by Jo Allen
‘I had a look at that, too.’ Ashleigh made a face. ‘Grim stuff. but I can’t say I saw anything illegal in it.’
‘No. That’s the problem. If there was something a bit more explicit, we might have a case for going after them, if I could persuade Faye there’s a direct link.’ That was unlikely, because although he believed in the connection himself it wouldn’t be quantifiable. And besides, making that particular crime stick was complicated and relied on a higher authority than his own. ‘Catch 22. We don’t have the resources unless I can justify them and I can’t justify them until we know what’s going on with this blog. There may be other things we can look at, but unless I can prove one of those kids read it and was influenced by it, I can’t act to stop it.’
‘It’s pretty nuanced, isn’t it?’ said Ashleigh, with a sigh. ‘Nothing that says go out and do it, but a lot of stuff about the positive side of death.’
The comments on the blog had been worryingly enthusiastic, too, but none of the names of its followers matched those of the dead. ‘It’s interesting to take the time to compare it with the press guidelines for reporting suicides. It’s in breach of almost every single one.’
‘I looked at those, too. Almost as if someone had been through it and ticked them all off.’
‘In which case the person behind the blog may be familiar with them. A journalist, perhaps.’ Chris made himself a note. ‘I can follow that one up, if you like. But the guidelines are there on the internet for anyone to download.’
‘Yes.’ Jude ran through the contents of the blog in his mind. ‘The article on the suicides was interesting, because it gave a lot of information on each death and it was mainly accurate.’
‘Stuff we haven’t given out?’
‘Yes, though nothing they couldn’t have picked up locally. There wasn’t anything on the forensics or CSI or anything.’ That was a relief, because if there had been they’d have been looking at a leak from inside the force, a serious matter. Faye would have thrown resources at that one, all right. He smiled at the irony. ‘We’ve obviously been careful to limit what we say and to whom, but all of the stuff will be talked about in the immediate area of each death. So that implies that if the person isn’t a newspaper person they’ll have an extremely good local network.’
‘And there’s a post up about Juliet,’ added Ashleigh. ‘Nothing much in it, but it went up in double quick time. And it includes a list of youth suicides over the last five years.’
‘Give me an hour on Twitter.’ Chris was scribbling down all sorts of things now, a veritable mind map of possibilities. ‘I’ll find out what people have been saying. It may be as simple as that.’
‘I doubt you’ll be able to track whoever it is down, but it’s worth a try.’ Jude remembered Vanessa’s irritation with it, her conviction that this was the kind of approach which could do real harm. His own fear was that every death made another one more likely. ‘Reference to other deaths implies someone local.’ The names would have been cherry-picked and the details tweaked to build a narrative of inevitable, impending doom. Clara Beaton’s death, for example, would be listed as the suicide she seemed to have intended rather than the misadventure which had been the coroner’s conclusion. ‘What else have you come up with? I’m sure you’ll have all the information we need on Juliet Kennedy.’
‘There isn’t much to find.’ Chris was the go-to man on this sort of thing, someone who charmed strangers with a phone call and pulled the rug from beneath their feet in cross-checking what they’d told him. ‘She lived in Lazonby, and went to school at the community college in Penrith. Bright girl. Not an A* student, but popular. Until recently there was no indication of any problem, but she’d been to Dr Wood’s drop-in sessions and expressed anxiety about what was happening.’
Jude sat back and sighed. ‘Ash, I know you’ve been sounding people out locally. I don’t suppose you’ve tracked down the local know-it-all-blogger with a background in media and a finger in every pie?’
‘I wish. Everyone has an opinion and no-one really knows anything. The most interesting thing is that I spoke to Izzy Ecclestone.’
‘Is that right?’ Chris sat up, interested, and tapped his pen rapidly in the palm of his hand.
‘Yes. Raven was right about the bicycle. It was hers. She’d been telling Juliet about the hanging in the woods and about the dead oak. She calls it the Sentinel Tree.’
‘When was this?’
‘The day after Charlie died. She and Izzy knew each other, although Juliet was a couple of years younger and still at school, and they’d been chatting about it in the village.’
‘Did Izzy encourage Juliet in any way, do you think?’
‘I don’t think so. My impression is that Izzy’s fascination with death — and it’s an obvious one, nothing she tries to hide — is entirely personal. She’s at that age where they only think about themselves, and I almost felt she regarded Juliet’s approach as encroaching on her territory. Not that she put it like that, of course.’
Jude nodded. It chimed in with his impressions. ‘Juliet had been along to one of Dr Wood’s drop-in sessions at the school.’ He’d called Vanessa with the news that morning and she hadn’t been happy, as if his failure to stop it was somehow his fault. ‘Not often. Obviously Dr Wood wouldn’t tell me what was said, on grounds of patient confidentiality, but she did say Juliet had displayed early signs of a morbid fascination with death. Her view was that they stemmed almost entirely from anxiety about the current situation, and she’d arranged for a second conversation next week.’
‘That’s interesting. Izzy certainly wasn’t under the impression that Juliet actually intended to take her own life. She said they parted reasonably cheerfully, and Juliet had asked if she could borrow her bike at some point because her own had a problem with the brakes. Izzy told her she’d leave it round the side of the house and she could take it any time she wanted, as long as she put it back. The bike was there on Friday evening and gone the next morning. She never saw Juliet come and take it.’
‘I don’t suppose it matters. Juliet must have cycled up to Long Meg, left the bike and then done the deed in the trees.’ Jude turned to the whiteboard with its Ordnance Survey map, squinted at the route Juliet must have taken, over the Eden Bridge. From there she could have cycled almost unseen through a network of country lanes and up the hill to Cave Wood.
‘The pathology report said the body had been there for some hours. Juliet was last seen in the village at about seven and Raven said the bike wasn’t there the previous evening. The earliest time of death would be about nine, but it could have been later.’ Doddsy checked the map, too, as if there was anything to be learned from it. ‘And there’s something odd about that, too. Remember Raven says she saw two lights in the woods.’
‘That could be anything.’ Chris tapped his fingers on his and. ‘Someone taking the dog out. Teenagers going up there for a dare. Especially now.’
There was a footpath along the river, but you couldn’t see it from Long Meg. The idea of a night time dog walker, so far from the path, was, Jude thought, implausible; the teenager theory was more credible. ‘Maybe. It had a bit of a reputation as a haunt for underage drinking when I was younger. But I’d like to look at it more closely, because it fits the time frame for Juliet’s death, and it’s in the right place. One light would be simple. Two, not so much.’
‘That perplexes me, too,’ said Ashleigh. ‘Two lights. One might be Juliet’s phone, but if that ended up in the river she’d still have had to make her way back to the tree. What was the other?’
‘I wondered about the bike light,’ Doddsy said, ‘but the same problem applies. The light was still on the bike. That means she’d have had to put it back on the bike and walk back down in the dark—’
‘In which case, why bother?’
‘Exactly. Or there was someone else with her.’
It was almost too attractive, almost too easy a piece of evidence to suit Jude’s theory of murder
. He challenged it, before one of them could. ‘Raven could be wrong.’
‘Very possible.’ Ashleigh reviewed Raven’s statement on her iPad. ‘She admits she was half asleep.’
Jude pondered on it. There had been no sign of anyone else having been on the scene, and the only footmarks were Raven’s delicate ones, tiptoeing down the path with the light tread of the dying, and Geri’s more determined prints, striding on ahead. Both overlaid the tyre tracks from the bicycle and neither approached the trail that Juliet had blazed on the way to her death. ‘Let’s not forget that, though. Two lights.’
There was silence for a moment. Creasing his brow in thought, Jude lifted the cup of coffee he’d allowed to go cold. ‘Okay. And now I want to think again about anything that might connect any two or more of any of these deaths. I know we’ve talked about this before, but Juliet’s death bring us into new territory. I can see some obvious similarities between her death and Charlie Curran’s, and I want to know if there are any more, or if we can make an association between Juliet and any of the others.’
‘The Beaton case looks to me like an outlier,’ said Doddsy. ‘At one level it’s noteworthy that Dr Wood mentioned it, but that’s probably just her being thorough. It’s more interesting that Eden Whispers picked it up.’
The list on Eden Whispers had, as far as Jude could see, included every death of a young person that could be conceivably dressed up as suicide, even those for which the coroner had returned a verdict of accidental death. ‘Yes. But they cast their net very wide.’
‘We’ll start with the obvious weak link. Raven.’ As if expecting argument. Chris folded his lips into a stubborn line. He’d never trusted the New Agers, even before he’d first come across them when Raven had found a body at her feet. She’d been guiltless then, but the faint distrust still seemed to linger at the back of his mind.
Aware that his own predisposition lay in the opposite direction, Jude fought hard against a subconscious assumption of innocence. ‘Yes. Although as she and Storm happen to live in that field, I’m inclined to think that’s not a critical factor. She found them because she’s in the habit of going for an early morning walk in the woods. The question might be more why two of them died in the same place.’
‘Raven’s surely physically incapable of harming anyone,’ Ashleigh pointed out, ‘and there’s no evidence that she was anywhere near any of the other suicides. In fact I think we can prove easily enough that she wasn’t.’
‘She isn’t incapable of talking them into it, though. Isn’t that what the psychiatrist implied? She talked to Izzy Ecclestone in the woods the night Charlie Curran died, and she told us they talked about dying.’
‘She persuaded Izzy not to kill herself.’
‘Izzy was vague about exactly what was said. And who’s to say Raven didn’t go down and talk to Charlie Curran, or to Juliet Kennedy?’
Jude rubbed his chin and thought once again of Mikey. The more he looked at these cases, the more he saw that some of these young people had shown no previous disposition to any kind of mental health issues, then the more he worried about his brother and his perennial insistence that he was fine. ‘She could have done,’ he conceded. ‘But remember, Dr Wood thinks there’s some dangerous level of trolling going on online, and I can’t believe Raven knows how to switch a computer on, let alone use it.’
‘She may not. But you can bet your life some of those fair-weather summertime hippies do. Maybe they showed her. Or did it for her.’
‘We can ask them.’ They’d deny it if they had anything to hide, but it least it might give more weight to any request to Faye to look at the Eden Whispers blog. ‘Anything else? Let’s talk about Geri, shall we? Because she was in the area when both Charlie and Juliet died.’
His enthusiasm renewed, Chris turned back to his keyboard. ‘I ran a check on her, just as a precaution. Because of being on two suicide scenes, even if she only turned up on the first one after the event. She’s an interesting character.’
‘I’ll say. She seems the exact opposite of her parents. Ran away from the circus to join a bank, or the equivalent.’
‘Her given name is Indigo Sunset Sky.’ Chris read aloud from his notes. ‘Jesus. What a thing to do to a kid. I’m surprised she’s sane. She changed it as soon as she was old enough.’
‘The Geri is after Geri Halliwell, then, I assume.’ That would fit. Jude could think of nothing less New Age than naming yourself after a Spice Girl.
‘Yeah, I guess so. Here we go. Born in Keswick. She’s thirty-eight. Father’s name is given as Storm, Kevin Foster in brackets. Mother’s name is Raven, aka Sarah Twist.’
Storm and Raven must have hated having to give up their independence for the moment the system held them in its grasp, locking the child into it with a name and a National Health Service number, the first of many chains in which life would bind her. ‘Keswick, eh? They move around a bit here. Never very far, though. I think Storm is a Londoner, though I’m sure I’ve heard he has local connections, but I’ve no idea where Raven comes from.’ Raven had an old person’s voice, a frail echo of what it might once have been, without any accent but that which she’d picked up from the river and the trees and the birds above.
Chris swiped on through his notes. ‘The kid stuck it out until she was sixteen, then ran away and got a job waitressing. She’s a bright girl. Formidably so, by the look of it. She won herself a place at Oxford and talked them into giving her a bursary on the strength of her unusual background. She got an upper second in mathematics, qualified as an actuary and later went into academia. She now lives in Oxford, where she lectures in mathematics and business at Waldorf College.’
‘She has a son,’ Jude observed. ‘I think she said his name was Josh. I bumped into her down by the river a couple of days after Charlie died. She spoke to me because she was concerned about him.’
‘That needn’t mean anything. One way or another.’
‘No. It needn’t.’ Geri hadn’t shown any reticence about the local suicides — the opposite — but crime was bluff and double-bluff. The smart operator could look you in the eye and invite you to investigate them, taking the chance you’d assume their innocence on the back of it. Jude never fell for that one. ‘Raven wrote to her — or rather, got Izzy Ecclestone to write to her — the days after Charlie died, so she came straight up.’
‘That’s what she said.’ Ashleigh was shaking her head over that. ‘Is that right, though? If Izzy posted a note to her on the day after, she’d have received it on the Thursday and even assuming she dropped everything to come up here, she couldn’t have made it any earlier than the Friday. The timing fits, because she was there on the Friday, wasn’t she? That was that time I was talking to Raven about it. You saw her. That was two days later. So it’s possible. But don’t you think it’s odd she went to her house and took the dog for a walk and only then went up to see her dying mother?’
Jude reflected on Geri Foster. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to find she was a liar; her approach had seemed defined by her own self-interest. Her attitude to her parents, frustration mixed in with a shot of resentment, suggested she hadn’t appreciated her unworldly upbringing. ‘Anything else about her? You said she was an academic, which is presumably how she can afford to spend the whole summer up here.’
‘She’s one of those who dips her toes in commercial waters as well.’ Chris consulted his notes again. ‘According to this, she has a few non-exec directorships. Some earn her a substantial amount. Those tend to be down south, in the City. There are a few others in this neck of the woods that she seems to do pro bono. I’m guessing that’s a nod to her local upbringing, or a sop to her social conscience or something.’
‘It looks like it. Is there anything interesting locally?’
‘Nothing obvious. She’s involved in a charitable trust down in Kendal that’s all about restoring marginal farmland to a natural state. And she’s on the board of a drugs rehabilitation charity, here in Penrith.’
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‘Right.’ Jude kept his personal and professional lives separate, a rule he rarely broke. When he’d begun the process that had landed Adam Fleetwood in jail he’d unwillingly but inevitably switched Adam from a friend to a felon. ‘And the name of that charity?’
‘Drug Rehabilitation Eden.’
He dared to look up and found Doddsy, who knew everything, and Ashleigh, who guessed everything, looking at him. He wasn’t so foolish as to think the whole thing could have been planned to spite him. He genuinely didn’t believe Adam was capable of killing, unless it was in the heat of a fight-or-flight panic. Yet now his former friend, however tenuously, was one of the many strands in the web that wrapped around the young people of the Eden Valley — and one of those threads led to the answer.
He pulled himself up. The connection rang too closely with that fleeting thought he’d had, the fear for Mikey, but it was implausible if not impossible. But how implausible did things have to be before you could discount them?
‘Interesting,’ he said, keeping his tone as neutral as possible. ‘Anything else?’
‘She audits the annual charitable fundraising drive run by one of the local papers. That’s all.’
‘Local papers?’ Ashleigh was the quickest off the mark, something that suggested to Jude that she didn’t really trust Geri Foster either. She wouldn’t have a sound reason for it, wouldn’t be able to place any evidence on the table, but she’d be right. ‘What were we saying about someone with networking skills?’
‘Indeed. Do you fancy going down and talking to her?’
‘I can do it if you like, but not today. I’ve a pile of things a mile high to do before I even think about something that isn’t urgent.’
