Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘Yes, but you’re a traditionalist.’

  In a whirlwind of black boots and faded denim, Mikey clattered down the path and into the back of the car. ‘Yo.’ Avoiding eye contact, he clamped huge headphones over his ears and subsided into his seat.

  ‘Yes, there’s that.’ His mother carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘But the Wordsworth-Dorothy relationship is an intriguing one, and Dorothy is always overlooked. Cody Wilder is the world’s leading expert on her, and everything I’ve read indicates that she has something new to say about it.’

  The publicity material had trailed Cody Wilder’s conclusions as sensational, but Jude reserved judgement. ‘It’s a day out.’

  ‘I’m so glad I’m retired. It gives me the chance to follow these things more closely. We were lucky to get tickets. And it’s astonishing she chose to reveal it here. She could have gone to any conference on the Romantic poets.’

  Cody Wilder, Jude knew from elsewhere, had fallen out spectacularly with every academic institution she’d worked for, so her choice of location didn’t surprise him. A paper delivered to an audience of hostile scholars on some campus university wouldn’t have the news impact of a public event in a picturesque Lake District village. ‘I’m sure she’ll go down a storm, but I’m afraid her wisdom will be wasted on me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk nonsense.’ Linda tutted at him as he were a child rather than a man of thirty-five. ‘Anyway, tell me your news.’

  ‘What makes you think I have any?’

  ‘About the new girlfriend. Who is she?’

  Amused, when another time he would have found that annoying, Jude couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Who told you?’ It had been bound to get out despite the efforts he’d made to keep Ashleigh out of the clutches of the bush telegraph, though he didn’t know why he was so keen on secrecy. To spare Becca, perhaps, though she wasn’t showing any sign she cared.

  ‘Nobody. But either there’s a new woman in your life or you’ve taken to wearing Chanel, and I don’t think it’s that.’

  The smile broadened into a grin. ‘You’re in the wrong job. I could use a detective like you.’

  ‘So I’m right, then? Is it serious?’

  ‘Do you really think I can answer that?’

  ‘It’s too early to say, then? Have you told Mikey?’

  ‘Not yet. Let me find the right moment.’ Looking in the driver’s mirror he caught Mikey, oblivious, staring in fierce concentration at his phone. Too much at ease with the world to allow either the perennial problem of his brother or the implications of a new romance to trouble him, Jude tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he turned the car up towards Ullswater.

  *

  Jude was a man who valued solitude and in his spare time he preferred to seek it, leaving the charms of Grasmere for the most part to the tourists. He stopped the Mercedes in the car park on the edge of the village, locked it and took a look around while Mikey, still protected from conversation by his headphones, distanced himself further with a few steps away. Today Grasmere was busier than he’d expected on a morning in January, so maybe Cody Wilder had more pulling power than he’d thought. As he and his mother walked briskly past the cafes and outdoor shops with Mikey trailing in their wake, doubt assailed him. ‘Do you two mind running on down to the venue and grabbing us some seats? There’s something I want to check up on.’

  His mother turned reproachful eyes on him, as if she’d known he had an ulterior motive. ‘Jude. This is your day off.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll join you. But there’s someone I wanted to catch up with.’

  He slowed to let them get ahead. Cody Wilder was trouble, a problem of her own making, and while her academic credentials were flawless and her research, as far as he understood it, regarded as outstanding in her field, her views on current affairs were a different matter. There wasn’t a matter of interest that she didn’t have an opinion on, regardless of how well qualified she might be to speak on it, and she never passed up an opportunity to share her thoughts. Inevitably, that created a spiral in which commentators were less interested in the trials of Dorothy Wordsworth two and a half centuries before than they were in what Cody thought of gun violence, feminism, immigration or whatever else was the trending topic in the media. Presumably, Jude thought with a sigh, she justified it on the grounds that at least it made her enough of a name to generate some exposure for her work. He hoped she knew what she was doing, because he could tell a deal with the devil when he saw one, and the results of it were all around him.

  Just beyond the bridge, the square mediaeval tower of St Oswald’s church sat in judgement on the village. His brow crinkled a little as he approached a group of protestors, standing in the churchyard and waving banners calling on Cody Wilder to go back to America. They looked peaceful enough, a fusion of umbrellas and sensible rainwear jostling under the yew trees and trampling the emerging crocuses. One of them was engaged in what looked like good-natured conversation with one of the cohort of uniformed police officers he’d sent down to Grasmere in order to make sure there was no trouble.

  There were more protestors than he’d expected though the small but obvious police presence ought to be enough to dampen any thoughts of law-breaking, and hopefully Cody Wilder would remember her priorities and resist the urge to engage with her opposition. Passing them on the other side of the road, he scanned the interested onlookers and was rewarded when a tall, fair young man in jeans and a good-quality walker’s raincoat detached himself from the group of them and came across. ‘Okay, Jude? It’s looking a bit busier than we thought.’

  Pausing to rest his hands on the bridge and pretend to inspect the ducks squabbling on the water beneath, Jude relaxed. Chris Marshall, the detective he’d dispatched to keep an unobtrusive eye out for any activity that might be taking place out of sight of their uniformed colleagues, was capable of taking on far more responsibility than his rank of constable demanded of him. Nothing sinister would get past him. Even so, despite the four policeman who represented the compromise between what was available to him and what he’d have liked to deploy, he was glad he’d turned up. ‘So I see.’ He flicked a look across the road. ‘Who are that lot?’

  ‘They’re pro-choice.’ Cody’s views on abortion were open to interpretation, but so colourfully expressed that both sides of the debate viewed her as their implacable enemy, something which she probably considered a good result. ‘The gun lobby are at the back of the garden centre. The First Nation rights people are out in force at the Wordsworth Hotel.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘No. That was a joke. The only protests are these guys and a couple of local nutters who’ve hung a banner out of their windows accusing her of being a murderer. I don’t know what that’s all about.’

  No matter how serious the situation, Chris’s flippancy held firm. Amused at the limited extent of civil disorder in village Westmorland, Jude stuck his hands in his pockets. For a moment, Cody’s reputation as a troublemaker had concerned him. ‘Did you brief Dr Wilder on what we’re doing?’

  Chris rolled his eyes. ‘As much as that’s possible.’

  ‘So far I’ve managed to avoid her.’

  ‘Lucky you. You wouldn’t get on. She’s the type that knows it all already.’

  In fairness, Cody Wilder had far more experience with this sort of protest than any of the police present. ‘Do you reckon we can trust her not to court controversy until she’s safely off our patch?’

  ‘Who knows? I like to think so.’

  According to Jude’s mother, Cody had been researching the lives of the Wordsworths for years so she surely wasn’t going to risk compromising her serious academic career for the sake of a few cheap headlines, but the one thing Jude knew for certain about her was that she was anything but predictable. ‘What do you reckon? Surely there isn’t going to be trouble?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s sensible enough – or maybe media-savvy enough – to have brought in some security to check everyone�
�s bags, so there won’t be any problems at the talk itself. Not that I think there would have been, looking at this lot. They’re harmless. But there’s a bit of me thinks it suits her to hype up the threat.’

  Jude nodded. He’d reviewed the matter carefully before he’d delegated it to Chris and he couldn’t see any harm coming to Cody Wilder in genteel Grasmere. Most of the abuse she received came from behind the anonymity of a computer keyboard and fake social media profiles, but she was such an anti-hero that he didn’t dare take the risk. ‘Are you going along to the talk?’

  ‘Literature isn’t my thing. I’ll be floating about in the lobby and making sure no one puts poison in the post-lecture coffee.’

  Chris’s enthusiasm was infectious. Jude allowed himself a smile, even as he was irritated at himself for having to check up when he was supposed to be taking time off to make up for countless extra hours worked. ‘It looks like you’ve got everything under control. I’d better get down to the venue, before I get in trouble with the boss.’

  ‘The boss?’ Chris’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Old man Groves hasn’t found his way down here, has he?’

  ‘Not that boss. My mother. I’m supposed to be keeping her company on a day out.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I’ll walk down there with you. I’d hate to miss anything.’ Chris’s smile was ironic this time.

  They strolled past the protestors outside the church and down beyond the garden centre. Cody had chosen to launch her research in the function suite of a hotel overlooking the lake, ten minutes’ walk from the village centre, and they joined the steady stream of ticket holders heading towards it. Local accents mixed with London ones, suits and silk scarves mingled with woolly hats and wellies. A TV crew had set up in the car park on Red Bank Road, filming all who went past.

  ‘There is one thing that struck me as unusual.’ Chris lowered his voice as they passed the banner he’d mentioned, strung up from the front of a slate cottage, the last few letters crammed together and the red paint on its lettering bleeding from an overnight shower. Cody Wilder murderer. ‘There’s a bunch of hippies down by the lake.’

  In the field that sloped down to the water to their left, a sad collection of damp tents clustered around a smother of smoke from a campfire. ‘Oh, yes. They’ve been there a while. There’s nothing sinister about them.’

  ‘Nothing? They seem completely batty to me.’

  ‘I come across them from time to time. They’ve always been attracted to this place.’

  ‘That’s all we need – a bunch of Flat Earthers cluttering up the scene.’ Modern-minded, child of a technological age, Chris betrayed his intolerance of older, slower ways.

  ‘They’re harmless. I’ll be astonished if they’ve even heard of Cody Wilder, let alone care about her. They reject the modern world, they reject science. They’re all about living at one with nature. It’s not a particularly connected philosophy as far as I can tell, but I wouldn’t worry about them.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, but I wondered about one of them. He was skulking behind the tents and staring up towards the venue, that’s all.’

  Confident in his own judgement of the hippy commune, Jude nevertheless followed Chris’s analytical gaze. The man he’d pointed out, tall and broad with dreadlocked hair, did, immediately, drop back out of sight. ‘Publicity-shy, maybe.’

  Chris was right to note anything unusual, so Jude gave the man an extra look as he disappeared and then strolled towards another man who was standing watching the goings-on from a safe distance behind a wall thick with moss. ‘Busy here today, isn’t it?’

  With the utmost show of reluctance, the man came forward. ‘Hopefully they’ll all be gone by tomorrow.’ Probably in his late sixties, he spoke with a cultured accent, stamped with London disillusion.

  Jude leaned on the wall, knowing exactly why these people nursed so much suspicion of the outside world. He had more time to spare for them than was strictly appropriate, finding himself in sympathy with their rejection of the complexities of the twenty-first century. In his experience the man in front of him and his wife, who he knew of old, were among the simplest and best-hearted people around, and it jarred that whenever he came across them it was in the context of someone reporting them for crimes they’d never dream of committing. ‘Let’s hope so.’ He straightened up and brushed a greasy smear of liquid moss from his Gore-Tex sleeve.

  ‘Is there someone important in town, up beyond?’ Responding to Jude’s smile, the man gestured up the road towards the hotel.

  ‘You could say that.’ Certainly, Cody was important in her own opinion. ‘We’d better get on. See you round, Storm.’

  ‘Storm?’ queried Chris, as the two detectives set off to the hotel where the last of the audience were heading indoors.

  ‘Not his real name, obviously. I have no idea what that is. His wife, if she is his wife, is called Raven.’ But his real name would be in the records along with his wife’s, filed away with his fingerprints and a sample of his DNA as part of a report into some petty theft that turned out to be someone else’s carelessness. ‘Okay. It looks like we’re already running late. Let’s get on in and see the show.’

  2

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Grasmere. My name is Sebastian Mulholland and it’s my job today to introduce you to our speaker. Of course, it isn’t me you’re here to listen to, so I’ll keep the introduction brief. But I would like to say a few words before the main event.’

  Remembering her manners, that it was acceptable to seem forthright but alienating to appear ungracious, Cody Wilder crossed her ankles demurely and smiled at Seb as he turned and nodded in her direction. He was a bore with a much greater opinion of himself than he deserved, but she hadn’t forgotten that she owed him. Without his help she’d still have got where she was going, but it would have taken her a little longer. If all it cost her to repay him was a share in the glory, she was happy to concede it.

  ‘I first met Cody five years ago when she walked into my second-hand bookshop in St Andrews in search of Dorothy Wordsworth’s lost journals. Naturally, I rose to the challenge. I’ve been in the antiquarian trade for many years. My interest was sparked when, as a student, I took a temporary job for a house clearance company…’

  God, how tedious. He was going to talk about himself. She nodded sagely, like a mother listening to the headmaster’s speech at a school prize-giving, and confined her fidgeting to a twist of the finger through her elevated blonde ponytail as she mentally ran through her presentation for the umpteenth time. As she listened to Seb coming perilously close to stealing her thunder in his description of the moment when she’d found the lost journals in a box in the back room of his shop, a thrill went through her. Life had its high and lows. There was love and there was sex and there was victory, there was rejection and there was disappointment, but nothing in life had ever offered her a buzz as wild as that she’d experienced in the moment when she’d set eyes on the missing portion of poor, repressed, underrated Dorothy Wordsworth’s life story.

  She glanced down at her notes. Dorothy Wordsworth is perceived as the sister of a great man, she’d written. Were they alive today, we would be calling him the brother of a great woman. Brandon would laugh out loud if he were to hear that. Even in full view of two hundred strangers she couldn’t stop a smile at the thought of him, but the smile was almost immediately displaced by a frown. He’d promised he’d be there to hear the talk, but she’d heard nothing more from him than his usual vague promise to do his best. Cody’s life had always been a lonely one and her brother was the one person left whose approval she craved.

  Then there was Owen. Her frown intensified. His hissy fit of the night before hadn’t passed and he hadn’t appeared at breakfast. She wasn’t surprised. The boy was the worst kind of wuss and would be cowering in his room in a funk of shame and embarrassment, but his outburst had been uncharacteristic enough to give her cause for concern. Not for herself – verbally she could eviscerate him, and
physically she was more than capable of taking care of herself – but she wouldn’t put it past him to stage some sort of stunt to undermine her. Failing to turn up for work and leaving her to do his job, including the chore of meeting and greeting, might not be enough to satisfy his pride.

  Let him try. If he did, she’d turn it to her advantage. She scanned the room again to see if he was hiding somewhere in the back row, but he wasn’t, and when she looked over the crowd again, she found herself being stared at most obviously by a young brunette in the front row. Journalist, said Cody to herself, her media antennae twitching, but she wasn’t quite sure why that troubled her. She knew of half a dozen journalists in the room and had researched them all so that she could press the right buttons in talking to them and trigger the responses she sought, but she didn’t know this woman, who wore no press pass round her neck. That put her on the back foot, as things she couldn’t control always did.

  ‘But enough about me. You all know Cody by reputation – a fearless defender of the right to freedom of speech, a woman who rose to academic heights from a background where learning was a luxury thought to be unaffordable.’ Seb turned to her with one of his more patronising smiles. ‘Her rise has been meteoric. She took on the academic establishment and rose above it, a household name before she has even reached her forties.’ He nodded towards her, as if that was meant to be a compliment. ‘She taught us that the fearless and unyielding mind can work – and thrive – independently of academia and need not be trammelled by years of routine and irrelevant research.’ At that, the smile turned to a smirk. At least some of the audience would know her university tenure had ended in a row over her political views. ‘Her critique of the Lucy poems is regarded even by those who dislike her as the definitive evaluation of that particular work that we attribute to Wordsworth, and many find her assertion that Dorothy was their author to be wholly convincing. The poet’s own words will do as a tribute to Dr Wilder: what we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.’