by Jo Allen
Death at Rainbow Cottage
Jo Allen
Author Copyright Jo Allen 2020
Cover Art: Mary Jayne Baker
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be resold or given away.
This story is a work of fiction. The characters are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Some of the locations used are real. Some are invented.
Dedication
To my lovely Beta Buddies. Thank you xx
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
More by Jo Allen
Prologue
Natalie Blackwell stood stock-still in the pool of blood, her eyes as wide as those of the stranger sprawled like a doll on the ground in front of her, her jaw as slack as his, but with stupefaction rather than mortality. She drew a hand across her eyes as if to waft this gruesome vision aside, but when the shadow had passed nothing had changed. The man still stared up at the blank white sky, the puddle of his blood still lapped at the soles of her muddied running shoes, and the deep scarlet stain had bled a few threads further into the Sunday-best starched white front of his shirt.
From somewhere nearby, a forlorn whimper penetrated the fog of confusion that had descended over Natalie’s brain. Her fear intensified. It took a second to understand that she was alone in the lane, quite alone, and the sound was only her pitiful cry for help.
He was dead. Surely he must be dead? But what if he wasn’t?
Clenching her teeth, she dropped to her knees on the edge of the grassy lane and, closing her eyes, laid a hand upon his chest as she’d seen paramedics do on the telly. His skin rippled under her fingers, the faintest rhythm of life showing he was no corpse. ‘You poor man,’ she whispered into the still March air. ‘You poor, poor man.’
No-one should die alone. She must do something, if it was only to cradle him while he died; but when she tried to lift him she succeeded only in pulling his dead weight against her. Fighting for balance she saw a macabre vision of herself, trapped under the body of a dying man, and pushed him away from her. He flopped onto his back in the emulsion of mud and blood and muck that had accumulated in the lane. It took a second attempt before she managed to cradle him against her.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m so sorry. I don't know what happened. I don’t know what to do.’
Even as she whispered, she knew. His body hung limp and unresponsive in her arms, and she could do nothing. After a moment of futile hope she let him fall. Her blood-stained fingers searched for some sign of life, but the throb of the pulse at his neck had stilled. The last whisper of this stranger’s mortal soul had left his body.
She bounced up to her feet and looked down at her bloodied hand in fascinated horror. Her breathing, which had been rapid as she’d run through the countryside of the Eden Valley, had slowed as she witnessed this death scene and now she became starkly aware of her own isolation. The closest building, a barn, was derelict. The fields around her were empty but for a few curious sheep nibbling at turnips. The hum of traffic along the A66 a bare quarter of a mile away might have come from the Moon.
A rainbow shimmered above Beacon Hill. She drew a deep breath, vibrantly conscious both of being alive and of how quickly life could slip into death with scarcely a sigh, and placed her hand on her chest like an actress in a Victorian melodrama.
‘Claud!’ she shrieked into the emptiness. ‘Claud, help me!’
The scream faded to an empty echo lost in the sky, in the traffic, in the song of the birds. Unable to take her eyes from the freshly-slaughtered corpse in front of her, she backed away towards the path along which she’d come and, reaching it, turned and ran for home, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the dry gravel track.
Chapter 1
The promise of a bright spring Sunday had faded into thin, cold drizzle, under whose shadow the soft green of the grass had lost its electric brightness and dulled to grey. From a distance of a dozen yards, outside the line of blue and white tape that marked the inner ring of a crime scene, Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite stood with his hands plunged deep in the pockets of his Barbour jacket and a customary frown of deep thought upon his face. Around him the police swung into the action that always accompanied the discovery of a body — uniformed officers steering away the odd interested onlooker whose curiosity impelled them to approach though they knew they shouldn’t; white-suited forensic investigators photographing the scene from every angle before beginning a fingertip search; a van bearing the white tent that would protect the scene from both the weather and the prying eyes of the public — but Jude, having issued his instructions, remained still at the edge of its frantic activity.
There would be no shortage of images available to remind him of every detail but he scanned the scene for a long moment. In the freshness of the golden hour after the crime there might be something to give him a head start in the hunt for a vicious killer. A man, about five foot seven and, as far as he could judge, in his late forties or early fifties, lay lifeless on his back in the middle of the rutted track, suit jacket flung open, the front of his shirt stiff with semi-dried blood. His thin face, drained and grey, bore an expression of appalled surprise and his dark hair, showing signs of salt-and-pepper ageing at the temples, stood out in damp spikes. One arm trailed wide across the stain of blood which must mark the place where he’d died and the other lay limp across his body. The white VW Golf in front of which he lay had been parked carefully on the verge facing towards the main road. The driver’s door stood open.
Jude stared for a moment longer before turning east, where another set of blue flashing lights, late to the party, scythed along the A66 from Penrith. A flock of crows, startled by the activity, rose up from the freshly-ploughed field beside him and into the grey sky.
If only the birds could talk. He shook his head and turned his attention to the ground. Someone, presumably the police officer first on the scene, had used a plastic bag weighted with stones as an improvised cover for the blurred and bloody footmarks that led away from the scene towards a path across a field, but they’d petered out by the time they met the soft turf.
Something told him they were less of a clue than he might first have thought. He looked further. Three hundred yards beyond, on the far side of the field where the footsteps led, stood a stone bungalow, its picture windows facing towards them. That was where Natalie Blackwell lived, and the footmarks almost certainly belonged to her. Most murderers were too careful to leave so obvious a trail, and to his mind the main exit route for the killer almost certainly led along the lane towards the A66. From there, traffic permitting, someone could have made it a long way in the half an hour since the crime had been reported.
The man was very recently dead, he noted, grimly. ‘Tammy.’
Tammy Garner, the CSI in charge of the crime scene, had been working within the taped-off area. Handing her camera over to a colleague, she stepped to
wards him with care. ‘Hello again, Chief,’ she said from behind her forensic mask. ‘Not looking good, this one.’
Murder never looked good, or not to anyone with a shred of conscience or humanity. ‘What do you reckon?’
She ducked under the blue and white tape and, once securely outside it, pulled down the mask in a movement that blended into a shrug. Tammy, who was the best of the CSIs on the Cumbria force, had been short with him on the last couple of occasions they’d passed one another in the corridor of the police headquarters and today she avoided his eye, but whatever he’d unwittingly done to offend her wasn’t serious enough for her to carry it over into the professional arena. ‘First thoughts?’
‘Body’s been moved.’ She extended a gloved forefinger towards the pool of blood a few inches from the dead man.
‘I’m told he was still alive when he was found. That’s why.’
‘Curse those well-meaning civilians, eh?’ she said, cheerfully. ‘Have you spoken to whoever found him?’
‘Not yet. But she lives locally. Over there.’ He gestured to the cottage, separated from the village of Temple Sowerby by the A66 and with access via a narrow bridge.
‘Ah, okay. Then those might be her prints.’ Dissatisfaction creased Tammy’s brow as it always did at the first review of a disturbed crime scene. Later, she’d relish unravelling the puzzle. ‘You know I never speculate.’ She sniggered, a half-laugh at a running joke. ‘But it looks like whoever it was did a runner via the A66. There’s a second set of tyre marks just there on the verge. Fresh.’ She gestured up the farm track. ‘And they overlie the marks from this car, so I’d say our victim was here first and someone joined him, by accident or design.’
The lane wasn’t wide enough for two cars. The second must have blocked in the first. ‘If it’s his car.’
‘Yes.’
Both the track and part of the inside carriageway of the A66 had been closed off and Jude had parked in the village of Temple Sowerby and approached across the bridge, picking his way with care past the cottage and along the edge of the ploughed field. ‘Then our killer could be miles away by now.’
‘I expect so.’ She allowed herself a fractious sigh, and turned her back on him. ‘I’d better get on. I’ll get back to you when we’ve had a proper look.’
She was usually more chatty that that, even when there was work to be done, but he shrugged her coolness off, and turned back to the constable who had been standing just behind him. ‘Do we have anything on the car?’
‘It’s registered to a Leonard James Pierce.’ She jerked her head towards the east, along the A66. ‘A businessman. He lives in Appleby.’
‘Anything to suggest that’s Mr Pierce lying next to it?’
‘Yep. That’s Len Pierce.’
She’d been holding a tablet device which she tilted towards him. Modern policing gained from modern means, and she’d gone straight to social media for her information. Len Pierce’s Facebook profile, open in front of them, didn’t tell Jude everything he needed to know but it confirmed the identity of the corpse. In the image the middle-aged man smiling on the bridge in Appleby on a sunny day was lit up by the spark that death extinguished but it was unmistakably him who lay yards away, his empty eyes tilted up to a grey sky.
Jude flicked a finger and swiped through the life Len Pierce chose to make public. Pictures of a garden, bursting with blossom, of cupcakes and traybakes, of a grey-muzzled collie dog, tongue hanging out as it lay flopped down on the grass. Len’s life, it appeared, was anything but people-centred. ‘We’ll need to find someone to give a positive ID.’
‘There’s nothing in his profile to suggest he has family. But we’ll find someone.’
‘Get on to that, would you?’
‘Right away.’ She folded the cover on the tablet.
Jude allowed himself another moment to check over the scene, to make sure that everything was running smoothly so that he could move on. ‘DI Dodd is coming over. He’ll be here any minute and he’ll take over.’ Doddsy, his best friend and deputy, lived in one of the new houses that had blossomed behind Temple Sowerby’s medical centre. ‘One last thing. The woman who found the body. What was she doing?’
‘Jogging.’
‘And she was the one who called the police.’
‘No. Her husband called them. She didn’t have her phone with her, so she went home.’
So he’d been right, and that would explain the bloodied footmarks. ‘Did she move him?’
‘I don’t know for sure.’ The policewoman turned to look at Len Pierce, sprawled on the floor, and her mouth twisted a little, as if she was fighting to keep a severe expression in front of a senior officer. ‘No-one’s interviewed her yet.’ She held up a quick hand as if to justify a failure in procedure. ‘I tried to get a statement out of her but she was barely coherent. I thought I’d better let her calm down. Didn't want a breakdown on my hands. Poor woman.’
Jude spotted Doddsy striding past the Blackwells’ cottage. ‘Okay. I’ll speak to her. You carry on.’
Leaving those on the scene to get on with what they were doing, he headed towards the building, intercepting his friend halfway. ‘One day we might get a whole weekend off,’ he said to him, by way of greeting. ‘You can take over here. I’m going down to chat to our only witness.’
Pausing by the wall, Doddsy snatched at the opportunity for a quick cigarette. It would be a while before he had the chance of another. He was in his suit on a Sunday afternoon. ‘A Lent lunch after church,’ he said, spotting Jude looking at him. ‘Up at Skirwith. Or I’d have been here sooner.’ He unclipped a cross-shaped lapel pin from his jacket and slipped it into his pocket. ‘We have an actual witness?’
‘Not a witness to the deed. The woman who found him. She lives in that cottage.’
‘Natalie Blackwell?’ Doddsy said, nodding. ‘Ah. Okay.’
‘You know her?’
‘I know of her. The Blackwells are recent arrivals in the area. I’ve met her husband, in passing. Interesting couple, if you believe the local gossip.’
‘Oh?’
‘Half of what I hear won’t be true.’ Doddsy looked at his half-smoked cigarette with obvious regret. ‘Folk think they’re a bit odd. The village gossip is that she used to be a ballet dancer.’
‘Is there a lot of talk about them?'
'Not a lot, but they came up in conversation over lunch. He’s a bit of a crusader. I get the impression he likes to take people out of their comfort zone. That never goes down well.’
For a moment Jude had toyed with the idea of handing the witness interview over to Doddsy but at the mention of the Blackwells’ oddness he decided against it. Doddsy was an organiser par excellence, but sometimes he missed the clues that hid under people’s idiosyncrasies.
‘It’s a pity Ashleigh isn’t here.’ Doddsy must be thinking the same. ‘She’s always good with interesting people.’ He ground out the cigarette on the wall.
Doddsy’s sly smile brought a matching smile to Jude’s lips. Ashleigh O’Halloran was one of those rare detectives who seemed somehow to charm confidences out of the least willing of witnesses, to persuade the most stubborn of people to part with secrets they never even knew they possessed. Quite how she did it even she didn’t seem to know, asking the same questions as her colleagues and yet reaping greater, and often instant, rewards. ‘She’ll be back in tomorrow. We’ll get her straight on to the case.’
‘Missed her, have you?’
Even under the sombre circumstances, Jude allowed a beat of pleasure to creep under his guard at the prospect of Ashleigh’s return. She was his girlfriend as well as his colleague, and they hadn’t been together long enough for him to regard her long-planned family holiday as a chance to do his own thing. It wasn’t love — God knew, neither of them was prepared to take that kind of risk — but the relationship worked just fine without it, and he’d felt her absence more than he’d thought he would. ‘She’d certainly be some use to us today.’
‘And in the meantime we’ll have to make do with you. Right. I’ll get on.’
‘When I’ve spoken to Mrs Blackwell, I'll go back to the office. Let me know what resources you think you'll need.’
‘Sure.’ Doddsy strolled off up towards the buzz of activity in the lane, unruffled.
Rainbow Cottage stood at the end of the rutted track from Temple Sowerby, a track whose vehicular capability petered out at the Blackwells’ cottage though the route itself stuttered on into the path on which they stood. The pedestrian link it offered to the dead end where Len Pierce had been slain, and so directly to the A66, was so frail that it wasn't marked on the map, and no-one could have used it from that direction without passing the cottage. The Blackwells could only reach the main road by car by going through the village. As Jude had walked past it earlier the nervous twitching of curtains told him the occupants were watching and waiting to play their part in the investigation.
The cottage was a century or so old, built in traditional style but with a modern glass extension on two sides. The sign announcing it as Rainbow Cottage was new and boldly carved on green Coniston slate. The garden was well tended, its borders a carpet of fading crocuses among the blue of grape hyacinth and glory-of-the-snow. Jude turned through the gate and up the path. Behind the opaque glass panel in the front door a figure shimmered, wrenching it open and interrupting his survey of the property.
‘The police?’ A man some six inches shorter than Jude himself but with a physical presence more than reinforced by a barrel chest and a bull neck, bounced onto the doorstep. He was probably in his forties, once-dark hair dusted with grey and receding at the temples. The rolled-up sleeves of his checked shirt revealed capable forearms. Energy sparked from him, every movement short, sharp and full of purpose.
Jude flashed his warrant card. ‘DCI Satterthwaite. I’m sorry to have left you hanging around. I needed to get the investigation up and running before I spoke to you. Mr Blackwell, is that right?’