Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  They paused and looked across the dank, damp field. In the middle of it, the fire flared up but the brazier, on which they cooked, seemed to have died down. Whatever had distracted Lynx had done so for a long time. ‘I’ll go and see if I can get us some lunch, shall I?’ There were the cold potatoes she’d cooked the day before, and Eliza Gordon had brought down some bread they hadn’t used up in the cafe. There was soup, too. It would be enough.

  Still unaccountably troubled, Storm turned to survey the scene, a glance which took in the grey-green mud of the campsite, the village nestling into the bottom of the village, the chilled lake and the skeletal features of the leafless woods beyond. ‘Isn’t that him?’

  ‘Is it? Where?’

  ‘Up along the lane.’

  Raven turned to look along the narrow lane, but there was no sign of Lynx in the green cleft between moss-covered dry-stone walls. He must have disappeared around the bend. ‘I wonder if he’ll be back for lunch?’

  ‘I wonder if he’s all right. Maybe I’ll go and speak to him. Find out. It’s not like him to let us down.’ Storm turned away from her and vanished among the trees and she watched until he was out of sight before she walked across the damp grass. The brazier had burned out completely and would need to be relit. When he’d first arrived, Lynx, who seemed to know a few tricks about living in the woods, had built a timber pile against the far wall, constructed in such a way that even when the rain tipped down on them in its traditional Lakeland way and worked its way through the canvas covering, there was always dry wood to be had inside. She crossed the campsite towards it. It would take her a while to get the brazier restarted and the soup heated up for lunch, but there was no hurry. It would probably take Storm a while to catch up with Lynx, if he’d gone so far ahead that she couldn’t see him.

  Her path to the woodpile took her past Lynx’s tent, which was set a little distance away from hers and Storm’s to give them a pretence at privacy, although when the place filled up in summer, they’d all be living on top of one another. He’d left the flap pinned open. Curious, and because they had no secrets, she stopped to peer inside and drew in a breath so sudden and sharp that it sent a stab of pain shooting across below her breast.

  Someone had ransacked Lynx’s tent. It wasn’t untidy – untidiness was impossible with so few possessions – but there was something violent about its disarrangement. Someone, surely not Lynx, who was curiously fastidious, had thrown the bedding aside, piled it into a corner of the tent and ripped up the wooden flooring.

  Raven stepped back, her brow shrivelling into an expression of concern. ‘Lynx!’ she called, although there was no one out on the dank January Sunday to hear her. Grasmere’s few winter visitors would be grouped around the roaring fires in the pub or trooping past the trivia of the Wordsworths’ life at Dove Cottage. Even the walkers who passed the lakeside in a brisk show of respect to the outdoors had gone back inside and the path where Storm had gone in pursuit of Lynx had been deserted. Only the ducks at the waterside responded to her call with a melancholy quack.

  Not quite sure what was bothering her, she kept walking towards the woodpile. There had always been something strange and unsettling about Lynx, but the policy of the camp, which had evolved when she and Storm had come to join it a few years before and continued unspoken as people came and went, was one of trust. You asked no questions, because so many people came to get away from their pasts. You did no evil to others and you expected none from them. The idea that someone might have thought that Lynx had something worth stealing was so peculiar that it could only have come from a random stranger.

  It was ironic, she thought as she lifted the canvas flap that protected the woodpile, that she was thinking this way when every summer some stranger placed the blame for a lost or stolen purse on them, because they didn’t know, or didn’t understand, the healing power of trust. At least the police knew that, and their investigations into allegations were usually polite and always ended up cordially. If you did no harm then you could receive no harm and everything would be well.

  And it was with that thought in her head that she found Lynx.

  *

  ‘It was that American woman. It must have been.’

  ‘Oh God, what did she do to him? Why?’

  ‘She did it because he upset her. She doesn’t care for anyone.’

  ‘Oh, Raven, my dear, come and sit in the cafe and I’ll get you some tea!’

  Once again, the unlucky one who was on call on a Sunday afternoon, Doddsy took one look at the chaos on the edge of the hippies’ field and didn’t need the mention of Cody Wilder to know that this was something he’d have to pass up a pay grade. When the initial emergency call had reported a fatal stabbing, he’d known better than to expect it would be simple.

  Simple. His mouth twisted. Sometimes his own flippancy over the dead disgusted him, but it was the only alternative to getting too closely involved.

  He’d stopped his car at the edge of the field and found that the uniformed officers on the scene had already closed Red Bank Road, but the two of them had been too busy taping off the scene to handle the panicked covey of witnesses. These, a mix of villagers and obvious visitors, congregated in a clucking, chattering group on the pavement just beyond the police tape.

  ‘I’m going to make you a nice cup of tea—’

  ‘Tea? The poor girl needs brandy.’

  ‘Did you see the body? It was awful, awful.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ When no one took any notice of him, Doddsy shouldered his way through them and ducked under the tape, pausing before he did so to slip on the pair of sterile overshoes he carried with him to every crime scene, then stood with narrowed eyes, assessing the relative capabilities of the uniformed PCs already on the scene. ‘Charlie. You carry on.’ Charlie Fry was an old hand and would make no mistakes. He could leave him to it. Tyrone Garner, son of the force’s best crime scene investigator, was a rookie – a good one, by all accounts, but a rookie nonetheless. He could be deputed to handle the witnesses. ‘Tyrone, sort the sheep from the goats for me, would you? You know what to do. Identify anyone who saw what was going on – we need to speak to them as a priority.’

  ‘I’ve asked them. No one saw anything. The woman called Raven found the body. Charlie and I checked. It’s cold.’

  Doddsy nodded him back to work. With relief, he saw another set of flashing blue lights as uniformed reinforcements sped up through the village. There was an ambulance on its way, and a doctor, though from what he’d heard, the doctor would be able to do no more than formally pronounce the victim dead and the ambulance would just take up space. The witnesses accounted for, he made his careful way down to where Charlie Fry stood taking photographs halfway down the field. Inevitably, the ground was churned up by too many pairs of feet. It was amazing how many people came out of the woodwork when there was something exciting to see, amazing how much fragile evidence they managed to obscure. Most amazing of all was that the CSI team almost always managed to turn up something useful from the most chaotic scene. ‘Charlie. Where’s the body?’

  ‘Over there, by the wood pile.’ The constable nodded towards a canvas-covered stack against the wall. His expression gave nothing away. ‘Poor bloke. Stabbed him so hard they nearly took his head off. Slaughtered like an animal.’

  With care, Doddsy picked a way down towards the site. On the side of the woodpile nearest the lake a pair of denim-clad legs sprawled out from beneath the canvas into a puddle of mud and blood. For form’s sake, he lifted the canvas, dropping it as soon as he’d satisfied himself that the man was dead. He’d leave the assessment of the body and how it lay, the injuries and the cause of death, to the specialists. It wasn’t his job to deduce how the man had died, but to manage the scene until Jude arrived and then help to put together the specialist evidence and decide who’d done it. ‘Do we know who he is?’

  ‘He’s one of the hippies who hang around here. Goes by the name of Lynx.’ Charlie finished with the tape a
nd stepped away.

  ‘Do we know his real name?’

  The flicker of an expression that passed over Charlie Fry’s face indicated that his view of the hippy community was closer to Chris Marshall’s than to Jude’s. ‘No one seems to know. He kept himself to himself.’

  ‘What do we know about what happened?’ Doddsy stifled a sigh. ‘Who found him?’

  ‘One of the campers. Raven. Real name Sarah Twist.’ Charlie rolled his eyes, as though he didn’t believe that, either. ‘She came down to get wood for the fire and found him in here. She says his tent’s been ransacked.’

  A quick look towards the tent indicated by Charlie revealed the signs of a frantic, but organised, search. ‘Has anyone touched anything?’

  ‘She didn’t. She ran straight up to the nearest cottage in the village. The couple who own the field live there. They were having Sunday lunch and they came straight down here. But they and the people who came down afterwards for a quick look have walked all over it, and I think someone must have moved the body. Ms Twist said it was hidden under the canvas but it’s half out now.’

  The layman’s desire to help, or the murderer’s intention to hinder? It must have been obvious there was nothing anyone could do for him. ‘Is there a murder weapon?’

  ‘There’s nothing obvious, unless it’s under the body.’

  Doddsy ran through a mental checklist of things to do. The CSI team would be with him soon and in the meantime the priority was to make sure the scene was roped off. Find out who the victim was. Find out who’d been seen around. Find out who might have a motive.

  Tyrone had marshalled the onlookers a few yards down the street and corralled them on the pavements while he took their names and addresses. As Doddsy moved to intercept the doctor, who had parked on the double yellow lines and was getting her bag out of the boot, he was cut off in his turn by a young woman whose most obvious assists were a ponytail and a notebook. ‘Are you a detective?’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t speak to you just now.’

  ‘I’m Fi Styles. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘No comment. I have to ask you to keep away from the scene. We’ll be issuing a press statement in due course.’ Shaking her off, Doddsy succeeded in cornering the doctor, and when he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that Tyrone had Fi Styles in the queue with everyone else. The two hippies were standing to one side, he with his arms around her, and Tyrone was ticking the rest of them off his list and lining them up, either to the one side or the other.

  More vehicles were converging on the scene now. Doddsy headed back up to hand the doctor over to one of the uniformed constables to take her down to the body. The CSI unit van had pulled up, and he relaxed. Tammy Garner, the best CSI officer he’d ever worked with, was on the case, pulling on her forensic suit and taking charge of the team who were with her.

  ‘Have we closed off enough of the scene?’ Charlie Fry was running an eye over the woods. ‘Looks like there are a couple of ways out. I’ve secured the whole field but you might want to seal off the woods, too.

  Doddsy checked the scene. There was a four-foot-high dry-stone wall abutting the woodpile, but anyone who tried to get away over that would have found themselves in an enclosed cottage garden, and there were no immediate signs of a great escape, though (he took a quick and cautious look over the wall) someone might have flung the weapon over it. The field opened on to the road and that was closed at both ends, no doubt to the huge inconvenience of anyone wanting to take a slow way round the lake. Cody Wilder would have to cross the cordon to get out of Coffin Lane, but that was a problem they’d come to later. A stile on the far side of the field led into the woods and that, along with the main road out of the village, looked the most likely escape route, but the murder weapon could be anywhere.

  Another police car came to a halt. The place was getting busy, now. He strode over to where Tyrone, patient and meticulous, had taken control of the growing crowd. What else had he expected from Tammy’s boy?

  ‘Okay, boss.’ Tyrone tapped the pen on his notebook, revealing the edge of a tattoo creeping below the cuff of his jacket. Efficient or not, he must be a man who pushed boundaries.

  For an unguarded moment, Doddsy’s eyes rested on him in appreciation. Tyrone, with his lithe lean figure, dark eyes and a narrow beard outlining his jaw, was a good-looking young man. Quickly, he recalled his duty. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘I’ve got the key witnesses settled in the cafe. It belongs to Mr and Mrs Gordon, who came to help Ms Twist after she discovered the body. They’re the landlords, and they’re happy to let us use the cafe as a temporary base. If I can have a couple of the guys who’ve just arrived, they can start getting the witness statements from them right now. You’ll want to speak to Ms Twist and her partner yourself.’

  Doddsy’s phone buzzed. Jude. I’ll be there in five. He allowed himself a quiet smile, knowing that Jude wouldn’t be happy at being called up on a weekend when his new relationship was still firmly in the lust phase. Understandably. In Doddsy’s view, Jude deserved a lot better than the treatment he’d had from Becca and in this barely concealed relationship with Ashleigh it looked as if he might have found it. ‘Good man.’ He gave Tyrone an approving smile and a flash of understanding passed between them. Tyrone would go far in the police. ‘Carry on as you are.’ In time one of the more seasoned hands would probably object to being given orders by a junior but you couldn’t argue with the fact that Tyrone knew what he was doing.

  ‘Okay, Doddsy.’ Tammy tapped him on the shoulder. Her face bore a serious look but there was that familiar glow of determination in her eye. ‘I’m taking the team on site, and I’ll let you know what we find. In the meantime, you mind you look after my boy.’

  Tyrone, overhearing his mother, shot her an exasperated look and then, with a resigned shrug, turned away.

  Doddsy reminded himself that he had a duty of care, that Tyrone probably hadn’t seen anything as savage as the butchered corpse in the field before and that these things could have delayed effects. ‘Tyrone, your mum has a point. Are you okay about this? That wasn’t a pleasant thing to see.’

  Tyrone turned back, hands in pockets and put his head to one side, looking at the inspector with a long, liquid gaze. ‘To tell you the truth, it was a bit shocking. I think I’ll probably need a pint when I’m off duty. What do you think?’ And he left his superior officer with a broad and totally inappropriate wink.

  8

  After a brief conversation with Doddsy to make sure everything was under control, the first thing Jude did when he arrived in Grasmere village was to check on Cody Wilder. As far as he was aware, there was no connection between Cody and the hippy community but crimes were too often built upon things of which the authorities were not immediately aware. Two deaths, though so very different, within a few hundred yards and a few days, was too much of a coincidence, even without the threats that formed so dark a background to Cody’s colourful career.

  It was a job he would normally have delegated but in the light of the non-specific nature of the threat, along with Cody’s over-assertive unpredictable character, he preferred to take on the challenge himself. Rank might offer him some sort of protection from her sarcastic tongue. As he walked, he thought of Ashleigh and her assertion that Cody’s brutal directness was protection against some secret fear. Less charitable himself, he preferred to ascribe it to downright misanthropy but Ashleigh had an instinct for these things. And others, too. He suppressed a smile.

  There was movement behind the glazed panel in the front door of the cottage as he came up the path, and the door eased open as he reached it. The man who answered was tall, lean as a whippet, taut-muscled and active, with an outdoorsman’s tan. He was clad in black jeans and black jumper and his expression was one of wary neutrality. ‘Howdy.’

  ‘I’m looking for Cody Wilder.’

  Cody materialised at the man’s side, as if she’d been waiting in the wings to decide whether she
was ready to see him. That, and the scowl she always seemed to have for him, offended Jude’s professional pride. ‘Chief Inspector. Hello. Don’t you have anything better to do than disturb law-abiding citizens on a Sunday afternoon?’

  When Doddsy had called, Jude’s mind had been firmly on other things – specifically, on Ashleigh. ‘It’s a courtesy call. I just thought I’d make sure you were safe and well.’

  She opened her eyes wide, in mockery. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? You have your man in uniform floating around the village pretending to look after me, don’t you?’

  No one in the village could possibly be unaware of the furore that was taking place at the foot of Coffin Lane. From where they stood, the blue lights and police cars were obvious, and if those weren’t enough, the visible white tent over Lynx’s body told the world that someone had died. Her feigned lack of interest irritated him further. ‘You obviously don’t know there’s been an incident in the village. I wanted to check that you’re safe. Obviously you are, so I won’t bother you any longer.’ He turned away. He’d send someone up to interview Cody and her visitor later, in case they’d seen anything, but if they hadn’t been on the scene, they weren’t his priority.

  ‘What kind of incident?’ A sharp edge to her voice gave her away. Yes, she was concerned, though whether for herself or for a stranger, he couldn’t say.

  He considered. Strictly speaking, he knew nothing other than the fact that the man known as Lynx was dead, but that information was all over the community. If she hadn’t heard it, she’d find out the minute she set foot in the village, where the buzz was such that even those who were hostile to her would be willing enough to forget it to share their information and opinions. He turned back to face her. ‘A man’s body has been found down by the shore. A man known as Lynx.’

  An expression of interest chased one of surprise across her face, like the shadow of a rainstorm over the fellside. ‘That’s hardly surprising. Those hippies don’t have a grasp on the modern world. People who don’t adapt to the benefits of science deserve to die young. It’s called natural selection.’