The Oxford Murders by Peter Tickler

Author:Peter Tickler [TICKLER, PETER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

As for Ngung, it wasn’t just the pregnancy that forced me to act. It was letting Kat escape. Or rather, not just letting her, but helping her. One of my rules — my strictest rule — was that both of them should remain inside the confines of the house and grounds. ‘For your safety!’ I told them both. Kat for obvious reasons: she wasn’t capable of getting around safely. But Ngung because she was an illegal. She had no papers, no passport, no money. I sent money to her family back in Vietnam as I promised. Not a fortune, admittedly, but she would have had a much worse life back there.

But once she was pregnant, she changed. She became cocky, full of herself.

‘I thought it would be a treat for her,’ Ngung told me when I challenged her. ‘She said she wanted to meet a friend at the Turf Tavern. I think that is nice for her.’

‘The friend was a man,’ I snapped back at her.

But all she did was shrug in a rather insolent manner. ‘I not know that.’

She even helped her hire a taxi. She thought I was away, busy at a meeting in one of the colleges, and that I would never find out. But the meeting didn’t last long because the keynote speaker was involved in a car accident that morning, so I came back home and discovered that Kat wasn’t there.

And then the man she met turned out to be a private eye. Doug Mullen for crying out loud!

The problem is that I had no idea what she said to the guy. Was she in any state to tell him anything incriminating? Half the time she is out of it — the power of medication — but she managed to get to the Turf, so I couldn’t be sure. And why did she want to meet him anyway? Had someone put her up to it?

My first thought was that it must have been Ngung, but I didn’t see how she would have come up with the idea of approaching a private investigator. But later, when I thought about Julie and saw how much Kat liked her and how fond Julie seemed to be of her, I had this sudden revelation that perhaps it had been her who put Kat up to it. Not that it matters now.

* * *

The atmosphere in the room was anything but cordial. McPherson himself had descended from his office on the floor above “just to sit in.” But if his words were meant to make Andy Kingston feel relaxed and supported, they failed miserably. He felt as if he were on trial, and he also felt as if the case was in danger of disintegrating in his hands. He had misread Krystyna. He had been distracted by her physical attractiveness, and that had blinded him to the fact that she was a clever and ambitious detective constable who was clearly set on making a name for herself.

‘So, you lead, Andy.

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