Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  She frowned down at them. She always put them in the folder the same way, the heading to the right so that whenever she opened it Mary Wordsworth’s handwriting seemed to greet her. My dearest darling… Today they were the other way round.

  A stranger to self-doubt, Cody knew immediately what had happened. Someone had been in the drawer. And that meant someone had been in the house.

  But the letters were all there, and all undamaged. She snapped the drawer shut, locked it, and put the key in her pocket.

  12

  ‘I can’t wait to hear how you got on with the mad professor.’

  Chris and Doddsy were at the table in the incident room when Ashleigh came in, and Jude was a couple of steps away from them on the other side of it, trying to sign off a phone call without sounding rude. ‘I’ll get back to you. Yes, as soon as I can. Certainly by the morning. What’s the latest I can call you?’ He wrote something on a pad, made an extravagant face, and ended the call. ‘Okay. Sorry about that. Yes, Ashleigh. Let’s find out what you learned from Cody Wilder.’

  She watched him as he slid into his usual seat beneath the whiteboard and glanced down at his pad. Jude was an inveterate doodler and almost certainly gave his thought process away more often than he realised. Today, it was revealed to anyone who cared to see it in a series of question marks. It was going to be that sort of day.

  ‘Did she talk to you?’ Chris’s bad mood of the previous couple of days had improved. That meant he had something up his sleeve he was dying to reveal.

  It would wait. They were looking to her first. ‘I never said a word.’

  Jude threw back his head and laughed. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  She smiled back at him. ‘Sometimes it’s better to watch and listen, though there wasn’t much new.’ She checked down at the notes she’d made that morning. It would have been good to have a tape recording of exactly what Cody had said, because the clues were in the inflections, in the tension between interviewer and interviewee. ‘There was one thing Cody said that struck me, but which may be coincidental.’

  ‘Go on.’ Doddsy suppressed a sigh, as if his mind were elsewhere.

  ‘Fi Styles had been talking to Owen Armitstead. Apparently, he’d suggested to her that there’s some doubt about the provenance of the letters on which Dr Wilder’s research is based. Fi challenged Cody on it. Cody denied it.’

  Jude rubbed a hand on his chin. ‘I read up about her and none of the reports of her launch questioned the authenticity of the letters.’

  ‘That was what I thought.’

  He scribbled over one of the question marks, almost in frustration. ‘That’s not a reason for Owen to kill himself, though I can see why he might have wanted to use that to get back at his boss if she was making his life miserable. How did Cody react?’

  Ashleigh thought about it. Sitting silently, watching the interplay, had been revealing. Cody’s response to the accusation had been realistically appalled. ‘She insisted that the letters had been independently authenticated, but Fi challenged her further on it. She suggested Cody had had an affair with the expert who undertook the verification and Cody denied it, although not particularly strenuously.’

  ‘That’s damaging for her, is it?’

  ‘Potentially. I don’t imagine there’s anything criminal about a soft verification and if there was, it isn’t our jurisdiction. But it’s interesting.’

  ‘What was the body language like?’

  ‘Tense, but you’d expect that. I don’t think Cody wanted to give the interview in the first place, and I still haven’t worked out why she agreed to have me sit in on it. I think she may have regretted it, but decided she couldn’t pull out of it. And I also thought that she was very uncomfortable with some of the questions Fi Styles was asking her.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think she was lying, but I certainly think she may have been withholding some of the truth.’ Recalling Cody’s stiffness as she’d faced down Fi Styles, switching from good cop to bad cop, from aggressor to victim with the switch of a subject or a turn in a sentence, Ashleigh struggled to make sense of it. ‘Is it bad to say I felt sorry for her?’

  Chris, who’d been patronised to hell and back by Cody Wilder, shook his head with amusement and Doddsy, who gave all humans the benefit of a certain degree of doubt did the same with a touch of understanding, but Jude’s scowl bore no regard for any relationship between them. ‘I can’t afford to have you feeling sorry for her. At best she’s a witness in a murder case and probably played a significant part in driving a young man to his death. I don’t think she needs our sympathy.’

  ‘She had a very tough upbringing.’

  ‘That may be what she wants you to think.’ Doddsy seemed to have taken Jude’s reprimand to apply to himself as well, and was fighting a valiant rearguard action against his better nature. ‘In reality, she’s highly privileged. What she calls a tough upbringing isn’t an excuse to walk all over other people the way she seems to have done.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say on Cody?’ Jude clearly wasn’t in the mood to go over the morality or otherwise of Cody’s behaviour.

  ‘No. There’s one other thing that did catch my eye. When she talked about Mary Wordsworth’s letters.’

  ‘If that’s what they are.’ Chris, it appeared, was ready to believe in Cody’s villainy. He yawned and stretched out in his seat.

  ‘I don’t know if they are. I think she genuinely believes they are. There’s a lot about Cody I’m not sure about. There’s a lot about her manner and her approach I think is put on, though whether that’s because she wants to con the wider public or whether she’s trying to deceive herself I don’t know. But I’m one hundred per cent sure that she’s dedicated to her subject, to an almost frightening degree.’

  Jude thought about it for a moment. ‘Okay. Anything else?’

  ‘There’s one thing. Fi Styles asked if she could see the letters and Cody said no. Why do that if you were sure of them?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t have them.’ Chris was the one who was closest to Ashleigh’s line of thought.

  Jude made another note. ‘We can come back to that. Meantime, I meant to try and catch Tammy before she left but I never got the chance. Did any of you manage to speak to her?’

  ‘I did.’ Chris couldn’t suppress his grin. He loved to be the man who produced the show-stopping piece of information, and if he couldn’t do it himself, Ashleigh knew he was just as happy delivering information from someone else. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I have three cases running at once.’ Jude was struggling not to get irritable. ‘I’m sure there’ll be an email in my inbox. I’ll read it when I get a moment.’

  ‘It’ll be worth it. The results are back from the samples the CSI team took from the murder scene.’ He allowed himself a dramatic pause.

  ‘And?’ Jude’s patience, it was clear, was running out.

  ‘Cody Wilder’s DNA was all over Lynx’s tent. Hair, fingerprints, the lot. She’d spent time there in the previous couple of days and they’d had sex.’

  Silence, in which Jude’s face froze into a mask of concentration as he reviewed the implications of this remark. Cody had lied. Ashleigh, thinking of her confrontational approach, her challenging attitude, could understand why. The controversial American, so obviously, was someone who trusted nobody but herself.

  ‘Okay.’ Jude rapped his pen on the table. ‘So there’s a relationship we didn’t know about. Let’s call a spade a spade. No, let’s call a suspect a suspect. That’s what she is. There’s a relationship she lied about. I’ll talk to her about it tomorrow.’

  Something flicked into Ashleigh’s mind. What was it Cody had said? ‘She first announced the date of the lecture back in October. Isn’t that the time Lynx arrived at the camp?’

  ‘There’s no point in asking those Flat Earthers,’ said Chris, with a note of contempt. ‘They don’t even bother to tell the time, l
et alone keep track of the date. And they probably wouldn’t tell us the truth if they knew.’

  ‘Clearly they didn’t.’ Jude tapped his pencil impatiently on the pad again. ‘She isn’t the only one who lied about it, is she? Both Storm and Raven said she hadn’t been down there. They must have known she was there, and you can hardly avoid the conclusion that they knew what the two of them were up to. What else do we think they’ve been lying about?’ He reached for a file and flicked through it. ‘There’s nothing in this that suggests they’re anything other than sweet-natured hippies, I grant you. But what if that’s not right?’

  With a sigh, because people lying to the police was inevitable but always made things complicated, Ashleigh looked down at the bullet points she had in front of her, the latest results from the door-to-door inquiries. ‘We’ve been contacted by a local resident who stopped his car on Red Bank Road to answer a phone call at three minutes past noon on Sunday. We know the time from his call log. He saw someone matching Storm’s description walking along the shore. At speed, he said. He was carrying a bundle and there was no one else in sight.’

  Jude sat for another few seconds in that fierce stillness, then bounced up and crossed to the map pinned up on the wall. ‘On Red Bank Road?’ His finger traced the line of the path. ‘That’s a hell of a place to stop. The only place he could pull in on this side of the village is where the path takes off down to the shore. There’s a gateway and a clear view from there. He’s sure there was no one?’

  ‘The call lasted thirteen minutes. He says when he started the path was clear, that he only saw one person, and his description of that person fits Storm.’

  ‘Okay. So we have three liars. Storm, Raven and Cody Wilder. Now I want to know what Storm was carrying and why he was in such a hurry to get it away.’

  ‘The murder weapon?’ Chris shifted in his seat a little.

  ‘Possibly.’ Jude took a long look towards the darkness. ‘There’s not a lot of point in trying to look for it tonight, but I think in the morning we’ll get a search going up in Deer Bolt Woods. Anything else?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Then we’ll get off. There’s plenty for us to do tomorrow. Doddsy, I’m going to leave you to take charge of the search for the weapon. Chris, I want you to keep on looking for anything you can about Lynx. I take it we don’t yet know who he is?’

  ‘No. There’s no match for his DNA on record so he’s obviously never been in trouble with the law, either here or in the States or Canada. I’m waiting for a result on dental records. And he had no papers that we’ve been able to find.’

  ‘They’ll be locked in some left luggage place, somewhere, I expect. Or else he was serious about cutting himself off from the world and he really did destroy them.’ Doddsy was getting his coat on already, with an unusual eagerness. ‘I’ll be away, Jude. I’ll be down in Grasmere first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s the hurry? Got a date?’ Chris bounded up and followed him out through the door and down the corridor.

  Jude took one long last look at the incident board, hands deep in his pockets. Pushing her chair back, Ashleigh went to stand behind him, more closely than she would if anyone else was there. In front of them, the complex and widely differing pieces of two different puzzles took on no recognisable shape, made no obvious sense. ‘There is an answer to this, isn’t there?’

  ‘There must be. But it would help if people didn’t try and hide things.’ He sighed and turned back. ‘Anyway, I’m done for today. I need an evening off. Doing anything tonight?’

  ‘I don’t believe I am.’ Ashleigh looked at him, thoughtfully. ‘But you are. Aren’t you? I thought you were going out for a pint with Doddsy.’

  ‘I usually do on a Wednesday. Not tonight. He’s stood me up.’

  ‘I’m sure I’m a poor substitute, but yes, I’ll fill the gap.’

  He grinned at her. ‘You’ll do. I’ll see you in the Dockray Hall at eight and we can stop thinking about Cody bloody Wilder for an hour or so.’

  But they wouldn’t. Both of them would keep chewing the matter over and over until the mystery was solved and Lynx’s killer apprehended.

  13

  Becca was just getting comfortable with her first glass of wine at Adam Fleetwood’s birthday drinks when Jude walked into the bar and ruined the evening, for her at least. She was fortunate enough to be the one facing the door so she saw him before anyone else, even before he saw her, but she wasn’t quick enough to turn away. He was usually good at concealing what he thought but they’d been together for too long, so that he couldn’t hide it from her. His eyes narrowed, shoulders stiffened under the sharp cut of his overcoat and he turned his head, quickly and scanned the room.

  He would be early, because he always was. For a moment Becca felt almost sorry for him as his gaze came back to her and settled on her companions. It wasn’t just her. There was Adam, his former best friend, sitting to her left and a few places along was Mikey, the younger brother who barely spoke to him.

  Beside her, Adam turned, saw, and placed a deliberate hand on her arm.

  Jude’s expression deepened from disinterest to an inimitable scowl, but he banished it, almost immediately. You had to hand it to him. He tried. It was a couple of months since Adam had come out of prison and even in a town as small as Penrith it was easy enough to avoid someone when you wanted to. Jude’s problem was that Adam didn’t want to avoid him, flaunting his rehabilitation and his acceptance back into society in the face of the man he believed had put him behind bars in the first place.

  It wasn’t quite like that. As Jude had never tired of saying when they were together, things were never that simple, but there was no question in Becca’s mind that his attitude and actions had been high-handed beyond endurance, and things had fallen apart between them as a result. Hard drugs were one thing; a little dabbling, as Mikey had done with Adam’s encouragement, quite another. Who, apart from the overly puritan Jude, hadn’t done that? On this matter her sympathies were entirely with Adam.

  It’s because I value friendship, she told herself, still watching Jude as he hovered just inside the doorway, a man in two minds about whether to stay or whether to go. It would have been good to keep him as a friend, and the offer was always open to him, but he was too proud to meet her on the middle ground after she’d rejected him. Surely that proved she’d been right to let him go.

  ‘There’s Jude,’ someone else said, a few chairs away.

  ‘Judas,’ someone else corrected, to general laughter.

  On the other side of the bar, Jude flipped a quick text, rammed his phone into his pocket and turned to leave, but thought better of it. His gaze flicked across the room, rested for a moment on Adam, and then he walked towards them.

  The ten or so people around the table, all of them friends of hers and many of them once friends of Jude’s, the people who might have joked about whether they were on the bride’s side or the groom’s side at the wedding everyone assumed they’d eventually have, stilled in anticipation. Adam stood up. The wall lights behind his head gave him the unlikeliest halo.

  ‘Happy birthday, mate.’ Jude stopped and held out a hand.

  Becca found that she was holding her breath.

  The silence persisted just long enough to remind her that Adam was both a clever man and a wronged one, to bring his friends inching closer around him in the expectation of a confrontation, and to leave Jude’s gesture of friendship hanging in the balance and his attempt at reconciliation looking like foolishness. Only when the tension had built so high that someone couldn’t suppress a nervous snigger did Adam move. ‘Thanks, pal.’ He took Jude’s hand, shook it briefly, let it go. ‘Care to join us for a drink? I’m buying.’

  Jude’s serene expression never wavered. ‘I’d love to, but I’m supposed to be meeting someone else.’

  ‘Your friend can join us, too.’ Adam sat down again and replaced his hand on Becca’s arm. Trying not to be too obvious, she shook him
off. Her sister thought Adam had a manipulative streak though Becca herself liked him – maybe more than liked him – but she was quite capable of rubbing Jude’s nose in his misdemeanours for herself.

  ‘Not tonight. We’ve just had to rearrange.’ Jude managed to deliver the line as if it wasn’t blindingly obvious he’d just texted whoever it was and headed them off. He was good at excuses, but he was good at twisting everything to make it fit his own agenda, so that he looked noble and everybody else looked small-minded.

  ‘Shame. Well, no doubt we’ll bump into one another around the place.’

  ‘I expect so.’ With every sign of relief at a situation defused, Jude turned once more for the door.

  He had reckoned without his brother. With a sinking heart, Becca saw that Mikey had risen from his seat as Adam had spoken and was threading his way round the back of the group to cut him off. His spiky silhouette bristled with attitude. ‘Jude. What the hell?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m leaving.’

  ‘You came here to check up on me, didn’t you?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t have come near the place if I’d known you were going to be here. Any of you.’ His look darkened in Becca’s direction.

  Fortunately, Adam had turned away to laugh with his friends, a clear signal of dismissal. That wouldn’t stop Mikey. Nothing ever did. He was as pig-headed as Jude himself, though he’d yet to learn how to look as if he was being reasonable. Ready to intervene if required, Becca shuffled in her seat.

  ‘You knew we were meeting here.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Mum knew.’

  ‘She doesn’t tell me everything you do. And Mikey…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can meet your mates anywhere you like. It’s nothing to do with me. But if I want to meet my girlfriend in a particular pub, I don’t need your permission.’