Blood on the Cowley Road Read Free Page A

months?’
    â€˜It was hardly a state secret, now was it?’
    Fox’s eyes were still on the plaque, as if scanning it might somehow bring him a blinding revelation. When that didn’t work, he read it out loud: ‘26 April. Jo Smith stood here while contemplating suicide.’ When he looked up, Bicknell had moved back to the desk and was turning on his computer.

    â€˜Who was Jo Smith?’ he asked quietly.
    â€˜Jo Smith?’ Bicknell snorted. ‘Jo Smith was a figment of my bloody imagination. All right?’
    Fox spun round with a sudden spurt of anger. Who the hell did Bicknell think he was? For a second he imagined the pleasure to be gained from punching the cockiness out of him. Fuelled by the thought, he strode over to the desk and leant with all the physical threat he could muster across Bicknell’s personal space.
    â€˜Don’t you regret what you did at all? Hasn’t it occurred to you that it might have been your smart-arsed project that tipped her over the edge? That if you had bloody well stayed in bed that day, she might still be walking around Oxford today?’
    If Bicknell was taken aback by Fox’s burst of anger, he wasn’t going to show it. ‘If I did tip her over the edge,’ he snarled back, ‘so fucking what? Who are you to pass judgement, detective? How the hell do you know that she isn’t better off dead than alive? Maybe life was, for her, just too bloody shitty to be worth carrying on.’
    â€˜And maybe she was just having a bad day,’ Fox responded. ‘Maybe if she had made it to the next day, she would have felt better.’
    â€˜Maybe you missed your vocation as social worker, detective.’
    Fox stood up straight again. Again pain shot across his lower back, but he kept his eyes full on Bicknell. ‘You’re quite a cool bastard aren’t you?’ he said, his voice now under control.
    â€˜Look, detective, let’s just get this straight, then you can stop trying to lay all this shit on me.’ Bicknell’s computer had come to life. He started to tap away on his keyboard as he spoke. ‘She’s dead, right? She chose to jump. Right? No one – unless, of course, you know any different – pushed her. She just climbed up to the top, looked out across the dreaming spires of sunny Oxford, and jumped. As a consequence, I got some great publicity – not to mention some cash from the newspapers. I’ve already had two galleries on the phone wanting me to exhibit my work. Sarah Johnson’s death was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. So if you want to know if I’ve any regrets, the answer is not many. If you want to know if I lie awake at night wondering if I behaved properly, I don’t. Now, if you’ll give me a couple minutes, I’ll burn these photos for you. Then, if you don’t object, I’ve got some phone calls to make. All right?’

CHAPTER 2
    When the door of Sarah Johnson’s flat was pulled back by a woman with brown shoulder-length hair, blue-grey eyes, slightly up-turned nose and a thin oval-shaped face, DS Fox felt as if he was seeing a ghost. He was a down-to-earth, sceptical man, but in the moment in which the door opened and he looked into the face of Anne Johnson, he was – however briefly – a believer. His logical approach to life should have prepared him for the facial similarity of the two sisters, but if less than an hour after scanning the blank features of a corpse in the morgue you come face to face with the living embodiment of that corpse, it would be easy for logic to get submerged by emotion.
    â€˜Yes?’ Anne Johnson had been rung two hours earlier by DC Wilson, but she too was briefly non-plused, primarily because she was expecting someone in uniform. Her first thought was that they were from the funeral directors, despite the fact that she had arranged for them to call round the following