Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  Appleby was going about its Monday business as usual, the idyllic English county town apparently unmoved by the loss of one of its own. He parked on Boroughgate, slipped the parking disc onto the dashboard and got out of the car. The flag of St George fluttered from the church tower and a traffic warden moved from car to car outside the market hall, from which two rows of sandstone buildings scaled the hill like a stairway to heaven.

  The Cosy Cupcake Cafe was on the square and he paused outside it to contemplate the menu (all dishes home-made). A card in the steamed-up window announced that it was business as usual and inside every seat was full.

  The smell of good coffee was first to greet him when he pushed open the door, with the fragrance of an all-day breakfast hot on its heels and a meaty scent — lasagne? — trailing in their wake, ushering him in from the chilly afternoon. Inside the cafe a knot of interested customers clustered around the counter.

  Appleby’s citizens, seated and standing, turned and froze as one as he came in, as if he’d walked into the wrong Glasgow pub, expecting him. Used to that kind of reaction, frequently in more threatening situations, Jude offered the general population an iron-clad smile and sidled up to the counter. Doddsy had been right about the chintz and the tea cosies, but the wholesome smells of the place made his mouth water and gave him a moment of regret for the petrol-station sandwich he’d snatched on the go as an excuse for lunch. If the home cooking was Len’s it must be a fine tribute to him but the cakes on display had a distinctly mass-produced look, a sad stop-gap for something authentic. ‘I’m looking for Mrs Skinner.’

  The knot of humanity unravelled to reveal a short, solid woman behind the counter, and she emerged to meet him. She was clad in an appropriate amount of black, her mourning leavened by the pinny imprinted with comic ginger cats that was unravelling from around her waist. He put her in her mid fifties, a twinkling and active woman, quick on her feet. Her face had the same shape as her brother’s, the same mouth, the same square forehead and something in her eyes — life — gave him a clue as to what Len Pierce might have looked like had he lived beyond Sunday afternoon. ‘I’m Maisie Skinner. You’re Detective Satterthwaite?’

  He flashed his warrant card in confirmation and she looked from it to him and back again as if she mistrusted it until, seeming satisfied, she stepped back. ‘Come through the back.’ She turned back to her customers. ‘You lot can look after yourselves. But make sure you leave the cash on the counter for me. And behave. We’ve got the law in here.’

  Under the keen stares of the onlookers, Jude followed her into the back of the cafe, through a small area where the paraphernalia of sandwich-making littered a steel-topped unit, and into a tiny office. She closed the door behind him and motioned him towards the only chair. For herself, she pulled a stool from under the desk, removing a sheaf of invoices from it and dropping them on the floor. A shaft of light filtered through a dirty window and onto a desk covered with box files whose labels showed ten years’ worth of paperwork. Maisie Skinner’s loss looked as if it might be financial as well as personal.

  ‘You want to talk to me about Lenny.’ She settled her broad backside precariously on the narrow stool.

  ‘Yes. I imagine you’re very upset by the whole business—’

  ‘But you need to talk to me to find whoever killed him. Yes.’ Her bottom lip trembled and she folded her hands on the desk like a schoolteacher. ‘Poor Lenny. He was such a lovely man. But I did warn him. If you mess with the kind of people he mixed with, this sort of thing is always going to happen. It’s like consorting with prostitutes.’

  Maisie Skinner was, Jude recognised, one of those people with an old-fashioned view of sexual morality and a clear idea that virtue was the only guaranteed protector. ‘I’m not looking for moral judgements, Mrs Skinner.’

  ‘No, you're right.’ She surprised him by laughing. ‘I might as well be honest with you. Someone else will tell you what I think if I’m not. I didn’t approve of his lifestyle. Not at all. But that didn’t mean we didn’t get on. We did. Just because he made the wrong choices didn’t mean I didn’t care.’

  Wrong was relative, and Jude didn’t bother to challenge her because he was policing to the law not to someone else’s prejudices. Anyway, he knew exactly what she meant because he’d come across the exact situation with Mikey, whose idea of harmless fun had nearly led him into very serious trouble. Jude disapproved of his young brother’s approach to life just as Maisie Skinner had disapproved of hers, though in a different context. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Saturday evening. He came to cash up and take the takings away. We never leave money in here overnight, even in an honest place like this.’

  ‘You own the business jointly?’

  ‘Yes.’ She waved a hand at the paperwork and her face creased in perplexity. ‘God knows what happens now. It’s not the sort of thing you plan for, though maybe we should have.’

  ‘And the shop?’

  ‘It’s rented. The business just about washes its face but it’ll struggle without our Lenny’s baking.’ She shook her head. ‘Him and me have been in this business nearly thirty years. Now look at it.’ She pulled a paper tissue from a box on the desk and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Nothing left of him but a freezer full of beef stroganoff and a double chocolate cake that never got finished on Saturday. I don’t know how I’ll bear to throw it out. We joked about that cake when he came in Saturday to pick up the cash.’

  ‘Was there much? Cash, not cake.’

  ‘Not a huge amount. Three hundred pounds, maybe. So many folk pay contactless these days. When I heard he was dead I did wonder if someone had hit him over the head for it, but your constable said it was all there.’

  Len’s flat hadn’t been broken in to and the cash had been in a brown envelope on the mantelpiece when Chris had gone along to take possession of his laptop. He made a note to check the will. Three hundred pounds in cash wasn’t all that Lenny had left and people had been killed for less than a two-bedroomed flat in Appleby. ‘Tell me about him. What was he like?’

  A pensive expression crossed her face. ‘I don't know what I can tell you that’ll help. He was just our Lenny. He cooked and baked. It was his hobby as well as his job. He liked a smoke. He had a dog but when the dog died he never replaced it. Devoted to old Fly, he was. But that’s all, really.’

  ‘Mr Pierce was gay, is that right?’

  She gave him an injured look, as though they were already into terminology she preferred not to use. He could imagine her whispering to her friends that Len was a confirmed bachelor. ‘Yes. Always was. He never told anyone about it, as such, never mentioned it. After our parents passed away he stopped even pretending.’

  ‘So he’d been openly gay for how long?’

  ‘Five years. But you say openly… really. Folk around here know him. They either don’t care or don’t talk about it. I’m not judging him. It was his life and he knew the risks.’

  ‘The risks?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not like he ever settled into a proper relationship. Maybe he was just happy living on his own. I don’t know. He never told me he was meeting people, but I guessed he was. People like that always do.’

  Jude thought of Doddsy and how he might have rolled his eyes extravagantly at the phrase people like that. No doubt Faye Scanlon, with her determination to bring the police into the forefront of the twenty first century, would have pulled Maisie up on it and ended by alienating her. What mattered to him was what Maisie had to tell him and even her prejudices, tinged with affection though they might be, were of interest. ‘People like…?’

  ‘You know.’ She pursed her lips.

  ‘Did you know for certain he was meeting people?’

  ‘Everybody knew.’

  ‘But not for certain?’

  ‘Not for certain, no. But he’d often get dressed up to go off in his car on a Sunday afternoon. Why do that if you aren't making an effort for someone? And one time last year one of my customers
said they saw his car parked up beyond Temple Sowerby, right where they found him. So it stands to reason. Meeting people on line. Nasty, sordid business.’

  Speculation. All speculation. ‘One time last year? Do you know when?’

  She shook her head.

  Jude spared a thought for Len, dressing up in his Sunday best and setting off on a sunny day, to meet his fate. ‘Did he have many friends?’

  ‘I’d say none, not what I'd call friends. Not people he’d tell his secrets to. Oh, he’d stop and chat as long as you wanted about the weather and the like, always give you the time of day, but never anything about himself. Some’d call him a loner. Even when he was a kid. He was civil enough, and everyone knew who he was, but he never went out. He never went to the pub. He’d always come to us for Christmas and family occasions — the kids’ big birthdays and so on — but even then he never said much about himself. I wouldn’t say he was a listener, either. Sat in the corner with the telly on.’

  ‘Was he happy enough in general?’

  ‘I’d have said so, sitting there with his own thoughts for company, but I could be wrong. And that’s what happens, isn’t it, if you go meeting up with strangers on line and not knowing who they are? I warned my daughters about strangers long before the age of the internet, and it applies just as much to a grown man. Sometimes I’d say something, in a roundabout way. But he thought he could look after himself. Turned out he was wrong.’

  It was hardly surprising Len hadn’t confided in his sister, with her narrow judgement and her insistence on lecturing him for his own good, but there was every chance her guess about what had happened was correct. The post mortem would tell them whether Len had put up a fight, but Jude’s assessment of the scene had suggested not. There had been no marks on his hands, as if the first blow had caught him so completely he hadn’t been able to respond. ‘Did he make a will?’

  A shadow passed over her face. ‘I don’t know. He never thought about death, or if he did he never talked about it.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll just keep carrying on until someone tells me I have to stop. As long as I can find someone to do the baking now he’s gone.’

  ‘Six days a week,’ said Jude, remembering the opening hours pinned on the café door. ‘But the shop’s closed on Sunday?’

  ‘Aye. It’s the only day off I get. Tony – my son – was back from college yesterday and we went up to Ullswater for lunch.’ She brushed a wisp of grey hair back from her face, tiring of him. ‘Check if you want. They have a note of the booking. Four of us, at the Sun at Pooley Bridge.’

  The bell in the shop clanged, and she shot a look towards the door. Accepting that Maisie had told him all she could, Jude allowed her to bring the interview to an end, folding the cover of his notebook down and disentangling his long legs from the cramped space beneath the desk. ‘Thanks, Mrs Skinner. That was very helpful.’

  ‘Aye, that’ll be right,’ she said with scorn. ‘I can’t tell you what he didn’t tell me. Just find out who did it.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  He followed her into the shop, nodded at the customers and went out into the street.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Nat! Where the hell are you?’

  Natalie had stopped in the darkness of the underpass, on the riverside path. At the sound of Claud’s voice she turned, and the light from her head torch bounced off the concrete and sent the shadows stretching and contorted around her. The rumbling of lorries on the A66 overhead throbbed like a pulse in a mother’s womb.

  She shivered, aware of her weaknesses and her strengths. She was anxious about everything, afraid of most things, but as long as she was running she wasn’t afraid of the dark. Now Claud had appeared to throw her routine out of kilter and with it her moment of calm.

  She checked her tracker. A minute to go of the ten she made herself spend on stretches. Bracing her hands against the wall she stretched her left leg out behind her. Go away, Claud. Let me be calm. Just for a minute.

  ‘Nat.’ The beam of his torch came ahead of him round the bend, spearing through the new growth of the bramble bushes, raising ripples from the river. With another light, the fusion of light and dark became even more frenzied. Fascinated, Natalie watched her own shadow appear, leaner than reality and twisted like a skeleton on the wall in front of her. ‘Why the hell did you go out?’

  ‘I told you. I needed a run. To calm me down.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘But I always run.’ She stretched the other calf. The minute ticked away and the stretching was complete, but with Claud present she wouldn’t be able to jog along the final stretch alone. She shook her head in frustration.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t think you’d want to—’ A shrug. ‘For Christ’s sake, Nat. It’s barely twenty-four hours. The police are only just out of the place.’

  But you couldn’t let fear dominate you. The memory of the dead man’s face was vague like a fading bad dream. Sometimes it surged back at her, sometimes she couldn’t even bear to look out of the window towards the scene of his death, but if she was going to run she had to do it straight away. Claud wouldn’t understand. Even as she thought it, the fear came back to her. After all it was a good thing that he’d come to find her and she wouldn’t have to run past the end of the lane alone so soon after the man’s death. ‘It’s fine. Really. I’m fine.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Claud was an impatient man, though not normally with her. Today the mask had slipped a little. ‘Are you mad? There’s a knifeman running around out there somewhere. He could kill anybody.’

  ‘Yes, but in the village they’re saying the poor man was gay and I’m not. So whoever killed him isn’t going to kill me.’

  Even in the darkness Claud twitched, as though this statement of the obvious had offended him. ‘We don’t know that was why he was killed. It may have been nothing to do with his sexuality. Robbery, maybe. A madman.’

  Oh God, Claud. No. Think before you say things like that. ‘The police haven't said but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the reason.’ She finished her stretching, checked her fitness tracker as the backlit figures glowed in the dark. Forty thousand steps. It was her second long run of the day. The numbers, representing the security of achievement, comforted her. Her breathing was calm and controlled. Tomorrow, she’d do more.

  ‘It could be for any reason.’ He came forward into the pool of light from her torch and smiled at her. ‘Come on. Let’s get back. I don’t like being out here any more than you do.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, and as they emerged from the tunnel onto the muddy path the sleet chilled her. ‘Shall I run on ahead?’

  ‘I think we’d better stick together, don’t you?’

  If you want, Claud. If you want. ‘Yes.’ And she slipped her hand in his like a trusting child.

  Chapter 6

  ‘I’ve brought you a present.’ Curling her feet up underneath her on the sofa, Ashleigh watched through the open door to the kitchen as Jude slid the used plates into the dishwasher and turned his attention to opening a bottle of wine.

  ‘Oh?’ He turned his head towards her, initially with a quizzical expression, but he caught her eye and the raised eyebrow gave way to a smile.

  In the three weeks they’d been apart she’d experienced a niggling sense of incompleteness, something she hadn’t expected. Nor was she entirely sure she welcomed it. But what the hell? It was easier to live in the moment.

  ‘You’ll laugh.’ She uncurled her legs again and reached for her bag, stirring among the debris of an intercontinental flight — passport, boarding pass, flight socks, an empty packet of paracetamol. The brown paper bag she’d nurtured across continents smelt faintly of incense.

  ‘I never laugh at you.’ He slid onto the sofa beside her and placed a glass in her hand. ‘Here. I know it’s a work night, but you probably need it after all the traumas of the last couple of days.’

  She curled her hand around the chilled bowl of her glass, turning it roun
d, considering how the rest of the evening might go and finding the answer acceptable. ‘If I drink it I won't be able to drive home.’

  ‘Damn.’ He brushed aside her fake protest, raising his glass in salute to a mutually satisfying solution. ‘Then you’ll have to stay. I can’t be bothered to make up the bed in the spare room, though. You’ll have to share mine.’

  They clinked glasses, and she settled back down on the sofa, close to him. On principle, she didn’t, wouldn’t, love him and she knew that on the same basis he didn’t love her, but sometimes a devil at her shoulder tempted her to whisper that little lie. Only the fear of the consequences stopped her.

  Discretion – and experience – triumphed. One day she’d have to tell him about her affair with Faye but tonight wasn’t the night for confessions.

  Setting her glass down on the side table, she clasped her hand round the packet, reached for Jude’s hand and closed his long fingers around it. ‘You can deduce what it is before you open it.’

  ‘Jeez, Ashleigh. I’m not at work now.’ But he laughed as he moved the packet from one hand to the other to feel its shape and weight, lifting it to sniff at it. Everyone knew his heart was never off duty. ‘Soap.’

  ‘Not even close.’

  ‘Chocolate.’

  ‘You think I’d get a bar of chocolate all the way from Sri Lanka without eating it?’

  ‘Fair point. Then it must be a door stop.’

  ‘Now you’re being ridiculous. You know perfectly well what it is, don’t you?’

  ‘Indeed, Moriarty. I hypothesise that you’re trying to drag me into your web with a pack of tarot cards.’ He delved into the bag and drew out a cardboard box, a little thicker than a standard pack of playing cards, which he turned over and over in his hands, examining the abstract pattern on the back, lifted it to sniff at that teasing scent of patchouli and sandalwood. ‘Where did you got them? A temple?’