by Jo Allen
‘No. That would have been too much of a coincidence. Although it’s interesting enough. He was killed. In a break-in at his home a year after Richard Stoker died.’ Chris smiled at them again, not because any murder, even an old one, was a matter for amusement but because another piece of the puzzle had appeared to them. ‘He lived in Lincolnshire at the time. Again, nothing was stolen but cash. There were fingerprints at the scene, and as with Richard they don’t match any named individual on the database. But there’s one key difference.’
‘It was the same person?’ Jude sat forward, intrigued.
‘Yes. The crimes are linked. The person who broke into Richard Stoker’s home and killed him also did the same to Finn McDougall. In both cases the assumption on the files is the same — that it was a member of the travelling community and the motive was robbery.’
The more recent of the two cases had been cold for well over thirty years. It was surely inconceivable that the perpetrator could be caught now, without either a very good reason for reviving the two cases or a more substantial new lead. ‘Interesting.’ Jude turned back to the photo. ‘What about the rest of the class? Tell me one of them was murdered and Faye will have a meltdown.’
‘Nothing so obvious. As I pointed out. Most of them are alive and well. But see here. Paul Curran.’ Chris tapped a finger on one of them. ‘This is where it gets interesting. He’s the father of the two Curran boys who died in Lacy’s Caves.’
‘Okay.’ Chris might find it interesting but Jude was unsurprised. There were only two secondary schools in the area; it was hardly surprising that lives overlapped. ‘Anything more?’
‘Here. Sharon Ford. She lives in Carlisle now. She married a man called Turnbull. He’s not in the picture.’
‘Turnbull?’ It was Ashleigh who cottoned on first. ‘Don’t tell me. They had a son called Connor.’
‘No. She was a teen mum. They had a son called Robert. Connor Turnbull is her grandson. Next to her we have Jimmy Kennedy. Daughter, by his second marriage — Juliet.’
‘Stop right there.’ Jude had been so sure of foul play and now the web of connections was tighter, and wider, than he’d imagined. Faye would have to throw resources at it. ‘You’re telling me that out of this class of twenty four, two were murdered, almost certainly by the same person, and we have links to four of our six suicides.’
‘Yep.’ Chris was struggling to control his excitement. ‘There’s more. Tania Baker’s mother, Lucy, didn’t go to the same school but she lived next door to Sharon Ford, and they were thick as thieves. So that’s five out of six.’
‘And the sixth? Clara?’
‘I drew a blank with that one. Her family are incomers. But another friend of Sharon and Lucy was a girl called Liz Battersby. She went on to marry a man called Ecclestone, and their daughter is—’
‘Izzy.’ Again Ashleigh got there first, that fraction of a second before anyone else.
‘Right.’ Jude frowned. ‘If we exclude Clara, we can trace all of these suicides and two connected murders back to one class in one school forty years ago. Have I got that right?’
‘That’s what it looks like.’
They were all looking at Jude, and he in his turn was looking at the photograph. This wasn’t about numbers; it wasn’t about a rolling, rising probability or a distrust of coincidence. None of them could be unaware that if death was picking off the smiling faces of this class, tapping on the shoulders of their children or grandchildren, it brought the matter closer than was comfortable to Jude himself — and to Mikey.
‘Okay,’ he said, more briskly than he intended. ‘I’m satisfied we’ve demonstrated enough of a connection to escalate it, and to bring these two cold cases back into play. First up, we need to warn the Ecclestones. Ashleigh, I’d like you to do that. Aditi, I need you to speak to all the suicide victims’ families again, about what happened when they were at school. Now let’s move on. Is there anyone else in this picture who we can connect to this case?’
‘There’s this guy. Steven Lawson.’
Jude looked at him again and the niggle that had kept in the back of his brain rose up again. ‘Yes, tell us about him. He’s wanted for murder, isn’t he?’
‘He is. And now no doubt we’re all thinking the same, about his two classmates if nothing else. He had a reputation as a troublemaker. He had links to the travelling community. He blew through the place, never settled at school, never made friends. Clever, but not a man for his books.’
‘Do we know where he is?’
‘No. He’s rather slipped through the net. Changed his name, perhaps, and most likely rubs along in the grey economy. That’s if he hasn’t left the area altogether. Or the country. He wouldn’t be the first to do that.’
Jude stared at the picture again, for a long moment, focussing on it, and then it came to him. He sat back. ‘I know what it is. Ash, have you noticed? He looks like Josh Foster.’
Twenty
‘So,’ said Jude. ‘This is my problem. I’m happy in my own mind that there’s some connection between Josh Foster and the suicides. It all points to him, except that he wasn’t born when Richard Stoker and Finn McDougall were murdered. But I think there’s a connection. I think there has to be. I just don’t know what it is.’
Ashleigh was sitting in her car in Lazonby, waiting to nerve herself to speak to the Ecclestones and warn them to keep a closer watch than ever over their daughter. Jude’s phone call had given her a moment to prepare herself. ‘Do you want me to go down and talk to Josh again? I don’t think he’d thank me for it.’
She pulled down the driver’s mirror, not to look at herself but to keep tabs on the woman who’d just walked past and given her a long, hard stare on the way. Sure enough, the woman had her phone out and the rumour mill would be in full swing. That detective was up at the Ecclestones. That’s not good news, mark my words.
‘No. We already know Geri’s hostile to us, though God knows why. But we need to do something.’
There was no question. A connection between a class of school kids forty years ago, two cold case murders, six youth suicides and a young man with a chip on his shoulder? ‘What does Faye say?’
‘I’ve been trying to talk to her all day. She’s busy. I’d better get on.’ He rang off.
When the interested bystander was out of sight, Ashleigh got out of the car and walked up the path to the Ecclestones’ neat semi. Izzy, dressed in black, was visible fluttering past an upstairs window and as Liz Ecclestone opened the door, the house shook with the vibrations of heavy, modern rock music.
‘Come in,’ said Liz, when Ashleigh had flashed her warrant card and introduced herself. ‘Come on through to the kitchen. It’s quieter there. I’m not going to tell our Izzy to turn that racket down. I don’t take a lot of comfort from any of the goings-on around here, but at least I know when she’s playing that music, she’s alive and well.’
It was was enough to kill yourself in your own home, while your family went about their business blissfully unaware of your torment, and in Ashleigh’s view the fact that none of the Eden Valley suicides had chosen that route further strengthened the connection between them. Someone standing beside Tania, encouraging her to jump from the bridge; with Charlie or Connor or Juliet, helping them choose a branch from which they’d hang; sitting beside Ben in the cave, looking out at the river and pretending to drink themselves into oblivion beside him.
Could that person be Josh Foster? And if so, what connected the Eden Valley suicides to the deaths of Richard Stoker and Finn McDougall, all those years before?
‘I don’t want to worry you unduly.’ Ashleigh had rehearsed this, over and over again, but her script went out of the window as soon as she crossed the threshold. Liz Ecclestone was a hard-faced woman who, she immediately sensed, wouldn’t take kindly to soft-speaking. So much the better. She could tell it to her straight. ‘Nothing to worry about. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your schooldays.’
‘My school
days? What the hell does that have to do with what’s happening to kids these days?’ Liz had been baking. There was a large mixing bowl on the kitchen table and a dusting of flour on the floor. A lump of grey dough, roughly flattened to half an inch thick, sat on the kitchen unit. ‘I’ll carry on with this, if you don’t mind. You sit down and tell me what you want to know.’
Ashleigh sat. ‘We’re trying to establish some link between these unfortunate deaths, and one of the things that’s come up is the parents.’
‘Aye, well. That’s no surprise. This is a small enough place. I’m one of those that has time for offcomers, but there’s plenty as sticks with the friends they’ve had all their lives. I’m more broad-minded than some I could mention.’ Liz turned the dough over, slapping it hard down on the surface, sending a cloud of flour rolling across the formica and over the edge like an avalanche. The music throbbed in the thin walls of the house. ‘But yeah. We brought up our kids together in this village. They know each other, even if they’re not friends. Izzy knew Tania and Juliet, god rest their poor souls, and I know their mams and dads.’
Thump, thump went the dough as Liz hammered it on the worktop. ‘All this has made me think. I wasn’t that nice a girl when I was at school,’ she said, and her voice wavered a little. ‘Teenaged kids never are. Girls are the worst, for my money, but the boys can be right harmful buggers too. I don’t think I was good to people when I was our Izzy’s age. I see them doing it to her. Making fun of folk because they’re different and never understanding why it hurts. I always want to turn it to good, now. I tell Izzy that. Don’t you go doing harm to man nor beast, I always say to her, and I’m being paid back in spades for anything I might have done, because she turns all her misery inwards. Serves me right.’ She kept on working, her forearms dusty with flour as she hammered the dough. ‘I suppose when I look back we were all a bit weird. But you get a group of people who are weird in the same way and they pick on someone who’s different. To them. That’s what we did back then.’
‘Who did you pick on?’ The music skipped forward, as if Izzy was bored of it. Ashleigh recognised the next track: Billie Eilish, this time, the music of the disillusioned teen.
‘Some gypsy kid,’ said Liz, raising her voice. ‘He was a mardy beggar. Chip on his shoulder the size of Helvellyn, and determined to make life difficult for everyone, so we did the same for him. He was only here for a couple of years. The lads were all afraid of him, though they’d never admit it. The girls were all sweet on him to start with, but we soon realised he was only after one thing. When he got it that was enough. When he left, he didn’t have any friends to his name. But that’s no excuse for the way we all behaved to him.’
The music stopped, as if Izzy was in an unsettled mood. Liz turned to switch the oven on.
‘And have you seen him since?’
‘No, I never seen hide nor hair of him for forty years.’ She rolled the dough into a ball, tipped it into the mixing bowl and placed a cloth over it. ‘I can’t even remember his name.’ She carried the bowl over to the oven, turned it on low and slid it inside. ‘It was years ago. He’s long gone.’
‘I think you should keep a very close eye on Izzy,’ said Ashleigh. And the music started up again.
When she’d taken Liz Ecclestone through the byways of her schooldays and learned nothing more than she already knew, Ashleigh drove slowly back to Penrith the long way round, through Great Salkeld and diverting down the dead-end track that led to the Fosters’ house. There was no sign of life there, and Geri’s Range Rover wasn’t anywhere in view. It was half past five so, rather than go to the office, she headed back home to write up her notes there and think the matter through.
On another day she’d have called in on Jude to share a bite to eat and chew over the day’s events and maybe, if the mood took the two of them, stay over. That wasn’t going to happen now she’d taken the initiative and shifted the relationship back to what it was before, that of colleagues. She frowned as she thought of him, comparing him with Scott. Lisa was right about how much better a bet he was for a partner than her ex-husband, but for all her common sense, Lisa had never understood love.
Leaving Jude had been the right thing to do. She’d had to end the relationship before she could fall into the trap of getting serious, before the whispers of I love you that they shared for form’s sake could take on any kind of sincerity. If she hadn’t gone, she’d have risked giving up her heart to him and finding he couldn’t give his in return.
But the alternative was Scott, and he was a risk. He loved her but he couldn’t help himself. And she couldn’t help herself, either.
Made for each other, she said to herself, and headed home.
Twenty-One
Everyone had left the office but with nothing to do that evening, no real reason to go home, Jude stayed late, tying up the last bits of admin on his to-do list, the things he needed to tackle on the half a dozen other cases he was working on. Faye was out of the office on a training course, but he dashed off an email to her anyway, yet another plea for her to apply to the relevant authorities and bring all possible resources to bear to find out who was behind Eden Whispers. Even if she agreed, there would be a long wait for an answer. It wouldn’t be a priority when there were cases of stalking and other potentially violent and unarguable crimes to be investigated. But it was all he could do.
When his enthusiasm for work finally ran out, he allowed himself a few moments longer to mull over the case. If, as he suspected, Josh Foster was Steven Lawson’s son, what were the ramifications? Geri had said she didn’t know who his father was but Geri, he was quite convinced, was capable of delivering a seamless lie, just as she was capable of selecting which truths she wanted him to hear. This innate ability to pick and choose her moral obligations might be something she’d learned from her upbringing, or it might be something she’d picked up along the way as a means of self-defence.
It didn’t matter. If Josh was the technical genius behind Eden Whispers, then what? Could he have done more? Was it credible to suggest he’d played at being mates with the vulnerable, that an arm around Tania Baker’s sad shoulders had tipped her to her doom in front of the 9.48 from Carlisle to Langwathby? Was it conceivable he’d sat in Lacy’s Caves with Ben Curran, commiserating with him over the loss of his brother, talking up his grief and handing him the bottle in which his sorrows had ultimately drowned? And had he accompanied others to the woods, handed them the rope, helped to haul them up, or even pushed them from the branches?
It was possible, but why? A young man with an inevitable chip on his shoulder, he might have a grievance if he knew his father had been bullied for being different. He couldn’t have killed Finn McDougall and Richard Stoker — but his father could have done that. Steven Lawson had a reputation for violence, was wanted for murder and was a member of the travelling community. He would have had every opportunity to roam the country, track down his victims even when they’d moved away, and carry out an opportunist murder. Both had been in their homes when they died. Neither had resisted their killer.
Maybe both had welcomed an old foe who appeared bearing an apparent olive branch, and if so both had paid the price.
If it were Josh, with or without his probable father’s connivance, who’d pursued this feud into the next generation, there was every chance the series of suicides was not, as Vanessa had contended, almost over. Cold fear washed over him as he thought of how Mikey had intervened in the fight after someone had called Josh a dirty gippo. The generation before had called his father much worse and now, perhaps, he was making them pay for it.
Mikey. Jesus. If revenge was indiscriminate, if Mikey’s innate good nature wasn’t enough to save him, if the sins of the parents were to be visited upon their children and if, as was all too possible, David Satterthwaite was one of those against whom Steven Lawson held his grudge, then not only was Mikey at risk but the shadow extended to Jude himself.
He checked his watch, shut down his lapt
op and headed for the car park. Next day he’d sit down with Faye and somehow persuade her to authorise a full investigation into Eden Whispers. He’d put out an alert to find Steven Lawson. Before then, he’d make time to call by and speak once more to Mikey.
There was a risk. As Ashleigh had reminded him as she manoeuvred him carefully out of her bed with a promise of friendship and her former husband back into bed with the promise of God-knew-what, there was a risk to everything. He evaluated it as he drove down through Askham, slowing to check the crowd sitting outside the pub to see if Mikey was among them. The most likely problem was that Mikey would finally have enough of being told what to do and go off and do the exact opposite, but surely even he wasn’t stupid enough to do that. But what he might do, being good-hearted, was to take a chance if he bumped into Josh, feel sorry for him, try to make up for the behaviour of his mates.
As he arrived in Wasby, he pulled the car up outside the cottage just as his mother was leaving. She was turning the key in the front door and the burglar alarm was bleeping as she walked down the path. So Mikey wasn’t there. He rolled the window down. ‘You’re just off out, I see.’
‘I’m doing the taxi run. Mikey’s been over to Newcastle and I said I’d pick him up at the station and run him round to some mate’s birthday do.’
‘I’ll do it for you, if you like.’
‘Thank you, but I’m going for a swim afterwards.’
A pity. If he’d known he could have had Mikey as a captive audience and not had to take his chance on meeting Becca, who was at the window of her cottage, no doubt waiting to come out so she could get the latest update. ‘Tell him not to stay out with the wrong sort.’
‘Are you worried about him?’ Linda stopped in the act of opening her car door.
‘No, not at all. It was a joke.’
