Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  ‘There wasn’t anyone else in the churchyard at the time,’ Chris supplemented. ‘Or rather, neither of the witnesses saw anyone in that particular part of it.’

  In response to Faye’s questioning look, Jude reached for a piece of paper and sketched a rapid plan. ‘The church is in a large curtilage, very enclosed. There’s no vehicular access to it, apart from about half a dozen parking spaces against the churchyard wall at the north eastern corner. There are buildings at the east end and a footpath connecting Burrowgate and Friargate runs between them and the churchyard. There’s a flight of steps that goes down from the south corner into King Street, and a passageway that goes from the west corner into the Market Square.’ There were photos on the whiteboard, retrieved by Chris from the internet in the small hours of the morning to give an interim picture of the scene in daylight. Someone had drawn every possible escape route on them.

  ‘It’s in the block between those that Claud Blackwell has his office. There are footpaths that cut across the churchyard itself, as well as those that go round it. The configuration is such that it’s very easy to be in one part of that close and not see something that’s going on in another. The body was found here.’ He slid the sketch across to her, and she frowned down at it, before passing it to Chris, who jumped up and pinned it to the board.

  ‘So far, we haven’t found anyone who saw Gracie in the churchyard, but she must have cut across one of the paths. Inquiries are ongoing and we may yet come up with someone who can shed light on what she was doing there.’

  ‘You’re treating Blackwell as a suspect, of course.’ Faye pushed her glasses up her nose and sighed. The rest of the diversity workshops would have to be put on hold.

  Under the cloak of his tiredness, Jude bristled with irritation. ‘Yes. Anything else you can tell us about her, Ashleigh?’

  ‘I don’t yet know if anything’s come up from her friends and colleagues that may indicate motive. If there’s anything in her private life it’s not immediately obvious. She was relatively new to the area, though, so the people we’ve spoken to haven’t been able to shed any light on it. Her parents say she worked hard and came home often. Her mother has been unwell recently. As far as I know she got on with everyone.’ She shuffled the bits of paper around.

  Faye fidgeted. ‘Of course you’ve enquired about her personal life. In particular her sexuality.’

  ‘We don’t know.’ Perhaps it was time to shift Faye’s attention to himself. Everyone had bad days and the woman could be intimidating, but Jude was surprised at how Ashleigh seemed to have allowed Faye to unnerve her. ‘Single, no past relationships that we’re aware of.’

  ‘You’ll be inquiring further.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘The modus operandi suggests they’re linked.’

  ‘But not necessarily a homophobic motive.’ He sensed disquiet. On the other side of the table Doddsy, who had remained silent until that point, allowed himself the faintest shrug. ‘Until I hear something else I’ll keep an open mind .’

  ‘As, of course, you should.’ Faye fidgeted with her cuffs.

  Jude reached for his coffee and sipped at it, reminding himself who was in charge of the investigation and taking back control of it. ‘We have to consider our main suspects.’ Chris had already written the key names on the board. ‘Those who were on the spot could have done it. There’s Phil. We can’t rule him out until we find someone who can swear he wasn’t lurking round the corner waiting to happen upon the scene.’

  ‘Do you know Dr Garner well?’ Faye asked, still fidgeting.

  Jude shook his head. ‘In passing.’

  ‘I’ve met him,’ Doddsy added, as if for the sake of disclosure, ‘but again it was brief and purely social.’

  Thankfully she didn’t press them. Tammy was furious enough with Jude, as well as Doddsy, and she’d be even madder when she realised they were investigating her husband as a possible murder suspect. ‘There’s Claud. He was on the spot both times. And Natalie.’

  ‘So the only people we can name as suspects for two possible homophobic murders are someone who’s dedicated to saving lives and someone who campaigns in support of gay rights.’ Chris sat back.

  ‘There may be other motives. And there were other people in the area as well. We need to cross-check their movements.’

  Jude’s heart had sunk as soon as Faye had raised the question of sexuality. ‘Obviously we rule nothing in or out at this stage, but equally obviously, we have to treat these two killings as linked, and we have to consider the very real possibility they’re motivated by hate.’ He tapped his pen on the table and the silence that lingered between them had a particular sourness to it. ‘But they may be random. I don’t want to cause any alarm but I think we need to warn people to take care—’

  ‘They’ll all be freaking out over it already,’ Doddsy said, ‘regardless of any threat level. It’s what people do. The risk to an individual might be small, but people don’t know that. The last thing we need is panic.’

  Faye plucked at her collar. ‘Absolutely. Leave that with me. Naturally I reassured everyone as much as I could but it won’t help. We’ll just make sure there are plenty of uniforms about in the town. That always helps.’ She checked her watch and stood up, but she lingered. ‘Keep me informed as to what’s happening, would you? I have other things to attend to just now.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jude said, taking this as a signal to carry on without her. ‘Do we know what we’re doing? Ashleigh, you’ll take on the door-to-door inquiries, as usual. Doddsy, do you want to pop down the road and get up to speed with what’s going on in the town? Faye’s right. We need to make sure that the public see us about.’ Because a murder in an isolated lane was one thing, but there was nothing to put the fear of God into the local population like a violent death on their own doorstep. ‘Do your reassuring act. Be as jolly as you can without looking as if you aren’t taking it seriously. Chris, I want you to get your team onto finding out as much as you can about Gracie Pepper. In particular, I’d like to know of she had any connection to Giles Butler. And I want you to find out where Dr Butler was last night.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘I’m going into Carlisle this afternoon, to attend the PM. I don’t imagine there will be many surprises, but you never know. And as always, I’m at the end of the phone.’

  He turned to give one long last searching look at the whiteboard, as if its scant information on the previous night’s murder might make any more sense, but inevitably his mind was as cluttered and incomprehensible as the material on the board.

  *

  ‘I’m off, then.’ Jude whisked his jacket up off the back of his chair and over his shoulder. ‘Keep me updated.’

  ‘See you later.’ Standing up, Ashleigh reached into the pile of small change in her desk drawer and addressed herself to Chris at the next desk. ‘I’m heading to the coffee machine.’ It would be a quick fix, because there was no time to head down to the canteen. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Flat white.’ He was already absorbed in the next step of the investigation.

  Faye had drifted only as far as the corridor and Ashleigh, leaving the incident room and walking down the corridor, ran right into the trap. ‘Ashleigh. There you are.’

  Did the woman never sit down in her office and do any actual work? ‘Oh, hi Faye.’ She turned her back to her boss and slipped a coin into the coffee machine, where it rattled straight into the reject tray. At the close of a briefing meeting her habit was to go to the coffee machine, and it was uncomfortable to reflect that Faye remembered that trivial detail and had used it against her.

  ‘I’d like a quiet word with you. Unofficially, of course,’ Faye said, staring down the corridor and picking away at her discreet gold earring.

  ‘Of course.’ Because what else could she say?

  ‘I want to know exactly what you’ve told your boyfriend.’

  In their previous shared workplace they’d had the same disparity in rank but this time Ashleigh was in a p
osition of relative strength. Faye’s hostility would damage her only if she allowed it. She’d come through all this and was no longer dependent upon the goodwill of a superior officer. ‘All sorts of things. We talk. People do.’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were talking about whether I take sugar in my coffee.’ She rattled the buttons on the machine, glad to have something to concentrate on. She’d allowed Faye’s presence to unnerve her during the briefing meeting when there was no reason why it should. ‘I told him I’m bisexual. I don’t keep secrets from him.’ Except that wasn’t entirely true. The secrets she chose to reveal would come out anyway. Surely Faye must know this one would never stay buried.

  ‘Very admirable.’ Faye’s tone crackled with sarcasm.

  Aditi marched past them, carrying a piece of paper, as Ashleigh thrust her pound coin back into the machine with added force and this time it dropped with a satisfying thud. When Aditi had disappeared into someone else’s office and the corridor had returned to a semblance of quiet, Faye returned to the attack. ‘And what else does he know?’

  ‘He knows I had an affair with my boss. He knows my boss was a woman.’ Quite how much Jude suspected about the relationship was another matter. Maybe he’d guessed. ‘I told him a few months ago. We haven’t mentioned it since.’

  ‘It’ll be better for both of us to keep it like that.’

  Sensible for both of them? It might suit Faye but Ashleigh was already aware that if she wanted the relationship with Jude to go anywhere — if she did — then secrets couldn’t be a part of it. The ridiculous affair with Faye could only hurt them if they identified it a problem rather than an incident consigned to history. ‘I thought we were having all these workshops to teach us not to be ashamed of what we are and to accept people who are different.’

  ‘The point is not what happened,’ Faye snapped. ‘Talk about extra-marital relationships in the workplace is distracting and gets blown out of proportion.’

  And would damage her career, she meant. ‘In which case, isn’t it better to be up-front and honest?’ But Ashleigh, watching the thick brown liquid tricking into the second plastic cup, knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. Faye was by nature defensive and her ambitions were threaded through with an unhealthy paranoia, a conviction that everyone was her potential enemy.

  ‘On the contrary. If an individual’s private life doesn’t impact on their work they have a right to keep it private.’

  The trickle of coffee stopped and the machine sighed and hissed itself to a standstill. ‘I’m not going to talk about it. You needn’t worry about that.’

  ‘And Jude?’

  ‘I haven’t told him yet, but I expect I will at some point. So what? He’s very discreet.’

  ‘I daresay. As long as it suits him.’

  Lifting the second coffee from the machine, Ashleigh shrugged. Jude didn’t covet a Queen’s Police Medal for serving time at a desk. He’d made his way up through the ranks because he was good at the job and she suspected he had no ambition to go any further, but Faye’s blind spot wouldn’t let her see that. ‘Why don’t you talk to him about it?’

  Aditi came out of the adjacent office, this time without the sheet of paper, and Ashleigh took the opportunity to extract herself from the uncomfortable conversation and fall into step beside her junior colleague as they headed back towards the incident room. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Oh, fine.’ Aditi held the door open for her, and closed it safely behind her before she said: ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I find that woman scary.’

  ‘I imagine she’s a pussycat when you get to know her.’ Ashleigh set one coffee down on her desk and handed the other to Chris.

  ‘Pussy cat with claws.’ Chris said. ‘Weren’t you in Cheshire before you came here, Ash? Did you know her?’

  ‘In passing.’ At moments like this she understood how honest people became liars. It was easier when the consequences of truth were something they weren’t ready to cope with. She cared nothing if people knew she’d slept with a woman, but Faye’s grim resistance to the facts made it difficult. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘The Blackwells had a short spell in Crewe so I was running a few things past a mate down there.. He was asking me how we got on with her.’

  ‘She had a bit of a reputation for being fierce.’ Every step dug the hole deeper, but really — was it worth telling the truth when a lie was harmless?

  ‘I’ll say.’ Aditi rolled her eyes.

  ‘She left very suddenly, he said, and no-one seemed to know why.’

  ‘Maybe she had family issues.’ Now, at last, Ashleigh found a safe patch of ground on which to rest. There was no sign that Faye had brought her husband with her when she’d moved. Her sympathetic side asserted herself. She wasn’t in a position to criticise anyone for falling apart in the aftermath of a breakup.

  ‘Aye, maybe. But they call her Faye Scandal down there, apparently. The gossip is there was an affair and the husband threw her out.’

  ‘Watch out for your virtue then,’ Aditi jeered at him, and took herself off over to her desk, laughing.

  *

  It was four o’clock by the time Jude dragged himself back from Carlisle, bypassing the incident room for the sake of his own sanity and heading up towards Faye’s office instead. Outside the spring daylight had faded early and the shadows had gathered in her north-facing room. She was at her desk, frowning at the screen of her laptop and the pool of light from the desk lamp illuminated an empty M&S sandwich wrapper and a half-eaten Double Decker.

  When he came in, she looked up. ‘You were at the post-mortem?’

  He nodded. He must be getting old. There had been a time, not so long ago it seemed, when he could get by on a few hours’ sleep, but there had been too many late nights recently. ‘Yes. I was just heading home, but I thought I’d stop by and update you.’

  ‘I’m glad you did. There’s something I want to ask you.’ Silence hovered between them and she reached out for the other half of the Double Decker, peeling down the packet and looking at it thoughtfully. ‘I think I can guess how it went. Exactly the same as Len Pierce. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes. A single blow to the heart from a knife. A kitchen knife. Blade six inches. Red plastic handle. One of a set.’

  She jumped up, crossed to the door and switched on the light. ‘You’ve found it, then?’

  ‘Yes. And from what I understand there’s every indication that it’s the same knife that killed Len Pierce.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In a bin on King Street, just outside Lloyds Bank. It was wrapped in a man’s overcoat. The bin caught fire last night, while we were securing the churchyard, and someone living in the flat over the road put a bucket of water on it because they thought it must be vandals, and we had enough on our plate so that they didn’t need to bother us. The guys found it last night and sent it off to the lab.’

  ‘I know you shouldn’t curse a good citizen, but sometimes I can’t help myself. What time was that?’

  ‘The fire was about seven, I think. They found the knife late last night.’ He could understand her frustration, had felt just as impotent at the valuable information that would have been lost to flame and water when Doddsy had broken the news to him. ‘Just when everything was kicking off. It wasn’t a big fire, by any means. The coat had been shoved right down and there wasn’t a lot of smother from it. It had pretty much burned itself out by the time they got there.’

  ‘Has it gone off for analysis?’

  ‘It’s at the lab now. And the coat looks as if came from a charity bag. There were some open bags in the doorway of one of them.’ Now, at least, they knew the route the killer must have taken, another piece of the jigsaw to ponder and slot into place. ‘I’ll keep you in the loop.’ As though she’d give him any chance to leave her out of it.

  ‘Good.’ She sat down again, swung her chair round to face him. ‘And as I said. There’s somet
hing else I want to talk to you about.’

  Something in her tone caught his attention. Defensive? Yes, that was it. Someone, braver than he, had Faye on the back foot. ‘Of course.’

  She scowled at him over her glasses as though he was a school pupil answering a teacher back. ‘Do you know a woman called Marsha Letham?’

  ‘Yes. From the local paper.’ Jude wasn’t good with the press and tended to leave that kind of interaction to others, but he made a point of knowing who they were because they could equally be allies as enemies. Chris spent a lot of time cultivating them, but Chris spent time cultivating everyone, a network of people who felt it might be glamorous to play a part in the ongoing process he made look like a fight between good and evil. ‘She’s very much on the local community side, I think. I’d be surprised if they’ve put her on anything like the Pierce case.’

  ‘She rang me this afternoon on the pretext of writing up a column inch or two on a new post in the police, asking me why I left Cheshire.’

  ‘That makes sense. Fits with her brief.’

  ‘Does it, indeed?’

  ‘Yes. Nothing to it, I’d say. They’re local newspaper and probably desperate for copy.’

  ‘It must be a very quiet day if an appointment at my pay grade is considered newsworthy. Chief Constable, perhaps. Assistant Chief Constable, also possible.’

  No doubt Faye harboured ambitions of progress to high office in the police, but something told him that this kind of attitude, rather than her capabilities, would be what held her back. Quiet news day? ‘It’s certainly not that.’

  ‘Was your appointment in the paper?’

  ‘I don’t believe it was. But I wasn’t interesting. I was a local boy making my way up, step by step.’ By contrast Faye, shipped in from outside to a senior post amid rumours of her predecessor’s misbehaviour and with a mission to bring redress, was newsworthy.