Blood in Grandpont (22 page)

Fox turned and looked up. He, of course, had never visited Karen Pointer’s flat, but he could see only one person above him, on the balcony below the topmost one. He couldn’t see who it was. He assumed it was Lucy Tull, but, whoever it was or wasn’t, he knew for certain that his boss was in danger. He started to run again, back round the flats. But on breasting the second corner he had to take sudden evasive action to avoid a grey-haired woman coming the other way. ‘Is she all right?’ the woman said, apparently unconcerned that a man of considerable bulk had very nearly flattened her. But Fox wasn’t interested in either answering her or stopping. At the bottom of the stairwell, he hit the lift button in case
it was waiting there. He would run up the stairs if he had to, but he knew the limits of his own mobility. Miraculously the door opened instantly, and he pushed himself inside it. Eight floors. He hit the button for the seventh. As the lift moved steadily upwards, he tried to work out on which side the canal would be, and so where the entrance to Karen’s flat was likely to be, because he was pretty sure there would be at least two flats per floor, and he didn’t want to waste time trying to enter the wrong one. The door opened at seven, and he rushed out, turning left. The door in front of him, with a ‘7b’ on it, was ajar. At least he wasn’t going to have to force it. He took a gulp, like a diver about to plunge off the high board, and thrust his way through the entrance.

‘Hello, Inspector.’ The figure on the balcony moved forward, pushing the flapping curtains to the side with her left hand.

‘Where is she?’ Holden spoke quietly, firmly, as her training kicked in over her emotions. ‘What have you done to her?’

‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ came the reply.

These words and the unutterable knowledge that they conveyed hit Holden like a tidal wave, deluging her so completely that she felt she must be swept into oblivion. Then the wave retreated, sucking and pulling every present, past and future hope out of her so completely that oblivion would have seemed bliss. But Susan Holden was a woman whose instincts had from her earliest years been honed towards fight not flight, a woman who lived in the reality of life, and not the fantasy of wish fulfilment. She was a survivor, and it was this instinct that cut in now, as Lucy Tull advanced slowly towards her, her left hand hanging loose at her side and her right hand held menacingly behind her back.

‘Stand still!’ Holden demanded. ‘Hands out to the front!’

Lucy Tull stopped, and brought her hidden hand into view. In it, she held a knife. It was a kitchen knife, with a wide blade, the sort of heavy chopping knife you dice meat or vegetables with, that Karen had diced her meat and vegetables with. ‘Such a terrible accident,’ she said blankly. ‘She just fell.’

Holden spoke slowly. ‘Put the knife down!’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Her voice was now high and shrill, and she lifted her right hand so that the knife was pointing directly at Holden. ‘You’re trying to trick me!’ Her voice had now changed to a hiss, and the pupils of her eyes had shrunk to such a degree that they were almost invisible. She stepped forward again, swaying slightly like a boxer weighing up a dangerous opponent, and her face was an emotionless mask. But it wasn’t her face that Holden was watching. Holden moved the weight of her body forward, feinting towards Lucy’s left, and then, as her opponent’s knife hand slewed across to counter the move, she hurled herself forward, grabbing for Lucy’s right wrist as she did so. Her hand closed tightly round its target, but as it did so a lightning flash of agony cut into her lower arm. Then her left hand joined the right, and together they gripped and twisted so violently that Lucy Tull screamed and the knife fell to the floor. Holden now pushed hard with her shoulder into Lucy’s unbalanced body, and sent her sprawling across the floor.

Briefly she paused, scrabbling for the knife, and then hurling it way behind her, well out of reach of her assailant. But Lucy was back on her feet and retreating, back through the swirling curtains and out on to the balcony. For a moment, Holden paused, wondering where the hell Fox was and why he wasn’t there backing her up, but she had no intention of waiting. She had got Karen’s killer cornered, and she was going to nail her if that was the last thing she did.

‘God, didn’t she scream as she fell!’ Lucy’s voice, high and loud and mocking, sliced through the curtain. Adrenaline flooded through Holden’s veins, fuelling her rage, and like a thing demented she burst through the flimsy barrier of curtain that separated her from her quarry, for her quarry was what Lucy Tull had now become. She crashed into her, and together they staggered and lurched against the balcony railing. Down below them someone screamed, but Holden was aware only of herself and Lucy Tull. She twisted round, trying to get a lock on her opponent, and
for a moment she did, but then an elbow crashed with stunning force into the side of her head, and her grip slackened, and Lucy broke free. Holden fell to the ground, but instantly thrust herself up, conscious that if Lucy escaped back through the windows and into the flat, then she herself would be in serious danger – if not from the knife she had tried to throw away, then from the other four knives that she knew lived in Karen’s butcher’s block. Again she threw herself at Lucy, catching her by the door. This time she was more successful, grabbing and twisting Lucy’s right arm, and forcing her round and down so that Lucy’s chest was pressed against the top of the balcony railing, while she leant with all her own weight on top of her, willing her into submission.

‘It’s over, Lucy,’ she said loudly. And then even more loudly she shouted the words again, as if merely by words she could compel her struggling opponent to surrender. ‘It’s over!’

But it wasn’t over. For perhaps two or three seconds, the pair of them remained there, like a tableau frozen in time, for all the world like two spectators looking over a balcony to get a better view, or two friends locked in a romantic embrace as they shouted down to friends below. And that was when Holden finally saw Karen Pointer, her body spreadeagled across the black railings. There was an explosion of red across her white blouse, and her arms and legs were stretched out in gruesome symmetry. Holden shuddered and emitted a wail of agony.

Then Lucy Tull spoke, as if in response, her voice less shrill than before, but full of excited glee. ‘And when she hit the railings, wow! She didn’t half squeal! Just like a pig!’

Later, as she rolled every moment of those frantic events over and over in her head, Susan came to the conclusion that Lucy must have invented this, and had said it to throw her off her guard or maybe to provoke her into an uncontrolled reaction. She did hope so, for any other thought was too much to bear. But in those impossible moments, the only way she could hold on to reality was to ask the key question ‘Why?’ she bawled, bending her head low over Lucy’s right ear. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Why?’ Lucy had giggled, as if in embarrassment, like a girl hearing a rude joke for the first time in her life. Then she stopped giggling. ‘Why don’t you ask Marjorie?’ she replied. Holden momentarily released some of the pressure she was exerting as she took this in, and Lucy, sensing it, made a final effort to break free. But to no avail.

‘Guv!’ It was a man’s voice behind her. ‘I’m here. Hang on.’ Susan Holden knew it was Fox’s voice, and she cursed inwardly. She had heard and felt and suffered enough, and she wanted no help, and no interference. Not now. With an enormous grunt she tightened her grip on her struggling victim, and heaved. She felt the weight of Lucy’s body begin to lift, and she heard a sharp crack as Lucy’s wrist fractured under the pressure, but she pushed all the harder, until quite suddenly all resistance evaporated, and Lucy Tull hurtled over the balcony’s edge and out into oblivion.

The following Friday, at approximately 10.45 a.m. Susan Holden pulled into the car park in front of the Raglan Hospital, brought her vehicle to a halt in the furthest empty bay, and switched off her engine. She did not get out. For some ten minutes, she sat there, unmoving, with eyes tightly closed and arms folded across her body, as if immersed in meditation. But meditation requires an emptying of the mind, something she could not have begun to do in her present circumstances. Inside her head there were thoughts, images and emotions which whirled wildly around in such a maelstrom that she felt that sooner or later her brain must explode.

Eventually she uncrossed her arms, and put her right hand on the door handle. She knew she had to do it – to open the door and climb out and walk into the hospital and confront Marjorie Drabble – but the act of so doing seemed beyond her will and strength. But it was the least she could do for Karen, she told herself – to find out the truth, to find out what had driven Lucy Tull to kill. She cared not for Maria Tull and Jack Smith and Dominic Russell. Only professional pride would have driven her to root out the reason behind Lucy’s killing of them. But professional pride had ceased to matter now, and not just because she had been suspended while the circumstances of Lucy Tull’s death were fully investigated. Everything had ceased to matter except the reason for Karen’s death. If only she had worked it out sooner, she could have saved her. Her left hand was thumping the dashboard, once, twice, and
again. If only, if only, if only! She raised her head, and found herself looking into the eyes of a short, bald-headed man in a suit. He was staring at her, and he looked disconcertingly like her dead father. A surge of nausea swept up through her stomach, so that she felt she would vomit then and there. She pulled viciously at the door handle on which her right hand was still resting, desperate to escape the nightmare that was engulfing her. It swung open and banged hard against the silver BMW parked next to her, and the man scurried off towards the main door of the hospital, afraid of confrontation, maybe to report her. She didn’t care. Holden gulped in the fresh air, as she fought to regain control of her body, and she noted with surprise – and relief – that the man moved, despite his shape, with remarkable nimbleness, and in that respect he was quite unlike her father. She sucked in another deep breath of air. He was no ghost. It was no nightmare.

As she entered the reception area of the Raglan Hospital, she felt a curious sense of déjà vu. There was the same sense of entering a rather smart hotel, elegant but restrained, where people move purposefully but quietly, and conversations are held in hushed tones. The receptionist, whom she thought was different from her last visit, looked up and peered over her glasses, as if daring her to proceed without first checking in personally with her. Holden moved dutifully towards her.

‘Can I help you?’ The receptionist spoke briskly, but with a
cut-glass
accent that suggested that even the receptionists in the Raglan Hospital were recruited from the choicest inhabitants of North Oxford.

‘I’ve come to see Marjorie Drabble.’

‘Are you a relative?’ There was a tone of puzzled disbelief in her question, as if the woman standing in front of her did not match her idea of what a relative of Mrs Marjorie Drabble would look like.

‘A friend,’ she lied. ‘I’m Susan Holden.’

The woman frowned. ‘I see!’ Two words that can mean so much, depending on how they are spoken. ‘Well, sit down. I’ll put a call through.’ And she turned dismissively away.

Holden walked over to the seating area and sank into a large cream-coloured leather armchair so soft that for a moment it threatened to swallow her. There was a coffee maker on the table across the room, and the flask was half full, but the effort of getting up felt enormous, so she shut her eyes and tried to make do with the aroma.

‘Excuse me!’

Holden jumped. Ms Reception was standing over her, and was prodding her lightly on the upper arm. ‘Mrs Drabble will see you now.’

Holden stood up quickly, or as quickly as the depth of the chair would allow.

‘Have you been before? Do you know where her room is?’

‘Yes.’ She reached down and picked up her shoulder bag. She wondered if she’d been asleep for ten seconds or ten minutes. Not that it mattered, but the receptionist remained standing there, as if reluctant to allow this rather dubious visitor to move unchaperoned around her hospital. ‘Thank you,’ Holden said firmly, ‘I’ll find my own way, I’m sure.’

‘Oh!’ came the disapproving reply. ‘Well, it’s room 203.’ And with that the woman turned abruptly round, withdrawing towards her reception desk, where she would, Holden had no doubt, lie in wait for the next unwary arrival.

Holden made her way to room 203 with rather less difficulty than she had expected. The door was shut, so she tapped softly on it and let herself in. Marjorie Drabble was lying in her bed, but was propped up on three or four plumped pillows, apparently asleep. Holden closed the door quietly behind her and walked over towards her.

‘Sit down where I can see you,’ Marjorie Drabble said, gesturing with her hand. If her eyes were open, they were only just so.

Holden sat down. ‘Can I get you anything?’ It seemed a better thing to say than to ask how she was.

Finally Marjorie Drabble’s eyes opened fully. ‘I understood you were off the case?’

Holden nodded. Her suspension wasn’t exactly a secret, not since Don Alexander had revealed it to his
Oxford Mail
readers the previous day. ‘This isn’t an official visit,’ she said quickly. ‘I was just hoping that we could have a chat. Off the record.’

‘What if I say “No”?’

‘Then I will have to leave you in peace.’

She gave a single laugh, followed by a cough. ‘I get enough peace, thanks. Pass me some water, will you, and then you can ask your damned questions.’

Holden got up, poured some water into the glass on the side table, and offered it to her. She grasped it in two hands, and helped herself, taking several gulps, before she passed it back to the hovering Holden.

‘No notes, no hidden tape recorder, no nothing. Promise me!’

‘I promise.’

‘And may God condemn you to eternal damnation if you break your promise!’ The ferocity of the ill woman took Holden quite by surprise, and for a few moments she busied herself with replacing the glass, and picking up a greetings card that had fallen on the floor.

‘Well, get on with it then!’

Holden sat down, and composed herself. She had listed several questions in her head, but inevitably they were no longer there when she wanted to draw on them. She cleared her throat. ‘When I asked Lucy why she had committed these murders, she told me to ask you.’

‘Did she now?’ Drabble looked at her quizzically. ‘When did she say that?’

‘Just before she died.’

‘Did you push her?’ The question hit her like a punch in the solar plexus.

‘What do you mean?’ Of course, Holden knew what she meant, but evasion came easily to her. ‘We had a struggle. She had already killed Dr Pointer. She had stabbed her and then she had pushed her over the balcony on to the railings below.’

‘Stabbed her?’ There was real surprise in her voice. ‘That wasn’t in the paper.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ Holden couldn’t see any point in withholding this information. It would be in the public domain soon enough. ‘But that’s what she did. She stabbed her, and then she pushed her over the edge.’

Drabble was staring hard at her. She grunted. ‘So, it was revenge was it?’

‘Revenge?’ Holden was floundering. ‘I’m not quite with you.’

‘Liar!’ She laughed. ‘You killed Lucy out of revenge. Yes or no?’

‘No!’ she replied sharply. Perhaps too sharply. ‘We had a struggle on a balcony seven floors up. You know that. I guess I was stronger, and she ended up falling.’

‘You mean you pushed her.’

Holden was non-plussed by this turn of events. She had come to try to tie up the loose ends about Lucy’s motives for murder, and here she was being, in effect, accused of murder by a terminally ill old woman. She tried to defend herself. ‘When you’re fighting like that with someone, there’s a lot of pushing and shoving.’

‘You were lovers, right, you and Dr Karen Pointer.’

Again, Holden was startled. That had certainly not been broadcast in the
Oxford Mail
by Don Alexander. Not yet.

‘There’s no point in denying it,’ Drabble said firmly. ‘I can see it by your face. And besides, Lucy told me. It’s amazing what she learnt in that dentist’s surgery. She heard Geraldine Payne and Karen talking about Karen and you.’

Holden again made no response. What was there to do except admit it, or deny it, and she couldn’t deny it. She wouldn’t do that.

‘So when Lucy killed your Karen, you saw red, and you killed her. Deliberately. Not that anyone can prove it was deliberate, but I think we both know it was.’ She had been leaning forward slightly as she made her argument, but now she lay back, and again shut her eyes. Holden was relieved to get this break. Her mouth was dry, and she wished now she had helped herself to coffee in the reception area. There was no second cup on Marjorie Drabble’s side
table, so she couldn’t even pour herself some water. She ran her tongue round her lips, and tried to think how to regain control of the situation.

‘OK, then!’ Drabble’s eyes were open, and there was both triumph and amusement on her face. ‘It’s your turn.’

Holden looked back at her. She had thought a lot about this since Karen’s death. In fact, when she had not been grieving or weeping, her only coherent thoughts had been about this. She began. ‘The question that I keep hitting my head against is why now? I can understand that Lucy hated her stepmother, but why did she kill her just ten days ago, and not ten weeks ago or ten months ago.’

‘I’d have thought that would have been obvious. She had just discovered Maria had been having an affair with the plumber.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Holden admitted uncertainly, ‘and that would explain why she killed Jack Smith soon afterwards, but—’

‘But what? That all seems very straightforward to me.’

‘I can think of at least two buts.’ Holden paused, but her eyes were fully alert, watching the frail old woman in front of her, whose brain and spirit were anything but frail. ‘Why don’t you ask Marjorie?’ That had been what Lucy Tull had said. Which meant, surely, that Marjorie Drabble knew more than she was letting on. ‘But number one: can it really have been the first time that Maria had had an affair?’

‘Possibly not. But maybe it was the first time Lucy found out.’

Holden rubbed her nose with her right forefinger. It wasn’t so much what Drabble had said – she herself had thought along the same lines – but the readiness of her answers, as if she had been expecting this interview and had prepared for it accordingly.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I expect you’re right.’ But she was hoping that she herself was right too, that by enlisting Marjorie Drabble’s help in all of this, she might also be lulling her into saying something more than she intended. ‘But that doesn’t explain why she killed Dominic Russell, does it?’ She waited then, curious to see if the response this time would be as quick. And, of course, she wondered what exactly Marjorie would say in response.

The answer to that was, initially, nothing. ‘All this talking is making me thirsty,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you can order us a pot of tea? Just dial zero. In the meantime, I’d like a couple of minutes’ break.’

Holden did as she was told, and sat down again until there came a tap at the door, and a smartly uniformed middle-aged woman entered balancing a tray with a tea pot, milk jug and a pair of cups and saucers, all in the same blue-rimmed white china. Holden poured them each a cup. ‘White, no sugar, please,’ Drabble said, opening her eyes, and shuffling herself into a more upright position. She took a sip as Holden moved back to her seat. ‘So, where were we?’

‘Dominic Russell,’ Holden responded. She wasn’t convinced that Drabble had forgotten, but maybe with the combination of pain and drugs she had. ‘I was saying that I couldn’t see why Lucy would have killed Dominic Russell.’

‘So do you have any theories?’

Holden shrugged. Drabble was suddenly being very cagey. She had been full of immediate responses concerning the deaths of Maria Tull and Jack Smith, but now she seemed to be deliberately avoiding giving any answers. ‘Maybe he had had an affair with Maria,’ Holden mused, ‘but somehow that doesn’t ring true to me.’

‘Why not?’ Again, she was much more ready to ask questions than answer them.

‘My impression was that Dominic was more interested in younger women than women of Maria’s age.’

‘Oh?’ Another uncommitted response.

Holden said nothing. Maybe silence would push Drabble into opening up. Or making a mistake. For whatever else, Holden was convinced she was holding back on something. ‘Why don’t you ask Marjorie?’ The words rattled insistently in her head. So she sipped her tea and waited.

Drabble too sipped at her tea, until she had finished it, and she held it there loosely in her hands. And then, quite suddenly, she spoke. ‘What about the painting? I understand they found one next to Dominic’s body, and it had been vandalized.’

Holden smiled politely. ‘Yes, quite right.’ She finished her cup of tea, and discarded it on the windowsill to her right, before turning back to face Drabble. ‘But, you know, the painting was not that valuable. A few thousands of pounds, but not hugely valuable, except possibly if you’re a Christian who strongly disapproved of the idea of Judas’s mother being comforted by Jesus’ mother. Would Lucy have had had views on that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. But I doubt it. She didn’t talk about religion or going to church, as far as I can recall.’

‘So what exactly did she talk about when she was with you?’ Holden said quickly. It was time to apply some pressure.

‘Gosh! Let me see.’ Again there was the impression of a woman playing for a bit of time. ‘Well, she was very considerate of my health. I suppose she was worried I might change my mind and sue her father. My son Graham was very keen that I should—’