Death on the Lake

by Jo Allen

  ‘And we don’t know who was calling Ryan on that burner phone.’

  ‘Surely not one of the twins?’

  ‘I can’t believe it was one of them. Eighteen’s young to be luring their stepmother into a trap, and they’re too smart to be conned into it. But someone did it.’ A light flicked on in his brain. He understood, There was only one candidate. ‘And I think I know who it was.’ The greyest, plainest, least likely person on the planet. An efficient, low-profile, utterly unthreatening, middle-aged woman.

  ‘It’ll be the PA,’ he said. ‘Aida Collins.’

  Twenty-Eight

  Faye was sitting with an expression of intense irritation on her face, a blank pad in front of her and both hands curled around a mug of coffee, when Jude made her office his first port of call.

  ‘Faye. I need to talk to you about the Neilsons.’

  She raised a hand to silence him. ‘I’m sure you do. But this is difficult enough. I don’t need you complicating things further. My colleagues are keener than ever that you keep your distance from Robert Neilson, which leads me to suppose they think they’re onto something significant.’

  ‘Did you see what I forwarded you? The Australian coroner’s report?’

  ‘I’ve seen it but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.’

  ‘Then I’ll summarise. You know Miranda gave evidence to clear Elizabeth Bell of murder. Elizabeth died in a car accident and the other vehicle involved was driven by the man we know as Ryan Goodall. He was cleared, on the basis that she was on some medication that may have affected her ability to drive. That’s a hell of a coincidence. And you know what I think of coincidence.’

  Faye, who never trusted coincidence either, pursed her lips. ‘He’ll have to have been very smart to have persuaded them he wasn’t involved.’

  But there was every chance that Ryan, or his sponsor, had been very smart indeed. ‘And then he turns up dead less than a mile from Miranda’s front door. Don’t tell me she had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘And don’t tell me she’s capable of killing him in the way he died.’

  ‘Not without help.’ Jude took a deep breath. ‘Robert’s help.’

  She drummed her fingers on the desk. ‘Well, do you know what, Jude? If that’s correct then it’s highly unlikely anyone else is going to die, and we can afford to wait a little while longer — and gather some more evidence — before we look at it.’

  ‘Faye. For Christ’s sake. Someone killed Ryan Goodall and buried him in George’s grave. You can’t just pass on that.’

  ‘I don’t want to pass on it. But I—’

  ‘What if I tell you I think Aida Collins might have been involved in giving Goodall information on Miranda’s whereabouts?’

  She touched her forehead as if she were dealing with a particularly trying child. ‘Jude. The last thing I can afford is to have you talking to Robert’s PA and giving him a reason to think we’re interested in his business affairs. I forbid you to speak to her without my express permission.’

  He bristled. ‘Two people have been murdered in Martindale. Maybe two more have been, too. And besides, do I have to remind you? We don’t know who killed our fake Ryan Goodall.’

  ‘We don’t know, but if you’re right and it’s Miranda, there’s no immediate need to worry. We’ll get her for it later. I can’t see that she’s a danger to anyone else.’

  ‘What about Summer?’

  ‘You’ve yet to provide me with any evidence what happened was anything other than an accident.’

  If there was much about Faye and her way of working that Jude liked, he struggled against her blank resistance to what he was trying to tell her. ‘This is your patch. If you want to move in and question Miranda about murder and Robert as an accessory, you can do that. If you want to search the property, you can do that.’ But she wouldn’t, because Faye was an ambitious woman and getting on the wrong side of anyone who might be in a position to review an application for promotion wasn’t in her plan.

  ‘I can. But I don’t think either of those steps is necessary.’

  ‘And have we made any progress on finding out where Summer got the drugs from? What if it was Robert?’

  ‘Didn’t you put Doddsy on to that? Maybe you should ask him.’

  Doddsy was as frustrated about that element of the case as Jude himself. ‘We haven’t made any progress. That’s rather my point.’

  ‘Then maybe you should concentrate on that.’

  ‘Okay.’ He kept his temper anyway. ‘Faye. I’m going to talk to Miranda. I believe she lied to us, even if she didn’t kill Ryan. I won’t go in hard, but I will go in.’

  Faye considered. ‘I suppose it’ll look odd if you don’t go down and talk to people, but really. I don’t want you to let any of them think that we suspect them, seriously, of murder.’

  None of the Neilsons was stupid. There would surely come a point where they’d start wondering why they hadn’t been hauled in and interviewed under caution, and that might be the point at which Robert started wondering about the reason for the softly-softly approach. ‘Okay. We’ll go straight along.’

  ‘Try not to surprise them too early in the morning. Most people keep more civilised hours than us.’ There was a lurking humour in her face as he turned to the door but as he laid his hand on the handle, she called him back. ‘Jude.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I absolutely forbid you to mention Aida Collins in connection with this case, or to speak to her. Don’t think I don’t understand where you’re coming from. But there are many ways to skin this particular cat. All right?’

  He left the room with a sigh, collected Ashleigh from the incident room and, leaving Doddsy in temporary charge, they headed down towards Pooley Bridge and towards Howtown.

  ‘Faye was adamant we don’t rock the boat,’ he said to her, as he squeezed into a gateway to let a tractor pass, ‘but I tell you. If I think there’s any immediate risk to Miranda, or anyone else, I’ll do everything I can to intervene.’

  ‘You really don’t want to get on the wrong side of Faye,’ warned Ashleigh. ‘She won’t forget.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I don’t want to get on the wrong side of anyone. But I’ll do it if it saves lives.’ Or if it brought the guilty to justice.

  ‘Hopefully she’s right in what she said. If someone’s after Miranda, they’ve surely been put off.’

  ‘They won’t be put off for ever, though.’ There might already be someone moving in to take Ryan’s place as an executioner.

  ‘Poor Miranda. She did the right thing, speaking up for her friend. It’s awful how she was hounded for it.’

  ‘I don’t disagree. But if she had to kill Ryan to save herself, she should have told us. Straight away.’

  The car crawled up over the hairpin bends beyond Howtown and down past the Martindale turn. The electric gates to Waterside Lodge stood open, as though the Neilsons hadn’t a care in the world — as if they knew any immediate threat had been eliminated. Jude drove through them and saw Aida’s red car parked outside. ‘Looks like we’re not the only ones who start work early.’

  ‘Maybe Robert’s been on the phone to Australia, too.’ Ashleigh stifled a yawn.

  ‘There’s always money to be made somewhere in the world.’ Jude parked his Mercedes neatly next to Aida’s car and got out. ‘Let’s go.’

  It was Miranda who answered the door, apparently unsurprised to see them. ‘Chief Inspector. Sergeant O’Halloran. I’m afraid I’m in the middle of breakfast, but come in and have coffee. Do you need to speak to Robert?’

  ‘Just yourself right now, Mrs Neilson. Though I expect we’ll need to talk to him later.’

  ‘Who’s that, Miranda?’ Robert’s voice burst out from distant part of the house.

  ‘Just the police,’ she shouted back. ‘Routine. Nothing to worry about.’ And she led them into the kitchen. ‘Have a seat.’

  They sat, while Miranda made them coffee and dealt the mugs out on the table
with the skill of a saloon barmaid, then resumed her seat and looked down at the remnants of toast and honey on her plate. She was silent.

  She hadn’t slept well, Jude judged. There was tiredness in her eyes — more than that, resignation. ‘Well, Chief Inspector. Please don’t tell me you’ve come to say someone else has died.’

  ‘I sincerely hope no-one else will die, Mrs Neilson. And I suspect no-one hopes that more than you do.’

  Tears filled her eyes. Getting up, she tore a piece of kitchen paper off the roll on the kitchen unit and resumed her seat, dabbing at her eyes. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. I knew you’d find out about Elizabeth.’

  ‘It would have been more helpful if you’d told us straight away.’ He knew now that she must have killed Ryan, with or without her husband’s help, but surely she’d try to plead self-defence. ‘Begin at the beginning.’

  ‘You know about Elizabeth, of course.’ She began to pick the kitchen paper apart. ‘Everybody does. Drew — her partner — was a violent, manipulative man, and no-one believed her when she said so. I was the only person who would stand up in court and speak up for her. No-one else dared. Yes, she killed him. She admitted it. But she did it to save her sanity, if not her life, and if she’d gone to prison it would have destroyed her after what he did to her. I believed, at the time, that I’d saved her by speaking up.’

  ‘What you did was very brave,’ said Ashleigh, quietly.

  ‘I didn’t think so. I just thought it was the decent thing to do. Afterwards, of course, there was a whole lot of media attention and then it became a social media thing.’ She shook her head. ‘It was horrible. Constant. I was baffled by it. People wrote books about it. I got a lot of support but there was a lot of negative attention, too. And it was nothing to what poor Beth had to deal with.’

  ‘I believe that’s why she left England.’

  ‘Yes. I never heard from her after the trial.’ Miranda shook her head. ‘It was sad, but I’m not in any way bitter. She’d been through hell and she had to go somewhere where no-one knew her, or knew anything about her. But it left me isolated. I lost a lot of friends.’

  Doing the right thing always did lose you friends. The more Jude saw it happen, the more he wondered why anyone bothered. ‘You bounced back.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Miranda placed the tissue on her plate, took a sip of coffee and looked at the two detectives in front of her. ‘You don’t have any choice in life, do you? You have to keep going or you go under, and you have to do it any way you can. I was sorry Beth felt she had to go, but I understood. I carried on. I went back to my job. I was still receiving a lot of the wrong sort of attention. Drew’s family threatened to break me. His brother took to following me around and I had to take a restraining order out against him. I received death threats on social media. A couple of years later I met Robert and married him.’

  ‘Did he know about Elizabeth?’

  Her smile was tremulous. ‘I told him a few days ago, but he already knew. He’s a very thorough man, and he checks everything. He was very supportive, thank God. Because things changed for me, badly, three years ago. Beth died in an accident. They said she was on medication, but there was only one witness. Maybe that witness had caused the crash. Because she was in fear of her life.’

  She picked up the tissue again. ‘I couldn’t sleep for worry. Maybe it was murder. I remembered a couple of the threats I’d had, before the fuss died down. One of them said: bitch, never sleep. We’ll come when we’re ready, when you don’t expect us. I started to believe that they were coming after me.’

  Ashleigh put her coffee mug down and looked across at her. ‘That must have been hard.’

  Once again, in some inexplicable way, a witness responded to her obvious sincerity and transferred her attention from the senior officer to the junior. ‘Yes. Unbelievably. I became very tense. I won’t say I was nervous. I’m too strong to be nervous. But I became aware of people around me. I noticed every stranger. I assessed every approach, every smile, every place for a potential threat.’

  ‘And in Martindale?’

  ‘I felt safer here than anywhere else. Not wholly safe, because people can always get you and I wasn’t hiding. I would go out and wonder where they’d come for me from.’ She bowed her head. ‘And then one day something happened.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Summer?’ Ashleigh prompted.

  Miranda nodded. ‘She messaged me and asked to speak to me about Beth, and about the trial. I didn’t know what to do. The boys must have given her my number. I wasn’t afraid of the girl, or not at first. But I knew whoever came to kill me could be anybody. And it struck me that pretending to talk about Elizabeth would have been an elegant approach for an assassin.’

  ‘Summer’s interest was genuine,’ observed Jude from the sidelines.

  ‘Was it?’ Miranda continued to address herself to Ashleigh. ‘I wasn’t sure, but even if it was, I didn’t want the matter resurrected. If people had forgotten who I was, I didn’t want them reminded. The afternoon she disappeared I knew the boys had invited her here, so I made sure I was out. But I couldn’t settle, so I came back early. I decided I’d speak to her and get it over with, just do it, meet the challenge head on.’

  Ashleigh folded both hands in front of her. Her sympathy was obvious. ‘That isn’t what you told the police.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did anyone see you?’

  ‘Luke Helmsley. I didn’t realise that until he threatened me, on the day he died, but I didn’t kill him.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t kill Summer, either.’

  ‘Then what happened to her?’

  Miranda’s look was agonised. ‘God forgive me. I didn’t do anything. Anything at all. When I got back I saw them fooling around on the Seven of Swords, her and Ollie and Will. They were obviously out of their minds on something and I didn’t want to know what. I went back into the house, wondering what I’d say to Summer if she spoke to me, and when I looked out again a while later I saw her. Just her. The boys must have crashed out by then. She was stumbling about on the boat and she tripped and went over the side.’ She put her head in her hands. ‘I didn’t do anything. I was so scared. I thought Fate was intervening to save me. Years ago, a fortune teller warned me I’d be in danger but the Seven of Swords would protect me, and that was what I thought of. That it was meant to be. Because that was why I’d named the boat.’ Her hands shook. ‘I must have gone a little mad.’

  ‘And then?’ Ashleigh, Jude could tell, was fighting to keep her tone nonjudgemental, but surely she must be thinking the same as he was, imagining poor Summer floundering in the cold waters of Ullswater, struggling to reach the shore or the safety of the boat and giving up, too soon.

  ‘It was done. The boys woke up and found her dead and Ollie suggested they hide the body, so they did.’

  ‘They confessed?’

  ‘We struck a deal. We agreed that none of us saw anything. I saw nothing on the boat and they never saw I was back early. And it’s true Summer’s death was an accident. No-one killed her.’

  Summer could have been saved, and the extended police operation had caused distress and used up resources that could have been deployed elsewhere. Her parents could have been spared those hours wondering what had become of their daughter. Opening his mouth to make that point, Jude saw Ashleigh’s fierce frown in his direction and let her carry on. ‘What happened after that, Mrs Neilson?’

  ‘I was still very shaken.’ Miranda looked at her, imploringly. ‘When I found poor Luke dead, I didn’t know what to do, or think.’ She looked at Jude, reproachfully. ‘You asked me why I’d assumed he’d been killed. Now you know. I was sure there was a killer in the dale and if I was right I knew I’d be the target.’

  ‘You let Summer die—’ Jude began.

  ‘Because I was afraid. Because standing up in court to save my friend from prison had brought me threats, and she was dead, and suddenly this whole thing was on my doorstep. I did not let Summer die
, as you put it. I just didn’t do anything to save her, because I was paralysed with fear.’

  No doubt that would be the line the defence counsel would take, and there was a reasonable chance that, with a sympathetic jury, it might come off. ‘All right. Carry on.’

  ‘I guessed Luke had stumbled upon something he shouldn’t have seen. That’s when I told Robert about it, and he promised he’d look after me.’ She looked beyond them, through the open door of the kitchen to where Robert must be sitting in his office with the expressionless, and possibly complicit, Aida. ‘I relaxed after that. I knew he’d have people watching me. I knew I’d be safe. But then I did the stupidest, stupidest thing. I trusted my good nature.’ She shivered. ‘I’ll never do that again.’

  ‘You get on well with your stepsons, don’t you?’ asked Jude.

  ‘You know about the phone calls, then. You must do. How?’

  ‘We heard you talking to Ollie about his phone.’

  ‘Yes. He lost it. Now, of course, I see it must have been stolen and someone had used it to text me.’

  Jude thought again of Aida, on the spot. Surely now Faye would let him haul her in for questioning. ‘You didn’t suspect?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not at all. I worry about them. Such bright boys, but no sense of restraint, and they have Robert’s energy. They’re always in trouble and what happened to Summer shook them. When I got a message from Ollie asking me to meet them up at George's house, I went straight away. I was terrified they’d got into trouble somehow. I even worried that they might somehow have killed Luke, although my head told me they couldn’t have done. I went to the house. The place was dark.’

  ‘The family hadn’t been in since George died.’

  ‘No. The door was open, but we all knew where he kept his key, so I assumed the boys were in there. When I went in I saw a shadow. A figure. And I knew. They’d come for me. I’d been right to be afraid and it was finally happening.’ She bit her lip. ‘I was sure I was going to die.’

  The kitchen clock ticked. In the bowels of the house a mobile phone rang. Outside, a pair of jackdaws fretted their way across the lawn. ‘So what happened then?’ Ashleigh asked.