Blood in Grandpont

by Peter Tickler

  Wilson meanwhile was going methodically through the calls to and from Dominic Russell’s mobile. An emailed list from the mobile company revealed that he had received only one call in the critical period that morning, at 8.16 from what turned out to be a pay-as-you-go mobile. The call had lasted two minutes and twenty seconds. The next one had been a call from his office number which had gone straight to his answering service – that must have been Francesca’s call just after noon – and then another one from his home number about 1.20 p.m., presumably Sarah ringing to see if she could get hold of him after Francesca had rung her. That all tied up. As for the previous day, there had been only two calls to his mobile, one from his wife and one from his solicitor, James Turley. Wilson scanned further back through the list of calls, but nowhere could he see a call from that pay-as-you-go mobile. So that, surely, was the key one.

  Holden listened carefully to the reports of her two constables, but she recognized, as they had, that there was nothing they could get their teeth into. Someone, someone who didn’t want the call to be traced, had rung him, and very likely it was that call that had led to Dominic leaving D.R. Antiquities, but beyond that there was nothing. A big blank dead end. Holden sniffed. She thought maybe she was coming down with a cold. ‘You’d better go and give Fox a hand,’ she said with a wave of her hand. ‘His car has got to be there somewhere on the CCTV.’

  Holden was right, but nearly three hours passed before they finally located it. It had had to stop at the lights on the A40 at Cassington at 8.41 that morning.

  ‘Where was he going?’

  It was the obvious question, but there was no obvious answer.

  ‘Not the Channel, and not any of the obvious airports,’ Fox said. There were several airports that an Oxford resident might use if he or she wanted to go abroad – Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Birmingham, even Stansted – but none of them was in that direction.

  ‘Which suggests,’ Lawson suggested, ‘that he is more likely have been going to meet someone. Presumably whoever it was that called from the pay-as-you-go mobile.’

  Holden nodded. ‘I agree. The question is where did he go after Cassington. To Burford, to Cheltenham? Or maybe on to the M5 and then north or south from there?’

  ‘We could get more CCTV from the A40 heading west,’ Wilson volunteered. ‘We know the timeframe, so if he did go as far as Cheltenham, it should be easy enough to spot him.’

  Holden looked at her watch. ‘Maybe, but I guess we all need some beauty sleep. Let’s call it a day.’

  ‘Do you want us in tomorrow, Guv?’

  Holden stood up, and arched her shoulder back, trying to loosen her tightened muscles. If Dominic had just done a runner with a woman, Sunday working was hardly justified. But if it wasn’t that banal? If he was involved in the murders, or the elusive painting? She yawned. ‘Let’s sleep on it. I’ll let you know in the morning.’

  Glebe Barn stands about half a mile from the A40, up a narrow and easily overlooked lane which the eagle-eyed west-bound driver may spot shortly after passing through the Cassington crossroads. It is a lane known and used only by locals and keen map-readers. If you were to turn right off the A40 as you headed towards Witney, this single-tracked road would take you some 150 metres north before turning 90 degrees west, and then after barely 50 metres cutting back again on itself by some 120 degrees. By now, neatly cropped hedges will have given way to a dense deciduous woodland which presses on both sides of the road. The wood does not spread far from the road, but it provides a deep enough and thick enough cover to attract muntjac and roe deer. And it was in search of these that Jim Sturrock came that Sunday morning, and indeed of any other four-legged or winged quarry that he might come across. He came silently and stealthily, moving along the edge of the wood, every sense alert and on edge. For Jim Sturrock was an amateur photographer.

  That morning, however, there were no deer to be seen or disturbed. Wood pigeon gave away their presence by their cooing, and a couple of cock pheasants took off noisily some ten metres in front of him, but there was nothing that caused him to even consider raising his camera. He proceeded along the edge of the wood, following it as it bent round to the right, until it came to an old Cotswold stone building. He had noticed it when he had been studying his map the previous evening. He had assumed that it would have by now been converted into an overblown country retreat for a city trader or celebrity chef, but in fact it had somehow managed to escape the intrusion of development, and it stood there, sheltered and half hidden by the lowering trees, almost apologetic in its isolation. Jim Sturrock’s spirits lifted – it was, surely, ideal owl territory. A five-barred gate separated it from the field along whose edge he had been walking, but even at the age of nearly fifty he prided himself on his fitness, and he clambered over it with alacrity. It was then that he noticed the car, a Renault Scenic if he wasn’t mistaken, which was parked away to the left. He froze, uncertain what to do. He hadn’t bothered to track down the owner of the land to get permission to walk the area, because in his experience he was more likely to have been told to ‘bugger off’. However, as he waited there, his anxiety receded. There was no sign of the driver of the car, and the several rabbits that he could see browsing the grass suggested no one had been wandering around the area for a little while.

  In the centre of the barn wall that faced him were a pair of very substantial double doors. He advanced carefully towards them. A metal bar was firmly set in the horizontal position, holding the doors securely shut. Jim noticed this, and felt relief. The barn must be empty. The car’s passenger or passengers could hardly have locked themselves in.

  He lifted the bar with great care and pulled on the right-hand door. It opened with surprising ease, and he slipped inside. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, but when they had he saw the barn was largely empty. A single agricultural machine, a harrow, was stored there in the corner, and a few bales were ranged along the far wall. But the thing that caught his attention was the long ladder propped up against the loft floor above. He walked over to it, and started to climb, conscious that it might be a good vantage point if there were any owls around, and if not, at least a safe and undisturbed place for a sandwich and a cup of tea. In the event, however, Jim Sturrock did no tea drinking and no sandwich eating, for within seconds of reaching the top of the ladder, was hurrying down it and then across the barn floor, fighting with himself as he did so, for the bile was rising uncontrollably in his throat. With a gasp of effort he pushed hard at the door, hurled himself outside, and then vomited violently on to the ground.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dr Karen Pointer was in a foul mood. As if Susan’s non-appearance the night before hadn’t been bad enough, to be woken up at 8.30 a.m. by a phone call from Holden’s eager-beaver sidekick Lawson was the ruddy limit. She knew as soon as she heard Lawson’s bouncy voice that it wasn’t just her Saturday night that had gone up the spout. Her Sunday was about to do exactly the same. There was another body, Lawson explained briefly, confirming her worst fears. It was just off the A40 on the way to Witney. Could she just come and take a look?

  Could she just take a look? Well, it wasn’t as if she could say ‘no!’ now was it? Not that she had expressed this thought to Lawson, but as she made her way out of Oxford and along the A40, she chuntered away to herself. Could she just take a look? What was Detective Constable bleeding Lawson talking about? The words of a conversation she would have liked to have had with Lawson began to bounce around the inside of her head, and then to reverberate around the car like angry hornets. Talking out loud to herself when no one else was around was a habit she had picked up in childhood, and clung to ever since, a way of letting off steam when there was no other safe way. Could she just take a look! Oh yes, of course, Constable! As if it’d only take ten minutes, and then she’d be heading back to Oxford in time for a mid-morning cappuccino! Yeah, right! In your bloody dreams, Detective Constable Lawson! She was driving faster than she should have been, but
what the hell. If it was important enough to wreck her Sunday, then it was important enough for her to take liberties with the ridiculous speed limit. She put her foot down as her emotional temperature entered the danger zone, and flicked past a Morris Minor out for a Sunday morning crawl. What a shitty weekend this was turning out to be! Damn! Her right foot hit the brake. Fuck! The Cassington lights were, she suddenly realized, diminishing rapidly in her rear mirror, and the narrow lane which she should have been looking out for was about to flash past too. Her right foot hurriedly switched pedals, and she felt the brakes bite and the vehicle shudder, and for a moment it was touch and go. There was a squeal from her tyres, as they lurched through the 90-degree turn, but they gripped the road hard and tight. An oncoming white van flashed its lights, provoking an adrenalin-fuelled snarl from Pointer and a single-fingered salute. ‘Fuck you,’ she shouted, but the white van had already swung out of her line of vision, to be replaced by a pitted road surface and a fast-looming stone wall. But she had the car under control now. She twisted the steering wheel anticlockwise as she followed the tight left-hand corner, and then sharply clockwise as an even tighter right-hander presented itself. She pressed the accelerator down to the floor as she came out of the bend, and then almost instantly had to brake as she realized, with sudden disappointment, that she had arrived. Some thirty metres in front of her, a uniformed copper was standing on the left-hand side of the road, next to an open gateway, a cigarette in his mouth.

  Slowing down even more, she swung into it, acknowledging him with a barely visible nod, as if he too was at fault for everything that was wrong with her life. The short track on which she found herself was bordered to its left by thronging trees, and to its right by the towering side of a large stone building which Pointer, with all the insight of a townie out of her natural environment, categorized as a barn. Once past it, she swung right, bumping into the rough area which was now serving as a car park behind the barn. She was gratified to see four pairs of eyes turn expectantly towards her. But she made no acknowledgement, for – with the suddenness of a switch being flicked – she had entered work mode, and her brain had engaged with the process of a preliminary survey of the area. The people were not in themselves important, though she was glad to see that there was tape up, and that they were waiting this side of it. No doubt Susan had taken a look round, but she did hope the others hadn’t been clod-hopping all over the scene.

  Holden was moving forward towards her, half raising her hand in greeting – or maybe it was a sign of apology or peace. Pointer raised a hand in response, cut the engine, and climbed down.

  ‘At least it’s not raining,’ Holden said with a smile.

  Pointer moved to the back of her vehicle, opened the boot, and extracted some white overalls. Holden stood silently by, watching her as she kitted herself up, pulling on the overalls, zipping them up, adjusting the hood, and then turning her attention to her white wellingtons.

  ‘Sorry to spoil our weekend.’ Holden said this quietly, leaning closer to Pointer as she spoke, to ensure privacy. The comment made Pointer look up sharply, temporarily forgetting the job in hand. Our weekend, she’d said, not your weekend. Our weekend. One word – one letter even – made all the difference. She busied herself with her footwear again, pulling, and adjusting and tucking in the trousers, until she was satisfied, and she stood up.

  ‘Is there any chance of you catching this bloody killer?’ she asked, but there was a sparkle in her eyes. ‘All work and no play.…’ She didn’t finish the sentence. There was no need, and besides, Mr Misery, a.k.a. Sergeant Fox, was advancing ominously towards them. ‘Anyway,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘do you know who it is?’

  ‘Yes. Dominic Russell.’

  ‘Oh!’ Holden had, of course, talked to her about both of the Russells. Not that she knew Dominic, but she had once bought a rather lovely Caughley blue and white jug off him when he was based in Jericho. She thought she remembered him from then, a rather florid, extravagant man. Anyway, she’d soon know.

  ‘Mind your feet,’ Holden said quickly, as they approached the double doors, which had now been propped open wide, allowing the improving morning light in. Her right hand pointed out the pile of vomit in front of them. ‘That belongs to the man who found the body.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Pointer said, thinking of the DNA possibilities that might have been.

  ‘Well, the victim is a bit of a mess,’ Holden said in explanation. Pointer looked around, but couldn’t see a body, but Holden was continuing to explain. ‘So it must have been quite a shock for the poor guy, when all he was looking for was a barn owl to photograph. He went up the ladder, and found rather more than he had bargained for.’ Holden was gesturing towards a long ladder propped against an upper floor. This loft ran for perhaps one-third of the length of the barn. It was, Pointer could appreciate, a good vantage point for a man with a camera, but she wondered what had brought Dominic Russell out here and up the ladder. Or rather who?

  She walked slowly across the floor, scanning it for anything unusual or out of place, and delaying the moment she would have to put her hands on the ladder and start to pull herself up rung by rung, pretending that she felt no fear. Don’t look down, she said to herself, as she felt the metal of the aluminium ladder. It was cold to the touch, but her hands were clammy with sweat. Don’t look down. Don’t look down. She kept repeating the phrase under her breath, in the hope that like a mantra it would transform her to some other state of being for as long as it took her to get to the top.

  When she got there, she eased herself carefully off the ladder and on to the loft floor, and then stumbled forward away from the edge, three or four steps. She steadied herself, straightened up, and stood still for several seconds as she looked around. At least that is what she told herself she was doing – looking round, familiarizing herself with the scene, and assessing what would need to be done. But in reality, she was trying to regain equilibrium. She forced herself to breathe deeply until the intense feelings of vertigo had dissipated, and she tried to banish from her mind the dreadful knowledge that she’d have to go down the ladder when she had dealt with the body.

  But dead bodies were what she understood, and she turned to examine the outstretched corpse of Dominic Russell with a feeling that was almost elation. A dead man with, as she could immediately see, a gunshot wound in his head – that was the sort of thing she could lose herself in. And it was the man she had bought her jug off.

  So successfully did she lose herself in her work, that it was only some quarter of an hour later, when Holden called up to her slightly impatiently – ‘How are you getting on, Karen?’ – that she stood up and noticed, a couple of metres away, an oil painting lying face up on the floor. Its canvas was disfigured by four slashes, two diagonally from one corner to the other, and two on the other diagonal.

  ‘I need a couple more minutes,’ she shouted down, ‘and then I’ll need some help to get this body down.’ But her attention was now on the painting. She had already bagged a firearm, but where was the knife that had slashed the painting? Because that might provide some interesting forensics. She couldn’t initially see one, but there was loose straw scattered across the floor, and soon, sure enough, she spotted it. Her sense of excitement grew as she crouched down to examine it. It had a plain wooden handle with brass fitting, and a slim steel blade about fifteen centimetres in length. It looked bloody sharp and it looked too, from its proportions, to be a strong contender for the blade that had killed both Maria Tull and Jack Smith. She’d have to do some careful measuring and testing, of course, but if her suspicions proved correct, this could be the bloody jackpot!

  It was, Holden had decided in the car, becoming an all too familiar pattern, her turning up at the door of a stranger, or in this case not quite a stranger, and having to explain that someone very close to that person had been killed. She had met Sarah twice, and she hadn’t exactly warmed to her, but that didn’t make it any easier to be the bearer of bad ne
ws. Assuming, of course, that it was bad news to Sarah, or indeed news at all. For Sarah had to be a suspect too, surely, as the far from loving wife of this latest corpse. But one mustn’t judge. That was what her mother would say, but didn’t everyone make judgements all the time? And the bottom line was that, from what little she had seen and what she had heard, the marriage of Sarah and Dominic Russell hadn’t exactly been made in heaven. Maybe it had, like most, started full of optimism and hope, but had long since degenerated into a thousand little resentments and bitter compromises. Not that you needed to marry, she reminded herself, to go through that.

  The door opened almost immediately in response to Holden’s ringing of the bell. Sarah Russell must have seen them arrive.

  ‘May we come in?’ Holden asked quickly, skipping the pleasantries. This wasn’t something to be discussed on the doorstep.

  Sarah Russell said nothing, retreating into her house and allowing Holden and Fox to follow her. Wilson and Lawson, who had followed them along the A40 and into this residential side street not far north of the Summertown shops, had been detailed to go and knock on some neighbours’ doors. Sarah led her guests through to the living room and gestured towards the armchairs and sofa, offering them a choice of comfort. She, however, walked over to the fireplace and stood in front of it, legs astride, her left hand on her hip, while with her right one she rubbed intently on the side of her neck.

  ‘Have you found him?’ she said. Her tone was matter of fact, almost disinterested, as if she was asking visitors if they had a good trip and hoping they wouldn’t go into any detail in their reply.