Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Her voice was pitched high with excitement as she rehearsed the question that had raced through her brain for hours, even though he’d already answered it. She’d missed him so much. Even in New York she felt his absence and the faint hostility of tame, green Grasmere would surely be banished by his presence.

  ‘Oh, honey. I know. Sorry I missed your big show. I couldn’t help it. Feels like I’ve been travelling for days.’ Letting her go, he checked his watch. ‘Hell, I have been travelling for days. Didn’t you get my messages?’ He reached out and tweaked her ponytail, just as he used to do.

  She shook her head, ushering him in from the night fog, doing the calculations in her head. It was two days since the lecture she’d been so keen for him to attend and if he’d left in time to make it, he must have experienced horrendous delays. Chicago was notorious for its fog, rolling in off Lake Michigan and settling on the city for days. ‘You could have let me know.’

  ‘You know me.’ He gave her the extravagant shrug and the smile for which she’d forgive him anything.

  Brandon had never been a great communicator, a man who wrote letters only when he had to and never tried too hard to tackle modern technology. And why would he? Out in the middle of nowhere, twenty miles down a rough track, you had to be able to manage without. She didn’t comment. It meant more to her than to him, but at least he’d tried to get there. The thought counted. ‘Come in. Sit down. The fire’s lit. I’ll get you a bourbon. And something to eat. You must be starving.’

  ‘I don’t know what time my body clock thinks it is.’ He followed her into the living room and sat down by the fire.

  ‘It’s only ten o’clock, but your body clock must know it’s five o’clock somewhere, as they say over here. And I could do with a drink myself.’

  ‘Didn’t it go well?’

  Her lip curled. ‘The lecture went well enough. I got a very positive reception, a couple newspaper articles and some interest in the paper I’ve written on it. And sold a lot of books.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’

  ‘All hell broke loose after that.’

  ‘Oh?’ He sank down in the armchair, kicked off his boots and stretched his long legs out towards the fire.

  ‘Yes. That milksop son of a bitch I employed decided to hang himself while I was delivering my talk.’

  He yawned.

  Bristling a little, still stinging from his failure to be there when she delivered her lecture and finding his response less than she’d hoped it would be, she glared at him. ‘Don’t you think that’s serious?’

  ‘Sure. It sounds very serious. Is that the posh English boy you brought out to New York in the fall?’

  She nodded. She and Brandon had too much of a shared history, too much of a vested interest in one another’s lives and too close a knowledge of each other’s secrets for her to be angry with him for long. ‘On the night before he did it, he threatened me.’

  ‘Hey!’ He sat up at that. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. He threatened to kill me.’

  Brandon’s expression creased in remorse. He jumped up and folded her hands between his. ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes. I told you I thought I’d scared the hell out of him the last time. But he was serious. He’d gotten a rope from somewhere. A noose.’ The noose, surely, from which he’d dangled to his own death just hours later. ‘He threatened to tell everybody I was a fraud and a murderer.’

  ‘You must have been terrified.’

  She bristled. Terrified of Owen? ‘It takes more than him to scare me.’

  ‘Then I’m scared on your behalf.’ He sat down.

  ‘You needn’t be. Owen is dead.’

  ‘So he is.’

  Jetlag again, blunting his backwoodsman’s sharpness. Cody was overwhelmed with emotion. She could talk freely, and it didn’t matter if he was too tired to take it all in. ‘Thank God for it. I couldn’t stand the little weasel any longer.’

  ‘Did you tell the police about it?’

  ‘Of course not. If I do, they’ll think I have an interest in him being dead, and they’ll start asking what he was threatening to tell. And we don’t want that, do we?’ She turned her back on him and crossed to the sideboard, crashing ice in two glasses and splashing a hefty measure of bourbon over it. ‘It’s my letters. That’s what he was talking about.’

  She had his interest. Crossing to place the glass in his hand, she looked out through the open curtains towards the lights of the village. The fires from the hippy campsite were dying down in the field at the bottom of the road, their smoke diffusing into the thickening blanket of fog over the lake. ‘And are your letters safe?’

  ‘I was going to give them to Lynx to look after.’ She’d thought of going down to see Lynx later that evening, but Brandon’s unannounced arrival had changed all that. No matter. Lynx could wait.

  ‘Lynx?’ Brandon frowned into his drink. ‘Who the hell is Lynx?’

  ‘Cain Harper.’ She sat down opposite him on the sofa and watched him, his long fingers curled around the glass as he frowned in pursuit of a memory. ‘You did meet him, but you won’t remember. He was a student with me in Laramie, twenty years ago. He was always a bit of a hippy and he’s reappeared in the village in the full-blown incarnation. There are a few of them there.’

  ‘Oh, okay. When I’m a bit less tired I’ll remember, I guess. What a coincidence he’s here.’

  ‘Indeed.’ She was keen to get off the subject of Lynx, who’d taught her things it was better Brandon didn’t know. Her brother, just like Cody herself, was prone to jealousy, to preserving the previous relationship they had. They saw each other less these days, but that couldn’t weaken the bond between them. ‘I can’t say how good it is to see you. I get so many threats.’

  ‘You attract attention. Ain’t that what you want?’

  She bit her lip. ‘I’m not afraid for myself. But I’m worried about my letters.’ Owen had known how she felt about them. She cursed herself for allowing him to see that, for allowing herself to feel so strongly about them. Cody was a rational woman, for the most part, but when she quivered at the very thought of those letters, she doubted her own sanity.

  ‘Then keep them safe. Give them to me, and I’ll look after them.’ He swigged at the bourbon. ‘And keep yourself safe. Keep in with the police.’

  ‘The less I have to do with them the better.’ She hated authority, anyone who tried to impose restrictions on her through a code of right and wrong that had evolved, at best, twenty years behind the times.

  ‘No. Promise me you’ll do it for your own safety. For my sake.’ His voice softened. ‘Think how I’d feel if anything happened to you.’

  She leaned over and placed a hand on his free hand as it rested on the arm of the chair. The world was better when Brandon was there. ‘If you think that’s sensible.’

  ‘It’s the only thing. Because I’m not always going to be able to look after you the way I have.’

  Puzzled at his tone, she studied him as he stared into the heart of the fire. ‘What do you mean?’ They spent so much time apart and now she looked after herself. Sure, she relied on him for emotional support but she trusted him when he was present and knew he’d never let her down if she needed him.

  ‘Nothing.’ He hesitated as if his courage had failed him, but that was impossible. Brandon’s courage never failed. ‘Nothing serious. Just… you’re everywhere. Not just New York. Not just London. You were in Auckland last time I tried to talk to you. And now you tell me the kid you employ—’

  ‘We can Skype. Jesus, Brandon, there are no excuses these days.’ It would have helped if they’d had those communications twenty-five years before. She slapped the memory down.

  He relaxed. ‘Skype. Yeah, sweetheart. We’ll Skype. Even if we don’t see each other so much.’ He yawned.

  ‘You must be tired. I’ll go and make up the bed in the spare room.’ As she turned to leave the room, a glance out of the windo
w showed her a figure moving up the lane towards the cottage. Intrigued, she stopped. ‘It looks like we have a visitor.’

  ‘Who the hell comes visiting at this time of night?’ Brandon stood up, too, and looked out. ‘Is that your hippy pal? If it is, tell him to give you back your letters. I can look after them for you.’

  In the end, Cody hadn’t given Lynx Mary Wordsworth’s letters to her sister-in-law. Her first thought, like Brandon’s had been, was that it was him at the door, but she was spared the collision between two men who both professed, in their different ways, to care for her. The ponytail – which irritated her, because it was so like her own as to be a sinister copy of it – gave the journalist away. She was tired of the woman, hovering around the edges everywhere she went. ‘I’ll send her away. I’m sick of this.’ And she headed for the front door, wrenching it open and calling out into the darkness just as she’d called out the chief inspector who’d had the temerity to interrupt her lecture and then compounded the sin by having a very good reason for it. ‘You. What are you doing out in my garden?’

  ‘Dr Wilder… I didn’t want to disturb you. I was about to leave you a note.’ The woman bobbed up on the doorstep, agitated. ‘Maybe it’s good that I’ve caught you. We did meet at your launch. Fi Styles. Journalist. I wondered about doing the interview that we talked about. Since you’re staying in the area a few days longer—’

  ‘Cody. Honey.’

  That was why she loved Brandon so much. He understood her. Appearing behind her he placed his hands on her shoulders and the firmness of his touch warned her, as he’d done so often before, that it was in her interests to stay calm.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry, Doctor. I didn’t realise you had—’ The woman’s face was in darkness but her voice gave away her interest. ‘A visitor.’

  Brandon’s common sense touched Cody where her own did not. ‘This is my brother, Brandon Wilder III. He’s just arrived from Chicago and is very tired. So if you don’t mind—’ Cody turned away, gave Brandon the special smile that meant she understood. ‘This really isn’t a good time.’

  ‘If we could even arrange a time to meet. It would mean so much to me. And after all, I was a friend of Owen’s.’

  Cody froze. A quick look at Brandon, a quick nod from him, and she turned back. ‘He never mentioned you.’

  ‘Well, not exactly a friend. But I bumped into him a couple of times in the village and we had coffee. He talked a lot about you. I thought if I—’

  Owen had said he’d tell the newspapers, and Fi was a journalist. ‘I don’t mind doing an interview.’ Cody had to force the words out, fighting against the way this woman, younger than she was and maybe as tough, was forcing her into it. She’d give ground now but she’d win it back later. ‘We can discuss research I’ve been doing. Who will you be writing for?’

  ‘I told you. I’m a freelancer. I’ll see who might be interested when I have the interview.’

  It got worse. Surely that was a threat. ‘Get in touch with me tomorrow. We’ll fix a date.’

  ‘It’s better if you get in touch with me, Dr Wilder.’ Fi Styles stepped forward and pressed a slip of paper into her hand. ‘My card. You must have misplaced the last one I gave you. I can be available any time you like. So nice to have met you, Mr Wilder.’ And she faded out into the darkness like the last shout of a bad dream.

  Restraint failed. Cody slammed the door though she knew Fi Styles must have heard her. ‘Talking to Owen? What did the little rat tell her?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ But Brandon’s eyes, she thought, were anxious.

  ‘No, of course not.’ She forced calm upon herself, but it was struggle. Owen would have told Fi everything, in the evening after his last and latest failed threat to kill her. The problem was that she didn’t know exactly how much he’d known.

  6

  ‘I’m off out,’ Lisa called through to the lounge. ‘But I can sense a tall dark stranger coming up the path – do you want me to let him in, or should I send him packing?’

  Ashleigh flipped over a tarot card, but she looked to the window before she glanced down to see what it was. Her lip curled into a smile at the sight of Jude’s tall figure standing on the pavement. ‘Mmm. I’ll let you decide.’

  The doorbell went. She kept her hand hovering over the cards. He was early, and she was caught, unusually, in two minds. To finish the reading she’d started, or to shuffle the cards away before he could laugh at her the way Lisa always did?

  She’d finish it. If their relationship was going to persist for any length of time, he was going to have to learn to stop making fun of her hobby. Reading the tarot cards was an unusual pastime for a detective, and if anybody else in the office found about it she’d attract the wrong sort of interest and a lot of disapproval from colleagues, but the cards, as she grew tired of having to tell people, weren’t about telling the future, or even about answering questions. A tarot reading was about concentrating your mind, focusing your thoughts, pointing you in a different direction and showing you how to think. The skill came in knowing how to use them, but if you could channel their creativity, they allowed you a fresh look at an old problem. In her career, she’d come across plenty of detectives who would have benefited from that.

  ‘Good morning, Chief Inspector. Are you here for your appointment with our resident psychic?’ Lisa greeted Jude with mock seriousness. ‘Madame Vera is speaking to the Fates just now, but I’m sure she’ll spare you a moment. Cross her palm with silver and she’ll give you good news. Satisfaction guaranteed. She’s in the living room. Go on through. Ash, I’m off out. Will you be back for dinner?’

  Ashleigh smiled at Jude as he opened the living room door. ‘No, we’re out for dinner tonight.’

  ‘Come and join us in the pub,’ Jude said, over his shoulder. ‘There’s live music on in the Dockray Hall tonight. Celtic rock, if you like that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ve heard far too much of that in my life. Too many of my colleagues are into that. No, I’ll give it a miss. I’m planning to binge watch Love Island. But thanks anyway.’ Ashleigh’s best friend and housemate snapped the front door closed behind her and bounced off along the street.

  In the silence she left behind her, Jude hovered on the threshold of the living room, leaning against the door frame and watching as Ashleigh sat back. ‘I’m glad she’s not coming. It’ll be nice to have you all to myself.’

  ‘Back to your place again afterwards, then?’ She hesitated a moment, waiting for him to come and sit next to her, ready to abandon the reading the moment he came close.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt you,’ he said, after a moment of delicious silence. ‘I’m interested.’

  ‘You’ll make fun of me.’ Daring him to do so, she allowed her hand to mask the upturned, unseen card.

  ‘No. You know what I think of it, but we’ll agree to disagree. What’s that card you’re hiding?’

  She moved her hand aside. ‘The Six of Cups.’ Aware of his careful scrutiny, she kept her face composed in what she hoped was an expression of complete concentration while she fought to control her irritation. The card came up too often and always reminded her of Scott, a card that could have either positive or negative associations depending on which way it appeared. Today it was reversed, which meant that the memories it talked about were poor ones and its connotations were irresponsibility, indecision and failure. She didn’t like it that way, so she tweaked it the right way up, making the past a happier place, brimming with innocence and golden memories, and transforming her former husband Scott into a friend rather than an ex-lover unknowingly driving them to mutual destruction. That single twitch made the whole reading altogether more palatable and although she would know, Jude wouldn’t. ‘That’s a good one. That tells me to work towards happy reunions and positive future relationships.’

  She flashed a smile at him and at last he came to sit next to her on the sofa, an arm stretched along the back of it ready for the moment when she would sit back. ‘Who with
?’

  ‘That’s up to me.’ She resisted the temptation to lean back against him, for the pleasure of anticipation.

  ‘Okay. I’ll suspend my disbelief. What’s next up?’

  ‘The Three of Swords.’ This was another that came up often when she was thinking of Scott. It was almost as if the cards didn’t realise that everything between them was at an end. For the sake of her new relationship, she interpreted it loosely and liberally, making the best of it. ‘Yes, here we go. This indicates divorce.’

  ‘And is this card about the past or the future?’

  ‘The present. My decree nisi went through last week. I meant to tell you, but I forgot.’

  ‘You forgot?’ His tone was quizzical and she saw from the tarnished mirror above the fireplace that he’d lifted an eyebrow. ‘Something as significant as that?’

  ‘Maybe I just want to put the whole thing behind me.’ She allowed the pause to draw out as she looked down on the pierced heart of the Three of Swords. ‘And we have far more important things to talk about during the week.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’ He didn’t press the matter, and nor should he. The marriage was dead long before she’d met him, and he’d had no part to play in laying it to rest. Nevertheless, she spared a soft thought of the man she’d loved enough to hope he could change. ‘Let’s get back to the cards. Will they tell you who killed Owen Armitstead?’

  ‘We know who killed him. He killed himself. Didn’t he?’

  There was a fractional pause as Jude flapped a hand as if in dismissal of his own uncertainty. ‘Yes. That’s what the evidence says. Forget I said it.’