Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  The man held out his hand as if it were a social visit. ‘Yes. Claud Blackwell. No worries, Chief Inspector. Your people did offer to leave us a policewoman when they saw how upset Nat was, but I guessed you’d need every hand to the pump up there. And there was no way Nat would have been able to tell them anything. Anyway, she has me to look after her.’

  ‘Is your wife all right?’

  ‘I think so. Very shaken up to start with, but she’s calmer now. She’s taken something.’ Claud Blackwell stepped back and held the door open, motioning Jude through the narrow hallway. ‘She’s in the living room. Would you like coffee?’

  Jude declined the coffee and headed through. Natalie Blackwell was sitting straight-backed in an armchair by the unlit fire, gazing across the dual-aspect room and out towards the village. Her face was turned away from the flurry of activity at the end of the lane. When Jude entered the room she rose and turned towards him, extending a hand. She’d showered and changed, and was dressed in jogging bottoms and a baggy sweatshirt. Her dark blonde hair, twisted into a tight bun, was damp and the fresh aroma of shower gel, mint and strawberry, clung to her. She looked ageless, anywhere between fifteen and fifty but judging her — probably inaccurately — by the age of her husband, she might have been in her forties.

  ‘Chief Inspector.’ Her voice was barely a whisper, but he heard music in it.

  ‘Mrs Blackwell.’ He shook her hand. She was as tall as he was, a good six feet, and she looked him calmly and levelly in the eye, a gaze from which any curiosity had been wiped away by shock and medication. ‘Are you all right?’

  Her hand fluttered in front of her breast. Despite the shower, the fingernails on the right hand were still picked out in red and she spotted him looking at it and held it out, as if for inspection. ‘I’m like Lady Macbeth, aren’t I? What, will this hand ne’er be clean?’ Her eyes were veiled, her soul hidden. ‘Yes. Very shaken. And I’m so sorry. I moved the body.’

  ‘Oh?’ He took the seat to which Claud motioned him, and watched Natalie as she resumed her seat in the armchair, snatching a fearful eye at the goings-on outside before returning her attention to him.

  ‘Yes. I know you aren’t supposed to touch anything, but I’m afraid I panicked.’ She folded her hands on her lap. ‘He was still alive. I thought I might need to do CPR. Then I realised there was nothing I could do and he was going to die. I wanted to hold him, so he didn’t die alone, so he knew there was good in the world as well as evil. The poor man. A stranger.’ A tear glimmered in her eye. ‘He died and I panicked. I don’t remember exactly what happened.’ Her hand fluttered upwards again, but whatever she’d taken to calm her had rubbed the inflections from her voice as easily as it had wiped the nuance from her expression, so her whole statement offered nothing but a sense of emotionless anti-climax. ‘I was covered in blood. So much blood.’

  ‘Did the police officer who spoke to you ask you to keep your clothing?’

  Claud twitched in what looked as if it might be vindication but Natalie’s look was blank. ‘She did, but I put it in the washing machine. Claud said I should keep it like she said, but I couldn’t bear to see the man’s blood. And it doesn’t matter, does it? It isn’t as if I killed him.’

  ‘I’m sure it doesn’t matter, Nat.’ Jude sensed resignation in Claud’s voice. ‘I’m sure it was just a precaution.’

  Just a precaution. Who knew what forensic evidence had clung to Natalie’s clothing as she’d cradled Len Pierce in his death throes? In the background, the hum of the washing machine made a mockery of procedure, but there was nothing to be done. ‘Don’t worry about moving him, Mrs Blackwell.’ It happened. It was frustrating, and sometimes it cost a conviction, but Jude was human. The clothing was different — infuriating, evidence contaminated or lost — but you couldn’t blame someone for trying to save a life.

  She was still gazing down at her hand. ‘Did I kill him?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Claud’s expression was somewhere between outrage and stupefaction. ‘Nat—’

  ‘I moved him, but he was so badly hurt. Did I kill him? Tell me he didn’t die because I moved him?’ She turned her blank expression towards Jude and that fluttering gesture of desolation ghosted once more in front of her body.

  Jude shook his head. He didn’t need a medical report to tell him Len’s injuries had been so severe they’d have been almost instantly fatal. Nevertheless, he struggled to suppress a sigh of irritation as he flipped open his notebook. ‘I don’t think there was anything anyone could do for him.’ He paused. ‘Can you try to talk me through what happened?’

  ‘Of course.’ She paused.

  Claud slid a cup of coffee on the table at Jude’s elbow, regardless of the fact that he’d turned the offer down. ‘I’ll step outside.’

  ‘No. Don’t go!’

  Jude sighed, but nodded his acceptance and Claud sat down next to his wife, taking her hand. Her fingers were bony. Jude hadn’t noticed before how thin she was, because her shirt was too big and her jogging pants baggy, but as she sat so still the fabric settled over her body and drew attention to the sharpness of her shoulders and her collarbones. Too thin, he said to himself, unable to stop himself contrasting her unfavourably with Ashleigh O’Halloran’s strikingly different form.

  ‘You were out for a run?’ he prompted. Now he had Ashleigh in his mind he might at least try and work out how she wound witnesses so completely around her little finger, but all he could see when he reviewed her interview techniques was that she somehow managed to look them in the eye in a way that promised them her every action was in their best interests.

  Natalie got a grip. ‘Yes. I’m a marathon runner. No, that’s not strictly true. I run a lot because I like running. I’ve run marathons.’ She gave Jude a watery smile that lit her face. ‘Claud has a lot of work to do at home at weekends, so I went for a long run. I left around noon, I think. I have a circuit. Culgaith, Skirwith, Langwathby and back along the river.’

  Natalie looked so frail that Cumbria’s infamous Helm Wind might have blown her away so Jude, a runner by inclination but restricted by time and the demands of his job, was impressed. ‘That’s a fair way.’

  ‘It’s more than a half marathon. I could do it in under two hours, if I wanted to. I never do, though, because I have a routine. I stop at the beginning to do some stretches, as soon as I’m out of sight of the cottage, and I stop again near the end to do the same, just before it’s back in sight.’

  ‘Nat has a touch of OCD,’ interrupted Claud. ‘Hence the importance of routine.’

  ‘Yes. Everyone laughs, but I can’t—’

  ‘No-one’s laughing at you, sweetheart.’

  ‘I know you aren’t Claud, but the chief inspector will think it’s odd. And odd is suspicious. Isn't it?’ She looked at him, in a gesture of appeal. ‘It’s why I had to put my clothes in the washing machine, even though your policewoman said I shouldn’t. Claud said we should do as she said. It's not his fault. But I couldn’t bear the thought of that poor man’s blood in the house.’

  Claud sat back and gave Jude an extravagant shrug, then turned to Natalie, soothing her as if she was a child. ‘Tell the chief inspector about your run.’

  Obediently, she turned back to Jude, like a child repeating a lesson. ‘I ran as normal. I stopped where the path goes under the A66, for ten minutes.’

  ‘Also as normal?’

  ‘Yes, ten minutes to the second. I did some stretches and some breathing exercises, and then I set off for the last part. I ran along the river to the end of the lane… I’m not sure exactly when. There was a car parked. A white one.’ She stopped, gathered her thoughts, carried on. ‘The door was open but I couldn’t see anyone in the car. I thought that was odd.’ She took her hand from Claud’s and spread her fingers out on her lap. ‘So I stopped. The bank is crumbling just beyond there and not safe, or I would have gone that way. But I had to go down the lane to get home. I was a little nervous.’

>   ‘What made you so nervous, Mrs Blackwell?’

  She threw her husband an anguished glance, and he came to her rescue. ‘Nat suffers from anxiety, Chief Inspector. Don’t judge her by everyone else’s standards.’

  Jude lifted an eyebrow. ‘I was just asking.’

  ‘Anything unusual bothers me,’ she went on, in a bright, forced tone. ‘I need routine. If there was any threat to me—’

  ‘There was no threat, Nat.' Claude squeezed her hand.

  'I see that now. But there was in my mind. When I’d got to Langwathby I realised I didn’t have my phone and that put me on edge. I was sure something terrible was going to happen so when I saw the car everything felt wrong. I thought about running past it and breaking for home, and I was going to do that. But then I saw the man.’ She licked her lips.

  Claud placed an arm around her shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Nat. We’re here. But you have to tell the police what you saw.’

  ‘I don’t remember exactly. I had a panic attack. I don’t know how long I was there. Everything went black and time stopped. I must have shut my eyes. I knew I had to concentrate on my breathing. I closed my eyes and I breathed, but I don’t know for how long.’ Her breathing lengthened in the present, as she spoke of it in the past.

  ‘When you opened your eyes, what did you see?’

  ‘I was kneeling down next to him. I touched him and the blood was pumping, so I knew he was alive, and I just held on to him. I couldn’t bear the thought that he’d die, but he did. I had blood all over me. I stood up and looked about but I didn’t see anyone. I screamed.’ She turned to her husband in mute appeal.

  ‘Can you be sure there was no-one else there?’

  ‘Oh God. Do you think they were hiding?’ If possible, she grew even paler. ‘No. I don’t remember looking for anything, really. I just looked round and I looked at the body.’

  If Tammy was correct, the attacker had probably arrived and left by car. The lane was a dead end, connected to Rainbow Cottage and Temple Sowerby only by the track through the field that he’d taken to reach them. The only alternative was across the open fields, or on foot via the track. ‘Did you see any other vehicle?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Was there anyone else on the path?’

  ‘No.’ It was Claud, this time. ‘I was looking out for Nat, because she was a little later than I was expecting. You can see where it happened from the window. I saw the white car but I didn’t see another, though it could have left before I started looking. But if anyone had come past on the track I would have seen them.’

  ‘And I didn’t have my phone,’ said Natalie, like a child repeating a lesson. ‘So I ran home and told Claud and he called the police.’

  ‘What time was that?’ Jude looked to Claud.

  ‘Just after two.’

  Jude’s eye was drawn to the thick rubber bracelet on Natalie’s fragile wrist. ‘Your running route will be on your fitness tracker, I take it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked alarmed. ‘Surely you don’t think I—?’

  ‘No.’ Jude turned away from the look of outrage that Claud directed at him. ‘The injuries were very recent. When you found the body it can’t have been long since he was attacked. If we can pin down exactly what time you found him, then that narrows the window for the time of the murder. That’s all.’

  ‘Oh, of course. I won’t have to give you the tracker, though? I’m a bit obsessive about it.’ Her wide, pale eyes regarded him with a touch of concern. ‘It’s my anxiety. I like routine.’

  ‘We can get you another tracker, sweetheart.’ Claud’s tone oozed endless patience

  ‘But Claud, then I wouldn’t be able to tally up and—’

  ‘You can download the data, I imagine?’ In fascination, Jude observed the signs of Natalie’s anxiety, watched her fingers tapping relentlessly on the black rubber strap, the wrinkling of her brow, the snatched glances at Claud as if to reassure herself that he’d help her.

  ‘Yes.’ The news delighted her, and she relaxed. ‘It’ll tell you where I was and when. It’ll tell you how long I stopped for, and where. You’ll know everything, won’t you? That’ll help.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a great help.’ Aware that he had a dozen other things to deal with before the opening phase of the investigation was complete, Jude set his half-finished cup of coffee down on the table, closed his notebook and clipped his pen into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Thanks again for your time. I know how distressing it must have been. I’ll get this typed up and send someone back with it for you to sign.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Natalie stood, with what seemed to be characteristic poise, and Claud bounced to his feet in an altogether more pugnacious manner.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ Jude shot a look out through the window. It was impossible to miss the frantic activity that was taking place in the lane.

  ‘It’s fine.’ Claud guided him out of the door. ‘Nat, why don’t you run off and have a lie down, now. You’ll feel better after that.’ Then he leaned in towards Jude, sharing a confidence. ‘She can get a bit frail sometimes, but it’s nothing serious. Just highly strung. But nothing I can’t handle.’

  ‘If you think of anything else, let me know.’ Jude had intended to address himself to Natalie, but she’d already ghosted her way off through the house so he was left to deal with Claud, who seemed accustomed to dealing as his wife’s gatekeeper. ‘Here’s my card. You can call me at any time.’

  Claud took the card, looked at it, turned it over in his fingers and laid it on the hall table. ‘Yes, of course. Thanks for being so understanding with Nat. And good luck with your search.’

  As if he was looking for a long-lost relative, Jude thought as he stepped out into the lane, not a vicious killer who’d almost certainly disappeared into the anonymous traffic of the A66 and could by now have made it south to the spaghetti of the urban motorway network or east to the M1. He took a long look at the line of cars and lorries building up along the main road.

  Or the killer could have gone as little as a few hundred yards, to hide in plain sight.

  Chapter 2

  Monday morning. Anything but fresh from a holiday that had overrun into a cancelled flight, a sleepless night at the airport in Dubai and an eventual arrival at Manchester airport in the small hours of the morning, Ashleigh O’Halloran staggered into the police headquarters in Penrith on the back of a monumental misjudgement. Jet lag was a brute at the best of times, bestowing all the privations of a hangover with none of the fun that might have preceded it. She should have called in with an explanation and come in after lunch, with a few hours’ sleep to see her through. She could have made up the time later and Jude would have understood.

  He’d have understood; but because he was her partner she daren’t put him in that position. Another boss might reasonably have been less sympathetic than Jude always was but she couldn’t afford any accusations that he might be treating her favourably. They’d be unjust, because his attitude to her in the workplace was so strait-laced compared to the way he behaved outside it that it was almost schizophrenic, but so it was.

  She yawned as she signed in at reception. Ten minutes early, just enough time to track down the strongest shot of caffeine in the building. Turning towards the canteen where she normally turned straight to the office, she ran straight into her past and her present lovers, deep in conversation outside it.

  ‘Jesus!’ It was an uncharacteristic loss of composure. Both surprised and amused Jude lifted an eyebrow at her, and Detective Superintendent Faye Scanlon, who she’d last seen in her previous job in another force, stopped in the middle of what she’d been saying and lasered her former girlfriend with a look that would have shrivelled a daisy.

  ‘Ashleigh.’ Utterly unaware of the complicated relationship in which he was, by default, now involved, Jude stepped aside to let her join the conversation. ‘Did you have a good holiday?’

  The confusion over flights had been so all-consuming she hadn
’t texted him with every twist and turn in her convoluted journey. Despite her confusion, she struggled to keep back a smile. He could seem stiff and austere to the outsider but those close to him knew better — and these days no-one was closer to Jude than Ashleigh herself. ‘The holiday was fine. It was the travelling that was grim. Sorry I didn’t call in. I’ve only just got back from the airport, and I haven’t slept for two days, but I made it.’

  ‘Your dedication does you credit.’ Faye, her look designed to chill in bottle-green skirt suit, crisp mint-coloured shirt and with a necklace of beaten copper solid as a breastplate, scowled at her, took off her glasses and turned them over in her fingers. Gimlet-sharp grey eyes, the same colour as Jude’s but fifteen degrees colder, looked Ashleigh up and down and denied any acquaintance, but Ashleigh could read the message in her eyes. What the hell are you doing here? ‘Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking you might have been better off staying at home and making sure you were fit to work.’

  It had been a mistake ever getting into bed with Faye Scanlon. Sufficiently self-aware to understand that for her it had been an act of self-destruction committed in the death throes of her marriage, Ashleigh had no idea what had possessed Faye. The older woman’s marriage and career had been outwardly stable and yet she’d risked – and quickly regretted – an adulterous office affair.

  And now here she was, a new arrival on Ashleigh’s turf, looking as confident as if she’d been there for years. Too tired to grasp the implications, Ashleigh took the cowardly option and turned instead to Jude. ‘I knew you’d be busy so I thought I’d better get in.’

  ‘We can certainly use you today.’ He softened his usual sardonic expression with a smile that she had to fight not to return. The last thing she needed was Faye Scanlon jumping to conclusions, worst of all the right ones.

  To avoid temptation, she looked beyond the sharp edge of his jaw to a health and safety notice on the wall behind him. ‘Has something happened?’