Blood on the Cowley Road

by Tickler, Peter

  Fox and Holden travelled from the Cowley Police Station to the Evergreen Day Centre in grim silence. Back at the station, they had disagreed strongly, and tension hung thick and heavy in the air between them. Holden leant back in the passenger seat, closed her eyes, and tried to concentrate on the case, but her mind was in noncooperation mode. It was only a few minutes after she had spoken to her mother that DS Fox had blundered in. ‘I need to speak to you, boss.’

  ‘Did you knock?’ she had said caustically, but Fox had ignored the question and the other warning signs that a less insensitive man would have identified.

  ‘Maybe you’re missing the obvious,’ he had stated bluntly.

  ‘The obvious?’

  ‘The obvious suspect.’

  ‘And who would that be?’

  ‘The man who most obviously links all three of our victims together.’

  ‘And this man is?’

  ‘Danny, of course. Danny bloody Flynn.’

  ‘Why Danny?’ She had spoken calmly, but in reality she was shaken by the blustering aggression of her sergeant. ‘Why not Les Whiting?’ she followed up. ‘If Jake had an affair with Mace, then he had every reason to kill both of them. Or why not Jim Blunt or indeed one of any number of people at the day centre? Anyone in the anger management group is potentially a suspect, I’d have thought.’

  ‘Danny Flynn was devoted to Sarah. Danny Flynn was jealous of Jake’s relationship with her. Hell, he smashed his car when he saw it parked outside her flat.’

  ‘And Mace? What reason did he have for burning Mace to death?’

  ‘He was there, in the crowd of nosey-parkers that morning at the allotment when we found Mace’s body. Maybe he was checking he’d done the job properly.’

  ‘The fact that he was there does not mean that he was the killer,’ Holden said, but she spoke without conviction. Fox, conscious that he had made an impression, waited. Holden’s brow crumpled in a frown of concentration. Eventually she looked up again at Fox. ‘So what about Sarah?’

  ‘Easy,’ Fox said. ‘She killed herself. She felt abandoned by Jake. Remember how he refused to answer her calls or ring her back. Danny blamed Jake for not supporting her. So he killed him. And Mace – well, he must have done something or known something that so angered Danny that he killed him too.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of that Sergeant,’ Holden said, testily pulling rank, ‘only a lot of supposition. I can accept that Sarah killed herself and I can accept that Danny might have had reason to kill Jake, but there is nothing that we have found that would explain Danny killing Mace.’

  ‘He’s a nutcase,’ snorted Fox angrily. ‘It doesn’t have to be a logical reason. Mace and Jake had a relationship. So once he had killed Jake, Danny wanted to complete the job by killing Mace. Maybe Mace had threatened him.’

  ‘The fact that Danny, as you so delicately put it, is a nutcase does not make him a killer.’

  Fox shrugged, but he hadn’t quite finished. ‘And the fact that he is a grade one nutcase doesn’t mean we should back off from applying a bit of pressure. So why don’t we just pull him in and search his flat?’

  Holden hadn’t replied. But now, as Fox steered them with exaggerated care down the Cowley Road, she felt almost sick with anger. Don Alexander, her mother and Fox – each had contributed to this, but above all her anger was born of her frustration with herself, that she had not been able to crack the case. And how much longer would she be given by the press, or indeed the Chief Superintendent? Maybe she should follow Fox’s demand, haul in Danny and see what happened. But why Danny? Why not Les Whiting? Didn’t he have a stronger motive to kill both Jake Arnold and Martin Mace? The killing of Mace in particular was carefully and brutally carried out, surely more likely to be the work of someone like Les than the paranoid Danny? Or was she underestimating Danny, blinded by his presenting symptoms. She shut her eyes and tried to clear her mind, concentrating instead on the car, noticing each increase and decrease of speed, and the gentle pulling left or right as it changed direction. Eventually there was a much greater pull on her as the car turned sharply left and then after a few more seconds sharply to the right. The car slowed, and Holden knew that they had arrived. She opened her eyes reluctantly. A figure was coming out of the day centre, in a hurry, head down, and stumbling so violently that he almost fell over. The man grabbed at the back of the bench he was passing, to steady himself. As he straightened himself, his face came fully into Holden’s view.

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER 12

  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.’