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‘Silence is one thing,’ came the reply, ‘but meal times should be social occasions.’
Susan Holden looked up from her glass, and smiled aggressively at her mother. ‘I was thinking, Mother, not just being silent.’
‘That’s what your father used to say.’
‘I know.’ And she smiled again.
‘And he used to drink too much!’
‘For God’s sake, Mother, I’m allowed to drink. I’m off duty, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ And to prove her point, she took a swig from her glass. ‘Now, Karen, for God’s sake just tell her all about it, while I carry on thinking.’
Karen Pointer took the tiniest sip from her glass, and then began to speak, slowly and methodically. She hoped that by doing so she might somehow cause the hostility between mother and daughter to dissipate. It was the first time she had experienced it, and she hated it. Because she loved Susan, and because she had already become fond of her mother too. ‘Dominic Russell was shot at very close range. The gun must have been virtually touching his skin. You can tell by the powder burns on the skin, and the nature of the entrance wound in the head. Death would have been instantaneous.’
‘So he could have shot himself?’ Mrs Holden did not believe in keeping questions for the end.
‘Yes. He could have. But there’s no certainty.’
‘What about fingerprints on the gun, or DNA or whatever?’
‘If we could find traces of someone else, then that would be significant, because if someone else was there, then murder becomes the favourite. But so far the only traces we’ve got are from Dominic, which means that we can’t tell conclusively whether it’s murder or suicide.’
‘Tell her about the painting,’ Susan said loudly, before taking another swig from her glass. ‘Tell her about the damn painting.’
‘There was a painting near the body,’ Karen said quickly. ‘We don’t know much about it yet. It looks quite old, painted in oils, and it had been badly slashed with a knife, diagonally both ways.’
‘Why on earth would someone do that?’
‘Maybe they didn’t bloody like it!’ Susan’s loud interruption caused both her companions to look at her, and then at each other as if to gauge their next move. Susan was oblivious of the atmosphere she was creating, and she drained the last of her glass again, and again clumped it noisily down on the table.
‘Was the painting valuable?’ Mrs Holden asked, but not of her daughter.
‘We don’t know, yet,’ Karen replied quickly. She hadn’t seen Susan like this before, and she wasn’t sure how to handle the situation, but she couldn’t let it drift. She stood up, and turned towards Susan. ‘We’ve both had a long day. Time to be going, I think.’
Susan looked up at her, and her eyes blinked. For a moment, Karen feared she was going to receive another blast of aggression, but the face that looked at her did so with a blank expression and a watery smile. She raised herself slowly to her feet, a naughty child suddenly realizing she has gone too far, and nodded towards her mother. ‘Thank
you for supper,’ she said, and began to make her way uncertainly towards the door. She tripped, and half fell, but managed to right herself. Karen quickly moved forward, grabbing her arm. ‘Steady!’ she said.
‘Christ, I feel sick,’ Susan replied, just before she was.
When Holden walked into her office the next morning just after eight o’clock, her nausea of the previous night was a thing of unpleasant memory only. Sometimes being sick is the best option. Throw it up and get it out of your system. Though she doubted her mother would have seen it like that. She ought to ring and apologize. She looked at her watch. Maybe later.
At half past eight, the rest of her team rolled in, gathering in her room with their first coffees of the day. Dr Bennett, she was told, had been hosting a family get-together on the previous day.
‘It was her birthday,’ Lawson chirped eagerly. ‘Lovely lady, isn’t she. She asked us in and showed us the cake.’
‘We arranged to pick her up at eleven,’ said Wilson, intervening. Sometimes he reckoned Lawson got a bit sidetracked by trivialities.
‘It’s a lovely house too,’ Lawson continued enthusiastically. ‘Even if it’s a bit Bohemian.’
Holden nodded. She felt frustrated that Dr Bennett wasn’t immediately on tap. It was vital to know more about this painting, and in particular how valuable it was. And she also needed Karen to shed some more light on Dominic Russell’s death, and sooner rather than later. Not that she could fault Karen. She had left for work shortly before seven, waking her up just before she left with a hot cup of tea, a kiss on the forehead, and not a single word of reproach. God, she was lucky!
‘Eleven is fine,’ she acknowledged, shifting back to the present moment. ‘We’ve plenty to do.’ Which was true. For a start, she needed a proper chat with Sarah Russell. No, cancel that. Not a chat. What she needed, and was going to do, was her damnedest to get some straight answers to some straight questions, such as where had Sarah Russell been going to at 7.45 that Saturday morning when her typical Saturday started with a lie-in. In fact, she needed, they all needed, to take a close look at Sarah Russell. She wouldn’t be the first or last – woman to kill her husband, and if the painting was very valuable, and he had been planning on selling it behind her back, well, it wasn’t hard to imagine how – if she’d found out – that might have been enough to tip her over the edge. All this assumed, of course, that Dominic Russell hadn’t blown his own brains out. Which brought her back to Karen.
Holden managed to resist the temptation to pick up the phone and start punching in the numbers until 9.45 a.m. She had originally decided she would wait for Karen to ring her, but she had spoken on the phone to Sarah Russell just after nine o’clock, and they had agreed that Fox and she would call round about ten thirty. It was, Susan had decided, a good time to arrive, as if they were old friends dropping in socially, at what her mother would have called coffee and chin-wag time.
‘Sorry to chase up like this,’ she said when Karen answered the phone. ‘It’s just that—’
‘It’s just that you’ve got three unexplained deaths on your hands and you need some help. No need to apologize, Susan. To be honest, I expected a phone call some time ago.’
