Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  ‘You don’t watch the local news?’ Faye carped at her from the side lines.

  ‘Of course, but I haven’t had a chance.’

  ‘There was a particularly nasty homicide in Temple Sowerby yesterday,’ Jude said, soothing her as if she were a probationer. ‘We’ll get to that soon enough. In the meantime, let me introduce you. This is our new Super, Faye Scanlon. Faye, this is DS Ashleigh O’Halloran.’

  Ashleigh waited for Faye to acknowledge that they knew one another but Faye, still twirling her glasses in irritation, passed up the opportunity for a second time in a minute, allowing her nothing more than the briefest of nods before flicking Ashleigh’s questioning look aside it the briefest shake of her chestnut head.

  So that was how it was going to be. ‘Lovely to meet you, Ma’am.’ Shuffling backwards, Ashleigh tried to cover her confusion but Jude would have spotted there was something amiss. If he asked her in public she’d blame it on jet lag and explain later. Faye needn’t think she had any control over Ashleigh’s past, no matter how strongly she might choose to exert it over her own.

  ‘It’s a pleasure, Ashleigh.’ A fractional pause. ‘You’d better call me Faye. I don’t think we need to follow any unnecessary formalities in the office.’

  At least familiarity wouldn’t trip her up. Ashleigh nodded in reply, planning her getaway. ‘Jude. I’ll just get a coffee and head up to the office. Fill myself in on the details. Okay?’

  ‘I’ll come along with you. I was heading that way myself.’

  ‘I’ll see you later. Good to meet you.’ Faye’s voice was already drifting from down the corridor.

  Ashleigh’s jet lag headache intensified. A boiling, bubbling tension reared up inside her, stretching her composure, already worn thin by her travels, to its limits. She flung open the door to the canteen more sharply than she’d intended, and allowed Jude in first. She’d have to tell him, but this was neither the time nor the place, and in any case discretion won out. By whatever twist of fate Faye was now Jude’s boss as well as hers. ‘Nobody told me we were getting a new Superintendent.’

  ‘There was an announcement about it just after you went off. Thought you might have come across her, but no?’

  She avoided the question. ‘And she was in post in three weeks? That’s pretty sharp.’

  ‘If she’s the right person and was available to start immediately, why not? The post had to be filled.’ He led the way up to the counter. ‘Two coffees,’ he said to the girl on duty. ‘You’d better make it a triple espresso for Ashleigh. She’s had a rough weekend.’

  ‘You’re mighty cheerful today,’ the girl said, busying herself with the machine. ‘You’ve lost that sultry snarl. Shame. Oh, I probably shouldn’t say that, should I, or someone will have me for harassment? That would never do. Or maybe it would — early retirement and two months’ gardening leave on full pay. Can I harass you a bit more?’

  ‘Harass away.’ Cheerfully, Jude pushed one of the coffees to Ashleigh and settled up. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

  He and the girl behind the counter might think it was funny, and Ashleigh herself had joked about the Faye’s predecessor and his unfortunate and ultimately career-ending attitude to his younger female staff, but that was before she’d realised who his replacement was. She stole a sip at the coffee while Jude gathered up his change, waiting for the buzz of caffeine to jolt her back into the real world. There would be plenty of time later to formulate a strategy to deal with Faye, and in the meantime the best tactic was silence. ‘Okay. Let’s get to work.’

  ‘Did you enjoy Sri Lanka?’ He held the door open for her and fell into step beside her as they made their way back along the corridor.

  ‘Apart from that nightmare of a journey, yes.’

  He looked at her. ‘The new Super might be right. Maybe you should go home and catch up on some sleep.’

  ‘I’m not going to lie. I’m knackered. But if we’re busy—’

  ‘I did a full briefing first thing and everyone’s off doing their stuff. Shame you missed that, but I’m about to sit down with Doddsy and Chris. I’d like you there too. Sit in on that, then go home and get some sleep. I’d planned on having you out supervising the house-to-house inquiries, but you can pick that up tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’ Aircraft cabins sucked you dry, aircraft seats cramped your limbs, airport lounges denied you your last hope of sleep. ‘I’m feeling rough.’

  ‘You’re looking great.’ He lowered his voice, in case anyone should overhear the compliment. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘You, too.’

  ‘Next time you go away for three weeks, take me with you.’ He stepped ahead of her, opened a door. ‘We’re in here. Morning everyone. Look who I found wandering about in the corridor.’

  Three faces looked up at her — Doddsy with his usual thoughtful nod, the newly-promoted sergeant Chris Marshall, and Tammy Garner, the CSI. Tammy was normally the most placid, but today her greeting was cursory and she sat turned half away from the table.

  ‘The sun suits you, Ash.’ Chris Marshall gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. ‘You’re looking great. Here. Have a seat.’

  She pulled up a chair next to him. The table sat beneath a whiteboard adorned with the grim collage of information that accumulated in the wake of a homicide, and she gave it a quick look. A nasty one. Great. Opposite her, Tammy scowled when Jude sat down, then remembered herself and uncapped her pen, scrawling her name and the date on a sheet of paper. ‘Sri Lanka, did someone say you were? It’s on my bucket list.’

  ‘Yes. We were there for three weeks. Amazing place.’

  ‘That’s enough chat.’ Jude set his coffee down on the table and stood up again in front of the whiteboard. ‘I’ll just run over the background to bring Ashleigh up to speed.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, Jude, I’ll say my piece first. I’ve a dozen other things to do and I don’t have the time to go over old ground. It’s not as if we didn’t cover this in the 7.30 briefing.’ Tammy drew a savage line under the heading Second Team Meeting.

  Ashleigh, who noticed everything even though today she was too exhausted to pick up on its significance, saw Jude lift an eyebrow and direct the swiftest, most discreet glance towards Doddsy before passing on. Small group sessions with his smartest, most complementary thinkers were his favoured method of focussing on an issue once an investigation was in full swing. Tammy knew that. ‘Yes. Of course. But I’d like to bring Ashleigh up to speed first.’

  Tammy was displeased, or so Ashleigh thought, but Jude ignored her, rattling off the briefest outline of what had happened the previous day. As he spoke, Ashleigh jotted down the details of Len Pierce and Natalie Blackwell’s macabre encounter in the bright March afternoon.

  ‘So,’ Doddsy said, with a suppressed sigh as Jude concluded his summary and sat down, as if he knew he’d get no joy from the question he was about to ask. ‘What did you make of it, Tammy?’

  She ignored both him and Jude, turning her attention to Ashleigh instead. ‘You probably don’t know the place. It’s a farm track off the A66, on the right hand side, just after the turnoff for Temple Sowerby.’ She roughed out a rapid pencil sketch of the scene. ‘It’s a dead end. It goes down to some ruined farm buildings and there’s a riverside footpath cutting across the end of it, which cuts through a field to the Blackwells' cottage. That’s where Natalie was running. You’d expect there to be very little traffic other than the occasional farm vehicle, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are plenty of tyre tracks there.’

  ‘People turn their cars there if there’s a queue on the road.’ Jude looked up at the map on the board. ‘I’ve done that myself before now. But I’ve never gone all the way to the end of the lane.’

  Doddsy rubbed his chin. ‘It’s well known locally as a bit of a lover’s lane. But more for…shall we say casual encounters.’

  ‘Dogging?’ Chris had none of Doddsy’s slightly old-fashioned restraint.

  ‘That would expl
ain a lot.’ Tammy sniffed. ‘I did wonder. There are plenty of tracks, and we got some good readings. I’ll send you a list of everything we retrieved but the best ones are for what look like the two most likely. They’re the only fresh ones. One belongs to the Volkswagen car recovered at the scene.’

  ‘Owned by Len Pierce.’ Jude nodded towards Ashleigh.

  ‘I’ve had someone run the second through the databases. The best match I can come up with suggests a passenger vehicle that arrived after the VW and parked ahead of it in the lane. There was no room for the two to pass. You might speculate about whether this was done to prevent the VW driving away.’ She didn’t look towards Jude as she spoke, keeping her head down, pushing her glasses up her nose as she stared at her notes. ‘The tyres were worn more on the left than on the right.’ She withdrew some printed images from a folder and spread them out in front of her on the table, highlighting particular points as she spoke. Succumbing to a sudden wave of tiredness, Ashleigh lost concentration as she rattled though them.

  ‘We’ll have someone for something when we trace the car.’ Chris picked up one of them and scrutinised it carefully. He was the only one of the team not in some way subdued, but he never was. There was something in his puppyish enthusiasm that reminded her of her ex-husband, both appealing and a warning. ‘Those nearside tyres are illegal. I’ve picked up enough people for that in my time.’

  ‘This is murder,’ said Tammy, with unusual irritation in her voice, ‘not a traffic cops' tea party.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know what happened with Al Capone. It’s the little things that get these guys.’

  ‘The rear tyre tracks were more heavily imprinted than the front ones.’ Tammy shook off his good-humoured enthusiasm and carried on.

  ‘As if someone had sat in the back while it was stationary?’ Still a relative newcomer to the Eden Valley, Ashleigh was unfamiliar with the location. Staring at the annotated Ordnance Survey map Chris had pinned up on the whiteboard, she tried to envisage the scene, matching the map to the photographs, the distant houses to the village. If she’d read the map right it was a clever place for a murder, with no clear line of sight to any dwelling save the bungalow the Blackwells occupied, on the edge of the village.

  ‘Yes. I can’t put a time to it. The ground was muddy. I imagine when you get the results of the PM it’ll tell you how long the man took to die and when he might have been attacked. And there are footprints. Man’s size ten, brogues by the look of it.’ Today, she was spectacularly brisk.

  ‘The sort that Len was wearing?’ Ashleigh nodded down to one of the photographs in which Len’s smartly-shod foot was clearly visible.

  ‘Yes. Slightly worn at the heel. I’ll email pictures and full details to you.’

  ‘That’s a good start.’ Jude rattled his pen on the desk. ‘Thanks, Tammy. Good stuff.’

  ‘Please don’t patronise me, Jude. I’m doing my job as best I can.’

  There was a short silence, in which Doddsy suppressed yet another sigh and Chris looked startled. Ashleigh, who knew and liked Tammy, tested her bad temper with a smile but the investigator’s dogged determination not to respond was too much for her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jude said, in a tone of complete neutrality. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘There was a cigarette end on the ground near the car. There was blood beside the car, and on the grass. Someone had knelt down beside the body, then run onto the lane. The footsteps petered out towards the track.’

  ‘That would be Natalie Blackwell. She told us she held him when he died and then ran home.’

  ‘That follows. I take it you’ve sent her clothes off for analysis?’

  ‘No.’ Jude set his pen down again. ‘By the time I went to speak to her she’d already showered and changed and her clothes were in the washing machine.’

  ‘No-one thought to tell her about that?’ Tammy finally looked at Jude, her frustration apparent. ‘No-one thought to tell her that it might be evidence? Surely you know how important—’

  ‘Thank you, Tammy.’ There was an edge to Jude’s tone. ‘I think I know how to do my job, too.’

  ‘Of course she’d want to get out of her clothes if they were covered in blood.’ Ashleigh frowned, trying to imagine what Natalie Blackwell must have thought, how she must have felt. ‘But you’d think they’d have known we’d need any evidence from the crime scene. And she should have been told.’

  ‘The PC must have made a mistake.’ Chris rushed in to try and help. ‘Jesus, but that’s pretty basic.’

  ‘There was no mistake. The Blackwells were told,’ said Jude. ‘But Mrs B was in a state of shock.’

  It was normal enough, maybe, if someone didn't understand the significance, but Ashleigh could see that Jude had marked an asterisk beside the word clothing on his pad. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?’

  ‘She suffers from OCD and anxiety.’ He’d folded his lips together as if he was reluctant to criticise. ‘She’d taken some kind of medication by the time I spoke to her. I think we can conclude her actions weren’t entirely rational.’

  ‘Hers, maybe. But what about her husband? If she went for a shower he could surely have taken them.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Jude wrote CB next to the word clothing and underlined it.

  ‘Never mind. We don’t have them. We can’t learn anything from them.’ Tammy resumed her narrative. ‘The murder weapon wasn’t at the scene and your people still haven’t found it.’

  ‘They're still looking.’ Jude’s patience with Tammy’s briskness was clearly running thin and Ashleigh couldn’t blame him. He shouldn’t have to defend what was normal procedure to someone who was looking to pick a fight. ‘It’s possible the killer, whoever he or she was, took it with them.’

  ‘Right. The car’s currently in the garage being checked over but I didn’t see anything unusual about it. And that’s really about as much as I can tell you.’ Tammy was already pushing her chair back. ‘If there’s anything more you need, you can ask one of the team. I’m out and about today so I won’t be answering the phone. I’ll have someone get back to you once we’ve got the results from the garage and the lab.’ She stood up, scowled at the whiteboard, and stalked out, leaving the door to bang shut behind her.

  ‘Not answering the phone?’ Chris stared after her in puzzlement. ‘Was it something we said?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Jude picked up the photos Tammy had left and pinned them up on the board next to those already there. Yellow markers showed the position of blood, the body, the cigarette end. ‘Let’s pull together a bit more information. Chris. What do we know about Len Pierce?’

  While Chris opened up a document on his iPad, Ashleigh took another long swig of her coffee. It might be enough to get her through the meeting but Jude — and Faye — was right. Coming to the office was a misjudgement which clearly proved the point: she shouldn’t be at work. Her eyelids drooped. Stifling a yawn, she tried to catch up with what Chris was telling them.

  ‘…well-known locally,’ he was saying. ‘He part-owns a cafe on Boroughgate in Appleby. The Cosy Cupcake Cafe. It’s been there for twenty years, apparently. Anyone know it?’

  ‘I do. It’s a bit kitsch for my taste. Too much chintz and pink knitted tea cosies. But it does a decent chocolate brownie, if you’re ever out that way.’ Doddsy licked his lips.

  ‘I’ve been in it a few times, but I don’t recognise him.’ Jude was staring at the picture, in perplexity. Not knowing things hurt him, almost as much as a personal affront, and Ashleigh, who had been dating him long enough to understand the way his mind went, had to struggle to hide her amusement. ‘I’ve never seen him in the shop. There’s always a woman behind the counter.’

  ‘That’ll be his sister. Maisie Skinner. She owns it with him. She runs the shop. He does the baking — did, I should say.’ Chris flicked up a piece of paper. ‘I went to break the news to her yesterday evening and took her to Carlisle to do the formal ID. She’s devastated, of course, and didn’t really wa
nt to talk about it. But from what she did say – and what she didn’t – I thought she wasn’t really surprised.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jude raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes. Lenny was openly gay and it’s pretty clear she disapproved of him. She said he’d never had a steady partner but tended to go in for more casual liaisons.’

  ‘Did he tell her about them?’ Ashleigh yawned. ‘Or is she just assuming things?’

  ‘No, she said he never shared his business with anyone. She said she’d warned him off what she called that kind of behaviour but he just laughed.’

  ‘I think I’ll go down and have a chat with her myself,’ Jude said. ‘When we get the results back from the lab we might have a clue who he was meeting or why. But it sounds to me as though she’ll have a view.’

  A lover or a would-be lover, even a spurned lover. A business associate, a stranger or a friend. Len Pierce could have arranged to meet anyone on that lane. His sexuality was only the starting point for the investigation. ‘No leads?’

  ‘Not yet. He had a Facebook account but he didn’t post very much.’

  ‘Only pictures of cake, as far as I can see.’ Jude licked his lips as though the thought made him hungry.

  ‘He wasn’t on any other social media,’ Chris continued. ‘At least, not under his own name. He may have had other accounts. We’ve got his laptop and his phone and the tech guys are going to have a look at those. It’ll be interesting to see what comes up. His sister certainly wasn’t aware that he was involved in the local gay community.’

  ‘There’s no need for stereotyping. Loads of gay people don’t play a part in the gay community.’ Doddsy’s normal sweet nature showed the slightest signs of strain. ‘Most of us are happy to be part of the same community as everyone else.’

  ‘We can’t assume he was promiscuous just because he was gay.’ Ashleigh turned a reproachful eye on Chris, why ought to know better.

  ‘I’m not, but his sister does, and that’s our starting point. That bit about the gay community was her phrase, not mine.’ Chris’s perpetual smile turned away any dissonance. ‘She’s the certain generation — his older sister, I’d say by a good ten years, and probably not far off retirement age. Anyway, before she dissolved into tears and couldn’t tell me any more she did say she’d always told him that kind of thing — her phrase again, Doddsy, not mine — would get him into trouble.’