Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  Chapter 20

  ‘I’ll admit to being a cad. I’ll admit to being an adulterer. I’ll admit to being a coward.’ With his back to the wall Giles Butler had finally unearthed enough spirit to come out fighting. His perfect life was already fatally snagged and he couldn’t stop it unravelling, but he’d do his best to limit the damage. ‘But I won’t admit to being a murderer. Because I’m not.’

  ‘Okay. Persuade me.’ Jude Satterthwaite, a man whom Giles had down as smart but possibly overzealous, was looking at him as if he believed he was the killer. Under his gaze Giles’s gut shrivelled. That was how it went. If you lied often enough, people wouldn’t believe the truth. ‘Give me a good reason not to have you charged with two counts of murder.’

  Colleen Murphy, Giles’s solicitor, crossed and uncrossed her ankles and cleared her throat, as if to remind them she was there. Giles had never had the need for a solicitor before, except for making his will, and so had no idea of the procedures, but he trusted Colleen. She struck him as meticulous, and she’d assured him she wouldn’t let the police away with the tiniest transgression with regard to his interests, but she’d also advised him, as strongly as possible, that if he was innocent telling the truth was the best way to get the matter cleared up. ‘Perhaps you want to help my client by asking him some specific questions, Chief Inspector.’

  He accepted the reproof with a wave of the hand. ‘I’ll begin with the background. Then we’ll get on to the questions.’ As before he’d brought Sergeant O’Halloran with him and Giles had turned to her with relief, but now they were playing hardball she was respectfully silent. Giles had seen enough TV shows to recognise the good-cop-bad-cop combination and was only faintly surprised that it appeared to be real. ‘I’m not going to accuse you of murder, Dr Butler, or not just yet, but I think you ought to know that the evidence that we have doesn’t look good as far as you’re concerned. Let’s begin with the circumstantial evidence. Two people with whom you have an association have been violently murdered. You were on the site of at least one of the crimes.’

  At least one. Giles shivered. That didn’t sound good. It sounded as if they’d dug deeper, uncovered another secret. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I want to go over your previous evidence and ask you some more questions.’

  ‘I understand.’ The room was hot and stuffy, and his mouth was dry.

  ‘I have here the statement you gave when you turned yourself in to the police station in Hunter Lane last week.’ Jude tapped the printed sheet. ‘You initialled it as accurate. I want you to read it through and tell me if there’s anything in it that isn’t true.’

  Giles wasn’t a vain man, but he knew his worth. He’d been justifiably proud of that statement because every single word of it had been true. He felt that peculiar pride again, as he read it over. It hadn’t been the whole truth, and that was the risk he’d taken, but if he’d told the police everything he would have compromised himself and had no chance of emerging from that little scrape with his reputation intact. Now the pride gave way to a sick feeling in his stomach. At the time he’d known it was a gamble and it had seemed worth it. He’d even thought he was being brave, getting his story in first and establishing himself as an innocent, offering them something that damned him in the hope that they wouldn’t see the rest.

  The question had been how far he dared gamble on withholding what he knew from the police. It was still the same. The stakes were higher and he had to give them more, and appear to do so willingly. But did he have to give them everything?

  He put the statement down on the table. His hand, he observed as if from a distance, was shaking. The sergeant noticed it, too, and pushed a glass of water across the table towards him. The good cop. He wasn’t fooled.

  ‘I stand by every word in that statement,’ he declared, picked up the glass and sipped.

  ‘Good,’ said the woman, with an encouraging smile. ‘But perhaps in the light of what’s happened since there might something you want to add to that? Something you’ve remembered?’

  What was he to do? What did they know? The must know something. The woman so obviously felt sorry for him and he didn’t know why. He sneaked a look at Colleen and was heartened by her encouraging nod. Even if the truth damages you, she’d said to him, it won’t damage you as much as lies. But she’d also reminded him that he didn’t have to say anything at all and the way she lifted a warning finger to her lips reminded him of that. ‘I stand by my statement.’

  Silence. Jude Satterthwaite narrowed his eyes at him. Ashleigh O’Halloran looked reproachful. He might as well already be in prison. He broke, too easily. ‘Lenny wanted us to be together. He wanted me to leave my wife.’

  ‘And you didn’t want to?’

  But he had wanted to. He’d just been incapable of doing it. He nodded, not even sure if that was the right answer.

  ‘Was he putting you under pressure?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Did he threaten you?’ the sergeant asked.

  He was shocked at that. ‘He’d never have hurt me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. But you had a lot to lose, didn’t you?’

  ‘He did say he’d tell my wife about our relationship if I didn’t. But I don’t think he would have done.’ Janice would go ballistic when she found out, and she’d be even more devastated if she realised it hadn’t changed the way he’d felt about Lenny. Love made you a fool at the best of times and illicit love turned you into a victim.

  ‘Okay. Now tell me,’ the woman said with a sigh, ‘about how you knew Gracie Pepper.’

  They knew. He looked up again. Under Jude Satterthwaite’s cool impatience and Ashleigh O’Halloran’s interest, he realised that what Janice thought was the least of his problems, but it was still Len who lingered in his thoughts. ‘I’m not a violent man. I’d never have hurt him.’

  ‘About Gracie,’ persisted the woman.

  It was easier to tell her. ‘I met her at the hospital. My father has been in and out of there for a long time. Not that there’s really anything wrong with him but old age, but he’s constantly being hospitalised with infections and for a while he hasn’t been quite well enough to go home. I go up to visit when I can. Sometimes I’d combine it with a visit to Lenny. It was a good excuse.’

  ‘Makes a change from golf,’ said the chief inspector, his voice dripping with criticism.

  Giles addressed himself to the sergeant. ‘You know Gracie worked in the elder care unit. Dad thought the world of her from the minute she arrived, and she did of him, so I made a point of seeking her out to ask about him. We found out we got on, straight away.’ Like the sergeant, Gracie had been someone it was easy to talk to at a time when Giles had needed to talk. More than ever he wished he’d been honest. ‘It was an entirely innocent relationship.’ He smiled, wryly. ‘Ironically, of course, if my wife had found out she’d have thought I was having an affair. But I think she’d have forgiven me more easily for an affair with a woman than she would have done for an affair with a man.’ It was about margins, how wrong you could be and salvage soothing from your mistakes.

  The woman was looking at him in a strange way, as if she’d like to disagree with him but didn’t dare. ‘You weren’t interested in her, sexually?’

  It was a roundabout way of asking a question. ‘No. I might have been, I suppose, but I always assumed she preferred women to men, though she never said.’ He took out a handkerchief and wiped a bead of sweat away from his brow as he thought about Gracie. ‘To be honest with you, it was a relief to have an uncomplicated relationship.’

  ‘Okay.’ Satterthwaite snapped back into the discussion. ‘Let’s ask you some additional questions. Did you see Gracie Pepper last Tuesday?’

  ‘She drove me to the lane at Temple Sowerby,’ Giles said. Heat prickled under his collar and he didn’t even have the courage to flip his shirt button loose in case it somehow incriminated him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I needed—’ A tear prick
ed his eye, the final humiliation. ‘I needed to find closure.’

  ‘Gracie knew about you and Len,’ the chief inspector went on. ‘Did she threaten to tell your wife?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Did you ask her to drive you to the lane with the idea, perhaps, of murdering her there?’

  He thought of Gracie, standing in the lane in the fading light, of a cloud of starlings wheeling above their head, of a moment of fear when she’d accused him of killing Lenny. ‘No, I never did! It was sentiment. That was all. Sentiment.’

  The two police officers exchanged glances. ‘When did you last see Gracie?’ DCI Satterthwaite asked him.

  He sat back, shoulders straight. ‘On Tuesday afternoon.’

  ‘Tuesday was the day she died.’

  He bowed his head.

  ‘Where and when did you see her?’

  ‘At the hospital. She was just going off shift as I arrived. I spent an hour with my father and then I left.’ He drew a long breath. ‘She invited me back to her house for supper.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  He looked across at Colleen and her closed expression told him this didn’t look good. ‘I’ve been struggling. It was bad enough when Lenny was alive, but since his death I’ve realised how close I came to dying, either at the same time or in his place. Gracie understood.’ Rather like he sensed Sergeant O’Halloran did, and that must be why Satterthwaite had muscled his way back into the interview. Resenting that, he turned away and back, once again, to his more sympathetic interrogator. ‘She knew how conflicted I was about Len. I loved him but sometimes he made me feel like a coward and a hypocrite. But with Gracie I never felt judged. She never judged anybody. So when I’d finished with Dad, I went round to her house as we’d arranged, but she wasn’t there.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I knew I hadn’t got the time or the date wrong, because we’d spoken about it just that afternoon, but I didn’t want to hang about, so I left the car and walked back into town. I thought I’d give it half an hour and then go back. I walked down to the Market Square and along to the New Squares. Then I walked back along King Street, and I was there when I heard sirens and saw blue lights.’ And he’d seen these two detectives, running down the hill as if someone’s life depended on it. Now he knew where they’d been heading.

  ‘Okay.’ Satterthwaite sat back, unclipped the buttons at his cuffs and pushed his shirt sleeves back up to his elbows. ‘Can we just confirm that? You’re telling me you were in King Street when Gracie’s body was found.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not in the churchyard.’

  ‘I never went into the churchyard.’

  ‘And is there anyone you can think of who might have seen you, and be able to confirm exactly where you were at that time?’

  Giles licked dry lips. ‘No.’

  ‘Okay. Another question. In your walk along King Street did you notice any bags outside any of the charity shops?’

  He shot a despairing look at Colleen, who returned it and then focussed her attention back on the chief inspector. ‘I think there were some outside the shop on the corner of the square.’

  ‘Okay. Open?’

  He closed his eyes and tried to remember. ‘One of them was torn, I think. I think.’

  ‘Another question. Do you smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And do you ever carry matches? A lighter?’

  Giles felt a net tightening round him. They’d already have picked up the car, Janice’s, that he’d taken to drive up to Penrith. They’d know. ‘My wife smokes. She keeps a lighter and cigarettes in her car.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He flung a look at his sergeant and then turned back. ‘Okay. I’ll run through this again and you can tell me if I’m wrong. Because it isn’t looking very good for you, is it?’

  *

  Giles Butler looked like a man on the edge. The very edge. But of what? A confession or a breakdown? Jude allowed him a moment of silence in which to think, if he was guilty, about admitting everything. Surely the evidence against him was convincing. Even Colleen Murphy, doing her job with skilled but silent determination, looked as if she knew that Giles’s was a lost cause.

  Damn. A tap at the door broke the silence, and the tension within the room snapped like an overstretched elastic band as all four turned towards the sound. Giles’s shoulders slumped and the breath he’d been holding slipped out.

  Ashleigh jumped up, flicking the door open and stepping outside. The voices in the corridor were tense, but he couldn’t make out the words. He waited.

  She half-opened the door. ‘Jude. Can you spare me a minute?’

  ‘If someone needs you, Chief Inspector, perhaps we can halt the interview to allow my client a break.’

  ‘Of course.’ He got up and stepped out into the corridor where Doddsy stood with his hands in his pockets and a troubled expression on his face. So it was serious. ‘What’s happened now?’

  ‘History repeating itself,’ said Doddsy, nodding his head in the general direction of the town, ‘only backwards. We’ve found a knife, covered in blood and wrapped in a coat. In a bin on Fell Lane. Whoever it was hadn’t set fire to it, though. They probably didn’t want to draw any attention to themselves.’

  Jude froze. Behind him in the interview room Giles might be in a state of panic but this changed everything. ‘Fresh blood?’

  ‘Relatively. A dog walker found it.’ Dog walkers always seemed to find the bad things. ‘Whoever shoved it in there must have been in a hurry and hadn’t wrapped it up properly. Our man was putting the poo bag in the bin, and the dog got all excited over it, and he looked in and saw the blade. Fortunately he had enough sense to dial 999 and not touch anything.’

  ‘No body?’

  ‘No sign of one so far. I needn’t tell you the Super is doing her nut over it, and I’ve got everybody out combing the area. Because it’s the same MO as Gracie Pepper and nearly the same as Len Pierce, so I’ll be astonished — astonished — if we don’t find another body somewhere nearby.’

  ‘But Giles—’ Ashleigh rolled her eyes back towards the interview room. ‘We had him on the ropes in there. Len was putting pressure on him to come clean to his wife. He knew Gracie. And he was in King Street when she died. He admits it.’

  Jude stilled. Giles had every reason to be glad of Lenny’s death and who knew what kind of argument he might have had with Gracie? It was tempting, so tempting, to get the CPS to charge him but this new discovery cast enough doubt to prevent laying charges. ‘He could have committed both of those killings.’

  ‘He could. But he couldn’t have committed this one, if it’s been committed. And if the blood is fresh — or even relatively fresh — he couldn’t have dumped the knife. Because he was in Kirkby Lonsdale at nine o’clock this morning and he’s been in custody ever since.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Giles was so smug, so clearly implicated, that Jude couldn’t bear to let him go. ‘No. We’ll keep hold of him just now. Apart from anything else, if this is connected to the two other deaths it could be safer for him that way.’

  ‘You want me to take over here?’

  ‘Yeah, go and break it to Colleen, if you wouldn’t mind.’ Jude was already on his way along the corridor. ‘Tell her I’ve been called away. Ashleigh, do you want to come along with me?’

  With her in his wake, he raced up to the incident room to find Faye standing by the whiteboard. She turned as she saw him, hands on hips. ‘Jude. This isn’t great. You’ve hauled in the wrong man.’

  ‘I don’t know if I have.’

  ‘I can tell you. You have. There’s been another murder and it happened in the past couple of hours.’

  So they’d found a body. ‘Who is it?’

  She looked down at the scribbled notes she’d tossed onto the table in front of her. ‘His name was George Meadows. He was fifty-five and ran a garage out on the Gilwilly estate.’

  ‘Gay?’ Jude asked, the second question to spring into
his head.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. He was widowed, though of course that needn’t preclude it. We found him in a house in William Street about half an hour ago. The postman noticed blood seeping under the front door and dialled 999. The body was in the hall. We don’t have any details yet, but the officer on the scene says it looked like a single wound to the heart, and he might have been dead for a couple of hours.’

  Jude paused to think. Was it conceivable the dead man knew Len Pierce, or Gracie, or Giles? ‘Do we know of any connections to the other deaths?’

  ‘There was a leaflet in his kitchen about the Rainbow Festival. There may be something else. They’re still looking over the house.’ She scowled at that, a woman who hated situations that got away from her, who couldn't abide a shortfall in knowledge. ‘We need to find out, though.’ She hesitated. ‘Phil Garner’s already a suspect. We need to find out where he was. And Claud Blackwell and his wife.’

  ‘Let me check the details and get down to William Street. In the meantime I’ll get Chris to follow up on Claud.’

  ‘Good idea. And get him to check up on Garner while he’s at it.’ She looked down at her paper again. ‘One more thing. I hadn’t had it down as a priority but now I wonder if it might be. We’ve found Claud’s laptop.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the stream behind the Tourist Information Office. It was wrapped in a plastic bag, but it was still pretty wet. I’ve passed it on to the appropriate department to see if they can salvage anything from it, but I don’t have high hopes.’

  Chapter 21

  Two minutes of your time, please.

  Faye, who liked to see everything that was going on, didn’t normally text and when she did she was rarely terse. Jude had scarcely had time to take his coat off when he got back to the incident room after visiting the scene at William Street, but the tone of it couldn’t be ignored. ‘Back in a minute, Doddsy. That’s Faye. Must be important.’

  ‘I’ll keep in charge here.’