Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  There had been nothing natural about what had happened to Lynx. Cody, seeing the ambulance, the police cars, the buzz of activity and the flashing of blue lights, must know that now, if she hadn’t guessed before, but she offered no sympathy, no thought for a fellow human. He shouldn’t be surprised, because she’d reacted in exactly the same way to Owen Armitstead’s death, and Owen, at least, had been someone she knew. Nevertheless, her hardness both repelled and intrigued him. ‘Do you know the people down there?’

  ‘You mean the hippies? God, no. Tree-hugging waste of space. This is supposed to be the age of progress, but they seem to want to go back and live in the sixteenth century.’

  ‘You never spoke to them?’

  ‘Maybe once, when I first arrived. There wasn’t a lot of intellect there, to be honest. I couldn’t even tell you who I spoke to. There were plenty of them there back then, and none of them could find a civil word.’ She stepped back. ‘I’ll let you get on. I’m sure you have better things to do than stand on my doorstep.’

  ‘You’ll find there will be a restriction on where you can and can’t go for a couple of days, especially while we have officers on duty.’ Coffin Lane came out directly opposite the gate into the hippy camp, so she certainly couldn’t be unaware of it. ‘I thought I’d let you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She shouldered in front of the man and closed the door.

  He was her brother, Jude judged from the matching accents and the broad foreheads, as he made his way back down to the scene to see what had come from it. So much the better. If she wasn’t on her own, there was one thing less for him to worry about. ‘Okay, Doddsy, where are we?’

  ‘I’ve got the first witness statements in.’ A man comfortable with a clipboard in his hand, Doddsy flicked through a couple of sheets. ‘You might want to follow some of them up yourself. We’ll need an officer to coordinate door-to-door inquiries. You want me to get Ashleigh on that?’

  Jude nodded. Tammy was already at work on the scene but it would be a while before they got any results from forensic tests. The post-mortem wouldn’t be done until the morning. In the meantime, his priority was to put someone on to finding out who the man was and why he’d died. Ashleigh could orchestrate the door-to-door inquiries and between them he and Doddsy, Ashleigh and Chris, would sit down and bring together the fruits of everyone else’s work into a coherent plan and a solution to this man’s murder. ‘Where are our witnesses?’

  ‘The owners of the coffee shop opened it up for us and let us sit in there.’ Doddsy made an ironic face. ‘They’re our friends with the libellous banner, as it happens. They were the ones Raven called when she found him.’

  ‘Is she okay?’ Raven, so deliberately detached from a wicked world, might meet evil stoically or take it too much to heart. You never knew.

  Doddsy shrugged. Who would be okay when they’d just seen the savagely butchered body down by the lake? ‘You can try offering her help, if you want, but I doubt if she’ll accept it. These people are too independent for their own good.’

  This echo of Cody’s rather harsher take on the matter was unkind, especially for Doddsy. Jude headed towards Tyrone, who was standing outside the cafe with his arms folded, ignoring questions from the interested public and turning aside the Sunday afternoon walkers who hoped for a quick turn around the lake before their evening meal. His expression lightened when he saw Jude. ‘Sir.’ That was for the benefit of the public, because Jude never encouraged formality, although there were those old stagers like Charlie Fry who refused to let go of it. ‘Is there anything you need me to do now?’

  ‘Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m looking for a quick chat with our key witnesses.’

  ‘They’re in the cafe. Mr and Mrs Gordon are looking after them.’

  Jude headed in. Young Tyrone, assuming he was responsible for this set-up, was a smart thinker. He’d rounded up someone to operate the coffee machine and that person – an older woman, looking gratified enough to be roped in to help – was shuffling cups of coffee and cake from table to table.

  The cafe ran through the depth of the building and was deceptively large. At the back, plate glass doors gave out onto a deserted terrace with view of the misty lake. Currently, the views encompassed frantic activity as white-clad figures worked around a hastily erected tent, conducting fingertip searches of the encampment. Inside the cafe, Jude’s attention focused on Storm and Raven, who were sitting in the corner of the cafe by themselves, staring at one another in shocked hopelessness. Two of the other tables were occupied by uniformed officers busy taking statements, and a couple of other local people were sitting waiting patiently around the counter for their turn to give their version of events. Fi Styles was there, chewing meditatively on her pen, and she gave Jude a speculative look as he passed, as if she were wondering whether she dared speak to him.

  The uniformed sergeant tasked by Doddsy with supervising the witness statements approached him, with a couple of pages in his hand. ‘These are the first statements we have. From the campers.’ He nodded towards Storm and Raven.

  ‘I’ll have a quick word with them.’ Taking the sheets, Jude scanned them, picking up the key information. He doubted very much that there would be anything more than the barest essentials, knew that Storm and Raven would answer only the questions they were asked, so immune were they to the sensitivities of the world around them. Anyone wanting to tease information from them would need to be as sympathetic to their world as they were skilled in interviewing. ‘Okay, thanks. I’ll just have a quick word with these guys.’

  ‘Of course. If you want a coffee—’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ Jude drank more coffee than he intended on these occasions but sociability sometimes did something to increase your credibility. He crossed the room to the table where the two middle-aged hippies sat holding hands across the table beneath a series of paintings of Grasmere and Rydal Water, all in primary colours and all for sale at an eye-watering price. ‘Can I sit down?’

  It was Storm – real name Kevin Foster, he’d learned from his quick scan of the sheets – who nodded. Raven just sat staring straight in front of her. He slid into the seat beside Storm, careful not to seem threatening, aware of his own prejudices. He liked the unpretentious, simple-hearted couple, out of place in this sophisticated cafe, but his feelings were irrelevant. They were witnesses, and until he knew for certain that they couldn’t have done it he had to treat them as suspects.

  That said, his job was to get information and sometimes you had to adjust your approach. Formality was something they might too easily perceive as hectoring or, worse, bullying, and now was the time to glean anything that would help. ‘Are you all right?’

  Raven nodded. When the woman left the counter and brought Jude a cup of coffee, she slid a plate of sugar-crusted shortbread in front of them too, and refreshed Storm’s cup, but Raven’s tea sat untouched in the table before her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Jude said, his voice soft as he could make it. ‘I know it must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘It was a horrible thing to see.’

  ‘Nothing ever prepares you for something like that. And he was a friend of yours, too.’

  The pause answered that question. Lynx hadn’t been a friend.

  ‘I never met him,’ Jude said, trying again to breach the wall of trust that encompassed the two of them, and the two of them only. ‘He seemed to keep himself to himself.’ In truth, he hadn’t found himself in Grasmere more than a couple of times since the bulk of the campers had filtered away between the departure of the swallows and the fall of the autumn leaves. Both times he’d seen Lynx, as he now knew him, in the distance but the man had faded away before he could speak, just as he had done when Chris Marshall had pointed him out on the day of Cody’s lecture a few days before. ‘Was he with you long?’

  ‘No.’ Storm, at last, overcame his reluctance to talk, as if he understood that silence might harm them. ‘He came in October, just when everyone els
e was leaving for the winter. He didn’t seem to mind the weather. He said he was used to looking after himself. But he never talked about himself.’ He lifted his coffee cup to his lips, but he kept hold of Raven’s thin fingers with his other hand.

  ‘You never asked?’

  Raven let go of Storm’s hand and turned to Jude, a weak smile on her face. Her long, grey plait lay over her shoulder and she flicked it back. ‘You aren’t very trusting, are you?’

  ‘No.’ Her remark was meant as a criticism and he couldn’t help accepting it for what it was. ‘I can’t afford to be. As long as there are people who do things like that, I have to catch them.’

  ‘I don’t know why anyone would do that to him.’

  Jude sipped his coffee, trying to read the body language and seeing fear and suspicion. ‘Did you ever get any sense about who he was? Where he came from? Even if he didn’t tell you, you must have had some idea.’

  ‘He didn’t talk. We never asked. Why is that so difficult to understand?’

  ‘He was American,’ Storm said, with a trace of doubt in his voice. ‘Or perhaps Canadian. And he didn’t have a lot to learn when he came to us. He knew what kind of a lifestyle we live and he wasn’t afraid of it. Cold, wet. Some people would call it limited. He didn’t always choose to abide by it.’

  ‘We are very committed,’ Raven explained. ‘Lynx couldn’t break himself free. He’d come into the village sometimes and buy a meal. We never did that. He was independent of us, just as we try to be independent of others as much as we can.’

  Their independence was dependent on the goodwill of others. Jude knew that the owners of the cafe passed on leftovers rather than throw them away, and the open neck of Storm’s hand-knitted jumper revealed a designer polo shirt that must have been a gift, but he wasn’t going to take them to task for cherry-picking their philosophy. Everyone did that. ‘Did he have any friends?’

  They exchanged glances. ‘We don’t have friends,’ Storm said. ‘Friendship is an alien thing. We coexist. We treat others with respect and others do the same to us.’

  ‘Our friendship has to be unconditional.’ Raven looked at Storm and for the first time she smiled. ‘Like love.’

  With someone else, Jude would have been less patient, but he knew that there was no way past this mentality. There were as many ways of getting information out of people as there were reasons for withholding it and with Storm and Raven, only one way would work. They were right to distrust the police and the only thing that would help him was honesty. And hope. ‘I know you think I’m prying.’

  ‘It’s your job. But it’s something we’ve never done. Lynx came to us asking for nothing and he found friendship and companionship. He didn’t ask us questions and we asked none of him.’

  Only asking questions would solve the mystery of Lynx’s death. ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Bright,’ Raven said, with a sigh. ‘Very bright. Hardworking and quick-witted. He was easily bored. I think he had an entrepreneur’s mind. He was sharp, and quicker than we were to see an opportunity.’

  ‘An opportunity?’

  ‘For anything. For improving the way we were living, or getting something for nothing. He took over disposing of my weaving and he bartered it for what we needed, rather than money we didn’t want.’ Raven dabbed a tear from her eye and shivered. ‘I think he was well-educated, but he never talked much. We don’t talk about books or science or politics. We think about nature and the environment. We listen to the song of the Earth.’ She lifted her tea cup and sipped.

  ‘Did Dr Wilder ever come down to the camp?’

  ‘Oh, she came.’ Storm’s normally gentle mouth twisted into an expression of contempt. ‘Once. She came here for the first time when she walked round the lake, back in November. They had an argument, as I remember, about something she said. I don’t remember what it was – something about the way we live – but it was arrogant and sarcastic and he didn’t like it.’

  ‘And how was that resolved?’

  Truth shivered in the air, close but not close enough. They weren’t telling him everything. ‘I don’t recall.’ Storm licked his lips. ‘She never came back here. We saw her walking along the lane, but we never spoke to her.’

  ‘Did he see her again?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. We practise freedom, Chief Inspector. He did what he wanted.’

  ‘Call me Jude.’ Yes, it was bad practice, but there was no point in standing on your dignity if it would only end up costing you in terms of results. ‘Sexual freedom, you mean?’

  ‘We don’t ask questions. But Cody Wilder strikes me as very… animal… in her approach to humans. Some people respond to the rhythms of their bodies rather than their hearts. Lynx was one of those, and I think she was, too. But that’s speculation.’

  That tied in with the Armitsteads’ comments that Ashleigh had reported to him. ‘And what did he think of her?’

  ‘I don’t know. The same, if I had to guess.’ Storm’s shrug dismissed the question. ‘She’s a good-looking woman, if you like that type.’ He hesitated for a second, a man to whom asking questions was alien. ‘When did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ The post-mortem would give them an idea, but possibly not a specific time. ‘When did you last see him alive?’

  ‘I never saw him all day.’ Raven, apparently revived by the tea, reached out for the piece of shortbread, broke a piece off and nibbled at it with the timidity of a rescued child, keeping a wary eye on Jude as if she was worried he’d tell her off for it. ‘Sometimes he’d get up very early and go for a walk. I was weaving and I had the tent open. I can see his tent from it, and if he was there, I’d have seen him.’

  ‘I thought I saw him in the woods.’ Storm reached out a hand for hers again. ‘I went after him, but he was quite far ahead. But it wasn’t him.’

  Storm, Jude remembered from his quick glimpse at the witness statements the uniformed officers had scribbled down, hadn’t been there when Raven had lifted the flap to the woodpile and revealed Lynx’s body. ‘Did you see who it was?’ Because that was another person who needed to be traced, a probable witness and a possible suspect.

  ‘No. I turned back as soon as I realised it wasn’t Lynx.’

  ‘Did you follow him far?’ Jude suppressed a sigh of frustration. There was a lot to be said for dispensing with anthropogenic trivialities of the clock, but it did mean it would be virtually impossible to pin down a time at which this stranger might have been walking along the lakeside.

  ‘A long way. He went up the lane and down into the woods and I followed him all the way up to…’ Storm considered, a longer pause than should have been necessary. ‘As far as the footbridge at the end of the lake.’

  ‘That far?’ It was a long way, a good mile and a half.

  ‘I never thought.’ Storm turned a bland look upon Jude. ‘I don’t think of time, or of distance. He was quite a long way ahead of me and I thought I’d catch him up. I just kept on walking until I realised it wasn’t him, and then I turned around to come back.’

  ‘I wonder where he was going.’ Trying hard not to frame his questions too harshly, aware of how difficult it was to gain both Storm and Raven’s trust, Jude resorted to thinking out loud and hoping they joined in.

  ‘I don’t know. I thought I might ask him. But as it turns out, it was someone else and Lynx wasn’t going anywhere, so it was an entirely academic question, wasn’t it?’

  With a sigh, Jude finished his coffee, thanked them, and moved on to see what other information had come his way.

  9

  ‘Are you happy with what you’re doing?’

  Ashleigh tucked the phone under her chin as she sat in the car just at the edge of the police cordon and watched a TV crew from the local news channel busy filming views of the campsite from a distance. They would be trying to establish a link, no matter how tenuous, between the death of Owen Armitstead and that of Lynx. Well, why not? It was something she knew Jude and Doddsy would be frow
ning over. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Jude’s voice was brisk, but there was, she thought, warmth in it. ‘I wanted to update you on what we’re looking for. We’re still waiting on the conclusions of the forensic investigation, but we do have the results of the PM and the initial crime scene report.’

  ‘They won’t make pleasant reading.’ Ashleigh’s conversation with Doddsy beforehand had indicated there was very little doubt as to the cause of death.

  ‘They don’t. We’re still waiting on the toxicology results but Tammy tells me the evidence points to the fact that the victim died where he was found. He was attacked from behind by a right-handed attacker, or a left-hander using the right hand, and the extent of the injuries are so severe that whoever did it must have been covered in blood. There was a trail of blood leading down to the water so they may have tried to clean themselves up, but it’s unlikely they’ll have been completely successful.’

  ‘Do we have a time of death?’

  ‘He’d been dead for several hours when Raven found him. It gets light at around half eight and he was probably killed just before then. If that’s the case, the killer probably escaped under cover of darkness, though that doesn’t mean no one saw them.’

  ‘I’ve got you. Then on those timings, whoever it was Storm followed into the woods isn’t a suspect?’

  ‘I don’t think so, though I’d still like to talk to that person. They may have seen something unusual. So make sure that’s one of the questions the guys are asking in the doors.’

  ‘Right. I’m on it.’ With interest, Ashleigh saw Fi Styles, floating around the film crew, watching them. She wasn’t alone but she stood out among the knot of interested villagers, pushing to the front where they hung back, clicking photographs on her phone where they stood with casual hands in their pockets. ‘What are your plans?’

  ‘I have things to do in the office this morning.’ Murder wasn’t neat and tidy, and killers never waited for the loose ends of one case to be led up before they presented the team with another. ‘Doddsy’s your man in charge if you need anything before then. I’ve got Chris in charge of finding out as much as possible about Lynx, because I don’t think we’ll know why he died until we find out who he is.’