Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  ‘You don't have to justify yourself to me. You can be whatever you want. I don’t care.’

  ‘I don't mind telling you. Yeah, I like him. Yeah, I like him a lot. We’ve been out a couple of times. But we’re very different. And she’s right, isn’t she? He’s a hell of a lot younger than me. That makes a difference, too.’ Age was a strange thing. In his career Doddsy had come across many people who had engaged in flings with younger partners and it had ended in frustrated violence. Some of them, ending up in court on an assault charge, had excused themselves on the grounds that the relationship made them feel young, good about themselves. Tyrone, with his youth and his humour and his belief that everything was achievable if you gave it enough time and effort, had the opposite effect on Doddsy, even as he moved irresistibly towards the inevitable acknowledgement that he loved him. He made him feel old and tired, as if he had very little to offer so promising a man.

  Jude let it drift, dropping the pound that came in his change in the tips jar, picking up the remaining glasses and leading the way across the bar to hand them out. He didn’t take a seat at once, but stood back and waited for Doddsy to do the same. ‘I’m not going to talk shop all evening. But what do you reckon to Len Pierce?’

  ‘Are you asking me because I’m gay? Because if you are, you’re wasting your time. I’m not into the gay scene at all.’ Church and folk music were Doddsy’s interests, two more things that suddenly made him feel older than he was. The shadow of a mid-life crisis lengthened behind him, stealing ever closer to his shoulder.

  ‘I’m asking you because you’re a detective,’ Jude said, ‘and because I value your opinion. But yeah, Len being gay may be significant.’

  ‘My opinion? Right. Then I don’t understand why he was skulking at the end of a lane when there’s nothing in the character profiles to suggest he cared what other people think about him.’ Doddsy picked up his drink. It wasn’t always self-doubt that held people back from being themselves, but doubt about the open-heartedness of their neighbours and friends, unspoken judgement behind a mask of tolerance. ‘I’ll ask Tyrone. He’s much more into that kind of scene than I am. But I think we’ll find Len wasn’t part of anything. I think he was just an ordinary bloke who met another ordinary bloke and maybe fell in love with him. As you do.’

  ‘My thoughts, too. Okay. Now let’s forget about it.’

  Stepping away, Jude sat down in the space that Ashleigh had made for him. On the other side of the table Tyrone pulled up a chair and Doddsy sat down behind him and smiled. He’d never hidden his sexuality, never made much of a thing about it and accepted the quiet celibacy that life had placed in his path, and now a strange thing had happened to him, as if Tyrone had somehow led him out of the closet to blink in the daylight.

  *

  There was a chill in the March night air as Gracie got out of her car, turned her back on it and looked towards the west. Civil twilight, her father called it – daylight was done, darkness yet to come upon them. Only the glow over the Lake District fells and the light from the car headlights offered her any comfort. The lane where Len Pierce had died was bleak and cold.

  ‘This is it?’ she asked, to break the silence.

  Giles closed the car door and walked round to join her, his body breaking the beams as he walked in front of them. ‘Yes.’

  He was nervous. Attuned to him in a way she rarely was with others, Gracie could sense it in the tone of his voice. If it hadn’t been so spookily dark, if he hadn’t had his back to what was left of the light so that his face was a pit of emptiness, she thought she’d have seen him licking his lips.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Again, short and terse.

  ‘You can’t see anything,’ she said, after a moment during which the soft light faded even further and the harsh beam from the headlights drew sharper, starker lines. Suddenly the world was divided into black and white, all shades of grey departed. ‘Perhaps we should have come another day.’

  ‘I don’t want to see anything. In any case, there’s nothing to see.’

  Gracie ran her forefinger around the neck of her coat, hooked her scarf up and tried to seal the gaps, but still that knife-like easterly wind crept in. A man had died here, where they stood. ‘You know they’ll find you, don’t you?’

  ‘Do you think so? They’d have found me by now.’

  These things took time. Giles ought to know that. He knew how long it took to get a sample off to the lab and analysed. He must know, too, that if there was no question of saving lives there was less urgency. Would the police be able to accelerate matters when there was murder involved? ‘They must have your DNA.’

  ‘They won’t know it’s mine. They won’t have any to compare it with. Because I’ve always been such a law-abiding sod.’

  Sometimes she thought that about herself, how much easier life would have been if she’d had the courage to rebel in the short term and take the hit, for the sake of her own peace of mind. It was hard not to empathise with the bitterness in his tone. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.’

  A pause, longer than was comfortable. ‘You think?’

  ‘Yes.’ She made herself sound brisk, confident even. And reminded herself that the chill was the wind, not fear. And then, in a moment of pure madness, because if she was going to die at the hands of the man she’d foolishly trusted she was going to let him know, she said: ‘Giles. You didn’t. Did you?’

  A long, long pause. ‘No.’ His voice cracked. ‘No. Why would I? I loved him.’

  Giles loved too many people. He loved Janice. He loved Gracie herself, to a degree. One of the people he’d loved, the one he claimed to love most, had died, at this very spot. The thought chilled her.

  ‘Let’s go.’ She opened the driver’s door, slid in and closed it again. Her finger hovered over the lock, just in case, but he made no move towards her, only walking slowly, with his head bowed, back round the car to the passenger door. There he paused for a moment to look at the shadows pooling round them, and opened the car door.

  Gracie tightened her grip on the steering wheel. ‘Okay?’ she said, with false brightness.

  ‘Yes.’ He snapped his seat belt back in place. ‘Let’s get back. Janice will be wondering where I am.’

  *

  The early evening drinks were done, the group breaking up to go their separate ways. In the ladies’ loo, Ashleigh was smartening up her make-up when her work phone, which she’d forgotten to switch off, pinged with an alert of a missed call.

  Number unknown. Administering a slash of scarlet lipstick, Ashleigh folded her lips together then dabbed at them with a tissue as she debated the eternal detective’s dilemma. To return the call, or not?

  ‘Never off bloody duty,’ she said to her reflection, knowing Jude would have answered it, regardless of where he was. He needed to learn to keep his work phone switched off, something she normally did. Closing the cover of the phone, she was about to stash it away in her bag when the voicemail reminder pinged in. So it was important enough to warrant a message. Curiosity won out. She flicked the message on to speaker and listened to it while she dabbed a touch of powder on her face.

  ‘Hi, Sergeant O’Halloran. This is Marsha Letham from the Eden Telegraph. We’re looking to run a piece alongside our reporting of the A66 murder in the local area. I wanted to talk to someone about diversity and inclusion of the LBGTQI community in the local police operations. I’m told there’s a new policy approach being developed. I understand you worked with Detective Superintendent Faye Scanlon at the Cheshire force and wondered if I could chat to you about that. Give me a call if you have a moment.’ A pause, and then the cheery voice came back at her again. ‘Oh, and no names, obviously. I protect my sources.’

  Ashleigh flicked the phone off and frowned at it. Even on a Friday night, even in the ladies’ toilets of a local pub, the fallout of her relationship with Faye Scanlon cast a long shadow. Questions about inclusion and diversity? No names? That wou
ld only be the beginning of it. The woman must think she buttoned up the back.

  I may make mistakes, Ashleigh said to herself as she thought of Faye, the biggest and most damaging of them, but I’m not so stupid as to get involved in something like that.

  Chapter 9

  Once Jude had crept quietly out of the house Ashleigh shared with her old school friend and headed off to work, she couldn’t fall back to sleep. Six o’clock was an unconscionable hour to be up and out on a Saturday, but she’d already learned he was a man who couldn’t settle easily to anything if there was a major problem to deal with at work. She was as bad. Other people’s problems niggled at her, but she preferred them to having to worry about her own.

  Except one. As she lay in bed waiting for the warmth that Jude had left behind him to cool and for the dawn light to creep over from the front of the housetop and lift the shadows that lay deep in her bedroom, the message she’d found on her phone the night before nagged at her. Journalists who wanted information on a case went to the press office. If they were looking elsewhere it was either because they didn’t think they’d get the answer they wanted or they’d tried and been refused. Whichever it was, she’d steer well clear.

  She should have told Jude about Faye the night before, but if she had it would have led her into history she didn’t want to revisit. Life was complicated enough without him asking the unanswerable question: why?

  I should stop worrying about the past, she lectured herself even as she realised she wasn’t going to get back to sleep and might as well give up and make the best of the day. It was past seven by then, and she swung her legs over the edge of the bed with a sigh. The plumbing was antiquated and shouted its complaints for all to hear, and Lisa wouldn’t thank her for disturbing her so early, so she delayed a shower, slipped on her dressing gown and padded down to the kitchen.

  Five minutes later she was sitting on the sofa with the side table in front of her. A mug of strong coffee steamed at one side and her pack of tarot cards, wrapped in purple silk, sat in the middle, inviting her to talk. Moments of silence such as this were rare and the week had given her something to think about. The Queen of Wands, scowling out from the tarot card in Jude’s hand. Faye, hostile and antagonistic. Secrets. Jude.

  ‘What I want to know,’ she said to the empty air, ‘is what the hell I should do about Faye?’ Because since that first, frosty, meeting her ex-lover hadn’t spoken a single word to her in her frequent — possibly over-frequent — passes through the office.

  Faye had always been hands-on. Ashleigh pursed her lips, hand hovering over the cards, as she remembered Faye’s close interest in all her staff — irritating to some, flattering to others — and where it had led the two of them. Unwrapping the deck, she dealt out five cards in a horseshoe, face down. ‘Should I tell Jude?’ But the question was ridiculously obvious. Of course she should tell him. The only decisions were when, and how much?

  ‘I don’t expect answers. I never do. But perhaps we can move towards some kind of constructive solution, huh?’

  The house rang like a bell with early-morning silence. She must sound ridiculous. She rarely read the tarot for others but when she did so, for Jude or for Lisa, she allowed their scepticism to influence her and she never spoke to the cards. Perhaps that was why those other readings were never quite so successful as those she did when she was alone — because she didn’t tune in to the questions she was asking or the answers she received.

  She paused before she turned over the first card, the one that would outline the issues in her present, that might hint at the significance of something she’d overlooked. The Saturday-stillness of the early morning frayed at the edges as a car made its way down Norfolk Road. A bird, wide awake and looking for a mate, screamed from a perch somewhere out of sight above the window. The low rumble of a northbound train rattled the windows and died away towards Plumpton.

  ‘The present,’ she reminded herself, turning over the card, knowing all too well what the issues were. On the table in front of her the Chariot, with its black and white sphinxes facing in different directions ahead of the stern Charioteer warned of a long and hard fight. ‘Who knew?’ she said, lightly, though joking with the cards was a high-risk strategy. Was this about Faye, or about life in general?

  Or work. Somewhere out there Len Pierce’s killer was at large and the only consolation she could draw from it was that the card was upright, indicating eventual success. Was the murderer satisfied with a mission completed, or waiting for another victim to stumble across his path?

  She shook the thought off. The cards were for personal problems. You’d have to be a special kind of fool to try and use them to solve a crime.

  She stopped for a moment to think what her present expectations might be before turning the card that would shed light on them. She’d arrived in Cumbria an emotional refugee and she hadn’t hoped for anything except a new start. The World, a positive card, made her smile, reflected exactly that. It implied a beneficial journey, a new start. So far, so good. Maybe Faye had changed, wanted to wipe the slate clean as Ashleigh herself did, and only a lack of courage prompted her silence and prevented an apology.

  Maybe. It had been a short relationship, but she thought she knew Faye’s weaknesses.

  The next card made her frown. It represented the unexpected, but it was anything but, a card that came up too often in her readings to be a surprise — so often that she’d once checked the deck to make sure there wasn’t a duplicate. Jude would have an explanation for its repeated appearance, no doubt — that she’d somehow subliminally marked it so it always came out of the deck, or it was question of perception and it came up no more often than any other. No matter: here it was in front of her, the Three of Swords, a card that spoke too often of Scott, of infidelity and divorce, betrayal and incompatibility.

  This time something else struck her about its grim and gaudy iconography. She didn’t need the image of its bleeding heart to remind her of Len Pierce, skewered by a six-inch blade.

  ‘That wasn’t helpful,’ she said, to herself rather than the deck. ‘You can do better than that. What am I looking out for in the immediate future?’ She turned over the fourth card.

  ‘Seriously?’ The High Priestess was one of her favourites, a confirmation of what she thought and believed, that instinct took its place alongside reason as an equal. Jude would have mistrusted it. She smiled at the thought, but the smile faded. In the picture on her card the figure of the High Priestess, like the Queen of Wands in Jude’s tarot deck, was looking out with exactly the same steely glance Faye Scanlon turned on everyone around her. I’m making this up, she chastised herself, seeing things that aren’t there.

  That bloody woman, living rent-free in her head where Scott used to. Today the negative attributes of the card were there to see when she’d previously only sensed its positive ones — egotism, selfishness and a ruthless drive for success. It dawned on her, then, that after everything that had passed she didn’t particularly like the woman who was now very much her senior officer. With this uncomfortable thought, she approached the final card, the long term, with trepidation. The Page of Swords came up, reversed, another figure who was unreliable and unstable, warning of deception. She shook her head at it. More swords. ‘I’m in the police. I see people like that all the time. For God’s sake, unstable and unreliable probably describes half my colleagues!’

  Looking at the cards in frustration, she shuffled the five back into the pack and reached for her coffee. A shadow in the doorway caught her eye and she turned to find Lisa standing there, clutching her shabby dressing gown round her skinny body and staring, a mug of coffee in her hand.

  ‘My God,’ Lisa said, cheerfully. ‘That was a bit of a show. You could make a better living doing that at fairgrounds than you do catching criminals. Did you realise you were talking to yourself?’

  Sighing, Ashleigh folded the pack back into its gauzy shroud. ‘There’s no-one else to talk to at this time of the morn
ing.’

  ‘Your man’s very dedicated, isn’t he? I’m sure if I was him I wouldn’t want to be sneaking out of a nice warm bed at this time on a Saturday morning, especially not with you still in it.’ Lisa came and sat next to Ashleigh on the sofa, peering at the silk-wrapped pack, but if she thought about requesting a reading, as she periodically did, she thought better of it.

  ‘It’s not like we never see each other.’ A bit of distance was probably a good thing, but Jude’s company hadn’t begun to grate on her just yet and neither, as far as she was aware, had hers on him. ‘We’re both off on Wednesday. I’ll see plenty of him then.’

  ‘I just love a job that’s five days a week.’ Lisa watched as Ashleigh sipped her coffee. ‘Shall I rustle us up some breakfast? I’d suggest going out but we’re such early birds there’ll be nowhere open.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lisa said, after a fractional pause. ‘What is it?’

  Denial was tempting but it only offered short-term gain. Ashleigh’s success as an interviewer relied, to some extent, to communicating to any witness the inevitability of being caught out and the comfort of conceding the truth early. And anyway Lisa was her friend, the best one she had and the one to whom she could trust even the secrets she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to Jude. ‘I never told you about what happened when I got back from holiday.’

  Lisa tilted her head to one side with a questioning look. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I met my new boss. And she’s my old boss.’

  ‘Faye Scanlon?’ Thrusting the cup of coffee onto the side table, Lisa flipped her hands to her mouth in an exaggerated gesture of shock. ‘Oh my! Is that what you were talking to the cards about?’

  Ashleigh nodded. There was no other source of sensible advice and one thing she knew about herself was that she couldn’t trust her heart.