Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘He did kill himself. Didn’t he?’

  Ashleigh O’Halloran rang the doorbell. ‘Of course he did. He was weak as water and he couldn’t handle me. I could have been a bit gentler with him, I guess, but he knew my reputation before he signed up.’ Owen must have been so full of dread at what she might do to him, the damage she might inflict on his career and his studies. He should have known better than to threaten her. ‘Nobody made him do it.’

  ‘You were sleeping with him, huh?’

  ‘Are you jealous?’ She hoped so. Jealousy was such a creative emotion. Even her jealousy of Brandon’s fiancée had a sweet tinge. It had been hard for him to break the news to her and his relief at her acceptance had been palpable. It was proof, if she’d needed it, that even with a wife in tow he couldn’t afford to cast her off.

  ‘No. What do I have to be jealous about?’ He moved towards the kitchen. ‘I’ll get out from under your feet.’

  The doorbell rang again and the time for talking was over. Cody swooped on it before Brandon could get there. ‘Detective Sergeant. Let’s hope you don’t find this a complete waste of your time. Obviously your boss is determined to finger me for something I didn’t do but I can assure you, he’s fighting the wrong dog.’

  ‘DCI Satterthwaite is only trying to get to the truth.’ The woman said it with her lips tight, as if she were trying not to laugh. Too late, Cody remembered that the police had no reason to connect her with Lynx and that she’d made the rookie error of protesting too much. This wasn’t going to be quite as easy as she thought.

  ‘Am I late?’ Fi Styles ran the last few steps up the path, as though terrified she was missing something.

  ‘Not at all.’ Cody stepped back to invite them into the cottage and ushered both women through to the living room. ‘The police were keen to talk to me and so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. You can do their work for them and DS O’Halloran can have an hour off.’

  ‘Isn’t that irregular?’ Fi Styles flashed an irritated look at both the detective and at Cody herself.

  If she wanted to play hardball, let her try. ‘I don’t think so. You both seem to want the same thing and my time is precious. Tea? Coffee?’ It was ready on the table, so she poured them both the coffees they asked for and helped herself to some peppermint tea. This wasn’t a meeting she planned on lasting a long time. ‘I have another appointment at eleven.’ Which was a lie, and she was pretty certain both of them knew it, but that didn’t bother her. They could challenge it if they wanted and she gave them a fraction of a second to do so, like a minister limiting the opportunity for the public to object to a marriage, but neither of them responded. ‘All right. Let’s go.’

  She sat down facing Fi Styles and cutting the detective out of the conversation. Ashleigh O’Halloran was there to listen, not to talk, and Cody would keep her firmly sidelined. She concentrated on her interrogator, staring straight at her. Brandon had warned her about the wisdom of being conciliatory and the risks of getting on the wrong side of a journalist, but she was confident she was big enough to beat aside any collateral damage from a would-be headline maker who didn’t even have a buyer lined up for her story. Fi needn’t think she’d get anything spectacular from the interview.

  ‘Thank you so much for agreeing to speak to me, Dr Wilder. Of course you don’t mind if I record the interview.’

  Cody nodded. That just meant she’d have to be doubly careful what she said. Despite her bullishness, there was a flutter of nerves in her gut. What did Fi know, and how much of it was true?

  ‘You’re a controversial figure, Dr Wilder,’ the interviewer purred, looking sideways at her as if she might take it as an insult. ‘Perhaps there are reasons for this? You’ve spoken before about your tough upbringing and how it’s forged you—’ she checked her notes ‘—into a woman of steel. Could you talk me through your childhood?’

  Out in the garden, Brandon was pottering about, poking without any real interest into the innards of some unspecified dead plant. Cody drew in a deep breath. ‘Sure. My parents were ranchers, out in the ranges of western Wyoming. We lived in a cabin twenty miles down a dirt track off Interstate 80. There were the four of us, and it was more than a little lonesome. When I was a child, there were cattlemen who lived on the ranch with us, but as soon as Brandon was old enough to help, they left and he and Pop managed the ranch together.’

  ‘Is that unusual?’

  It was very unusual. Brandon Wilder Junior had been a man so introverted and antisocial he preferred to work himself and his family into the ground rather than put in the effort it took to retain employees. He’d been mean, too, though he’d died without spending any of the money he’d saved. Not that there had been a lot of it, but there had been enough to make everybody’s lives easier, if he’d chosen to do so. That was something else she’d never forgive him for. ‘He was proud and an independent man. He wanted everything he owned to be something he’d earned, something he’d worked for. That’s what he taught me. Among other things.’ Yes, there were a lot of things she’d learned from her father that had shaped her, and she wasn’t going to tell Fi Styles what they were. ‘He made me the person I am. Every time I achieve something, every time I succeed, I think of him.’ In its way, it was the truth. She composed her expression into one that she hoped showed admiration, rather than hatred. ‘Every time I publish a paper. Every time I speak at a conference. Every time I see my name on the cover of a book.’

  Fi was scribbling enthusiastically. It was a good quote. Cody’s heart sang like the whirring of the recording device on the table.

  ‘Every time I come across someone who abuses me, every time I meet someone who tells me I can’t do something because I’m a woman, every time I hear someone tell me I should stay silent and sit in the corner, I think of him, and I rise up.’

  ‘Life in Wyoming was hard?’ Fi underlined whatever she’d written in her spidery shorthand and put a star next to it.

  This was the easy bit, the embroidery over the frame of a brutal upbringing, with an abusive father, a weak and increasingly frail mother and only Brandon on whom she could rely. ‘It was hard, but it shaped me.’ She could talk for hours on this, and rattled into her standard speech on the rare good side of her childhood. The black velvet of the night sky, the huge moon hanging low, the howl of the wolves in the distance and sometimes not the distance, the drifts of snow in the winter. The isolation. The cold. Working in the daytime, studying in the long winter nights, driven by an unwavering determination to be out of that place and into the real world.

  Wyoming had been her personal hell, but its cold isolation had forged her steel soul. Did she regret what she was, she wondered, briefly, as she prattled on, but she caught herself up. She couldn’t afford to ponder on the philosophy of life with Fi Styles sitting in front of her, ready to slip in a sly question when her concentration had lapsed.

  ‘So the big question.’ Fi put her head to one side, almost coquettishly. ‘How did you come to be interested in the classics?’

  Those cold, hard winters had been dark and lonely. ‘The snow was feet thick. We couldn’t go out. There was little to do but we had a lot of books, so I read. One of the books was a collection of poetry and that’s where I learned about Wordsworth.’ It could have been any other book she’d picked up at that moment when her soul was ready to fly. It could have been Shakespeare of Longfellow or Austen but chance had chosen a damp copy of the Prelude, its pages spotted with mould, to spark her lifelong obsession and she’d fitted too easily into a world where a brother and sister were so dangerously interdependent. ‘His poetry spoke to me. I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, the self-sufficing power of Solitude.’ She paused. William, Mary and Dorothy, at once domestic and unconventional, had become an alternative family into whose lives she’d escaped. ‘But there was no way, or seemed no way, to fulfil my dream to become an academic. And one day my life changed.’

  ‘Your father died?’

  ‘Yes. I
couldn’t stay on the ranch. There were too many memories.’ She was about to quote William again but she could tell Fi wasn’t interested, so she stopped.

  ‘So you left Wyoming and went to the big city. What then?’

  ‘I didn’t leave it.’ Cody hated inaccuracy. ‘I went to the University of Wyoming, in Laramie. It’s hardly a big city.’

  ‘But it must have felt like it to you.’

  Cody was off again, another tour through the comfortable parts of her life. She couldn’t believe how easy a ride Fi Styles was giving her. ‘Coming to Laramie was a step up for me. I adapted very quickly to a socialised environment.’ Maybe she should show a little humility. ‘My past made me what I am. Sometimes maybe I should be more sympathetic to those who didn’t have to endure the hardships that I endured when I was growing up.’ That was as far as she was prepared to compromise. ‘That said, I have to be true to myself. Young people these days have no idea what hardships other people have to endure. They care only about their tender sensibilities, about their own safety, about being able to do what they want when they want. They believe that democracy means getting what they want. They believe that their right not to be offended overrides anyone else’s right to speak. Well, I can tell you that I shall continue to speak out, within the law, in the defence of freedom of speech, and I will speak out on behalf of those who daren’t speak out, even if I disagree with them. We must be free or die, as William wrote.’

  This, she could see, was the sort of thing Fi Styles was after. The woman was nodding and making notes, not asking any questions but allowing Cody to rattle on. She dared a glance at Ashleigh O’Halloran, and found the detective watching her in silence. Let her make what she wanted of that.

  ‘And so,’ Fi said, when the story of Cody’s career had followed seamlessly on from that of her upbringing, ‘tell us about your breakthrough in the story of the Wordsworths. Your findings are controversial at best.’

  There was nothing new to say. ‘You attended my lecture. You have the press pack. You have my book. Everything is in there, the process of my research, how I came here to Grasmere in October last year to show the Trust the papers, how excited they were about them. Of course, I can outline for you the moment when I realised I had something special.’

  She paused and lifted the cup of peppermint tea, which she’d been holding throughout the interview, to her lips. It wasn’t unpleasant when cold. ‘I knew, of course, that the last reference to the complete Alfoxden Journal placed it in the possession of Wordsworth’s biographer, Professor William Knight, in St Andrews. I had put out feelers there for some time and eventually it paid off. Sebastian Mulholland got in touch. He’s an antiquarian bookseller and he has a phenomenal memory for detail. He told me he remembered seeing something, many years before, in a bookshelf in a private house. The owner of that house had died and the house was to be sold.’

  She sipped her tea again, savouring the memory. ‘I instructed him to ask if he could buy the books on my behalf and he did. I told him I would take them all, unseen, for five hundred pounds. And it turned out Seb had been right. The books included Dorothy’s handwritten journal.’

  Even thinking about it set her heart hammering, and it got better. ‘As you know, the contents of the journal were disappointing. I shouldn’t say that, of course. It was – it is – a very precious document and I can tell you that I intend to gift it to the Wordsworth Trust.’ Fi Styles could have that nugget of information for nothing. ‘They were very helpful to me during my research.’ And they’d been discreet when she’d shown them the papers. That was one reason for giving them the journals. She no longer had any academic interest in it, and it could be used by others who wanted to analyse William’s relationship with his sister.

  ‘How incredibly generous of you. And the letters?’

  The letters were different. There was something about them that Cody, as a historian, couldn’t let go. ‘It was what was in them that really changed everything. Folded at the back of the journal were letters written by Mary Wordsworth, William’s wife, that clearly indicated that the relationship between William and Dorothy was closer than society considered decent. Mary asks Dorothy to take the best care of her husband when she’s not there and tend to his every bodily need. At one point she asks about Dorothy’s condition. She recommends herbs her sister-in-law can take. The implication is clear – that Dorothy, so devoted to her brother, was carrying his child.’

  A tiny vein fluttered in her own belly as she thought about it. How had Dorothy responded? Had she wanted to keep her baby, or was she content to sacrifice it for her brother’s reputation? What sins had these two siblings committed for each other’s sake? ‘I’d suspected it for a long time. At last, I had proof.’

  ‘What a wonderful moment for you.’ Fi nodded, encouragingly, as if Cody were a child who’d correctly answered a difficult question. That put Cody’s back up even more, if it was possible. How had she come to let this aggressive young woman sit in her living room and question her in the first place? What had come over her?

  Ah. She remembered. It was because the girl had been talking to Owen and he, in an unbalanced state of mind and with revenge at the forefront of his heart, might have told her anything. Lies or truth, it didn’t matter. Owen would have sought to do as much damage to Cody’s career as he could, by any means. That was why she was here. It was why the detective, unwittingly, was there. She forced a smile. ‘It was.’

  ‘And these letters. They’re genuine. You had them verified?’

  Oh, so that was it. After all, it was a pity Ashleigh O’Halloran was there, or she’d have ripped into Fi in a way that would have made her a prime suspect for something, for sure. ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Independently?’

  ‘Yes. By an expert in New York.’

  ‘George Gould, I believe.’ Fi shook her head, an exact mimicry of Cody’s own mannerism.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Is that George Gould the independent expert you are rumoured to have had an affair with?’

  Jesus. No wonder Owen had killed himself, if he’d told Fi that. He’d have been terrified of the consequences, and rightly so. Cody’s fury towards him gathered strength, even though he was beyond her reach, but her battle, for the moment, was with Fi and it wouldn’t be won by fury, but by disarming honesty. ‘Honey, you need to understand. They were verified by the foremost independent expert in the field. It isn’t a large field of expertise. It so happens that this man is someone I knew well and had been close to. Yes. Socially and academically it’s all pretty incestuous. But there was no affair.’ It was a safe lie. George would deny it as hotly as she had, and there was only the word of a dead troublemaker to say otherwise. ‘Not that it’s your business, and not that I care what people think. You know about me. If I’d wanted to sleep with George, I’d have done that. I won’t let other people’s morals hold me back.’ But in reality, George hadn’t been that interested, and there had been other people around at the time so she hadn’t needed him. Not in that way, at least.

  ‘That’s not what Owen said.’

  ‘With respect. There’s no way Owen could have known. It wasn’t something I felt the need to discuss with him.’

  Fi’s smile betrayed her. She must already be writing up the article in her head, probing for the sensational angle. ‘What kind of relationship did you have with Owen, Dr Wilder?’

  ‘No doubt Owen told you that. I prefer not to discuss my personal relationships with strangers.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s the case. I’m sure you have every reason.’

  Cody sat for a moment and stared at Fi’s pretty, little-girl face, the simpering green eyes. Did she think that by playing it simple she’d make any kind of breakthrough? ‘We know that poor Owen was unstable. I don’t think it’s appropriate or respectful to cover this topic.’ Bowing her head to try and shame Fi off the subject, she chanced a look at the detective, who sat curling the end of her plait round her finger in silen
t fascination.

  ‘The letters.’ Fi resumed the attack, though subtly. She, too, spared a quick look at Ashleigh. ‘May I see them?’

  ‘I don’t have them here. They’re precious documents.’

  ‘Is there any doubt at all about their authenticity?’

  ‘No.’ Cody sighed.

  ‘Then you won’t mind me approaching Dr Gould on the subject.’

  ‘I can’t stop you, but even if I could I’m very happy for you to do so.’

  ‘Thanks. This has been a most helpful interview.’ Fi had achieved whatever she came to achieve. She got to her feet, and Ashleigh did likewise, and Cody saw them off the premises.

  So that was it. Before he’d killed himself, Owen had sown the seeds of his revenge and now they were blooming. Fi Styles, Cody was sure, was no investigative journalist looking for a big story, but an aspiring one seeking a breakthrough. Owen’s story might give her that, but at what cost to Cody? It wouldn’t take much of an allegation for her enemies to rally round and her reputation as a researcher to be besmirched.

  And that wasn’t going to happen. She paused for a while to be sure they’d gone. George had assured her the letters were genuine, and she believed it. That wouldn’t stop someone trying to cause trouble.

  Swiftly, she moved to the drawer in the bureau, turned the key and pulled it open. The letters were in there, in a cardboard folder and three layers of acid-free tissue paper. They should be in controlled conditions in a fireproof safe somewhere but without them she felt deprived. Instead she’d brought them with her and then taken the ridiculous notion that Owen might try to destroy them if he couldn’t destroy her and in the end he, in his weakness, had chosen to destroy himself.

  And yet she felt jumpy about them even after he was dead, unable to bring herself to leave them with Lynx. Fi’s questioning of their authenticity only sharpened her concern. She got them out, partly to be sure they were there and partly for a quick adrenaline fix. It was unbelievable how much they mattered to her – more than any human ever had, except Brandon. Any psychologist would have a field day with so strong a reliance not just on something material but something rooted so far in the past.