Death in the Woods: A DCI Jude Satterthwaite novel (The DCI Satterthwaite Mysteries)

by Jo Allen

  ‘It’s a gorgeous day,’ said Ashleigh, with regret, ‘but I don’t suppose we can play hooky much longer.’ Being out in the sunshine when there was work to be done in the office always did feel like skiving off, even if what they were doing had some bearing on the case.

  If it did. Jude must think so, or he wouldn’t have wasted time looking. She stepped aside to allow a jogger to get past them, a young man barely in his twenties. As they reached the end of Fiddler’s Lane, a police car drove past in the direction of Great Salkeld and the young officer in the passenger seat, Tyrone Garner, raised a hand in recognition.

  Jude was frowning after him long after the car had crossed the solid sandstone bridge and even if she hadn’t known him so well Ashleigh would have had a clear guess about what he was thinking. Tyrone; the young woman in black who’d been posting the letter; the jogger who was even then puffing his way over the bridge from which Tania Baker had fallen to her death… All fitted the age and the demographic of three recent suicides. They weren’t the only ones. ‘Mikey will be okay.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re so comfortable about it.’

  ‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. You know yourself. People always feel these things personally, because they’re local to them. You’re no different. There must be thousands of young people of that age, locally. They’ll survive. And so will Mikey.’ They’d reached her car by then and she tossed her cup into a nearby bin.

  ‘It won’t stop people worrying. It never does.’ He shook his head as if he was impatient with himself. ‘Kid brothers are more trouble than your own kids, if you ask me. I’ll need to have a word with him. Since his dad won’t.’

  Jude and Mikey’s father had walked out on the family years before. Ashleigh had never met him, though she knew he haunted the bars of Penrith on a regular basis. ‘Would he, if you asked?’

  ‘I doubt it. And if he did Mikey wouldn’t listen to him. I’ll do it myself, and I might make something useful out of it. Mikey’s a mine of information. I don’t think he goes looking for it. Just absorbs it. But if there’s some chat around these suicides he’ll have heard it.’

  Four

  Becca Reid, finishing off with the patient she visited twice a week at the Eden’s End nursing home, checked her watch and found she had time on her hands. That happened rarely enough for her to be surprised by it. Picking up her bag, she headed back up through the thickly-carpeted lobby and through the lounge, where a knot of the home’s staff clustered around the tea trolley.

  ‘Becca might know,’ Ellie Jack, the head nurse, tossed her a quick — and not altogether friendly — glance. ‘She used to go out with that policeman. Didn’t you, Becca?’

  Becca’s lip curled, as it always did when she thought of Jude Satterthwaite. This time it was less in irritation at the way things had gone so badly wrong between them that it still troubled her years on, and more amusement at the way Ellie sniffed and tossed her head when she mentioned him. The previous year, a killer had crept through the corridors of Eden’s End and laid a hand on a woman already dying, and Ellie’s view on the matter had been very much that things were best left to lie.

  But Ellie, for all her resistance to the investigation and her callous approach to the dying, wasn’t the killer. That was one of the many things Becca had learned from her years with Jude. Because someone could have committed a crime, or any other misdemeanour, didn’t mean they had, and therefore it was wise to keep an open mind and refrain from prejudgement. A useful lesson. ‘Yes, but that was years ago. I don’t see him that often these days.’ And when they did meet their conversation was brief and sterile unless Ashleigh O’Halloran was present, in which case it became forced.

  ‘Yes but you’ll know how these things work. Someone said they had the police all over the place down at Lacy’s Caves this morning. That’s not standard for suicide. Is it?’

  Someone else drifted over, and Becca found herself somehow at the centre of a group of staff, with the elderly residents at the margins, all looking at her as if she was up to speed not just with police procedure in general but with the details of this specific case. ‘I don’t know. I imagine they have to look at these things. Just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Three suicides in a couple of months isn’t normal, is it?’

  What was normal? Suicide was more common that many people realised, something that cropped up in Becca’s work from time to time. And it was indiscriminate. It affected the popular and the apparently fulfilled as much as the friendless and obviously lonely, snatched away those who couldn’t cope with the pressures of wealth as well as those who struggled to make ends meet. She wouldn’t be surprised to find the numbers were nothing outside the normal, but there was no question there was something about this latest clutch of local losses that chilled the community’s heart. They were young. That must be it. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve read about copycat suicides before.’ One of the carers perched herself on the arm of a chair and flicked a sidelong look at a colleague who, Becca remembered, had a teenage daughter of her own. ‘No-one knows why they happen. It could be anyone next. We all need to watch our kids.’

  For God’s sake, Becca chided the woman, in her head. Is this helping anyone? ‘I’m pretty sure it’ll turn out to be coincidence.’

  ‘Somebody get the teas,’ Ellie said, tiring of the conversation. ‘I don’t have time to stand around gossiping. I’m a busy woman.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’ Her colleague jumped down from the chair and turned away. ‘We don’t want you giving us hassle because the tea’s cold, do we, Leslie, my heart?’ She dimpled a cheerful smile at the elderly man sitting in the corner and began rattling the tea cups. ‘Ellie, give Leslie his tea and biscuits on your way past, would you?’

  ‘I’ll take it over.’ Becca had spotted what no-one else had — that the old man’s cheek was damp with grief and another thin tear was trickling down his cheek to join those he’d already shed. Ellie, who tended to the brisk and businesslike, didn’t always respond to other people’s emotion as gently as she might have done, but Becca was a pushover for tears. That must be why something within her soul responded so painfully to the loss of three young people, why her heart ached for their parents. If she’d had children — if she’d only stayed with Jude long enough for that to become a reality, rather than letting his work and his absurdly rigid conscience come between them — she’d have been watching over their beds every night after the recent news. As they grew older she’d have talked to them, listened to them, supported them, done everything she could to protect them. If, by chance, she’d met one of the three young people the community had lost and seen some sign of their inner pain, she might have been the one to say something that changed their histories and saved their lives.

  But she didn’t know them, and no-one who did had seen anything amiss. If ifs and ands were pot and pans, her mother used to say, there’d be no need for tinkers. Just now Becca had to focus on the living. At least she could do something for them, no matter how small. She picked up the cup and saucer in her free hand and carried them over. ‘Here you go, Mr Chester. I’ve brought you your tea. Let me get you a biscuit.’

  She put the cup and saucer down on the table next to him, dropped her bag on the floor and went back to the trolley for a biscuit. Two for him and one for her, because she’d been on the go since eight and hadn’t had lunch. ‘Chocolate ones, today. I’ve picked the right time to call.’ Without waiting for an invitation, she slid onto the chair next to his and lowered her voice. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s a wicked world,’ Leslie Chester said. He straightened his back, took the tissue that Becca automatically offered him, and dabbed at his eyes before thrusting the tissue deep into the pocket of his old, oversized jacket.

  ‘It’s all of that.’ She sighed. On the television in the corner of the room one of the daytime TV shows was running a series of outtakes involving animals doing hilarious things. In the act of dishing
out the coffee, the woman in charge of the tea trolley couldn’t stop herself spluttering with laughter as a goat bounded onto an unstable stepping stone and tipped into the water. Whatever had triggered Leslie’s distress, it couldn’t be that. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  He put his head on one side for a moment. Leslie was of that generation to whom tears were a weakness, but it seemed he was too old to fight against them. ‘A very sad, mad world,’ he repeated.

  Sensing a part of his life story coming her way, Becca made herself comfortable. It was bound to be something to do with the conversation at the tea trolley. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had a son,’ Leslie said, twisting his fingers in distress, ‘a long time ago.’

  Even before the tears renewed and the next of them trickled down onto the front of his navy blue cable-knit sweater, Becca knew where the story was going. This was how the world went round, nothing new under the sun. Someone’s personal tragedy in this generation was a repeat of someone else’s from the generation before. All it took was a snatch of a song or a clip on the news to bring it out. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He died.’ Leslie’s fingers went to the inside pocket of his jacket and he felt about in it, unable to see through his own tears. He pulled out a small brown envelope. ‘Here.’

  Becca took it. The thin paper was fragile under her fingers as she slid open the flap and drew out a photograph. In the sad, faded images from perhaps forty years before, a teenager in flared jeans and a mullet hairdo pushed a younger girl on a swing that was too small for her. The copper colours of the trees in the background, even though they were fading to sepia, told her it had been taken in autumn, and in the background she recognised the familiar shape of the Pennines and the conical peak of Dufton Pike. ‘Your children?’

  ‘Yes.’ His finger jabbed at the image and he folded his lips tightly together in a vain effort to stop them quivering. ‘This is Nicholas.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Sixteen.’ The finger quivered. ‘This is the last picture I have of him.’

  Sixteen. Becca’s heart quivered. It was too young. No-one should ever lose a child, let alone have to live on for forty years or more without them. ‘What happened to him?’

  After all those decades, Leslie was struggling to find the words. Although he was in his eighties, Becca’s occasional dealings with him had shown her he was an educated and articulate man, someone who had embraced growing old and been determined to make the most of it. But in the face of death, as she knew too well, the most determined people could crumble.

  ‘It was an accident.’ Leslie regained the stiff upper lip his upbringing must have taught him and the words came out clearly. ‘He fell.’

  ‘Fell?’ asked Becca, caught in the dilemma between allowing him to talk and probing too deeply into his unhappiness. ‘On the hills?’

  ‘On the railway.’ He dabbed at his eyes. ‘Up at Eden Lacy. He was playing on the tracks up on the viaduct and a train came and he jumped out of the way and fell into the river.’ He looked down at the picture again. ‘A proper daredevil, they said at school. Always trying to prove something.’

  The viaduct at Eden Lacy was just a couple of miles from Lazonby, where Tania had met her death, and within sight of Cave Wood where everyone said the police had been that morning. It was no wonder he was distressed. ‘Oh, Leslie. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘If I’d known it would happen,’ he said dolefully, ‘I’d have talked to him more. Told him I loved him.

  For a second Becca closed her eyes. Having a child — she would love to have a child — was so precious. Too often parents failed to communicate their love to their children or the children, for whatever reason, were unable to accept it. ‘This must have brought it all back.’

  ‘Aye.’ He took the picture back from her and slid it carefully back into the inside pocket of his jacket. She had the impression he didn’t normally keep it there, that it was something he’d dug out of a folder or a drawer and chosen, for today, to keep close to his heart. ‘Those poor kids. Three of them, they said.’

  ‘And their poor parents.’

  ‘Their parents should have looked out for them a bit better,’ he said, sharply.

  He reached for his cup of tea and Becca sensed the moment of confidence was over. She wasn’t going to judge the grieving families, but nor was she going to take issue with the harshness of his opinion. Unbidden, the image of Jude Satterthwaite swept once more into her head. If there was one thing harder than bringing up your own child it had to be dealing with the dysfunctionality of someone else’s. Jude’s relationship with his brother was fragile at best but whatever she thought about his dedication to his job, his dedication to Mikey was as justifiable as it was admirable.

  But the task might be impossible. Mikey was just twenty-one and yet to mature, still seething with resentment at the break-up of his family and blaming everyone else for the pain of it. If there was one person he wouldn’t listen to it was his father and if there was a second it was surely Jude, whose determination to look after him he deeply resented.

  David Satterthwaite was the one really at fault, but Becca didn’t know him well enough to remind him of his responsibilities and would never have presumed to do so if she did. In any case, he shouldn’t need prompting. But she got on well enough with Mikey, despite more than ten years’ difference in their ages. Maybe she should try and talk to him herself.

  Best not to interfere without speaking to Jude first. She shook her head as she left Leslie and the rest of Eden’s End behind her. And on the way out, noticing the television had flicked to the news, she changed the channel to something less brutal so that at least she could spare Leslie Chester an ill-timed camera shot of the viaduct where young Nicholas had died, all those years before.

  Five

  ‘Well.’ Lisa, Ashleigh’s friend and flatmate, pushed her chair back and sighed in satisfaction. ‘That was pretty damn good. We’ll make a cook of you yet, Ash. Maybe.’

  ‘That’s harsh.’ Jude got on well with Ashleigh’s housemate, Lisa, who was intense, sensible and outspoken. Two of those qualities he valued and the third he could cope with. He sat back and smiled, replete. ‘She’s learning all the time. And for the record, I did the cooking.’

  ‘I might have known she’d let you do the work.’ Lisa reached for his plate, then Ashleigh’s and piled them on top of one another, forks to the left of the plate, knives to the right. ‘I’ll finish clearing up later. Right now I’m going to leave you lovebirds alone together. I’m doing a school talk to a bunch of sixth formers tomorrow and the school have asked me to tone it down.’

  ‘Tone it down?’ Ashleigh jeered. ‘What on earth was in it?’

  Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s a careers talk, to help them with their subject choices. It’s not easy trying to sell the best job in the world when too many people only think about the dirt.’

  Archaeology, to Jude’s mind, was as dry as the dust Lisa spent much of her summers digging in. ‘So how were you trying to corrupt these kids? Sex drugs and rock and roll? Spicing it up a little?’

  ‘No, though I could do a pretty good talk on hallucinogenic plants if called on.’ Lisa picked the plates up and carried them over to the dishwasher. ‘I always go as gory as I can with these talks, to try and keep the kids — sorry, young people — interested. Crime and punishment, a bit about how we excavate the graves, some examples of the more unusual deaths and so on. Bog bodies, executions, human sacrifices, the lot. They love it. I do this one at the beginning of every school year but today the head emailed me to say she thinks too much graphic detail probably isn’t wise at this point in time, so could I please revisit my usual talk. And so. I shall describe in detail the graves where we’ve found various people who’ve died peacefully of old age, explain how we can tell their diet from the isotopic make up of their teeth, show them a few slides of pollen grains, and my audience of snowflakes can doze quietly away.’

  Even
as he laughed at Lisa’s self-deprecation, Jude thought once more of the cluster of suicides. In his experience most young people were more resilient than they looked when it came to the darker side of history. It was their own present, the immediacy of their own problems, with which they struggled. That said, he could see where the head teacher was coming from. ‘There’s a bit of concern about this, then?’

  ‘You’d probably know that better than me.’

  ‘People talk to me about it a particular way.’ They were direct, demanding he do something about it. The mystery of what went on in people’s minds — and what they thought he could achieve in healing it — was beyond him. ‘I was wondering what the general buzz was.’

  She considered. ‘I do hear a bit of talk. I spend most of my time up in Carlisle, of course, and I don’t do a lot of school work this early in the academic year, but I’m sensing a bit of concern among the staff. Three suicides is a lot.’

  None of the suicides had been of school age, but nor were they much older. When Jude nodded his agreement, Lisa’s expression sobered further. ‘If I’m honest I think the adults are more concerned about it than the kids.’

  Jude thought of Mikey again, knowing he was falling into the same trap. He looked across at Ashleigh to see if she’d picked up his concern, but she’d been frowning at her phone rather than listening to the conversation.

  ‘That’s a message,’ she said. ‘I’d better deal with it, I suppose. In case it’s something important.’ She jumped up from the table and shouldered her way through the door, the phone clamped to her ear. ‘No. It’s not a good time to talk. Jude’s here. What do you want?’ Her voice faded into the distance as she snapped the living room door closed.