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‘What’s the address?’
‘Beaumont Street.’
‘That’s not so far.’
Two minutes later Holden and Fox were driving back along Bainton Road towards the Woodstock Road. Or they would have been had a delivery lorry not stopped in the middle of the road to disgorge a sofa and pair of armchairs. Lawson and Wilson had been left behind with strict instructions to detain Lucy Tull if she arrived home. Fox got out to hurry the delivery men up, but Holden was unconcerned. A minute or two shouldn’t matter. She pulled her mobile out of her jacket pocket, and realized with disgust that it was still powered off. She had forgotten. Her blooming mother. She pressed the red button and waited for it to kick into life. A text message soon flashed up. She viewed it. It was telling her she had a voice message. She keyed ‘121’ and waited. It was from Karen. She recognized her voice, but her words were faint and indistinct, and besides, Fox had just got back into the car and had started talking. ‘Shut up, Sergeant!’ she snapped, and pressed ‘1’ to listen to the message again.
‘Christ!’ she swore, and with such intensity that Fox jerked his head round even though he had now reached the Woodstock Road and was trying to negotiate a safe moment to turn out on to it.
‘She’s with Karen!’ There was panic in her voice. ‘She’s at Karen’s flat.’
Fox was staring at her, trying to take this information in. Holden could see his blankness, but could feel too the tide of absolute panic rising through her body. She willed herself to speak more slowly, but the fear was all but overwhelming.
‘Lucy Tull is at Dr Pointer’s flat. For God’s sake, get there. Don’t bloody hang about.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Je
richo Court. Over Aristotle Lane. If you turn into Polstead Road, and then take a right and left at the end.’
Fox was already out on the Woodstock Road, and heading south fast. This might not be his part of Oxford, but he knew where Polstead Road was, a road of huge houses so far removed from his own ex-council semi that it was way beyond a joke. Shit. Five hundred metres had passed ridiculously quickly and he found himself braking hard and sharply. He flashed his headlights and hooted too, but even so it took several seconds for the oncoming, almost stationary traffic to make a gap into which he could turn. That’s the problem with plain-clothes coppers and plain-clothes cars. Other road users treat you with the anger they reserve for the BMW drivers of this world. A toxic mixture of anger and contempt.
Some forty seconds and several terrified pedestrians later they were approaching Jericho Court and Holden was screaming at Fox to stop. She pushed her door open and, before he had cut the engine, she was out on the pavement and sprinting towards an eight-storey block of flats that rose impersonally before them.
Holden did not wait for the lift. She took the stairs two steps at a time, driving herself upwards as if her very existence depended on it. She was a slim woman, but she never jogged, never went to the gym, and rarely swam except when on holiday, so by the time she had reached the second floor her muscles were starting to scream their complaints against this improbable and unreasonable imposition. As she rose higher, the pain spread to her lungs, and her head, and soon her whole being was demanding that she relent. But dread drove her on, forcing her legs to stretch and climb, stretch and climb till she was beyond pain and she stood finally on the seventh floor at the door to Karen’s. She paused only then, to catch her breath and to screw herself up for whatever she might find beyond the door. Then she put her key into the door, twisted it, and pushed straight into the flat.
‘Karen!’ she shouted. All her training and all her common sense should have led Holden to utter this word in the manner of someone returning home after a day at work – ‘Hi there, I’m home!’ But she didn’t. She shouted, in a shout gripped and moulded and empowered by the deepest fear. She looked around the living area and saw no one. ‘Karen!’ she called again, as hope and desperation battled with each other. And then she felt a breeze on her face, and saw the long net curtains flapping in that same current of air. The French window on to the balcony was open.
Her movement, previously frantic, was now slow motion. Through the curtains, she could see the shadow of a person. The figure did not move. Like a shop’s marionette, it stood there, as if looking out across the canal that lay below, or maybe looking in through the curtains, watching. It was impossible to tell which. Thoughts, fears, assessments ran through her mind, but these were processes that took fractions of seconds, and almost immediately she resumed her forward progress. She was conscious she had no weapon in her hand. If it was Lucy on the balcony with a knife, she would need something, but looking for one did not occur to her. Her only thought was to get to the motionless figure out there, see who it was, and then react. It was as simple as that. Nothing else was possible. But please God, let it be Karen!
Detective Sergeant Fox should have been at his Inspector’s back. He had followed in her footsteps across the manicured lawn that fronted the flats. But as he reached the entrance, he almost collided with a man who was himself sprinting round the corner from the back of the flats. He was wearing uniform green trousers and polo shirt, and as soon as he saw Fox he started shouting. ‘Have you got a mobile? I need to ring “999”!’
It took Fox a few seconds to extract more information from the man, who was gibbering with shock, and then he was running again, hurtled his big frame round the corner of the flats, down the side and then round the next corner. And then, despite, all his years of experience, he stopped dead and for two or even three seconds stood unmoving.
The woman’s body – for a woman it clearly was – was spreadeagled across the black railings which fronted the edge of the canal. The body had landed centrally, so that the spikes had pierced the width of the body just above the waist. Her legs were splayed, facing him, and her head and arms hung slack over the other side, above the dark, slow-running waters of the canal, so that he could not see the face. Fox shook himself, and moved forward again until he reached the railings. It seemed impossible that the woman could have survived the fall, but he stretched for and grabbed hold of her left hand, feeling for a pulse. She was, undeniably, dead, and he released her wrist. It was still warm. Finally, he pulled himself up on the railing, so he could see her face. It was, oddly, undamaged and even serene. It was the face of Dr Karen Pointer.
Fox turned and looked up. He, of course, had never visited Karen Pointer’s flat, but he could see only one person above him, on the balcony below the topmost one. He couldn’t see who it was. He assumed it was Lucy Tull, but, whoever it was or wasn’t, he knew for certain that his boss was in danger. He started to run again, back round the flats. But on breasting the second corner he had to take sudden evasive action to avoid a grey-haired woman coming the other way. ‘Is she all right?’ the woman said, apparently unconcerned that a man of considerable bulk had very nearly flattened her. But Fox wasn’t interested in either answering her or stopping. At the bottom of the stairwell, he hit the lift button in case it was waiting there. He would run up the stairs if he had to, but he knew the limits of his own mobility. Miraculously the door opened instantly, and he pushed himself inside it. Eight floors. He hit the button for the seventh. As the lift moved steadily upwards, he tried to work out on which side the canal would be, and so where the entrance to Karen’s flat was likely to be, because he was pretty sure there would be at least two flats per floor, and he didn’t want to waste time trying to enter the wrong one. The door opened at seven, and he rushed out, turning left. The door in front of him, with a ‘7b’ on it, was ajar. At least he wasn’t going to have to force it. He took a gulp, like a diver about to plunge off the high board, and thrust his way through the entrance.
‘Hello, Inspector.’ The figure on the balcony moved forward, pushing the flapping curtains to the side with her left hand.
‘Where is she?’ Holden spoke quietly, firmly, as her training kicked in over her emotions. ‘What have you done to her?’
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ came the reply.
These words and the unutterable knowledge that they conveyed hit Holden like a tidal wave, deluging her so completely that she felt she must be swept into oblivion. Then the wave retreated, sucking and pulling every present, past and future hope out of her so completely that oblivion would have seemed bliss. But Susan Holden was a woman whose instincts had from her earliest years been honed towards fight not flight, a woman who lived in the reality of life, and not the fantasy of wish fulfilment. She was a survivor, and it was this instinct that cut in now, as Lucy Tull advanced slowly towards her, her left hand hanging loose at her side and her right hand held menacingly behind her back.
‘Stand still!’ Holden demanded. ‘Hands out to the front!’
Lucy Tull stopped, and brought her hidden hand into view. In it, she held a knife. It was a kitchen knife, with a wide blade, the sort of heavy chopping knife you dice meat or vegetables with, that Karen had diced her meat and vegetables with. ‘Such a terrible accident,’ she said blankly. ‘She just fell.’
Holden spoke slowly. ‘Put the knife down!’
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Her voice was now high and shrill, and she lifted her right hand so that the knife was pointing directly at Holden. ‘You’re trying to trick me!’ Her voice had now changed to a hiss, and the pupils of her eyes had shrunk to such a degree that they were almost invisible. She stepped forward again, swaying slightly like a boxer weighing up a dangerous opponent, and her face was an emotionless mask. But it wasn’t her face that Holden was watching. Holden moved the weight of her body forward, feinting towards Lucy’s left, and then, as her opponent’s knife hand slewed across to counter the move, she hurled herself forward, grabbing for Lucy’s right wrist as she did so. Her hand closed tightly round its target, but as it did so a lightning flash of agony cut into her lower arm. Then her left hand joined the right, and together they gripped and twisted so violently that Lucy Tull screamed and the knife fell to the floor. Holden now pushed hard with her shoulder into Lucy’s unbalanced body, and sent her sprawling across the floor.
Briefly she paused, scrabbling for the knife, and then hurling it way behind her, well out of reach of her assailant. But Lucy was back on her feet and retreating, back through the swirling curtains and out on to the balcony. For a moment, Holden paused, wondering where the hell Fox was and why he wasn’t there backing her up, but she had no intention of waiting. She had got Karen’s killer cornered, and she was going to nail her if that was the last thing she did.
‘God, didn’t she scream as she fell!’ Lucy’s voice, high and loud and mocking, sliced through the curtain. Adrenaline flooded through Holden’s veins, fuelling her rage, and like a thing demented she burst through the flimsy barrier of curtain that separated her from her quarry, for her quarry was what Lucy Tull had now become. She crashed into her, and together they staggered and lurched against the balcony railing. Down below them someone screamed, but Holden was aware only of herself and Lucy Tull. She twisted round, trying to get a lock on her opponent, and for a moment she did, but then an elbow crashed with stunning force into the side of her head, and her grip slackened, and Lucy broke free. Holden fell to the ground, but instantly thrust herself up, conscious that if Lucy escaped back through the windows and into the flat, then she herself would be in serious danger – if not from the knife she had tried to throw away, then from the other four knives that she knew lived in Karen’s butcher’s block. Again she threw herself at Lucy, catching her by the door. This time she was more succes
