by Jo Allen
‘Cain?’ He glanced out of the window in the direction of the lake, though from where she sat a bank of bushes that settled in the crooked elbow of Coffin Lane obscured the view. ‘You knew his real name?’
‘Yes. His name was Cain Harper.’
‘He told you that?’
‘I’ve known Cain for a long time.’ Using Lynx’s given name did more than establish herself as the owner of particular information. It kept a contact with a memory of an older, even a kinder, time. She shivered at her own weakness. When had she become a prey to sentiment?
Uninvited, Brandon took a seat at the table beside them and helped himself to a chocolate, but what she had to say was so painful and so personal that she couldn’t bear him to hear it. He knew the story, but he’d never had to hear her tell it. ‘Brandon.’
Her look to him was the nearest she ever got to seeming apologetic, but he read it well. ‘Everything okay, honey?’
‘I just realised. We don’t have any milk.’
‘I’ll run down and pick some up.’ They drank their coffee black but he was quick to go, hooking his jacket from the back of the chair and over his shoulder in one fluid movement. When the front door had clicked behind him, the chief inspector pulled out a notebook and pen and began to write. ‘Fire away. I’m interested in everything you have to tell me about him.’
He wrote fast and neatly, in a bold hand that sprawled across the page. Cody had never studied graphology, but his self-confidence spilled out from the tip of his pen. ‘Is this a witness statement?’
‘Yes. I’ll get it typed up and sent to you for signature. And in view of our earlier conversation, I’ll add the warning. You already know that lying to the police is an offence. We also take a hell of a dim view of people who withhold information from us, if that information might help us to find a killer.’
Ruthlessly, Cody smothered the whisper of her conscience. Life was a long game and her role in it was to tell the police enough to preserve her innocence. ‘Your forensic evidence has likely shown that I slept with Cain.’ The phrase had an apocalyptic ring to it, so much so that she regretted using it.
‘Yes. Care to tell me about it?’
‘He was a former lover.’ Irritated by the way he tapped his pen on the word former after he’d written it in his notes, she rushed onwards, past the barrier of his judgement. ‘I’ve known him for a long time.’
‘Can we go back to the beginning? When and where did you meet him?’
‘Way back when I first went to university. As you’ll no doubt know from my interview with Fi Styles, I left the ranch and came to Laramie. Cain was at college there, a couple of years ahead of me. He was already a bit of an outlier. He was different and so was I. It was natural that we were attracted to one another.’
Time played tricks on some, but not on others. Twenty-five years before, Cain had seemed old, sophisticated and world-weary to a girl who came from the wilderness. ‘His parents were traditional hippies – San Francisco in the Sixties, flowers in your hair, free love and so on. He was brought up on a commune and a part of him yearned to be conventional, which was how he came to Laramie. But when he came to a conventional place, he wanted to be different.’ Some people could never be satisfied. That had been Lynx’s curse, doomed to wander the world like a modern-day Flying Dutchman, caught between two worlds and able to settle in neither. She stopped talking as she thought about him and once more Wordsworth offered comfort, almost as if he’d known Lynx, the sleepless soul that perished in its pride.
The detective let her think for a while, longer than he needed to and she found herself strangely grateful for that, but his patience wasn’t endless. ‘And after he left Laramie?’
‘I don’t know. We lost touch. But now you know who he is, you’ll likely be able to find all that out. Maybe let me know, too.’ Because there were things he hadn’t told her, so keen was he to leave parts of his life behind him. None of them would be traumatic, but she’d like to know them, if only because there would be no one else to tell her.
‘You were close to him?’ he asked.
After all, this chief inspector was smarter than she’d thought. He understood that having sex with someone needn’t mean anything but that there were people who kept a piece of your soul even when you were no longer together. Cain’s earthy scent, the rough touch of his skin, his animal hunger, had gone, but they’d always be a part of her. ‘I suspect you think I may have killed him, or at least had something to do with his death. I didn’t. So perhaps you’ll let me explain.’
‘Go ahead.’ He reached out his hand for his coffee cup, and tried to meet her eye, but she looked away. There were things you should only think of when you were concentrating on something harmless, to take the pain away. Instead she stared out of the window and saw a robin, feathers fluffed up against the cold, shouting indignantly at the world from its place on a branch. At least she could smile at that.
‘You’ll have heard worse stories than mine. I’m not self-indulgent and I don’t want your pity. I was brought up on a ranch in the wilds. You’ll know that. But you won’t know – or you might think you know but not understand – how isolating that was. If you need help, there’s no one. If you meet a bear, or a coyote, or you run across the tracks of a wolf pack, there’s no one. If a tree falls across the track, you move it yourself. If you tread on a rattlesnake, you die. But I learned young that the biggest danger out in the wilderness is the same as it is everywhere else in the goddamned world. It’s other people.’
He wrote that down on his pad and threatened her with another empathetic pause but she ploughed on before she could dwell too long on it, before her heartrate rose and the memories overwhelmed her. ‘My father was a loner and a violent man. He raped and abused my mother. He did the same to me.’ Lynx, of course, had known. ‘I fell pregnant and my mother took me to a clinic in Laramie for an illegal abortion. I was fourteen.’ There. It was out and she could roll the stone back over the dungeon door of history. ‘No living person knows that but you and Brandon, and I want to keep it that way.’
‘I’ll be discreet.’ He didn’t write that down, and though he made no promises she almost believed in his sincerity.
The story wasn’t over. ‘Mom died not long after that. You can imagine the turn my life took then.’ A shiver, one she hoped Jude Satterthwaite didn’t see, crept across her skin. ‘Fortunately, karma paid Pop back with an equal measure of brutality. Three years later he went out to look at the cattle and never came back. Brandon went out to look for him and found his truck empty. There was no sign of him, and he never came home. As soon as we realised he must be dead, I applied to go to university, and the first person I met there was Cain.’
‘You must have been seventeen? That’s very young.’
The robin strutted its way along the branch, skipped down and fluttered across the damp and moss-ridden lawn. A couple of sparrows, nervous, took off in front of it. She smiled, a thin smile at how life had dealt with her after her father died. ‘In many ways Cain was a rough man. He knew neither subtlety nor security. I was drawn to him because he was the first man apart from my brother to treat me kindly.’ The clock ticked. The coffee machine emitted a strange sigh as it cooled down. ‘That was why he was special to me. He was the first man I willingly had sex with and I learned a lot from him, but we grew out of one another. When he left Laramie it was easy to let him go, but I always wondered what had happened to him.’
‘Were you surprised to see him here?’
‘Not especially.’ Nothing Lynx did had ever surprised her. ‘He told me he’d been bumming around Europe in different places, but he must have kept up with the world somehow, because he’d seen something about my work. He came to Grasmere on the off chance of finding me and I wasn’t there. But he found the New Agers and he joined them.’
‘Was he keen to see you again?’
‘I don’t know if he was.’ She turned her back on the robin, now busy probing the mossy lawn, listeni
ng for worms in exactly the same thoughtful way Jude Satterthwaite was listening to her account for mistakes or treasures or things she’d wish she hadn’t said. ‘Cain – Lynx – was always very… casual. He never planned anything. I think he turned up here, found a connection, stayed to see if anything came of it. It did, but if it hadn’t, he’d have drifted on somewhere else.’ Poor Lynx; he’d been the most profoundly unsatisfiable man. ‘He was an old friend and a good lover. That’s how I came to be in his tent before he died. For old times’ sake.’
He sat back, nodding. ‘Thanks, Dr Wilder. That’s helpful.’ He even managed to mask what must be his annoyance at not having had the story sooner. ‘It’s no consolation, but I understand why you didn’t want to share the full story.’
‘Remember what I said. I want to keep it secret.’
‘And as I promised. I’ll do my best.’ He held back a moment in uncertainty, then must have decide to risk the compliment. ‘That must have taken courage.’
A swell of gratitude rose within her, and she forced it down. Was she so desperate that she needed sympathy from a policeman? ‘No courage at all, Chief Inspector. I hated my father. He died and we all lived on. I put the trauma behind me.’ She sat back, as if the interview was over. That night, she knew, she would have nightmares.
He put the pen down. ‘One more thing. The tent had been ransacked, as if someone had been looking for something. Do you have any idea what that might have been?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘I wondered if you’d given him something to look after.’
He, or someone in his team, was very smart indeed. ‘If it’s relevant, I did think about asking him to look after something for me. But in the end, I decided not to do it.’
‘That wouldn’t have been Mary Wordsworth’s letters, would it?’
‘I take it it was your detective sergeant who worked that out?’
He smiled. ‘Yes. She could tell that you seemed attached to them. So much so that you seemed reluctant to show them to Fi Styles. We wondered if part of that reluctance might have stemmed from the fact that you don’t have them. And whether you might be concerned about them.’
There was a reason people withheld things from the police. If you gave them even a little information, they would extrapolate from it and sometimes they were correct. ‘I didn’t show them to the journalist because I don’t know she understands. They’re precious documents – not necessarily valuable, but irreplaceable. They should be kept in controlled conditions and I shouldn’t have brought them with me, but they mean a lot to me and I couldn’t bear to leave them behind.’ That had been a mistake, too. The letters had been copied and scanned and she had all the information she needed for her work on her laptop but she’d brought them with her in a moment of weakness, like a child dependent upon a security blanket. ‘That’s the reason I decided not to ask Cain to take them.’
‘Do you have them there?’
‘At the moment, yes. It isn’t ideal. When I return to New York, I’ll make arrangements for their permanent care. But I do have them.’
‘And they’re genuine?’
She scowled at him, as if he’d questioned the paternity of her child. ‘I’ll be astonished if they’re not.’
‘And he knew how much they mattered to you?’
‘No.’
For a second he stared at her as if he were about to ask to see them, but the key in the front door heralded Brandon’s return. ‘That’s fine, then. I’ll get this typed up and someone will bring it through for you to sign.’ He got up and picked up his coat.
‘Do you know who killed Cain?’ She asked him in an undertone, as if it mattered that Brandon might overhear.
‘No.’
‘Or why?’
‘If we find the answer to that question, I might be able to answer your first one,’ he said, shrugged on his coat and left.
*
Still mulling over what Cody Wilder had told him, Jude had barely got as far as Grasmere village when his phone rang. He pulled up on a double yellow line to answer it, justifying it to himself as important when he saw that the number was Doddsy’s. ‘Have you found it? The murder weapon?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it? Where? And where are you?’
‘About ten yards from you. In the cafe.’
Looking up, Jude saw Doddsy standing laughing at him in the window of the cafe which had somehow become a base for their inquiries within the village, with Ashleigh at his shoulder. So much the better. ‘I’ll join you.’ He drove on and squeezed the Mercedes into the car park at the back of the garden centre, then jogged back to the cafe.
The investigating team had taken up their position at the back of the room and Graham and Eliza had set out the tables in such a way as to give them an element of privacy and had placed reserved notices on the closest tables for good measure – something they probably couldn’t have afforded to do in the summer. But crime was an ill wind and the Gordons’ takings would be well up on normal as a result of Cody Wilder and the little local difficulty she’d brought down upon the village.
‘Okay.’ He slid into the seat beside Ashleigh, not looking at her but nevertheless with a comforting sense of her presence, and addressed himself to Doddsy. ‘What is it? And where?’
‘It’s pretty much as the PM and the forensic evidence suggested. I’ve packed it off to the lab.’ He flicked up pictures on his phone and handed it over.
Image after close-up image of a six-inch hunting knife wedged into a cleft in the rock, its blade dull in the sunless conditions, flicked across the screen. Enlarging the image, he frowned over it. It didn’t look as if whoever had hidden it had tried too hard. ‘Blood?’
‘Yes.’
‘But not much.’
‘I’d say it’s been badly cleaned. Of course,’ Doddsy reprimanded himself, ‘I say the murder weapon. It may not be.’
‘Let’s hope it is, or we’ll have something else to worry about.’ With one last look, Jude handed the phone back.
‘I think we can assume it is. I’ve leaned on the guys in the lab and they’re going to get me the results as soon as they can.’
‘Where was it?’
‘One of the search teams found it up in Rydal Caves. The biggest one. Right at the back. Tucked under an overhanging rock, as you can see, but not well hidden.’
Turning to field Ashleigh’s questioning look, Jude reached for a paper napkin, fished out a pen and sketched out a quick map of the area for her benefit. ‘Rydal Caves are some disused slate quarries. You find them all over the place here. These ones are a known beauty spot.’
She looked out of the window as if trying to match the map to the landscape. ‘That’s quite a distance. What is it? Two miles to the far end of Rydal Water?’
‘Nearer three. Probably two and a half to the caves.’ With the blunt end of the pen, Jude traced a possible route from the spot where Lynx’s body had been found, along the shore and up the hill.
‘That’s too far for Storm to have covered in the time he had, then.’ She frowned at the puzzle. ‘Chris could do it, I suppose, but he’s a runner.’
‘I could, too.’
‘Of course.’ She spared his male pride an indulgent smile. ‘But Storm couldn’t. And the time doesn’t fit with our witness who saw him.’
‘We spoke to Storm again,’ Doddsy said. ‘No good. He just closed up on us.’
‘I’m not surprised. They don’t trust the police, and I can hardly blame them.’ Having just dealt with Cody’s refusal to cooperate, Jude felt rather more sympathy with Storm and Raven, but understanding their attitude didn’t make it right. There was a balance to be struck between procedures and people, but the New Agers, rejecting everything that smacked of modernity, pushed it too far, freezing with terror at the sight of a uniform or any kind of questioning, any challenge to their simplicity. ‘Did he just refuse to answer?’
‘Not exactly.’ Ashleigh, tapping her finger on the desk, loo
ked as if she knew where they’d gone wrong and wished she could try again but trust, when it was lost, couldn’t easily be regained. ‘He insists he followed someone he thought was Lynx through the woods, as far as the footbridge at the end of the lake, then lost sight of him and came straight back. And in fairness to him, he had time to do that, though not much more, and it’s just about plausible that the person he was following had either cut off the path before our witness saw Storm, or else was much further ahead of him than we thought.’
‘And the parcel Storm had?’
‘He flatly denied having had anything. Maybe you want to talk to him about it.’
Would that achieve anything? Probably not. ‘I think I’ll leave that until tomorrow. They aren’t going anywhere, and we have a couple of leads to follow up.’
‘That’s progress, at least.’ Doddsy’s to-do list, Jude noticed with amusement, had the words find murder weapon scored out. ‘Did you get anything from your academic?’
‘Yes.’ Jude turned to smile at Ashleigh again. ‘You were right. There’s a connection between Cody and Lynx – old friends, lovers way back. Current lovers, as the forensics show. And she’d thought of asking him to look after her letters from Mary Wordsworth to Dorothy.’
‘Is that what someone was looking for?’
‘I don’t know. She says she changed her mind and never gave them to him, and no one else knew she’d thought about it. She said it was a passing thought and she never followed it up, but I suppose it’s possible that someone else might have thought that was what she’d done. Heaven only knows what else they might have thought he had. But at least we know who he is. I can get Chris onto that.’ Chris would come up with a profile of Cain Harper by the morning and there would surely be answers to a few questions in there – not least corroboration or otherwise of Cody’s story, though quite why it needed corroboration wasn’t so clear. He remembered his promise. Something would have to be said, but he’d spare her the exposure of every detail. ‘I’ll head back and brief him.’ He looked across at Doddsy. ‘Will I see you up there?’