by Jo Allen
‘They want people to know they’re around. It’s all about visibility. Or maybe he’s got nothing else to do.’
‘It’ll be because it’s us. We’re suspects. Me. They must think it’s me, because I found the first body.’
‘And I found the second.’ He’d given in to irritation, as if the strain was beginning to get to him, too, but with those words he turned and smiled at her, as if that was all he could offer in the way of reassurance. ‘Of course we’re suspects. Dozens of other people must be, too. But just because we could have done it doesn’t mean they think we did.’
‘At least we aren’t gay. So we’re safe.’
‘For God’s sake, Nat. Two dead bodies aren’t a scientific sample. They might be random killings.’
Even Claud’s nerves were fraying. The tension in her body heightened in response. ‘Then nobody’s safe.’
‘And anyway,’ he went on, ignoring her, ‘you know what I think. We shouldn’t define ourselves as gay or not gay. We’re all a little bit gay. It’s a spectrum.’
How Claud defined sexuality was irrelevant. It was how the killer saw it that mattered. ‘But it’s always near us.’ She bit her knuckle. How was she going to cope when her rock, her soul mate, was struggling? ‘Supposing someone wants to kill you.’
‘If someone wanted to kill either of us they’d have done it, instead of taking out the poor guy you found and the nurse in the churchyard. It’s coincidence.’
Which took them back to the first question. ‘So why are they sending a chief inspector if all that’s happened is a break-in?’
‘I told you. It’s because it’s a high profile case and they want the public to know they’re on top of it. Or think they are. They clearly aren’t, or they’d have arrested someone by now.’ He turned away from his position by the window with every sign of relief. ‘I’d hoped they might send Chris Dodd, if they were sending a big cheese. Bloody brilliant copper, and so helpful. I really took to him. You know when you meet someone.’
‘Like us.’
Yes, exactly like us. Only different of course.’ He squeezed her hand and returned to the issue. ‘Anyway, Satterthwaite’s here now. You can ask him.’
Natalie stayed where she was, balanced on the more rickety of the two chairs with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped around them, feet touching the seat just firmly enough to maintain her balance. The damp of her running gear clung to her skin. She shivered, watching Claud as he went towards the door to the office and flung it open, resting his brawny forearm on the wall. In some insane, inexplicable way she was afraid of Jude Satterthwaite. ‘Chief Inspector. We’re up here.’
The detective paused at the doorway to check a phone message, lifted an eyebrow and pocketed the phone. With enough urgency to show he was keeping a close eye on events but not enough for even Natalie to panic, he ran lightly up the flight of stairs from the ground floor. Claud, who seemed entirely oblivious to potential danger, had left it wedged open for him. ‘Good afternoon Mr Blackwell. Mrs Blackwell.’ He nodded in Natalie’s direction. ‘I understand you’ve had a break-in. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’ Claud turned his back on the policeman, who was already running his trained eye over the premises to see if there was any damage, any disturbance. ‘It wasn't exactly a break-in, though. Was it Nat?’ He sighed.
Finding herself the focus of the man’s attention, Natalie reluctantly unfolded herself from the secure and womb-like position she’d assumed and sat straight up on the chair to face him. He was looking down at her trainers, as if he expected to find their soles rimmed with blood as they had been after Len Pierce’s murder, but if he hoped for some clue to catch her red-handed, then he was doomed to disappointment. The trainers had gone straight in the bin, as had the pair she’d been wearing when Gracie was murdered, and she’d never be able to wear the same brand again. ‘No, it wasn’t. I’m afraid it was my fault. I let them in.’
‘You let them in? So you saw them.’
‘No.’ Claud interrupted, as if the detective were simple and Natalie herself obstructive, rather than just not quite able to answer the question. ‘She didn’t let them in. It was carelessness.’
‘Mrs Blackwell?’
She wilted a little under his gaze. ‘Claud’s right. I was careless. I went out and I left the door open.’
‘Where did you go? For a run?’
‘Of course it was for a run. I keep telling you, Nat. This running is an obsession. You need to break it. It does you more harm than good.’ He turned to Jude. ‘I wasn’t here. I was out at a meeting. At the town council. I’m discussing a program of workshops with them, similar to those we’ve been running up at your place. And while I was away Nat went for a run.’
His scorn rebuked her. ‘You’re right. I know I shouldn’t have done. But I didn’t have any work to do, and I thought if I went out while you were out then I wouldn’t have to go out later on.’ She stuck a forefinger under the black rubber band of her fitness tracker and tugged at it, but it stayed as firm as a handcuff. ‘I didn’t have my keys with me, so I left the door open.’
Jude Satterthwaite said nothing either to condemn or reassure her, but crossed to the window and looked out. Natalie stood up, too, so could follow his gaze. A dark grey sky brooded behind the huge sandstone edifice of St Andrew’s Church and the green sward around it. In the distance the snowdrops and crocuses that swamped the grass beyond the church in early spring had faded, and the sharp spikes of daffodils threatened to burst out into glorious yellow at any moment. Maybe flowers grew well in churchyards because of the dead below them.
It was reasonably certain that the man wasn’t interested in the daffodils but (she shivered) trying to see if there was any spot from which they could have been watched. There must have been a dozen. The north side of the church, the south side, the entrance to the arcade, the stairway into the library, the lane that dropped down to King Street, where she’d appeared to find Claud taking his turn at stumbling on the newly-dead. All of them were vantage points for a casual observer, and that didn’t include any passing opportunist who might have spotted her running out of the office leaving the door swinging open, and tried his luck.
Jude concluded his review of the churchyard and turned back, running his eye over the contents of the office. Trying to see it through his eyes, Natalie saw only confusion — a pair of rickety chairs, a desk stamped with the hallmark of Claud’s enthusiastic chaos, boxes of marketing leaflets and tee shirts with a rainbow logo. ‘Was anything taken?’
‘My laptop.’ Claud flapped his hand at Natalie. ‘It’s not valuable in itself. It was an old one. But I keep confidential information on it. If there’s a data breach I could lose a lot of business.’
‘It’s secured, of course?’ The grey eyes swept the room again.
‘Yes. There are passwords for the laptop, for every package and for individual documents. I dare say your people could break into it in pretty short order, but a casual thief wouldn’t be able to.’
‘A casual thief would be more likely to wipe the data and sell it on,’ Jude agreed. ‘I don’t see any sign of damage, so my instinct is to conclude that it was an opportunistic theft.’
‘I thought we lived in a honest neighbourhood.’ Natalie resumed her seat again, bolt upright on the edge of it.
‘We do, pretty much. I maybe wouldn’t have gone out leaving my door open quite so obviously myself, but if I did I wouldn’t expect to be burgled when I got back.’ He got out a notebook. ‘I’ll get someone down here to do a quick sweep for fingerprints, but it doesn’t look to me as though there will be many clues. In the meantime, could you just run me through what you were both doing, when you were out, how long and so on?’
Claud took the second seat, running his hand across his brow. ‘Shall I start? My version of events is pretty slim.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I had a two o’clock meeting with the town council. I left here at about half one.’
‘I like to be early. In my way I’m as bad as Nat.’ He smiled at her, a sign that his irritation was thawing. ‘Of course I got there far too soon, so I walked back to the square, got myself a coffee to take out and then turned up and drank it sitting on the wall outside. Right under the CCTV cameras, if you want to check.’
‘I don’t disbelieve you.’
The man would check anyway. Natalie, whose eyesight was good, noticed how he’d put an asterisk beside the word CCTV.
‘Good. And you obviously didn’t take your laptop with you. Is that normal?’
‘It was an informal chat, rather than a presentation. I took a folder with some hand-outs and a notepad. The meeting lasted for about forty-five minutes, and I came back via the arcade. I stopped at the bakery for a sandwich — I hadn’t had lunch. Then I cut through past the library.’ He gave a vague wave in the general direction of the churchyard. ‘As I got to the gateway I saw the door at the bottom of the stair was open.’
‘It’s not a shared stairway, is it?’
‘No. This office — office suite, they call it — is self-contained. It may once have been part of a flat overlooking King Street and the square, but it must have been partitioned. The stairs would originally have been the back stairs.’
‘And you normally keep the downstairs door open?’
‘If we’re in, yes. The bell doesn’t work. I didn't think anything of it, but I came up the stairs and the door to the inner office was open, too.’ He drew a short, sharp breath. ‘First up, of course, I thought the worst.’
That was what happened. Natalie felt a surge of pity for her husband. ‘But Claud,’ she pleaded from the other side of the room. ‘I left you a note.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t see it straight away. When I did see it, of course, it made sense.’
Jude Satterthwaite, she could tell, had already seen and read the note. He struck her as a man who already knew, or suspected, the answer to many of the questions he asked. Nerves rose in her stomach at the idea that the answer she might give him might be wrong, when everyone knew her anxiety made her an unreliable observer, prone to overstatement and always leaning towards the worst possible scenario. Would he understand that when he came to take her statement, or would he silently hold her to account for the inevitable mistakes she would make?
‘After that,’ Claud resumed, ‘I had a look round and saw that my laptop had gone. I guessed what had happened and went down to see if I could find Natalie. She wasn’t about, so I waited until she came back to make sure that we actually had been broken into. That must have been about ten past three. Then, of course, I called your sergeant immediately.’
‘Okay. Thank you.’ He drew a line under the notes on his pad, turned over to a new page and wrote her name at the top. ‘Mrs Blackwell?’
Her heart fluttered in her chest. It was always hard to explain herself to anyone who lived by the laws of hard-headed rationalism. Even Claud, who was endlessly tolerant of her many eccentricities, never made the fatal mistake of pretending to understand. ‘Well, it’s all very simple.’ Which it was, but how would it seem to any onlookers? ‘After Claud left for his meeting there was very little left for me to do. I’d been for my run this morning as usual, but we were in here early and so I’d cut it short. I wasn’t busy so I thought I’d take a quick run to get some of my miles in the bank. I do that sometimes. I always have my running gear with me, just in case.’
She looked at him, uncertain of his reaction. Some people laughed at her obsession and she struggled to sleep if the numbers weren’t safely logged, in her head or on the app, but he must have been used to hearing this kind of thing. ‘Where did you run?’
‘Just around the town. I have a route. It’s only a couple of miles. I run along Meeting House Lane, then up Wordsworth Street, along Beacon Edge past the cemetery, down Salkeld Road. Then Scotland Road and Middlegate and back. Sometimes I do it twice. Sometimes more.’
He smiled at her again. ‘I’ve seen you. I do that loop, too, though not often enough. It’s the hill that kills you. That’s why I always go up first.’ And then he moved her on, swiftly. ‘What time did you get back?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’
‘Did you stop?’
‘Yes. I used to stop outside M&S to do my stretches but now I think that must be the way the killer got away.’ She couldn’t do that any more. Not after Gracie. The run along the end of the lane after Len Pierce had died had been hard enough and she had only a limited amount of courage to draw on. ‘I stop in Meeting House Lane, now.’
‘Okay. It doesn’t really matter, as your husband was already back, so we know when the burglary must have occurred. And you left the doors unlocked.’
‘Yes, because I didn’t have my key.’
‘Okay. No worries.’ He seemed very cheerful about it. ‘If you want my opinion it was an opportunistic theft, but given what’s been happening it’s probably wise to be extra vigilant. As I said, I’ll send a CSI round to look for fingerprints, but it might not be until tomorrow.’
Whoever it was wouldn’t have left any. All they’d have done would be to come in and pick up the laptop. And it was a straightforward burglary. Natalie stressed all these things to herself. Eventually she might almost believe them.
‘By the way,’ Jude Satterthwaite said, as an afterthought, ‘I meant to ask you. I don’t suppose either Len or Gracie had anything to do with your Rainbow Festival?’
Claud shook his head. It was his project, not Natalie’s. She left it to him to do the talking. ‘No.’
‘Does it go down well?’
‘Mostly. there’s always some opposition, of course. Every congregation has its unChristian homophobe, and they’re always the ones who shout the loudest. But those are the people we’re trying to reach.’ Claud paused. ‘You know one of them.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. I’ve remembered where I saw the fellow in the churchyard, the doctor. He was one of them.’ Claud’s lips curled in irritation.
‘Fascinating,’ the detective said, politely. ‘Anyone else?’
‘As I say. There’s at least one in every congregation. I couldn’t tell you their names.’
‘I daresay I can find out,’ Jude said, standing up to signal the interview was at an end. ‘Let me know if anything else comes up.’
‘Let’s go home,’ Claud said, when the detective had got them to initial his record of the conversation and then headed off past the remnants of blue tape on the churchyard railings (whistling, she noted, as though he hadn’t a care in the world). ‘I suppose in the great scheme of things that wasn’t something to make a fuss about, but we’re both a little bit stressed.’
He always tried to downplay her nerves. Maybe he thought if he did that his overt calm would rub off on her. She loved him for it, as if her life depended on it. ‘Yes.’ She tapped her wrist, desperate to run again. ‘Are you angry with me about the keys?’
‘No, of course not. I know I sounded a bit snappy to start with. But that was because I was worried about you.’ He turned around, frowned at the empty chair, where he always left his jacket. ‘Bastards!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They’ve taken my coat. To wrap the laptop in, I suppose.’
She sighed. ‘It was about time you got a new one anyway.’ And he never kept anything worth having in the pockets.
‘Yes, you’re right. Now come on. Let’s get home.’
Chapter 18
Ashleigh had been sitting on a desk, running through the results of the constables whose door-to-door inquiries she was responsible for supervising. There were sheaves of notes and the PC who delivered them to her hadn’t picked up any obvious connections, but one name caught at her. A tiny thing, but worth exploring. When the constable had gone she jumped down and drifted across the incident room to where Jude was standing in front of t
he whiteboard. ‘Jude. Can I run something by you?’
‘Of course.’ He stepped back from the board. ‘Did the door-to-doors come up with something?’
‘I think they might have done. These are the interviews we have from the staff and patients at the hospital. There’s nothing in them that helps us directly. No-one has anything you might call a lead. But we talked to some of the patients on the elder care ward where Gracie worked. They all loved her to bits, and nobody can think of any reason why someone would have hurt her. But I think there’s something in here that implies that Gracie knew Giles Butler.’
‘Is that right?’ That stopped him in his tracks, though he should hardly be surprised. It was a small enough world, and people knew of their neighbours and their doings even when they’d hardly ever met. Giles lived in Kirkby Stephen and his paranoia over being recognised suggested he had plenty of contacts up in the Eden Valley.
‘Yes, though I wouldn’t get too excited about it. It’s just that one of the patients she spoke to is a Mr Butler.’
‘Not an uncommon name.’
‘No, but he mentioned that the last time he saw Gracie was on the day she was killed. He remembers it clearly, because it was the day his son came to visit him. He didn’t name the son, but we can check. The son doesn’t come too often, because he’s busy. He’s a GP. In Kirkby Lonsdale.’
‘We know Giles went up to visit his father in Penrith hospital. That’s where he met Len. How reliable is Butler senior?’
‘It’s possible he might be mistaken, but if he isn’t, that puts Giles Butler in Penrith on the day, though not necessarily at the time, that Gracie was killed.’
‘Right. You’ll need to get your guys to check that.’
‘I’ve got them on to it already. Butler is working just now, but I expect we’ll hear soon enough where he was — or where he said he was — on that day and at that time.’ It felt like progress, so much so that she was surprised at his lukewarm reaction to it, but she’d learned to tell when something was nagging at him. ‘And what’s on your mind? Are you inspired? Or baffled? You must have been standing there for five minutes.’