Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I’m in any way responsible for his death.’ Cody brushed her hair back from her face and glowered.

  With a sigh, Ashleigh recognised a born grievance-monger and reminded herself that you should always leave your enemy a golden bridge over which to retreat. Not doing so might be a mistake Cody chose to make, but Ashleigh was smarter than that. ‘No. It must obviously have been very upsetting for you, as well as inconvenient. And as you worked so closely with him, it might be that there’s some comfort you can offer his parents.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Seemingly unconvinced, Cody turned as she sat and delivered herself promptly into the hands of a young woman Ashleigh had noticed hovering outside the window like a teenager waiting for a date and who had entered the cafe hot on Cody’s heels.

  ‘Dr Wilder.’ The smile was effortless, the confidence supreme. ‘Fi Styles. We met very briefly after your talk—’

  ‘A latte for me,’ said Cody to the waitress who’d presented herself as if she knew the hassle that would come with being slow. ‘And—?’ She looked at Ashleigh.

  ‘An Americano.’

  ‘An Americano. And a piece of that iced fruit cake.’

  Ashleigh shook her head at the offer of cake, watching Fi Styles bouncing on the balls of her feet as she waited.

  ‘Dr Wilder. About the interview. You told me I had to contact Owen but—’

  ‘It isn’t the right moment, Ms Styles. Can we leave it? I’ve got important business.’

  ‘Perhaps if I could call you.’

  ‘No. I’ll decide whether to call you.’ Cody sat down and turned her back.

  ‘I’ll give you my number. My card.’ Fi slid it onto the table.

  ‘I can find your number for myself, honey,’ sighed Cody, without turning around. There was a brief silence, after which Fi beat a retreat and Cody folded the card in half and tucked it into her pocket. ‘Sorry about this. These people have no subtlety.’

  They sat back while the waitress delivered the order and Fi removed herself completely from the cafe. ‘Okay.’ Cody ripped the top off a paper tube of sugar and shot the contents into her latte. ‘You’ve got questions. Ask them.’

  Outside the cafe, Fi loitered on the pavement by a stone wall thick with moss, swinging her handbag. Intrigued, Ashleigh nevertheless didn’t dare risk giving Cody less than her full attention, so she turned away from the journalist with her most reassuring smile. ‘We know the facts about Owen’s life, but not his personality. What sort of man was he?’

  ‘Intelligent. Dedicated. Hardworking.’ Cody stirred her coffee, rattling the spoon around inside the mug. ‘I take it you want the truth, not the eulogy. Uninspired. A follower, not a leader. A man with a low opinion of himself and no stomach for the tough things in life.’ She paused for a moment, the pause that Ashleigh recognised as encapsulating a fractional breath preceding a lie. ‘We got on well. I’m astonished that he took his life, even more astonished that something was troubling him and he felt he couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Your relationship was good?’

  ‘Oh, sure. How could it be anything else? We worked together a lot. Some of the time Owen lived in London and carried out research for me in the UK. I’m mainly based in New York, though I have spent a lot of time over here, in the various locations where the Wordsworths lived. One has to immerse oneself in their world. And Jeez, what a world it is.’ She glanced out of the window beyond Fi Styles, at the small-windowed grey stone building peeping through a thicket of rhododendrons. ‘When we were in the same place, it was full on. I work hard and I expect my students and researchers to do the same. You get nowhere without hard work.’ She dismembered the cake, splitting it into its constituent parts of marzipan, icing and cake, and popped the marzipan into her mouth.

  ‘Owen was on a year’s internship. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. My policy is to take researchers on year-long placements, and I choose post-graduate students looking for some experience of high-level research. Owen was working in that field.’ Another fractional pause. ‘I have a high reputation in academic circles. A year working for me is a valuable entry on a CV.’

  She lifted her head from the coffee and stared hard across the table. The pale eyes narrowed, shoulders drawn slightly backward in what Ashleigh, fascinated, judged the classic pose of a liar, or at the very least of someone skilled in not telling the whole truth. In her experience people often did that in the aftermath of a suicide, to protect themselves from real or imagined blame. They wanted to persuade themselves that it wasn’t their fault, that if they’d seen any clues to something being wrong it wasn’t reasonable to expect them to act upon them. But Cody Wilder’s manipulation of the story seemed somehow different.

  ‘Mr Armitstead was—’ Ashleigh made a point of checking her notes, though she knew them off by heart ‘—twenty-five.’

  ‘You brought me here to tell me what I already know?’

  ‘No. I’m hoping you can help me.’ It was a struggle to keep her patience. ‘How did his state of mind strike you beforehand?’

  Cody seemed to relax. ‘I can’t lie to you, Sergeant. As we approached the launch, Owen was struggling with the pressure. He ran my social media accounts, and I don’t think he was able to cope with some of the trolls on there. Of course, I tried to talk to him about it and I offered him reassurance, but he took it personally. He was always going to struggle to make it in academia. We have to learn to be bitches, in our ivory towers.’ Her laugh had an unpleasant edge. ‘I believe he was on some kind of medication, so I’m even more surprised at what he did. I wasn’t aware of anything specific that was troubling him. You’d need to ask around.’

  ‘Would you say your relationship was close?’

  ‘You mean, was I sleeping with him?’ This time the doctor gave way to a snort. ‘I’m forty this year and he was a very infantile twenty-five. When I go looking for a sexual partner, I don’t look for people like Owen Armitstead. It was a purely professional relationship.’

  *

  ‘She lied,’ Ashleigh said to Doddsy, calling him as soon as she’d got through a tortuous half an hour with Cody and ordered herself a second coffee with which to recover. ‘I don’t mean about everything. I don’t even mean a lot. But I’d bet my job that she doesn’t want us to know something, and after thirty minutes in her company I’m going to suggest that she’s a hell of a difficult woman to work with.’

  ‘The sister act didn’t work, then?’ At the other end of the line Doddsy allowed himself a sardonic laugh. ‘Sorry about that. I thought she’d be more receptive to you than to any of the rest of us.’

  Ashleigh watched through the steamy cafe window, as out in the street, Cody paused to check her phone. Fi Styles materialised beside her. The two exchanged words and Cody strode off, leaving Fi looking cheerfully after her. Strange, the way Fi aped Cody with the same style of jacket, jeans, boots and that 1950s high-school ponytail. ‘She wasn’t out and out rude. But she was obstructive and challenging and evasive. Hiding something, for sure. But that doesn’t mean she’s guilty of anything other than being unpleasant to him and smart enough to realise, with hindsight, that he couldn’t handle it and some people might say she could have stopped it.’

  ‘I think you’d have to say she has an abrupt management style.’ She could imagine Doddsy shaking his head.

  ‘She must have made a hell of an impact in the village. You should have seen the way the waitress was looking at her.’

  ‘They get their fair share of brash Americans, I daresay.’

  ‘I’ve come across a few myself, but never one like Cody Wilder.’

  ‘Yeah, but hopefully she’ll be on her way soon. I’ve had the results of the post-mortem back, and the crime scene assessment. It all points to suicide. The toxicology results show he’d taken a significant dose of his medication – not enough to kill him, but enough to stop him thinking straight. So except for the formalities, I think we can say it’s case closed.’

&nb
sp; 5

  Owen Armitstead’s family and Louise, the Family Liaison Officer who’d been assigned to them, arrived on their sorry pilgrimage to Grasmere on Friday afternoon. Meeting them at Cody’s rented cottage – the only one in the appropriately named Coffin Lane – gave Ashleigh her first chance to view the scene of their son’s apparent suicide.

  The kitchen wasn’t large, and she and Louise stepped out of the room as soon as they could, so as not to crowd the moment Owen’s parents spent with their son’s ghost. The dim hallway was typical of its type, the old-world set up with heavy wooden furniture, its walls hung with sepia photographs of hikers and fishermen, or Victorian etchings of surrounding fells. Less interested in the permanent furnishings than in the traces of its current occupants, Ashleigh took a careful look around her. There was little or no sign that Owen had ever been there, as if he’d kept his personal items out of sight. The two coats hanging behind the door, a rain jacket and a thick woollen coat, were both very obviously women’s clothing. The pair of leather cowboy boots in the corner had a feminine touch to their decoration. A pile of tattered old books contrasted with a stack of copies of Cody’s newest work, on a bureau whose top drawer had a key standing proud from its lock.

  She strayed into the kitchen while Louise guided the Armitsteads along the corridor to Owen’s room. The kitchen faced the village and she looked out onto a brave January day, with a sheen of ice on the surface of the lake and a breath of cloud snagged on the fell top. Sunlight chased shadows across the leafless woods on the lower slopes of the fells opposite and as Owen’s parents set about coming to terms with their loss, the village went about its business. A tourist bus passed along the road on the far side of Grasmere and turned into the car park. Figures moved in the New Agers’ camp. Life went on undisturbed as it had done since the days of the Wordsworths, as curious and eccentric to the villagers in their day as Cody was in a modern era.

  ‘Perhaps his personal items…?’ Owen’s mother was asking Louise as they left his room, almost pleading.

  ‘We’ll get them to you as soon as we can.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ Mrs Armitstead stood for a second on the doorstep as Louise opened it for her, straightening the faux-fur collar of her black coat in preparation for facing the world. She wiped a tear from her eye and strode out down the path. Her husband followed, then Louise, and finally Ashleigh closed and locked the door behind her and joined them as they stood where the branches of a yew tree overhung the gate. The cottage had been there a long time and the yew tree probably longer. They’d seen many an unhappy person come and go and would see out many more. ‘You’ve been so good to us. You, in particular. And Louise.’

  Louise was, indeed, a reassuringly calm woman with the manner of a sympathetic nurse, who seemed able to absorb the bad vibes and emit the positive, much more capable of handling emotions than Ashleigh herself had ever managed. What surprised her most as she walked down Coffin Lane next to Owen’s father with his mother and Louise walking behind them, was their extraordinary acceptance of their loss.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ his father said to her, as they reached the bottom of the lane. Cody had made a point of being absent when they’d arrived at the cottage and now the visit to the scene of their son’s death over, Owen’s parents had expressed a wish to walk around the village as he had done. ‘Heartbroken, yes. Of course. He was my child and I loved him. But Owen was someone who always found life difficult. He set himself impossibly high standards, personally and professionally, and he struggled to meet them.’ He dug in his pocket for a handkerchief, dabbing at his eyes.

  ‘It must be so difficult for you.’

  ‘Yes. And it won’t get any easier. But he was always going to be unhappy. Some people are. Even when he got this job – his dream job – we knew it wouldn’t make him happy. Even he knew it. He said that Cody Wilder was a challenge he had to take on and if he couldn’t work with her for a year, he didn’t deserve to make it in life. And it seems as though he couldn’t.’

  They turned past the field where the New Agers were camped. An enticing smell of cooked meat drifted towards them and a woman swathed in layers of hand-knitted woollens stood next to a campfire, turning something on the embers of a brazier. It looked as if they had a canny lifestyle, one they’d evolved until it worked. Sometimes, Ashleigh thought, there was a lot to be said for a simple life, free of the pressures people created for themselves. ‘Have you spoken to Dr Wilder?’

  ‘No.’ Mr Armitstead’s expression darkened. ‘She wrote us a very charming letter of condolence but she didn’t offer to see us and my wife and I would prefer not to meet her.’

  That must be why Cody had made herself scarce. She’d gone up on the fells, according to Chris, walking in the Wordsworths’ footsteps. ‘I see.’

  ‘Owen had a high opinion of Cody Wilder, Sergeant. Purely academically, of course. That’s something I understand. But personally, she didn’t live up to it.’

  Mrs Armitstead must have caught the end of the conversation and stepped forward, leaving Louise behind her. ‘Say what you mean. Owen had something of a crush on his boss, and while he never told us anything intimate—’

  ‘Obviously, he wouldn’t. He wasn’t like that.’ Her husband snatched at her hand in an agonised moment of shared loss.

  ‘I had a mother’s sense.’ Mrs Armitstead was talking to her husband now, as if Ashleigh and Louise weren’t there, and he was listening to her with the earnestness of a lover. ‘That woman is a sexual predator. Read some of the articles about her, some of the interviews she gave. She’s never made any pretence to be anything else, although of course she doesn’t call it that. She calls it sexual freedom and absence of guilt. She’s given interviews on how it’s impossible to have a close working relationship without some sexual tension, regardless of gender. It’s something she was proud of.’

  ‘Nonsense to most people, of course,’ he agreed. ‘But she believed it.’

  ‘She did. And of course, poor Owen saw things differently. He was so much gentler, so much more spiritual.’

  ‘And he was right. But a woman like that doesn’t understand how different people can work at different levels. If there was anything between them then he would have taken it far more seriously than she did. When he realised the truth, he’d have felt betrayed, and he’d have taken it out on himself.’

  ‘If the woman did want to see us, we’d be right to say no, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Without question. Although it isn’t that we’re angry. What’s the point in being angry? It won’t bring Owen back.’

  They stopped and stared at one another in the middle of the street and the tears came to them both. Stepping back to join Louise and allow the two of them their moment of quiet grief before they left to head back and learn to endure life without their child, Ashleigh’s eye was caught by a high ponytail bobbing out of the churchyard. Fi Styles. That was all they needed. According to Jude’s account of his own brief encounter with her and the quick piece of research he must have managed in a spare moment, Fi was a young journalist trying to make a breakthrough. Her interest in Cody Wilder was understandable at one level, even admirable, but Ashleigh hoped Fi would have the decency to back away from the Armitsteads’ raw and open grief. Owen’s death was suicide and no one could have anything to say that would add to the story without the loss of decency or dignity.

  Fi, clearly interested, didn’t disappear, but nor did she approach, shadowing them round the sombre streets of the grey village, past the cafe and the bookshop and the graves of the Wordsworths. When someone came shooting out of one of the gifts shops to check on who they were and offer their condolences, she hung back, picking up again as they moved on. When the visit concluded at the car park she stopped at the outer edge, leaning on the wall and playing with her phone and looking for all the world like a tourist too saturated with a rural experience to appreciate it.

  I’ll never stop appreciating it, Ashleigh said to herself as she breathed in
the sweet scent of leaves after rain. The Lakes for an office and Jude for a boss in work and an equal outside it? What more could she ask for?

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said to the Armitsteads. ‘I know nothing will ever compensate for your loss, but I hope that seeing the place will have brought you some closure.’ A futile, fatuous thing to say, but it was better than silence.

  ‘Thank you so much, Sergeant O’Halloran.’ Mrs Armitstead clutched her hand as her husband, still gallant after decades of marriage, opened the door for her. ‘You’ve helped us through a difficult day.’

  They got into the car and Louise started the engine and drove off into the gloom that was encroaching on the sun, fog strengthening around the crags of the Lion and the Lamb, ready to slide down and fill the vale. Aware of Fi hovering yards away, Ashleigh gave her the merest fraction of an opportunity to approach, her politely worded rebuff already phrased, but the woman did nothing, so she slid into the car and called work. ‘On my way back into the office now, Doddsy. See you in forty-five minutes. In the meantime, you might want to get someone to look up and find out what kind of relationship Dr Wilder had with her other research assistants.’ And then, driving past the marked police car that was meant to show everybody that no matter how objectionable she was, Cody Wilder was still entitled to the protection of the law, she headed back through the gathering fog to Penrith.

  *

  ‘Honey. I’m so sorry it took me so long. Life just gets in the way sometimes. I couldn’t make the flights work from Denver. Had to go via Chicago and there were cancellations. Hellish place. Fog. Too late, I know, but I made it.’ Brandon Wilder III, his lean cowboy’s face stained by the disturbed sleep of a multi-leg transatlantic journey, let go of the suitcase he’d hauled from the taxi and stepped over the threshold into his sister’s arms.

  The relief. Cody clung to him, brushing her cheek against two days’ worth of stubble as he clasped her into a bear hug. Two days of hell since Owen’s death – no, she corrected herself, remembering not to exaggerate, two days of stress – melted away. In public and in private she disregarded threats but Brandon’s arrival meant that even the slight concern, one she hadn’t understood she was feeling, disappeared. Her hero since the day he’d taken their father’s shotgun and blasted the head off a snake in the back yard when she was barely more than a child, he would look after her here the way he always had done in Wyoming.