Blood in Grandpont

by Peter Tickler

  Drabble laughed, a single high-pitched explosion that ricocheted around the room with such force that Tull almost ducked to avoid it. ‘Next thing is you’ll be telling me that she was your favourite patient!’ And Drabble laughed again.

  ‘I don’t have favourites.’ Alan Tull prided himself on his professionalism, and even in the midst of stress this controlled his reaction. ‘Of course, I care a lot about my long-standing patients. I get fond of them. That’s only natural.’

  ‘You get fond of them!’ The tone of Drabble’s statement made Tull look at him sharply. He might be a bit bumbling, but Tull was no fool, and instinctively he realized that their conversation was leading into deeper, more dangerous waters.

  ‘Would you rather I hated them?’ he retorted, but he was floundering. He was paddling in the sea, the water was up to his knees, the sand was sucking at his feet and the tide was coming in.

  ‘Fondness is a dangerous thing,’ Drabble was saying. ‘Especially when the object of your fondness is a vulnerable, trusting woman, and you are unable to keep your feelings under control, Doctor. I was looking on the web only the other day. It’s amazing how many GPs get struck off for sexually abusing their patients.’

  Tull gulped, and his mouth gaped, but at first no sound came out, as the sickening reality of where this was all leading dawned on him. His right hand pulled distractedly at his thinning hair, until finally some words came. ‘What are you accusing me of,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Because I can assure you I have never—’

  ‘Who are they going to believe, Doctor? You, or the testimony of a dying or – by the time it comes to a head – dead woman? And does it matter, anyway, when rumour and gossip is so much more effective than the laboured progress of justice? If you don’t resign, and soon, your reputation will be ruined. The choice is yours, Doctor!’

  ‘Marjorie would never say I abused her,’ Tull insisted, his face now the colour of the palest parchment. ‘Never!’

  ‘First you abused her medically, and then you abused her sexually. That’s what her testimony will confirm.’

  ‘But she can’t say that. It’s not true,’ he said desperately.

  ‘Oh, but she will,’ Drabble said harshly, before he turned towards the door and wrenched it open. ‘I’ll give you a couple of days to think it over, Doctor,’ he snarled. ‘Then I’ll take action.’

  At the same time as Graham Drabble was uttering his final threat, Sarah Russell was sitting – another world and half a continent away – in the café of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. One of the perks she had established for herself as administrator of Cornforth was to be one of the staff who, each October, supervised a select group of students on a visit to Venice. Sometimes she wondered about the educational benefits of these trips, but they were valued by the parents and even more so by their offspring. No doubt both parties were glad of some time off from the other. Right now, she herself was off duty, while one of the museum staff took the students round some of the key paintings and sculptures in the collection. Opposite her sat Maria Tull, née Scarpa, whose fluency in Italian, family connections in Venice, and knowledge of art were three compelling reasons why she – despite not being a member of the college staff – was the other regular adult presence on these Venetian trips.

  They had been sitting there, each with a cappuccino, in an uncompanionable silence for some ten minutes. Sarah was studying the menu, although they had already agreed to eat at a café they had identified as they walked to the museum from the Academia Vaporetto stop. Maria was leafing through a copy of Vogue magazine, and was enjoying reading the Italian language again as much as she was scouting out the upcoming styles. When she reached the end, she looked up and pushed it across the table.

  ‘You ought to take a look,’ she said.

  Sarah abandoned her feigned interest in the menu and looked across at her companion.

  ‘Ought I?’ There was sharpness in her voice. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, look at you!’ Maria said, waving her arm expansively. ‘You could still be an attractive woman if you tried. Of course, ideally you ought to lose some weight, but even so.’ She paused, allowing the jibe to sink in. ‘Have you not looked at the women of Venice, and the way they dress? They have style, they think a lot about their appearance, and the men appreciate it.’

  ‘I’ll dress the way I want,’ Sarah said firmly, conscious that they were in a public place, and conscious too that she could never compete with Maria in the style or figure stakes.

  ‘You need to try a bit harder, dear,’ she said leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘Take it from me.’

  ‘When I want your advice,’ Sarah hissed, ‘I’ll ask for it.’

  Maria looked back, her smile and gaze unwavering. ‘Did Dominic ring you this morning?’

  Sarah stiffened, and leant back, as if to put more space between the two of them. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because, my dear, he rang me. He wanted to know if I’d had any luck with finding a new source for him. He’s probably told you he’s fallen out with Carlo?’

  Sarah winced. Dominic never told her anything about his business. So of course he hadn’t told her about Carlo. He had decided early on in their marriage that she wasn’t the asset he needed in the world of antiques, and so he had looked around for someone else to assist him. First it had been James, until he’d done a runner with his brother’s wife, leaving his own wife with three children under five, and then it had been Maria. The fashionable, antique loving, half-Italian bitch who sat opposite her now and dared to lecture her on how she should bloody well dress to keep that bastard of a husband interested. She knew only too well how to keep him interested, and it didn’t involve the latest Italian fashions.

  ‘Just remember,’ Sarah said icily, fighting back the fury inside, ‘Cornforth employs you to look after the students, not to go antique hunting round Venice.’

  Maria smiled, conscious that she had got under Sarah’s skin, but conscious too that she needed her cooperation. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? But I would like some time off tonight or tomorrow. No doubt you do too?’ The smile got even broader. ‘Why don’t you choose? And I’ll fit in round you.’

  Sarah nodded. ‘I’ll think about it.’ They were the words of surrender, reluctantly given.

  Maria stood up, her mission accomplished. ‘Perfetto, mia cara!’ she gushed loudly. ‘I’ll go and find our students. You enjoy the magazine!’

  Sarah watched her move across the floor. She moved smoothly. Despite her high heels, she seemed always to move smoothly, even up and down and across the many bridges and steps of Venice. Not for the first time, Sarah wondered about Maria and her own husband. Not that they were conducting an affair: she was pretty sure of that. If anyone was at risk from Dominic in that department, it was most likely Minette, that pretty little nineteen-year-old back in Oxford. But Maria and Dominic were up to something. She was damned sure of that.

  Lucy Tull arrived home just before 5.30 p.m. Unlike her father, she locked and left her bike in the front garden before entering the house. Her mother was in Venice, and Joseph was rarely back at this hour, so when she heard noises from the study, she divined quite correctly that her father must be home.

  ‘Hello Daddy,’ she called cheerily, pushing the door open.

  ‘Hello, dear.’ The slurred reply and the half-empty bottle of whisky on the desk told its own story.

  ‘Daddy!’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  The alarm in her voice failed to register with him. He smiled goofily at her and raised his glass. ‘Just having a snifter,’ he burbled.

  Lucy was used to dealing with challenging behaviour at the dental surgery. Patients who panicked just as they were about to be injected, and patients who turned up late and then got stroppy because they were told to come back another day. In such circumstances, she believed in decisive action. She moved swiftly forward, detaching the glass from her father with one hand, and picking up the bottle with the other.
‘That’s quite enough,’ she said, as if she was his mother and he was a naughty boy.

  He looked at her, squinting slightly, his head at an angle.

  ‘So, are you going to tell me why you’re drinking at this time of day?’ she asked firmly.

  He whimpered plaintively. ‘All right.’ Then, slowly and not very steadily, he proceeded to tell her all about Graham Drabble’s visit and the background to it. ‘I’m ruined,’ he said at the end, and began to sob. ‘What am I going to do?’

  Lucy, who had remained standing throughout, looked down at him in disgust. She wanted a father who would stand up and fight for himself, not a quitter. She loved him dearly, but right now that feeling was buried deep beneath others.

  ‘Have you told Maria?’ she asked, for she refused to refer to her stepmother in any other terms.

  ‘She’s in Venice,’ he mumbled, as if mobile phones had never been invented.

  ‘I know she’s in Venice,’ she snapped irritably. ‘For God’s sake,’ she continued after a pause, ‘we can’t just do nothing!’

  ‘But what can we do?’

  ‘I’ll have to see Marjorie, and speak to her myself.’

  ‘Yes,’ he responded vacantly, glad that someone else was taking the responsibility.

  ‘I’ll see if I can reason with her. Get her to see how wrong Graham’s course of action is.’

  ‘Perhaps I should do it,’ her father said unconvincingly.

  ‘They won’t let you anywhere near her,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll do it, Daddy, but best not to tell Maria if she rings, not yet.’

  He looked at her, gratitude and relief apparent in his moist eyes. ‘Lucy dear, you’re my angel, you really are.’

  At 8.20 a.m. the following Saturday, a tall woman, wearing a black trouser suit and red silk blouse, boarded the Oxford Tube at Gloucester Green station in the centre of Oxford and walked to the back of the bus – for despite its name, a bus was what it was. She sat down at the back, on the driver’s side just in front of the toilet. She took the window seat for herself, but placed her handbag and mackintosh on the one next to her. She was, to all intents and purposes, a woman determined to ensure her own privacy.

  At Queen Street, in St Clement’s, and at three different stops in Headington, the bus steadily collected more passengers, the majority paying their money and then making their way past her and up the stairs. The last pick-up in Oxford was on the very outskirts, at the Thornhill park and ride stop. Four people got on there, the first three being an elderly couple and a girl of maybe eight or nine. Behind this grandparental trio, there trailed a middle-aged woman. Her round face was framed by straight, fake-blonde hair that almost brushed her shoulders, and she wore a black three-quarter-length mackintosh and a blank expression that flickered only once as she made her way laboriously down the aisle. She needed, Geraldine Payne thought unkindly, to lose some weight.

  ‘Hello,’ Geraldine said suddenly, her voice a study of surprise. ‘Fancy seeing you here!’

  ‘Geraldine,’ came the equally amazed reply. ‘Are you going to London?’

  It was, of course, a fatuous question. Where else would she being going on the Oxford Tube? But Geraldine played along. ‘I thought I’d have a day’s shopping.’

  ‘Me too!’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down here,’ Geraldine said, moving her bag. It was, she thought, ridiculously dramatic, this public display of surprise, especially when she was sure there was no one on the bus who knew her, but her fellow traveller had insisted, and she had agreed to play along.

  ‘Looking for something in particular?’ The woman had fought her way out of her mackintosh, and had slumped heavily down into the seat.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I took two bags to Oxfam yesterday, so I need to fill the gaps in the wardrobe. You can’t go wrong in John Lewis.’

  ‘No, I guess you can’t.’ Reluctantly, Geraldine forced herself to continue the game. ‘I’ve got a civil partnership coming up next month, so I need something for that.’

  And so they chatted, two acquaintances, casually met, who were determined to make the most of their unexpected encounter. Only when the coach had passed Lewknor and forced its way up the steep cutting that took them out of Oxfordshire, did their voices grow silent, as each of them drifted off into sleep, oblivious of the red kites that wheeled above, searching for prey along the borders of the motorway.

  Geraldine Payne’s sleep was the deeper, and it might easily have lasted until they reached their destination had she not been woken by a sharp jab in the ribs.

  ‘Are we there?’ she said, a moment before her eyes told her that they clearly weren’t.

  ‘I need to talk.’

  ‘God, you could have waited. I was having such a nice sleep.’

  ‘I need to talk,’ her companion reiterated, but her voice had dropped down to a confidential, but intense whisper. ‘I’ve done something stupid.’ She paused, and looked up, checking that there was no one who could possibly overhear her. ‘Something really stupid.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ There was still irritation obvious in Geraldine’s voice, but she too had dropped several decibels.

  ‘I’m being blackmailed.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Maria Tull died shortly before 10.00 p.m. on the Monday following her return from Venice. No one – with one possible exception – knew the precise time, though later the general consensus of her shocked students was that she had left the St Aidan’s Hall in St Clement’s round about 9.45 p.m., give or take five minutes. She had been giving the first of six planned lectures on the history of Venetian art, and it had gone well. Those who knew her modus operandi would have expected her to join her students in a local pub or bar at the end of the evening. Socializing was part of her make-up, and she was shrewd enough to know that if she established a personal bond on that first night, then her students were much more likely to stay the course. In the event, the weather put paid to any such plans on that particular Monday night. Round about 9.15 p.m., it had begun to rain. Not the soft refreshing rain celebrated in the old hymn, but a driving, torrential downpour of such primeval fury that it caused the flood-conscious residents of the lower-lying parts of Oxford to twitch curtains, peer nervously out of windows, and wonder if sandbags would need to be drafted into action again.

  These were the weather conditions that greeted Maria’s students as they prepared to leave, and it was therefore inevitable that they left at a run, in ones and twos, heading for the bus stop, the car or the pub. Maria was the last to leave. John Abrahams, a tall, old-fashioned man in his late sixties, later confirmed this to the police. He had waited for her to lock up, and then he had walked hurriedly to the bus stop twenty metres to the east, while she scurried off in the other direction, towards town. After some seventy metres, she very likely turned right, down a passageway that led into the St Clement’s car park. That, at least, would have been her most direct route to her car, which was parked in the corner at the back of the car park. And it was by the car, as she was scrabbling around in her handbag trying to locate her keys, that she felt a sudden and unutterable pain in her side, before collapsing on to the tarmac. The knife which had caused this searing agony struck again, this time into the neck area, but she felt nothing, for she was already dead – or as good as.

  Despite the fact that this untoward event occurred in a public and well-used car park, it was not until shortly after 10.30 that evening that a middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Martin Barnes, who had been enjoying a leisurely anniversary supper at the nearby Thai restaurant, returned to their car and almost literally stumbled over her body.

  It took an ambulance approximately six minutes to arrive. Martin Barnes had reported the prone woman as a possible heart attack victim, for the darkness in that area of the car park had hidden the telltale blood, and the intensity of the rain had discouraged him from any close inspection. Mr Barnes knew he needed to ring 999, and that was enough. But when the paramedics arrived
they quickly realized (a) that the woman was irredeemably dead, and (b) that she had been stabbed. Within another six minutes, three other vehicles had arrived, out of which emerged two uniformed policemen in the first case, then two plain clothes detectives (both female), and finally another non-uniformed woman who was obviously well known to all four members of the police.

  ‘Sorry to spoil your evening, Karen,’ DI Susan Holden shouted, as the latest arrival clambered down from her four-by-four.

  Dr Karen Pointer flashed a grim smile through the darkness. ‘What’s there to spoil on a Monday night?’ she called back, as she walked to the back of her car, opened the boot and pulled out a squat, black case.

  Both the wind and the rain had eased somewhat, but water was still beating down furiously from the black sky with a power that gave the unfortunate group of figures no sense of relief. Umbrellas had been found, however, so as Dr Pointer knelt down to examine the body, she did at least receive some protection from the remorseless elements.

  ‘I can confirm that the subject is dead,’ she said. ‘There’s a stab wound in the neck.’ Her eyes made their way methodically down the body, until they came to rest on a darker patch. ‘Can I have more light?’ she snapped, and began to unbutton the sodden fawn mackintosh in which Maria Tull had died. She pulled it open. A dark red patch on the white blouse told its own unequivocal story. ‘There’s a stab wound to the heart as well,’ she continued. ‘At least death would have been quick, maybe instantaneous.’ She peered closer, unbuttoning the blouse to get a proper look at the wound. ‘You should be looking for a narrow-bladed knife,’ she concluded, before rebuttoning the blouse and standing up. ‘If it’s OK by you, Detective Inspector, I’d rather continue my investigations in my lab, in the morning.’