Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘Have we signed off Owen’s death?’

  ‘Not yet, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t, other than time.’

  Ashleigh watched as the TV crew packed their equipment away. Their film would appear on the lunchtime and teatime bulletins, with her in the background, interspersed with clips of whichever one of Jude or Doddsy had drawn the short straw of speaking to the press conference. ‘Even if that’s suicide, do you think the cases are linked?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s something we can discuss at the team meeting this afternoon. I’d like to know a little more about the disagreement between him and Cody. There does seem to be some link, even if it’s tenuous. Storm and Raven implied that.’

  They should probably refer to the hippies by their real names rather than the ones they chose to go by, but Jude must see there was a benefit in a softly-softly approach. ‘Should I go and talk to Cody about that? Apart from anything else, she may have seen something.’

  ‘We certainly can’t pick her up with the casual door-to-door inquiries.’ A lone bird – a robin or a blackbird, she thought – filled the stillness left by the film crew’s departed car. ‘I’m not sure it’s fair to ask you to do that one on your own. I’ll come down after my morning meeting and we can have a chat to her then. I’ve spoken to her about it, and she’s as happy with that arrangement as she’s ever going to be.’

  ‘Is it her brother staying up there?’ There had been a few raised eyebrows at the mention of the new man at the Wilders’ cottage. Grasmere was used to all sorts but this cowboy, with his mid-western drawl and his cantankerous stare, had made a few ripples.

  ‘It is. Apparently he was due to arrive for the lecture but had a transport nightmare and didn’t make it. I’m a little bit happier about her welfare with him there than I would be if she was on her own.’

  ‘You still think there’s some risk to her?’

  ‘There has to be a possibility, though I suspect it’s small.’ At the other end of the phone, rustling was followed by silence. He must have turned away, as if someone else was after his attention. ‘Right. I have to go. I’ll give you a call when I get down and we’ll talk to the Wilders together. And in the meantime, you might want to chat to the Gordons. They’ll be about.’

  When he’d rung off, Ashleigh got out of the car and headed towards the lakeside cafe which had become, by default, a de facto operational headquarters. Graham and Eliza Gordon, landlords of the hippy camp and proud owners of the banner which had caught so much attention with its accusation of murder on the day of Cody’s big reveal, turned out to be a middle-aged, middle-class couple who had allowed their burning fury to get the better of them and now showed every sign of being slightly embarrassed by what had seemed like a good idea at the time. They had turned their cafe over to the police, allowing Ashleigh and her interviewers a secluded corner at the back of the building and moving tables from the middle of the cafe to create a buffer between them and the store of onlookers who came in to buy coffee and Lakeland plum bread or, if the tables were full, some handmade chocolates to take away. The arrangement seemed to be working to everyone’s advantage, not least increasing footfall in an establishment which, even in a tourist honeypot like Grasmere, surely wouldn’t normally have been doing a roaring trade on a Monday morning in January.

  The Gordons were hovering in a corner. Ashleigh had read their witness statements, detailing how they’d been sitting down to lunch when Raven had come screaming and crying to fetch them, how, unable to make sense of what she was saying, they’d gone down to see what the problem was and come across the mangled body. They’d called the police and then, some time later – neither of them was quite sure exactly when – Storm had reappeared, red in the face and out of breath, to be followed very quickly by the police.

  Charlie and Tyrone, first on the scene the day before, were on shift again, sitting in earnest conversation in the corner with a couple of other uniformed officers. She crossed over to them. ‘Okay guys. How’s it going?’

  ‘We’re ready to get out on the doors.’ Tyrone, who had that particular kind of charm that would get him a long way, turned a dazzling smile upon her, and shifted his seat along to allow her to sit down. With one eye on the clock, she ran through what they needed to know from Jude’s update, and sent them out to talk to the good folk of Grasmere and see what, if anything, they could glean from the villagers’ humdrum observations. Most of them would have nothing to add, but one or two insights could prove valuable. And the man in the woods might yet emerge from their morning’s work.

  That done, she looked around for Graham and Eliza Gordon. He was standing behind the counter tinkering with the coffee machine, she arranging cupcakes on a plate. When they saw her looking across, they exchanged a quick word and then Graham Gordon left his post and threaded his way across the room towards her, barging chairs out of the way with his hip as he did so. ‘Sergeant O’Halloran. Is there any news?’

  She shook her head. People always seemed to think that the police would tell them everything, and in a sense that was fair enough because weren’t the police always the ones asking questions? But in this case, there was nothing to tell. ‘It’s still at a very early stage in the investigation.’

  ‘It’s shocking. I can’t believe such a terrible thing happened so close to home.’ He ran nervous fingers through his thin beard but not, she thought, in a way that suggested he had something to hide. ‘To think that anyone could do something so terrible to those gentle people.’

  ‘Did you know Lynx well?’ Ashleigh motioned to him to sit down, and he did so, ready to talk.

  ‘No, not well at all. The relationship we have with these people is a strange one, I suppose. Technically, Eliza and I are their landlords, although no money changes hands. It’s a historical thing. When we bought the property, the previous owners had always allowed travelling folk to camp there for free, and it became a permanent deal over the years. We help them out, where we can. We understand their thinking. Raven and Storm have been here for a long time. People know them. Our daughter was a bit of a hippy herself.’

  Ashleigh sensed a tensing of his jawline beneath the beard, a quivering of emotion that he struggled to hide. ‘I’m sorry to hear that you lost her.’

  ‘Yes. She was a peace-loving young woman, who would never have harmed anyone. She was vegetarian, couldn’t bear any kind of cruelty, or to use any living thing for her own convenience. Unfortunately she fell in love with a cruel man, and there was nothing she could do to change him. Turning the other cheek was all she could do, but standing up to him would have been as bad. She was true to herself.’ He paused for breath and rushed off the subject. ‘I’ve never charged Storm or any of his friends for using the field, and they’ve never given me a moment’s trouble. It’s so-called civilised people who don’t know how to treat human beings. They’re the problem.’

  He threw a fierce glance up Coffin Lane. Ashleigh remembered Jude’s concerns about Owen, about how much more sense there would be in a theory of murder if Cody had been the one found hanged. The same applied here. They’d be having a very different interview if she’d been the victim, rather than Lynx, and if the Gordons’ whereabouts weren’t firmly established for the deaths of both Owen and Lynx.

  ‘You know Storm and Raven well?’ They nodded. ‘Did you know anything about Lynx?’

  ‘Nothing. He’d come in from time to time for a chat. Not often, and the chat was never about him. it was about the weather and the trees and the phases of the moon. You’d say he kept himself to himself for most of the time. But when he did come in, he was friendly enough.’

  ‘You don’t know where he came from? Or his name?’

  He shook his head. ‘None of those things. I don’t think I even knew the name he went under until today. He was just someone who dropped by from time to time, and I never had any need to ask his name. There’s no formal arrangement over the field, so nothing ever needed to be signed. If it had been, it wouldn’t ha
ve been him who signed it. He always said he was just blowing through.’ He glanced back to the counter, where a queue had formed. ‘I’d better go back and help Eliza out. Excuse me.’ He slid away.

  Ashleigh looked from the scribbled witness statements to the bleak lakeside and back. No one knew who Lynx was. No one, it seemed, really cared. And by all accounts he’d had nothing, so perhaps his death, with its apparent robbery, wasn’t what he had but what someone might have thought he had. Or it was a bluff, something to conceal the real cause of death.

  Yet no one, it seemed, had any reason to dislike the man.

  At the back of the cafe, where the patio doors gave onto the garden with its terrace for smokers, Raven sat with a shawl around her shoulders and a pack of tarot cards spread out in front of her on a rickety table. Unable to resist the lure of a shared interest and aware that such a connection could easily prove beneficial, Ashleigh slipped out of her seat and through the door onto the terrace. ‘Excuse me.’

  Raven waited a moment before she turned a thin, sad face away from the cards. She didn’t say anything, merely nodding towards Ashleigh.

  ‘I’m DS Ashleigh O’Halloran. In charge of the door-to-door inquiries. I just wanted to say—’ Ashleigh floundered to a halt. Just wanted to say what? Just wanted to intrude on someone’s misery? Jude had interviewed Raven, after a fashion, after Tyrone had taken the initial witness statement, and he seemed already to have won their trust. There was surely nothing more that Ashleigh herself could learn, and yet something at the back of her mind suggested that there was. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt.’ She looked down at the cards, fanned out on the table in front of Raven. The Sun, the Star, the Eight of Swords, all reversed so that they represented misery and pain. It was so complete a selection that Ashleigh almost wondered if Raven was doing the same as she herself had done, tweaking the reading to make it reflect the world as she saw it rather than listening to what the cards were trying to tell her.

  When she saw Raven sneak a look down at the upturned pack, pick out another card and turn it over and over in her fingers before setting it down, her suspicions were confirmed. The card was Death, and Raven’s gaze, distracted from Ashleigh herself, flicked from it to the camp where the police were still working around the tent that had covered the woodpile. Apart from the tent and the police activity, everything was as it must have been at the moment when Lynx’s body was found. Through a lifted flap of another tent she saw a loom, a piece of fabric half-completed. A man’s clothing hung on the line, though it had been so wet over the past couple of days that it would never have dried. ‘I hope someone’s looking after you.’

  ‘Yes. Gordon and Eliza have been very kind. They’ve taken us in and found us a bed.’ Raven laid the card down on the table and used the end of her shawl to mop up the puddle from the seat next to her.

  Taking that as an invitation, Ashleigh sat down. ‘I’m glad to hear that. I don’t know the exact progress of the operation, but I expect you’ll be able to go home soon. Maybe even later on today.’ She was an instinctive judge of character, and all that she could feel from Raven was goodness. Even the thoughtful, sad eyes, passing gently over the scene of Lynx’s murder, spoke of forgiveness without sorrow. Hating herself, Ashleigh suppressed the surge of sympathy she felt, not to its extinction but to a point where it didn’t affect her judgement. It was a mistake to feel too much for someone, witness or even victim. All it did was distract you from what needed to be done.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ Raven said, shuffling the cards, ‘but it’s the memories that are a problem. I’ll never look on this place again without thinking of him.’ She cut Death back into the pack, and looked down at it, held tight in her arthritic hands as if an idea had suddenly come to her. ‘He was a fellow traveller. We all are. I hate no one and I try to love everyone.’ She gave Ashleigh a shy, sidelong smile. ‘Would you like me to read your fortune?’

  The turn of phrase tripped Ashleigh’s interest. No one with any credibility used the cards to tell fortunes. Maybe Raven was tempering her language to make the idea more easily accessible, or maybe it was something else. She’d find out. ‘Yes, why not?’ Because it wasn’t about interrogating the Fates, which was something that she could do very well for herself, for what it was worth. It was about seeing how Raven interrogated them on her behalf.

  ‘Of course,’ Raven began, flicking the well-worn deck of cards between her fingers with surprising dexterity, not looking at them, not dropping any, ‘there are no certainties.’

  There never were. ‘I understand.’

  ‘There are many ways to read the cards.’ Raven had adopted a sing-song voice as she shuffled. ‘I lay five of them out in a horseshoe. They’ll tell you the answers to your questions. Pick a card.’ She passed a hand over them like a magician waving a wand over a top hat, then withdrew the hand to a protective position in front of her left breast and held the pack out.

  Pretending to be hesitant, Ashleigh picked a card between finger and thumb and laid it on the table, face up, where Raven indicated.

  ‘And another.’

  She repeated the action, a third, fourth and fifth time until the cards sat in a semicircle like a Greek chorus. Only then did Raven look down at them, staring with a slight frown, switching them deftly around on the table into a certain order. ‘How fascinating. The Five of Wands indicates anger. It’s an unhappy card. Here’s the Queen of Swords.’ Her gaze flicked up the hill towards Cody’s cottage. ‘She represents an unreliable female with uncontrolled desires and secrets to hide. The Four of Cups… ah, that’s a card. That’s a warning to all of us to look over our shoulders. Poor Lynx. As he should have done.’ She bowed her head, sighed and went back to the cards. ‘The Eight of Cups shows us someone on a journey. I’m seeing a dark man, travelling alone. And lastly, the Hermit. He’s a stranger to us. A single stranger.’ Her hand hovered over the five cards. ‘A single stranger, travelling through the woods.’

  Ashleigh stared down at the cards then back to Raven. The woman’s eyes were bright but her face was pale beneath the stains of outdoor life. ‘And did you ever see a tall dark stranger in the woods?’

  There was a pause. Raven passed a hand over the cards as if she were wafting her lies away from them, shuffled them up and returned them to a tattered box. ‘Yes, but at a distance. A tall man in a black jacket. Someone who doesn’t belong here.’

  ‘When was that? Today? Yesterday?’

  Raven’s eyes flipped up to meet Ashleigh’s then down again. ‘It was the day of the big fuss in the village. The day that poor boy died.’

  *

  ‘Of course,’ Ashleigh said to Jude as the two of them walked up from the village centre towards Cody’s cottage, ‘the reading she did for me was complete hokum.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ he said, amused. Ashleigh’s fondness for the tarot, at odds with her professional position, had troubled him from the moment he became aware of it. Later, as he got to know her, he’d become reassured that she wouldn’t let it impinge upon her judgement but he was still uncomfortable when it came into the realm of her police work. ‘And I take it you put her right? Did the two of you sit and discuss different interpretations of a random selection of cards?’

  ‘No, we didn’t. You’re completely missing the point.’

  ‘Then what is the point?’

  ‘There’s a code in reading tarot. Of course, no two people interpret the cards the same way and I’m not saying that Raven is any kind of a fraud. I suspect she knows perfectly well how to read the cards but she chose not to.’

  He sensed her exasperation with him, but he stuck to his guns. There was nothing as important as the facts and the evidence. ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘She doesn’t know I’m interested in that sort of thing. I never told her. She was busy telling me that it answered my questions, but she never asked me what the questions were. She’d have said the same thing regardless of what came up.’

  ‘So she was tryi
ng to mislead us?’

  ‘I think so. She told me the cards pointed to a cruel woman, with secrets to hide, and a tall dark man who’d travelled a long way alone. We were to look at the woods.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Cody Wilder, and her brother. Is that right?’

  ‘That was the clear implication. I imagine she’ll have heard about Brandon in the village if she hasn’t seen him, since Cody’s all they ever seem to talk about in the cafe and the two of them are pretty exotic by local standards. But she tripped herself up. She claims that she saw this man – who she wants us to think is Brandon Wilder – in the woods on the day Owen died.’

  ‘When he wasn’t here.’

  ‘Yes, though we need to check the passenger lists to be sure he wasn’t. But in actual fact there was no coherent reading from the cards. She never intended there to be one. She barely looked at them before she launched into the interpretation, and she arranged them into a particular order, which you never do. The order they come out in is significant.’

  ‘Past, present, future and the like?’ Pausing as Cody’s cottage came into sight, Jude took a look back down the hill. The CSI team had finished in the field, although there was a boat moored just off the shore as divers scoured the water in search of the murder weapon, and a couple of police cars remained parked outside the Gordons’ cafe, base for the door-to-door inquiries. Those would be finished soon, because so many of the properties covered were holiday lets and had been empty. There had been very few people out and about on that dark January morning. ‘She was telling you what she wanted us to think.’

  ‘Yes. I believe that’s exactly what she was doing. Though whether she genuinely believes it was Cody and Brandon who are guilty, is open to question.’