Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

Used to more direct challenges from more violent men, Jude ignored the implied threat but he made a mental note and it didn’t favour Phil. ‘I do. Remember you told me you didn’t recognise Gracie Pepper?’

  ‘I didn’t recognise her at first. It was dark, and she was covered in blood. And she didn’t look like I knew her. Anyway I told you later that I did recognise her.’

  ‘You told me you didn’t know her very well.’

  ‘She didn’t work in my department.’

  ‘No. But you participated in the same workshop with her a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Ah.’ Phil sat back and picked up his coffee cup. ‘Of course. Those bloody sessions. Complete waste of my time and of public money. We’re stretched enough without having someone making us all fart around telling everybody stuff they’d no desire to hear. Some people buy into that, but not me. I just made something up.’

  And thereby confirmed himself to Jude as a liar. Not that Jude fundamentally disagreed with Phil’s assessment of the workshops, though the doctor was exactly the type of man they were meant to reach and yet the type who would ultimately remain unconvinced. ‘Do you remember Gracie from it?’

  ‘Now you mention it, yes, but I didn’t at the time.’

  ‘I understand she was a bit of a star turn.’

  ‘She may have been. I probably spent the afternoon thinking of all the paperwork I’d have to do that evening. If that’s all you’ve got to offer in the way of an interview, perhaps we could just have done it over the phone.’

  ‘You were out on your bike on the afternoon Len Pierce died. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ Jude had an OS map in his briefcase and fished it out, unfolding it. ‘Can you show me?’

  Phil hesitated, just a fraction. ‘I don’t remember the exact route. Up along the hillfoot villages, anyway. I parked at Langwathby and went from there. Then I cycled down to Knock and back via Newbiggin.’ Phil reached for the map and his finger sketched a furtive route, carefully skirting away from Temple Sowerby. ‘I left late morning. I saw all your blue lights in the distance.’

  ‘Did you stop anywhere?’

  ‘I had a sandwich in the pub at Langwathby before I started.’

  That would be verifiable, but how much of the rest of Phil’s route would be? ‘Did you have your phone with you?’

  ‘I left it in the car. I cycle where I feel like cycling. I have enough dealings with computers in the rest of my life. I don’t need them nagging at me about where to stop and start and where to turn left.’

  For a moment Jude thought of Natalie, slave to her own obsession with the fitness tracker as its foreman, shouting orders she had to obey. ‘Okay. We’ll ask around.’

  ‘Let’s hope someone saw me, then, because if you try and finger me for a hate crime you’ll be the one who looks stupid.’

  ‘It’s murder,’ Jude said, folding the map and replacing it in the case, ‘twice over. That’s pretty serious.’

  ‘Sorry for being inexact. I’m not a lawyer.’ Phil fingered his pager again, as if willing it to ring. ‘If that was all? I need to get back to my patients.’

  ‘One more thing. You haven’t written to DI Dodd recently, have you?’

  ‘No.’ Phil got up and leaned forward, a sorry attempt to intimidate. ‘I don’t write to people. If I have something to say to that man, I’ll say it to his face. You can tell him that.’ And he turned and headed from the building.

  Jude sat for a moment after he’d gone, watching him. Doddsy was right. Phil didn’t strike him as the kind of man to pussyfoot around, certainly not the kind who’d kill two people at random before he got to the person who triggered his fury.

  And then there was Doddsy. He reflected a moment longer on the note. Faye, when he’d alerted her, had taken it as seriously as he’d expected but her intensity had been frightening. She’d had it off to the lab for assessment within a minute of being shown it, as if the whole thing was personal to her.

  So she should. There was a clear and a present threat, now, not only to anyone in the area who was gay but to police officers in particular. But it was personal to him, too. His best friend was gay, his girlfriend bisexual. It had come close.

  He was afraid.

  His moment of introspection didn’t last. As ever, someone else’s needs intervened. This time the message that pinged up on the phone was from Ashleigh. Break-in at Claud’s office. With a sigh, he picked up the phone and called her back.

  Chapter 16

  ‘I hear my mum’s been on your back.’

  Doddsy sighed. Tammy’s opposition to his relationship with Tyrone had played uncomfortably on his soul since Jude had told him about it, but that was nothing to how he’d felt since the conversation that morning, and the realisation that Phil had been indisputably on the scene of the second murder and within a couple of miles of the first. The threatening message had only made it worse. When there was a right moment he’d tell Tyrone about it, because a threat to one was a threat to the other. ‘Not directly.’

  ‘Jude, then. She told me she’d had it out with him. I knew he’d have told you.’

  They were coming back into Pooley Bridge along the lakeshore walk. The sun had given up under the onslaught of the rolling spring clouds and a chill breeze had sprung up to whip tiny waves ever faster across the surface of Ullswater and force the Union Jack at the end of the steamer pier to stand out as if to attention. ‘Are they giving you trouble at home?’

  He was a few steps behind Tyrone as the path narrowed to the gate and he watched the younger man anxiously. Tyrone habitually walked like a policeman on the beat, tall and slightly ponderously with thumbs tucked into his belt, but today he was off-duty and light hearted, swinging his hips through the twist in the narrow gate and turning back with a smile that turned Doddsy’s gut and reminded him of his own misgivings. He was looking fifty in the eye, he reminded himself, too old even to justify a mid-life crisis.

  ‘Nah.’ Tyrone said, with an easy laugh, and slowed to allow Doddsy to catch up. Out of uniform he went for a look more suited to his age, jeans and a Newcastle United football shirt, a baseball cap defying the faint and declining sun. To the casual onlooker they must look like father and son. ‘She knows better. She says what she has to say and that’s her duty done. She does think a lot of duty, my mum.’

  Doddsy came across Tammy more regularly than most of the other CSIs, largely because of the mutual regard in which she and Jude held one another and the consequent fact that they liked to work together. Her chilliness with him wasn’t, he sensed, personal. If it was only Tammy’s displeasure he had to think about, he wouldn’t have worried. Time would smooth out the wrinkles and eventually, if anything came of what was growing between him and Tyrone she’d get used to it and if nothing came of it her worries and her resistance would melt away like snow off a dry stone wall, her tolerance only to be tested when Tyrone found himself another, younger, man.

  The morning’s meeting had shown him that there was much more to worry about than Tammy. ‘And what about your dad?’

  ‘Let’s get a coffee.’ Tyrone accelerated away again, shot across the road just before the lights changed from red to green and turned to wave across the stream of traffic that passed between them. When the lights changed again and Doddsy made his more sedate way across the road to join him, he was grinning at him. ‘You know what dads are like. They’re just like mums, only more macho. Let’s get a cake.’

  They settled in a seat by the window and ordered tea and cake, Doddsy opting for chocolate cake that he never usually ate and Tyrone choosing the lemon drizzle. It was a strange occasion, Doddsy told himself, feeling like an old maid on a first date. It wasn’t the first time he'd been out with Tyrone but his own awkwardness, the lifting of an internal curtain on his own heart, made it different. Suddenly it mattered to him what happened to the Garner family, and whether they were torn apart by criminal activity or an old-fashioned intolerance or whethe
r they made up and stayed together. He’d become invested in what happened to them, purely because it mattered to him that Tyrone was happy, with or without him. For the first time he understood exactly why Jude had been so conflicted over Mikey’s struggle between right and wrong, how hard it must have been for him to take the decision that, to an outsider like Doddsy himself, should only ever have gone one way.

  ‘So,’ said Tyrone, when the waitress had delivered their cakes and an enormous pot of tea, ‘what were we talking about? Dads, that was it. And aren’t they strange things?’

  Slicing the corner off his chocolate cake, Doddsy allowed himself to remain in a spellbound silence.

  ‘I mean. My dad’s a man’s man.’ Tyrone sighed. ‘Rugby and cricket — the men’s game, never the women’s — and he’d never wear pink. He does the cooking, but only when Mum isn’t there. He always drives, unless there’s drink involved, in which case he drives there and she drives back. And he’d be appalled if ever saw her drink a pint.’

  Doddsy had seen Tammy sink a few pints in his time. He suppressed a smile. ‘It’s a generational thing. My dad’s like that.’

  ‘I thought as much. Though even the metrosexual parents, the ones who think they’re right up with it… even those ones are perfectly happy for everyone else to be gay but they can’t help questioning things a little bit when it’s their boy. In my experience. That’s where my dad’s coming from.’

  ‘Mine too.’ Doddsy’s childhood was a generation removed from Tyrone’s but it was peopled by the same style of parenting.

  ‘When did you come out?’

  ‘When I was twenty-one. I thought they ought to know.’ It had spared his mother the futile exercise of hoping he’d find himself a nice young woman, though not the disappointment of realising she'd have to look to friends for the surrogate pleasure of grandchildren.

  ‘Were they disappointed?’

  ‘That’s an understatement.’

  ‘Angry?’

  ‘Not to my face.’ On reflection, perhaps they’d taken it well. His father had worked in the shipyards and to him it was a shame, akin to siring a son who was a criminal. It didn’t change the love they had for him, only the way it was expressed. He’d no doubt his father had been angry — blamed everybody else, for sure — but the love between them, always unspoken, had been strong enough to survive.

  ‘No. Mine neither.’ Tyrone looked beyond him, out of the window and down towards the shallow river to where a couple of smokers, sitting outside, huddled their jackets around them and puffed away in discontent. Following his gaze Doddsy, undertaking a crusade against a quarter of a century of chain-smoking and succeeding only in cutting down, weakened enough to want to join them just for one quick smoke, but Tyrone was abstemious and clean-living so he stayed where he was. ‘My mum gave me a hug and told me she was proud of me. She knew, of course. They always do. And I can see why she was disappointed. Not because she minds, not really. It’s because they don’t have a daughter and she always hoped I’d bring someone home that she could have that sort of relationship with. Optimistic, I dare say. But that’s what I think she wanted.’

  ‘And your dad was different?’ If only Phil hadn’t been anywhere near the site of Gracie’s murder, or had arrived just that little bit later, when she was dead, so that he wouldn’t have tried to intervene and he wouldn’t have disturbed the body and ended up soaked in the woman’s blood and looking like her butcher.

  ‘He’s a great guy, Dad is.’ Tyrone sighed. ‘When I told him I was gay he went quiet for a while, avoided me for a week or so, then started talking to me again. Never said anything. Never explained. Certainly never apologised. But he dropped the stuff about poofs and men being real men and so on.’

  But had Phil changed his mind? ‘And you reckon he meant it?’

  ‘He’s a traditional old stick, is Dad. He won’t change what he thinks. He might change the way he talks, because he know other people find it unacceptable and every now and then something comes up. You should have heard him when he and Mum were at church and people were talking about this Rainbow Festival. No place for that in the church. It wants to stop meddling with people’s private lives. None of this woke nonsense.’ His mimicry of his father was clever but fond. ‘He’s traditional enough, thank God, that he still thinks blood’s thicker than water.’

  ‘I expect he’s wondering what he did wrong.’ Gloomy at the folly of his fellow humans, Doddsy in his turn looked outside and the antics of a couple of ducks, scrabbling in the shallows for bread that the smokers tossed to them, cheered him up.

  ‘Yeah, I expect so. But he needs to loosen up.’

  ‘We all do, to an extent.’

  Tyrone chopped his slice of cake into neat pieces and Doddsy found himself staring in fascination at his long, thin fingers. ‘I don’t think he killed Gracie Pepper, you know. But I wonder if that’s what I want to think. It’s easy to delude yourself. We all do it, all the time.’

  ‘Did he know her?’

  ‘Better than he lets on. I don’t understand why people can’t be open about their sexuality.’

  Doddsy knew. It wasn’t easy being an older generation. It made it harder to be at ease with yourself. He had more sympathy with Giles Butler than either Jude or Ashleigh had managed to muster. Sometimes you just wanted to make life easier. And the implications of what Tyrone had just said caught on. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Gracie. She’s a lesbian.’ Tyrone beamed across the table at him. ‘Hey, Doddsy. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. I just assumed you did but no-one was saying anything.’

  ‘I’d no idea. Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Not so much hear as overhear. I was leaving this morning and Mum and Dad were talking about it. He said something not very complimentary about Gracie being a dyke.’ He crinkled his face in distaste. ‘Excuse my language. I thought about going back and saying something but Mum tore a rare strip off him for me, so I didn’t need to stay and get involved in the aggro. When I went out she was lecturing him about the language he used and he was banging on about political correctness making people think it’s cool to be gay when they should just get on with the way they were born, or something like that. I left them to it.’

  Gracie, gay. It looked as if Faye had been right after all. And the note, which he’d taken seriously at first and then managed to write off as an ill-judged prank, suddenly became more that that, morphed on the instant into a very real threat to himself and others. ‘Quite right.’

  Tyrone’s anxious eyes searched his face. ‘I thought it must be common knowledge. If it isn’t that doesn’t look good for him does it? If he’s right, I mean. But it didn’t look good for him anyway.’

  The last thing Doddsy needed – the very last thing – was Phil implicated in two murders. He pictured the look on Jude’s face when he heard. ‘You know I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘I’m not sentimental, mate.’ Tyrone’s anxiety had transmitted itself from face to fingers, and he was mashing the crumbs on his plate. ‘If he did wrong he has to answer for it. I don’t think he did it. Of course I don’t. He’s my dad. But let’s not pretend he isn’t in the frame.’

  ‘Does he realise he’s a suspect?’

  ‘He could hardly not, with me in my job and Mum in hers. He knows we’re asking questions.’

  The truth was the truth and the law was the law. Striving to keep down the importance of what Tyrone had revealed. Doddsy shifted the conversation on. ‘I didn’t know your parents were churchgoers.’

  ‘The old-fashioned sort. Habit, I think.’

  ‘Does he know Claud then? If he knows about the Rainbow Festival.’ It kept coming up. The church meeting about the festival, back on the day that Len had died, had been where he’d first heard of Claud Blackwell. Doddsy himself, a silent listener from the back pew, had liked the idea, seeing it as a vehicle that might somehow lead to his own acceptance of himself. At the workshop Claud had made him feel like a coward for not wanting to
engage and choosing, instead, to take on an invisible cloak of celibacy. He’d felt forced into talking about it when he was much more like Jude, someone who was rarely caught out committing the error of showing a stranger how he felt.

  But Tyrone liberated him. He understood now that it wasn’t about sexuality but about himself and the fact that he’d never before met someone who touched his soul. He’d had to wait far longer than he’d ever thought, but he’d finally found the man who made him care nothing for the opinion of the world around him.

  ‘Claud? I don’t think so. He certainly never mentioned it.’ Tyrone pushed his empty plate aside. ‘We’ve got the rest of the day. Let’s call into Booths and pick up some stuff. Then we can go back to your place and I’ll cook you some tea.’

  He went off to settle the bill and Doddsy, day off or not, took the opportunity to flick a quick message to Jude.

  Chapter 17

  ‘This is all my fault.’

  Death — any death — was traumatic. Natalie plucked at the skin on the back of her hand but the pain wasn’t great enough to distract her. Anxiety bred anxiety, until the smallest thing presaged the largest, the most innocent move assumed the signature of guilt. Deep down she was a rational woman, had read all the books and had all the help that Claud could get for her, but there was an inexplicable and unbridgeable gap between knowing and understanding. No matter what techniques she employed with her rational mind, her eternally anxious soul believed the worst.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Claud was at his desk, looking out of the window just as he must have done when Gracie Pepper had been slaughtered in the churchyard almost under his eyes.

  ‘It is my fault. And they think it’s serious.’

  ‘It’s routine. It was just a break-in. Nobody died.’

  The nobody died made her twitch, as if the mention of death was an electric shock prompt meant to keep her sane. And this was after the calming effects of the medication. Without it, she wouldn’t have coped. ‘If it’s routine, why are they sending the chief inspector?’