A Narrow Margin of Error Read Free Page B

She and Rowan were not touching, she noticed, but her arm was casually slung around the waist of the man beside her.
    Dwayne Cox was by far the best-looking of the bunch, and at six feet in height one of the tallest. With black hair and blue eyes he must have presented serious competition for Rowan, and she wondered idly if the murder victim had been jealous of him. From the quick run-down she’d given the notes so far, Rowan had had a voracious sexual appetite. And although he was good-looking himself in a more quirky, almost gamine kind of way, Cox was much more classically handsome. At twenty-one, he was a year older than Rowan, and was in his final year of reading experimental psychology.
    Darla de Lancie matched her cute name, and was tiny – perhaps five feet – with red hair, freckles and big green eyes. She had a heart-shaped face and in the photograph had her arms flung around Rowan Thompson’s neck, and was giving the camera a wide, infectious smile. She was also, according to the CIO’s notes, the victim’s main girlfriend. The CIO at the time had been Detective Inspector John Gorman, and he’d made it clear that Darla de Lancie knew full well that she did not have exclusive rights on the promiscuous Rowan, and had to be well up on the list of suspects. She was also a year older than Rowan, and was in the process of gaining a BA in English literature.
    The odd man out in the photograph was easily Barry Hargreaves. A mature student, at the time of the killing he’d been forty-one years old. Six foot two and balding, he looked like the construction worker he’d been until having what DI Gorman clearly thought was a somewhat typical mid-life crisis. Hargreaves, married for twenty years with teenage twin daughters , had apparently woken up one morning and decided that he should put his brains to better use, and had taken A-levels in mathematics and physics at night school. He’d left regular school at sixteen in spite of a raft of excellent O-Levels in order to earn money, and had, until then, never seemed to regret it. He’d gained a place at one of the newer colleges through the auspices of some government scheme or other, and was in the first year of a three-year course in Mathematics.
    Idly, Hillary wondered if he’d ever finished the course, and wondered what he was doing now. But then, no doubt, within the next few days she’d be finding out, for all four of them were suspects in Thompson’s murder.
    Along with the house’s owner, sixty-four-year-old Wanda Landau, who lived in the basement flat, it seemed unlikely that anyone else had access to Rowan’s room.
    Wanda Landau had discovered him in his room at about ten o’clock in the morning. He’d been lying on the floor, roughly halfway between his bed and the sofa, with the scissors which had killed him lying beside him. From the crime scene photos, it was obvious that the room had been used as some sort of workshop , for swathes of coloured fabrics draped a lot of the unfashionable, brown wood furniture, and a sewing machine was set up on his table.
    Gorman quickly established that Darla often made her own clothes, and tended to use Rowan’s room to do so, because it was bigger than her own, and gave her more space.
    She’d admitted that the scissors were hers, and were kept sharp in order to cleanly cut the silks and satins that she preferred.
    Forensics had discovered that whoever had killed him had washed the scissors at the small washbasin beside the bed – and probably their hands too – before tossing the scissors down beside the body and leaving.
    Gorman had ascertained that it was almost certain, due to the amount of blood at the scene, and the probability of arterial spraying, that the killer must have had a considerable amount of blood all over him – or her. But no witnesses came forward who could remember seeing anyone in the area at the time, walking down the street with blood on their clothing. Of course, it was the middle of