Death at Rainbow Cottage

by Jo Allen

  I can also establish Natalie’s whereabouts, Claud had written, and attach a screenshot showing her running route at the time in question. You will see that it takes her nowhere near William Street.

  The screenshot, when he opened it, showed exactly that. Natalie had run her usual route, taken her usual ten minute rest in Meeting House Lane. Weird. He shook his head over it. Something about the case was staring him in the face and he couldn’t see what it might be.

  Yet another email pinged in. This time it was a message from the intelligence unit, informing him that they’d have a look at the issue he’d raised. And we’ve just had this back.

  This was a forwarded email headed: source of printed material. He opened it up. The printed sheets you sent us have been scanned and the source is the printer with the following ID. The printer is registered to the business Blackwell Ltd.

  He sat back, looking at it. ‘Chris. Are you busy?’

  ‘Do I look busy?’

  ‘I think we need to go out to Temple Sowerby and have a chat with Claud Blackwell.’

  ‘Sure.’ Chris bounced to his feet and stretched. ‘Anything more on him? I was just going back through those interactions he had on the local forums. Did you know Len Pierce was on one of them?’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. He never commented but he liked the odd post. One or two of Claud’s, in fact.’ Chris lifted his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘You want to send Doddsy, if you want to get anything out of him. Or Faye. He likes those two way more than he likes the rest of us. If I was Mrs Blackwell, I’d be getting jealous.’

  Jude had been turning towards the door, but at that, something clicked in his mind. He spun back on his heel and strode over to the whiteboard, stared at its confusion of maps and tracks and photos and the black dots on the tracks that marked the stops in Natalie’s complicated, obsessive runs.

  If I was Mrs Blackwell I’d be getting jealous.

  Of Len Pierce, if the two had ever met. Of George Meadows, so keen to help with the Rainbow Festival. Of Doddsy, to whom Claud had taken such an improbably liking, and of Faye, whom he so clearly admired.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get moving.’

  Chapter 23

  The sun had made a belated appearance in the Eden Valley. From the living room window, Natalie watched Claud as he moved among the roses that grew up against the fence. He was late pruning them. He’d been talking about doing it, she remembered, on that afternoon when Len Pierce had died in the lane.

  It seemed so long ago, so distant. The image of the man, lying dead at her feet before she’d turned to flee to Claud floated across her mind like a cloud. Now even the last of the police tape had gone, and only the occasional tractor trundled up and down the lane. The cars that had stopped there for their owners to meet up and couple and leave no longer came, as if there were still a threat.

  Eventually, no doubt, they’d forget all that and come back. People did.

  She’d showered after her run and dressed, and towelled down her hair. The fitness tracker, heavy on her thin wrist, irritated her so she unclipped it and laid it on the kitchen table while she cleared up after the previous night’s supper. Claud had cooked a beef casserole and she’d barely been able to manage a few mouthfuls of it. He always cooked, she cleared up, but she’d been worryingly distracted and hadn’t been able to face it. On another day Claud would just have done it, but these days he seemed to tiptoe around her as if her emotions were too deep and too dangerous for him to disturb.

  She rearranged the mess prior to washing it up. The curved blade of the kitchen knife Claud had used in his preparations troubled her, the beads of congealed red on the blade bringing up images of the dead — of Len, of Gracie, of George, who’d been so kind to them on the night of Gracie’s murder. Eventually time would close over them and their killings, unsolved, would be forgotten.

  Or would they? Bending her head, she squeezed her eyes tightly together. It couldn’t go on.

  Out in the garden, Claud moved along the line of rose bushes, clipping them back and dropping the cuttings in a bucket. Placing the carving knife on the table next to her fitness tracker, Natalie strode out through the conservatory and across the soft spring grass towards him. He was whistling. ‘Claud.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ He looked up, alarmed.

  He was in a constant state of alarm these days. Every time she spoke to him he seemed to be expecting something, some bombshell that had burst in her mind, some new fear he alone could soothe. Claud did so much for her yet somehow that patience, that commitment, that consideration was never enough. She needed everything. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Of course.’ He straightened up and dropped the sprig of rose bush, with fresh green leaves on it, into the bucket. His face framed the ready smile it always took on when she was needy. ‘What about?’

  She took a deep breath and met his questioning gaze. Sometimes Claud’s expression was thoughtful, sometimes it was concerned. Sometimes it darkened into an approaching storm, and those were the times when she was irrationally afraid he might hurt her. As if he would. Claud could never hurt anyone. ‘Who is your lover?’

  His eyes widened in astonishment. His silence condemned him.

  ‘Claud.’

  ‘You’re my lover, Nat.’ He dropped the secateurs he’d been holding into the bucket, stripped off his gloves and tossed them on the grass next to the secateurs. The traffic hummed on the A66, the tractor rumbled in the lane. Startled by the sudden movement, a robin skidded from tree to hedge, its breast as scarlet with feathers as hers had been with Len Pierce’s blood. ‘Listen. We need to talk about this.’

  At his ringing failure to deny it, an invisible knife sliced into her heart, just as a real one had ripped the life out of Len and Gracie and George. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘No. Listen to me. It’s you. You only.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘What made you think otherwise?’

  She flicked a dry tongue around her lips. So often she’d rehearsed what she’d say to him when she challenged him, and already it was playing out in a way she hadn’t envisaged. Claud was lying – he must be, because a man who loved his wife would have wanted to spend all his time with her instead of seeking the company of others when she needed him – but his shoulders were set. He’d never admit it. ‘All those other people.’

  ‘Natalie. Darling. This has all been a bit too much for you.’

  Claud was a liar. He’d say whatever was expedient to keep her quiet. ‘I saw it on your laptop.’

  He lifted his chin, not quite in defiance. Claud never usually felt the need to be defiant, too entrenched in his own position so he only ever needed to indulge in self-justification. That kind of moral superiority was what irritated other people about him, unjustly, because Claud was a very good man. ‘I knew someone had been looking at it. I didn’t think it was you.’

  That must be why he’d disposed of it. She’d seen him, carrying it through the church close, shadowed him when he dropped it into the beck. A manic laugh curdled somewhere in her brain at the thought of what Jude Satterthwaite would say when he realised that Claud had faked the burglary. ‘You were hiding it from people. You’re a fraud.’

  There was fury in his eyes, but he subdued it. Claud was good at that. He could control his feelings, hide them, but now she could see what he was really thinking. Her breath came, short and ragged, the precursor to a panic attack. ‘It isn’t the way it looks.’

  ‘You went on gay websites.’

  ‘But not to date people. Why the hell would I want to date anyone else when I have you?’

  ‘Why would you go on those websites? The clue’s in the name. Dating. Dating, Claud!’

  ‘Christ, Natalie. You don’t think I’d do that, would you? But I find people interesting. That’s all. And we have a cause. I thought you were on board. It’s really important. I just wanted to talk to people. Not just men, either.’

  That made it worse. ‘Talking is how it start
s. Isn’t it? And what about Gracie Pepper? What about that bloody bell ringer, picking you off the street and inviting you to his house to discuss the Rainbow Festival?’

  He was bewildered. ‘But what’s wrong with that? He invited you, too.’

  ‘But I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want you to go. I wanted the two of us to be together, with no more of you spending all evening on secret sites and emailing God knows who, and always finding ways to see someone else. Anyone but me!’ She paused for a snatched breath. Her heart raced. There was no way through Claud’s self-righteousness.

  ‘Oh, Nat. Come on.’ His eyes flicked nervously from her to the secateurs, as though he thought she might pick them up and lunge at him.

  He was hers and hers only. Sharing him with anyone meant less of him for herself. Eventually he would leave her and she would go under, drowning in the airless horror of her own inability to cope. ‘What about Faye Scanlon?’ she asked, breathlessly.

  ‘Faye Scanlon?’

  ‘Yes. And Inspector Dodd.’

  He kept his eyes on her face. She used to trust him but now she knew she couldn’t. ‘They’re colleagues. That’s all. Maybe I’ve spent a bit too much time working. I’ll take a few days off. Take a day or two and think it through. All the things we’ve been saying. All the things we’ve been teaching people. That matters. That’s why I’m talking to people. You have to network.’

  ‘They all think you’re a bit weird, you know that?’

  ‘Maybe they do. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.’

  ‘That sergeant. Ashleigh O’Halloran. She thinks you’re very weird. I bet you think she’s attractive, too, but she doesn’t care about you. She’s just mad for her boss.’ And just as well for her. But if she said that Claud would look at her the way he had done before, measuring up in his mind how unhinged she might be and then saying whatever he thought necessary to deflect her.

  ‘Did you take your tablet this morning?’ He laid a hand on her arm.

  She shook it free. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Just that you don’t sound like your normal self. You don’t really think I’m having an affair.’

  ‘How dare you tell me what I think?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but every rational conversation I’ve ever had with you, you’ve understood. I’m sorry if I haven’t shown you how much I love you, but I have to see other people. It’s my job. It doesn’t mean anything. And I’m sorry about the laptop. I knew you’d been looking, and some of the content on those chats wasn’t really appropriate. That’s why I got rid of it, and I see now it was stupid, and not only because the police started looking at it. I was afraid you’d get the wrong idea. And you have.’

  She took a moment to breathe, a moment to listen, knowing he was right. She was being irrational and when these moments came upon her, she struggled to keep control. But because she thought differently some times from the way she did at others, did that mean that what he called her irrational mind was wrong? ‘I’m not a good person.’

  ‘My gorgeous girl. Let’s go inside and talk about it, shall we?’

  When they got inside he’d be checking to see she’d taken her drugs and probably putting in a sly call to a doctor to have the dose increased. Maybe he’d try to have her locked up. Yes, that was it. And then he could do whatever he wanted with whoever he chose and she’d lie alone in some narrow room in an institution, for the rest of her life. A thin tear overflowed her eye and trickled down her cheek, dropping onto the roses and gathering like a raindrop at the base of a leaf. ‘You don’t love me any more.’ She set off back towards the garden with him trailing in her wake.

  ‘Christ almighty, aren’t you listening? Of course I love you. You’re gorgeous. Don’t you understand?’

  Yet he’d disposed of the laptop when he’d realised she was looking at it. No-one with a clear conscience did that. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew Len?’

  ‘Because you’d have got the wrong idea. And you have got the wrong idea, haven’t you?’

  ‘What about Gracie?’ She was shouting at him. ‘Did you have sex with her?’

  ‘Gracie was gay!’

  ‘So? Anything goes with you, doesn’t it? Except fidelity.’

  She strode into the house and he caught her in the kitchen and grabbing her arm, pulling her back so that she faced him. On the table the knife gleamed next to the dull black rubber of her fitness tracker. Her heart hammered.

  ‘Listen to me!’ He stepped right up to her, and the echoes of his shout rang in her ears and shocked her into silence. ‘Natalie, this can’t go on. I love you, but I think you need help.’

  All the things she’d run away from were in front of her. Claud, whom she adored, for whom she would have done anything, for whom she would have sacrificed everything, no longer loved her. She was suddenly immensely tired, her legs shaking. She shook her head again.

  Her breath tore in her chest. Her fury, higher than it had ever been, flashed across her eyes like a kaleidoscope of red and black and silver. ‘Now say you love me!’

  ‘I love you, Nat.’ She opened her eyes to see him smile. ‘When you’re calm, you’ll understand.’

  When she was calm, if she was ever calm again, maybe she would. ‘Yes.’

  The knife gleamed at her on the table. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea. Then we can sit down and talk about it. And perhaps if you aren’t feeling well I can take you down to the hospital.’

  ‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, too quickly.

  They stared at one another, a crisis, and she saw his integrity crumble. He was afraid of her emotions, would say anything to reassure her and she could no longer tell his truth from his lies.

  But would he be faithful to her in the future? How could she ever trust him again? ‘You made me do it, Claud. Because I love you and I want you only to love me.’

  ‘Made you do what?’ Fear flickered in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you, Nat. But let’s sit down and talk this through. And maybe call a doctor and see if they can help.’

  And lock her up so she’d never get out. Never, Claud. Never.

  She reached behind her for the knife.

  Chapter 24

  ‘So you reckon it’s Natalie, then?’ Chris turned to look towards Rainbow Cottage as Jude manoeuvred his way off the A66 and doubled back through Temple Sowerby towards it.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s still a lot that doesn’t make sense. The fitness tracker, for a start. She wasn’t on the spot. But I want to talk to both of them again. They have some questions to answer.’

  ‘If either of them has been sending threatening messages to investigating officers, they’re going to have to have some very good answers.’

  Jude thought, briefly, over some of the answers he’d already come up with. There had been nothing on Claud’s laptop to incriminate him when it came to murder, but there was plenty to rouse the suspicions of a spouse. ‘I’ll be interested to know what she has to say for herself.’

  Claud’s car was parked outside the cottage, and there was a line of washing — most of it running gear — blowing in the breeze on the line at the side of the house. The door of the conservatory stood open. ‘Looks like there’s someone at home, at least.’

  ‘I wonder what her explanation will be.’

  ‘We’ll find out.’

  They got out of the car and Chris strode up to ring the doorbell. It jangled in the depths of the house and there was no sound or movement in response. He rang a second time.

  After another long silence, he turned a troubled expression towards Jude.

  ‘Let’s have a look around.’ Jude stepped off the path and around the side of the house, scanning the scene. A scarlet bucket lay abandoned in the middle of the empty lawn. He gave that a second look before he turned elsewhere, walking rapidly towards the open door to the conservatory, with the radio still playing inside. He followed the sound through the house to the kitchen.

&
nbsp; They were too late. The first split-second glance showed him Natalie’s fitness tracker, abandoned on the table. The second revealed the slumped figure of Claud Blackwell, sprawled beside the table in a pool of congealing blood.

  Chris turned a puzzled face to Jude. ‘How the hell…?’ I mean, weren’t we sure it was him?’

  Jude, staring down at Claud’s appalled expression, saw the conformation of his fears. ‘No. It was Natalie.’

  ‘Oh God. Do you think she’s okay? Should we look for her?’

  ‘Sure as hell we should look for her.’ Jude was reaching for his phone. ‘She did it. She killed them all.’

  ‘But you said, about the tracker. She can’t have done. This one,’ he gestured at Claud’s body in horror, ‘yes.’

  Jude was through to the control centre. ‘Police and an ambulance to Rainbow Cottage in Temple Sowerby. Homicide. Yes, and we’re looking for a suspect. Natalie Blackwell. Mid forties. Driving a Honda Civic, silver. I don’t know the reg number, but you’ll find it. Cheers.’

  ‘Jude. She can’t have done it. She wasn’t at any of the locations.’

  ‘She was near every one.’

  ‘But not at any of them.’

  ‘We don’t know that. We know that her fitness tracker wasn’t at any one of them. We know that at every one it shows she’d stopped for ten minutes or so within a couple of hundred yards of the scene of the murder. Look on the table.’ Before, he had suspected. This clinched it. ‘The fitness tracker she swears she’s so obsessed with that she never takes it off. It’s there. So we can’t conclude that because the tracker was somewhere Natalie must have been there too. As an alibi, it’s busted.’

  He paused, waiting for the lights of the patrol cars that would descend on the scene. ‘There’s no knife. She’s taken it with her.’ What else did Natalie know, and where was she heading?

  He could ask her.

  *

  Natalie’s phone rang as she bumped along the track out of the woods where she’d parked up. She knew whom it would be. She’d seen the car going up the track and the figures moving in the garden of Rainbow Cottage. It would be Jude Satterthwaite, and he would know what she’d done.