by Jo Allen
Seb, floundering in the dictionary of quotations for a vaguely applicable sentence, had missed the point. People like him always did. Cody picked up her pen and made a savage note on the margin of her speech, a reminder to herself not to let that go. This is about Dorothy, not William!
Pausing for a sip of water, Seb shuffled his notes, put them down again, tweaked his scarlet silk tie. A door at the back of the room creaked open. It must be Owen, creeping in late. ‘And so, to launch her book Strange Fits of Passion: The Creation of Dorothy Wordsworth, in the village beloved by both Wordsworth and his sister, let me introduce you to perhaps the most gifted scholar of literature ever to emerge from Wyoming, the Equality State – Dr Cody Constance Wilder.’
As the audience applauded, Cody stood up and crossed to the lectern, making sure she gave Seb a gracious smile. Glancing round the room she saw that it wasn’t Owen lurking behind the door, but some latecomer who was taking the opportunity to home in on an empty seat – inevitably in the middle of the room.
Nothing irritated her like lateness, a sin which implied a lack of respect, and in her big moment, lack of respect was intolerable. Cutting the applause short, she forced the criminal, a tall, serious-looking man in his mid-thirties, clad in well-cut chinos and a designer jacket, to complete his walk through the ensuing silence and the disapproving gaze of those around him.
‘Is everybody comfortable?’ She glared in his direction, but he’d slid into his seat and was whispering something into the ear of the older woman in the red jacket who was sitting next to him. Hopefully it was an apology, but any apology was due to Cody herself. If he hung around long enough afterwards, she’d track him down and make it quite clear what she thought of his behaviour. ‘Good. I’m sorry. We must have started early.’ But he didn’t even look at her, staring thoughtfully at Seb Mulholland instead. ‘However, we’re all here and it’s my pleasure – my absolute pleasure – to introduce my latest book and share with you what I discovered among Dorothy Wordsworth’s papers.’
*
‘The journals themselves, then, were a disappointment. Other than completing the canon of Dorothy’s work as far as we know it, they served only to reinforce how anodyne her written work was. True, they carried subtle phrasing that later reappears in William’s poems, but that was all. They yielded nothing more than an extension, rather than a deepening, of how we understand Dorothy and her relationship with her brother.’
Cody Wilder was a performer. Though he knew little about Wordsworth beyond what he’d absorbed from his mother’s enthusiasm, Jude was impressed by her delivery and her energy when the most exciting revelation so far was that her much-vaunted discovery had been all but worthless. But it was obvious there was a lot more to it than that. Seb Mulholland, nodding as Cody talked, clearly knew there was a big reveal coming and was visibly struggling to rein in his glee.
In his pocket, Jude’s phone buzzed. He’d had the foresight to put it on silent, and with his mother next to him and Cody having already directed considerable and obvious disappointment towards him he hesitated to get it out and check the message. It would be work. No one who knew him ever tried to call him on a personal matter when he ought to be working. They knew he wouldn’t answer.
But of course. He wasn’t working. Sometimes he forgot that. Nevertheless, he opted not to look at the phone but swivelled in his seat to see if the creaking of the door at the back of the room was someone even later than he had been, or something else. His instinct proved correct. Chris, an anxious expression on his face, hovered just inside the door, scanning the room.
On stage, Cody Wilder stopped mid-sentence and cleared her throat.
The anxiety on Chris’s face gave way to relief as he caught Jude’s eye, jerking an almost commanding gesture towards his superior before ducking back out of the room. Without thought, Jude pushed his chair back, turning to his mother. ‘I’ll see you outside afterwards. Got to go.’
A few feet away from him Mikey cringed into his seat. In turning, Jude caught the expression of fury on Cody Wilder’s face. If he hadn’t known already, that look would have shown him how little it took to make an enemy of her, but even without knowing what had disturbed Chris so much that he felt he had to seek help from a senior colleague, he sensed it must be to do with Cody herself.
Someone else could explain it to her later. He wasn’t going to make time to deal with a woman as irascible as she so clearly was. He stood up.
‘Excuse me.’
Jude kept walking.
‘Excuse me,’ Cody snapped at him again. ‘You. The man leaving. Is there a problem? Am I boring you? Do you feel I’m not giving value for money? Or can’t you handle the suggestion that a woman who was belittled because of her gender in another age should be restored and properly credited in the current one?’
He could quite see why so many people fell so swiftly and so completely onto the wrong side of Cody Wilder. Resisting the temptation to engage, he walked on.
‘I’m asking you a question.’
He did stop, then, drawn into the debate against his better judgement but still retaining enough autonomy not to turn fully, but throwing the remark over his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. I had a message. I need to go.’
‘In future, if you think you may have to leave an event, may I respectfully suggest you don’t attend at all and let someone else make use of your ticket? Unless, of course, what you have to do is vitally important.’
This time he did turn around. She’d stepped away from the lectern and was standing at the front of the stage, hands on hips – a slender figure dressed in grey as if to keep attention on her words not her person, and yet displaying a commanding presence. ‘I’m a police officer on call.’ He could stand on his dignity, too, sound as pompous and entitled as any academic. Out of the corner of his eye as he turned away, he saw his mother lower her head in embarrassment alongside Mikey’s.
Striding swiftly through the ripple of excitement and disapproval his exit had engendered, he made the safety of the breakout area and found Chris out there, speaking into his phone. ‘Okay, what’s up?’
Chris ended the call and shoved the phone back in his pocket. ‘Let’s get out of earshot, shall we? It’s bad, but at least I don’t think we need to be concerned about the doctor’s personal safety.’
That was one less thing to worry about. Jude followed Chris into a quiet corner. ‘So what is it?’
‘Her researcher. Name of Owen Armitstead.’ Chris looked at his phone and swiped a message off the screen, unacknowledged. ‘He’s dead. Looks like suicide.’
Think murder, Jude’s instinct warned him. Evil sometimes reared up where you expected it, more often where you didn’t. ‘What happened and where?’
‘Dr Wilder has rented a cottage up at the top of Coffin Lane. She and her researcher have been staying there. The landlord came by to check on something and saw him through the kitchen window. Hanged himself, or so it seems.’
‘Okay.’ Jude took quick stock of the situation. ‘What have you done? Called the doctor, obviously?’
‘Yes, and I’m expecting him any minute. The landlord has some first-aid training – he’s ex-army – and cut him down and tried CPR. He says the body was still warm, but he couldn’t save him. I’ve got one of the uniformed guys from the village to make sure no one goes up to the cottage.’
‘The lane’s a dead end, is that right?’
‘Yes. I called the two guys up from the village to take charge of the scene and get a statement from Steve Hardy – the landlord. And I called in to the office and Doddsy’s coming down to take charge. He’s got all the information I have. It isn’t much.’
The arrival of Detective Inspector Chris Dodd, Jude’s colleague and close friend, would mean that Jude himself could leave the field and get back to mending fences with his mother and enjoying the rest of his so-called day off, but until then he’d stick around and provide Chris with any help he needed. He glanced through the window. A hundred yard
s away, he could just spot a policeman, arms folded, at the bottom of the lane. ‘You’ve done a good job.’
‘Thanks. I’ve called for additional support.’
‘Let’s get up there.’ They left the building and walked rapidly, side-by-side, up along Coffin Lane and past the uniformed PC who nodded them past as Chris rattled through the information. ‘I asked Doddsy to find us some more people, if he can. In case it isn’t suicide. In case it’s some kind of distraction tactic. Or even if it is suicide, we don’t want someone taking advantage of the uniformed boys being busy elsewhere.’
‘Smart move. We don’t need any opportunists causing us trouble.’ Fifteen years in the police, almost all of them as a detective, had taught Jude to be suspicious even though in most cases the explanation was the simple and obvious one. The sooner Cody Wilder left town the happier he’d be, but she’d have to give some background to the case so it looked as if she’d be his problem for a few days to come. ‘Do you know how long Doddsy will be?’
‘Five or ten minutes, I expect. I called the minute I heard about it, and then I had to get up and deal with the landlord and the body.’
‘So it happened when?’
‘Pretty much immediately after I’d left you. I went back out of the building to double check on your hippy pals over the road, and the guy came haring down the lane in a hell of a state, shouting at me to call a doctor and an ambulance.’
‘He didn’t call them himself?’
‘The signal’s flaky up there.’ Chris checked his phone as he spoke and shook his head. ‘I have it now. I didn’t a couple of minutes ago. That’s why I came to fetch you myself.’
Jude followed him into the garden of the single-storey, slate-roofed cottage and paused to look around. The cottage was up on the hill, nestled against a tangle of leafless woodland that sheltered it from the wind funnelling down off the fells. Across the valley the steep slopes of Nab Scar and Heron Pike towered above the road and the village nestled on the lake shore. In the garden a couple of gnarled yew trees, studded with scarlet berries and surely older than the cottage itself, brought a peculiarly festive feel to January, and the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves presaged the spring. ‘What do we know about the researcher?’
‘Nothing. I can give you chapter and verse on almost every enemy Cody Wilder’s ever made, but I’d never even heard this boy’s name. The landlord only knew it because the man was the doc’s secretary as well as her research assistant. He was my age, maybe. Younger.’
A shadow passed over Chris’s face. You could see many dead bodies and develop a coping mechanism to deal with them all, but it took a tougher man than him not to betray some kind of fellow feeling at the passing of another human being.
‘We’ll need to ask her.’
Chris turned towards the house. ‘Do you want to see the body?’
‘No need.’ Jude shook his head. There would be photos, and if it was a routine suicide then Doddsy would deal with it. If it wasn’t, it would come up the ranks to him soon enough. ‘Where did it happen? The kitchen, you said?’
‘Yes. It’s one of those olde-worlde places, all stone floor and exposed beams. He’d jumped off the table.’
Keeping as detached as he could, Jude reviewed the context. Was Cody impossible to work with, or had something totally separate driven Owen Armitstead to his death? Given the way he’d already managed to get on the wrong side of her without even an introduction, Jude was grateful she’d fall to Doddsy, whose implacable good nature and inherent belief in the goodness of most human beings continued to resist the evidence to the contrary he saw every working day.
A car drove up through the village and turned up Coffin Lane. Jude recognised it as Doddsy’s and relaxed. The case was in good hands and his task of supplying reassurance was over before it began. ‘Here’s your boss. I’ll step aside for him.’
‘Yeah, sorry. I know you’re not supposed to be on duty.’
‘It seems to me you have everything covered.’ Nevertheless, Jude lingered, in case there was something he could do. ‘I’ll maybe take a drift down through the village,’ he said, as Doddsy levered himself out of his car and stretched in the pale sunlight. ‘Just to check everything’s okay.’
‘You might want to check up on those hippies.’
Perhaps that was a joke, or maybe Chris really did buy into the idea that anyone who chose to reject the modern world’s values automatically rejected the morals and rules that went along with them. ‘I’ll have a word.’
‘Jude.’ Doddsy was looking particularly world-weary. ‘You don’t need to hang around here. You spend too much time on the job as it is.’
It was undeniable, and it had cost him but that was with Becca, in the past. Now he had Ashleigh who not only understood but was as guilty as he was of the same sin. ‘I was around.’ And ultimately if there was anything involving Cody Wilder it would fall under his remit. ‘Keep me informed, though.’
‘Where’s Dr Wilder?’ Doddsy, too, seemed reluctant to go to the scene and view the body.
‘Still giving her lecture. Someone will have to tell her about it.’
Always thoughtful, Doddsy ran a slow finger round his chin. ‘You don’t fancy doing that for me?’
Did he? Jude knew he hadn’t made a great impression so far, but if it helped, and if it soothed his conscience for sneaking away and leaving the field to someone else, then he was prepared to do that much. ‘I’m going back down there. I need to take my mum and Mikey back home. And as I was there before, it won’t look quite so obvious if I try and sneak a chat with Dr Wilder.’
‘Are the press around?’
‘Bound to be. She’s not the type to go anywhere without making sure someone knows about it. As far as I can tell, she’s a serious player and what she has to say is significant. Do you think we can avoid attracting too much attention?’
‘We can try. I’d appreciate it if you could break it to her gently. I’ll send Chris along in a bit to rescue you. It looks pretty straightforward to me, so we shouldn’t keep her out of the cottage for long.’
Glad to have the chance to disengage himself from the case before he could get too closely into it, Jude made his way back down to the hotel. The security staff had gone, the accusing banner still fluttered in a faint and forlorn breeze a hundred yards up the street, and when he stopped to listen there was nothing but the quacking of ducks on the lake and the rumble of a lorry along the A591. The protestors in the village had either gone quiet or given up and left.
If it wasn’t for this unexplained death, this apparent suicide, Jude would have considered the day a success, but his brief acquaintance with Cody Wilder made him wonder if there might be something sinister connecting her unrepentant aggression with the death of Owen Armitstead.
He’d find out. And in the meantime, it was time to go back down and take on the challenge of breaking the news to the woman herself.
*
The lecture was over by the time Jude got back into the venue, and Cody was mingling with the public in the foyer, a cup of coffee in her hand. Showing them the common touch, he thought, with the cynicism that clicked so well with Doddsy’s positivity; he had to admit she was good at it. When, as he assumed, she was talking about her work her passion showed through and he stopped to watch her for a moment, her eyes shining at every question, her free hand jabbing in front of her to illustrate a point, while he waited for the opportunity to approach.
Eventually his mother helped him out, taking her opportunity to glide into Cody’s orbit with Mikey at her elbow, keen to engage. Her voice floated through to him. ‘Dr Wilder. What an extraordinary story that was. To think that Dorothy and Mary committed their thoughts to each other that way, so honestly and openly. And how selfless of Dorothy to sacrifice—’
‘Sacrifice is of its age. These days I guess I’d like to see her do things differently. I’m sorry ma’am.’ Cody was politeness itself. ‘I don’t think I know your name.’
‘I’m Linda Satterthwaite. And this is my younger son, Mikey.’
‘Good to meet you, Linda. You’re a bit of a Wordsworth aficionado, then?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’m an English teacher. Was, I should say. I’m retired. But I’ve always had a fondness for his work, among all the Lakes poets. If it is his, of course. And Dorothy is such an enigmatic character. And so devoted.’
Taking his opportunity, and in direct defiance of Mikey’s scowl, Jude edged closer. So, from the other side of the conversation, did a young brunette, wearing her ponytail in a high 1950s style just as Cody did. Jude ignored her, nudged in beside his mother and deflected Cody’s brief scowl of recognition with a smile. ‘Dr Wilder.’
‘This is my other son, Jude. He very kindly brought us along today.’ If Linda saw a scowl, either from Mikey or Cody, she gave no sign.
‘Jude? The Beatles, then? Or Hardy?’
‘Hardy. I love his novels.’
‘For my money, he’s a Victorian lightweight, but I enjoy reading him for a little relaxation.’ Cody dismissed a giant of literature as if he were a gnat, and turned her searching expression on Jude. ‘You must be very busy. I hope you were able to resolve whatever pressing business made you late in and sharp out of my lecture.’
Aware of the press of people around them, particularly of the young woman so obviously desperate to snatch a few words with a celebrity, he leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘I’m afraid not. Could I have a quick word with you?’
‘On police business?’ Her sharp gaze was a window onto an even sharper mind.
‘Yes. I should have introduced myself properly. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Satterthwaite, Cumbria Police.’
Cody Wilder never missed a beat, keeping the smile for the benefit of any onlookers, but the cup trembled in the saucer she was holding. ‘Has something happened?’