Death on the Lake

by Jo Allen

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘Ryan Goodall had two phones on him. I need to know what’s on them.’

  ‘Isn’t that already in hand?’

  ‘I need it hurried along. I’d like to know what’s on them by tomorrow morning. And you know how it works. The higher the rank the more weight you can bring to bear.’ His relationship with the technical team was, at best, fraught.

  ‘Okay,’ she said with a sigh, ‘leave it with me. You won’t get anything tonight but I can get them onto it sharp.’

  Jude went back to his office and sat down to scroll through his emails. Buried among them was one from Lorraine Broadbent, informing him that the anonymous complaint against him had been withdrawn by a person who preferred not to be identified and whose subsequent account of events had tallied more closely with his own. The tone of the email, he thought, lacked the relish with which she’d pounced on him originally.

  He sighed, writing off the incident as an unnecessary distraction, and got on with his work.

  When the doorbell went, very late in the evening as the May sunshine was fading into darkness and the very last stripe of sunlight touched the top of the Lowther escarpment and gave it an otherworldly look, Becca jumped to her feet and brushed Holmes off her lap and onto the floor. She wasn’t expecting anyone but it was bound to be Jude. She’d taken Doddsy’s advice and contacted the police to withdraw the complaint Adam had made, and now she was ready for him to turn up and talk about it. And other things, of course. The village was buzzing with gossip about what had happened up in Martindale.

  Composing her face into an expression of contrition and preparing to apologise for something she hadn’t done, she strolled towards the door with exaggerated calm and opened the door. ‘Hello. Oh.’ She checked herself. ‘Hi, Doddsy. Come on in.’

  ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind.’ He hovered on the step, his long shadow stretching behind him. In Linda Satterthwaite’s cottage opposite, a lamp went on and Mikey’s thin figure glided across the window.

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  He spread his hands out in a gesture of futility, and Becca felt ridiculous. Of course it wasn’t all right. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘I thought you might be Jude.’ She might as well be honest about it, since Doddsy was the one she’d trusted for advice.

  ‘He’s working late tonight. You’ll have heard there’s bad news from Martindale.’

  ‘I know.’ She gave him a troubled look. ‘My dad called. Is it right they think they’ve found Ryan?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Death was something Jude kept close in his soul, had never shared with her during their relationship, though he dealt with it on daily basis. She did, too, though in a different way; slow decay of the living who were approaching their time to die, rather than the short shock of a violent and unexpected death. Perhaps, if they’d talked more, if she’d asked him to share and been able to bear it, they might still be together. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘We don’t know yet, but I think we can be pretty certain it wasn’t an accident.’

  Becca wasn’t squeamish and she hadn’t really liked Ryan that much, but he was family, and if he hadn’t been he was still a human being. A tear gathered in her eye and rolled down her cheek. She ignored it and appreciated Doddsy pretending not to see it. ‘Thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘I think Jude would probably have come to tell you himself. If he—’

  ‘If he wasn’t busy. Yes, I know.’ she paused. ‘Good of you to come.’ And then, as she thought once more about Ryan she hurried the conversation on before she could shed any more tears. She was anything but heartless, but on balance she preferred to grieve alone. ‘You don’t happen to know if anything came of my…um… complaint, do you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I expect it’ll go through the system. I’m not in the loop, and Jude hasn’t mentioned it to me.’

  ‘It’s just that I asked them to withdraw it.’ Though quite why she hadn’t named and blamed Adam she didn’t know. Perhaps she was just too cowardly to make an enemy of him the way Jude had done.

  ‘Then it’ll be fine.’ Doddsy hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I’ll be off, then. Tyrone will be wondering where the hell I’ve got to.’

  ‘I’ll see you.’ She closed the door and heard his car engine start up, rev and then die away. In all the sadness, she managed to find a smile. It was about time Doddsy enjoyed a little happiness.

  Essentially and unshakeably practical, Becca went back to the living room to repair relations with Holmes and think about what to do next. Move on, of course. She wasn’t on shift until twelve, so she’d take the chance to do what she’d promised her mother she’d do, and go down to Martindale next morning to begin sorting through George’s belongings.

  Twenty-Six

  The post-mortem was scheduled for eight o’clock in Carlisle and Jude was in the office to catch up before he headed out. Someone had been up before him, though, because as he headed past the security desk just after six, his phone rang. He answered it walking down the corridor to the incident room, not recognising the number. ‘Jude Satterthwaite.’ He stopped at the coffee machine in the empty corridor and threw a selection of coins down into the slot.

  ‘Jude. It’s Kelly McKay over in Adelaide. Wondered if you’d be up.’

  ‘Hi.’ Jude stifled a yawn. It was hard enough to function at this time of the morning anyway, but even harder without coffee. The last thing he needed was mockery from colleagues on the other side of the world. ‘It’s six am. Isn’t everyone at work?’

  Kelly laughed at him, in a manner far too jolly for someone used to dabbling in deceit and death. ‘Sorry to call you so early, mate. But there’s been a misunderstanding.’

  ‘What sort of misunderstanding?’ Jude picked the coffee out of the machine and carried it towards the incident room. Jamming the phone between his shoulder and his ear, he swiped his security card and opened the door.

  ‘Mate.’ Kelly laughed. ‘He isn’t dead.’

  Jude put the coffee on the table and rolled his eyes. It was way too early for a joke and he was already too tired to appreciate it. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What I say. He isn’t dead. There’s a case of mistaken identity at your end.’

  ‘I saw him with my own eyes.’ More than that, he’d brushed the dry soil from Ryan Goodman’s face with his own fingers.

  ‘Nope. Because when I went to confirm his whereabouts with his parents they said he wasn’t in England, and never planned to go there. He’d never expressed any interest in his family over there. As far as they knew he was with his unit. I’ve spent all morning verifying his identity, and I’m happy with it. He’s sitting in the office with me this very minute.’

  The clock on the wall ticked through ten seconds. ‘Okay,’ Jude said, ‘Thanks for that. I’d better get on and stop his relatives here doing the official ID, then, hadn’t I?’ And he rang off and called Faye.

  Holmes woke Becca early, as he too often did in the summer. He was no respecter of a day off or a lie-in and the only authority he acknowledged was that of the weather and the seasons. After ten minutes she gave up trying to ignore him, got up, made a cup of tea and then headed down towards Martindale.

  The police were still swarming over the churchyard. Seeing the white tent over George’s grave made her feel vaguely queasy, though she knew they’d have to treat the old man’s coffin with appropriate respect. She parked at a respectable distance and walked along the dale. George had left the house to Becca and her sister, and she knew Kirsty would want to sell it, but she herself wasn’t so sure. It needed a little bit of work, but it could easily be made liveable. Perhaps she could sell her cottage in Wasby and buy her sister out, and then she could settle in splendid isolation and enjoy looking at the world going past, just as he’d done.

  It was a ridiculous fantasy. For one thing, it was inconveniently far from work, and while that might not be a problem on a glorious day
like today’s, the winter would be a different matter entirely.

  She strolled up to it. The patch of green around it had begun to run wild in the ten days or so since George had died, and she stooped and pulled a young and enthusiastic dandelion from the ground. The rosette of leaves snapped off, the root stayed in the ground and Becca was left with damp soil beneath her fingernails, like a metaphor for her life.

  She had a key but she was accustomed to walking in and calling out George’s name, and so she fumbled with the lock. The key wouldn’t turn, but when she twisted the handle it opened easily. Her mother, in her flying visit to empty the fridge after George’s death and to close the curtains ahead of the funeral, must have forgotten to lock it.

  She made her way briskly through into the kitchen and crossed to the window, flinging open the curtains to let the light in. The place was strangely silent, though the curtains stirred in a draught from underneath the warped window frame. If she did buy Kirsty out, the windows would be just the start of the repairs. She turned around, wondering where to start. In George’s bedroom, perhaps, or the desk where he kept his few valuables and an old chocolate box filled photographs of people whose names he’d long forgotten.

  She frowned as she turned. One of the kitchen chairs lay on its side, one leg cracked as if someone had smashed something against it. The photograph of George’s parents on their wedding day lay on the floor, face downwards in a crystal halo of shattered glass.

  That wasn’t how she’d left the place, and she was sure her mother wouldn’t have left it like that either. She picked up the frame. A perfect circle, blurred at the edges, punched a hole between bride and groom. With growing dread, she crossed the room. Above the sideboard, where the photograph had stood, a hole of the same size punctured the wall.

  Becca had learned a lot from Jude, and not of all of it had turned to bitterness and regret when the relationship had failed. Touching nothing, she backed out of the house the way she’d come, opened the front door using her elbow rather than her fingers, and set off down the hill towards the police officers gathered around the church.

  ‘Becca found that someone had been in the house,’ Jude was saying to Doddsy when Ashleigh appeared in the incident room on her return from checking in with the house-to-house team in Martindale.

  She paused to suss out the body language before she interrupted. He had a grim expression on his face, the look of a man who thought he’d seen the pieces of a puzzle forming a shape in front of him and saw, in a moment, that they were illusory.

  That would be down to the news from Martindale, no doubt. Unless there was more bad news to come.

  ‘Was she okay about it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m mightily glad she didn’t go there at the wrong moment, though. God knows what she might have walked in on.’ He looked up, saw Ashleigh and gave her the warmest of smiles, as if to compensate for the fact that he’d just been caught being solicitous about another woman. ‘Good. You’re back. Have you learned anything?’

  ‘Up to a point.’ She sat down and placed her iPad and notebook on the table. ‘I know every detail of everyone’s comings and goings. I know how old their kids are and who does what day on the school run, and why it was so much of a hassle when we had to close the bridge and Mrs McGinty couldn’t get into Penrith to get her corns done.’ She laid the folder of witness statements down on the desk with an exaggerated sigh. ‘I swear I’m now so well-known in Martindale they’ll be fighting to invite me round for Christmas dinner.’ Everyone had an opinion — they always did — but nothing she’d heard shed any light on the mystery.

  Jude took his usual seat at the table beneath the whiteboard, and motioned for Chris to join them. ‘I’m reeling from all sorts of things coming at me today. I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Ryan’s maybe a good place,’ observed Doddsy, as Chris left his desk, picked up his cup of coffee and his pad and came over to join them.

  ‘Ah. Yes. Though obviously he isn’t Ryan, and we don’t yet know who he is, so we may as well keep calling him that until we hear something else. But we’ll find out. I’ve asked for DNA and fingerprint tests to be run through as soon as possible, and I’ve asked our colleagues in Australia if, when they’ve finished falling about laughing, they wouldn’t mind digging a bit further into who he might be and how he came to be impersonating the real Goodall. Though to be honest, I don’t hold out any hope from that direction. Not immediately, at least.’

  ‘In fairness.’ Chris checked his watch. ‘What time is it over there? Two in the morning or something?’

  All of them saw two am more often than they’d like but, Ashleigh knew, none of them would have stayed up late for that if the request had been reversed. Chris’s time check reminded her that she hadn’t had any lunch. She reached into her bag for the sandwich and family-sized packet of crisps she’d picked up at the garage on the way back in. ‘Don’t mind me. I need food and coffee to function.’

  ‘Before you get stuck in.’ Over-familiar, Jude reached out and ripped into the packet of crisps. ‘Run us through what you’ve got. No-one saw or heard anything. Right?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Whoever killed Ryan must have done it as quickly and as efficiently as whoever it was — possibly Ryan himself — did to Luke.’

  ‘It’s a bit early to get any responses from the press conference and TV appeal.’ Doddsy followed Jude’s lead, picking out a few crisps between his fingers. Before she knew it the packet would be gone. ‘We’ve had a couple of calls after the lunchtime news, but not many and nothing too promising, though those are being followed up. But maybe there’s someone out here who was up on the hills and saw something but didn’t realise. Or heard something.’

  ‘There has to be a chance.’ Ashleigh looked at the map on the board. Jude’s frustration showed in the web of lines he’d drawn on it, marking where the tent had been and what could be seen from it. ‘The difficulty is the topography. George’s cottage is on that wonderfully prominent spot, and you can see almost everything from there. But the church is down in a dip, a really beautifully sheltered spot, and the only place you can see it from is the farm. The farmer didn’t see anything, but he was up on the hill with his dog for a lot of the time, and in any case their living space looks the other way. He says he saw Miranda and Robert walking out towards the bridge when they said they were there, but he never paid them much attention as he was on his way elsewhere, and he never saw them heading back.’

  Jude’s frown deepened. ‘Right. And the CSI team didn’t find anything outside the tent and the graveyard. Inside the graveyard is another matter. But we’ll get to that in a minute.’

  ‘What about the post-mortem results?’ asked Chris ‘Do they tell us anything? Was he shot?’

  Jude’s expression darkened even further. He’d been away at the post-mortem for most of the morning, and it always left him out of sorts. None of them enjoyed watching the pathologist slicing open the remains of a human being, picking them apart and exposing their innermost secrets. ‘Two blows on the head. The first was on the temple, inflicted by some kind of blunt instrument. The skin isn’t broken although we think we may have the weapon. I’ll come to that later. That was sufficient to stun him. The second blow, to the back of his head, smashed his skull and killed him. He was dead when he was buried, and the time of death seems to be not long — maybe half an hour — before Ashleigh and I found him. The second blow was inflicted on him by the stone that controls the self-closing mechanism for the churchyard gate.’

  Chris handed out some of the photos that Jude himself had taken in the churchyard. ‘It must have been inflicted in situ. You can see how the chain is screwed into the stone via that hook, and the ends of the chain are attached to the gate and the wall. None of those fixings has been moved in years. They’re rusted over.’

  ‘So, he was stunned.’ Ashleigh tapped fingers on the desk. She knew, from the find at the cottage, how it must have been done, and she could see that he did too. ‘
Time’s of the essence. They’ve got their man, unconscious, but they need to kill him. For whatever reason they don’t use the gun. Do they?’ She looked at Jude.

  ‘No. They don’t. They may have been afraid of attracting attention.’

  ‘Of course. So they look for the nearest weapon. For some reason they don’t use whatever inflicted the first wound—’

  ‘It wasn’t heavy enough.’

  ‘Yes. So they look around and they find the first large stone they can.’

  ‘They have to stay in the graveyard,’ Doddsy supplied, ‘because if they get out of it they run the risk of being seen.’

  ‘Yes. The stone sits on that chain and although it’s heavy you can open the gate you can lift it off the ground and swing it. One good blow and the skull’s fractured. Your unconscious man is a dead man. And then they shovel the earth out of the grave — at a guess with their hands, which will have taken a while and been a messy business — put the turf back and get rid of the rest of the earth over the wall in the hope it won’t be spotted.’

  ‘How long would that take?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude tapped his pen on the pad in front of him. ‘Is someone keeping a note of all these times? Because I think it’s important. They must have had some time in hand, but they were in enough of a hurry not to go and find something easier to handle than the stone. They could have found something suitable lying around outside the graveyard, for example. But they had enough time to excavate the grave and get rid of the surplus soil, though not very tidily. And then they must have done a runner.’

  Chris had been sketching out what passed for a timeline on the pad in front of him. ‘Okay. So you and Ashleigh came down into the dale at about ten past eleven and Robert and Miranda say they were there at half ten, though neither of them could be specific about it. They say they walked down to the graveyard and although they didn’t go in, they didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. There’s a gap of about forty minutes between them leaving and you arriving, and in that time, if the post-mortem is correct, the person claiming to be Ryan must have been killed, buried, the grave refilled, the soil cleared, and then they made a clean escape.’