Blood in Grandpont

by Peter Tickler

  ‘It’s nice to see you too,’ Lawson replied breezily.

  The taxi trip took less than five minutes, with at least two minutes wasted, first waiting to pull out across the stream of oncoming traffic in Beaumont Street, and then queuing to turn right at the lights opposite Worcester College. The rest of the run was straightforward, apart from the speed bumps and a pause while another taxi executed a U-turn in the middle of Walton Street. Once at their destination, Karen paid the driver, and then led the way uncertainly to the lift. ‘I normally walk,’ she insisted. ‘But look, I really will be all right. If you want to go home or back to work—’

  ‘Geraldine will skin me alive if I don’t make sure you are okay. And besides, I need a pee.’

  After a prolonged wait for the lift – how on earth could it be busy at this time of day, Karen wondered – and a swift ascent, Karen unlocked the flat and entered it, with Lucy in close attendance. While Lucy disappeared off to the loo, Karen moved zombie-like to the small rectangular space that represented her kitchen area. She filled the kettle, and turned it on. She ought to offer Lucy a cup of tea. But even though the kettle soon boiled, she got no further in the process. It was as if her brain was stuck in neutral and no amount of revving would get her body to move. Meanwhile Lucy, her bladder emptied, materialized in the archway that separated kitchen and living room, her head held at a slight angle. Karen wished, ungratefully, that she would go away, because she just wanted to lie down. But Lucy was showing no sign of moving.

  ‘How are things going with you and DI Holden?’

  Karen looked at her, and for some reason felt uneasy. It wasn’t as if she and Lucy hadn’t been in the same room before. Obviously they had been in the same reception area several times, but this was different. ‘I’d rather not discuss it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She felt suddenly irritated beyond all reason. She didn’t expect to be given the third degree in her own flat, and certainly not by her dentist’s sidekick. ‘Because it’s none of your business!’ The words snaked across the short distance between them like the crack of a whip, doing their best to keep Lucy at a distance.

  ‘I was just trying to be friendly.’ She spoke in a tone of injured innocence. ‘Most people like to talk about their boyfriends. Why should it be any different with dykes?’ Karen flinched, but fought the temptation to react. Instead, she turned back towards the abandoned kettle, in the hope this might cause her inquisitor to withdraw.

  ‘OK,’ Lucy said suddenly, ‘let’s change the subject if it’s too sensitive for you. Where’s Susan got to in the case?’

  Karen jerked round. ‘I can’t talk about that.’

  ‘I won’t tell. It’s just between you and me.’

  ‘It would be completely unprofessional.’ Karen spoke firmly.

  ‘I need to know.’ Lucy’s voice was low, but intense. Karen shivered. Why the hell wouldn’t Lucy just go? She needed to lie down, and she needed to talk to Susan, or at least to make contact with her. But Lucy was unrelenting. ‘I need to know who stuck a stiletto into my father’s wife. Was it Dominic Russell? Did he kill her and Jack Smith, and then himself. Is that what happened? I need to know. Tell me, and then I’ll go.’

  Karen didn’t answer. She couldn’t have, not even if she had wanted to, because fear had taken hold of her throat with a strangler’s grip and it was squeezing hard.

  ‘We found this in your chest of drawers, Joseph.’

  Joseph Tull was sitting in the same armchair as he had been a week previously, when questioned over his whereabouts at the time of his mother’s death. As before, DI Holden was doing the questioning – with DS Fox and DC Lawson attending, and Dr Alan Tull looking anxiously on – but the casual nonchalance which Joseph had displayed at that earlier meeting had disappeared.

  The reason for this lay on the glass-topped coffee table that lay between interviewer and interviewee – a pile of £20 notes that Holden had just tipped out of a large brown envelope. The gasp that came from Alan Tull indicated the surprise it was to him that his son should have such a sum of money hidden away, but it was Joseph’s reaction that Holden was interested in. She thought she saw a brief flash of panic pass across his features, like a small cloud blown swiftly across the face of the full moon, but maybe that was merely in her imagination.

  ‘So?’ he replied, aggressively.

  ‘So, where did you get it?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  It was the sort of sullen response that was designed to irritate. Holden’s mouth tightened, and the vein down the left side of her head began to throb. She leant forward and spat her words like a burst from a sub-machine gun. ‘It’s my business too, until I decide it isn’t! So don’t mess me about, Joseph. Where did you get the money from?’

  ‘You haven’t been selling drugs, Joseph?’ Alan Tull broke in. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t.’

  ‘No, Dad, I haven’t!’

  ‘So where did you get the money?’ Holden insisted. She would like to be doing this without Alan Tull in the room, but he had resisted that suggestion, and the key thing was to get some answers out of Joseph now.

  ‘I was given it.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘A family friend.’

  Holden stood up suddenly, and walked away from the sofa towards the door that led through to the hall. She leant with her back against it, but said nothing. Alan Tull was watching her, alarm in his eyes, while Joseph sat unmoving, resisting the impulse to look round at her, determined to win this battle of wills.

  Eventually Holden spoke, quietly but firmly. ‘So you were blackmailing this family friend?’

  ‘No!’ Joseph twisted round as he said this. ‘I asked her and she gave it to me of her own free will.’

  Fox laughed raucously, as if Joseph had just told a crude joke. ‘That’s what they all say, sonny!’

  Joseph twisted round, suddenly furious. ‘My name’s not sonny!’ he snarled, as if that was the worst thing that anyone could possibly have said to him.

  Holden strode back across the carpet and sat down opposite Joseph Tull again. She wanted to regain control, and she wanted some straight answers, and she wasn’t sure any more winding up from her sergeant would help. She’d stick with the softly, softly approach, at least for now.

  ‘Look, Joseph,’ she said, ‘you do have to explain to me exactly how you obtained this money. If you prefer to do it without your father present, or indeed with a solicitor present down at the police station, then that is your choice. Otherwise, I’d like you to tell me who gave you the money, and how and why that was.’

  ‘OK,’ he replied. His lifted his left hand and pushed his long sweep of blond hair back off his face.

  ‘So, first of all, who gave you the money?’

  ‘Sarah Russell.’

  ‘And she gave all £700 of it in one go, did she?’

  ‘No, she gave me £400 initially, and another £300 later on.’

  ‘And this was payment for some sort of service that you rendered?’

  He laughed. ‘What are you implying? That she was paying me for sex?’ And he laughed again. ‘You must be bloody joking!’

  ‘I wasn’t implying anything, but it’s a lot of money.’

  He smiled, ‘I’d call it guilt money.’

  ‘Guilt money?’ Holden smiled back. She was making progress. ‘Perhaps you can explain exactly what you mean?’

  ‘It’s not what you think it is. You see, the fact is I wanted to prove a point. I was out one night, with Hugo Horsefield. He got thrown out of Cornforth, and he was moaning that he just been kicked out of this bar job after only a week because this other guy thought he was a stuck-up git. So I told him he needed to get smarter. And he said what did a tosspot like me know about being smarter. And I said that sometimes you just need to get some leverage on people, and he told me I was talking a load of horse shit, and what did I know about earning money. Anyway, there was a bit more of that sort of thing, and in the end I said that
I bet I could raise more money in a month than he could, no sweat.’

  He paused, and looked around as if to assess how what he was saying was being received.

  Holden was watching him, her eyes unblinking. She leant forward even more. ‘That’s all very interesting, Joseph, but what about Sarah Russell?’

  ‘I didn’t really know how I was going raise money, but then I was on the way to a class one day, and I saw Sarah Russell in the street with Geraldine Payne, and they seemed to be having – how shall I put it – rather an intimate conversation, and I suddenly thought, what the hell, that’s how I’ll beat Hugo. So the next day I went to Sarah’s office at Cornforth, and I told her I had a serious financial problem, and of course she wasn’t the slightest bit interested, so I asked her how Geraldine was, and that got her on the defensive, and I mentioned how they had seemed to be very friendly the day before in St John’s Street. Anyway, that changed her attitude.’

  ‘So she gave you the money?’

  ‘Yes. She gave me £400 the next day.’

  ‘So Sergeant Fox was right. You blackmailed her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t describe it as blackmail.’

  ‘What the hell would you it describe as?’ Fox jumped in noisily. Joseph Tull was, in his book, an overprivileged, spoilt piece of shit, and he had no time for any of his pissing about. ‘You threatened her and demanded money. Would you prefer to call it extortion?’

  ‘What did I threaten her with?’

  ‘To tell her husband that she was carrying on an affair with Geraldine Payne.’

  ‘I did wonder out loud what he might think if he found out, but I told Sarah that her secret was safe with me. Then I said I had to go as I was late for a class. The next day, she summoned me to her office and gave me £400. She said it was just to say thank you. Those were her words. Just to say thank you.’

  ‘And what about the other £300?’

  ‘She gave me that a week later.’

  ‘And that was entirely out of the kindness of her heart again!’ Fox gave another of his harsh laughs.

  Joseph Tull turned away from Fox and back towards Holden. ‘Look, if you want to call it blackmail, I don’t care. I’ll give the money back to Sarah if you want. It’s just that I have the theory that everyone has a weak point. Find that weak point, apply a bit of pressure, and then see what they do. That’s all I was doing. To be honest, I thought she was a tougher cookie than that. Hell, I don’t have any compromising photographs of the two of them snogging or anything. I don’t know for sure if they were having an affair. But she handed over the money readily enough. So, Inspector, the question you and your sergeant should be asking yourselves is why. Why did she not want her relationship with Geraldine Payne to become known to her husband? And does it have something to do with the death of my mother and the death of Sarah’s husband? Because one thing I do know is that I didn’t kill either of them, but somebody bloody did!’

  ‘Excuse me, Guv!’ All their heads turned. Wilson was at the door, and excitement was writ large across his face. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve found something on the laptop. Two things in fact.’

  Karen Pointer shut the lavatory door behind her, turned the lock, and then leant with her back to the door as she tried to gather her thoughts. Her breath was coming in deep, harsh gulps, and she tried to fight it. Steady, she told herself, keep calm. Slow down! She was used to getting up close and personal to dead bodies, but not to murderers – assuming she was right. Lucy had used the word stiletto. ‘I need to know who stuck a stiletto into my father’s wife.’ The police had never used it in their news releases and interviews. They had made a conscious decision not to do so. They had merely referred to Maria Tull and Jack Smith being stabbed with a knife. But Lucy had said stiletto. Which meant either that someone had been talking out of turn or that Lucy was the killer. She had to tell Susan, but suppose Lucy was listening at the door? She pulled her mobile out of her pocket, found Susan’s number and called it. As she did so, she moved over to the toilet and placed her free hand on its handle. Damn! There was no ringing at the other end, merely the brief silence that signifies that the mobile you are trying to contact is turned off. The silence slipped instantly into the pre-recorded message. God help me! The words rose noiselessly and unsummoned into her head. The last thing she would have called herself was religious, but the words came nevertheless, surfacing from childhood perhaps, or from some deeper level of unconscious knowledge. God help me!

  She pressed the toilet handle, and whispered into her phone. ‘For God’s sake come, Susan. I think it’s Lucy Tull, and she’s in my flat.’

  ‘Are you OK?’ called Lucy from close outside.

  ‘I’m fine!’ she called back. She ran the taps, and washed her hands, to make the charade complete. For a moment she considered staying in the toilet, the door locked, but that would be to give the game away. Lucy hadn’t twigged, surely, that she had made a mistake. All she had to do was behave as normal. She dried her hands, unlocked the door, and practised a smile. It would all be over soon.

  They were standing around Wilson, who was hunched over the laptop.

  ‘They were hidden away in the system files,’ Wilson was saying. ‘They had been completely renamed, so they took a bit of tracking down.’ Lawson felt smug and irritated at the same time. Her hunch had been right. But it didn’t look like Wilson was going to admit that now. Later, though, she’d have words. ‘Here’s the picture of Jack Smith. And here’s the one of the classical rape painting.’

  ‘No sign of the Judas painting, then?’

  ‘No. Not so far. But I can’t be certain it isn’t hidden around here somewhere.’

  ‘Dr Tull, does anyone else have access to this laptop except for your family?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. But I hardly ever use it.’

  ‘And I’ve got my own laptop,’ Joseph added quickly.

  ‘Which leaves us with Lucy.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ There was alarm in Alan Tull’s voice.

  ‘Where is Lucy?’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Alan Tull was saying, apparently oblivious to the question. ‘Lucy wouldn’t do anything like that.’

  Joseph looked at his watch. ‘She should be at work still,’ he said unemotionally.

  ‘What’s the address?’

  ‘Beaumont Street.’

  ‘That’s not so far.’

  Two minutes later Holden and Fox were driving back along Bainton Road towards the Woodstock Road. Or they would have been had a delivery lorry not stopped in the middle of the road to disgorge a sofa and pair of armchairs. Lawson and Wilson had been left behind with strict instructions to detain Lucy Tull if she arrived home. Fox got out to hurry the delivery men up, but Holden was unconcerned. A minute or two shouldn’t matter. She pulled her mobile out of her jacket pocket, and realized with disgust that it was still powered off. She had forgotten. Her blooming mother. She pressed the red button and waited for it to kick into life. A text message soon flashed up. She viewed it. It was telling her she had a voice message. She keyed ‘121’ and waited. It was from Karen. She recognized her voice, but her words were faint and indistinct, and besides, Fox had just got back into the car and had started talking. ‘Shut up, Sergeant!’ she snapped, and pressed ‘1’ to listen to the message again.

  ‘Christ!’ she swore, and with such intensity that Fox jerked his head round even though he had now reached the Woodstock Road and was trying to negotiate a safe moment to turn out on to it.

  ‘She’s with Karen!’ There was panic in her voice. ‘She’s at Karen’s flat.’

  Fox was staring at her, trying to take this information in. Holden could see his blankness, but could feel too the tide of absolute panic rising through her body. She willed herself to speak more slowly, but the fear was all but overwhelming.

  ‘Lucy Tull is at Dr Pointer’s flat. For God’s sake, get there. Don’t bloody hang about.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Je
richo Court. Over Aristotle Lane. If you turn into Polstead Road, and then take a right and left at the end.’

  Fox was already out on the Woodstock Road, and heading south fast. This might not be his part of Oxford, but he knew where Polstead Road was, a road of huge houses so far removed from his own ex-council semi that it was way beyond a joke. Shit. Five hundred metres had passed ridiculously quickly and he found himself braking hard and sharply. He flashed his headlights and hooted too, but even so it took several seconds for the oncoming, almost stationary traffic to make a gap into which he could turn. That’s the problem with plain-clothes coppers and plain-clothes cars. Other road users treat you with the anger they reserve for the BMW drivers of this world. A toxic mixture of anger and contempt.

  Some forty seconds and several terrified pedestrians later they were approaching Jericho Court and Holden was screaming at Fox to stop. She pushed her door open and, before he had cut the engine, she was out on the pavement and sprinting towards an eight-storey block of flats that rose impersonally before them.

  Holden did not wait for the lift. She took the stairs two steps at a time, driving herself upwards as if her very existence depended on it. She was a slim woman, but she never jogged, never went to the gym, and rarely swam except when on holiday, so by the time she had reached the second floor her muscles were starting to scream their complaints against this improbable and unreasonable imposition. As she rose higher, the pain spread to her lungs, and her head, and soon her whole being was demanding that she relent. But dread drove her on, forcing her legs to stretch and climb, stretch and climb till she was beyond pain and she stood finally on the seventh floor at the door to Karen’s. She paused only then, to catch her breath and to screw herself up for whatever she might find beyond the door. Then she put her key into the door, twisted it, and pushed straight into the flat.