Blood on the Cowley Road

by Tickler, Peter

  ‘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’.

  ‘Are they genuine?’ Holden asked as with one hand she took a glass of white wine from the woman standing by the trestle, and with the other gestured towards the surrounding walls. ‘Were they taken at the time, or faked up later?’

  ‘Does it matter,’ the woman replied defensively.

  ‘They look fake to me!’ Lawson said loudly, determined to put her embarrassment with Anne Johnson behind her.

  ‘And what is that,’ Holden asked, pointing to a PC screen in the corner beyond the table.

  ‘Oh that’s genuine,’ the young woman said quickly. ‘He had a camera set up at a different angle, shooting down the street and taking shots every thirty seconds. It shows people looking at the plaque, and then the dead body, and everyone rubbernecking, but he wasn’t very happy with it. When you zoom in to get a closer view, the images lose definition. He needed a better camera really.’

  Holden moved forward round the side of the table to get a closer look. Lawson and Holden followed, and for some time the three of them watched in silence, sipping from their glasses, as every fifteen seconds or so a new photo took up position on the screen.

  ‘We haven’t seen these before,’ Holden said without elaboration.

  ‘No,’ agreed Lawson. Though at that moment her mind wasn’t really attending to the images that kept appearing in front of her. ‘I’ve been thinking, Guv,’ she continued.’

  ‘Don’t overdo it, Constable,’ Holden murmured back.

  ‘Well, being here makes you think. And there’s one thing that I really can’t get my head round. In fact, it’s really beginning to bug me.’ She paused, untypically needing permission to carry on.

  ‘Yes?’ Holden said, still watching the PC screen. ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Well,’ Lawson said earnestly, ‘there’s one thing that really puzzles me. Don’t you think it’s an extraordinary coincidence that on the very same day that Anne visits her sister at the crack of dawn, Bicknell sets up his suicide plaque just down the road. I mean, it might be coincidence, but personally I find it hard to believe.’

  For a moment, Holden turned to look at her colleague. There was a frown across her face. ‘I see,’ she said quietly. She continued to gaze in the direction of Lawson for several seconds, before turning silently back to yet another new image on the PC. What she saw, however, caused a dramatic change in manner. ‘Look!’ The excitement in her voice was palpable. She pointed urgently towards the screen. ‘There, Lawson! In the background.’ And she moved her finger further forward until it was almost touching. ‘Look at the jogger!’

  ‘I see him, Guv.’

  ‘A woman or a man? What do you think?’

  ‘Very hard to identify, Guv. The hood is hiding most of the face. A woman or a small man.’

  ‘There’s red piping on the trousers. Oh Damn!’ Their fifteen seconds was up, and in the next photo to be displayed, taken exactly thirty seconds later, the jogger was nowhere to be seen.

  Holden turned and tapped the woman by the table on the shoulder. ‘Do you know how long this runs? When it started and when it finished?’

  She puckered her nose as she assessed the question. ‘I think it’s about a fifteen, maybe twenty-minute loop. Sorry, I can’t pretend I’ve watched it through.’

  Holden turned back to her colleague. ‘The time, Lawson. It must have been a couple of minutes after Sarah was killed.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that the jogger was something to do with—’

  ‘It’s a cul-de-sac, isn’t it? The jogger is coming out of a cul-de-sac.’

  Lawson strained to remember what the side-street was like. ‘I think there are some flats on the other side, so maybe the jogger lived there?’

  ‘But if not, where did he or she come from? From the car park. In which case, the jogger must be the killer.’

  ‘Based on size, it can’t be Blunt.’

  ‘Which leaves us with Anne Johnson.’

  Lawson looked at her boss. Holden’s whole face was alight with excitement, as the implications of what she was saying and thinking surged through her body. Lawson, however, felt uncertain and even bemused by this sudden development. She fiddled nervously with the stud earring in her right ear, as she tried to weigh her next words with care.

  ‘It is possible,’ she admitted uncertainly, ‘but even if it’s correct, proving it may be harder.’

  ‘I know that!’ Holden replied emphatically. ‘I’m not stupid, Lawson.’

  ‘No, Guv,’ Lawson said quickly, and then turned back to watch the still revolving cycle of Bicknell’s photographs.

  Holden too turned, waiting for the jogger to come round again, but she was irritated to find that her attention no longer fully engaged. Partly that was because most of the photos had nothing to capture her interest, and partly because her mind refused to jettison what Lawson had said earlier about the coincidence of Bicknell’s suicide plaque project and Sarah’s supposed suicide.

  ‘Lawson,’ she said finally, her eyes still on the photos, ‘I think we need a copy of these, and I think too we need a chat with Bicknell.’

  Lawson turned to look at her boss, but her eyes focused instead some metres beyond her. ‘Speak of the devil,’ she said quietly, ‘here the great man is!’

  Bicknell was approaching the drinks table, an empty wine glass in o
ne hand, which he exchanged for a full one.

  ‘Ah, Mr Bicknell,’ Holden called across the room. ‘We’ve just been watching this.’

  He took a swig of wine, and moved towards them, a large grin across his flushed face.

  ‘Not my best work, I’m afraid.’ He spoke expansively, as if he was a photographer with a long and distinguished career. ‘Didn’t quite get the exposure right, and the shots are too long. In fact, I nearly didn’t bother with it, but then I thought what the hell, it’s not taking up a lot of space.’

  ‘Can I have a copy,’ Holden cut in.

  ‘If you really want to.’

  ‘Tonight if possible!’

  Bicknell shrugged. ‘OK. I’ve got a back-up CD in Les’s office. Just in case anything went wrong.’ And he walked off towards a door at the back of the room.

  ‘We’ll come with you,’ Holden said, beckoning Lawson to follow.

  ‘No need,’ Bicknell said, as he unlocked the door.

  ‘Actually, there is every need. We need a chat with you. Now, sir, if you don’t mind.’

  Bicknell turned to look at her, suddenly wary at her change of manner. ’This is hardly the time—’

  ‘This is exactly the time, sir’ Holden interrupted, her voice low but insistent. ‘We need to have a conversation right now, and we can either do it discreetly and very quickly here, or my constable can whistle up a car and we can do it down at the station. But that would, of course, take a lot longer—’ She allowed her sentence to fade to a stop, and waited for his response.

  ‘Not much of a bloody choice, is it,’ he snarled, before pushing his way angrily into the office.

  Holden waited for Lawson to shut the door behind them, and then reverted to a more conciliatory manner.

  ‘So, Ed, tell me where this idea of a suicide plaque came from? Did someone put you up to it?’

  He looked at her in disbelief. ‘Put me up to it? What the hell do you mean? It was my bloody idea. Mine, and no one else’s.’

  Holden considered apologising, but decided that would be being altogether too friendly. ‘OK, so what gave you the idea?’

  He looked hard at her again, but this time there was no visible emotion in his face, and when he spoke he did so in a matter-of-fact way. ‘My father killed himself. He was an alcoholic, you see, a drunk. First he crashed the car while under the influence, and killed my mother, and then, three months later, he walked to the top of a car park and jumped.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Holden replied, and paused, though only briefly before continuing her questioning: ‘Can I ask when you decided to do your blue plaque—’ Again she tailed off, but this time it was because she was struggling to find the right word.

  ‘Installation?’ Bicknell suggested.

  ‘Right, installation.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe six months ago, maybe more.’

  ‘Really? So will you tell me why you decided to do it on that particular Friday after a such a gap?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I just kept putting it off and putting it off until I couldn’t put it off any longer.’

  ‘So you woke up early one morning and just decided on the spur of the moment to do it, did you?’

  ‘Of course I bloody didn’t. I had to prepare for it, didn’t I? I had to make the plaque, and organize my cameras and work out exactly the best position.’

  ‘Did you discuss your installation with your fellow students?’

  ‘You must be joking. I didn’t want them nicking my idea.’

  ‘So you didn’t discuss it with anyone? Not even your tutor?’

  ‘Especially not my tutor. I wouldn’t trust him further than I could vomit.’

  ‘So you didn’t discuss it with anyone at all?’

  For several moments the question hung in the air. Bicknell pursed his lips in thought, before slowly raising his glass and draining the red wine from it. Only then did he look Holden full in the face.

  ‘For the last few months, I’ve been going to a support group. For people who’ve suffered loss. In my case, my parents. For others it was husbands and wives, lovers, children, in one case a twin sister. And we talked about how we felt and all that sort of stuff, and how we could properly confront our loss and move on. To be honest, I thought it was all going to be a load of bollocks at first, but it wasn’t, and so I kept going back. And I got pally with this guy who had lost his girlfriend in a car crash, and one night we went to the pub afterwards, and I told him about my idea and he was really interested and encouraging, and said I really should do it.’

  ‘And this guy’s name?’

  ‘Jim. I didn’t know his other name. First names only in the group. But, of course, I recognized him when his face appeared in the papers.’

  ‘It was Jim Blunt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Holden took a deep breath in, and then let it out again, as she tried to maintain a semblance of calm.

  Lawson, sensing the situation, took up the baton. ‘Can I ask you, sir, if you actually discussed with Jim Blunt the precise day you were going to do it?’

  ‘Oh yes, we discussed it,’ Bicknell said. He was relieved now. Talking about it even to the police, was amazingly cathartic and comforting. Outside the support group, he never talked about his parents. Now he spoke almost cheerfully. ‘In fact, he suggested that Friday was a good day for him, and he might come and take a look himself after he’d attended some meeting he had first thing.’

  At 9.05 the following morning, DI Holden presided over a meeting of Fox, Wilson and Lawson. She herself had arrived in the office at 7.45 a.m., but had felt no sense of impatience or indeed urgency. She knew what she wanted done, and 7.45 was too early to go banging on doors. She was glad, however, of the peace of her office, and took the opportunity to read through the files and statements again, and to make some notes for the interview she had planned. At 9.05, when the three of her colleagues filed in, she briefed the two men on the previous night’s developments, and then laid out her instructions for the morning. Lawson would accompany her in locating Danny Flynn. Fox would get hold of Blunt’s mobile phone records, and also make a phone call to Dr Adrian Ratcliffe. And Wilson was given the task of knocking on doors.

  Holden and Lawson found Danny just leaving his flat. He recognized both of them, and looked at them uneasily. Like many people, he found himself getting uncomfortable when confronted by the police, even when they were bending over backwards to be nice.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Danny,’ Holden said in a voice that she hoped sounded both apologetic and friendly. ‘But we really do need your help.’

  ‘Why?’ he said. He was genuinely puzzled. It was weeks since the young one had talked to him in the hospital, and he had heard on Radio Oxford the night before that the inquest had decided that Sarah had committed suicide, so he couldn’t see what else there was to talk about.

  It was the young one who spoke next, her voice calm and barely loud enough to be heard over the passing cars. ‘Danny, do you remember that when you were in the hospital you told me how you had seen Sarah visiting Jim Blunt’s house.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said indignantly. ‘I’m not an amnesiac, you know.’

  ‘No, of course not. All I want is for you to tell me what Sarah was wearing that night?’

  Danny didn’t answer at first. Instead, he busied himself with doing up the zip of his windcheater, and then thrust his hands into his pockets. His face and eyes remained cast down, as he searched for a detailed memory of that night. Eventually he looked up at Lawson. ‘She was wearing a skirt, black I think or some other dark colour. And a short jacket or coat. It might have been leather. And she wore boots. Red ones. I remember that clearly.’ Danny looked down again, apparently finished.

  ‘That’s really clear, Danny,’ Lawson enthused. ‘Was she wearing any jewellery that you can remember?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly, still looking down. ‘I wasn’t that close and it was dark.’

  ‘I understand.’ Again she spoke
gently, and with care, all too conscious of how suddenly her last interview of Danny had disintegrated. ‘I think you said last time you saw them kiss, just before Sarah left. Can you tell me a bit more about it. Was it, like, a kiss between girlfriend and boyfriend or maybe more of a hug like between friends?’

  Danny twisted his head, first to the left and then to the right, a man enduring the pain of something he’d much rather not remember. ‘Not a hug.’

  Lawson paused, not sure how much further to press. Holden, sensing this, intervened.

  ‘Danny,’ she said. ‘I just want to ask you one question. It may seem a bit odd, but I want to ask it anyway, and then we’ll leave you in peace. OK?’

  He finally raised his head to look at his questioners, and nodded slightly.

  ‘I know you’ve met Sarah’s sister, Anne. They are very alike, aren’t they? So what I want to know is whether you’re certain the person you saw that night was Sarah. Could it possibly have been Anne?’

  ‘You think I’m stupid,’ he said, his voice rising wildly. Lawson recognized the behaviour and knew that they had lost him now, just as she had previously lost him in the hospital. Holden lifted her hands, in apology or surrender, but Danny wasn’t looking. He had turned, and was already moving away from them down the Iffley Road, striding out like a competitor in a fifty-kilometre walk. Lawson made as if to follow him, but Holden grabbed her arm. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said firmly. ‘We’ve done enough.’