Death on the Lake

by Jo Allen

  ‘Jude. What if they—?’

  ‘Do you have any evidence they were using drugs?’

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘Right. Then no search. Not until you come up with something better, or unless you can give me any real suggestion that we might find her there. Sorry.’

  He could have done it. In Ashleigh’s view they had clear grounds for suspicion. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

  ‘Clearly,’ he snapped back at her, uncharacteristically sharp. ‘Otherwise we’d know exactly where to find her, wouldn’t we?’ And he ended the call.

  Four

  The police came back in the early afternoon, with boats and divers under the supervision of Ashleigh O’Halloran, who stood on the shore with a radio and a clipboard. When Miranda went up to the first floor and looked out from her bedroom she spotted another boat, just off the shore further down the lake path, and figures in hi-vis vests tramping through the fresh green curls of early summer ferns. At the edge of the lawn Ollie, looking exactly like his father, stood with his hands in his pockets and, she suspected, a frown of deep thought on his face, watching them with Will hovering just behind him like a downtrodden handmaid. The boys must know something and the police might know they knew.

  This is all getting too difficult, Miranda said to herself, taking another look over the silver sheet of water, rippling in the stiff breeze. The boats from the sailing school weren’t out today, maybe as a mark of respect or maybe because Summer’s former colleagues were too busy answering the police’s questions. She could tell by the severe look on Ashleigh O’Halloran’s face that they weren’t expecting to find Summer alive.

  Where could the girl have gone? People didn’t just disappear. And somehow, her instinctive response was one she couldn’t share with the police, no matter how much she might want to. The fear that lay like a rock in the pit of her stomach wasn’t one that anyone else could understand. It’ll be me next.

  Miranda wasn’t a woman for leaving things alone. She strode down the stairs with purpose and out into the garden to where the twins were standing. Will, she could tell, would rather be anywhere else and only Ollie’s bullish determination kept him there, tethered to his brother by an invisible tie. Of the two of them she liked Will the better, but he was the weak link. Even at the age of eighteen Ollie, a formidable businessman in the making, was the one she could deal with. ‘Will, would you pop in and put the kettle on? Maybe offer the police a coffee or something.’

  ‘Keep them sweet, eh?’ muttered Ollie as Will took advantage of the loophole and scuttled back towards the house. ‘Great idea.’

  ‘It never does any harm to be hospitable.’

  ‘Right.’

  When Will had gone, he turned to her and stared, cool brown eyes weighing her up. She often thought she was glad Robert loved her and today a similar thought occurred to her about her stepson. I’m glad he isn’t my enemy. ‘Are you okay, Ollie? Yesterday must have been shocking for you.’

  ‘Sure was.’ He showed the faintest sign of weakness, biting his lip, but he didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘Just as well you were out all afternoon, eh, Miranda?’

  ‘And just as well it was only alcohol and not drugs you had on the boat, eh, Ollie?’ she rejoined, deadpan.

  His face cracked into a wary smile. ‘Do you think you can keep Dad sweet for us?’

  ‘I doubt it. He’ll assume the worst and act on it. You know what he’s like. But I promise you I’ll try.’

  He sighed. ‘Okay.’ One day in the not-too-distant future he’d be brave enough to challenge his father, the young stag taking on the old, but they all knew he wasn’t ready yet. There would be drama aplenty in the Neilson household when that day came. ‘And in return I promise I’ll forget I saw your car outside the house when you said you were still in Kendal.’

  She nodded him a gracious acceptance, but the conversation terminated as the sergeant strode up the lawn towards them. Beside her, Ollie allowed himself the lowest of wolf-whistles, unwilling to let a sexy woman escape his notice yet not quite daring to antagonise the law. Scrutinising her with care, Miranda judged his appreciation to be well-earned. The woman had curves many other women would have envied but which must send a low rumbling through a red-blooded male. She wasn’t what Miranda herself would have called beautiful, but she had an earthy attractiveness. There was a sensuousness about her that reminded Miranda of Elizabeth, her long-ago best friend.

  But Elizabeth was dead and Summer was probably dead too. Am I next? wondered Miranda, as a chill threaded itself around her spine and up to her neck. Could there possibly be a connection? She shivered.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Neilson?’ The detective reached them and must have read Ollie’s body language and found his thoughts unwelcome, but she could look after herself, brushing his smile of welcome aside and turning her back on him. This show of spirit, this putting the bumptious young man firmly in his place, was admirable and Miranda warmed to her. ‘You look pale. I’m so sorry we have to do this. Please don’t feel you have to stay here.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Miranda kept half an eye on Ollie, who’d taken a step back and was eyeing the woman up from the rear, now, with obvious appreciation. She wished she dared scowl at him. ‘I quite understand. But it’s so distressing. The poor girl. An accident, you suppose?’

  ‘I don’t suppose anything,’ the woman said, words that surely came from the dictionary of stock phrases for reassuring the public.

  ‘But you’re looking for a body.’ Miranda didn’t know why she was harping on about it. It was better to let it go, not to show anything other than a stranger’s shock at an overly-close death.

  Ashleigh O’Halloran was looking at her carefully and to her shock Miranda suddenly found herself wanting to tell the woman all about Elizabeth and what she’d done, about how she’d died, and about the guilt Miranda herself would carry with her until the day the past caught up with her. One day, perhaps one day soon, the police might be probing the cold depths of Ullswater looking for Miranda herself. ‘Sergeant O’Halloran.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Thank God Ollie was within earshot. Otherwise she might have done it, might actually have committed the cardinal sin of telling the police the truth they hadn’t asked her for. ‘This poor girl. You will find her, won’t you?’

  The detective looked at her again, long and hard, but decided to let it go. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘And you think she may have had an accident.’ Any question, even an old one, would do to to deflect this woman’s attention.

  ‘The signs certainly point to that. After all,’ (a hard stare towards Ollie, who remembered in time that it would become him to be humble and composed his face into a suitable expression of sorrow) ‘it does appear everyone on the Seven of Swords had rather more to drink than is good for them.’

  ‘Bit judgemental there, Ashleigh,’ Ollie muttered under his breath, but if she heard him she ignored it.

  ‘Perhaps she fell in the water, if she was very drunk.’ Miranda flicked her eyes closed for a second.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  A call from down by the water sent Ashleigh down there at speed, but she’d barely reached the water’s edge before the drama seemed to be over. Her heart in her mouth, Miranda turned to Ollie. ‘For a moment I thought they might have found her.’ But he was shaking his head, as though that thought had never crossed his mind.

  Five

  Monday morning’s sunshine had turned to afternoon rain, and low cloud had clamped down over the Lowther Valley as Becca Reid drew up outside her cottage on Wasby. Ryan was already there, sitting on the wall with his scarlet rain jacket on and his hood up, and although he was early rather than she late, the abject misery of a man stranded in the Lake District wilderness made her feel bad about herself. She’d thought she’d have time for a shower and a cup of tea, at least, but the long day at work was about to stretch into a long evening doing her cousin yet another favour. A tinge of resentment coloure
d her good nature, regret at a promise she wished she’d never made. She pulled up the car, opened the door and got out. ‘Sorry Ryan. Have you been waiting long?’

  ‘Nah.’ He beamed at her. ‘Walked down from Askham. Just got here.’ His Australian accent had a cheerful twang to it. Perhaps, after all, he found the drizzle different and invigorating.

  ‘Good.’ She walked up the path and Holmes, her cat, streaked out from his shelter into the porch, pressing his nose to the crack in the door while she fiddled with her key. She felt no sympathy for him. It served him right for refusing to come in the morning, falling for the false promise of sunshine. Like Becca herself, Holmes was old enough to know better. ‘You can stand in the kitchen and drip for five minutes while I get changed. Have a coffee if you think you’ve got time to drink it. I’d rather get down to Howtown sooner and back sooner, and George is early to bed these days. But I warn you, if he’s in the mood, he can talk for Westmorland.’

  George Barrett, their mutual great-uncle, could lie for Westmorland, too, but at ninety-five his tall tales had become a source of amusement and entertainment for family and friends, as well as for George himself, so she didn’t grudge him the exaggeration. She ran upstairs, changed and ran down again to the kitchen where Holmes was standing beside an empty bowl scowling and Ryan leaned against the kitchen unit checking his phone. With a sigh, Becca forked food into the bowl, mopped up the drips from the floor and picked up her own raincoat. ‘Okay. Let’s go.’

  Outside, as she turned the key to lock the front door, her bad mood intensified. A dark blue Mercedes drew up outside the cottage opposite and Jude Satterthwaite and his girlfriend got out. Becca had ditched Jude after an eight-year relationship four years before and so she had no right to feel resentful, either of Ashleigh O’Halloran for falling into the lap of so charismatic and intriguing a man or of Jude for having, after a respectable interval, replaced Becca herself with an altogether higher-spec model. That didn’t stop her feeling irritated every time she saw him, and she saw him more often than was comfortable because she lived opposite his mother.

  ‘Hi Becca.’ It was Jude’s standard greeting, neutral, polite and yet somehow unforgiving.

  ‘Hi,’ Ashleigh said, more brightly, and took three steps up the path towards Linda Satterthwaite’s front door.

  ‘Hi.’ Becca felt in her pocket for her car key and it wasn’t there. Beside her, Ryan loitered next to the wall. His silence, and Jude’s presence, forced her into social interaction. ‘This is my cousin, Ryan.’ But Jude would know that, because he had an irritating habit of knowing everything and an even more irritating habit of largely keeping it to himself. ‘Ryan, this is Jude. He’s an old friend.’ Because that was all he was.

  ‘I’ve heard all about you.’ Ryan heaved himself off the wall with reluctance that verged on rudeness and went straight to the car door.

  ‘All good I hope.’ There was a smile lurking on the edge of Jude’s lips, as if he found this whole awkward situation amusing. As well he might.

  ‘Nah, mate. Not much of it.’

  Becca closed her fingers on the key card, flipped the doors unlocked and saw Ryan disappearing into the car with no further ado. ‘Ryan’s Australian,’ she said to Jude, as she walked past him to the driver’s door. The smile was full on now. He could afford to laugh at her. ‘They speak their minds.’

  ‘Obviously.’ He turned away before she had the chance to add to her apology. ‘Okay, Ash. I’m coming. No point in standing out in the rain.’

  With relief, Becca slid into the car and started the engine. ‘Did you have to say that? Jude’s okay.’

  ‘I thought you’d fallen out with him.’

  That was what the story was but the story was never quite the whole truth. ‘Yes, but it was years ago, and we’re both grown up enough to be civil.’

  ‘Yeah, Becca. But I’ve never been a great fan of the pigs.’ He paused. ‘Though that girl he’s picked up is a bit of all right.’

  Becca drove out of Wasby and up towards Askham, still disproportionately annoyed. Dislike of Jude Satterthwaite was something she regarded as her prerogative, because he hadn’t valued their relationship as highly as he rated his job. A more general dislike of the police didn’t carry quite the same credibility, especially not from Ryan, who was ex-army. Or maybe that was it. Maybe the one branch of authority instinctively despised the other. Either way, his tactless but accurate appraisal of Jude’s new woman hadn’t helped.

  In good weather and light traffic it was twenty minutes to Howtown, but today the cloud had clamped down on the road that climbed around Askham Fell and flooded the Eden Valley to the east. The road was slippery with mud and flooded where the water had surged down the hillside.

  Their progress was further slowed by obvious police activity as they wound their way down the narrow road to George’s cottage in Martindale. There were two cars parked near the marina and another two pulled up on the verge by the Sharrow Bay Hotel.

  ‘Something up?’ Ryan inquired, raising a hand to wipe away the condensation from the inside of the passenger window and serving only to blur what little Becca could see in the wing mirror.

  ‘It looks like it.’ It couldn’t be important, or Jude wouldn’t have been spending his evening taking Ashleigh round to visit his mother, but even as that thought occurred to her, Becca suppressed it. Jude’s devotion to his job was excessive, but he wasn’t involved in every case and maybe he was learning, albeit too late for the two of them, that there was value in getting away from the job.

  Or maybe that was all he and Ashleigh ever talked about. Maybe, after all, he hadn’t learned the value of downtime and his only chance of a successful relationship was to build one with someone who shared his priorities.

  Three more police cars were parked at the pier in Howtown and the signs of activity here were more intense. Becca had to slow down to squeeze her way around them. There was a cluster of police officers, and a small motorboat sitting fifty yards off the shore. As she glanced across, a diver tipped backwards over the edge and disappeared below the surface with barely a splash. A policeman she vaguely recognised as one of Jude’s uniformed colleagues was leaning against a dry stone wall holding a reusable cup in one hand and clamping his radio to his ear with the other.

  ‘Looks like someone’s fallen in the lake.’ Ryan turned to crane his neck backwards as she turned the car up the hairpin bends that took them from Howtown and down into Martindale. ‘Someone misjudged the countryside I bet. Rookies.’

  It had taken a week for her cousin’s continual chirpiness, which he seemed to think did something to offset his constant requests for favours, to begin to grate on Becca’s nerves, and she was the most tolerant of her family. That was why most of the favours seemed to devolve to her. Normally she wasn’t remotely bothered about popping along to see George, but she preferred to do it at a time of her own choosing and one she knew would be suitable to him. Ryan had a tin ear to other people’s convenience. She dropped down the steep hill past the new church of St Peter’s, a mere hundred and fifty years or so old, and turned along the lane to Martindale and the much older St Martin’s, its churchyard walls standing reassuringly solid a bare twenty yards from George’s cottage. ‘I’ll warn you. He can be a bit grumpy.’

  ‘Ruth told me about that. He’ll be fine with me.’

  ‘You can turn your legendary charm on him.’ She pulled the car up and turned to him with a smile that was meant to take the sting out of her words. Ruth, her mother, was already losing patience with their distant cousin.

  ‘I told you. He’ll be fine.’ He smiled back, the full stare, the cheeky wink. Cousin or not, Becca knew when she inevitably had to introduce Ryan to her current boyfriend, there wouldn’t be a lot of love lost. Adam resented everyone who challenged him for her attention — even Holmes. ‘She said he can get grumpy in the evenings. That’s all. We’ll be ready for it.’

  Becca got out of the car and locked it. When her mother had issued Rya
n with a coded warning to watch his step with George, the suggestion that the evening wasn’t a good time had been meant as a firm instruction not to visit, but Ryan, who was bright enough to pick it up, had chosen to disregard it. Fair enough. He’d already shown he had the sensitivity of a rhinoceros to everyone else around him, so why would he care about George?

  ‘Come on then.’ Resigned to a short, blunt visit, she led the way up the path and round the two-storey house to the side door he used to avoid the front step. The window frames needed attention, especially upstairs, but George hadn’t been upstairs for a good two years, so it didn’t matter. He’d be far better out of the place but no-one dared suggest it. She opened the door, always left unlocked and stepped into the dark rear porch. ‘Uncle George! It’s me, Becca. I’ve brought someone to see you.’

  He was in the kitchen and she waited until he replied before she left the narrow hallway. ‘Who is it? Not that new boyfriend of yours?’

  ‘No.’ Becca had brought Adam Fleetwood along to meet George on one previous occasion, and she wasn’t about to do it again, not because they hadn’t got on but because the last thing she wanted to do was allow anybody to jump to the conclusion there was any permanence in a relationship she now realised she’d primarily entered into to put Jude Satterthwaite’s back up. It hadn’t worked, and now she was looking for a way to disengage herself from it with grace. ‘Much better than that.’

  ‘Better? You haven’t brought Jude to see me, have you?’

  He was provoking her. She held firm. ‘Even better. I’ve brought Ryan. Sharon’s Ryan. You know. From Australia.’

  ‘I’ve just finished my tea and I was thinking about my bed.’

  It was half past six but Becca, a district nurse, knew all too well how people like George could spin a routine to cover three hours. ‘Why don’t you and Ryan sit and have a blether? I can clear your tea things up, if you like.’