‘I appreciate this may have come as a bit of a surprise,’ Holden said gently, ‘but I do have to ask you about it. Do you know who the man is?’
‘Yes,’ he croaked. ‘He’s the plumber.’
‘I need a name,’ Holden pressed.
Tull cleared his throat. ‘Jack Smith. He put a new shower in for us only a few weeks ago, and redid our bathroom last year. Several of our friends round here use him. He’s very handy.’
‘Have you seen the photograph before?’
Tull looked at Holden as if she’d just asked him if he’d ever run naked down the High Street.
‘It must be a joke, a big joke. One of Maria’s friends must have taken it and sent it to her for a laugh. He does tend to charge a lot. I bet they wanted to cut him down to size.’
‘We think the photograph was taken with this mobile!’ Holden responded.
‘Rubbish!’ he exclaimed, his voice now shrill. ‘Anyone could have taken it.’
‘But the most likely explanation is that your wife took it,’ Holden insisted. However unpleasant it was to pressurize like this a man whose wife had just been murdered, she had no option. Unless Maria’s death turned out to be a mugging gone wrong, then this photo made her husband suspect number one. There was no room for sentiment.
‘She wouldn’t have,’ he protested, though Holden detected a buckling of confidence in his voice. ‘I mean, how could she?’
Holden removed the mobile from his eye-line and put it back into her bag. ‘I appreciate this is a difficult time for you, but you will understand that I have to follow this up.’
‘If this comes out. …’ Tull began, but his words dribbled to a halt.
‘I can assure you, Dr Tull, that I will be as discreet as I can. Only time will reveal if this is relevant to your wife’s death. For the meantime, if you could give me Jack Smith’s address and phone number, we’ll leave you in peace.’
He looked at her in astonishment. ‘Peace? Do you seriously think you’ll leave me in peace when you walk out the door? Are you absolutely deranged, Detective?’
It took Fox, four uniformed constables and a dog an hour and half to do a sweep of the southern side of the meadow, and of the bushes and shrubbery along the northern edge of the St Clement’s car park, an hour and a half in which they found precisely nothing. Although DC Lawson’s discovery of the handbag had earmarked the likely escape route of the killer, there was no sign of the weapon. Not that this surprised Fox. There were plenty of established waterways around here, he ruefully told himself, and if anyone had been intent on getting rid of the evidence, they would surely have used one of them, rather than just toss it into the nearby bushes. In addition, the rain of the previous night had continued for so long after the incident that any footprints made at the time had been greatly degraded, and indeed, early morning joggers had already squelched their way along the area, further reducing the chance of getting anything useable from the scene.
When the sky darkened, and more rain began to fall heavily from the low, grey clouds, Fox called off the hunt and returned to the Cowley station. There he found Wilson in a state of equal disgust. The CCTV had yielded nothing, because the CCTV in the car park had failed at approximately 7.00 p.m. the previous evening, and no one had been inclined to go out to see why. The only bright light in the gloom was a sheet of paper he had located in Maria Tull’s designer handbag, a list of all the people who had been due to attend her lecture, complete with contact phone numbers.
‘It was tucked away in this little zip compartment,’ Wilson said eagerly, demonstrating the zip as he did. ‘Lawson missed it.’
But Fox was more interested in the list than the intricacies of the handbag.
‘Maybe there is a God,’ he muttered, as he slumped down at his desk.
CHAPTER 3
After leaving the Tulls’ house, it was for DI Holden the work of a single call to Jack Smith’s mobile to track him down, and barely more than a single minute of conversation with him to establish that he would prefer to come down to the station rather than be questioned in the house of Mrs Anderson of Beechcroft Road. Jack had already realized Mrs Anderson was one of those women who liked nothing better than a good gossip, and the idea of being quizzed by the police anywhere near her was not one that appealed to him. How long would it take for her to ring his wife and casually mention that it had been such a surprise when detectives knocked on the door and insisted on questioning Jack while he was meant to be installing a new hot water tank? Hell, that was the last thing he needed. So, he made his excuses, telling her that he needed some extra piping in order to complete the job. With a bit of luck, the police wouldn’t want him for long, and he would be able to return to work with neither her nor his dear wife finding out anything about it.
About twenty minutes later Jack Smith was sitting in an interview room at the Cowley station. He declined DC Lawson’s offer of a coffee, insisting he just wanted to get the interview over and get back to his job, but Holden deliberately waited for ten minutes before making her way down. It wasn’t that she was sadistic – well, no more so than her job demanded – but it made sense to probe any weak spots, and if playing on Jack Smith’s anxiety to be out of the station meant she got better answers out of him, then that was what she would do.
When Holden, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Fox, did finally put in an appearance and sit down at the table opposite Jack Smith, she opened a file and begin to read through the first sheet of paper in it.
Smith gave a snort of impatience. ‘Look, why don’t you bloody well get on with it. I’ve got work to do, you know.’
‘And so do we, sir,’ Fox growled back, leaning his considerable bulk forward as he did so. He was pleased to be alongside his boss again. He hadn’t exactly minded leading the hunt for the knife in the rain, but he did resent the fact that Lawson had been the one to accompany Holden to the Tull’s house. Holden, he couldn’t help thinking, favoured Lawson, saw her maybe even as a protégé, and he wondered where that might leave him.
Jack Smith flinched instinctively before the sergeant’s aggression, and muttered something inaudible under his breath. But when Holden continued to read her file, he tried again, this time less aggressively. ‘Anyway, what is this all about?’
Holden looked up from her papers, and smiled thinly at him. ‘I’m sure you know, Mr Smith.’
‘Why should I?’
‘You do know that Mrs Maria Tull was murdered last night?’
‘’Course I do!’
‘Who told you?’ The quick-fire question came from DS Fox. It was a technique they often employed, changing the line of attack, first one then the other, throwing the interviewee off balance.
‘It was on the news,’ he replied uncertainly. ‘Radio Oxford.’
‘We didn’t release the name to the press until about half an hour ago,’ Holden said mildly.
‘So who the hell told you?’ Fox barked.
Jack Smith shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Sarah Russell. She’s a friend of Maria, and I rang her about some money she owed me, and she told me.’
‘I see,’ Holden said, nodding slowly, and frowning as if deep in thought. ‘In that case, we’ve only two questions to put to you. The first is, where were you last night between nine and ten o’clock?’
‘I went out to price up a job about eight-thirty. A Mr and Mrs Knight in Harpes Road. Then I went home. About ten, I guess.’
‘Can anyone confirm that you were at home?’
‘My wife works at the hospital as a nurse. She’s on nights this week, so no, there’s no one to confirm when I got home. The Knights will confirm I went to them, of course.’
‘We’ll need their details,’ Holden said, ‘but there is another question. We found a photograph on Maria Tull’s mobile phone. Her husband told us that the photo was of you. Perhaps you can explain it?’ And with that she removed a photograph from the bottom of her thin file and slid it across the table. ‘This is a copy.’
&nbs
p; Jack Smith had been pondering how to respond to this question when it was asked – as he had known it surely would be – but even so he found himself hesitating. Should he tell the truth? And how the hell was he going to square it with his wife if it came out?
‘It was just a bit of harmless fun,’ he said finally, trying hard to sound unconcerned.
‘Really?’ Holden said in a tone that signified disbelief. ‘What do you think, Sergeant,’ she continued, turning to Fox.
‘I doubt Mrs Smith would see it as harmless fun,’ Fox replied instantly. ‘But maybe she’s more broad-minded than my missus.’ Not that Fox had a missus. Not any more.
Smith reacted with alarm. ‘I don’t see what it’s got to do with my wife!’
Fox grinned broadly. ‘It doesn’t,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but if you don’t explain it to our satisfaction, then maybe we’ll have to ask her if she took it and then sent it to Maria as a laugh.’
‘She didn’t,’ he replied quickly. ‘Maria took it.’
‘You were lovers then?’ Holden had taken up the baton again, and leant forward as she asked the obvious and crucial question.
‘We had a fling. A one-off.’
‘And that was when she took the photo?’
‘Shit, aren’t you a smart cookie!’ he snapped back, spitting sarcasm in self-defence.
‘Careful!’ It was Fox who growled the warning, and like a guard dog bristling in defence of its mistress, he half rose from his chair. Holden gestured him down, but her eyes were fixed on Smith. She pointed at the photo. ‘And this one-off took place at her house?’ she continued, her eyes firmly fixed on his face.
‘No. It was a house I was working in. She came round to chase me up about a problem with her shower, and it just happened.’
‘A bit of a ladies’ man, are you! One look at you in your dirty overalls, and they can’t wait to tear them off?’
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘How many of your clients have you slept with?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
Holden leant back, turned to Fox and shrugged. ‘Maybe you were right, Sergeant. I think we’ll have to keep him for a few hours while we pursue other enquiries.’
‘Sure, boss.’
Smith’s panic was palpable. ‘What do you mean, keep me here? I’ve answered your questions, and I have to get back to work.’
Fox gave a brutal laugh. ‘You think a few half-arsed lies are enough? If you want to get out of here any time soon, you’d better start answering the inspector’s questions properly. And she asked you how many of your clients you’ve slept with? Mind you, personally I find it hard to imagine how any woman in her right mind would want to get jiggy with a tubby creep like you.’
Smith half-opened his mouth, but said nothing. He looked across at Holden, but if he was hoping she would call her sergeant to heel, the hard set of her face told him he was out of luck.
‘We want a list of names!’ she said firmly. ‘Then we might let you go.’
He swallowed, and licked his lips uncertainly. ‘Honestly,’ he said quietly, ‘she was the only one.’
‘Liar!’ Fox bawled.
‘I’m not,’ he yelped back. ‘She was the first, the only one. Christ, I wasn’t expecting it. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did.’
‘And then she took the photo?’
Smith paused before he spoke. The fight appeared to have gone out of him, and when he replied he did so in a resigned monotone. ‘Yes.’
‘What was she blackmailing you about?’
He looked up sharply. ‘I never said anything about blackmail.’
‘So why did she take the photo?’
He shrugged, and gave a sheepish grin. ‘Maybe to show her friends?’
Holden turned again to address Fox. ‘Well, I suppose if we asked around we could soon find out. Get a dozen copies printed off. Ask them to blow them up nice and big so that there can be no confusion about identity—’
‘Hey! Just a minute! What are you playing at?’ Smith squealed desperately. ‘Do you want to wreck my marriage?’
‘We aren’t playing at anything,’ Holden said flatly. She knew instinctively that Smith had cracked, but she had no intention of taking the pressure off. ‘We are investigating a murder. And given that the dead woman appears to have been blackmailing you, you are currently a prime suspect. So I will ask you for the second and final time: why did Maria Tull photograph you in the nude?’
Smith felt his throat tighten. ‘I wouldn’t call it blackmail exactly. I found a painting in the house.’ He paused, wondering quite how to describe what happened. ‘She offered to help me sell it. Well, she knows a lot more about that sort of thing than I do. We haggled a bit about the split, and then we had sex, and after that she took the photo to make sure I didn’t cut up rough about it later.’
Again Fox interrupted. ‘So it was her idea, the sex?’
Smith turned his head to face Fox. He said nothing, but he had the look of a cornered rat, Fox reckoned, only he didn’t look half as dangerous.
‘Tell me about the picture,’ Holden asked quietly.
‘Well, it looked old to me,’ Smith said quickly, relieved to be talking to the woman about something less embarrassing. ‘That’s all I can say. An oil painting, maybe two foot square. There were two women standing up, and a man lying on a bed. Maria said it needed a damn good clean.’
‘So how much was it worth?’
‘I’ve no idea. A few hundred, a few thousand, who knows? But she was interested, all right, so I knew it must be worth a fair bit.’
‘And you trusted her to give you a fair price?’
‘God, no! I wouldn’t have trusted her further than I could spit. But I reckoned anything was better than nothing.’
Holden nodded her head slowly up and down, and then leant forward, as if to pass on a secret to Smith. ‘It seems to me that you’ve got a pretty good motive for killing her.’
‘What are you talking about?’ His voice was strident with alarm. ‘I don’t even know where the bloody painting is now. And I told you I was pricing a job up last night. Ask Mr and Mrs Knight. They’ll confirm it.’
‘For your sake, I do hope so.’
‘Can I go now?’
Holden pursed her lips and half closed her eyes, as if pondering – all at the same time – the meaning of life, the likely winner of the 4.30 at Kempton, and what on earth to wear to the police charity ball. Eventually she closed the file in front of her, looked across at Smith, and nodded. ‘You can go as soon as you have given my sergeant Mr and Mrs Knight’s details. But make sure you stay around.’
Tracking down and interviewing everyone who had attended Maria Tull’s first, and final, lecture on the art of Venice was not entirely straightforward for Detective Constables Wilson and Lawson. Maria had done her best to make their task easy: she had left inside her handbag a printed list of sixteen persons. Alongside each name had been written, in a variety of different biros and pens, phone numbers and, in the majority of cases, email addresses. No doubt, Maria had requested her students to do this in case she needed to contact them. In addition, a single hand-written name – Dominic – had been added at the bottom of the list, but with no surname and no contact number or email address.
There is no easy way to tell someone their tutor has been murdered, and telling someone this baldly over the phone is not ideal, but in the circumstances it seemed to the two of them the only way to proceed. They reasoned that few, if any, of her students would have met her before that lecture, so her death might be a shock, but hardly an emotional trauma. So the pair of them began the process of investigation by making eight phone calls each. In point of fact, they managed to contact only thirteen at this stage, but such was the willingness to help – or maybe the novelty of being asked ‘to come down to the station to help us with our enquiries’ – that within three hours ten of them had come and made a statement.
One thing the statements made c
lear was that the Dominic who had been added to the list was someone known to Maria. This Dominic, it transpired, was some sort of antiques and fine art dealer. He stayed only for the first half of the evening, and for the coffee and socializing in the interval when he seemed keen to introduce himself around and hand out his business cards. John Abrahams, the third witness to arrive, had one of these business cards in his wallet, and it confirmed that the Dominic was a Dominic Russell, the proprietor of D.R. Antiquities.
‘He was a nice enough chap,’ Abrahams confirmed, ‘if a little overdressed for the occasion – navy blue pin-striped suit, yellow shirt and bow tie. Mrs Tull obviously knew him, though I’m not sure she was entirely pleased that he had turned up.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Wilson’s interest was roused.
Abrahams pondered the question. ‘Just an impression,’ he conceded. ‘I can’t say they argued or anything like that, but there didn’t seem to be any warmth between them. Maybe she felt he was queering her pitch, if you know what I mean.’
Despite the patronizing comment and tone, Wilson nodded politely, and then moved the conversation on to the end of the evening. Abrahams stated that he had left at the same time as Maria, after all the others had gone. ‘I don’t believe in leaving a woman on her own at night, so I waited while she locked up, and then I headed for the bus stop. She had a car, she said. Maybe I should have accompanied her to it, but it was a terrible night, wasn’t it, and I’d have got wetter.’
When Wilson and Lawson compared notes, it was Abraham’s statement which stood out as being useful. Only one other student, a middle-aged woman called Dorothy, commented on what she termed a ‘frosty atmosphere’ between Maria Tull and Dominic Russell.
‘Could you elaborate on that?’ Lawson had queried. ‘What did they say to each other?’
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