Blood in Grandpont

by Peter Tickler

  ‘We have.’

  ‘And?’

  It was a funny way to ask if your husband was dead, Fox reckoned. ‘And?’ Mind you, she was a pretty funny woman, was Mrs Russell. And a tough one.

  ‘I’m afraid your husband is dead,’ Holden said. It was a blunt statement, though she hoped it didn’t sound too bluntly put. But how else do you say the unspeakable?

  Sarah let out a gasp, and then turned away towards the fireplace, with the consequence that neither Holden nor Fox could see her face, or the emotion on it – whether fake or real.

  ‘How?’ she said, through what appeared to be a muffled sob.

  ‘We found him in an old barn on the way to Witney.’

  Sarah Russell turned back, and the only emotion visible was anger. ‘Christ, I said how, not where. For fuck’s sake, tell me straight. Was he stabbed like the others?!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Holden said involuntarily. Apologizing wasn’t exactly second nature to her, but the ferocity of Sarah Russell’s response had thrown her right off balance. ‘He was shot,’ she continued hastily, ‘in the head at close range. Until the pathologist has had a chance to look more closely, we can’t be sure if it was suicide or … or murder.’

  ‘Do you want me to identify him?’

  ‘At some stage, but there’s no doubt, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The stupid bastard,’ she said. ‘The stupid, stupid bastard!’ And then, quite unexpectedly, her legs folded under her and she collapsed on to the floor with a whimpering cry.

  The rest of Sunday was a write-off as far as Holden was concerned. As well as falling dramatically to the floor, Sarah Russell managed to crack her forehead on the edge of the marble hearth. Her blood had flowed red and messily on to the white rug – why the hell do people have white rugs, Holden asked herself irritably – and Holden and Fox had found themselves driving her up to the John Radcliffe Hospital at speed. Their rank at least ensured that they jumped the queue, but a diagnosis of concussion and shock for Sarah ensured there could be no further questioning that day.

  While they were still waiting at the hospital, Holden had received a call on her mobile from Lawson, ringing in to report the results of Wilson’s and her house to house. ‘There’s one interesting piece of information that you might want to follow up, Guv,’ she had said, in a tone of voice that suggested that she was feeling rather pleased with herself. ‘A Mrs Leighton, from just across the road, insists that Sarah left home yesterday morning shortly after Dominic. She saw her car leave round about 7.45 a.m. So no lying in that Saturday morning for Sarah. Despite what she implied when we talked to her yesterday.’

  Lawson, Holden was fast coming to realize, had a very impressive head for detail. ‘OK, Lawson, I think that’s as much as we need do for now. We’ll be taking Mrs Russell home shortly, but can you just call in on Dr Bennett on your way home? Wilson knows where she lives. If she’s not there, leave a note. We need to get her to look at the damaged painting tomorrow. In the morning, if possible. Offer to pick her up in a car. After that, you can have the rest of today off.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, Guv,’ came the reply. There was, Holden reckoned, an unusual note of sarcasm in Lawson’s voice, but that was hardly a surprise. It was already mid afternoon, and it was Sunday.

  ‘My pleasure, Lawson,’ she replied, but only when she heard the line go dead.

  ‘So, was it suicide or murder?’

  It was Sunday evening, and Mrs Jane Holden asked the question just after swallowing the last spoonful of fruit salad in her bowl. Both her daughter and Karen Pointer had already finished, and had gone into what Mr Holden would have called conversational reserve, had he been alive and sitting at the table with them.

  Susan had been staring at her three-quarters empty wine glass since she had finished eating. She had insisted she didn’t want to talk shop during the meal, but her mother had no intention of allowing that embargo to extend beyond the final mouthful of food. Susan suddenly raised the glass to her lips and drained the rest of its contents, before placing it down on the table with a clump. She leant forward, grasped the bottle of red wine, and refilled her glass. ‘Anyone else?’ she asked waving the bottle in the air.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ her mother said pointedly.

  ‘Just a little,’ Karen said, stretching across and taking the bottle gently from her. She poured herself about a third of a glass, and then placed the bottle to her right, out of her friend’s reach.

  ‘Well?’ Mrs Holden said firmly, looking at Karen. ‘Which is it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Karen slowly, ‘I’m not sure that’s for me to say.’ She turned to her left. ‘Susan?’

  ‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Holden, as she wiped her mouth on her napkin, ‘is not in a chatty mood. As you will discover, Karen, it is one of her enduring characteristics, learnt, I fear, from her father.’

  ‘I don’t mind silence,’ Karen responded, and immediately realized she was defending Susan.

  ‘Silence is one thing,’ came the reply, ‘but meal times should be social occasions.’

  Susan Holden looked up from her glass, and smiled aggressively at her mother. ‘I was thinking, Mother, not just being silent.’

  ‘That’s what your father used to say.’

  ‘I know.’ And she smiled again.

  ‘And he used to drink too much!’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mother, I’m allowed to drink. I’m off duty, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ And to prove her point, she took a swig from her glass. ‘Now, Karen, for God’s sake just tell her all about it, while I carry on thinking.’

  Karen Pointer took the tiniest sip from her glass, and then began to speak, slowly and methodically. She hoped that by doing so she might somehow cause the hostility between mother and daughter to dissipate. It was the first time she had experienced it, and she hated it. Because she loved Susan, and because she had already become fond of her mother too. ‘Dominic Russell was shot at very close range. The gun must have been virtually touching his skin. You can tell by the powder burns on the skin, and the nature of the entrance wound in the head. Death would have been instantaneous.’

  ‘So he could have shot himself?’ Mrs Holden did not believe in keeping questions for the end.

  ‘Yes. He could have. But there’s no certainty.’

  ‘What about fingerprints on the gun, or DNA or whatever?’

  ‘If we could find traces of someone else, then that would be significant, because if someone else was there, then murder becomes the favourite. But so far the only traces we’ve got are from Dominic, which means that we can’t tell conclusively whether it’s murder or suicide.’

  ‘Tell her about the painting,’ Susan said loudly, before taking another swig from her glass. ‘Tell her about the damn painting.’

  ‘There was a painting near the body,’ Karen said quickly. ‘We don’t know much about it yet. It looks quite old, painted in oils, and it had been badly slashed with a knife, diagonally both ways.’

  ‘Why on earth would someone do that?’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t bloody like it!’ Susan’s loud interruption caused both her companions to look at her, and then at each other as if to gauge their next move. Susan was oblivious of the atmosphere she was creating, and she drained the last of her glass again, and again clumped it noisily down on the table.

  ‘Was the painting valuable?’ Mrs Holden asked, but not of her daughter.

  ‘We don’t know, yet,’ Karen replied quickly. She hadn’t seen Susan like this before, and she wasn’t sure how to handle the situation, but she couldn’t let it drift. She stood up, and turned towards Susan. ‘We’ve both had a long day. Time to be going, I think.’

  Susan looked up at her, and her eyes blinked. For a moment, Karen feared she was going to receive another blast of aggression, but the face that looked at her did so with a blank expression and a watery smile. She raised herself slowly to her feet, a naughty child suddenly realizing she has gone too far, and nodded towards her mother. ‘Thank
you for supper,’ she said, and began to make her way uncertainly towards the door. She tripped, and half fell, but managed to right herself. Karen quickly moved forward, grabbing her arm. ‘Steady!’ she said.

  ‘Christ, I feel sick,’ Susan replied, just before she was.

  When Holden walked into her office the next morning just after eight o’clock, her nausea of the previous night was a thing of unpleasant memory only. Sometimes being sick is the best option. Throw it up and get it out of your system. Though she doubted her mother would have seen it like that. She ought to ring and apologize. She looked at her watch. Maybe later.

  At half past eight, the rest of her team rolled in, gathering in her room with their first coffees of the day. Dr Bennett, she was told, had been hosting a family get-together on the previous day.

  ‘It was her birthday,’ Lawson chirped eagerly. ‘Lovely lady, isn’t she. She asked us in and showed us the cake.’

  ‘We arranged to pick her up at eleven,’ said Wilson, intervening. Sometimes he reckoned Lawson got a bit sidetracked by trivialities.

  ‘It’s a lovely house too,’ Lawson continued enthusiastically. ‘Even if it’s a bit Bohemian.’

  Holden nodded. She felt frustrated that Dr Bennett wasn’t immediately on tap. It was vital to know more about this painting, and in particular how valuable it was. And she also needed Karen to shed some more light on Dominic Russell’s death, and sooner rather than later. Not that she could fault Karen. She had left for work shortly before seven, waking her up just before she left with a hot cup of tea, a kiss on the forehead, and not a single word of reproach. God, she was lucky!

  ‘Eleven is fine,’ she acknowledged, shifting back to the present moment. ‘We’ve plenty to do.’ Which was true. For a start, she needed a proper chat with Sarah Russell. No, cancel that. Not a chat. What she needed, and was going to do, was her damnedest to get some straight answers to some straight questions, such as where had Sarah Russell been going to at 7.45 that Saturday morning when her typical Saturday started with a lie-in. In fact, she needed, they all needed, to take a close look at Sarah Russell. She wouldn’t be the first or last – woman to kill her husband, and if the painting was very valuable, and he had been planning on selling it behind her back, well, it wasn’t hard to imagine how – if she’d found out – that might have been enough to tip her over the edge. All this assumed, of course, that Dominic Russell hadn’t blown his own brains out. Which brought her back to Karen.

  Holden managed to resist the temptation to pick up the phone and start punching in the numbers until 9.45 a.m. She had originally decided she would wait for Karen to ring her, but she had spoken on the phone to Sarah Russell just after nine o’clock, and they had agreed that Fox and she would call round about ten thirty. It was, Susan had decided, a good time to arrive, as if they were old friends dropping in socially, at what her mother would have called coffee and chin-wag time.

  ‘Sorry to chase up like this,’ she said when Karen answered the phone. ‘It’s just that—’

  ‘It’s just that you’ve got three unexplained deaths on your hands and you need some help. No need to apologize, Susan. To be honest, I expected a phone call some time ago.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t pretend that things have moved along very far. As we discussed, the injury is consistent with him having shot himself, but if someone had been able to get close to him, that person could have put a gun up close to his head and … bang!’

  ‘How about the angle of entry? Doesn’t that help. In terms of probability, which way does it point?’ She was aware even as she spoken that a tone of desperation had entered into her voice. She heard a sound in her ear that might have been a sigh.

  ‘I can’t say for definite one way or another. And I can’t give you odds, Susan. I’m not a bookie at the greyhounds. The way things are, unless or until we come up with something more at our end, you need to keep an open mind.’

  ‘What about the time of death?’

  ‘Ah, I thought that might be your next question. Again, I’m not able to be a huge help. Given that he wasn’t found until Sunday morning and rigor mortis was fully established, the best we can do is make a judgement from his stomach contents. But assuming that he had breakfast no later than seven o’clock that morning, all I can say is that there is no sign of any more recent meal. Breakfast had been pretty much fully digested by the time of death, so I guess that leaves the time slot pretty wide. Let’s say after nine o’clock, and before noon. Probably.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, speaking without even a hint of irony.

  ‘Thanks? I’m not sure I’ve been much help.’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ she agreed firmly. ‘But I wanted to say thanks anyway, Doctor.’

  ‘I appreciate it, Inspector.’

  ‘Sorry about yesterday.’

  For the second day running, DI Holden and DS Fox were seated in Sarah Russell’s living room. This time, their host and interviewee chose, to Holden’s relief, to sit opposite them rather than stand in front of the fireplace. The only obvious reminder of her fall was a plaster on the side of her forehead, and the livid swelling underneath it.

  ‘I hope you’re feeling up to this?’ Holden replied. It was a politeness only. She wasn’t about to get up and leave if Sarah said she wasn’t.

  ‘I’ve felt better.’ Of course she’d felt better.

  ‘I hope it won’t take long.’

  ‘In that case, why don’t you get on with it?’ The fall had clearly not knocked the aggressive streak out of her. ‘You could start by telling me if it was suicide or murder.’

  ‘I’m afraid we still aren’t sure about that.’

  ‘Great!’ The fall hadn’t damaged her capacity to do sarcasm either. Holden wondered if this was delayed shock, or a ruse to divert them, or just normal service resumed. She glanced at Fox, a pre-arranged signal. He was sitting with a notebook open on his knees.

  ‘When we spoke to you on Saturday,’ he said carefully, ‘you said your husband left home that morning at 7.30. Is that correct?’

  ‘As near as damn it.’

  ‘And that was the last time you saw him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you went back to bed till when?’

  Suspicion raised its head in Sarah Russell’s head. He knew something. This was not a detective going through the motions, ticking off the questions and counting the seconds until he could be out the door and off to the next interview.

  ‘Who says I went back to bed?’

  Fox looked down at his notes. ‘What you said was: “Saturday is my chance of a lie-in”. So I was assuming that meant that you went back to bed.’

  ‘Is that what policemen do – make assumptions?’

  Fox didn’t rise. He wasn’t going to answer her question because he knew from experience that when interviewees got aggressive, there is always a reason. Sometimes it was fear, but this woman showed no sign of that. So he smiled back at her, and deliberately paused. He never got to respond, however, because Holden cut in. She was not prepared to play softball.

  ‘You clearly led us to believe that you had a lie-in on Saturday.’ She leant forward as she spoke, and she stabbed her forefinger abruptly towards Sarah. ‘That’s a fact, not an assumption. And another fact is that one of your neighbours saw you driving off from here at approximately 7.45 a.m. So perhaps you would be kind enough to explain the discrepancy.’

  ‘I went to the supermarket. I needed some things.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Sainsbury’s. In Kidlington.’

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘What did I get?’ There was a note of surprise in her voice. ‘What the hell has that got to do with my husband’s death?’

  ‘Do you have the receipt?’

  ‘Do you keep your receipts, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Did you pay with cash or by card?’

  �
�What?’

  ‘We’re trying to establish your alibi, Mrs Russell. You’re an intelligent woman, so I expect you’ve worked that out. Is there any person or any thing that can confirm that you were in Sainsbury’s on Saturday, and the time you were there?’

  ‘No!’ Mrs Sarah Russell was indeed an intelligent woman, and she realized it was time to come clean, at least partially. ‘But I do have an alibi for after that. I went to see Alan Tull.’

  ‘I see,’ Holden replied, though of course she didn’t see. She didn’t see at all. ‘Can I ask why you visited him?’

  ‘We’re part of an amateur dramatics society. Alan is due to direct An Inspector Calls and I wanted to know if he was still up for it. In the circumstances, I thought he might want to pull out, and as the chair of the society I needed to check it out.’

  ‘So how long were you with him?’

  ‘I must have got there between half-nine and quarter to ten. He made us some coffee, and we sat and chatted until maybe eleven thirty, and then I went home.’

  ‘And he’ll confirm that?’

  ‘Yes. Why shouldn’t he?’

  Holden nodded. It would be easy to check out, but if they were in some sort of relationship, they’d protect each other, wouldn’t they? And if they were in some sort of relationship, what did that do to the investigation, not to mention their motives.

  ‘Can you give me his mobile number then?’

  Sarah looked at her inquisitor warily. ‘If you want. But you must know where he lives.’

  ‘It’ll save time,’ Holden said firmly. ‘I could ring the police station, because we’ll have it in the files, but if you give it to me, Fox can give him a quick ring, and if he doesn’t answer we can try the surgery, and that way Dr Tull can confirm your alibi – for that period only of course – while we are still here.’ And before you can tip him off, she might have added.

  Sarah Russell shrugged, as if unconcerned. ‘Be my guest, Sergeant. The address book is by the phone in the kitchen.’