mail
will doubtless pedal in its feature in tomorrow's edition, but who cares what the
Daily Mail
thinks? Maybe the blue plaque freed her to be true to her innermost convictions. Maybe it simply gave her permission to jump. Maybe she looked in the mirror as she brushed her hair that morning and suddenly decided
enough misery was enough. Watch the news. Read the newspapers. The world is a catalogue of misery. Maybe Sarah saw the world more clearly than we do. Maybe that was the reason why she jumped. Twenty-twenty vision.'

‘And maybe,' said Holden, ‘we'll go and see the rest of the exhibition. '

He shrugged unconcernedly, and turned away as they themselves moved on through a doorway into a small auditorium. There were several people already sitting in the chairs, and one – a woman's voice – called out encouragingly from the darkness. ‘Quick, it's only just started!'

The moving image on the wall was black-and-white and silent: a woman dressing. She was dressing with her back to the camera, so that her face was not immediately visible, but when she turned to pick up a pair of trousers, her profile came into full view: Sarah Johnson. Or rather, as Holden quickly realized, Anne Johnson pretending to be Sarah Johnson. The resemblance was striking, even creepy. For the next ten minutes they sat and watched this woman play out the penultimate scene of her sister's life: staring listlessly into the mirror as she lethargically brushed her hair; trying on six pairs of shoes and boots before reverting to the black ankle boots she had first tried on; writing a note which she then crumpled onto a plate and set fire to; going to the loo and then reappearing after barely thirty seconds; picking up her mobile phone in her left hand and making a call while her right hand weaved an erratic path through the air as if conducting an invisible orchestra; shutting the kitchen window; putting on her coat; staring again at herself, this time in the mirror in the hall; and finally walking out of the front door.

Lawson was nearest the exit, and so it was she who was first to reach the doorway, and she who screeched first and loudest at the figure coming the other way. It was, as logic would have told her, none other than Anne Johnson dressed up to look like Sarah, but in that first moment Lawson was a creature of instinct, not logic, and the woman she saw, dressed in exactly the same clothes as in the film, and looking exactly the same in every respect, really did shock her, albeit briefly. Anne Johnson smiled in obvious pleasure.

‘Gosh,' she said, ‘I don't usually have that affect on people!'

‘You surprised me,' Lawson said defensively.

‘That was the idea, actually,' she said unrepentantly. ‘It's nice to see
you again, Constable,' she added, ‘but now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better mix with the other guests.' And she swept away from them.

It was a relief to both Holden and Lawson to discover that the next doorway led into a very different room. In the middle of it, there was a long trestle table, on which stood a selection of drinks. Furthermore, unlike the rest of the gallery, the impression here was of light and space – and also of being watched, for all around on the walls were pictures of people looking. They were, according to the large title on the end wall, ‘The nosey-parkers of death'.