by Jo Allen
‘God, you’re a morbid one today. Fifty-eight isn’t old.’ The finger hovered over it. ‘Though now you mention it, there’s a few have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another.’
They’d almost included Linda. With practised ease, Jude subdued the anger with his father that Mikey had yet to learn to control. ‘You’d expect to lose one or two, maybe.’
‘Natural wastage.’ David laughed. ‘Here’s Nick Chester. That was a sad one. He was killed in an accident, just a few weeks after this picture was taken.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was a hell of a shock. I liked him. He was a good kid, a bit geeky and a bit bookish. Not into sport or our kind of music, not adventurous at all. He liked art and history and classical music. God knows what he was doing on the track.’
‘A dare, maybe?’
‘Aye, maybe. He was a good sort.’
In the photograph Nick Chester had had a grin on him as wide as the Mersey tunnel. ‘Poor kid.’
‘Yes. And there’s this guy here.’ The finger moved along to the other side of Linda, a youth with an insouciant expression, hands stuck in his pockets. ‘What was his name again? Richard something? Richard Stoker, maybe, or Stokes? He came to a bad end.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Murdered,’ said David, with relish. ‘You’re a policeman. You ought to know about these things.’
Jude looked at the later-to-be-murdered teenager with interest. ‘I can’t be expected to know the details of every homicide in the area over forty years. If it was local. Was it?’
‘Yes. Or not local, exactly. After he left school he moved away down to Appleby. They found him dead in his garden over the Horse Fair weekend, a few years on. House broken into, cash and alcohol missing.’
‘Did they catch anyone?’
‘No. Must have been one of those…’ David caught himself up, sober enough to remember he must be politically correct. ‘Travelling folk. That’s what the talk was, at the time. The police never caught anyone, of course. Case unsolved.’
Jude allowed himself a wry grin. There was every chance whoever had been on the case had a clear idea who it might have been but couldn’t find the evidence. The annual Appleby Horse Fair was a regular headache and he knew plenty of locals who took the opportunity to commit some petty crime or other under the umbrella of chaos, and hope the blame was conveniently shifted to someone passing through. ‘Interesting.’ If he found himself with a spare minute he’d look that up and see if it led anywhere. ‘So that’s two out of twenty dead.’
‘Two out of twenty dead unnaturally,’ his father corrected. ‘Here’s Clare. I dated her once.’ Clare was standing behind Linda, grinning. ‘She went to work out in Africa and picked up some nasty disease or other. Some fly bite, I heard. She died, what… about four years ago? And here’s Mac. Finn McDougall. I never liked him. I lost touch with him after we left school, but I heard someone say he died. I don’t know how.’
The class of teenagers would all be in their mid-to-late fifties by now, but surely in an area such as this the loss of four of them was way above the average? Imagining himself explaining this to Faye, Jude could see the scepticism in her face. But where was it coming from? Where did it lead?
‘This guy.’ David jabbed the forefinger down on the figure at the back of the picture. ‘He was a hell of a lad. Trouble through and through. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that. He wasn’t here long, just a year or so. His folk were tinkers. I mean travellers. If he isn’t in prison by now, he should be.’
‘Oh?’
‘He killed a man. Lost his temper in a bar in Hexham or somewhere, and then did a runner. I remember thinking that wasn’t like him to be so obvious. He was a sly bugger. I was always careful not to get on the wrong side of him. I never knew what he’d do if I upset him and I didn’t want to find myself driving over Hartside one day with my brake cables cut.’
Jude looked at the picture and saw the boy had what his mother would have called a look of the devil about him. He was handsome, in a buccaneering kid of way, and stood at the end of the back row, sneering at the camera. One arm was visible, hanging by his side, and the fist was clenched. A murderer and a murdered man, in the same photograph. ‘Do you think there’s any connection with—?’
‘With Richard? I wouldn’t be surprised. They hated each other’s guts.’ David sat back from the picture, as though his memories were exhausted. Maybe the good ones were. ‘Take the photo and throw it to your cold case team to keep them interested. It would be good if you could finger the bastard after all these years. Richard was okay. He didn’t deserve his head cracked in like it was.’ He moved to put the picture away. ‘Steven Lawson. That was his name. He had a hell of a temper on him but a way with the girls.’
‘That’s not always a good combination.’
‘I’ll bloody well say it wasn’t. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Steve.’
Jude held up a hand to stop David putting the picture away, and it wasn’t just because there was something curious about seeing his parents so obviously in love when many of his memories and surely all of Mikey’s had evolved from a toxic atmosphere, constant rows, constant disappointment. David and Linda Satterthwaite, the epitome of the way that people grew apart, were a warning to everybody. ‘Do me a favour, would you?’
‘Aye, if I can.’
‘Can you write me down all the names you remember? On the back of the picture.’
‘Why?’
‘I can find out another way, I suppose.’ Linda would know, though he was reluctant to share this bittersweet memory with her. ‘It might help us track down witnesses.’
‘Aye, okay then. Why not?’ David rooted around in his bag again for a pen and accepted the one that Jude produced from his pocket. ‘And that’s me almost done with my pint. I wouldn’t mind another one while I’m writing.’
When Jude looked back from the bar he saw his father frowning over the images, then turning the picture over and beginning to write on the back.
Steven Lawson, the man who came and went, who blew through the Eden Valley and ended up killing a man further over the Pennines, was familiar enough to trouble him. It would be ironic if, instead of solving the mystery of the Eden Valley suicides, they ended up solving a cold case murder, forty years old.
Eighteen
On the Monday, after the remnants of his weekend off had been spent trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mikey to take a step towards repairing his relationship with David, Jude had come in to work early. The first thing he did was hand the class photograph over to Chris with a request to follow up on it when he had a spare moment.
He sat down and opened his desk, scrolling through the emails. There had been no new developments on the Eden Valley suicides, thank God, other than a new post on the blog. Rather to his surprise, this asked the question: Is this the Last of the Eden Valley Suicides? There was no surprise to read through it and discover that it wasn’t, at least in the view of the author. Many more young people will yet find the escape route they crave from this toxic world, the writer concluded.
He closed down the blog as a text came through. Faye, wanting an update and wanting it straight away. Vanessa Wood was coming in to give her perspective on the investigation, and she thought he should be there. Now.
When Faye texted rather than phoned it was always a warning of her irritation. There had been increasing signs of it over the past couple of weeks and he could sense she felt meeting Vanessa was a waste of her precious time and of his. Faye was touchy about rank and deference, and he suspected she wasn’t just a little in awe of Vanessa, but saw her as the only person who had any degree of control over the situation. As such, she must feel obliged to tolerate this intervention.
Picking up his pad, he made his way towards Faye’s office. It was scarcely surprising she felt out of her comfort zone. He did, too. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t get inside the head of someone who took pleasure out of lea
ding — or driving — young people to their deaths.
‘Chief Inspector.’ Vanessa, who had been perched on the edge of a chair looking at the thick cup of black coffee Faye had made her as though it was poison, put the cup down and stood up when he came in. He thought she might be trying to exert some kind of psychological dominance over him, but it was a mismatch. She was tall, but he was well over six feet. In the background Faye, who was nominally in charge of the meeting, was clearly fuming. ‘Thank you for finding the time to join us. I’m on my way up to the Community College just now for one of my open sessions, but I thought I might take the chance to update you on where I am.’
He murmured a polite greeting and took the seat Faye indicated. She was in one of her more brisk moods, he could tell, clearly keen to get this meeting over and done with within as short a time as possible. She, he knew, was the one who was picking up the flak from the local community over what they perceived as slack handling of the matter.
‘I’ll be brief.’ Either Vanessa had picked up Faye’s subliminal messages or she, too, was in a hurry. ‘The response I’ve had from the young people of our community and their parents has been tremendous and overwhelmingly positive. I’ve been able to offer them strategies to handle their own feelings and also to deal with the matter if they suspect that someone else, friend or stranger, may be vulnerable to the kind of autosuggestion Eden Whispers is putting about. I’m quite confident that we’re controlling this series of incidents.’
‘The press are very much on board,’ Faye said, ‘and thank God for that. I always worry some journalist will fall into the trap and sell out for a clickbait headline.’
‘Naturally they’re on our side. Plenty of them will have young friends and relatives of their own. It would take a very hard-headed newshound to run a story that risks lives without a good deal of thought.’
‘I understand that. But they’re asking questions I can’t answer. I don’t imagine you can answer them either, but I’m going to ask anyway. Do you think this is over and if not, when will it be? And how many more young people will we lose?’ Faye sat forward at her desk, resting her chin on her hand.
Vanessa allowed herself a moment’s reflection. ‘I can’t say. I’m afraid I have to go with my more pessimistic instincts and say it probably isn’t over. There’s damage already done which we may not be able to undo. And I’m not a miracle worker. I can only help those who put themselves forward for help.’
‘Have you spoken to a young woman named Izzy Ecclestone?’ Jude asked. ‘I appreciate there may be patient confidentiality involved here, but she’s someone we do know has a fascination with death and particularly with Cave Wood. I’m no expert, and I know in most cases we only see what people want to show us. But she seems to me to be extremely vulnerable.’
‘I do know Izzy, and I’ve reached out to her. I’ve spoken to both her and her parents. Yes, you’re right. Izzy is a concern. But we can’t keep her under lock and key and I’m not convinced she’s a danger to herself.’
Jude thought of Izzy, ghosting through the trees, and of both Raven’s and Mikey’s instinctive concern for her. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. She’s had plenty of opportunity to harm herself and hasn’t done so.’
The irresistible thought of Mikey reared again in Jude’s brain. Did Vanessa think those who were apparently stable were, in fact, at greater risk? But Vanessa passed on. ‘If there’s no more progress on this investigation, Superintendent Scanlon, then I should head off to the Community College.’
‘There is no more. I don’t think you understand our role.’ Faye fought her irritation, too obviously. ‘We deal with the law. There’s no evidence the law has been broken.’
‘No,’ said Vanessa with a sigh, ‘indeed not. But I believe there’s a perpetrator — that’s the word you use, isn’t it? — and finding that person is certainly your responsibility.’ She stood up.
Faye was about to say something, possibly inflammatory, and Jude found himself cast in the unusual role of peacemaker. ‘Am I right in thinking you lost a brother, Dr Wood?’
Vanessa put her mug down. ‘That’s correct, Chief Inspector. Have you been checking up on me?’ She smiled. ‘I’d expect that, of course.’
‘Not checking up. My father mentioned it. He was at school with Nicholas.’
‘I see. Then he’d have been at school at the same time as me, though I was a few years younger. What’s your father’s name? There were a few Satterthwaites, as I remember.’
‘David.’
‘David Satterthwaite. No, the name doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid.’ She turned back to Faye. ‘So, to conclude. There’s no progress on identifying this mystery blogger?’
‘Not as yet.’ Faye met Vanessa’s gaze straight out, to Jude’s considerable admiration. He could see she wasn’t about to admit they couldn’t justify it. ‘Whoever it is has been adept at covering their tracks.’
‘Inevitable, I suppose.’ Vanessa shrugged. ‘I think we’re in the dying stages of this scenario. If you want my view, we need to target all our resources on preventing any more deaths — which, in my view, we’ll be lucky to do and, frankly I’m surprised there haven’t been more — and after that the blog will die a quiet death of its own. You can flush out vulnerable people, but you can’t create vulnerability. If we can identify the vulnerable, we can build resilience. The odds are stacked in our favour from here on, I’m glad to say. Goodbye.’
Faye saw her to the door and pointed her towards reception, then came back and closed the door behind her with an exasperated snap. ‘What a waste of time. Nothing said that couldn’t be said on the phone. That woman is on a power trip, if you ask me. She expects us to jump when she shouts.’ She picked up the mug Vanessa had placed on her desk and frowned at the ring it had left behind.
‘Perhaps we could look in a little more detail at the blog—’
‘Don’t try and gang up on me. Copycat suicides are unpleasant but they aren’t criminal. And yes, I’ve looked at the blog and yes, it’s distasteful but in my view there isn’t enough there to consider it encouraging suicide. Which, as you know, is the letter of the law.’
Jude disagreed, but he understood the subtext. Pressing on with a criminal investigation into encouraging or assisting suicide meant a lot of work, much of it devolving to Faye. ‘I read it as clear encouragement.’
‘It’s impossible to justify the resources that would require, and you know it. Besides, she said herself. We’re on top of it. Pull up a chair. I’ve a whole load of other things I want to go through with you, and they’re urgent in their own way.’
But Vanessa hadn’t said that. He was about to argue with her, though there was no point, but he kept thinking about Vanessa’s words even as Faye was rattling through budgets and resources.
He was losing concentration when there was a knock on the door. Ashleigh, anxious and businesslike, answered Faye’s snapped acknowledgement by opening it and stepping inside.
‘I’ve got some really bad news,’ she said, without preamble.
And Jude knew, without being told, that Vanessa had been right. The series of suicides might be coming to its end, but it wasn’t over.
‘So who is he?’ asked Jude, as he and Ashleigh headed down to Cave Wood once again.
Ashleigh checked her phone for the umpteenth time. Information was coming in by the minute and she fired it off as it appeared. ‘He’s Ben Curran, younger brother of Charlie. He’s twenty-one. There was a little more than a year between them. Ben wrote an emotional tribute to his brother on social media that would break your heart, Chris says.’
It must have been bad if it could get behind the terminally unsentimental Chris Marshall’s defences. Perhaps this death wasn’t so surprising, if the tensions running so high in the community had collided with, and amplified, Ben’s devastation at the loss of his brother. Jude spared a thought for the parents, already wrecked by grief, perhaps so much so that they’d lost track of their welfare of
their son. ‘Any other family?’
‘There’s a third brother, a few years older. He lives in Manchester.’
Jude turned down through Little Salkeld, lifting a hand to acknowledge the uniformed constable who’d closed the road. Would the parents be quietly relieved that their surviving child was away from the fevered atmosphere of the Eden Valley, or tortured by the thought of what he might do without their help and support? ‘Who found him?’
‘Not Raven, thank God. The farmer.’ Ashleigh kept flicking through her phone as Jude manoeuvred the car past a parked-up police car and squeezed it into a gateway. ‘He takes a turn around the woods last thing at night and first thing every morning these days, just to make sure.’
‘I don’t blame him. I do the same myself, if I’ve nothing else on. We’ll stop here. I think it’s as close as we’ll get.’
Ashleigh unclipped her seatbelt as he stopped the Mercedes. ‘He came down last night, he said, along this path. Either he was there too soon and missed him, or Ben heard him and hid.’
‘He was in Lacy’s Caves, is that right?’
‘Yes, but he looked in there.’
Ben hadn’t hanged. There had been a bottle of vodka and some pills. ‘Do we know what he took?’
‘Not yet.’
Jude’s concern gave way to frustration. That was three deaths in Cave Wood, four if you included Clara Beaton, as he was inclined to do and Faye was not. ‘This is ridiculous. We can’t police these woods. It’s impossible.’ And if they did there were endless others locally where someone could choose to go and never be found.
They got out of the car and headed down the well-worn path, though quite what there was for them to see was open to debate. ‘Isn’t Geri Foster’s house over there?’ Geri, Ashleigh had told him as she’d briefed him on the way to the scene, had been on the scene again. ‘It’s a pity she didn’t see anything.’
‘I don’t know if anyone’s asked her about last night. There hasn’t really been time. I know the bare bones. She says she took the dog for a walk and went up to see her parents, but by the time she’d made it to Long Meg the police were on their way.’ She raised her hand to stop his intervention. ‘I know it looks odd, but it didn’t really surprise me. It’s her routine. They’re all early risers.’
