by Jo Allen
‘Any joy?’ There had been a new blog post up that morning, wondering about who might be next, asking its readers if they ticked all the boxes. Could it be you? the blog had asked, a snake inside the head of the vulnerable.
‘Nope. I got so far but whoever it was has made sure they aren’t easily tracked down.’ Chris’s look was almost pleading. ‘We should get the professionals involved. It’s way beyond me, and it’s not just a blog. Eden Whispers has a Twitter feed. There are some niggling messages on there, and the engagement has gone up hugely in the last couple of weeks. A lot of the followers are young people, by the look of it, some of them local. It’s the same sort of stuff.’
‘Do they tag anyone? Target anyone by name? Specifically suggest people should take their own lives?’ If that was the case he’d have a chance at persuading Faye there was a case to make, a crime committed.
‘No, they’re far too smart for that. I’d lay my pension on the fact that there are a few direct messages that bear scrutiny, though. I’d love to see them.’
Maybe Jude could try again to persuade Faye. Even if they couldn’t easily peel away the layers of cyber-secrecy protecting the blogger, they might find enough to identify potential victims. ‘I can’t ask you to spend any more time on that. But if you have any ideas, come back to me.’
Geri Foster’s house was barely more than a cottage — a single-storey sandstone building with tiny windows, crammed onto a narrow terrace above the river between the hamlets of Great Salkeld and Eden Lacy. A skylight built into the attic suggested someone had squeezed an extra bedroom into it at some point. The exterior paintwork was peeling but the rest of the house was in good condition — new pointing, a few shiny grey tiles suggesting recent repair and a neat garden that pointed to the later stages of a renovation.
Ashleigh parked in front of the house and got out. It was a pleasant evening and Geri was in the garden that sprawled around the side of the house, sitting in an ancient wrought iron chair with a tall glass of golden liquid beside her. When she heard the car she turned, got up and strolled over to the front garden. ‘Sergeant O’Halloran, isn’t it? To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘I was passing.’ Ashleigh had changed before she came along, to make herself more obviously off duty. ‘I thought I’d pop in. Given how things are.’
‘You people seem to spend all your leisure time in this small area. Your boss always seems to be passing Long Meg. But since you’re here, come and have a drink,’ Geri suggested.
‘I wouldn’t mind a diet Coke if you have one.’
‘I think we can manage that. Josh!’ she called in through the open kitchen window. ‘Get yourself a drink and bring out a diet Coke, and come and make yourself sociable with a wandering detective.’ She led the way along the path down the side of the cottage and waved Ashleigh to a second chair. ‘He’s a nice enough kid, and I shouldn’t really complain because he does get out and about a lot. But he spends way too much time on the computer, and God knows what he’s doing on it.’
‘Most of them play a lot of games these days, don’t they?’
Geri snorted. ‘Maybe my parents were right after all. I’d be a whole lot more competent with computers if I’d learned to use one a lot earlier instead of being the only one at school who couldn’t switch the thing on, that’s for sure. But yes, you’re right. You can play too many games.’
‘But I’m going to study computing.’ Josh Foster, broad-shouldered and with his hair cut short enough to intimidate, emerged from the house, blinking into the evening sun, and handed Ashleigh a glass of Coke without meeting her eye. There was a bruise under his left eye and another on his forearm. He sat down on a step that led to the lower part of the garden, where it fell away towards the river. It had, Ashleigh noticed, handy views across the river towards Cave Wood and the sandstone warren of Lacy’s Caves, just about visible below the overhanging trees. Long Meg was on the back slope of the hill, out of sight, and a couple of hundred yards away the railway passed over the bridge from which Nicholas Chester had fallen to his death. It was a landscape of ancient and modern mystery, of sinister, sudden death.
‘So you are.’ Geri’s attitude to her son was brisk and offhand, but she kept a mother’s eye on him as he sat and stared across to Cave Wood, just as Ashleigh herself had done. ‘Okay, Sergeant. Let’s have the pastoral care spiel and get it over with.’
‘I was wanting to check your mum’s okay. And Josh, of course.’
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ He put his glass down and rested his hands on his knees. His young man’s muscles blossomed under his tee shirt, biceps rippling in the sun as if he were posing, consciously or unconsciously, in the expectation of admiration. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘It must be upsetting, knowing that those young people—’ Ashleigh ground to a halt as it occurred to her that while she knew exactly what not to say, the right form of words eluded her. ‘Looking out over this.’
‘Lacy’s Caves are haunted, they say. By a madman, naturally. Obvious nonsense.’ Geri picked up a pair of designer sunglasses from the table and put them on, another level of security to hide behind.
‘Nah. I don’t care,’ said Josh, in answer to Ashleigh’s previous question. ‘I don’t live here. What’s it to me?’
‘I thought you said you knew the lad. Charlie, was it?’ said Geri, sinking a fair amount of Pimms.
‘I met him in town, in the pub. He won’t be missed. Introverted, selfish sod. Like the others round here.’
They all stared out at the river. On the path on the far side a dog galloped along, distantly followed by a hurrying, overweight man. A woman supervised two small children at the water’s edge, where a dry spell had lowered the water level until it barely trickled over the weir.
‘Did you ever see them about?’ asked Ashleigh. ‘Maybe the night that—’
‘Nah. Only the weird Goth girl from Lazonby, but she’s always hanging around. Never speaks to me, though. She thinks she’s too good for the likes of us.’
Josh, Ashleigh concluded with interest, was a young man with a chip on his shoulder. ‘I expect people are talking about it in town.’
‘People talk a lot of crap in town. I don’t have nothing to say to them.’
‘What is this?’ Geri turned to Ashleigh and took off her sunglasses. Her voice was calm but her eyes were narrow. ‘I’m not sure I like where this conversation is going.’
‘It was a genuine inquiry. We’re still trying to find out what caused these young people to take their own lives and hopefully prevent any others doing the same.’
‘I sincerely hope you aren’t suggesting Josh had anything to do with those suicides. Just because those kids treated him like an outsider and wouldn’t accept him as one of them.’
As far as Ashleigh understood thing Josh surely was an outsider, someone who drifted up in the summer and drifted away again when the school holidays — or, in future, the university holidays — were over. ‘I—’
‘I thought the police knew everything.’ Geri laughed, although she didn’t sound friendly.
‘I wish we did.’
‘I’ll tell you something for nothing and you can take that away and put this in your files. Josh was here with me at the time of the three suicides that happened when we were here.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ Ashleigh flicked a look past her to Josh, who was staring away from the confrontation as if it was nothing to do with him, watching a heron as it rode the air above the river with long, lazy flaps of its wings.
‘It should be obvious to you he can’t have had anything to do with it. If you’re seriously suggesting a teenager has gaslighted four young adults he doesn’t even know to their deaths, you shouldn’t be in the force.’
In some astonishment, Ashleigh stared at her. ‘I didn’t suggest anything of the sort.’ Geri was like everyone else in the area — on edge. ‘What makes you think I did? Has anyone else suggested that?’
‘No, of course not.’ Geri
looked down at her glass. ‘That’s my second Pimm’s of the evening. I’m sorry. Alcohol tends to make me speak my mind even more than I usually do. Obviously I worry about Josh. But let’s move the conversation on to something else.’
‘It was the strangest thing.’ It had taken Ashleigh a while to bring herself to call Jude. On any other day, even before they’d been in a relationship, she’d have done so instinctively but for the first time it felt difficult.
But it was business, not pleasure. She’d left the Fosters and driven into Lazonby. In search of inspiration, she’d headed up to Fiddler’s Lane, parked on the verge and walked up to the bridge, remembering how they’d come there the day after Charlie Curran’s death, how Jude had measured up the scene. It was possible this death was more than suicide, but there was no evidence the three hangings and Clara Beaton’s overdose could have been anything else. ‘She went after me for no reason. I asked after Josh, asked if he knew any of the kids who died and she came after me and accused me of accusing him of being involved.’
‘Is it possible?’ She imagined him sitting in the living room, half his attention on her and half on his work emails, or on the telly.
A train whistle blew in the distance and she turned towards it. It was the time of the evening when Tania had fallen to her death in front of the Langwathby train, the last on the line. She withdrew from the bridge, away from the driver’s line of sight in case she spooked him into a panic, a fear that what had struck a colleague might happen to him or, in the worst case scenario, the same driver had returned to work, would see a figure and fear the worst. ‘I suppose at one level it is. He’s fit and strong. Guns of steel, even for an eighteen year old. He’d be fully capable of hanging someone.’ Capable of pushing a woman off the bridge, too, whether or not she resisted. ‘He didn’t get on with a lot of people locally. He wasn’t one of them and he resented it.’
‘Did I tell you Mikey came across him in the gym? I don’t think he took to him, either.’
‘You said. He stood up for him, at least. The other thing about Josh is that he’s a computer geek. I’d imagine he’d be perfectly capable of setting up something like Eden Whispers and hiding it behind layer upon layer of secrecy.’
The train whistle blew again and the three carriages rattled under the bridge and onwards. She watched it disappear.
‘So,’ pursued Jude, unaware of the backdrop, ‘that’s the case for the prosecution. But of course there’s a case for the defence, too.’
‘Yes. There’s no evidence at all for any third party involvement. He wasn’t in the area when Clara and Connor died and his mother will give him an alibi for the other three deaths.’
‘I’m sure she would. Rightly or wrongly. But I think we have to remember. You don’t have to be on the spot to gaslight someone.’
Eden Whispers had published a photo of the very bridge on which Ashleigh stood. They’d called it the bridge to peace. ‘Are you sure you can’t persuade Faye to pick up on that?’
‘I can mention it again. But even if she agrees, she won’t prioritise it. Getting anything back could take weeks.’
They shared a silence while a car came down Fiddler’s Lane. She was conscious of the occupants watching her, taking note of anything unusual. She reassured them with a smile and a wave. ‘Nothing we can do, then.’
‘Nothing we can do until something else comes up. Let’s just hope it isn’t another body.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ She waited for a second. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’
Another day he’d have said You could drop in on your way past and she’d have hesitated, because Becca still got in her way, and Scott almost certainly got in his. As far as Becca was concerned, Jude could do what he wanted now. She’d arranged to meet up with Scott the next time they were both free, for a quick bite to eat for old times’ sake.
For old times’ sake. That should be her epitaph. ‘I’ll head home, then.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, and rang off.
Seventeen
For the first time in what felt like months, Jude had managed to honour an arrangement to meet up with his father.
Their relationship was rocky at best, but they clung to its wreckage. David Satterthwaite pleaded love and fondness towards both his sons, along with a touching innocence in the matter of his broken marriage, but he lacked the will to make good on his words. The consensus was that he was wrong on at least one of those counts and had treated his wife badly when he’d sacrificed her to his mid-life crisis, but David never quite managed either to take up his responsibilities or offer an apology for failing to do so.
Jude, who had been old enough to bear the burden of his mother’s near-fatal illness and Mikey’s roller-coaster teenage years, was the only one of the family who still spoke to him and had to make a constant effort to keep communication open. Saturday afternoons at the football were the least painful way of doing so; father and son had season tickets for adjacent seats at Carlisle United, and the only time they were truly at ease together was in the tribal comfort of the stand, where every neighbour was a friend for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.
Keen to pick his father’s brains over the school photograph Leslie Chester had shown Becca, Jude made a special effort, and so far it was going well. They’d taken the train up from Penrith to allow themselves a pre-match pint, and negotiated ninety minutes of football without discussing anything contentious. David hadn’t mentioned Mikey, though — hadn’t even asked after his general welfare, let alone expressed any specific concern. If he didn’t feel some primitive fear for his son, he must be the only parent in Eden not to do so.
‘Pint?’ David said, inevitably, as they walked back to the station. ‘It’s not often you manage to spare me a whole afternoon, so we should make the most of it. And it’s in your own interests. I’ve got something for you.’
‘You managed to find that school photo?’
‘I did, and let me tell you, it got me off on a real nostalgia kick. We’d better look at it before I have my pint or I’ll have a tear or two in my eye.’
That was more than likely. David had a weakness for a drink and a soft spot for amateur dramatics, a combination which sometimes ended badly. Jude, whose nature was immensely more practical and whose drinking was more restrained, invariably ended up as an interested onlooker or, if his father became mawkishly over-emotional, trying to control his irritation. ‘That would be good.’ And later, when David was getting sentimental, he might try once more to broker a peace deal between him and Mikey. The series of suicides had only reinforced his perennial worry that one day one of them would go out as normal and never come back.
It was irrational, he knew, and if he applied the same mathematical logic to the probability that he did to the Eden Valley suicides, he wouldn’t be concerned, but he’d seen it too often. Few people who got the call from the police to say their loved one had been the victim of accident or murder had expected it would happen to them. Most expressed bitter regret at things unsaid, sins unforgiven. If Jude could do anything to heal the rift between father and son, he would do it, because one day it might be too late.
David led the way into a city centre pub where he was all-too-clearly well known and spent ten minutes getting the orders, joking at the bar with the regulars while Jude checked his work email and was disproportionately relieved to find there was nothing immediate and no-one else had died. When his father returned with two pints, he thrust the phone back into his pocket and turned his attention to the matter in hand. ‘Let’s have a look at this picture, then.’
‘What’s the story with it?’ David felt in his backpack and brought out an envelope with a cardboard backing, a larger version of the snapshot that Becca had described. ‘Is one of my old schoolmates wanted for an international drug smuggling ring? I wouldn’t be surprised to find some of them weren’t keen on making an honest living.’
‘It’s interest, really. Becca said sh
e saw someone looking at an old photo in one of the places she was working and thought she recognised you in it.’
‘Becca, eh?’ said David, exactly as Ashleigh had done. ‘That’s back on now, then, is it?’
‘No.’ Jude lifted his pint. No matter how much he might regret that Becca was no longer so integral a part of his life, he wasn’t so foolish as to think he could change it, even after Ashleigh had so elegantly ended their relationship. When you lost trust in someone, as he’d done in Becca, you didn’t get it back easily. He might still love her — he was honest enough, at least, to admit that — but love wasn’t enough. Ashleigh knew that, too. Theirs had been a relationship between second-bests, fraught with difficulties as result, and in the end it lasted for longer than he’d thought. But it, too, was done.
For once David got the message, let that single word end the thread of the conversation. He placed the picture down on the sticky table top. ‘Here we go. That’s my old marras from way back when. That’s me. As if you didn’t know. You’ll find that like looking in a mirror.’
Jude looked at it. He was dark, like his mother, where David’s hair had once had a sandy tint before it faded to grey. That apart, they could have been the same person. In the picture David was standing next to Linda, the childhood sweetheart who’d become his wife. His arm was around her and she was smiling up at him where everybody else was looking towards the camera, but neither Jude nor David mentioned that. ‘A bit. Yes.’ The apple never fell far from the tree; there was more than a touch of Mikey in the image of his father, too. It had never occurred to him before how tough it must have been for Linda, confronted on a daily basis by the living images of the man who’d treated her so badly.
‘Forty years ago, that was. More than. Makes me feel old.’ Lifting his pint with one hand, David jabbed a finger at the picture with the other.
‘I bet a few of them have dropped off the perch by now.’
