Blood on the Cowley Road (22 page)

‘Mother!' she replied.

‘Is this a bad time?'

‘No!' she lied. Three unexplained deaths, two of them unquestionably murder. Several leads, but no clear pattern to them. Junior staff looking to her for inspiration and guidance. Of course, it was a bad time! But, curiously, Holden found herself relieved to hear her mother's voice.

‘We've been thinking about you, Doris and I have.'

‘Well, that's good of you,' she replied.

‘And praying for you, of course.'

‘Of course,' her daughter echoed. She didn't believe in prayer – not really – but it was ridiculously comforting to know that these two old women had been spending their time praying for her. After all, what sane person would not like to be prayed for?

‘So, any progress, then?' her mother asked eagerly.

‘If you mean by that, have we arrested anyone, or are we about to arrest anyone, the answer is no. There's been no spectacular break through.' She spoke firmly, as if she was a parent lecturing a somewhat dippy child. But of course the thoughts of stern parents do not always match their outward demeanour. And tapping away inside her head was a question that was becoming more insistent by the minute. What about Blunt and Sarah Johnson?

‘Well, there will be,' came the confident reply. ‘We have asked the Lord to show you the truth, and he will not refuse the prayers of those who cry out in faith to him.'

‘I am busy, Mother,' her daughter said hastily, suddenly keen to disengage. A born-again Christian mother. God, was that what she had been landed with?

‘Remember what I said this morning,' Mrs Holden said, ignoring her daugher's alleged business. She had never been a woman to be
swayed from her objective. ‘Mace and Sarah Johnson. They are the key to the mystery. I just know they are.'

‘Is that what God told you?' her daughter replied waspishly.

From the other end of the phone there came a gasp that was fully audible to the younger woman, and she felt immediate shame at the cheapness of her own remark. There followed only silence, as each waited for the other to make the next move. Eventually it was the older woman who spoke.

‘We will continue to pray for you,' she said firmly. ‘Goodbye!'

 

‘Guv! We've found a link.'

It was a bare two minutes since Holden
mère
and Holden
fille
had terminated their conversation. The latter looked up at the intruders, irritation and mayonnaise smeared across her face. Her right hand brandished two-thirds of a tuna mayonnaise sandwich, the first third of which was wedged irrevocably inside her mouth. Talking was briefly out of the question, so she waved the two young puppies that stood eagerly in her doorway towards the chairs.

‘We could come back in a few minutes,' WPC Lawson said in an only slightly apologetic tone. The cat that got the cream, Holden decided, as the animal analogies came thick and fast. She shook her head, returned the uncommitted part of the sandwich to its plastic triangle, and concentrated several seconds on chewing. Then a sip of coffee, and she looked up again at Lawson and Wilson.

‘OK,' she said, ‘Tell me about it.'

‘As you know, Guv,' Wilson started, ‘we've been searching the homes of Sarah Johnson, Martin Mace, and Jake Arnold. Mace was a dyed-in-the-wool supporter. Went to nearly every home and away game. The two guys you interviewed at the Kassam stadium before the game, Sam Sexton and Al Smith, they were his best mates and it looks like they always sat together. In the case of home games, that was always in the Oxford Mail stand. He kept a programme from every game he went to, and the tickets. He missed just four games last season, two in early September – holiday we reckon – and two in early December – more holiday, or maybe he was ill. However, Jake is a very different story. He went to just six games. One in January and one in February, both home games. Then Leyton Orient away in March. Two
more home games in April. And lastly the away game at Wrexham on 5 May.'

‘And did he sit in the Oxford Mail stand too?' asked Holden.

‘No, Guv. The South Stand. The connection isn't with the home games.'

‘So they sat together at the away games, then?'

‘One moment, Guv,' Wilson said, trying to wrest back control of the story. ‘We found just three programmes in Sarah Johnson's flat. For the same two home games in April that Jake Arnold went to, and the away game at Wrexham in May.'

‘So Jake and Sarah went to the same games,' Holden summarized. ‘So they maybe went together.'

‘That seems likely. We know Jake bought two tickets for those April home games, whereas he bought only one ticket for the games he went to in January and February.'

Holden leant back and surveyed Wilson and Lawson. Was this all they had? Was this what they meant when they had said they had found a connection, because she sure as hell needed more than a pattern of Jake and Sarah building up some sort of relationship over football. She needed something, if not concrete, then at least solid.

‘That Jake and Sarah had some sort of personal relationship isn't exactly news,' she said quietly.

‘We know,' said Lawson, finally breaking her silence. ‘But take a look at this. It's a programme from the away game at Wrexham. We found it in Mace's house.' She laid a programme carefully on the table in front of Holden. Then repeated the process with two more. ‘This one came from Jake Arnold's loo, and this from the bookshelves in Sarah's flat.'

‘What's your point exactly?' Holden said sharply.

Wilson leant forward now and, like a conjuror performing a card trick, very deliberately turned each programme over. As was traditional, the back page showed the two squads of players, Wrexham down the left, and Oxford as the away team down the right. As was also traditional, the fans who bought these programmes had marked the players chosen for the team that day. In biro. In fact in a rather unusual colour of biro. Purple. All three programmes were annotated in purple biro.

‘It looks very much like the same biro. We think they must have sat together for the game, Jake and Sarah and Martin Mace,' Wilson said.

Holden peered closely at the programmes. She was no forensic expert, but if that wasn't the same biro then it was one hell of a coincidence. ‘It is certainly a connection,' she admitted grudgingly. ‘But do you think they travelled to the game together, or just bumped into each other beforehand and so went in together?'

‘We think they travelled together,' Lawson said.

‘Think!' Holden snorted, turning to face Lawson. ‘What do you mean, think? Because thinking isn't enough, Lawson, as I'm sure you know.'

‘It's not just guesswork,' Lawson said, while producing another piece of paperwork from her lap. But this was just a single sheet of A4, a police incident report. ‘On the evening of 4 May,' Lawson continued, ‘Jake's car was vandalized.'

‘By Danny Flynn,' Holden replied, stopping Lawson in her tracks. Holden smiled a rather smug smile, pleased to see the surprise on both their faces. ‘Danny admitted as much when we saw him the other morning. He burst in when we were interviewing one of the workers, Rachel Laing. But at the time, I don't imagine Jake knew who had done it. Still, I am interrupting you. Do carry on.'

‘Well, the fact was Jake had a problem when he saw his car Saturday morning. He and Sarah had tickets but no transport to get to Wrexham. So what do they do? They get a lift. With, to judge from the purple biro, Mace.'

‘And,' added Wilson, ‘maybe with Al Smith and Sam Sexton too, since they were inseparable from Mace on match days.'

The three of them fell silent. Outside, an irate driver hooted impatiently at another road user. Inside, Lawson and Wilson waited for their boss to pronounce. ‘So,' she summarized, 'we have a connection, in point of fact a very strong connection. Five people drive to Wrexham on 5 May in a vehicle. Of these five, three are now dead. Sarah Johnson jumped – or was pushed – to her death, Jake Arnold was slugged over the head and dumped into the river, and Martin Mace lured to his allotment and burnt to death. Al Smith and Sam Sexton are still alive. But I'd bet my life they know something. Sexton was very on edge when we interviewed him. So my question is, what happened on 5 May?
That's what we've got to find out.'

‘Why don't we go and pick up Sexton and Smith,' Lawson said. ‘They must know something.'

‘Do we know where they'd be? Still at work presumably.'

‘They do building work together often,' chimed in Wilson, who had typed up the notes the morning after the match.

‘Which means they could be working anywhere presumably?'

‘Sexton has a wife,' Lawson said, anxious not to be outdone by Wilson.

Holden looked at her watch. ‘You could waste a lot of time trying to find them. Let's leave it for now, and pick them up once they get home from work. In the meantime, I want you two to do some research. Police records. Press reports. What I want you to look for is something that could have caused someone to want revenge. Anywhere between here and Wrexham, on 5 May.'

‘What are you going to do, Guv?' Wilson said.

Holden looked at him sharply. ‘Why, Wilson. Are you monitoring me?'

‘No, Guv, definitely not, I was just—'

‘I'm going to take another look at Sarah Johnson,' she continued in a voice that would have sliced through pack ice. ‘If, that is,' she added, ‘it is all right by you, Wilson!'

For several seconds, a freezing silence descended on the trio. Holden knew she had gone too far, but had no intention of saying sorry. She sniffed, and when she spoke again, her voice was under control, and almost human.

‘Wilson, would you mind getting the file on her, please.'

Wilson needed no further asking. ‘I think it's on Fox's desk.' And with that he scuttled out the room.

Holden looked at Lawson, who in turn looked back at her. A woman who had got somewhere, and a woman who wanted to be there. ‘You think I'm too hard on him?' Holden asked.

Lawson shrugged, but offered no comment.

‘Tell me!' she insisted. ‘Woman to woman. Off the record.'

Lawson shrugged again. ‘A bit hard, yes. But mind you, he does ask for it.'

‘And are you hard on him, Lawson?

This time there was no shrug. ‘Yes. But I look after him too.'

‘So do I, Lawson.'

‘Damn!' The curse came from the corridor, and both women immediately recognized it as Wilson's. Out of their sight, the flustered constable dropped to his knees to pick up several sheets that had fallen from the file in his arms. Then, back on his feet, he hurried the last couple of paces to the door and pushed into DI Holden's office, head down. ‘Here you are,' he said ‘that's everything off Fox's desk.' And he set the bundle down in front of Holden, oblivious to the amused smiles that the two women were exchanging.

 

Holden didn't notice them at first. It was some 20 minutes since Wilson and Lawson had retreated from her room down the corridor to their own, and in that time she hadn't so much as opened the file on Sarah Johnson, let alone reread it. What with visiting the loo again – she really should cut down on the coffee – getting some paracetamol from her car, and then being ambushed on her way back by Linda from personnel, the time had raced unrelentingly forward, leaving all her good intentions in its slipstream. Back in her office, instead of sitting down and opening the file, she stood and gazed out of the dirty office window. Not that her brain registered anything that was happening in the stop-start Oxford Road traffic, for it was focused on violent death and also on her mother. Not that she was wishing one on the other, far from it. But somehow her mother's words refused to go away. ‘Martin Mace and Sarah Johnson,' she had insisted. ‘They are the key to the mystery.' Who the hell did she think she was? Miss Marple? What the heck did she know about solving crimes? And yet maybe she was right. They were linked by this game of football at Wrexham, of course. But they were linked too by Jake. Jake and Sarah had a strong relationship, and Mace and Jake were or had been lovers. And then there was Blunt, a man Holden neither liked nor trusted. But that, she had to remind herself, did not make Blunt a killer. But he was another link, no question. And Blunt and Jake disliked, maybe even hated, each other.

‘Guv! Guv!'

Holden turned round reluctantly, to see Lawson and Wilson in her room again.

‘We've found something, Guv!' said Wilson.

‘What?' she said pulling herself irritably into the present moment.

‘A car crash on the 5th. On a side road just off the A5, about 10 miles south of Wrexham. A VW van went off the road, about eight o'clock at night. Six passengers, all killed.' Wilson paused and glanced at Lawson,

‘I rang the locals,' she said, taking over the baton. ‘The van was from Oxfordshire. Three of them from Witney, and three from Oxford itself. They were peace campaigners, on the way home from some demo.'

‘You have a list of names?'

‘Yes, and pictures,' Wilson said, holding out a wadge of paper in his hand.

‘One more thing,' Lawson said. ‘We think it might be relevant, given the nature of Martin Mace's death. The van caught fire. They reckon the petrol tank burst open on impact. It looks like all the occupants burnt to death.'

‘You think it may be relevant, Lawson?' Holden exclaimed. ‘That's the understatement of the year. Well, drop everything and for God's sake go and pick them up – Smith and Sexton – before the murderer gets to them too.'

 

Two minutes later Holden frowned hard at the sheet of paper she was reading, and scratched at her forehead. She had just finished reading the single-page report of Fox and Wilson's visit to Anne Johnson. She leafed quickly through the rest of the file, not reading, but looking. Then she got up, crossed the room to her open door and walked purposefully down the corridor. ‘Wilson!' she called, as she turned into the second doorway on the left. The startled constable looked up. He was sitting at his desk, with one hand holding a bag of salted crisps in its palm while the fingers of the other deposited some of its contents into his mouth. He jumped to his feet, almost dropping the bag as he did, wondering what the heck he had done now.