Blood in Grandpont (9 page)

‘Well, it looks like the same murder weapon. The initial stab wound is not quite in the same place as it was on Maria’s body, but the knife was either the same one or an identical one. However, he didn’t die instantaneously. He may have lost consciousness. There’s no sign of a struggle, but the blood from the neck wounds indicates he was still alive when those were inflicted. Then there followed the facial disfigurement. A single stab to each eye. The coup de grâce. Though that appears to have taken place after the heart had ceased to pump.’

‘Time of death?’ Holden was brusque, but if Pointer noticed she gave no sign of it.

‘It’s hard to be precise. The house wasn’t heated, and so it was pretty cold. I’d estimate between maybe twelve noon and two o’clock.’

‘Can’t you be more precise?’

Dr Pointer looked up, and this time there was irritation in her voice. ‘No, I can’t.’

‘Oh!’ came the graceless reply.

Lawson, conscious of the tension between the two women,
forced herself to focus on the body, and to imagine, without emotion, what it must have been like. Lying on the slab, stripped of clothes, and bereft of dignity, it presented a very different picture from the image imprinted in her head, of the twisted
blood-spattered
, brutalized person she had seen on that kitchen floor. What sort of person could do that?

‘At least,’ Pointer said suddenly, ‘it would be hard to tie the time down with absolute certainty. But maybe nearer two o’clock than one.’

‘Right,’ Holden grunted. Then, almost as an afterthought: ‘Thank you.’

‘That’s unofficial, you understand.’

‘Of course.’

Again there was silence, and into this Lawson now gently tossed the question which had been growing in her mind. ‘Dr Pointer,’ she said, before remembering the pathologist’s preference for first names. ‘Karen, there was a lot of blood. Do you think the killer could have avoided getting it on his – or her – clothes?’

‘It’s hard to be certain. The knife cut the carotid artery in the neck, so that might have sprayed, but the heart was already in crisis by then, so there would have been less pressure, and.…’ She drifted to a stop.

‘Thank you, Karen,’ Holden broke in, apparently deciding that they had got all they could from the visit. ‘You’ve been very helpful. If you could email your full report over when it’s done, I would be most grateful.’

‘Not at all,’ came the reply. Formal politeness was suddenly back in vogue in the pathology lab. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot. His possessions are over there.’ Pointer pointed to a large grey high-sided tray sitting on one of the work benches. Lawson, looking at it, felt a sudden surge of queasiness. The tray was just like the ones in airport security, the ones into which you have to place everything you are carrying and half of what you’re wearing. She had only flown abroad twice in her life, which made her something of an oddball amongst her friends. The first had been with friends to
Ibiza, and the second had been less than a year ago. It had started with a five-hour delay at Gatwick. This had been followed, on night number two, by her developing a horrendous bout of gastroenteritis. Three days later, when she could finally risk venturing out on to the beach, she overdid it, fell asleep on her towel, and got horribly sunburnt. And alongside and during all of this, her relationship with her boyfriend Tom had been deteriorating via angry outbursts (hers) and surly exits (his) until there was no part of it that was not in ruins. She hated flying.

Holden, oblivious to her constable’s interior musing, had walked over to the tray and cast a brief eye over it, before turning away. ‘That’s your job, Lawson. Get it into the car, and while you’re waiting for me, check out the mobile for recent calls, and all his contacts. Karen and I have one or two things to discuss.’

Lawson got the message, and hurried to collect Jack Smith’s personal possessions and get out of the room. She was no mug, and had already wondered about her boss and Dr Pointer. Not that she had voiced her suspicions to anyone. But she was human enough – and nosy enough – to wonder what things Holden still had to discuss with the pathologist, and in private. Her guess was that it wasn’t police procedures or new developments in post-mortem techniques.

However, by the time Holden had joined her in the car several minutes later, her idle speculation on her boss’s private life had long since gone out the window. For all her attention had been hijacked by what she had seen on Jack Smith’s mobile.

‘We’ve got another one, Guv!’

Holden wrenched her mind away from the conversation she had just had with Karen Pointer. ‘What was that?’

‘There’s a photo on this mobile too, Guv!’

‘What? Of a naked Jack Smith?’

‘No, Guv. It’s a painting. You know, like an oil painting.’

Holden’s interest shot up several points. ‘Well, let me have a look then!’

It is not easy to appreciate the quality, or even the subject matter,
of a painting on a screen approximately three centimetres square. Holden had to squint, and then to move the mobile’s face around before she could get a decent grasp of what it was. Lawson’s estimate that it was an oil painting seemed to be a good one. There were two figures. In the centre was a woman, lying back against a rock. She appeared, as far as Holden could see, to be in distress. Although clothed, her diaphanous dress was dishevelled, and her left breast uncovered. To the viewer’s right, a male figure could be seen, moving away from the woman, but casting a glance behind him, though whether the expression on his face was mischievous or triumphant, evil or embarrassed, Holden could not divine.

‘What do you think, Guv? Do you think it’s the picture that he found?’

‘No,’ Holden said flatly. ‘That one had two women and a prone man, according to Jack.’

‘Maybe he was lying.’ The words shot out of Lawson’s mouth. Quite why she uttered them, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if she had mulled the idea over for even a second.

‘Why on earth should he be lying about the subject of the painting?’

Lawson pursed her lips, and said nothing. She felt foolish for not having remembered Jack Smith’s description of the painting. She hadn’t been there – Fox had been with Holden – but she had seen the notes of the meeting, and she really should have remembered.

‘Well, come on, Lawson.’ Holden was not going to let her off. ‘Why? Give me a possible reason why Jack Smith might have lied. You’re on my team, so I want you thinking, not playing the village idiot. Why might he have lied?’

‘To mislead us, Guv.’ Lawson’s idea was only half-formed, and maybe only half-baked, but if Holden wanted ideas, she’d ruddy well give her one.

‘Any chance of you fleshing that idea out, Detective Constable?’

‘Yes, Guv,’ she replied sharply. ‘To make sure that we wouldn’t recognize the painting if we came across it.’

‘Hmm!’ Holden leant back and shut her eyes briefly as she
considered the idea.

Lawson, pleased that her suggestion hadn’t been dismissed out of hand, decided to follow up. ‘In fact, that seems to me to be the obvious solution.’

Holden’s eye opened – an owl wakened from its reverie, or more likely a hawk. ‘Obvious!’ she repeated with sarcastic emphasis. ‘Well, well, well, Constable. Aren’t you the clever clogs! The only problem is I don’t see Jack Smith as being the smartest cookie in the jar. When Fox and I interviewed him, if he was lying, he was very good at it.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t his idea,’ Lawson riposted. She was flying by the seat of her pants now, but there was no way she was going to bail out. ‘Maybe it was the idea of his killer.’

Holden was sitting forward now, and her eyes were looking at Lawson with an intensity that made the constable uneasy. Eventually, she smiled. ‘You’ll make a good detective, Jan. A very good detective.’

Lawson, uncertain of her ground, smiled nervously back. ‘Thank you, Guv.’

‘But just for the sake of argument, Lawson, let’s suppose Jack wasn’t lying. Let’s suppose there are two different paintings. What would you make of that?’

Lawson frowned. She was so set on her own idea that she found it hard to switch her thinking.

‘Well?’ The prompting was gentle, but insistent.

‘Two different paintings?’ Lawson spoke slowly, trying to buy some time while she thought of an answer. ‘To be honest, I would have to say if they are two different paintings, then’ – she struggled for the words – ‘then it’s one heck of a coincidence.’

‘Is it?’ came the reply. ‘Is it really?’

Lawson shivered as a childhood memory resurfaced. It was one of those defining moments of growing up, which mark the progress from innocence to knowledge. She had been watching her cat, Flossie, playing with a mouse in the garden. She was lying on the lawn, and Flossie was toying with the mouse as she sometimes
toyed with a ball of wool. Occasionally she would touch it, allowing it to move this way or that, but never once taking its eyes off its helpless playmate. Jan remembered feeling intensely uneasy. The cat was playing, but this was no toy she was playing with, this was a live, harmless little mouse. She did not fully understand what she was seeing, and yet she felt anxious almost to the point of fear. She called Flossie by name, but the cat ignored her. The mouse ran a little way to the left, and Flossie pranced effortlessly into its path, so it stopped, mesmerized. It was a bright sunny day, but at that moment a cloud drifted over, and a shadow passed across that familiar patch of grass, and next door’s Jack Russell began to bark, and – all in an instant – Flossie the cat had pounced and snapped the mouse’s neck with a single bite.

‘What about Dominic Russell?’ Holden said, her face a picture of innocence. ‘He’s got lots of oil paintings.’

‘You think he did it?’

‘Hey! That’s a mighty big leap. But there’s a painting or paintings at the middle of this business. And Maria had, at the very least, a business relationship with him. So I’d say Dominic Russell seems an obvious place to start looking.’

Two unmarked cars pulled up outside D.R. Antiquities just after 2.00 p.m. that afternoon. Dominic Russell, who was preoccupied with labelling a couple of garden statuettes he had just acquired, looked up, his hopes briefly raised that this might herald a serious bit of business. God knows, he needed it. But when the passenger door of the leading car opened and DI Holden got out, he knew it was not to be.

‘You’re not, by any chance, here to buy a retirement gift for the Chief Superintendent, because if you are I am sure I can do a very good deal.’ He grinned as he said it. Mr Bonhomie himself.

‘This is a search warrant.’ Holden held up a piece of paper in front of his face. ‘My colleagues and I would appreciate it if we could have your cooperation.’

‘A search warrant?’ Dominic Russell spoke with apparently
genuine surprise. ‘What on earth are you looking for?’

‘I am not required to answer that question, Mr Russell,’ Holden replied. ‘But we would like to see every single painting you have on the premises.’

‘Well, you’d better be bloody careful! If you damage them—’

‘We won’t damage them,’ Holden assured him.

The big policeman, whom Dominic remembered from their previous visit though he couldn’t for the life of him recall his name, stepped forward in his role of polite enforcer. ‘All the more reason to cooperate with us, sir.’

For an hour they searched, Holden and Fox in one team, watched by Dominic, and Lawson and Wilson in the other, escorted by Sarah Russell, who had again been working in the office. It didn’t take long to see that the painting they sought was not on display, but Holden had hardly expected that it would. One of the two smaller buildings turned out to be an area for storage and repair, but careful examination of it proved fruitless. The third building stored mostly furniture, and despite Lawson and Wilson assiduously opening every door and drawer, no paintings were found.

‘So that’s that, is it?’ Dominic said. ‘Such as shame we couldn’t help you find whatever it is you are looking for.’

The mocking tone of his voice did nothing to improve Holden’s mood. She hadn’t liked him on first acquaintance, and she liked him even less now, the patronizing self-satisfied git. But she wasn’t ready to give up yet. They were back in the office, and she looked around again, scanning the room for inspiration. ‘You have catalogues of your paintings, do you?’

‘Nothing current.’

‘When did you last produce one?’

‘Well,’ he said warily. ‘I suppose that would have been a couple of months ago.’

‘Can I see a copy, please.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And maybe we could have four coffees, too?’

‘We’re not a branch of Starbucks, you know.’ The arrogance was
back in his voice, an arrogance which suggested he felt less threatened now. Maybe, for him, the danger had passed. Publicly available catalogues held no incriminating secrets.

‘Would you rather my sergeant did it? I wouldn’t. Because number one he’s very clumsy, and number two he makes bloody lousy coffee.’

Dominic turned towards his wife who had taken up her guard dog position behind the desk. ‘Sarah, would you mind?’

‘Actually, I’d like to talk to her. Why don’t you make it yourself? Constable Wilson will come and advise you on our milk and sugar requirements.’

For a moment it looked as though he was going to object. Agrunt of disgust emitted from his mouth, and Holden prepared to resist, but his bluster was just that, and he turned and left the room, trailed by Wilson.

Sarah Russell meanwhile had stood up, and had removed a slim publication from the shelves behind her. ‘Here you are!’ She slapped the catalogue down on the desk.

Holden picked it up and passed it to Lawson. She had already given up on it as being of use, but you never knew. In the meantime, she was more interested in Sarah.

‘You must be a very busy woman, Mrs Russell. We come here, and you’re here. Sergeant Fox goes to Cornforth and you’re there. We return here, and lo and behold here you are again.’

‘Dominic is short-handed at the moment.’

‘Yes, I remember you saying that last time we were here. A French-Canadian, wasn’t it? Minette?’