Death on the Lake

by Jo Allen

  And a voice. ‘Goodbye, Miranda.’ And then the shot.

  Jude’s car chased the shadow of a cloud down the Ullswater shore, catching up with its fading remnants in the shape of a rainbow hovering over Howtown pier. He pulled up beside the patrol car parked up by the pier, where Ashleigh was deep in conversation with two uniformed police officers, and wound the window down. ‘Any joy?’

  Ashleigh lowered the clipboard. ‘None.’ She ended the discussion with the two officers and drifted over to Jude while they returned to their patrol car. ‘I think we’re just about finished here. We’ve spoken to everyone we know was here, and I’ve put out an appeal for anyone who was walking up there yesterday, but I’ll be surprised if we find anything, to be honest.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right. All the signs point to it being a very smart piece of work. So smart I almost wonder if it was a professional hit.’

  ‘On Luke? You really think that?’

  ‘I do. Hop in and we’ll have a chat about it. I want to go down there and have another look around in case I can find any more inspiration, and I’d also like to talk to Robert Neilson about it.’ Faye hadn’t liked that idea but it had become increasingly difficult for her to argue. They were at the point where not speaking to him would look suspicious. ‘He’s bound to have crossed the wrong sort of people at some stage.’

  ‘I’m done here anyway, so I can spare you some time before I head back to the office.’ She got into the car and clipped on her seatbelt. A red car, driven by a grey-haired woman who he recognised as Neilson’s PA, drove past and headed up the steep hill, very slowly, as if the driver wasn’t used to the sequence of hairpin bends.

  ‘Good. I’ve been scratching my head over this and it infuriates me. It’s so neat, so tidy. A murder committed on a public road with no evidence left behind. It can only have taken seconds. I can’t imagine it was somebody with a personal grudge who met up with Luke on the road. It’s far too professional for that.’

  They followed the red car, catching up with it at the bridge where Luke had died, and there Jude turned off while the car continued on its sedate way towards Waterside Lodge.

  ‘Is it possible someone could have paid a hitman to take out Luke?’ asked Ashleigh.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Jude stopped the car on the grass verge just beyond the bridge, outside George’s cottage where he’d pulled up on the day the old man died. ‘I want to satisfy myself as to where you can see the bridge from. I don’t think you can see it from the church.’

  ‘Nobody saw anyone going down the dale,’ said Ashleigh, flicking through the papers on her folder as he stared down the road. ‘There’s a chance whoever it was got away through Boredale and down to Patterdale, but Tyrone spoke to a witness at one of the farms down there who’s adamant that no-one went down the road.’

  ‘I was wondering if they’d cut up behind the church and headed up into the hills that way.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to be a serious walker to do that, but you would if you wanted to make a clear getaway. But you’ve already thought about that, haven’t you?’

  Jude got out of the car and she followed him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So let me guess. You suspect Ryan Goodall.’

  He walked down towards the church, hands in his pockets. ‘It makes sense. He’ll have all the skills he needs to do the job, he’ll blow through and disappear. If you’re an opportunist — whether you’re someone who wants to take out Luke Helmsley or whether you have a grudge against Robert Neilson — then he’s ideal, and he had every reason to be about in the dale if anyone saw him.’

  ‘But he wasn’t here.’

  ‘He told Becca he wasn’t here. That’s not the same thing.’ Jude frowned. It had never occurred to him to question Becca’s version of events. Maybe Ryan had guessed that. ‘I know it’s improbable but I wonder if he was here all the time. Waiting. And he did the job and disappeared.’

  They stood and scanned the dale. There were a dozen escape routes if you wanted them, if you knew your territory. Jude himself knew this section of the eastern fells as well as most other people, and the terrain was rough but by no means as unforgiving as some of the fells further west. Given a good start — a few minutes would be enough — all you had to do was make the cover of the rising bracken. From there, especially if you were dressed in the greens and greys and browns of the hillsides, you could pick your way to the skyline, choose your moment to get over it, and then you were out of sight and away. ‘If you pick your route, you’re only twelve miles or so from Penrith and no-one’s going to look twice at a guy with a rucksack there, are they?’

  ‘There’s CCTV at the station, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve already got Chris looking at that. But it occurs to me. Luke might not have been the man he was after, but just the man in the way. In which case, maybe he’s still here.’ It wouldn’t be the first time a criminal had hidden in plain sight. ‘Let’s head up the hill and have a look.’

  ‘We’re hardly dressed for it.’ Ashleigh looked at his suit and brogues, then down at her own flat shoes.

  ‘We won’t go far. You don’t have to go far up there before you get a really good view. And I suspect he won’t have gone far, either. He’d need to be able to drop down into the dale and out again pretty quickly as soon as he saw his opportunity.’

  Despite her reluctance, despite the poor grip of his smart shoes on the muddy grass, he headed off along what passed for the path up the side of the fell. It petered out rapidly, obviously rarely used, and the bright green fronds of the ferns rippled in the breeze. A gut feeling drove him. He could see exactly how Ryan might have staked out the dale, how he might have perched up there expending a week’s worth of patience, watching and waiting for his intended victim — whoever that victim was.

  But surely not Luke. Who, then? Robert had been out of the dale but perhaps that was what suited him. With Miranda and the boys out of the house, maybe that was his opportunity to get into Waterside Lodge. And then he’d met Luke.

  A ripple of self-preservation took him. He’d back himself in a fight with most people, if it came to it, but maybe not on a windswept hillside with a trained assassin. He slowed down. ‘We’d best ca’ canny, as my old granny used to say.’

  ‘I was about to suggest we get someone out to search the fellside,’ said Ashleigh. She stopped for a moment to disentangle herself from a strand of heather that had caught itself up in her trousers. ‘But I don’t think we need to. Look.’

  She was looking away from him, at a wall about four feet high that marked the lower end of an old sheep fold. On the upslope side of it was a tent. A cooking stove was set to one side of it.

  Jude crashed his way through the heather. God knew who was in there, if it was Ryan Goodall or someone else. But he wouldn’t have lasted long in the police by being faint-hearted. ‘Morning! Anyone there?’

  No answer. The wind rippled the green nylon of the tent.

  He headed up the path for a few yards to where the wall had fallen, and scrambled over it. ‘Anyone there?’ he called again.

  ‘Jude,’ said Ashleigh, agonised. ‘Take care.’

  He could bluff it out, if he had to. ‘Hello!’ he called again, but the silence was resolute. He ducked down and lifted the flap of the tent. Empty. The he reached down to touch the kettle that sat by the camping stove. There was still warmth in it. At the back of the tent was a bowl with the remains of a breakfast, cereal barely congealed. At the front, tucked under the flap, was a pair of high-spec binoculars. ‘There you go. He’s been keeping an eye on what’s going on, and he’s around here somewhere. If it’s our man, and I think it is.’

  She was aghast, and he could see why. ‘We need to get someone up here as soon as we can.’

  He thought about it for a moment. There was little justification for flooding the dale with police when the tent could belong to any old camper. ‘You reckon? I think right now I’d rather keep an eye on this place. He’s obviously using it as a base.
He’ll have to come back. I might get someone to get a drone up and see if there’s anything going on, and I’ll make damn sure there’s someone keeping an eye out down in the dale. When we know more we can ask him a few questions. But yes. Let’s get back down to the car and start looking innocent. We don’t want him to know we’ve found him and we don’t want to look any more suspicious than we already do.’ He got out his phone and checked it. ‘No signal, dammit. Sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t.’

  They slipped and slithered their way down the slope. ‘So if he’s hanging around,’ said Ashleigh, after a furtive look about to make sure there was no-one listening, ‘that means there’s unfinished business.’

  ‘It looks like it.’ Jude scanned the dale. They should have searched it. If they had, and the camp site hadn’t been there immediately after Luke’s murder, that definitely suggested that the camper — whether Ryan or someone else — had moved back in for the kill.

  He paused for a moment longer, as if something was off, something not quite right. ‘Let’s go and have a look at old George, shall we?’

  ‘Why on earth would we do it now?’

  ‘No-one uses the church. Maybe there’s a crypt. It would be an excellent place to hide, wouldn’t you say?’

  He pushed open the gate to the churchyard and held it open for her, letting it swing back. The gate was self-closing, controlled by a weight on a chain that pulled it closed and as they went through, a black cloud of flies rose from it.

  Eternally curious, Jude gave the contraption a second look, and it didn’t disappoint. ‘Ashleigh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’

  She bent down towards it as the flies settled back, took a look and stood up again. The look she gave him was troubled. ‘That’s blood.’

  ‘Yes.’ He stood and surveyed the churchyard. The long grass was still trampled from George’s funeral two days before and the police search the day before that.

  ‘What the…?’ Ashleigh saw, at the same time as he did, the mess of soil next to the grave and piled below the neighbouring yew tree. Dry soil, when the grass under their feet was wet. And the roughed-up turf that overlaid the grave, and the family’s arrangement of flowers, perched askew upon the grave.

  He’d stood at the back of the crowd during the funeral, ready to make his escape, but he’d have sworn that the soil had been piled on a tarpaulin so as not to spoil the grass of the churchyard and make it easier to fill in the grave when all was over. He strode over to the grave and looked over the wall. A substantial quantity of dry soil lay scattered on the thick grass and on the leaves of the overhanging yew tree outside.

  Dry soil, he said to himself again. Dry soil. He dropped to his knees by the grave, moved the flower arrangement, and unrolled the turf that had been laid upon it.

  ‘’What are you doing?’ said Ashleigh behind him, scandalised. ‘You can’t dig up George!’

  If he was wrong, he wouldn’t find anything. He’d dig down a couple of inches, realise the effort was futile, replace the soil and the turf and leave the graveyard with no-one but Ashleigh and himself aware of how he’d desecrated George’s grave. If he was right, he’d be disturbing the crime scene.

  But if he was right whatever — whoever — was in there might not have been there long and so, if it was human, might still be alive. He thrust both hands into one end of the loosely packed soil and his fingers touched something solid, a bare few inches below the surface. ‘Ash. Call for help.’

  Down in the dale there was a signal and she was already on her phone, calling in to Doddsy as Jude kept on, turning the soil, scraping it away with little care for anything other than speed. But he was too late. He knew he was too late but still he kept scraping the earth away until the shape of a face emerged. ‘Ah, hell.’

  ‘Jude’s found a body,’ Ashleigh reported, ‘in the graveyard up at Martindale. In George Barrett’s grave. I don’t know. Hold on a minute.’

  ‘No rigor,’ Jude reported, his voice terse. ‘It hasn’t been here long.’ His fingers closed on something hard and cold. ‘Bloody hell. It’s a gun.’ And then, scooping away soil by the handful, he revealed a head, the skull marked with a bloody mess of soil, blood, matted hair. But beneath all that, a recognisable face.

  He sat back on his heels. ‘It’s Ryan Goodall.’

  Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that.

  Twenty-Four

  The patrol car from Martindale had reached them in minutes, and it was another half an hour before the CSI team rolled in. ‘I should just set up camp in this place,’ Tammy had said to them, in passing. ‘And I hear you’ve contaminated the scene, too. Can’t trust you clodhoppers.’

  Jude had shrugged the objection aside. She might joke about it, and he’d unquestionably made her job more difficult than it needed to be, but she’d know as well as he did that he’d had to be sure the man couldn’t be saved.

  ‘He can’t have been there very long,’ he said to Ashleigh as they left the scene to the experts and more cars poured down the dale.

  ‘No. And that’s the puzzle. If you’re right and he killed Luke, then who the hell killed Ryan? Or are we on the wrong track altogether?’

  Instinct and experience told him not. Luke’s death bore the hallmarks of a killing of which Ryan was eminently capable, while Ryan’s own murder looked messy and opportunistic. ‘We’ll find out. Eventually.’

  ‘Here’s Doddsy.’ Ashleigh made a general wave in the direction to accompany her statement of the obvious. She was frowning, as though something troubled her about it as much as it troubled him. He strode away towards his friend’s car. ‘Good to see you. All we need — another dead body. Charlie Fry will fill you in on the detail, but I think you might want to get a drone up and see if there’s anything untoward. He can’t have gone far.’

  ‘I don’t know how it can have happened,’ Ashleigh said, her voice rich with frustration. ‘He’s barely dead. How didn’t we see anything?’

  Jude thought back. They hadn’t looked in on the churchyard on the way, and when they’d been scrambling up the fellside and down again they’d been paying more attention to where they were going than to any activity below. And there were blind patches, hidden by a wall or a clump of trees or the solid bluff of Winter Crag. The killing could have taken place almost under their noses or, at the very least, immediately before they arrived. ‘I don’t know. But he sure as hell didn’t do it himself. We’ll stop any cars leaving the dale, of course.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of uniforms stopping people at the footpaths at the Pooley Bridge end,’ said Doddsy, scratching his head. ‘But yeah, a drone would help.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to sort all that.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ve got something more important to do?’ Doddsy put his head to one side and gave his friend a quizzical look.

  ‘Possibly. I want to get down to Waterside Lodge and see what kind of response this news gets. And I’d like to get there before the gossip mill.’

  The police cars had come without sirens but some of the locals had already spotted that something was up. Luke’s boss was looking from the cab of his tractor, as if he didn’t quite dare ask what was going on, and was already picking at his phone. The Neilsons might not be locked into the heart of the local news network, but it was only a matter of time before Robert’s PA headed out again, or someone from the hamlet of Sandwick came past, and then the news would spread. ‘Then I’ll need to get back into town and have a word with Faye.’

  ‘Ah. Yeah, leave it with me, then.’ Doddsy drifted off, his brow crinkling as he in his turn took in the scene.

  Jude and Ashleigh drove the three quarters of a mile to Waterside Lodge, but he pulled up in a lay-by just before it. The gates were open. ‘That’s handy,’ he said. ‘I like a bit of a surprise. We’ll walk the rest.’

  They got out of the car and he turned to look back. You couldn’t see the church from the gates, nor the entire length of the
winding road, but you could just see George’s cottage and the point on the hill where the tent crouched behind the wall. Interesting. ‘Right. Let’s see what the Neilsons have to say.’

  They approached the front door, and he paused before he raised a hand to the bell. There were muffled voices from somewhere that sounded as if it was the garden on the other side of the house. But he never got to the bell, because the door opened and Robert’s PA answered, her face a mask of neutrality but her eyes narrow with suspicion. To her, it was clear, they were nothing but a nuisance ‘Yes? Can I help you?’

  Jude flashed his warrant card and Ashleigh did likewise. ‘Jude Satterthwaite and Ashleigh O’Halloran. We’d like a word with Mr and Mrs Neilson.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Neilson, or Mr or Mrs?’ She gave them both a cool glance. Her eyes were as steel-grey as her hair and as the neat business suit.

  ‘Both of them, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Come into the living room. I’ll fetch them.’

  The French windows from the living room were open and Miranda and the twins were on the patio, engaged in a heated discussion. One of the twins looked cowed, Jude thought, and was staring in silence at his shoes. The other was putting up an argument, but Miranda, uncharacteristically, was furious. Her voice carried clearly towards them. ‘For God’s sake, Ollie. What were you thinking of? What do you mean, you lost your phone?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ The second twin, who must be Ollie, clearly thought she was over-reacting. ‘What’s wrong with you? I mean, I lost my phone. It’ll be around here somewhere. I haven’t been anywhere to lose it. And supposing I did drop it somewhere and it’s in a ditch or in the lake or something. We can get a new one.’

  ‘What if someone had needed to contact you?’

  ‘They’d have called Will. Does it really matter? Nobody died.’

  ‘Someone did die, Ollie. Do you have such a short memory?’