Blood in Grandpont (20 page)

‘How are you feeling?’ She looked up guiltily, like a child caught raiding the sweet jar. Geraldine Payne was standing at the doorway, with Lucy Tull at her shoulder. She wondered if they had been there long, for she had been quite oblivious of their presence until Geraldine spoke.

‘Not too bad.’ She shut the magazine and put it down, picking up the half-drunk tea instead. It was cold. She hated cold tea, but she drank it down nonetheless.

‘Don’t tell me you found something worth reading?’

‘It passed the time.’

‘You looked engrossed.’

‘You’ve been very kind. I’d better go.’ She stood up, but as she stepped forward she wavered, as light-headedness struck her again.

‘Hey!’ Geraldine and Lucy both grabbed at her. ‘Steady!’

Karen felt ridiculously foolish. ‘Sorry!’

‘Don’t be,’ Geraldine said sharply, taking charge. ‘Lucy is going to call a taxi, and she will go with you and see you back to your flat.’

‘There’s no need,’ Karen replied, but there was no conviction and no strength in her words.

‘There’s every need,’ came the firm reply. ‘There’s absolutely every need.’

The Tulls were a three-computer household. Not that Lawson and Wilson found three of them that afternoon. Joseph’s laptop, like Joseph, was absent, though a plugged-in power cable suggested that wherever he had taken it, he wasn’t planning on spending the whole day working on it. Lucy’s tower PC was on the desk in her bedroom. It was an old one, at least three years, which in computing terms was verging on the unusable, Wilson reckoned. He tried to log on, but it was password protected, so he powered it off, unplugged the tower from its multifarious connecting cables, and tucked it under his arm. ‘You never know what might be on even a museum piece like this,’ he admitted, as they trudged down the stairs in search of the study. Here they found, as Dr Tull had said they would, a much newer laptop. ‘I hardly ever use it myself,’ he had insisted. ‘It was Maria’s really. I get quite enough of the damn things at surgery. Mind you, Lucy’s pretty much taken it over now. She’s been moaning for months about how slow hers was, but I wasn’t going to replace it. She’s been earning good money, so I didn’t see why she couldn’t buy one herself. But now she won’t have to.’

The laptop was not password protected, and Wilson gave a whoop of excitement as soon as he realized. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

A flash of irritation lanced through Lawson. How was it that Wilson had assumed the role of IT expert? She wasn’t exactly a computer dimbo herself, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. At least, not now.

‘Yeah, and I’ll see what I can find too!’ she threw over her shoulder as she headed out of the study. It wasn’t just an idle parting shot. If she was a murderer with an even half-functioning brain, and she had got sensitive, incriminating photographs, she wouldn’t leave them sitting on a computer. She’d copy them off on to a pen drive and hide it somewhere safe. Lucy or Joseph – whose room to search first? Well, on the basis of who was most likely to have killed Maria, she’d have to go for Lucy, the stepdaughter. The stepdaughter. It was a term that in these days, when reconstituted families are commonplace, had rather dropped out of fashion. But
the concept of the evil stepmother was one that had been implanted in Lawson at an early age when her father had read her fairy stories at bedtime. The story of Hansel and Gretel had always been, for her, the fairy story that had most fascinated and disturbed her as a child. It was the stepmother, not the witch, that was the most disturbing character for her, a manipulative, ill-defined character who schemed to separate a father from his beloved children. She was the figure of nightmares.

So, it may have been entirely because of the Brothers Grimm that Detective Constable Lawson turned left at the top of the stairs and entered Lucy’s room. There she began to make a methodical search of the room: first the desk, then the chest of drawers, and finally the cupboards. Nothing. She looked around the room again. Where else? There was a glass-fronted corner cupboard with a few china ornaments. She opened that, carefully examining each of these, but there was no pen drive hidden behind or under or in any of them. If there was one, it must have been hidden with great care, maybe taped to the underside of one of the pieces of furniture, or, of course, she might carry it with her in her handbag, or hide it at work.

She sighed, turned and made her way out of the room and up the other end of the short corridor to Joseph’s room. If Lucy gave the impression of being organized and careful, then Joseph did the opposite. Maybe, if he had something to hide, he was the sort of guy to stick it in the bottom of his sock drawer and think it was safe and undetectable. So, she made her way straight to the chest of drawers next to his bed. The top drawer was indeed his sock drawer, but the expression sock drawer implies a degree of order – socks matched up two by two in neat piles, or rolled together in balls – which was entirely absent from Joseph’s drawer. A sock scrimmage, Lawson thought would be a better description, but at least she could move her hand around all four corners of the drawer without feeling she was making a mess. But there was no pen drive. The next drawer was pants, and the third and last was shorts. She pulled them out. Underneath were a couple of
magazines of the sort young men prefer to keep hidden from their parents. On the cover of the uppermost one was a woman with remarkably large breasts pouting at the camera. Lawson didn’t bother to even look at the second, because as she removed them from the drawer she saw that they had been hiding something of much greater potential: a brown envelope. It was plain, and unmarked, and it was sealed, though not tightly. Lawson carefully eased it open, and gave a grin of delight. ‘Yes!’ she exclaimed to the room triumphantly. ‘Yes!’

She knew she ought to report this to Holden ASAP, but she was aware that she hadn’t finished searching the room. She moved fast now, going through Joseph’s desk drawers and wardrobe, but as with Lucy’s room she drew a blank. Still, given what she had found, this was no big deal. She trotted quickly down the stairs, and breezed into the study.

‘How’s it going, Constable?’

Wilson’s frustration, as the tone his reply made clear, was reaching a crescendo. ‘Nothing,’ he snapped. ‘Absolutely, bloody nothing!’

‘Have you checked the desk for pen drives?’ She spoke calmly. ‘There aren’t any in Joseph’s or Lucy’s rooms.’

‘Yes I bloody have!’ His face was flushed. ‘Anyway, how come you’re so damn cheerful?’

Lawson was tempted to take him on, but she had found something and he hadn’t, and besides, there was more than one way to challenge him. ‘If I was wanting to hide a sensitive file on a PC, do you know what I would do?’ She paused, but only briefly. Wilson said nothing, but she was going to tell him anyway. ‘I’d rename the file something really meaningless, and I’d change its extension, and I’d hide it amongst the system files. Wouldn’t you?’

Wilson looked up at her for the first time since she had entered the room. What she had said made sense, but he had no intention of saying so. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the envelope that Lawson was carrying.

‘It may not be relevant to the case,’ she smiled. ‘But I think I’d
better show it to the DI first, don’t you think? Anyway, keep at it.’

She turned and left the room, pausing in the hall in the front of a long gilt-framed mirror. She inspected herself, ran a hand through her hair, and puckered her face. Not bad, she mouthed silently. At which point, there was the noise of a key being thrust into the front door, and in came a tousled Joseph Tull. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘It’s nice to see you too,’ Lawson replied breezily.

The taxi trip took less than five minutes, with at least two minutes wasted, first waiting to pull out across the stream of oncoming traffic in Beaumont Street, and then queuing to turn right at the lights opposite Worcester College. The rest of the run was straightforward, apart from the speed bumps and a pause while another taxi executed a U-turn in the middle of Walton Street. Once at their destination, Karen paid the driver, and then led the way uncertainly to the lift. ‘I normally walk,’ she insisted. ‘But look, I really will be all right. If you want to go home or back to work—’

‘Geraldine will skin me alive if I don’t make sure you are okay. And besides, I need a pee.’

After a prolonged wait for the lift – how on earth could it be busy at this time of day, Karen wondered – and a swift ascent, Karen unlocked the flat and entered it, with Lucy in close attendance. While Lucy disappeared off to the loo, Karen moved zombie-like to the small rectangular space that represented her kitchen area. She filled the kettle, and turned it on. She ought to offer Lucy a cup of tea. But even though the kettle soon boiled, she got no further in the process. It was as if her brain was stuck in neutral and no amount of revving would get her body to move. Meanwhile Lucy, her bladder emptied, materialized in the archway that separated kitchen and living room, her head held at a slight angle. Karen wished, ungratefully, that she would go away, because she just wanted to lie down. But Lucy was showing no sign of moving.

‘How are things going with you and DI Holden?’

Karen looked at her, and for some reason felt uneasy. It wasn’t as
if she and Lucy hadn’t been in the same room before. Obviously they had been in the same reception area several times, but this was different. ‘I’d rather not discuss it.’

‘Why not?’

She felt suddenly irritated beyond all reason. She didn’t expect to be given the third degree in her own flat, and certainly not by her dentist’s sidekick. ‘Because it’s none of your business!’ The words snaked across the short distance between them like the crack of a whip, doing their best to keep Lucy at a distance.

‘I was just trying to be friendly.’ She spoke in a tone of injured innocence. ‘Most people like to talk about their boyfriends. Why should it be any different with dykes?’ Karen flinched, but fought the temptation to react. Instead, she turned back towards the abandoned kettle, in the hope this might cause her inquisitor to withdraw.

‘OK,’ Lucy said suddenly, ‘let’s change the subject if it’s too sensitive for you. Where’s Susan got to in the case?’

Karen jerked round. ‘I can’t talk about that.’

‘I won’t tell. It’s just between you and me.’

‘It would be completely unprofessional.’ Karen spoke firmly.

‘I need to know.’ Lucy’s voice was low, but intense. Karen shivered. Why the hell wouldn’t Lucy just go? She needed to lie down, and she needed to talk to Susan, or at least to make contact with her. But Lucy was unrelenting. ‘I need to know who stuck a stiletto into my father’s wife. Was it Dominic Russell? Did he kill her and Jack Smith, and then himself. Is that what happened? I need to know. Tell me, and then I’ll go.’

Karen didn’t answer. She couldn’t have, not even if she had wanted to, because fear had taken hold of her throat with a strangler’s grip and it was squeezing hard.

‘We found this in your chest of drawers, Joseph.’

Joseph Tull was sitting in the same armchair as he had been a week previously, when questioned over his whereabouts at the time of his mother’s death. As before, DI Holden was doing the
questioning – with DS Fox and DC Lawson attending, and Dr Alan Tull looking anxiously on – but the casual nonchalance which Joseph had displayed at that earlier meeting had disappeared.

The reason for this lay on the glass-topped coffee table that lay between interviewer and interviewee – a pile of £20 notes that Holden had just tipped out of a large brown envelope. The gasp that came from Alan Tull indicated the surprise it was to him that his son should have such a sum of money hidden away, but it was Joseph’s reaction that Holden was interested in. She thought she saw a brief flash of panic pass across his features, like a small cloud blown swiftly across the face of the full moon, but maybe that was merely in her imagination.

‘So?’ he replied, aggressively.

‘So, where did you get it?’

‘That’s my business.’

It was the sort of sullen response that was designed to irritate. Holden’s mouth tightened, and the vein down the left side of her head began to throb. She leant forward and spat her words like a burst from a sub-machine gun. ‘It’s my business too, until I decide it isn’t! So don’t mess me about, Joseph. Where did you get the money from?’

‘You haven’t been selling drugs, Joseph?’ Alan Tull broke in. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t.’

‘No, Dad, I haven’t!’

‘So where did you get the money?’ Holden insisted. She would like to be doing this without Alan Tull in the room, but he had resisted that suggestion, and the key thing was to get some answers out of Joseph now.

‘I was given it.’

‘By whom?’

‘A family friend.’

Holden stood up suddenly, and walked away from the sofa towards the door that led through to the hall. She leant with her back against it, but said nothing. Alan Tull was watching her, alarm in his eyes, while Joseph sat unmoving, resisting the impulse to
look round at her, determined to win this battle of wills.

Eventually Holden spoke, quietly but firmly. ‘So you were blackmailing this family friend?’

‘No!’ Joseph twisted round as he said this. ‘I asked her and she gave it to me of her own free will.’

Fox laughed raucously, as if Joseph had just told a crude joke. ‘That’s what they all say, sonny!’

Joseph twisted round, suddenly furious. ‘My name’s not sonny!’ he snarled, as if that was the worst thing that anyone could possibly have said to him.

Holden strode back across the carpet and sat down opposite Joseph Tull again. She wanted to regain control, and she wanted some straight answers, and she wasn’t sure any more winding up from her sergeant would help. She’d stick with the softly, softly approach, at least for now.

‘Look, Joseph,’ she said, ‘you do have to explain to me exactly how you obtained this money. If you prefer to do it without your father present, or indeed with a solicitor present down at the police station, then that is your choice. Otherwise, I’d like you to tell me who gave you the money, and how and why that was.’