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

by Jo Allen

  ‘Oh?’ They paused in the centre of the stone circle. It was late afternoon. The sun drifted out from behind a cloud and Long Meg’s grasping shadow, dominating those of her daughters, reached towards them. Inside the circle, the spindly shadow of the dead tree stretched out towards the east.

  ‘She saw a girl hanging around in the woods the night before Charlie died and they talked. The girl talked a lot about dying. Raven asked her to send a letter to her daughter for her, because she wanted to get her out of the woods. I think she went down there in the morning half expecting to find her dead, but she found poor Charlie Curran instead.’

  Jude digested that. In the daylight the stone circle and the woods round it were attractive and unthreatening, but it was too easy to see how dusk might bring shadows to a vulnerable mind. ‘I think I know who she meant. There was a young woman in black on the riverside path just now. Mikey’s age, maybe, or a bit younger. I spoke to her.’

  ‘What did you think?’ Ashleigh’s brow puckered into a frown. Her concern for the local youth would be as great as his.

  ‘I don’t think a preoccupation with death is that unusual in teenagers, is it? It’s a question of where it leads. In most cases, that’s nowhere.’

  ‘True. But Raven was worried about her. She might be just the sort of person who’d be influenced by a series of suicides, mightn’t she? Perhaps we should try and identify her.’

  ‘No need. She’s a friend of Mikey’s or so she said. I can get someone to have a quiet word with her parents if you think it’ll help.’ Mentally, Jude added another thing to his to do list and allowed himself a wry smile. ‘If I’d thought I’d have asked her to give Mikey a message from me. He ignores me, but he might listen to someone else.’

  Ashleigh’s look was sympathetic, but she didn’t pursue it. They both knew there was nothing constructive she could say. ‘So the woman who arrived at the same time as you is Storm and Raven’s daughter, then? It looks like Izzy did send the letter Raven asked her to.’

  ‘It certainly does. I bumped into her down by the river earlier. Anyone less like Storm and Raven is hard to imagine. She introduced herself as Geri Foster, though I doubt Geri is her real name.’

  ‘Raven called her Indigo.’

  ‘I heard. Who’d have thought it? Those two unworldly hippies produce a daughter who drives around the countryside in her Range Rover, walking the Labrador?’ On first glance Geri Foster was everything her parents weren’t, the archetype of conventional affluence and with an acquired sense of self-belief that was totally lacking in the wary New Agers. ‘She said she’s up here for the rest of the summer.’

  ‘I imagine she’s planning to spend as much time as she can with her mother.’

  ‘Looks like it. And she says she’s up with her son.’

  They paused, contemplating the steady approach of certain death which would take Raven, gently, when the time was right. There was a rough contrast with the ambush of its rogue counterpart, suicide. Eventually Ashleigh broke the spell by turning back towards her car. ‘I’d better get back to the office. And you should get back home and do something restful with what’s left of the day.’

  ‘I’ve just been for a long walk up at Nenthead. That was very restful.’

  ‘I bet you weren’t really relaxing though. You were thinking about work, or you wouldn’t have been here.’

  ‘Fair point.’ Through the hedge, Jude saw Geri Foster deep in conversation with her father. The physical resemblance between them was clear — a strong jawline, an identical stance with upright shoulders. Facially it was impossible to tell whether there was a relationship because Geri, he suspected, had indulged in some subtle plastic surgery. ‘Any chance of catching up later?’

  ‘I’m not planning to work late, so yes.’

  ‘Pop round to my place when you’re done.’

  ‘I will do.’

  They kissed quickly and parted, and he made his slow way down to his car, pausing before he got in to fire off one more optimistic text to Mikey. Fancy a pint? But there was no answer, and he hadn’t expected one.

  Eight

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ Faye Scanlon said, drifting into the office where Jude had finally got round to pulling together the team who’d been keeping tabs on what they had come to refer to among themselves, though never in public, as the Eden Valley suicides. Suicide wasn’t usually a priority and there were always other, more pressing investigations under way. A week had passed since Charlie Curran’s death and there had been no further incidents, though Jude, keeping his ear to the ground, hadn’t noticed any quietening of the local concerns. Faye’s presence, despite the casual disclaimer that had accompanied it, was significant, indicating either that something was up, or else she had some idea as to how he might better do his job. Though he respected her, and over time had come to like her, Jude nevertheless nursed an instinctive resentment against her interference.

  It was Faye’s style. She interfered with everything, a woman who wasn’t good at delegation and somehow maintained the capacity for keeping hold of every detail on almost every case run by the officers under her command. Her micromanagement was an occupational hazard for them all. ‘Sure. I don’t imagine we’ll be very long.’

  Chris Marshall, the youngest of them, got up to fetch his senior officer a chair and resumed his seat in front of his laptop and a pile of notes. It was a shared office and Doddsy, Jude’s friend and deputy, wasn’t on the team but nevertheless seemed to be giving them more than half an ear. Ashleigh shuffled her chair up to put as great a distance as possible between herself and Faye, and Tammy Garner, the CSI who’d been in charge of all three suicide scenes, gave up trying to make space for herself in the very cramped circle around Jude’s desk and chose to perch on the corner of Doddsy’s desk instead. The room was warm.

  ‘Ashleigh.’ When Faye was around Jude had to make a conscious effort to keep control of his own cases. ‘Do you want to start off? I don’t imagine we’ll be long. I don’t think there’s much new to say.’

  ‘Not much at all. As you asked, I went down to the New Agers’ camp at Little Salkeld to talk to Raven.’ That was for Faye’s benefit.

  ‘You got some sense out of her?’ Chris had little time for Storm and Raven and their tenuous grasp of the modern world.

  ‘She gave me her version of events, which is all I needed.’ Quickly, Ashleigh outlined Raven’s statement. ‘She was concerned about the other girl, Izzy Ecclestone, who was around the day I went there, though I didn’t see her. But I don’t think her concern was misplaced. I asked around a bit at the farm. Izzy’s local, from Lazonby, and they know her. They think she’s a bit strange — fey was the word they used for her. She comes up often and they’ll keep an eye open for her. But they didn’t know Charlie and they’d never seen him up there. And that’s about all I learned from them.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jude ticked that off his list, but there was something that suggested more to come. He’d hoped the meeting could be wrapped up in fifteen minutes and everyone sent swiftly on their way, leaving Faye and himself to decide on any next steps. He couldn’t see them agreeing to do anything more dynamic than take up a watching brief. ‘Tammy. I know you’ve got other things to do.’ Tammy was always the elusive one, always rushing from crime scene to crime scene. The hasty convening of this meeting had been dictated by her availability. ‘Anything to report?’

  ‘Nothing significant. Or I should say, nothing that’s worth looking at again. At none of the three sites were there any signs of external involvements. Connor Turnbull and Charlie Curran died by hanging, Tania Baker was hit by a train. In the hangings the ropes were different.’

  ‘Connor’s came from his parents’ garage,’ supplied Chris, ever ready with the details. ‘Charlie had bought his the week previously, at an agricultural suppliers on the industrial estate, presumably for the purpose.’

  ‘They used different knots. I couldn’t see anything to connect them.’ She looked around the group for questio
ns, but none was forthcoming.

  Jude crossed Tammy’s name off the list, too. There was nothing so far that he didn’t know, nothing to surprise him, and yet the situation troubled him. It was cumulative. You could roll a die and get a six and the odds of doing so were always the same, but it you rolled that same die twenty times and scored six every time then a pattern emerged that begged questions. Was a series of three events enough to make a pattern? ‘Okay. So let’s talk numbers. How abnormal is this?’

  He looked, as everyone did, to Chris, present at the team because of his unquestionable thoroughness in tracking down information and his instinctive knack of reaching straight to the right place for it. ‘Suicides aren’t that common in that age group. Teen suicides are low, about five per hundred thousand in a year and it’s ten per hundred thousand for ages twenty to twenty four.’

  Jude took a moment to reflect that ten per hundred thousand was, in its own way, a painfully high number. ‘We’ve had three in a couple of months. In an area with a total population of what…fifty thousand?’

  ‘Depending on how you define the area. The district council population is just over that, yeah. But if you limit it to the area where they all lived it’s much less than that.’

  ‘So we might expect ten per hundred thousand in the year, in the district. Five, in other words. And we’ve had three of those in the last couple of months, all in the same age group. What other suicides have we had this year?’ He turned his pen over in his fingers. Suicides never normally made it up the chain to his level, but he’d attended his fair share earlier in his career.

  ‘There were three others recorded locally. One was associated with mental illness, one with relationship breakdown and one with business failure.’ Chris checked his notes. ‘None of the people knew each other, and all were significantly older than the most recent three. The big difference is that we know why those three did it, but none of the later three gave any specific reason and for two of those it was a complete surprise.’

  Jude saw Ashleigh doodle a huge question mark on her pad. Her mind must be following the same track as his. He looked up at Faye and saw that her face bore an expression of deep thought. Tammy was shaking her head. Chris, alone, tramped on through the facts without stopping to interpret them.

  ‘Okay.’ Jude sighed. ‘Three young people, two of them with no known reason to take their own lives, killing themselves within a small area and a small time period. No evidence of any external involvement.’

  ‘There is one thing.’ Ashleigh looked at him, apologetically. ‘Maybe it’s not significant. As you suggested, I called the driver of the train that hit Tania Baker. He’s been off work ever since the incident and didn’t really want to talk about it, but he did say one thing that concerned me a little. He doesn’t think about what happened but he thought as he came under the bridge that he saw a shadow. And then he shut his eyes. That was all.’

  There was silence around the table. Everyone knew shadows could play tricks and a fleeting glimpse in the arc of a falling body, a flash of a second that could be too-easily distorted by nightmares, was anything but reliable.

  ‘He never mentioned it his initial interview, I suppose?’ asked Jude.

  ‘No. He said it comes back to him at night.’

  ‘And he’s been off work ever since. Hmm.’ Faye was unimpressed. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’ve every sympathy with the poor man’s trauma. But he doesn’t sound like a reliable witness.’

  Tania Baker had died in the evening light, as the train had flashed under the bridge outside Lazonby. Jude thought again of the dead tree at Long Meg, its shadows stretching out like welcoming arms. But Faye was right. He moved the conversation on, looking to Chris. ‘Tammy’s covered the crime scenes and they’re clearly separate. I know you’ve been digging about online. Have you found anything to connect our victims?’

  Faye flicked an eyebrow at his choice of language as Chris turned away from his laptop and back to the sheaf of notes he’d dug out. ‘They may have known one another. You know what this place is like. Two of them had been at the Community College, but not in the same year, and Charlie was at the Grammar School. They probably knew of each other, at least. In this place everybody does, or so it seems. I haven’t had a chance to look much into their social media but I haven’t yet come across anything that suggests they socialised together.’

  All four of them — Faye, Tammy, Chris and Ashleigh — were looking at Jude as if he had all the answers. Even Doddsy, on the other side of the room, had given up trying to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing and was listening in. Jude thought again of the idea of a rolling die. If he rolled twenty sixes on the trot he’d be checking to see if it was loaded. ‘I distrust coincidence.’ There was a tiny ripple around the room, as if they’d all been expecting him to say exactly that. ‘I’d like to look a little more closely at this.’

  Faye coughed. ‘This is a delicate matter. We have a responsibility to ensure suicide doesn’t breed suicide, as far as we can. I’m sure we’ve all thought some form of copycat incident might already be taking place. It’s a known phenomenon, the Werther Effect. Within a particular demographic group, suicide can sometimes trigger repeat incidents if it becomes seen as glamorous or fashionable. Don’t forget that. I’ve already had to remind a couple of the local press about their responsibilities.’

  Faye naturally distrusted the media and had had her run-ins with them in the past, but when it came to crime the local press were reliably good at sticking to the guidelines and not sensationalising. What Jude had seen of the local reports had been properly restrained and avoided any speculation or unnecessary detail, but Faye had a point.

  ‘I’m not suggesting we go in heavily,’ he said, as if his boss needed reassurance. ‘The last thing I want to do is set any more panic running locally than there already is.’ He understood exactly where she was coming from. There was nothing to suggest a single crime had been committed, let alone three of them. If it was nothing more than a tragic series of coincidences — if the die was honest and that run of three rolls was unusual but still possibly pure chance — then an overt investigation would do nothing except heighten the tension, generate hysteria and increase the risk of further deaths. But if it wasn’t — if the die was loaded — more deaths might follow. ‘Chris. I’d like you to be discreet. Have another look and see if you can find any connections between them. Anything at all.’

  He looked to Faye and she inclined her head, judging him with her silence. ‘It’s not a priority,’ he added, in case that mollified her and stopped her thinking he was over-keen to pursue the sensational at the risk of the mundane, ‘and if nothing comes up we’ll let it drop. But it’s for everyone’s peace of mind. Okay?’ Silence around the table. ‘Then that’s all.’

  They pushed their chairs back and shuffled out of the room but Faye hung back. When Ashleigh had closed the door behind her, she pulled her chair forward until she was facing him. ‘I’m not entirely convinced by your theories, Jude, I have to say. But on this occasion I’m prepared to pander to your peace of mind and let you have a closer look.’

  Faye, at her worst, could be patronising, but he’d learned to handle it. All she ever needed was a little validation. ‘I may be wrong. But it seems to me there’s a serious problem here and whatever it is, we need to know what’s causing it.’ The image of Izzy Ecclestone swam again into his head, the prime candidate for a copycat suicide. Mikey, when he’d finally deigned to return one of Jude’s many calls, had been surprisingly positive in his response, agreeing to meet up for a pint even though he must know it would come with a pep talk attached, and he’d also offered to look up Izzy and see if he could find anything. This enthusiasm had made a refreshing change and had gone some way, at least, to offering Jude reassurance but Izzy — and every other troubled young person in the area — remained a worry.

  ‘I totally accept that. But I don’t see any evidence of crime. And there’s what Ashleigh said about Izzy E
cclestone.’

  ‘That has no evidential weight at all, and you know it.’

  Right again, but both of them knew that Ashleigh’s instinct was usually true. The task was to find enough evidence to back them up and that was the problem. Faye would be thinking about resources, costs and personnel. ‘Aside from that. I don’t like the way the numbers stack up.’

  ‘Three. And one of them had serious issues.’

  ‘I think that’s enough to raise a red flag.’

  ‘Possibly, but there’s an explanation other than crime, and there are alternative options for exploring it. Which is something I wanted to talk to you about. I had a phone call this morning from someone who thinks, like you, that there’s something about this cluster of suicides we should all be very concerned about. However, her concern comes from rather a different direction than yours. She’s a psychiatrist.’

  So that was where Faye’s sudden grasp of psychological theory had come from. ‘Is that where you found out about the Werther Effect?

  ‘Exactly. As it happens, Jude, I do think we need to be doing more about this, but treating it as a potential crime might do more harm than good. We need to work with the relevant educational and social services to resolve matters. Dr Wood — the psychiatrist — has offered to advise us on the matter and to liaise with those agencies. So while I’m quite happy for you to put Chris on to looking more closely into the background, and while I do think there might be some value in understanding how these young people communicate, if they do, I don’t want to see these three cases treated as potential crimes. Can you work with that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good. I believe Dr Wood has reasons of her own for wanting to help. I’ll email you her details and you can arrange to meet her and see what she says.’