by Jo Allen
‘Take one,’ she said, his closeness prompting her to abandon the coherent set of observations she’d been intending to make. ‘But I’ve told you before that’s not how they work, even if there was any doubt. But if it gives you something to think about, there’s no harm done.’
With a sidelong look, as though by joining in he was compromising himself, Jude reached out a hand for the pack, tapping the top card a couple of times before lifting most of them and digging out one from close to the bottom. ‘If this is the Hanged Man…’ He turned it over. ‘The Eight of Swords. What does this mean?’
It was the third card in a row that spelt out difficulties with relationships. If she’d been doing the reading seriously, Ashleigh might have worried, but it was Jude’s choice of card not hers. ‘What do you make of it?’
He held the card in the palm of his hand. A tall woman, bound and blindfold, stood surrounded by eight swords stuck into the ground, a castle in the background. ‘It looks like a typical day in the Lakes.’ He grinned, touching a bird of prey silhouetted against storm clouds and purple mountains. ‘Is this about justice?’
‘There’s a specific card for Justice. One for Judgement, too. But yes. You can interpret it that way. Anything else?’
‘I don’t know.’ He frowned at it, and the corners of her mouth twitched into a smile in response. So tolerant in many ways, he wouldn’t open his mind to anything that couldn’t be measured or supported, and even his acknowledgement of the intangible had to have some kind of evidence to offer proof or disproof. Which was completely illogical when so many criminal actions stemmed from passions and emotions that could be neither predicted nor quantified.
If you wanted to read the cards properly, you took time and treated them seriously. That was why she preferred to consider the tarot alone; only some foolish impulse had made her take them out when she knew she’d risk exposing her eccentricities to sceptical minds. That was why the reading hadn’t made sense and so, she argued, she was justified in playing about with it.
‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she said to him, optimism rising. ‘Let’s get outside and make the most of it.’
‘Back to my place later, though.’
‘Oh God, yes.’ It didn’t matter anyway. By playing fast and loose with the interpretation of the cards, the only person she was cheating was herself.
*
‘So tell me,’ Jude said, as they strode up the final strides to the cairn that topped Skiddaw, ‘about Scott.’
‘What’s there to tell?’ Unused to a long and strenuous hill walk, Ashleigh made the most of the pause she needed to get her breath back, choosing her words carefully. ‘I kept telling him I wanted a divorce and he finally accepted it. Stage one is done.’
Scott, incapable of fidelity himself and intolerant of any departure from it in his wife, always promised change but in the end Ashleigh’s patience had given out. Love had lost out to self-preservation. Thank God she could blame the relentless cold of the north wind for the tears that suddenly streamed down her cheeks.
‘Simple as that, eh?’ Jude reached out to brush the moisture away.
‘Okay, sometimes I thought he never would agree.’ She slid her hand into his. Men didn’t understand how women felt for other men, always wanting to be the only one. Maybe Jude would be different. ‘He’s that persistent.’
‘Maybe he thought you were worth persisting for.’
‘I’m sure he did.’ Her hair had whipped free from her ponytail and as she pushed it back, she missed the expression on his face. They’d arrived at the summit alone, clear of the group of walkers behind them. Now their isolation was a sanctuary for shared confidences, where the wind tore up words and cast them up into the clouds, unrecorded. ‘But he didn’t think I was worth giving up his philandering for. That was the deal breaker.’
‘It would be for me, too. Here. Let’s get a photo of you for Lisa.’ He got out his phone and slid an arm round her, snapping a selfie of the two of them with the land falling away to the north and Scotland, while the bulk of the lakes and mountains jostled for space to the south. Until she’d come to the Lakes, in the dying months of the previous summer, Ashleigh had never been much of a walker, but Jude had little enough time free and liked to spend it in the hills. If she wanted the treasure of his company, she’d no option but to learn to like it. ‘She won’t believe you’ve walked this far without proof.’
‘Lisa’s a lazy toad. She won’t appreciate the enormous effort this cost me.’ She slid her arm around him for a second selfie, holding on longer than she needed to, and the two of them swayed together for a kiss.
‘So Scott’s definitely gone.’ He let go with some reluctance as another pair of walkers appeared on the skyline.
‘Has Becca definitely gone?’
‘No, but that’s different.’ Turning away from her to rummage in his backpack for a thermos flask, he failed to hide his scowl.
His irritation must be with Becca, not Ashleigh herself, or so she hoped. ‘I don’t see why.’
‘Because she lives next door to my mother for a start, and I can’t avoid seeing her. And because we were never married. That counts for something.’
Becca, for all the wrong reasons, had ditched Jude and it was taking him longer than he admitted to get over it, whereas Ashleigh was the one who’d broken the chains of a toxic relationship. Taking the Mars bar he held out to her, she dared reflect once more on Scott, who was the only man she’d ever loved and so the only man who could break her heart. She’d have put money on that was how it had been with Jude and Becca, too.
So much the better. It meant neither of them would make the mistake of going back to the old love or rushing naively into the new. Mentally drawing a line under her relationship with Scott to emphasise the one drawn by the official documentation, she turned from the subject with relief as he tipped his finger under her chin, tilted it up, and the kiss he brushed across her lips was so light the wind blew it away. Her shiver came from anticipation, not the January wind. Jude Satterthwaite, just wait until I get you home.
When this kiss, too, was done, she accepted the cup of coffee he poured from his flask and turned to enjoy the rest of the view. ‘What are we looking at?’
His arm swung from left to right. ‘There are too many to name them all, but I’ll point out the main ones. That’s the Helvellyn range on the left. Great Dodd. Helvellyn itself. Ullswater’s behind. There’s Coniston Old Man.’ The names rippled easily off his tongue. ‘Crinkle Crags. Bow Fell. Glaramara. Great End. Scafell, Scafell Pike, Great Gable. That’s Derwentwater down there.’
‘Have you climbed them all?’
‘Most of them. I went walking every weekend when I was younger. School holidays too. Somehow Glaramara has escaped me, so I’ll need to pick that one off. We’ll do Catbells next time. It’s a nice easy walk. You can get the boat across from Keswick.’
The other walkers reached them, exchanged greetings, took the requisite photos, touched the trig point and moved on. Sipping at the tepid coffee, Ashleigh peered after them. She and Jude had started late and the climb had taken a couple of hours, so that the sun had already started dipping to the east and the short winter day was on the run. ‘Should we go back?’
‘Yes. We’ll easily make the car before sundown, but we should probably head down.’
They lingered a moment longer, while he packed the flask away and she felt in her pocket for her gloves to combat the growing chill, turning her windblown head towards the central Lakes. It was a wild and beautiful scene, but it hid some of the worst of human nature. ‘Can we see Grasmere from here?’ The Wordsworths, she had read, were enthusiastic hillwalkers.
‘No. It’s down there, beyond Thirlmere.’ His raised arm indicated the slashed trough in the fells where a road wound south, a glint of gunmetal grey. ‘It sits in that little sheltered dip. There.’
They shared a silence. Ashleigh’s thoughts, as his must also do, tripped back to the death of Owen Armitstead, to his
grief-ravaged parents and his unrepentant boss. ‘What do you make of Cody Wilder?’
‘I should be asking you that. There’s no way I can make an objective judgement. We didn’t get off on the right foot and she’s the sort of person who puts my back up.’
Cody, it seemed to Ashleigh, was merely a female version of Detective Superintendent Groves, someone who bullied those around her mercilessly and played on their weakness to feed her own insecurity. In Cody it was a deliberate stance and in Groves probably a leftover from an old age of male entitlement, but the effect was the same, except that Cody Wilder was judged more harshly for it on the basis of her gender. She slid Jude a sideways look, wondering how far his open-mindedness went and deciding not to test it. ‘Yes, mine too. But she does it deliberately. I don’t know what she’s hiding but there’s something she’s afraid of. I’d love to know what it is.’
He turned away from the view but took hold of her gloved hand where the path was broad and easy. ‘Doddsy reckons Owen’s death was an obvious suicide. From the soundings he’s taken, the boy appeared mentally frail. Bluntly, he probably couldn’t take the heat and Dr Wilder isn’t the kind who understands the need for pastoral care. Maybe she’s afraid of being held to account for the way she behaved. I would imagine it’ll all get wrapped up pretty soon and we can get on with our business.’
‘That’s what Doddsy thinks. What do you think?’
‘It’s hard to argue. Though I do wonder. If it were Cody Wilder who’d been found dead in the same circumstances, I might have been looking at it a lot more closely.’
‘But it couldn’t have been planned?’
‘No. Opportunistic. Someone comes up to confront her, finds a rope in a conveniently unlocked shed, and the victim wandering about in a confused state? I can see how you might take that chance. Only it wasn’t Cody. It was a young man with emotional issues and under an awful lot of pressure.’
‘Cody would never have exposed herself to such a risk.’
‘No. And since you ask, I think Dr Wilder’s backstory would bear some examination. Because you’re right and there has to be something that makes someone behave as aggressively as she did to me on so little provocation.’
Cody had set out to humiliate Fi Styles too, brushing aside her inquiry in the cafe without mercy. ‘There does seem something not right about it.’
‘And what do you think? What’s your—’ he hesitated fractionally over the word: ‘—instinct?’
He hated instinct. When she’d first arrived, he’d resisted her sixth sense for things being wrong, her intuitive understanding of people’s personalities and the actions that chimed wrongly with their words. Professionally, it was a weakness as much as a strength, but she sensed that he’d ask her about it out of the office when he never would inside.
‘I think she’s an unhappy woman, though she’d never admit it.’
‘She’s certainly a very angry one.’
‘The two go hand in hand, don’t they?’
‘Maybe.’ But as they walked down the path from the summit of Skiddaw and the light began to fade away and blur the distant haze from pink to grey, she sensed that while Owen Armitstead’s misery might be over, Cody Wilder’s was just beginning.
7
Raven – whose real name was buried so deeply in the graveyard of a suburban past that she no longer cared to remember what it was – sat in the tent where she kept her loom and sent the shuttle flying back and forth through the longitudinal woollen threads. She’d pinned back the tent flaps to allow as much natural daylight in as possible, not just for the sake of her eyesight but so that she could maintain her much-cherished connection to the natural world, but the downside was the cold that came in with the light. January had never been her favourite month but it seemed to grow more vicious as she grew older, and the chill came through to her bones. She shivered. She was sixty and if she sat working for too long, even in summer, her fingers complained at the oncoming curse of arthritis.
Sometimes Raven thought this was a curse, a punishment. She’d chosen to reject her parents when she was barely more than a teenager and she’d never regretted it, but four decades later the grinding of her joints was loud and harsh, like the echo of her long-dead mother’s laughter. You could never escape your past.
The faint and fleeting light tempted her, dancing across the moss-green and lake-blue of the wool she’d chosen and turning them into the elusive shimmer of a bluebell wood. A walk along the lake to the wintry splendour of Deer Bolt Woods would stretch her legs and give her a chance to rest her fingers. That done, she could come back and perhaps finish the scarf before the afternoon light faded too far.
The short days were a curse. She set aside the shuttle, wedging it safely between the grey strands of the warp, and stepped out into the daylight, her boots squelching on the wet grass. The faint sun and long shadows warned her that it was way past midday and time for something to eat. She looked around. There was no rota but Lynx had promised the previous day to take on the task of preparing something for lunch. Normally he’d be pottering about the place, improving or adjusting something, but he was nowhere in sight.
Sighing, she turned towards the lane that would take her up Red Bank Road and onto the path around the lake and her face creased into a smile when she saw Storm leaning on the gate waiting for her. The winter was harsh to him as it was to her – harsher, perhaps, because he was a man who brimmed with natural energy and this cold season, devoid of growth, left little for him to do. In the summer he occupied himself with the vegetable patches they’d made at the side of the field, but in the winter he slowed down into semi-hibernation and cultivated only patience.
‘You’re looking very smart today,’ she greeted him admiringly, an echo of the kind of compliments normal people paid one another. ‘Almost like a normal person.’ She dimpled a smile at him.
He plucked at his knitted jumper. ‘I got muddy. Soaked right through. At my age I can’t afford to get too damp. So I changed.’
‘Care to join me for a walk, my lover?’ Rain wasn’t far away. She sniffed the air, slipping a comfortable arm through his. When she’d first joined a hippy commune all those years before, her head had been full of the seductive ideas of free love. She smiled at that, now. Living and letting live was what it was about and she made no judgement on anyone else, but once she’d locked eyes with gentle, dry-witted Storm the idea of sharing her favours had disappeared and never returned.
‘No,’ he said, too sharply.
‘Have you seen Lynx? He was supposed to be getting us something to eat.’
He shook his head. ‘He’s got other things on his mind.’
Raven nodded. Living so closely, it was impossible to be unaware of what else was going on. Paradoxically, in the summer, when the community swelled to a couple of dozen, they could achieve a degree of privacy, if not anonymity, but the winter forced them into closer proximity and you learned a lot of things you’d rather not know. ‘She’ll be gone soon.’
‘Not soon enough. If that poor boy hadn’t killed himself, she’d have been away by now.’
She patted his arm with her free hand, and made soothing noises, as she would to a child. She could always tell when Storm was agitated, and he’d been that way ever since Cody Wilder had arrived in the village and come swanning down to the camp to introduce herself. Lynx had looked at her with interest straight away.
Cody, she supposed, was an attractive woman, if you liked a certain type, and Lynx was never a man who cared for a pushover. If the two of them followed their natures, then what was wrong with that? So there must be something else about Cody that upset her, and upset Storm. Because he was upset, quivering with the kind of nervous anxiety he’d spent a lifetime trying to escape. ‘Where do you think he is?’
‘Gone up to her cottage, I expect. Couldn’t keep away.’
‘It’ll blow over.’ Stroking the back of his gnarled hand with a forefinger, she shushed him. ‘She’ll leave.’
/> ‘He isn’t really one of us, is he?’ Storm shook her hand free, too troubled even to accept the comfort she offered him.
She considered. What did it mean to be one of them? Were there degrees of belonging? Lynx was dynamic and occasionally confrontational, but perhaps he just operated on a different wavelength from them. There was no single way to be alternative. ‘We’re used to doing things a different way. That’s all. And it takes time to get used to doing it our way. I don’t know much about him but he’s clearly been too used to living in the modern world.’ And it was a toxic world. ‘It isn’t always easy to step away from it completely.’
‘You’re such a sweet hippy child.’ His smile warmed her chilled bones. ‘It isn’t him I have the problem with. It’s her. There was no problem before she came. I don’t know why she can’t leave us alone.’
They knew the answer to that. Cody Wilder was a narcissistic attention-seeker and it didn’t matter where the attention came from, to the point that she was even prepared to waste her time by leaning over the fence pointing out to them just where the inconsistencies lay in their philosophy. Being a clever woman, she put her arguments in a way that they couldn’t answer. It wasn’t a problem for Raven, who’d learned through the years that this was a natural enough reaction for anyone who didn’t understand what it was to be different, but she could tell that it disturbed Storm’s hard-learned serenity, and who could tell what impact that attitude had on Lynx, beyond his obvious infatuation with the woman?
‘She’ll be gone in a few days. When they’ve tied up the loose ends. That poor boy.’ Owen, at least, had always been pleasant to them, even if his smiles had sometimes been apologetic as he hurried three steps behind his boss like a subservient husband. On the couple of times he’d wandered down alone, he’d been wistfully open-minded in his interest.
‘Yes. It’s a damn shame, and she drove him to it.’