by Jo Allen
Whoever had closed off the scene had extended it further than usual. Jude and Ashleigh paused for a moment on the path outside the blue and white tape and from somewhere in the trees the chattering of a red squirrel floated down to them.
‘Do you think we should we look more closely into Geri?’ asked Ashleigh, stepping off the path to allow the CSI team, clad in their white forensic suits, to pass by. Even the usually gregarious Tammy had nothing to say today, passing by with nothing more than an acknowledging shrug, head down as she approached the grim task.
‘Probably.’ Jude looked along the path. Lacy’s Caves, a network of man-made caverns burrowed into the sandstone cliff, were just round a bend, invisible among a tangle of birch and holly trees. He was relieved about it, and at the same time a little ashamed at feeling that way, but he wasn’t in the mood to look on the body of another young man, snatched away too soon. ‘That’s Eden Lacy. Which is her house?’
‘That sandstone one, there. Standing out on its own a little.’
‘A clear view of Cave Wood isn’t evidence of a murder, I know,’ he said, with a sigh, ‘but she sure as hell is in a good place to see what’s going on.’
‘As is her son.’
‘Yes. I don’t have a good feeling about this.’
A ladybird descended on whirring wings and settled on Ashleigh’s sleeve. She put a finger down and the creature crawled onto her polished nail. ‘You were in with Dr Wood this morning, weren’t you? What did she say? Not about this. About the whole thing.’
‘She still says this is a normal sequence of events. The damage has been done and we can do very little to undo it. She said she thought there’d be more, but not many.’
‘I hope to God this is the last.’
Jude thought of the parents again, and inevitably his thoughts went to Mikey, to how his father would respond if anything happened to him while the rage between them still simmered. Of the two, Mikey was the one whose pain he understood; David was the sinner who’d forced his sons to choose between their parents. It had cost Jude enough to keep up a civil relationship and he never mentioned it to his mother. Some people might kill themselves to spite those they left behind. It was just possible Mikey detested his father enough to do that. ‘Yes. Hopefully.’
Tammy popped her head back around the corner. ‘I just thought you’d want to know. An empty vodka bottle by his side, half a dozen blister packs of paracetamol, all empty. Place stinks of alcohol. I can’t say when he died, but it’s been a few hours.’
So Ben Curran had perished, presumably alone, in the small hours of darkness. ‘Tammy, I know you always go over everything with a fine-toothed comb.’ He was always careful not to insult her professionalism but this time he had to be sure. ‘But under the circumstances—’
‘Yeah, I know. I’ll be extra careful.’ She disappeared around the bend again.
‘I never came here when I was younger,’ Jude said to Ashleigh, looking along the green curve of the path. ‘I was over the other side of town. But back in the day this was one of the places kids would come for an illicit drink. I don’t imagine that’s changed too much. But this is different.’
‘Let’s go back up and see what’s going on up the road.’
Back where they’d left the Mercedes, Doddsy was busy with his clipboard, dispensing instructions and receiving information. Geri was standing in her characteristic pose with her hands in her pockets giving her account of events to a uniformed PCSO and — rather to Jude’s surprise — Vanessa Wood was deep in conversation with Josh Foster.
Josh. In running gear, his face still pink with exertion. Leaving Ashleigh dealing with Geri, Jude strolled over. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yep.’ The young man was noncommittal, but his hands were balled into fists and the look he gave Vanessa was less than friendly. He’d been out running, shoes crusted with mud and plastered with grass, tee shirt still damp with sweat. ‘I was just getting a dose of advice I don’t need about how to look after myself. But hell, I’m used to that.’
Vanessa stepped away, lifting her hands in apology. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’
‘You should never force advice on people,’ Geri called over, from where she must just have finished with the PCSO. ‘It’s counterproductive. I thought you’d have known that. Being a professional. But I’m pretty damned sure you guys make this up as you go along. I’m only surprised the fake advice some so-called counsellors dish out doesn’t drive more people to kill themselves. Still, whatever brings in the cash, eh?’
Vanessa shot her a look that was concentrated poison, but discretion triumphed. ‘I’m sure you can always confide in your mother,’ she said evenly, to Josh, ‘but if you need to talk to anyone, you know where I am.’
Jude could quite see why these two women wouldn’t get on; both very determined, each convinced she was right. Geri hadn’t bothered to hide her dislike of therapists.
‘Come on,’ Geri said to her son, impatiently. ‘We’re done here. They know where to find us if they need to.’
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here,’ he said to Vanessa, when the two were out of earshot.
‘I probably shouldn’t have come along,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I’ll give the woman that. But the farmer called me to let me know what had happened and said there was a young man around and he thought he might need help. I thought I’d better come down at once and talk to him. I’d only just got here. However, not every therapist is the right person for every patient.’
‘I’m sure he’ll understand that.’
She hesitated. ‘You asked me about my brother, earlier. That’s what made me come down.’
‘I can see it might be difficult.’ It was comforting to think he wasn’t the only one whose professionalism was affected by the events.
‘It is indeed. I can handle it myself, you understand. But when I visit my father he’s distraught. The memories have come flooding back, of how he was when it had happened. Sometimes he conflates the past and the present, thinks the girl who fell from the bridge was Nicky. I made a grave professional error by rushing in just now, and I know DI Dodd would have called me in his own good time, but these deaths hit very close to home.’ She looked across at Josh. ‘I’ll move on, and I imagine he will, too. He seems a reasonably secure young man in himself, as far as I can judge.’
Jude thought the opposite. Even without the benefit of Mikey’s opinion, Josh’s attitude spoke for itself and told of a huge chip on his shoulder, about life and the way everyone treated him. Maybe Vanessa’s use of terminology was different and secure in himself just meant she didn’t think he’d kill himself. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I don’t think there’s much benefit in my being here,’ she said, after a moment. ‘I came down on a whim.’ She looked as if she was irritated with herself at some lapse in professionalism. ‘It was a misjudgement, but a genuine one. I thought I might be needed. On reflection I see my time will be better spent elsewhere.’
Jude’s own time would be better spent elsewhere, too. He waited for Ashleigh to come across to join him. She stood a good six inches further away from him than usual and he could see from Doddsy’s raised eyebrow that his friend had noticed it. ‘I’m no psychologist but I always think it’s better to act than not.’
‘Such a policeman’s reply.’ Vanessa’s eyes lingered on young Josh Foster, disappearing along the path. ‘Do you know the worst thing about Eden Whispers? It’s that a lot of what it says is so very seductive for people who have problems, even confident individuals who don’t think they do. Me. You. It offers us that temptation. It whispers in our ears that it’s in our power to make everything all right by leaving this world behind. In that one moment when everything seems so overwhelming — a moment that comes to us all — it’s so very easy to take that message on board. To stand on the edge of a cliff or stare into a bottle of spirits and hear that voice saying to you just do it and everything will be all right.’ She turned. ‘Goodbye. I’ll
obviously keep you briefed.’
They watched her go. ‘Let’s get back to the office.’ Jude strode back in Vanessa’s wake, nodded at the police officer on guard and flicked the key fob to unlock the Mercedes. ‘I need to process this.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Ashleigh said to him, as he started the engine and drove down the lanes. ‘You’re thinking it’s Josh, aren’t you?’
‘It could be.’
‘I was wondering about it last night.’
Another time — even a few days earlier — she wouldn’t have hesitated to call him, even late at night. ‘Go on.’
‘I was looking over the notes you made from your first meeting with Vanessa. All the deleted comments on the local Facebook group. And I looked back over the stuff on Eden Whispers. And I realised something. Do you remember the name of the poster whose comments started Vanessa off on the idea that it was deliberate?’
‘Not offhand, no. Only that it was a pseudonym.’
‘Okay. It was Four Hats Jose. I thought it was some kid having a laugh about something. But it’s an anagram. Of Joshua Foster.’
Jude said nothing, negotiating the car around a bend in the road. Maybe now was the time he could persuade Faye that there was a real and present threat, and that it was time to find out who was behind Eden Whispers.
Nineteen
‘Right.’ Jude closed the door of the incident room behind him and took a seat beneath the whiteboard. He was glad to have his back to its gallery of fresh faces, alive only in the memories of their families and friends, their potential doomed to be unfulfilled. ‘What do we think? Because I’ll tell you what I think. There’s a hell of a lot more to this than meets the eye.’
He looked across at Aditi Desai, the one additional detective Faye had been able to spare for him. It had been enough of a struggle to get Aditi on the team and if the case was as complex and sinister as he suspected, they would still be woefully under-resourced. ‘Have you been able to find out anything about Ben?’
‘There wasn’t that much to find out.’ She placed his picture on the table, with care. Ben Curran had been a young man, and the photo showed him in football kit, wreathed in smiles. Families often chose a picture of their lost ones in their happy moments, the way they liked to remember them. ‘He and his brother were close and he was devastated by his loss, but there’s no evidence of any previous depression of mental health issues. He worked on a farm. He was popular. He’d had a couple of girlfriends but nothing serious or long term, and he wasn’t in a relationship when he died. He played a lot of sport and was very much one of the lads.’
‘Did he leave a note?’
‘No note. He’d told one of his friends he didn’t know how he was going to manage without Charlie but the friend didn’t read anything suicidal into it. The opposite. I haven’t finished speaking to all of his friends, but nothing’s obvious so far. His phone’s in the hands of the digital forensic guys just now, so we can see who he’d been in contact with. But that’ll take a while.’
‘Okay.’ Jude had expected nothing less. He moved on to Chris. ‘Let’s talk about Eden Whispers. Is there anything new?’
‘Not much. Just a news flash kind of post saying that some else had died — found peace it says here, which is just about as much in breach of the code as you can get.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘There’s a reference to Ben drinking with his brother in heaven, which implies they’ve picked up some gossip along the way.’
‘We haven’t issued any statement about it yet,’ Ashleigh said, ‘but news travels so fast around here.’
‘I have my ear to the ground down in the town.’ Chris sighed. ‘But Ash is right. I’ve never known a bush telegraph like there is in this area. There were plenty of people who knew.’
Mentally, Jude ticked a few of them off. He could safely rule out the police or the CSI team, because none of them would have risked a disciplinary offence by speaking off the record, and Vanessa’s professional reputation wouldn’t stand a breach of trust. Beyond that, there were many whose silence couldn’t be so easily guaranteed. There was the farmer who’d found the body and who had been indiscreet enough to call Vanessa before the police did so, his wife, the farm hands who’d been there when he’d come back up with the story. There were Geri and Josh, once again on the scene. There were Storm and Raven, and the assorted dog walkers who’d arrived at the riverside path and been turned away again, without any information but with eye-witness accounts to season the gossip. It was all too easy to see how the name and the likely cause of death had found their way into the public domain. ‘There’s nothing we can do to contain it. But I want you to keep your eye on that blog and see if there’s anything that comes up that gives us a clue as to who it might have been. Beyond that, I don’t know what we can do.’
‘Yeah. There are ways of finding out who’s behind it, but they’re beyond my skillset. You’d need to get your mates on the tech team onto that, as well.’
Jude rolled his eyes. Even with Faye’s authorisation and support he wouldn’t expect any urgency from the digital forensics team.
Ashleigh’s phone pinged with a message and she looked down at it. ‘That’s Tammy. Jude, this is interesting. There were two empty vodka bottles in Lacy’s Caves. She’s sent them off to the lab but she thought you’d like to know that she’d put her house on the fact that one of them contained vodka and the other contained water.’
There was silence around the table. ‘Water?’ said Aditi, puzzled. ‘Why?’
Several possibilities flicked through Jude’s mind. The bottles could have been there a while. Ben could have brought water with him. Tammy’s initial appraisal might be wrong. Or it could be something altogether more sinister. ‘Let’s go straight to the worst case, shall we? If it’s water. If it wasn’t Ben who brought it. Then I think—’
‘Someone sat with him, pretending to drink while he drank himself to death. Or positively encouraged him to do so.’ Ashleigh’s face was serious. She avoided his eye. ‘I know there are other explanations for it, but it’s so…elegant. You can see it, can’t you? You can see exactly how it might have happened.’
He nodded. ‘It’ll be interesting to see what we get from the bottle.’ Not everyone realised how closely they investigated a suicide scene. The alternative — that someone did know and had taken steps to prevent identification — would be equally telling. ‘If there’s DNA we’ll have a lead and if not…well, that’ll be interesting in itself.’
‘That’s progress,’ said Doddsy, nodding. ‘This is the first of these deaths that we can look at as being probably more than a suicide.’
‘Exactly.’ Jude couldn’t suppress an unbecoming sense of triumph. Faye would struggle, now, to resist escalating the matter. ‘Let’s move on. Chris, did you find anything else?’
‘Yep,’ said Chris, noncommittally. ‘I had a rare bit of fun with your photograph.’
Chris had had the class photograph blown up and had annotated it. He handed copies out round the table. Jude lifted an eyebrow but stayed silent, taking the opportunity to look at it again, in a more detached manner than he had done in the pub. ‘Talk us through it. Was it worth the effort?’
‘You can be the judge. If nothing else, I think you’ve set a cold case running.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’ Chris moved his finger along the lines of schoolchildren. ‘Nicholas Chester. Dead. Fell from the Eden Lacy viaduct. Jude, your mum, your dad, obviously. Another couple of random people, both alive and well. One of them runs a self-catering business at the back of Skiddaw. One lives in Leeds. This is Richard Stoker.’ He tapped a finger on the picture. ‘Your dad was right about him. He was killed following a break-in at his home in Appleby during the Horse Fair, six years after this picture was taken. There was no sign of a struggle so it looks as if he was taken by surprise. The house was ransacked. There are fingerprints on the system but they couldn’t match them at the time. I had them checked again. Still noth
ing.’
Six years after the photo would have been too early for DNA results. ‘And the conclusion?’
‘The case is still open. There were no suspects, no-one saw anything, nothing that was stolen was ever traced. It looks like an opportunist crime by someone who’s never attracted the attention of the law, before or since.’
There were plenty of those. Jude thought, once more, of the New Agers. They were an easy target for those seeking a criminal, but their life was more or less static, confined to a small area of Cumbria. They were passive, too, and generally open, lacking the mobility of the majority of the thousands of travellers who came every summer for the Appleby Horse Fair and the cunning of the few who broke the law. Ironically enough it was the likes of Raven and Storm who were regularly accused and investigated, who co-operated and were cleared. The clever criminals got away with it. ‘Go on.’
‘This is a lady called Clare Mahoney. She went off to become a doctor in Africa. She never came back to Cumbria and died of a fever caused by a reaction to an insect bite, four years ago.’
‘At least we can reasonably assume that’s nothing to do with this,’ said Ashleigh, with unwarranted cheerfulness.
‘I think so.’ Chris ran through half a dozen others, each of them still alive and some of them prospering, some still local, others not. ‘And now this. Finn McDougall. He moved on from Penrith and ended up working in Lincolnshire.’ He looked up, with a sly smile. There was very little theatre in procedural policing, but somehow he found it. ‘He’s dead. Do you want to guess how?’
‘Not suicide?’ Ashleigh leaned forward and looked at the picture. Jude sat back, watching her. He’d spent a long time studying the photograph, didn’t need to see Finn McDougall’s face.
