Death on Coffin Lane

by Jo Allen

  ‘Lynx gave them to me, the last time I saw him. He said someone had given them to him, but he’d stopped eating chocolates because he was vegan. So I took them.’

  ‘You ate them?’

  ‘Just one. Brandon had some of them, but I think Seb took the last one.’

  ‘No. There’s one left.’ Getting to his feet, Brandon fetched the box of chocolates and laid it on the table. They’d looked handmade, Jude remembered, each sitting in its little paper case, crammed into a small box. Half a dozen of the wrappers, empty, still floated around in the box and one chocolate remained, hidden beneath them. ‘Didn’t you offer them to me?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I’ve been offering the goddamned things to anyone who came.’

  Jude stared at the chocolates, his brain whirring. If someone had placed the chocolates in Cody’s house in the hope of killing her then they’d been putting random strangers, himself included, into a fatal game of Russian roulette which Seb Mulholland had lost. The idea was preposterous. ‘Thanks. Obviously we’ll take that.’

  Brandon handed the box to Ashleigh, who bagged that too, then followed Jude’s lead and got to her feet. ‘So now we need to watch what we freaking eat, do we?’

  ‘’I’ll make sure there’s an officer outside the cottage—’

  ‘No. That’s the last thing I need. People thinking I’m scared. Why give them the satisfaction?’ Cody looked towards Brandon, as if he were all the assistance she needed.

  *

  ‘The chocolates came from the Gordons.’

  Jude groaned. So that was why, when he’d tried to round up Ashleigh and Doddsy for a hastily convened team meeting she’d insisted it wasn’t wise to hold it in the cafe and they’d assembled, instead, in the corner of a tea room looking down on the river. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes. They make their own, and they often pass the misshapes on to other people rather than throw them away. Raven was particularly fond of them. And yes, they gave some to Lynx.’

  ‘But surely they couldn’t have been intended for Cody. Or if they were, that’s an astonishing lack of care for anyone else. They can’t have known he’d give them to her when he could equally possibly have given them to Raven or Storm.’

  She shrugged. ‘I know. And they seemed genuinely appalled at the idea that their chocolates could have caused any harm to anyone. I didn’t tell them what happened, of course. I implied he had a nut allergy, but I don’t think they were fooled.’

  ‘Can we be reasonably sure it was poison?’ Jude looked to Doddsy. ‘I know nothing will be certain until after the PM, but there must be some indication.’

  ‘There is. I spoke to the paramedic who treated him and I had a quick word with a specialist in toxins. The paramedic had seen something similar before, in a small child, who survived. He recognised the symptoms as being those of taxine alkaloid poisoning. You get that from yew trees.’

  All three of them looked out across the river to the churchyard, where the traditional assemblage of yew trees in the churchyard overshadowed the graves of William Wordsworth, his wife and his sister.

  ‘There’s yew up in Coffin Lane, too. I noticed it the first time we went up.’ Ashleigh wrote it down. ‘And some in the back garden at the Wilders’ cottage. But that needn’t mean anything. It’s all over the place here. Such a pretty tree. They have it on sale in the garden centre. You can get saplings with berries on. It certainly isn’t in short supply.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the toxicology test results before we can be sure.’ Doddsy was in a melancholy mood, and so he should be, on the fourth dead body in little more than a week. ‘There may be something else.’

  ‘I can’t wait for the results. If someone has a vendetta against Cody, then we’re short of time. Not that I think that’s the case. She could have done them all except Owen, and it’s pretty clear she bullied him to his death.’ His phone rang and, looking down at it, he saw Chris’s number. ‘Chris. What have you got? Anything?’

  ‘I’ll say. I think I’ve got dynamite.’ The constable’s voice crackled with excitement. ‘Total dynamite.’

  They were alone in that part of the cafe and the waitress was busy elsewhere, so he flicked the phone on to speaker and laid it in the centre of the table where they could all hear, if they leaned in. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was following up on Lynx, trying to get a sense of what he might have done, what he might have threatened to do. I couldn’t find anything. I went through all the stuff I could find about Cody when she was a young academic, every reference. And I found the story of the Wilder family.’

  Through the plate glass window, the River Rothay grumbled its way through the village beneath overhanging willows, their leafless twigs dipping into the water. In the churchyard beyond, a regiment of green spikes prepared to burst out as daffodils, heralds of spring. It was hard to imagine anything less like Wyoming. ‘And?’

  ‘It’s even more Wild West than you think. The mother died. She’d always been frail. A couple of years later the father, Brandon Wilder Jr – a nasty brute by every account – died in a snowstorm and there was a rumour of foul play. The police went out and questioned the kids, but they stuck to the same story. Pa Wilder had gone out in a storm to check on the cattle and not come back. When the storm was over, Brandon went out to look for him and found the truck empty and no sign of him.’

  ‘Okay. And is that necessarily suspicious?’ A storm, wolves, bears. In Jude’s hazy knowledge of the place, Wyoming wasn’t the safest to be out alone.

  ‘I chased up the police department and they sent me the case notes. Here’s the thing. Daddy Wilder went off in his truck but when they found it after he was dead the driver’s seat had been readjusted.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He was tall but the seat of the truck was pushed forward. I asked them straight out – could one of them have bumped him off?’

  ‘Good thinking.’ Jude said it automatically, as if the death of Brandon Wilder Jr was his case. ‘I can see how that might have worked. If he’d been out with Brandon and Brandon had left him out there to die, then he and Cody would have had to get the truck back later. It would be a hell of a risk.’

  ‘But the risk would be worth it,’ Ashleigh said, ‘when you think what he put her through. Wouldn’t it? And maybe she’d rather have taken the chance of landing in jail than spending the rest of her life stuck out in the wilds with him. Just him and her and Brandon.’

  ‘I called the guy in the police department.’ Chris’s voice piped up from the phone in the middle of the table. ‘It’s frontier country out there. They all knew the man by repute and no one was going to miss him. They chose not to look closely at it. I got the distinct impression that no one was too bothered about catching whoever it was. They have the death penalty out there and they maybe thought if he was murdered no one deserved to be punished for it.’

  It was just possible that someone else cared. If that old case were to come alive, Cody’s extramural academic career would end even more spectacularly than her stint with the university had done. Jude sat back while the waitress drifted over with top ups for their coffees, eyed them with interest, then drifted away again, her curiosity unsatisfied. ‘This is starting to make sense. Lynx was at the university at the time, she said.’

  ‘Yes. He was a couple of years older than her, so he’d have seen the story, the speculation about what happened and the quiet decision to let it go. We know he came here when she came, and maybe it was because of her. And we know he threatened to tell the world about her father.’

  Power? A perverted joke? Something else? They hadn’t been able to build up enough of a picture of Lynx to understand why he might have done it. ‘Lynx had been talking to Fi Styles. She’d been looking around, trying to find some story about Cody that would make her name. We’ll never know what he told her, but we can guess what Cody might have thought it was.’

  ‘But did she think it was worth killing for?’

  Somehow, despite
Doddsy’s presence, Jude had taken Ashleigh’s hand. She disentangled her fingers from his and tapped them on the table. ‘Surely not. The police in Wyoming weren’t keen to dig out evidence at the time, and it was twenty years ago. That’s a hell of a cold case.’

  And it didn’t explain Seb Mulholland’s death. Jude shook his head. ‘The bookseller. What about him?’

  ‘That’s the clincher, Jude.’ He’d almost forgotten about Chris. ‘As soon as I heard he’d died I got on to searching for him. It didn’t take long. He worked for three years in Wyoming at the university library, as an archivist. In the second of those three years, the Wilder story was in the papers. In the third, Cody came to the university. They almost certainly met.’

  There was only one person to benefit from those three deaths and Chris’s discovery had confirmed that Cody’s uncompromising support for violence in self-defence was rooted in her father’s death. If not a killer herself, she was almost certainly an accomplice. And if then, why not now? ‘Okay.’

  ‘That’s incredible work, Chris.’ Ashleigh was trying to make up for Jude’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, but it wasn’t that he underrated the contribution. Far from it. It was just that there was one thing that didn’t quite make sense. The letters. Cody wouldn’t hurt Seb Mulholland if it risked her losing the letters.

  Or would she? Maybe the balance of risk was too great and what he knew was too much of a threat. She might be gambling on buying the letters from his estate. The pieces of Doddsy’s mixed puzzles fell into place in front of him and made a triptych of murder. ‘Here’s what I think could have happened. Cody turns up here with Owen, and the two of them fall out. But before he decides he can’t take any more, he sets out to make mischief. He tells Fi Styles something – probably that the letters are fake. It appears that isn’t true, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Cody fears exposure. As soon as Fi let slip that she knew something, she was marked down.’ Because Cody, with some justification, could have turned into the most ruthless protector of herself and her reputation. ‘Then she spoke to Lynx. Storm heard Lynx threatening to reveal something about her father. I assumed it was the abuse – but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Lynx knew the story.’

  ‘Right.’ Doddsy was seeing it, too. ‘And so she had to kill Lynx. She throws the knife – wherever she got it from – in the water, tears his place apart to make to look like a robbery. Then she lures Fi Styles up to the house on some pretext or other and brains her with a slate. And that’s fine. Owen can’t tell. Lynx can’t tell. Fi can’t tell. Her secret is safe.’

  ‘Yes. And then Seb Mulholland turns up with some more letters and asks an extortionate amount of money for them. And if she doesn’t pay? Maybe he also threatens to reveal what he knows. And when he appears, she has a chance to poison him. One chance. A couple of crushed seeds from a yew berry and he’s a dead man within an hour.’ It all remained to be proved, of course, but time would solve that. ‘I bet there’s some in the garden.’

  ‘She knows yew is poisonous.’ Ashleigh’s sympathy for Cody was still there, he could tell, but for once it wasn’t over-riding her judgement. ‘Tyrone saw her shouting at some poor woman with a toddler about not letting the kid play with the berries.’

  The pieces were coming together. Now he had to think about the next step. ‘Thanks, Chris. That’s good work.’ He closed off the call and pocketed his phone.

  ‘How unlucky.’ But Ashleigh was speaking ironically, not with any sympathy. ‘Just when she reaches the height of her career, someone comes back to bite her. And you can see the deal. It wasn’t even what they knew, but what she thought they knew, what she was afraid of. Even Cody Wilder has a conscience, it appears.’

  It couldn’t be much of a conscience if the guilt of one killing that no one would hold against her was great enough to drive one person to suicide and kill three others. If Owen’s death was suicide. Jude still harboured doubts about that.

  ‘Lovely theory,’ said Doddsy, with a sigh. ‘One I wish I’d come up with myself. But what we need now is something we can offer up as sufficient evidence to arrest her. And we don’t have that. Unless there’s something up at the cottage. Do you reckon we’ve got enough to apply for a search warrant?’

  There was the audio monitoring. That was the most likely source of information. The relationship between Cody and Brandon was so close that whatever she’d done, he would surely know about. ‘We’ll leave it for a day or so, shall we? They won’t be going anywhere.’ And there was surely no one left for Cody to kill.

  19

  ‘At least we got through that without any more dead bodies.’ Cody slammed the door on the cold wind and the outside world, most of all on the police activity that was still too obvious in the village. The morning walk on which she’d dragged them both hadn’t helped to charm her conscience. She dropped to her knees in front of the fire and touched a match to the kindling that Brandon had laid before they left, watching for a moment as the warm, welcoming flames licked around moss and twigs, crept over the edges of the logs and took hold with a satisfying smell of pine resin. She got up.

  ‘We sure did.’ Brandon tossed his jacket onto the back of the sofa and strode across to stand beside her in front of the fireplace, thumbs tucked into his leather belt. Looking at him, Cody was reminded with a shiver of their father, and how he’d cracked the buckle of his belt on the kitchen table to bring silence whenever he wanted to speak. The terror had lasted until Brandon had become a man and brought their nightmare to an end but today the image of the devil, the clearest she’d seen him since the day of his death, flashed across her consciousness. Despite herself, she backed away.

  She passed a hand across her forehead. You always had to look forward, but if she could do one thing differently, it would have been to safeguard her sanity by keeping a lifetime of silence about the brutality of the relationship she’d had with her father. The man who should have supported and protected her had almost become her destroyer and if it wasn’t for Brandon’s wickedness she’d have gone under. Evil had conquered evil and she’d always be grateful. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve been speaking to Laura. She reckons it’s time for me to go home.’

  The clock showed that it was one o’clock. The police had cleared out of the village but Jude Satterthwaite must know more than he’d let on, and had left a uniformed officer sitting in a patrol car on the edge of the village where she could see him. No doubt they’d claim he was there for her reassurance but she interpreted it as a deliberate power play from a man who thought he was smarter than she. ‘Oh, you can try, I suppose. But they won’t let either of us leave until they’ve found out who it is.’ And that was a good thing. She’d have the benefit of his company and when he went, he’d surely miss her more than he thought he would. There was no relationship as strong as theirs, forged in the heat of interdependency and mutual self-defence.

  ‘I know that. But they’ll pick the dude up soon and then we can go.’

  ‘Since you’re so smart, you might want to tell me who it is.’

  He shrugged. ‘Must have been one of those wild guys down by the water. Or those crazies in the shop.’

  Cody thought of the Gordons. She knew what went on in the mind of a killer and what she saw when she looked at them was stupidity, naivety and uncharacteristic hatred but she didn’t see murder. ‘The police won’t let you go for a while, I imagine. Even if they do, it would be nice if you stayed. You should get Laura over. We could meet, be friends.’ For the first time in a while there was something to be enthusiastic about. She could check out Brandon’s intended and if she thought the woman was a snowflake she’d warn her off. Brandon needed a strong partner. ‘A short break in the Lakes. Since she works so hard. Though not as hard as she’ll have to work on the ranch. Is she ready for that?’

  ‘We ain’t gonna stay there. I’ve got a buyer for the place. And Laura doesn’t need the money. We’re going to live in LA.’ A pause, during which something about the tone
of his voice caught at her and caused her to look up before the blow. ‘That’s why I maybe won’t be able to come over any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She understood she might have to share Brandon but she couldn’t survive without him. ‘Then I’ll come over and see you.’

  ‘No, honey. I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Why not? I’m your sister. Think of everything we’ve been through together.’ Think of the violence and the desperation and the death. Think of that night in the snowstorm. Think of what only we know. ‘I need you.’

  A slight curl in his lip hinted at coming rejection. ‘And Laura needs me more. Her job comes first.’

  ‘Her job? You mean it’s about money?’ At his shrug of dismissal, their father’s instant and irrational fury erupted in her veins. ‘Are you bored of living alone on that ranch with no one but the wolves and the coyotes for company? I can understand that. But going to be a gigolo for an heiress? You should be ashamed of yourself.’ Her breath came sharp and a wail of desolation shivered inside her, but the anger overrode it. Appalled by it, she was nevertheless unable to hold it back. ‘I know you only care about me.’ Just as she only cared about him, as Dorothy had only cared about William. ‘If it’s money you want, I’ll give it to you.’

  A muscle in his face twitched at the insult. ‘This isn’t about dollars. One day you’ll fall in love with someone. I hope you do. Then you’ll understand. You have to sacrifice things for them. And I can’t live in that place on my own.’

  ‘Oh, it’s your conscience.’ She controlled herself, knowing she was in a battle with an enemy whose powers she didn’t know. A wrong word and she could lose him. ‘You’re going to LA,’ she pursued, hoping she’d misunderstood the finality of his tone. ‘I can come and see you in there and you can come and see me in New York. Bring your wife. It’ll be swell.’ Because she wasn’t going to let him go.