by Jo Allen
When Ashleigh, normally so calm and together, got flustered, there was only one cause. Resisting the temptation to comment, Jude got up and joined Lisa at the sink, reaching for a cloth to wipe the crumbs from the table.
‘Well, now.’ Lisa shifted the pot from the cooker to the sink. Her forthrightness always overwhelmed any attempts she might make at discretion. She’d been Ashleigh’s friend too long to care, or so it seemed, and time had bomb-proofed their relationship so no slip of the tongue or moment of irritation could damage it. ‘I think we know who that was.’
He did. He opened the washing machine and tossed the dirty dishcloth into it.
Lisa wasn’t letting go. ‘You realise you have a rival?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Scott, the ex-husband who was on the phone, might still be a part of Ashleigh’s life but the core of that relationship was firmly in her past. ‘He calls her and she answers. That’s fine. I talk to Becca all the time.’ But even as he spoke the thought niggled at him. He’d never really got over Becca, and there were moments when he believed he was still in love with her. ‘Ash gets on well with her exes.’
‘Is that what she told you? Ha! And you believed her?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘You’re supposed to be a detective.’
‘Yes, not a psychologist.’ It occurred to him, periodically, that being a psychologist would be a distinct advantage in the job and it was never truer than at that moment.
‘She doesn’t have that many exes. Scott was the one and only, until you came along. Apart from the meaningless ones at school.’ Lisa turned the tap on too fiercely, so that the water splashed over the worktop and onto the window. ‘Not that I’m warning you about her.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, amused.
She missed, or ignored, the sarcasm. ‘It’s not her you’ve a problem with. It’s Scott. I’ve known that man for years and he never gives up. He also likes to have the last word. So you can take it from me. He doesn’t like the fact she ditched him, even though he knows it was his fault. He’s trying to get her back. You need to do something about it. Because he won’t change his ways and she’ll get hurt.’
‘I’m pretty certain she knows exactly what he’s up to. She’s a grown woman and I don’t own her.’
‘No, of course you don’t. But I thought I’d let you know. Because he’s not doing it for her. He’s doing it because he can’t bear rejection. For her sake if not yours, you need to do something to stop her getting sucked back into a toxic relationship with someone who—’
‘I can look out for myself, thanks.’ Ashleigh had come back into the room while their backs were turned, and was thrusting the phone back into the pocket of her jeans in obvious irritation. ‘I don’t need you nannying me. We all know you don’t like Scott.’
‘Right now you’re in a relationship with someone else.’
‘You sound like my bloody mother, only she liked him.’
‘Yes, well he can be very charming when he wants, I’ll admit that. But he’s toxic, as well. And controlling. You don’t need that in your life.’
‘Thanks for the life advice, but I don’t need it. I try to be civil with him, that’s all. Now just leave it. I thought you had work to do.’
‘Lisa can be an interfering cow,’ Ashleigh murmured in Jude’s ear, much later on in the darkness. Scott had unsettled her, as he always did. ‘I hope you know better than to listen to anything she says.’
Beside her, he lay still for a moment, and she imagined his smile. ‘You know me. I listen to everyone. Then I decide what to believe.’
She thought she could trust him not to take Lisa literally. After all, there was no need to. ‘I’ve told you how it is. He’s only up here for the summer, and he’s working. He didn’t come because of me. I see him because we’re grown ups and it wouldn’t be civilised not to.’
‘Indeed.’
Was she protesting too much? She shifted a little closer to him as if nearness to her current partner could cancel out thoughts of her ex. Living with Scott had been impossible, forcing her to walk an unmanageable tightrope between being herself, keeping her independence, and allowing him the role he’d wanted to play in her life. It might have lasted if he’d been able to keep his charm on a tight rein instead of unleashing it at every skimpily-dressed young woman who’d rolled up at the yacht-hire business where he’d worked for the summers they’d been married. Good-looking, happy-go-lucky Scott, bare-chested on the deck of a yacht, was a holiday temptation any woman might have fallen for and the sunshine and the wine had too often proved his undoing. Hers, too, in the final reckoning. ‘You know I won’t go back to him.’
‘Lisa certainly hopes not.’
Jude was hard to read in the daylight when she could see his face, so much harder in the darkness. Downstairs Lisa, an incurable insomniac, was still rattling about, though it was way past midnight. ‘What does she know?’
‘Well, who knows? But I’d guess she cares about you, just the way I do.’
It would hardly be unreasonable of Jude to be jealous. Ashleigh was almost put out that he wasn’t, or at least that he hid it so well, but she couldn’t stop herself rattling on. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? He’s only up here for the summer and I only see him for old times’ sake. And when I say I see him, I mean it’s an occasional cup of coffee. No more.’
‘Not even a cake?’
‘You can come along and see, if you want.’ She was annoyed with herself. If she didn’t believe what she was saying, why would he?
Jude slid an arm around her, an affectionate squeeze. ‘No. I trust you.’
That almost annoyed her more. At heart, what was the value of a relationship if it didn’t involve total commitment? There was a part of her that would have welcomed a show of jealousy. After all, she was jealous of Becca Reid and the hold the woman still had over Jude, even though Becca had been the one to end their relationship. But of course, she never said so because to do so would make her seem as mean-spirited and possessive as Scott himself. ‘Just as well.’ She turned towards him. ‘And I do love you.’
‘And I love you, too.’
But neither of them, she knew, was telling the truth.
Six
It felt much longer than two days since Raven had found the body of the young man hanging in the woods. Two days since she’d scrambled up the slope to the camp in the early morning light, with her frail heart hammering inside her rib cage and her blood pulsing round her body so violently she thought it would break her; since she’d cried when the police had arrived and panicked in a way that defied her usual serenity. Gripped by the horror of what she’d seen, she’d been unable to talk to them about it and Storm had eventually chased the abashed police constable away.
Raven had known the police would be back and was almost relieved when a car crawled along the lane beside the field, slowed and pulled over, blocking the gateway. In a moment the door opened and Ashleigh O’Halloran’s generous figure presented itself as a silhouette against the sun. The detective was the kind of woman you always looked at twice and even Storm, who for forty years had had eyes for Raven and Raven only, stopped fiddling about at whatever he was pretending to do and stared at her as she came across the field, picking her way through a skin of mud that the overnight rain had formed across the grass. ‘Look who it is.’
‘Make her a cup of tea,’ Raven suggested. Storm’s attentiveness was touching and she valued every minute she spent with him, but she sensed he was suffering an underlying distress that matched her own.
‘I told them you weren’t to be upset. The boy did it himself. There’s nothing you can say to help them. I’ll tell her to go away.’
‘It’s routine. They have to do these things. It won’t take long. And I like her.’
He harrumphed a bit at that, but he did as he was bid and forged his way through the sun and shadows of the field to where Ashleigh was standing with the sun behind her. They shook hands and then he headed off to the braz
ier, apparently to rustle up the requested cup of tea, and she paused for a second to survey the camp.
The police who’d been popping up around Cave Wood in the previous forty-eight hours had kept drifting into the field and, after a brief look, out again. After this procession of clumsy would-be interviewers, Raven was especially relieved when she saw who they’d sent. In the past she’d had secrets and Ashleigh had proved the most uncomfortable interviewer, capable of shifting questions around and capturing her goodwill as if it were a butterfly in a net. Once entrapped, it had been too easy to tell her everything, and Raven’s attempts to conceal the truth had failed. Now her conscience was clear and she found Ashleigh the only detective she was comfortable talking to.
In an ideal world, Raven said to herself as she watched Ashleigh taking in the field, looking across to the low and fractured hedge that separated the camp from Long Meg and the woods beyond, there would be no interviews and the police would leave them to get on with their blameless lives. But this world wasn’t perfect and too many of the local people, failing to understand just how straightforward their philosophy was, misinterpreted simplicity as shiftiness and ended by blaming them for everything that went wrong. Vandalism and petty theft brought the police to their field on too regular a basis, a couple of times a year, and the constables had yet to go back to the courts with any evidence against them.
But this was the second time in a year the detectives were around the camp, investigating a suspicious death. As her life grew to a close, Raven felt its problems and its cynicism weighing ever more heavily upon her. She pulled her shapeless knitted shawl around herself and shivered.
The sun was out. Storm had found a couple of chairs and a wobbly wooden table from somewhere, and she felt strong enough to sit outside their tent in the sun. He’d found her a small table, too, and she sat there with the mug of tea he’d brewed for her at her elbow, shuffling a stained pack of tarot cards in her hand.
She drew three cards from the pack and set them out face down on the table, lacking the energy for a longer, more complicated reading. These days when she read the cards, the deck was kind to her. When Death came up, as it so often did, it was always coupled with a positive card, as if to reassure her there was nothing to fear from the future. At worst it would be nothing. At best it would be a simple existence on the far side of a margin from which she could look back and watch Storm grieving for her until it was time for him to join her.
With a frown, she remembered the conversation with the girl in the woods. There was a right time to pass on and she was approaching hers. Age was irrelevant — she was only sixty — and what mattered was where you fitted into the plan the universe had for you. When she’d talked to the girl she’d known it wasn’t the right time for her, and when she’d stumbled upon the boy’s body — a young man, she supposed she ought to call him, but he’d looked so much like a boy — she’d known it wasn’t the right time for him, either. The balance of nature had been upset, affronted.
The girl had been there again the next day, loitering around the edges of Cave Wood, but she hadn’t gone in. That was something, at least, but still Raven’s stomach churned with unaccustomed anxiety and foreboding, in case the girl hadn’t listened to her.
Just out of earshot, Storm broke into Ashleigh’s contemplation and nodded her in Raven’s direction. For a moment, Raven saw the camp through the detective’s cynical eyes — half a dozen townies taking a break from the rat race for a few weeks over the summer, and herself and Storm, tattered and isolated, in a corner. I’m like an animal waiting to die, she thought.
‘Look who’s here,’ said Storm, finally leading Ashleigh O’Halloran across the field towards her.
‘Good morning, Raven,’ said the sergeant, with a broad smile.
Raven dipped her head. Ashleigh O’Halloran, she suspected, didn’t deal with them the way she dealt with others, and certainly not the way the younger, less empathetic officers did. She spared them the focus on detail that Raven’s free spirit had long ago lost the knack of remembering. Nevertheless, under that smile Raven found a curdling of unaccustomed shame at her own inadequacies. ‘Hello, Sergeant. Do sit down.’
Ashleigh sat, her back to the sun, and looked down at the table where Raven had turned up the first of the cards. The Queen of Cups smiled up at them. ‘I should have brought you some biscuits or something, shouldn’t I?’
Raven smiled back at her, unsure what to say. It didn’t matter; she’d only have to answer questions.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again,’ Ashleigh went on. ‘I just want to have a quick word about what happened up in Cave Wood. It shouldn’t take long. Ticking boxes, form filling. Sometimes I think it’s all we ever do. But there are procedures and this is one of them. I’d just like you to talk me through what you saw. Then I can leave you in peace. I can see you’re busy.’
Nodding, Raven saw that Ashleigh was looking at the cards with interest. ‘They teach me serenity,’ she said, forced by that interest into defending something she really shouldn’t need to.
‘I know.’ Ashleigh looked down at the cards. ‘Not a bad card to turn up, that one.’
‘You know it?’
‘Oh, yes. I read the cards myself.’ Ashleigh waved a hand to one side. ‘I probably shouldn’t have told you. I don’t imagine it sounds particularly professional. But I thought you might understand.’
It made her that much more empathetic. Encouraged, Raven turned the second card upwards. ‘The Ace of Swords,’ she said, though the detective surely had sharp enough eyesight to be able to see that for herself.
‘Another good one,’ said the woman, as if she was being tested on the subject. ‘Lots of positive energy there.’ But she paused as if she, like Raven, interpreted the sword in the card as double-edged, cutting for ill as well as for good.
‘Yes.’ They hesitated, while Raven decided whether to draw the next card or leave it for later, and in the end decided against it. Tempting though it was to confide, the gap between her world and Ashleigh’s was too wide to bridge. To indicate the reading was temporarily suspended, she laid the remainder of the pack face down upon the table. ‘There’s not much to tell. I don’t sleep very well these days, and I woke up when it was light. I don’t know what time it was.’ Because who needed a watch when the the sun would tell the time for them, without numbers? ‘I got up and went for a walk along by the river and into the woods.’
‘Did you see anyone?’
Raven shook her head. There had been no-one to see, in the pearly pink dawn — only the dew on the grass, the birds clattering in the trees and the precious glimpse of a red squirrel scampering from branch to branch. ‘I expect you’ll think I’m foolish.’ She felt herself going pink. Good-natured and sympathetic though she was, this smart and intuitive police officer made her feel naive and foolish. ‘I had a funny feeling about things.’
‘I know how that is.’ Ashleigh O’Halloran didn’t write down anything about a funny feeling, only (Raven tried not to look too obviously) the bit about the woods. ‘Any reason?’
‘I was worried. But not about him. The night before, when I’d been walking in the woods, I met a young girl. Twenty, maybe. No more.’ The police always liked facts, and this was the nearest she could get. ‘I spoke to her. She talked a lot about death and dying.’
Ashleigh’s expression stilled for a moment, but Raven sensed a curl of concern beneath. ‘Okay. Did she say her name?’
‘No. But she was small — only a little taller than I am, and very thin. A waif of a girl. I was worried about her.’
‘Did she say anything,’ asked Ashleigh, looking down at the upturned deck of cards, ‘about wanting to die? Or about anyone else wanting to die?’
‘I don’t remember exactly. Maybe not those words, exactly, but she said there had been two young people who’d passed away too young.’ Gossip passed Raven by. Now she wished it hadn’t, and she might have been better equipped to speak to the girl and maybe save a li
fe. ‘Everything about her was sad. She talked about what a terrible world we live in.’ And how could you disagree with that?
‘How did the conversation end?’
‘I wanted to get her out of the woods but I didn’t know what to do. I thought I’d ask her for help, so I asked her to write a letter to my daughter for me and she agreed. We walked back up towards the camp and she went back up the lane. That was just when it was getting dark. And when I woke up I could feel death.’ Most mornings she felt it, but it was her own, approaching serenely for when she was ready. The day of her grim discovery had been different and the sense of doom had been dark and unwelcome.
‘Just feel it? You didn’t hear anything or see anything?’
Raven offered the detective an indulgent smile. She couldn’t offer evidence, which was what the police wanted, so they would have to accept what she could give them. And in any case, she’d been right. ‘No. I was sure it would be the girl. I’d been thinking about her. So I went down to the woods where I’d first seen her, and then on down to the river. That’s where I found him.’ She stilled, thinking about it. ‘I went back up to the camp as fast as I could. Then Storm went down to the farm and they called the police.’
Ashleigh looked across at the modern tents, with a half frown. ‘You didn’t ask—?’
Raven shook her head. ‘They don’t wake up early. We knew the farmer would be up.’ What else would the police want to know? ‘I didn’t touch anything when I found him. I just left him as he was.’ Though she’d ached to loosen the rope and cradle the young man in her arms, as if by so doing she could ease his passing, she hadn’t. The police, with their procedures and their questions, had stolen away some of her innocence.
‘Did you know him?’
Raven shook her head.
‘And the girl.’ Ashleigh wore quickly, her brow crinkling into a frown. ‘Would you know her if you saw her again?’
Did Ashleigh, like Raven herself, sense the need to heal the living before troubling the dead? ‘I think I would.’
