by Jo Allen
‘Girlfriend!’ Mikey said, his mouth slack with surprise. ‘You kept that one quiet.’ But if Jude heard he couldn’t be bothered with the discussion, and slid out of the door, as unobtrusively as possible.
‘Did you hear that?’ Mikey asked Becca, oblivious. ‘A girlfriend? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’
‘Yes. I heard.’
‘Why didn’t I know about it?’
‘I didn’t know, either.’ She picked up her glass and sipped and Mikey, the bone of contention removed, slipped back down to his seat and his pint.
A girlfriend was no real surprise. Jude wasn’t a bad-looking man, a bit of a catch if you liked them mean-looking and weren’t too desperate for a casual smile. (That was harsh. Jude smiled a lot, in private, when he was happy.) And she’d hazard a sportsman’s guess at who the woman was, too – the blonde, overtly sexy detective sergeant with whom he’d been so obviously smitten when she’d seen the two of them together a couple of months earlier. The woman wasn’t the most beautiful in town, but she had a figure that any red-blooded male might take a few risks for and she compensated by accessorising for impact. Her blonde hair was unjustly natural. The whole effect, and the confidence that came with it, gave her the knack of making people – man or woman – look at her with interest and more. Perhaps it was as well Jude had bailed out of that particular date, or Becca would have spent the evening sneaking little looks across the pub at them, wondering whether she and Jude would still be together if she’d done things differently, and that would have put Adam out just when things were beginning to move forward between them.
Jude was a detective. He always got his man – or woman. ‘Good luck to you,’ she muttered, after his departed figure. ‘And I don’t need to know who she is. Because I really don’t care.’
Because, she assured herself, she really didn’t.
*
‘What was all that about?’ Ashleigh must have been almost at the pub when she got his text, because she was doing her best impression of an undercover cop, loitering in Angel Lane, on the other side of Great Dockray.
‘I’ll tell you later.’ Reaching her, he gave her a longer and more obvious kiss than was strictly necessary, a gesture of defiance aimed at Becca even though she wouldn’t see it, then turned along the street with her hand clasped firmly in his. ‘We’ll try Xavier’s. They have about fifty types of gin and you’re bound to find one that suits you.’
‘Don’t be cheeky. I’m easy to please.’
His mood, which had been soured by the unexpected encounter in the Dockray Hall, mellowed as they progressed through the town centre, hand in hand, and arrived at a wine bar that wasn’t to Adam’s taste and where, if the birthday party moved on, they could be reasonably certain of being undisturbed. ‘My turn to buy, I think.’
‘I’m not sure it is, but I can’t be bothered to argue.’ She slid out of her coat and settled herself down in a corner of the wine bar with a sigh, and when Jude returned with the drinks she was already measuring him up with that quizzical look that warned him he might as well tell her what was bothering him, if only to save her the effort of working it out. Ashleigh was smart and had an instinctive understanding of people she’d never met before. Those she knew had no chance of hiding their weaknesses or disguising them as strengths.
Fortunately for him, she was generally forgiving of his many faults, and there was no denying that it was very much less complicated dating someone who understood how much he loved the job and why he sometimes had to let it take priority over everyone else, than it had been dating Becca, whose patience had eventually run out.
‘Here you go. Cheers.’ He lifted his pint. ‘Thank you for sparing me from a lonely evening at work.’ He smiled at her and drank. After all, Becca had been right and all work and no play did no good at all.
‘So who’s Doddsy stood you up for? I thought your little man-to-man chats were sacred.’ She curled her hands around her glass and the ice cracked inside it.
In all the time Jude had known Doddsy his friend had remained single, a cautious celibate unwilling to take a risky step. ‘I don’t know for certain, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion the better offer came from Tyrone Garner.’
‘Oh, really?’ Ashleigh obviously couldn’t have seen the two of them together, or she wouldn’t have been so surprised. ‘I thought Doddsy had been a bit more cheerful recently.’
‘Yes. I might be wrong but I overheard the two of them discovering a shared interest in folk music and there’s a band on at the Gate Inn in Yanwath tonight. Who knows where that’ll end up?’ He grinned. Being in the police didn’t leave you time for friendships, but the ones he forged were solid and long-lasting and Doddsy, so unlike him in almost every way, was the person on whom he could always rely.
‘That’s very sweet.’ Ashleigh, who was as fond of Doddsy in her own way as Jude was, smiled at him over the rim of her glass. ‘There’s quite an age gap there.’ Tyrone was twenty, Mikey’s age, and the two of them had been at school together, though their paths had diverged early.
‘Yep. Twenty-five years.’
‘That’ll get people talking.’
‘I expect it will. But they’re both over the age of consent and we’re all grown up and tolerant, these days.’ Remembering how DS Groves had leered over Ashleigh in the corridor, he revised his best estimate of human nature downwards. ‘Well, most of us are. And those of us who are still dinosaurs will be retired before we know it.’
She lifted her head as if she were about to say something, then stopped.
‘Well?’ he said to her. ‘Out with it. What’s on your mind?’
‘Nothing. I was just going to ask you what caused the last-minute change of venue.’
‘Oh. That.’ It was in his mind to play it down, but she’d know. ‘I bumped into someone I know.’
‘Oh, I see. You’re ashamed of me.’
She said it with a laugh but he couldn’t risk her taking him seriously and seized the opportunity to close his warm hand over her cold one. ‘No, of course not. Even my mum knows about you now. Amazing no one found out before, but there you go.’
She didn’t look at him but disentangled her fingers from his and stroked the back of his hand with her forefinger. A tingle ran up his spine. ‘Was it your old mate Adam Fleetwood in the pub?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘As in, he was there but it wasn’t him you were avoiding.’
‘Yes.’ Letting go of her hand, Jude drank deeply from his pint, once more reviewing and reconsidering his behaviour of a few years before, checking every aspect of it and finding himself guiltless even though everyone else still judged him for it. ‘It’s his birthday. When we were younger, we always met up. His birthday’s two days before mine and we always used to celebrate together. It was fine. I met his eye, I shook his hand and left.’ There had been a challenge in the look that Adam had given him, one that promised his sins weren’t forgotten and would never be forgiven, but Jude hadn’t risen to it. He could be proud of himself.
‘So if it wasn’t him, who was it? Becca?’
Jude met her gaze. He’d been in love with Becca for long after she’d ended the relationship, but he thought he could be honest with himself and say it was over now. It had annoyed him to see Adam flaunting their friendship and hinting that it could be so much more, annoyed him even more that Becca didn’t seem to see just how cynical his attentions to her were, but that was all it was. She could do whatever she wanted with whoever she wanted and it wouldn’t bother him now that he had Ashleigh, who understood him to a fault, who was as good in bed as he could have hoped she would be, and who was also once bitten and not looking for a complicated romance. ‘She was there, as it happens. She hangs out with that crowd. But she wasn’t the reason I left. It was Mikey.’
‘Ah.’
He wasn’t a man who worried about things beyond his control, but Mikey haunted his dreams and his nightmares. In the two months he’d been building that tentative relations
hip with Ashleigh he’d told her a lot and there was a lot more she’d guessed, but he hadn’t told her quite how deeply he worried about his brother. ‘I know he’s twenty but he’s still a kid. He’s still got a lot of growing up to do.’
‘Twenty’s an adult.’
Once again, Jude made the comparison between Mikey and Tyrone Garner. ‘But a very young adult. He’s hanging round with friends my age, not his age. They tolerate him, but they aren’t what he needs. And it’s all about me. It’s Adam and Mikey, the two of them, for their own different reasons, punishing me for having let them down.’
‘You didn’t let either of them down. You did what you could for Mikey, and Adam let himself down.’
He shrugged, a gesture that represented his helplessness. ‘Mikey needs a father and he won’t let me help him.’
‘He never sees your dad at all?’
‘No. He hasn’t spoken to him since Dad walked out on us. Not on me, strictly speaking. I’d left home by then. But he walked out on my mum and he walked out on Mikey. She’d been diagnosed with cancer the week before.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ He could tell from her expression that it was only a half truth. She might not have known the detail but she’d have guessed there was something there. ‘Do you still see your dad?’
‘Yes. It’s something else Mikey holds against me.’
‘And do you get on with him?’
‘Not as well as I’d like to. Better than Mikey thinks he deserves.’ He shook his head, a wry grin on his lips. ‘Mikey doesn’t hold his drink that well. That’s why I left. Because if I’d stayed and he’d had a few, there would have been a scene. I don’t want that, and you shouldn’t have to sit through it. So it’s best avoided.’
‘You’re both right, of course,’ she said, after a moment, and the blue eyes darkened a little, as if her heart had hardened at a difficult memory. ‘Some people don’t deserve to be forgiven, or don’t deserve a second chance. But just because they don’t deserve it does that mean we shouldn’t give it to them?’
He took it as a rhetorical question, knowing that she was thinking of Scott and the number of times she’d forgiven his infidelities. He suspected that she might have given in once more if her husband hadn’t turned up drunk and tried to win her back by aggression, but Ashleigh was a woman who couldn’t be bullied and that had been Scott’s final, futile roll of the dice. She had Jude, now, instead of a philandering wastrel, and he had her instead of an emotional butterfly with no understanding of his motives.
With that, the conversation ground to a halt. He’d told her as much as he wanted to about Mikey, and was on the edge of revealing his deepest fear – that what he’d done for Mikey wasn’t enough to protect him from the effects of what he’d done to Adam Fleetwood. And he could tell from the rueful expression on her face that she was regretting that last glimpse she’d let him have into her heart and the part of it that would always belong to someone else.
‘I’ll get us another drink,’ she said, with a sigh, ‘and after that we’d better get back. Because it’s not as if tomorrow’s going to be a quiet day, is it?’
*
Walking her back home, Jude passed the Dockray Hall with a certain degree of trepidation, almost expecting Adam and Becca and Mikey and their friends to come rolling out and Mikey, with a drink or two inside him, to get bold and try to cause a scene, but the walk up to Castletown passed without incident.
‘Coffee?’ she asked him, before she turned to unlock the front door.
He was tempted, as he always was, but with Ashleigh he could refuse without offence. ‘Better not.’
‘No, you’re right. We spend far too much time having coffee together. Maybe next time we’re both off together we’ll find time for something a bit more exciting.’
The roguish wink tempted him into a more intense goodbye than he’d intended, and it was a moment before she extricated herself, with a giggle. ‘Behave yourself.’
‘I behave myself in the office but I can’t keep it up all the time. I’m only human.’
‘I love your humanity,’ she said, stepping away from him into the shadows and rearranging her hair. ‘By the way, I had one thought. It could wait until tomorrow, but it’s something that just occurred to me. About Cody Wilder.’
‘Go on.’
‘If you’re going up to talk to her tomorrow, you might like to ask her about her letters. Ask her to show them to you.’
‘Do you think she won’t?’
‘I don’t know. But she wouldn’t show them to Fi Styles. And then it occurred to me. She obviously knows Lynx. Pretty well. And she obviously really values the letters. So maybe she gave them to him to look after. And maybe that’s what someone thought it was worth killing him for.’
14
Ashleigh O’Halloran’s unexpected silence hadn’t marked the end of the police’s interest, nor even their retreat in the face of Cody’s brusque manner. Cody hadn’t really expected it would and throughout the interview she’d given to Fi Styles – which had passed with less hassle than she’d expected – she’d been aware of the sergeant, sharp as a ferret, sitting in the corner and making the occasional notes, but mainly watching in silence.
Perhaps it was the silent approach that had unnerved her. She was used to people who couldn’t keep their own counsel in the face of her outrageous assertions, who abused her publicly to her face and anonymously through social media. With those people she could give as good as she got, but in her considerable armoury she had no defence against silent evaluation and the sense that the woman understood her too well. For that reason, she was relieved when it was Jude Satterthwaite who appeared on her doorstep the next morning, even though irritation clouded his brow like a swarm of summer midges on the surface of a lake. She could reasonably expect a fight with him, and she’d a chance of coming out of it as the victor.
‘Chief Inspector.’ She folded her arms firmly across her chest, blocking the entry she knew she’d have to concede and aware of Brandon’s shadow behind her. She knew, without looking, that he’d be smiling. ‘What is it now?’
‘May I come in?’
‘Is it important?’
‘Misleading the police is very important.’
She stepped aside to let him in as Brandon headed towards the kitchen. They’d found out about Lynx, then. It had been a matter of time. ‘Who’s alleged to have done that?’
‘This isn’t an allegation. You claimed you never went down to the New Agers’ camp at the bottom of the lane. You said you had nothing to do with them. The forensic evidence proves that wasn’t the case.’
‘Proves is a very strong word.’ She turned and stalked through the narrow hallway into the kitchen, leaving Jude to close the front door behind him and follow her through. Brandon, a man who was happier tinkering with the engine of a pickup truck, was standing by the kitchen unit fiddling with the finer features of the coffee maker, frowning at it like a master watchmaker dissatisfied with the work of an apprentice.
‘Honey,’ she said to him, with a wink that Jude Satterthwaite couldn’t see, ‘you’ll see we have an uninvited guest. But I like to be hospitable. Would you make us some coffee?’
Brandon pressed a couple of buttons and the machine fizzed and hissed like a miniature steam train. ‘Coffee, Chief Inspector? Black? Sugar? Have a seat.’
The visitor sat down, the expression on his face relentless in its annoyance. For the first time, Cody felt the very slightest shadow, a chilling sense of doom, as she too sat down at the table from which Owen had stepped to his death. Eventually, things came back to haunt you. Owen’s suicide had removed any threat he might have posed to her and for that reason she’d welcomed it, but Lynx’s murder implied a threat from another direction. Perhaps it wasn’t wise, after all, to be so fiercely independent and to turn her back on those who might help her, but what help could any of them bring her when she had the unconditional support of Brandon, always watching her back. ‘Biscuits? Or we have
some chocolates.’ She tried to stare him down and failed. On reflection she shouldn’t have lied to him about knowing Lynx, or about the time she’d spent at the New Age camp, but she hadn’t thought it mattered and everyone needed some happy secrets. ‘The chocolates are handmade. Lynx gave them to me.’
‘Your coffee.’ Brandon turned on his most charming smile, and she could see Jude Satterthwaite looking at him as if he were trying to make sense of him, why he was there.
The detective waved the chocolates aside with a word of thanks, and turned back to Cody, who was beginning to get the impression that he wasn’t, as she’d previously thought, no match for her but had chosen to go soft on her for reasons of his own. Maybe she should have told him everything she knew about Lynx earlier, but that was the devil in her. He hadn’t needed to know and she couldn’t abide the entitlement that always came with men in senior positions when their female colleagues had to fight for it. ‘Okay, Dr Wilder. Can we talk?’
‘You want to talk about Lynx.’
‘I do. But before that I want to make a few things clear to you. The evidence points to Owen Armitstead’s death as being suicide, but with Lynx we’re dealing with a violent murderer. I don’t need to remind you that threats of personal violence have been directed at you.’
‘If it’s my safety you’re concerned about, it would be easiest for everyone if you let me return to the States.’
It was obvious that there was nothing he’d like more than to see the back of her, and she took that as a small victory. ‘You’re a potential witness in a murder case at best, and it’s in everybody’s interests for you to cooperate fully with the inquiry. The sooner we can finish it, the sooner you can leave.’
At best. For the second time in a few minutes, she felt a qualm. The man was looking at her with eyes that threatened judgement. She swatted the fanciful thought away. Conscience was weakness and she was strong in her own defence. ‘So you want me to tell you everything about Cain, Chief Inspector.’