‘Did you manage to get a look at the cyclist’s face?’ Wilson asked hopefully.
‘Naw! The bampot had a balaclava on. A black ’un. And he was wearing navy blue waterproofs.’
‘Why do you say “he”’ Wilson fired back.
‘Who kin tell, nowadays?’ came the laughing reply.
They gave up at 2.15 p.m. and retreated to Cowley, where they dried off and warmed themselves with hot drinks in Holden’s office. Outside, in the Oxford Road, the increased traffic levels signalled the end of school, and beyond their view the ring road was already clogging up, the result of the breakdown of a London-bound coach at the Headington roundabout. It was Friday, and Holden should have been looking forward to the weekend, but all she could feel was frustration. She began the meeting by briefing Fox and Lawson thoroughly on the visit to Eleanor Bennett, and concluded with a variation on the question she had earlier put to Wilson. ‘Would Dominic Russell commit murder for the sake of a painting worth ten thousand pounds? Any offers?’
‘Yes!’ said Lawson. If truth be told, she was feeling a little resentful that Holden had taken Wilson rather than her to visit Eleanor Bennett. And now she was determined to show her worth.
‘No!’ said Fox firmly.
Holden turned. ‘Are you playing devil’s advocate, Fox?’
‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’m just saying it how I see it. You saw his business. Loads of expensive stuff. He may be a smarmy arsehole, but I don’t see him as a killer prepared to risk all on a painting like that.’
‘You’re making two assumptions, with respect, Sarge.’ Lawson had no intention of backing off, especially when Sergeant bloody Fox was in flat-foot mood. ‘First, we don’t know how well his business is doing. We’ve entered a recession, haven’t we, and the stuff he sells is hardly essential for people’s survival. So if ten thousand pounds was the difference between going bust and survival, why wouldn’t he kill? Second, maybe there’s a personal angle to it all. He and Maria have a bit of history. Who’s to say this painting wasn’t all that it needed to tip the balance.’
‘Where’s you evidence for that?’ Fox spoke aggressively. He didn’t much like Lawson. Fancied herself a lot. Thought she was smart as hell.
‘We haven’t got the evidence,’ Holden snapped. She was angry that a brainstorming session was so quickly degenerating into a personal battle. Whatever their differences, they clearly hadn’t sorted them out in her absence. ‘That’s why we’re trying to bounce ideas around, preferably without you two scrapping like kids in the playground. But Lawson’s first point is a good one. So let’s run some checks against Dominic Russell and his business. See if there’s any evidence he’s got financial problems.’
She paused. She was tempted to bring the session to a premature close, but she was conscious there was other ground to cover. But in any event, Lawson had something else to say.
‘Guv, we’ve also got the evidence of Jack Smith’s phone calls.’
Holden looked at Lawson hard. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sorry, Guv, but what with everything that went on yesterday, I only got round to going through his phone properly this morning.’
‘But you got it from Dr Pointer yesterday morning!’
Lawson swallowed. ‘Well, I suppose I got a bit distracted by the photo of the painting, and then we went to D.R. Antiquities, so I only did a thorough check this morning just before we went on the house to house.’
‘OK, Lawson, that’s enough excuses. So you’ve written your findings down, have you?’
‘I sent them to you by email, Guv.’
‘Do you think I’ve time to be checking my email every five minutes, Lawson. If there’s anything important, you should tell me.’
‘Sorry, Guv. It’s just that I don’t know if it’s important, but it is evidence of sorts.’
‘Lawson,’ Holden said, with a suddenly – and dangerously – quiet voice. ‘What is this evidence that you’ve emailed me? Do you think you could give us all a quick resumé or do I have to go and sit down at my PC in order to find out?’
Lawson flushed, and she replied with eyes not quite meeting her boss’s. ‘Jack Smith received a phone call from the Tulls’ home number on Wednesday at 7.55 a.m.’
There was not so much a silence at this point as a hiatus. The world, or at least the room, stopped dead for several moments as the three other detectives in the room assimilated this news into their understanding.
‘Hey,’ Wilson piped up, ‘that’s only a few hours before he was killed!’ On another day, or perhaps if they had been uttered from the lips of a less guileless person than Wilson, these words would have been petrol sprayed over a smouldering fire. But somehow there was no explosion. Fox jumped in, unusually sensitive to the currents swirling around in the room. ‘To be fair,’ he said in deadpan tones, ‘it could be nothing. If your heating has broken down overnight, or something’s leaking, that’s the time you’d ring your plumber.’
‘Or,’ said Holden, ‘it’s the time you might ring on a pretext in order to find out where your murder victim is going to be later that day.’
‘Agreed,’ he replied instantly. It was the first thought that he had had. ‘But we can easily check if the Tulls did have a plumbing problem.’
‘We can and we will,’ Holden concluded. ‘In fact, the Tulls are due a visit. None of them had a watertight alibi for Maria’s death, so we need to check their movements for the time of Jack’s death. That way, with a bit of luck, we might be able to rule some of them out.’
‘Do you want to do it here?’ Fox said.
Holden looked at her watch. ‘The chances are Dr Tull and Lucy are both at work, so why don’t we see if we can call round when they are all at home later this afternoon. Wilson, can you fix that? Start with Dr Tull, see if it’s OK with him, and then track down the others.’
In the event, Dr Tull turned out to have a 2.00 p.m. clinic that afternoon, and by the time Wilson rang there were only three patients waiting to be seen, so Dr Tull suggested the police come round to his house at 4.30. He insisted he would ring his children and make sure they were there too. He put the phone down with a sigh, conscious he had been slightly duplicitous; he had no intention of getting them home before 5.00 p.m. because he wanted to get his interview over and done with first.
‘So,’ Holden was saying, ‘we just need to know where you were between 12.00 noon and 2.00 p.m. yesterday.’
They were sitting in Dr Tull’s study – Dr Tull, DI Holden, and DS Fox, while the two detective constables waited in the hallway for Dr Tull’s offspring to arrive.
‘I see,’ Dr Tull replied, rubbing his cheeks between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. ‘I had surgery from 9 o’clock till about 11.15. I then made a couple of phone calls, following up on a couple of my patients, and then made a home visit on Cumnor Hill. A Major Johnson. It must have been about twelve by the time I finished, so I decided to go for a walk. My only commitment on a Wednesday afternoon is paperwork, so there was no rush to get back.’
‘Where did you walk?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I just put my case back in the car – in the boot that is, out of sight – and I walked.’ He paused, and then, as if realizing more was expected, continued. ‘I just needed some time out. On my own.’ There was another short silence. ‘Time not to think, as it were. After Maria’s death and everything, I just needed time out. Go walkabout. Isn’t that what the Australian Aborigines do?’ He took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose.
‘Wasn’t it rather wet for walking?’ It was a casually asked question, but not a casual one.
He looked at Holden with a look of slight bemusement. ‘Probably. I’m not sure that was at the forefront of my mind. But I had my raincoat with me.’
‘Did you meet anyone you know while you were walking?’ Again a simple question, but with considerable significance. A significance that he would surely be aware of, Holden reckoned. She didn’t bu
y this puzzled, I-don’t-know-where-I-am-half-the-time act, not from a GP who was still attending his patients diligently despite his grief.
‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t know many people in Cumnor, actually.’
‘Sir,’ Fox interrupted, ‘what about any patients? I guess you must have a lot of those, and they’d always recognize their doctor.’
Again the look of innocent incomprehension as he tried to come up with a more satisfactory answer. ‘Sorry, I really didn’t meet anyone I know.’
‘That’s fine,’ Holden said quickly, taking the reins back. ‘There is just one other thing. Did you by any chance make a phone call to Jack Smith yesterday morning?’
For the first time that morning there was a look of genuine surprise on Dr Tull’s face. He peered at Holden his eyes narrowing. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said firmly, before adding, ‘though the shower is leaking.’
‘It could be him,’ Fox concluded tersely, after Dr Tull had asked to be excused and gone out of the room. ‘No alibi.’
‘It could be,’ Holden replied. ‘But who made the phone call?’
Joseph was the next of the Tulls to arrive home. His hair flopped across his face, and every gesture and word exuded the same disgruntled note, a young man at odds with the world and himself. He had been at college all morning the previous day, he insisted. He had had two classes, and the second had finished at 12.30, and then he’d gone home and played on his X-Box for a while and then he’d had to write an essay because it was late and he’d been given a bollocking about it by his tutor. And no, he hadn’t rung the bloody plumber. If the shower was dripping a bit, so what!
It was rather a relief to Holden when Lucy Tull arrived. Fox intercepted her in the hall, and invited her straight into the study. She took off her black coat and scarf, hung them neatly on the coat stand in the hall, and went and sat down opposite Holden. Holden couldn’t help but compare her with her half-brother. Whereas he had slouched in the chair and given every impression of total boredom, she sat upright and tense, her hands clasped tightly together on the table, and her eyes looking so directly at Holden that she might have been practising the pose. Look at me, she was saying, giving you absolutely one hundred per cent attention.
‘I’m sorry if you’ve had to rush home, Lucy.’
‘Our last appointment didn’t turn up, so it didn’t matter.’
‘I’ll try to keep it brief. We need to know where you were between 12.00 noon and 2.00 p.m. yesterday.’
‘Work for some of it. I was in the surgery till about 12.45. We were running a bit late because we’d had to fit an emergency in. Then I went out, and I came back just before two o’clock.’
‘That’s a long lunch break.’
‘Not really. You see, at least twice a week we catch up with the admin at lunchtime, so then it’s a short break. So on other days I get longer.’
‘And what did you do while you were out?’
‘I went to get a new bell for my bike.’
‘Where from?’
‘There’s a little shop on the Botley Road. I always use it. They specialize in Bromptons.’
‘And then what?’
‘Gosh, you do ask a lot of questions. Let me see, I put the bell on the bike, and I cycled back towards town, only it was really chucking it down so I stopped by that church on the right, near Osney, and sheltered in the porch while I ate my sandwich. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot,’ she continued, with sarcasm now transparent, ‘I read my book while I was waiting for the rain to ease off – Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel – and then I made my way back to the surgery.’
‘So that all took you an hour and a quarter?’ Holden had no intention of being distracted from her task.
‘Roughly speaking.’ She made a face, and Holden saw in it a flash of her brother’s disdainfulness. Did they both get that from their father, then? Or was that the product of money and class. ‘Maybe it was only an hour and ten minutes. I wasn’t counting the minutes. But you can always check with Geraldine.’
Holden yawned. She too could play the ‘I’m bored with all of this’ game. But right now it was merely a distraction technique. The real game was altogether more serious. She ran her forefinger up and down the side of her nose, rubbing a non-existent itch.
‘Did you ring Jack Smith yesterday morning round about eight o’clock?’ If Holden hoped the suddenness of the question would throw Lucy off her guard, she was quickly disillusioned by the immediate and sure-footed response.
‘Yeah!’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because the shower was leaking. Why else?’
‘So you rang the man who had had an affair with your stepmother, in order to get him to fix a leaking shower?’
‘Sure. He installed the damn shower, so he could fix it. You don’t think I was going to call out another plumber who’d charge daddy at least fifty quid when it was Jack’s responsibility to fix it for free. And besides, do you really think Jack Smith was the only person who’d slept with Maria? Because I don’t.’
Holden nodded her head slowly. She’s probably got as far as she could. But there was one more thing she wanted to ask.
‘Why do you visit Marjorie Drabble?’
‘Why? That’s an odd sort of question. Why not? She’s got cancer.’
‘I’d like a better answer than that, Lucy,’ Holden said, her voice now raised.
Lucy Tull looked down at her hands, which were still clenched firmly together. Her breathing was deep and noisy, so that Holden wondered whether she wasn’t on the brink of exploding, but gradually the breaths grew quieter, until finally she raised her head and looked her questioner full in the face. ‘To protect my father,’ she said bluntly.
‘Can you explain that for me?’
Lucy sucked in a deep breath and then let it out gently, as if preparing for a relaxation class. ‘Daddy is Marjorie’s GP. He’s known her since way back when. She knew my mother. They were friends. But when Maria came on the scene there must have been a bit of a falling out. I guess she didn’t approve of Maria or something. So although Daddy remained her GP, we rarely saw her socially. Marjorie contracted cancer, but it wasn’t diagnosed till a few weeks ago. Graham Drabble blamed my father, saying he should have spotted the signs and sent her for screening sooner, and then he started threatening Daddy, and he said he’d accuse him of sexually molesting Marjorie if he didn’t resign. It was all quite ridiculous, or would have been if Graham wasn’t such a nasty piece of work, so I said to Daddy that I’d go and visit her in hospital and see if I could get her to stop Graham. We really hit it off, and she told me she would speak to Graham. So that’s how we started, but really I like visiting her now because she remembers my mother, and we talk about her. For a few short years, they were really good friends, and I think talking about Mummy helps her to forget her own problems.’
She stopped, and took another deep breath. ‘That’s about it, really.’
‘Thank you. I think that’s about all.’
‘I’m sorry if I was a bit late getting here,’ Lucy said, as she got up.
‘Don’t worry,’ Holden replied. ‘We only had to wait five minutes or so. And that was because Joseph didn’t have a lot to say.’
‘No change there then.’ She laughed. The social pleasantries were being observed. Despite the circumstances. ‘Still, I would have been back sooner if Daddy hadn’t rung my mobile when I was on my way home. He said you’d only just started quizzing Joseph, so I knew there was no mad rush. Now, did you have coats?’
‘Bloody hell!’ Holden slammed the palm of her hand down on to the dashboard. Her three colleagues – Fox in the driving seat, Lawson and Wilson in the back – jumped as one.
Holden turned round and gave her two detective constables a look that would have scorched a piece of granite. ‘Why the hell did you let him near the phone?’
The looks of incomprehension on their faces only served to egg her on. ‘When we were interviewing Joseph, Dr Tull went and
rang Lucy as she was cycling back to Bainton Road.’
‘I expect he was wondering where she had got to,’ Wilson said innocently.
Fox, conscious that Wilson was now pouring petrol directly on to an open flame, tried for the second time that day to intervene, but he barely got his mouth open before Holden’s hand again slammed down on to the dashboard. But this time Holden’s voice was more controlled, if no less threatening. ‘Let me explain, Wilson, in words of great simplicity. Someone rang Jack Smith from the Tull’s house yesterday morning. Alan Tull said it wasn’t him, but said the shower had been leaking. Joseph said it wasn’t him, and said nothing about the shower leaking. And then we asked Lucy, who piped up very promptly that it was her who had rung Jack Smith because the shower was leaking. So now, Wilson, do you understand the importance I am attaching to the phone call Dr Tull made to Lucy Tull while Fox and I were talking to Joseph Tull?’
‘Yes, Guv.’
‘Praise the Lord!’ Holden leant back in her seat and shut her eyes. ‘Just get us home, Fox,’ she added.
Fox started the car, but didn’t immediately set off. ‘To be fair, Guv, they weren’t to know, and even if they had it would have been difficult to stop him making a phone call in his own house. He’s probably got a mobile, and a land-line in his bedroom.’
‘Thank you, Fox. So what you’re saying is that it’s actually all my fault for not thinking of it in advance, and planning accordingly.’
‘No, Guv,’ he replied quickly. ‘I was just pointing out—’
But Holden had no interest in hearing anything else he might want to just point out on the subject. ‘For God’s sake, stop talking and drive us home, Sergeant!’
CHAPTER 7
Dominic Russell went missing the following day, Saturday. Quite when this occurred depends on your point of view. According to his wife Sarah, he left home at about 7.30 a.m. to make the short journey from his home in North Oxford to D.R. Antiquities. That was the last time she saw him, she said. Unless, of course, as Sergeant Fox later commented to Constable Wilson, it was she who killed him.
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