Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘Thank you.’ She nodded, as if to dismiss him from her presence, then thought of something. ‘You’ve taped off the lane. Can we go back to the cottage?’

  ‘Perhaps you’d be better relocating to a hotel for tonight. Let me know where you are. I hope we’ll be clear of the place tomorrow. I’ll send someone up to the cottage with you to pick up some stuff.’

  That visibly irritated her, but if she was innocent of Fi’s death she must be sensible enough to understand the situation was serious. Leaving Ashleigh to deal with the witness interviews, Jude took himself once more along Red Bank Road and down into the field where Storm and Raven clung resolutely to the last of their innocent way of life. A kettle sang like a bird on the brazier near the main tent and the sides of the canvas shack where Raven did her weaving were looped up to let in the air and light, but the tent was empty. Stepping through the hissing smother from the brazier, Jude took in the single branch of an early-flowering shrub that someone – presumably Raven – had laid against the woodpile. Goodness knew where she’d found it – culled from someone’s garden, perhaps, or given as a gesture of goodwill.

  In the main tent, he found the elderly couple sitting on the floor staring out at the lake in a companionable silence. Raven, he noted, had laid tarot cards out beside her but she wasn’t looking at them. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to bother you both again.’

  Storm scrambled to his feet. ‘I’ll make us tea,’ he said to his wife, and to Jude, he said: ‘Come over with me. You’ll want to ask us questions and I’ll answer them.’

  Jude stood aside to let him pass, then followed him over to the brazier. Three chipped mugs sat on top of a box next to it, and a knitted square sat over a jug that must contain milk.

  ‘You’ll have some tea. Sir,’ added Storm, in his first, uncomfortable concession to the realities of life.

  ‘Just call me Jude, okay?’ Jude curled his hands around the mug that Storm handed him, shaking his head at the offer of milk that would make the tea unpalatable. ‘Strictly speaking, you probably shouldn’t. But let’s keep this a bit less formal than usual, shall we?’ Storm and Raven, unlike Cody, resisted questions on a matter of genuine belief rather than political principle, and what was the point in hammering home your authority when people were already broken by it?

  ‘You want to know about the girl who died.’ Storm tossed his head in a gesture towards the tent. ‘We’ve talked about it. You can leave Raven out of it, and I’ll tell you everything I know. Come away over here, where she can’t hear us.’

  Another carload of police arrived at the scene and headed into the cafe for instructions. Doddsy, his hands plunged into his pockets and a look of philosophical acceptance on his face, strode away from the police tape and into the cafe after them. ‘Go on. Tell me what you know about Fi Styles.’

  ‘Was that her name?’

  ‘You didn’t know it?’

  Storm chewed a charcoal-blackened thumb. ‘I think she introduced herself, but we don’t need names like you do. It didn’t stick.’

  ‘She came down to the camp, then?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of times in the past week. Wanting to talk about the woman up Coffin Lane. I told her Raven and I knew nothing, but Lynx found time to talk to her.’

  Jude couldn’t allow himself to sigh. People always found their tongues when it was too late, but who knew whether Storm’s information might have saved Fi’s life, at least, if he’d revealed it earlier? ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I don’t know. She took him into the village and bought him lunch. He wasn’t quite a part of our world, you know. Not as much as he thought he was. Not as much as we are.’

  ‘I see that.’

  ‘And there was something Raven overheard one night. When Cody was down in the camp.’

  ‘That’ll be one of the visits you seem to have forgotten about when I asked you the first time.’

  Storm tugged at his beard. ‘You know about it now.’

  Undeniable. ‘Why did you lie to me about it?’

  ‘If I’d told you you’d have turned it against me. I know what you people are like.’ Storm’s words were at odds with his submissive body language. ‘You’re like everyone else. You see someone who’s different and you blame them for everything wrong. All you modern, sophisticated folk are the same. See how the villagers talk about Cody Wilder and her brother. I never liked her but I live and let live. I never gaped at them like they’re exhibits in a zoo.’

  It was useless to argue. In any case, there was some truth in it. People did look at Cody with intrigued eyes, stared in fascination at Brandon’s tooled leather cowboy boots. ‘Okay. So tell me about the last time Dr Wilder was down with Lynx.’

  A sidelong, guilty look acknowledged the earlier lie. ‘It was the day of that palaver in the village, when she did her talk or whatever it was she was doing. She came down late at night, after we’d gone to bed. I was asleep, but Raven doesn’t sleep well.’

  Cody had been with Lynx, in a coupling that the two New Agers must have heard. Why had they claimed it had never taken place? ‘What did she hear?’

  ‘Lynx told her that he could tell people things about her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just laughed. A couple of times he talked about her father.’

  They didn’t like her. Jude sensed it by the way Storm fidgeted, by the way his mouth twisted a little when he talked about her. Sometimes he had to remind himself that Storm wasn’t just an ageing hippy but had lived another life in which, the background reports had assured him, he’d been highly thought of in recruitment, a sound judge of character and temperament. It was easy to see how Cody’s aggression might have grated upon their gentle withdrawal from any kind of conflict.

  ‘That follows.’ Lynx couldn’t reveal Cody’s nightmare now. Would he seriously have done so?

  Storm stayed still, looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Is it all over?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Jude allowed himself a shrug, then moved the conversation on. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything else to do. When he’d had a chance to review the information that would soon come flying at him from every direction, there would be a moment to send someone back down to take both Storm and Raven through their relationship with Cody, tenuous though it was, in more detail, but he was aware that the fund of goodwill he was building up could too easily be dissipated by an overly harsh approach. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Can we just get on with our lives?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They walked back towards the tent where Raven had begun turning the tarot cards over, looking at them with exactly the same expression of deep thoughtfulness that characterised Ashleigh’s readings of them. He paused for a while and watched as they were flipped over, trying to see what they were from a distance and failing, not sufficiently familiar with them. A King and a Queen, he could see that. He watched as she shuffled and dealt again, and again they came up – a different king, a different queen.

  ‘Goodbye.’ Acknowledged only by her nod, he turned and walked back up towards the village. The cards were nonsense, but sometimes they caused people to think in a particular way. He only wished he knew what was going through Storm’s mind.

  16

  Jude had kept his phone switched off when he was down in the camp, aware that his best chance of getting any information lay in meeting the New Agers halfway. When he flicked it back on, there were half a dozen messages flinging themselves at him like angry wasps around a jam jar, but it was the one from Chris that caught his attention. Murder weapon forensics, it read, a message fraught with capital letters and spotted with exclamation marks.

  Chris liked a bit of theatre, sometimes to a fault, but he wasn’t prone to exaggeration. Ignoring all the other calls on his attention for the minute, Jude called him straight back, holding the phone clamped to his ear as he headed up towards the cafe. ‘Okay. What’s the bombshell you’ve got for me on the knife?’

  ‘Mixing your metaphors there.’ A breakthroug
h always put Chris in high good humour. ‘The lab phoned. They’ve found blood and they’ve found fingerprints. Someone has tried to clean it up – washed it in the lake, probably – but they haven’t made a great job of it.’

  A ray of sunlight drifted from behind a shred of broken cloud, a finger of light pointing down towards the cottage on Coffin Lane, and Jude’s mood lightened with it. ‘It was definitely the murder weapon?’

  ‘Yes. There are traces of Lynx’s blood on the joint between the blade and the handle.’

  ‘And could you get a match for the fingerprints?’

  Chris could never help himself. He held the news back for a few seconds, for effect. ‘We ran them through the system. They’re Storm’s.’

  Stopping dead, Jude turned to direct a hard stare towards the New Age camp. A bare fifty yards away, Storm crossed from the tent to the fire and busied himself with something or other he must deem important but the rest of the world would see as trivial. The dislocation between the life of the Flat Earthers and everyone else was, Jude now saw, so significant that it would take more to learn their story than simply winning their trust. Storm had sworn that he’d told the truth and the whole truth, but he hadn’t. Jude cursed his own weakness. He should never have been quite so ready to give them ground. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep. And if you have any doubts about whether there could be a mistake they’ll disappear when I tell you the rest. Because there was someone else’s blood on the blade, and that was Raven’s.’

  In the field, Raven had left the tent, her tarot reading presumably complete, and had strayed over to where Storm was standing by the fire. Apparently oblivious to Jude’s gaze, she slid her arms around him and the two of them stood locked together against the world in a moment of shared affection.

  Was that for show or for real? ‘Okay. That’s very helpful. I’ll get right onto that.’ And he’d do it before Storm, who must think in his naivety that they’d got away with it, had time to work out an answer to the questions he was about to face. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’

  He was outside the cafe by then and Ashleigh, fortunately, was standing in the middle of it having just ended a discussion with one of the uniformed teams. In turning, she spotted him, responding immediately to the gesture that summoned her out into the street. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘As far as I know. I’ve been speaking to Chris about the forensics.’

  ‘Doddsy just told me.’ The wind ripped a strand of hair from her ponytail and flicked it across her face, and she twisted it back behind her ear. ‘Could there be a mistake?’

  There could always be a mistake, but he couldn’t see how that particular one could have been made at the lab. ‘Yes. It was my mistake. I should have hauled the two of them in under caution and put the fear of God into them to start with, instead of treating them with kid gloves to spare their delicate sensibilities.’ Maybe Cody was right about the snowflake generation after all, and a short, sharp shock would be an effective remedy and good for everyone’s soul. ‘I think it’s time we put that right.’

  ‘Steady on.’ She placed a restraining hand on his sleeve. ‘Going in there all guns blazing won’t work.’

  ‘The softly-softly approach didn’t work either. I’m willing to give the alternative a try.’

  She lifted an eyebrow at him. ‘I wondered at the time if Doddsy and I went in too heavily with them to start with. That might be the problem.’

  ‘They lied to us. It’s their fault, not yours and Doddsy’s. There are no excuses.’

  ‘No. But what are you trying to do? Make a point about the primacy and inviolability of the law? If that’s it, fine. Cart them off in handcuffs and interview them under caution. You won’t get any information from them. If they haven’t told us anything it’s because they were scared of what we’d do with the information.’

  ‘They’ve every reason to be worried. The forensic results on that murder weapon make Storm a prime suspect in a murder investigation.’

  ‘They also suggest he injured his wife, and that clearly isn’t true.’ Her gaze followed his to the field beyond which the grey surface of the lake was frilly with wind-driven wavelets. ‘So there’s got to be an explanation, and the quickest way to get it is if they give it to us voluntarily. That’s your objective, isn’t it? To find out the truth.’

  ‘It’s a part of it.’ Ultimately, his objective was to protect the innocent and bring the guilty to court, but the truth was an unmissable step on the way.

  ‘Right. Then first we find out the truth of it, and then we see what we have to do from there.’

  She was right, but from that point on he wouldn’t be able to take anything Storm told him on trust. ‘Fair enough. But I don’t like being manipulated.’

  ‘I don’t think you are being. Even if Storm did kill Lynx, you’ll get the story out of him, bit by bit. He doesn’t understand our thinking, and he isn’t equipped to resist it.’

  ‘He’s a former recruitment consultant.’ With his usual thoroughness, Chris had prepared a profile which established Storm’s previous life as astonishing only in its banality. There had been nothing extraordinary in his ten years in the peloton of the rat race.

  ‘That was years ago. People can change their mindsets.’

  ‘Then we’ll ask him now. Can you spare me a moment?’

  She checked her watch. ‘I think so. If anyone needs me, they’ll be able to find me easily enough.’ She fell into step beside him and they headed once more towards the camp.

  When they reached the gate Storm, who had been watching them, leaned over to Raven, said something to her, then detached himself from her orbit and headed up towards them. He’d begun walking with purpose but by the time they met his steps had slowed and his expression was the sheepish one of the child about to be caught out in very obvious mischief. ‘Jude. Did you forget something?’

  Ashleigh was right, and anger would get them nowhere. Jude knew it, but he had to keep reminding himself. Scenes like those at the woodpile and in Coffin Lane made the blood run hot as well as cold and Storm’s refusal to cooperate, even if it had no criminal foundation, might end up costing another life. ‘No, it isn’t that, but there’s something else I’d like to ask you about. Something that’s just come up.’

  ‘Of course.’ Storm licked his lips, avoiding Jude’s gaze.

  ‘Shall we go somewhere else?’ Looking at Raven, Ashleigh must have picked up Storm’s desire not to involve her, as Jude himself had done. ‘Did I see a seat over by the water? We can go there.’

  ‘We’ll go up the lane.’ Storm walked past them, along Red Bank Road, past the bottom of Coffin Lane and the policeman whose attempt to stop him was deflected by Jude and Ashleigh’s presence, up the hill. His concentrated, purposeful stride was at odds with his shabby appearance – body swathed in misshapen knitwear, hair long, the hems of his trousers dragging on the damp ground. After a quarter of a mile he stopped and swung his way over a stile and there, on a low viewpoint overlooking the lake and the scene of police activity, he stopped. ‘What is it?’

  Jude opened his mouth to level a challenge but Ashleigh pre-empted him, stepping forward and cutting him out of the conversation as if she didn’t trust him to handle it. ‘Tell us about the knife.’

  Storm leaned back against the fence and glanced at the two of them with a look that was an echo of his days in business, calculating and rational. It lasted barely two seconds before he was back to a haunted face, as if he was wondering where it all went wrong. ‘You know it all already.’

  ‘No. We know a lot already. But what I want to hear right now is your side of it.’

  A dog walker passed through the stile, a young and bouncing collie at his heels. Moving out of the way, Jude put a hand down to pat the dog, took a few steps downhill and took up his station on Storm’s other side. He didn’t think the man would make a break for it and if he did, he’d be easily caught, but pre-emptive action was always the best.

  Storm tur
ned his head away from Ashleigh, towards the mist-shrouded crag of the Lion and the Lamb. His eyes were bright with unshed tears.

  ‘What happened? You should have told us where it was. You must have known we’d find out. You were the last person to handle it.’

  ‘You are so smart,’ he said, under his breath. ‘Work it out for yourself.’

  How could Storm be so naive? Reviewing the profile of him once more, Jude shook his head over it. A university degree in economics was almost fifty years behind him and for forty of those fifty years he’d rejected everything but instinct and the feel of the environment. Once upon a time Storm must have known the power of science, but he’d let that knowledge slip away from him and any developments in forensics would have passed him by. He could never have stopped to contemplate the inevitability of being caught and now here he was, wriggling under Ashleigh’s gentle questioning, trapped like a butterfly in a lepidopterist’s net. Liars were rarely so easily and so completely caught.

  ‘I think I have worked it out.’ Ashleigh turned once more to look at him, her wide blue eyes playing on his innocence, inviting him to trust her. ‘Is Raven ill?’

  A wood pigeon grumbled at being disturbed in the woods behind them and the wind fretted the surface of the lake below. Storm had been standing with his back to the dry-stone wall, elbows resting on it in the negligent pose of an executive switching off by the water cooler, but at that comment he clenched his fingers tightly into the palm of one hand. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I can tell.’ Ashleigh’s hand fluttered around her body in a sexless way, one that mimicked and exaggerated Raven’s slow and deliberate gesture. ‘She’s so pale. And the way she unfolds herself from the ground when you get up so easily. She must be ten years younger than you.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And the way she holds her hands. All the time. Protecting herself as if she’s in pain.’ Her hand recreated a gesture that Jude had noticed but never really understood, hovering in front of her left breast. ‘Is she in pain?’