by Jo Allen
Some people tried too hard to force abnormal situations into a normal frame. Dawn might be overshadowed by her husband’s obstreperous personality, but she was a strong woman in her own right. ‘Yes. Getting out always does everyone good. It can’t be easy being trapped in here. All those memories.’
‘Exactly. Greg loved it here. He felt so free. And now Max has security men at the front gate all the time and won’t let me go out without them. They’ve only been here a few days and already I can’t bear it. But now you’re here, he won’t mind if I go out.’
‘I can look after myself.’ Ashleigh smiled at that. ‘I started off as a beat bobby. I can handle any trouble. Not that there will be any.’
‘I keep telling Max that. No one’s going to try and kidnap me.’ Dawn twisted the corners of her silk scarf between her fingers.
They could never have thought anyone would kidnap Greg, let alone murder him, and of course you should never rule anything out, but it would be foolhardy to attempt anything in so public a place as Windermere in the summer, and there must be a chance that, whatever Max had done, Greg’s killer would believe he’d been punished enough. ‘I think we’ll be safe enough.’
‘That’s settled, then. We’ll run down the road. I’ll go and tell him.’
She didn’t, Ashleigh noticed, go up the stairs to his office, but paused to call him from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Max! Ashleigh and I are going down to Windermere for a walk. I’ll keep calling you, and she’ll look after me.’
A grunt from above acknowledged her, and she turned back. ‘The security people are here for Sophie, of course, not me.’ She picked up her bag. ‘And quite right.’
‘Is Sophie okay?’
She dipped her head. ‘No. She pretends she is. I’ve tried to talk to her, but she won’t let me. She cried in her room by herself and when I went to comfort her she pretended to be asleep.’ She shook her head, as if frustrated by her own impotence, and a tear rolled down her cheek. ‘She and Greg never really got on, but she’ll miss him. We all will.’ Grief was too much for her: she fought against it. ‘What was I saying before then?’
‘You were talking about your husband.’
‘Yes. Yes, I was.’ Dawn paused, sniffed. ‘Oh, I love your perfume. Chanel?’
You could try too hard, be too normal. Poor Dawn. ‘Is it a bit too much for a police officer? My mum gave it to me for my birthday.’
‘It’s gorgeous. I’m a Nina Ricci fan myself.’ Dawn opened the front door and a surge of summer air blew in. ‘I’ll be honest. Honesty helps, doesn’t it? You want to ask me questions. Well, if it helps you find out who killed Greg, you can ask me anything. I’ll tell you, even if it hurts.’
A flashback, unwelcome, triggered memories of bad times. ‘I hope you think I’ll be sensitive.’
‘I know you will. Max doesn’t dislike the police, as I was saying. But he’s had no reason to trust them in the past. It isn’t personal.’
A bird flew up from the rhododendron bushes that bounded the property. It was half a mile into Windermere, an easy walk in the heat. At the gate, the security man sat on the wall, as if he was trying to look inconspicuous but failing completely. Dawn smiled at him. ‘It’s okay, Laurie. Max knows we’re going out.’
‘Are you lonely?’ Ashleigh asked her as they stepped side by side along the narrow pavement. ‘Max must be away a lot.’
Dawn considered. ‘Lonely? I don’t know if I’d say that. Yes, he is away, but I have the children. My mother and my sister are in Liverpool, so when we’re down in Formby I see them. We come here in the holidays and there’s always something to do.’
‘Max was working on Sunday, wasn’t he?’
‘After a fashion. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but he does go out regularly by himself. He drives somewhere for a walk, or just to sit and look at the scenery, for hours on end. He says it inspires him, and that’s where he does his most effective planning. It’s one of the reasons he bought the house up here.’
‘I’ve only been here for a few days myself, but I can see why he might be inspired. Do the children like it?’
‘Greg loved it. Sophie doesn’t like it so much, now. She’s only ten, but she seems already so grown up. Always listening to her music and messaging her friends. They grow up so quickly.’
‘Too quickly, I sometimes think.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘No.’ Ashleigh took a few steps before she answered, thinking of Scott and the hopes and plans that had crashed and burned in the flames of her fury and his philandering. Any children of Scott’s would be good looking, heartbreakers like their father. ‘It would be nice, one day, maybe.’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘No. I have a husband, but that’s a temporary state of affairs. I’ll be free and single before you know it.’
‘That’s a terrible shame.’
‘Oh.’ Ashleigh laughed, aware she was committing the same folly as Dawn by pretending there was nothing wrong and that life could be kept on track with nothing more than laughter and denial. ‘No, it isn’t a shame at all. Let’s go and get a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you all about it. I don’t mind.’ Because Scott was gone and irrelevant, and if talking about him encouraged Dawn to talk about Max, then it was worth it.
They’d dropped down into the village now and stopped in a cafe that looked along the main street. When they’d ordered coffee and two slabs of particularly moist looking chocolate cake, they settled themselves in the window for a comfortable chat.
‘It isn’t that I didn’t like being married.’ Ashleigh tweaked at the ribbon in her hair, irritated. After too many failed attempts, she’d made the break and Scott was history. Why did she have to keep reminding herself of that? ‘I did. But you can be married to the wrong person.’
‘I’m sure that’s right. But the trouble is, you don’t know when you marry them.’
‘No. I’d known Scott – my husband – for ever. Then I married him. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that he really wasn’t capable of fidelity.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I just guessed. He was a sailor. Girl in every port. Literally, I think. But he forgot that he was married to a police officer, or maybe he just didn’t think about it. He left clues. I found out. It was inevitable. We might have saved the relationship if he’d been sorry about it, but I know him well enough to know he’ll never change.’
‘Sometimes they do, though.’
‘Yes, for worse.’
‘Oh, Ashleigh. They change for the better as well.’
‘You think so?’
‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. I wonder whether I might have stayed with my first husband if I’d believed he would change. But sometimes you can’t take the risk.’ She plunged her fork into the cake, spilling fat, squishy crumbs over the table.
‘I don’t judge people. We all make mistakes. Too often, we pretend they never happened. And it wasn’t just him. It never is. It takes two to tango.’ Ashleigh stopped, unwilling to confess too much. It was just as well Jude wasn’t there. She could imagine the raised eyebrow, the slight tilt of the head that warned her to keep a close hold on her professionalism.
Dawn’s phone bleeped. Glancing quickly down at it, she hid the screen with her hand. ‘That’s Sophie. She wants me to get her some chocolate.’
‘Chocolate always helps.’ An unfailing truth. God knew, she’d consumed enough of it at the time. Reminded, Ashleigh pushed her plate away, the cake half eaten. No matter how much she wanted either, she didn’t need chocolate and she didn’t need Scott. That was maturity.
‘I know she sounds heartless, but she’s only ten. She’ll talk to me when she’s ready. I don’t normally encourage her to have too many sweeties, but if she wants chocolate, she can have it. She can have anything.’ Dawn laid the phone back down on the table, picked up her coffee and sipped it. ‘I suppose you know that Max is my second husband.’
&nbs
p; ‘I’m afraid I do.’ Ashleigh pushed the unwanted cake around her plate. ‘You must hate the way we dig about in your life. I bet it feels really intrusive.’
‘Of course it doesn’t. How do you catch criminals if you don’t find out everything about the people around them? And anyway, I’ve nothing to hide. My first husband was a friend of Max’s. I met Max through him. But I left him.’
‘Because you fell in love with Max?’
‘No. I left him because he was violent towards me.’ Dawn fidgeted. ‘Though it wasn’t really his fault.’
Ashleigh, through cowardice, let this diminution of Randolph Flett’s sins go. ‘You did the right thing.’ Scott’s lack of emotional intelligence had been bad enough, but it had been thoughtless not deliberate and he’d never turned to violence. ‘Too many women don’t leave abusive partners. Men, too.’
‘I don’t understand why they stay. I left Randolph as soon as he raised a hand to me.’
‘If they have children. They fear for the children. All sorts of things.’
‘They should be stronger. You have to look after yourself. When I left I had nothing, but I kept my self-respect. And Max was there to help me.’
Ashleigh pulled herself together. She wasn’t there to have a chat with a friend. This was business. ‘You knew him before?’
‘Yes. He was a friend of Randolph’s, until they fell out.’ She smiled. ‘At the time I thought Max was only helping me to get back at Randolph, but we fell in love. I adore him, though I never had the same kind of emotional connection with him that I had with Randolph. Maybe because he was my first love. My mother always said we’re the classic example of an unworkable relationship. We couldn’t live together and we couldn’t live apart. She was right. In the end I was happier with Max. And we have the children.’ Another tear rose in her eye.
Ashleigh was quick off the mark with a hanky. ‘I don’t know what to say. I can’t understand how you feel. How can I? Poor, poor you.’
‘It’s easier now I know what’s happened to him. It was the waiting that killed me. But now I know there’s a way forward. He can’t have suffered much. And I have to be strong for Max. He’ll never tell anyone how much it hurts, but I know. And for Sophie.’
‘And for yourself.’
‘Yes.’
Stirring her coffee with one hand, Ashleigh picked at the scarlet ribbon in her hair with the other. ‘Was your first husband very upset when you left?’
‘I don’t think so. Not at the time.’ Randolph had been too obsessed with his own health to notice. ‘You mustn’t think it was Randolph who killed Greg, Ashleigh.’
‘I don’t think anything. I was interested.’
‘That’s Sophie again.’ As before, Dawn had covered the phone with her hand when it bleeped. ‘Why don’t you let me read the cards for you?’
‘Maybe some other time.’
‘I brought them with me. Look.’ She fished in her bag – a new pack, but one that was already scuffed at the edges.
‘It’s probably not smart to draw them in full view of everybody in the cafe and in the street.’ Ashleigh, with a self-conscious touch of her hand to her hair, deftly disengaged herself from a potentially awkward situation. ‘Police are supposed to be cold and calculating. We aren’t supposed to have any truck with anything that can’t be proven.’
‘That’s nonsense. A third dimension exists. I’m sure you can tell. You’re so intuitive.’
‘Well, maybe. But knowing my luck DCI Satterthwaite would appear in the cafe as we did it, and that really wouldn’t be a good look for a detective.’
With a touch of reluctance, Dawn returned the pack to her bag, then picked up her phone again and took a quick and fruitless look at it. ‘He’s quite good looking, isn’t he? Your boss.’
Ashleigh suppressed a smile. Good looking? Possibly. ‘If you like that type.’
‘I think it’s those eyes. But he doesn’t smile much. Perhaps he’d be more attractive if he smiled.’
‘There’s not a lot to smile about in our line of work.’ Ashleigh glanced at her watch. ‘Should we go back?’
‘I need to get Sophie’s chocolate. But, oh, you know, I wish I didn’t have to go back. I wish I could go somewhere quiet, where there’s nobody.’
‘I don’t think that would be wise at this stage.’ Windermere was one thing: a lonely moor or lakeside would be quite another. ‘Maybe we could do that later. Or take one of your security guards with us. You must have a favourite place.’
‘Oh, I do! Do you? Where would you like to go?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve only been here a few days.’ Ashleigh laughed. ‘Everywhere’s new and wonderful to me.’
‘When this is all over and everything’s put right, I’ll take you to my favourite place. It’s just up in the woods beside Brothers Water. You know it? It’s on the Ullswater road. You can park at the far end of the lake and there’s a path goes up the hill, but there’s another one at the end of the car park. It’s overgrown and you can follow it around a nick in the rock and through the trees. It brings you out on a tiny cliff above the lake. You’re so close to everybody else, and they would never know you were there.’
Nothing would ever be right for Dawn again. Deep down, she must know it, but the pretence persisted. ‘Maybe.’
‘Anyway,’ Dawn said, checking her phone for one last time, ‘let’s go and get this chocolate.’
17
It was Chris who made the breakthrough.
Jude was standing at the whiteboard, staring at the grim collage of photos and question marks that they’d assembled, the web of lines connecting people, times and places, the marks on the map that spun the sorry tale of Greg Sumner’s murder. Hands in pockets, he frowned at it, trying to make some sense of it. Even being clear in his mind about what the motive must be – surely to punish Max Sumner for some legal but brutal misdemeanour in business – didn’t bring things any further forward. He put his finger on the map, ran it over the lines of the place he knew so well. The key was knowing how Greg had got to the place where he’d been found. Once that had been established – and none of the house-to-house inquiries, or the appeal for help, had raised any answers to that – then there might be a way forward.
He stepped back again, turned round to scan the rest of the incident room in a search for inspiration, and in that moment Chris Marshall spun his chair around, punched a clenched fist into thin air and shouted. ‘Yes!’
Jude was beside him in a moment. ‘What?’
‘Here.’ Chris sat back with a broad grin, a desk bound hunter who’d tracked down his quarry. ‘God know how long I’ve spent looking at those traffic camera images. It’s worth it. It’s them.’ He tilted the screen round. ‘See?’
It didn’t look much – just a grainy black and white photo, heavily magnified, but as Jude leaned forwards and flicked the mouse to move around the image, it became clear that Chris had, indeed, struck the jackpot. In the driver’s seat of a camper van, he could make out a blonde woman with her hair scraped back into a ponytail. Beside her in the passenger seat sat a man with a Manchester United football top. ‘Well done. That must be them. Where was this taken?’
‘On the M6. The camera picked them up at six fifteen on Sunday, just beyond Tebay. They must have stopped somewhere. I’d been expecting them to get down through there much earlier on. That’s why it took me so long to find them.’
But his persistence had paid off. ‘I need the details. Run the number plate through the computer. And let me know as soon as you find anything.’
Chris was already reaching for his keyboard. ‘I’ve a good feeling about this.’
‘Let’s hope it takes us somewhere.’
It took ten minutes for Chris to establish that the camper van belonged to a hire company in Manchester, another ten to determine that it had been hired for the day the previous weekend by a young couple named Harriet Martin and Karl Boyes, and a further thirty minutes for the Greater Manchester Police to
call back having identified and located the pair.
‘They work in a supermarket in Manchester.’ Chris was beside himself with excitement. ‘The guys have hauled them in. You’ll need to get down there and talk to them.’
‘Okay.’ Jude was already reaching for his jacket. ‘Come on, Doddsy. Let’s get down there. We have a lead.’
*
Harriet Martin met the two police officers with an air of bewildered innocence, though there was something about her that suggested to Jude that this turn of events wasn’t entirely unexpected. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t understand what this is about.’
Hands in his pockets, and with Doddsy doing his best to look menacing behind him, Jude prowled the room. He could have done with Ashleigh there right then, or at least with knowing the secret of her success in getting people to confide, but he had neither of those things, and all he could rely on was his own innate skills at questioning, and the blunt instrument that was the truth. ‘Then let me enlighten you. DI Dodd and I are here to question you about the murder of a twelve year old child.’
‘Murder!’ She sat bolt upright, genuinely shocked. ‘I don’t know anything about murder!’
‘Surely you’ve seen the news this week?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve seen that there have been fires in the Lakes? That someone died in one of those fires?’
‘Yes. I saw that. But murder?’ Sitting at the table with the recorder whirring relentlessly on the table in front of her, she ran thin fingers through dyed blonde hair.
‘Am I right in thinking that you were up in the Lakes last weekend?’
‘Yes.’ She folded her lips into a mutinous line.
‘Good. So perhaps you’d like to talk me through exactly what you were doing on Sunday, beginning from when you hired a camper van in Manchester on Sunday morning?’
