Blood on the Cowley Road (7 page)

‘Thank you, my dear,' Whiting said. ‘Kind of you to say so, though I prefer to think of it as an apartment. The word flat has such, such—' He paused, and ran his right hand through his streaked hair while he tried to conjure up the precise word he was looking for. ‘Such uninteresting connotations. Don't you think so?'

Holden smiled. ‘Thank you for seeing us. I appreciate you've got a gallery to run, and I guess Saturday is a busy day for you, so we'll try to keep it short and then—'

‘Please!' said Whiting, waving her to a halt. ‘I could hardly refuse to help the police with their enquiries, now could I? But before we get down to business, how about a coffee? Espresso, cappuccino, or Americano? Or I've got a very nice jasmine tea, or a selection of herbal infusions.'

‘Cappuccino, please,' said Holden, impressed by the choice.

‘Black coffee for me,' said Fox uncompromisingly, refusing to be drawn into the world of fancy hot drinks. ‘With three sugars,' he added, before slumping heavily onto one of the two white sofas.

Whiting smiled the indulgent smile he often had to employ in his gallery in the High Street when customers tried to knock down his prices. ‘Three sugars it is,' he said softly, turning towards the archway that led through to the kitchen.

‘Sorry,' said Holden, ‘but could I use your loo. Bad planning as my mother would say, but it's—'

‘Woman's stuff?' Whiting interrupted. ‘Don't you worry,' and he tapped his nose with the forefinger of his right hand. ‘Mum's the word. Follow me!'

She followed, but he stopped in front of the door lavatory, blocking her way. ‘Just to get this out the way,' he said firmly. ‘I know Jake was bonked on the head, and I know he was fished out of the river. That's enough for me. More than enough. Are you with me?'

‘Of course,' Holden said quietly. ‘I understand.'

‘Well, I hope that orang-utan of a colleague does too,' he said moving to the side. ‘Anyway, I'll leave you to it.'

‘Thank you.'

Five minutes later and they were sitting down around a low rectangular table which consisted of aluminium tubes of varying diameters and a sheet of glass. Holden took a sip from her cappuccino, and then waited for Whiting to take one from his.

‘I'd like you to tell us about your relationship with Jake,' she asked.

Whiting took a second sip, before carefully placing his cup and saucer on the table. Fleetingly, his right hand touched the small silver cross hanging around his neck. ‘He came into my gallery about six months ago. That's Bare Canvas, in the High Street, in case you're interested. Anyway he asked a lot of questions, but he didn't buy anything. You soon get a feeling when someone comes into the shop whether they are curious, or serious, or just trying to avoid the rain. He turned up again later that week, just before I was due to shut up shop, and we ended up going out for a drink. Well, to cut things short, we got into a relationship.' He paused again, and picked up his cappuccino, but this time just cradled it in his hands.

‘Did he move in with you?'

‘Not permanently. He'd stay over most weekends, and sometimes midweek, but we both liked our personal space.'

‘And when did you split up?'

He lifted the cappuccino up close to his lips, but made no attempt to drink from it. ‘Three weeks ago,' he said quietly. Holden thought she could detect a tear straining to form in the corner of his eye. ‘Three weeks yesterday, to be precise.' There was another pause. Holden waited. ‘He'd been seeing someone else.'

‘Seeing someone else,' Holden echoed, a question mark almost visibly attached to it.

‘Buggering someone else, if you prefer it, ma'am!' He spoke forcefully now, all nostalgic emotion now put firmly on hold. ‘Not my scene.
Wanting a bit of space is one thing. Fucking someone else on the side is quite another.'

‘So it was an unpleasant break-up, was it?' It was Fox who said this, causing both Whiting and Holden to turn towards him. Holden frowned with irritation, but Whiting seemed unflustered.

‘Have you ever had a relationship that went down the tubes, Detective?' He paused, giving Fox an opportunity to reply. But Fox said nothing. ‘The ends of relationships are never, in my experience, pleasant. Never. In the case of Jake and me, he betrayed me, so of course I hated it. Briefly, I hated him. So I gave him his marching orders. But life is too short to dwell on things that don't work out. So if you are implying, as I think you are, Detective, that our break-up was so acrimonious that I decided to bash the cheating bastard over the head and then drop him in the river to make sure, then let me tell you that you have got it wrong.'

Whiting now raised his cup, which had been hovering uncertainly between his mouth and his lap all the time he was speaking, and took a long and noisy slurp from it.

‘We have to be suspicious of everyone.' Holden spoke softly, almost apologetically, irritated as she was by her colleague's heavy-footed intervention. ‘It's virtually part of our job description. I'm sure you must realize. And while we are on difficult questions,' she continued, plunging on while she had an opportunity, ‘I might as well ask you now where you were on Thursday night. Please!'

To her surprise, Whiting smiled. ‘Oh, Inspector,' he said, ‘How reassuring this all is.' He placed the not yet finished cappuccino cup on the table, and leant back in his chair. He placed his fingers together, as if he was about to demonstrate to them that old rhyme that Holden suddenly remembered from school. ‘Here's a church and here is a steeple, open the doors, see all the people.' But the fingers stayed still, as did his eyes which surveyed Holden as a chess player might stare at his adversary, immediately after making a move.

‘First you do, well if not the good-cop, bad-cop routine, then at least the nice cop, miserable sod cop routine, and then even as I am in mid-cappuccino you slip in the “Where were you when the victim was murdered?” question. Of course, I knew it was bound to come, and of course like all good suspects I have an alibi that no one can vouch for.'
He paused, half-smiling, forcing a response. But surprisingly it came from a suddenly good-humoured Fox.

‘If you could just tell us what your unprovable alibi is, sir, then I can, like a good Policeman Plod, record it in my notebook, so that we can come back another time and try and trip you up on the details.'

‘Sergeant!' Whiting almost bounced vertically in the air in his delight. ‘How nice of you to enter into the spirit. Now let me see.' He paused – overdramatically in Holden's view – until he felt he had got sufficient audience attention. ‘It was a migraine. I felt it coming on as I was on the bus home, so as soon as I got in I made myself a cup of jasmine tea, took two painkillers, and then took myself to my lonely bed. All very inconvenient, I know.'

‘And no one phoned?' Holden asked firmly. ‘No one rang the bell?'

‘I unplugged the phone, didn't I.' Whiting's tone was flatter now, as if the seriousness of the situation was beginning to seep under the surface bravado. ‘If anyone rang the door bell, I didn't hear. I was in never-never-land almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.'

‘You have a mobile?'

‘Who doesn't? But I turned that off too. Obviously.'

‘Why obviously?' Fox interrupted again.

‘Bloody hell, haven't you ever had a migraine. Cause if you had, you wouldn't ask such a stupid question.'

‘I specialize in stupid questions,' Fox responded evenly. ‘I'm a stupid plodding, sergeant, and I ask stupid bloody questions.'

‘Well, bully for you!' Whiting laughed.

‘Perhaps we can focus on Jake,' cut in Holden, who was getting a little suspicious of Whiting's manner. His lover of recent time lay dead in the mortuary, yet here he was playing to his audience of two with a will. ‘You may not have killed him, but someone did. It was a nasty, violent, deliberate act. Someone out there disliked Jake very much. So as Jake's close friend, maybe there is something you know that we ought to know. And if so, now is the time to tell us.' She paused, and added: ‘If, that is, you want us to catch his killer.'

Whiting held up his hands theatrically, but then dropped them as if having second thoughts. ‘Sorry. Point taken.' For a few seconds he shut his eyes, raising his right hand to his mouth. Then he opened them again and looked straight at Holden.

‘Do you know about Jake and Jim Blunt?'

‘Know what?' said Holden, her ears metaphorically pricked.

‘Well, I guess Blunt wouldn't have mentioned it, and I doubt any of those self-seeking workers who fawn around him would have wanted to rock their cosy little boat.' He paused, looking for some sort of reaction from Holden. Like an actor, he seemed to crave the oxygen of audience approval, but the Detective Inspector had no desire to indulge him. ‘Perhaps you can get to the point, sir!'

‘The point, my dear, is that Jake put in a complaint about Blunt. A formal complaint. To management.'

‘A complaint about what?' Holden said evenly, still refusing to cooperate with Whiting's game.

‘He said that Blunt had bullied him. In supervision.'

‘In supervision?'

‘They had one-to-one supervisions every three or four weeks. Privately, in a room. So it was the ideal place for Blunt to bully poor Jake. No witnesses, you see.'

‘Assuming that Blunt was bullying him.'

‘Well, of course he was bullying him! Why on earth should Jake have lied about it?'

For several seconds, Holden said nothing. On the face of it, Whiting's loyalty to his ex-boyfriend, was convincing, even impressive. Jake had cheated on him, and that had hurt Whiting. Hurt him enough to end the relationship. Yet here he was taking Jake's side.

‘Okay,' she said uncertainly, feeling her way. ‘Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that Blunt was bullying Jake. Now, that's hardly a motive for murder.'

‘Why the hell not!' Whiting spoke sharply, his voice leaping an octave. ‘He's a right bastard that man. I wouldn't put anything past him.'

 

Some four hours later, Martin Mace was pushing his way through the crowd of football fans in the garden of the Priory pub. Oxford were playing Bristol Rovers. Not quite a local derby, but it was a rivalry with history. Two men (Little and Large to their mates) sat at a small round table by the low wall that delineated the edge of the pub's official limits. There were six pint glasses on the table, two of them already
empty, and two only half full. Mace was late.

‘Hurry up, your miserable bastard. It's nearly your round already. Honestly, you move bloody slower than Julian Alsop, and let me tell you that ain't a bloody compliment.' Al Smith was 6 feet 4 and rising, with a body frame to match. Even sitting down, his physical bulk was obvious, and his voice cut a swathe through the babble of noise.

On another day, Mace would have given as good as he got, but on this occasion he slumped heavily down onto the empty stool, nodded at the smaller man, and picked up one of the glasses of Guinness.

Sam Sexton, a short, skinny man with a dark swirl of hair and at least three days of stubble, slipped unconsciously into his role of peacemaker. ‘Leave him be, Al. He's had to drive to Grimsby and back today. It's enough to piss anyone off!'

‘Fucking Grimsby,' Smith snorted. ‘I hate bloody Grimsby. The only good thing about that hole is the fish and chips.'

‘You all right, Martin?' Sexton asked. Mace had drained his pint, and was pulling the second one towards him. He ignored the question, and began to drink again, only stopping when the glass was two-thirds empty. He carefully placed the glass down on the table, then leant forward. For the first time since sitting down, he looked at his two friends. Each of them leant forward.

‘Jake's dead!'

For several seconds, the three of them remained silent, while all around the chatter ebbed and flowed. ‘They reckon he was murdered!' Mace continued.

‘Fuck!'

‘Murdered?'

‘Some bastard whacked him over the back of the head, then dumped him into the river. They fished him out at Iffley Lock.'

‘The poor bugger!' Sexton said.

‘How did you find out?' Smith said, his voice no longer booming.

Mace had anticipated this question. He hadn't told either of his friends about the anger management group – he could imagine what Al's response would have been – and he didn't want to tell them now, but he did want to talk about Jake.

‘I was down near the Evergreen Day Centre,' he improvised, ‘where Jake works, and there were a couple of police cars outside. So I knew
something must be up, and this guy started to tell me that one of the workers had been found dead in the river—'

‘I'm not fucking surprised,' Smith said, his voice louder again and harsh. ‘He was bloody asking for it if you ask me. Bloody pansy.'

‘No one deserves to be murdered,' Sexton said quickly.

‘Don't call him a bloody pansy,' Mace snarled. ‘He was OK. I liked him.'

‘Liked him, did you?' Smith leered across the table. ‘Liked him a lot, did you?'

‘Leave it out, you guys,' Sexton said plaintively. ‘Martin,' he said, trying to steer the conversation to safer water, ‘when did this all happen?'

Mace raised his glass and drained the rest of its contents. Then he put it down, belched and leant even further forward. ‘Suppose, just suppose the person who killed Jake knows?'

‘Knows what?' Smith replied, his voice now much quieter.

‘About last May.'

‘Don't be fucking stupid,' Smith said aggressively, but his voice was even quieter. ‘How could anyone?'

‘Suppose Sarah didn't jump?' Mace continued, ignoring him. ‘Suppose she was pushed.' He paused, picked up his glass, realized it was empty and put it down again. ‘Suppose she was murdered too.'