Death on the Lake

by Jo Allen

  ‘If it is accidental.’

  ‘Unless there’s evidence to the contrary, yes.’ Usually her instinct for a crime was an asset but today it was a thorn in his conscience. He offered an olive branch. ‘Though there are one or two things that trouble me about it. One is the location she was found. She went to Waterside Lodge by the road and her shoes weren’t suitable for that path. Even if she was off her head with something, she’d got a long way along it.’

  Doddsy looked again at the post-mortem report. ‘Blisters on her feet, in fairness, but she could have got those walking there rather than walking back.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a spot.’ Chris spent most of his work life inside and most of the rest of it outside, and Ullswater was one of his favourite playgrounds. ‘I go wild swimming in the lake quite a lot and there are plenty of easier places to get to than that.’

  ‘And she’d climbed down the bank, while drunk, taken off her clothes, folded them, placed them neatly underneath a tree root and gone into the water.’ Ashleigh chewed the end of her pen. ‘Folded them. That’s the thing. Not dropped them on the floor or stuffed them into her bag or gone into the water fully clothed. But that apart, no. It’s easy to see what happened.’

  ‘Deepish waters,’ Chris supplied. He’d brought along some prints of the photographs Carly Bright had taken of the body, and he spread them out on Doddsy’s desk. ‘Colder than she thought. Slipped, went under, panicked, got caught up in a branch. Couldn’t get out. Especially if she was very drunk.’

  Another set of heels tapped along the corridor, another knock came on the door. ‘Jude. I can give you five minutes.’ Tammy Garner, leader of the CSI team, breezed into the room, smiled at everyone except Doddsy for whom she reserved the chilliest of nods, and declined the offer of a seat. ‘I can let you know what happened down at Kailpot Crag, and I can take three questions. Then I’m off.’ She smiled at him as if she needed to indicate it was a joke. Since Doddsy had begun dating Tyrone, her son, she’d been very frosty with her former colleagues, as if they were taking sides against her.

  Jude, who was very much of the opinion that Tammy’s objections had no place in the workplace, refused to give ground. ‘This is Doddsy’s case. I’m only here to make the coffee.’

  Professionalism asserted itself. In a simpler life, Tammy had got on with Doddsy well enough, but the fact that he was only a couple of years younger than she was and a clear quarter of a century older than Tyrone strained her temper whenever she saw him. This time, as always, she took refuge in briskness. ‘Fine. But no need to make one for me. I won’t be here long enough.’ She turned towards Doddsy. ‘So. We’ve completed the investigation on the path. As you know there’s been quite a lot of rain since Sunday afternoon and if she left any footprints they’ve been washed away. There’s thick bracken along that way and some of it was broken down.’

  ‘So she did go down from the path?’ Chris sat forward, alert.

  ‘I wouldn’t swear to it. There wasn’t a clear area where she might have got down to the water, but the vegetation springs back pretty quickly, especially at this time of year. There are other explanations. We might not think it’s the easiest way to get to the water, but a lot of people walk their dogs along there, and some of them are pretty big. They don’t think twice about galloping up or down the slope.’

  ‘The branches,’ Ashleigh said, looking at the picture of the body as it floated face down in the water. ‘That big one there. Could she have got trapped under that?’

  ‘I didn’t see the girl in situ, but yes, she could have done.’

  ‘And the clothes?’

  ‘Maybe she was neat and tidy. All I can say is, we didn’t find anything to suggest anyone else had been down there at the waterside with her. But we didn’t find a lot of evidence that she’d been tramping around much, either. Sorry if this doesn’t help, but bluntly, I’m wondering why you felt the need for a full crime scene investigation on a case like this.’

  ‘I thought you might be bored.’ Jude grinned at her. None of them was ever at a loose end.

  ‘Aye, that’ll be right. I sit twiddling my thumbs all day.’ But she grinned back at him. ‘It looks straightforward to me. I’ll write up the full report, but as far as I’m concerned, everything you need to know will fit on one sheet of paper. And if that’s all, I’m off to twiddle my thumbs somewhere else.’

  ‘I never trust something that looks straightforward,’ Doddsy said, with a sigh.

  ‘The clothes bother me.’ Ashleigh was still frowning. ‘They really bother me. And there’s something else. Jude, do you remember when we spoke to Luke Helmsley? He said Summer had talked of going to see Miranda Neilson about her dissertation.’

  ‘Yes. He said that.’

  ‘She left university in the summer.’ Doddsy checked the missing person report. ‘And was due to embark on a masters degree.’

  ‘I got the call log back from her phone,’ Chris said. ‘She called Miranda’s number on Saturday and left a message but there’s no reply. I don’t know where she got the number from. One of the twins, I expect.’

  If Summer had found out something about Robert there might have been a case to have her removed, but what could she have found out that Faye’s connections in the organised crime agency didn’t know? And it wasn’t Robert that she’d tried to contact, but Miranda.

  ‘Miranda Neilson wasn’t there on the Sunday,’ said Doddsy. ‘According to her story and the twins, she didn’t get back until after they’d found Summer gone and started sobering up. But it might be worth asking if she had any idea what that call was about.’

  ‘What did you make of the Neilsons?’ Jude asked Ashleigh. ‘Co-operative?’

  ‘Extremely. I thought Mrs Neilson was particularly concerned, although she never mentioned having met Summer. I got the impression most of her worry was about how to handle things internally — tough father, kids showing signs of rebelling, that sort of thing. But actually I thought she was pretty much together. She struck me as someone who intended to use her position as stepmother, which might be a weakness for some, as a position from which to broker some sort of compromise. I think she’s a strong and capable woman.’

  ‘Interesting stuff. But if Summer didn’t die by accident there has to be a motive, doesn’t there?’ Chris pointed out.

  ‘There does indeed.’ Doddsy turned once more to Ashleigh. ‘What do we know about Miranda Neilson? She’s couldn’t be the jealous type, could she? Summer seems to have been fairly easy come, easy go when it came to sex by all accounts, and her boyfriend was, too.’

  ‘Yes, he certainly wasn’t jealous, which is interesting given he does have a history of jealous rage. But that all seems to be directed towards the same woman, not Summer. I think Luke’s a simple soul, but I think he’s probably still trying to fight his way out of falling in love with someone who isn’t interested.’

  Jude allowed himself a moment for reflection. Someone needed to take Luke Helmsley to one side and tell him the only way out of that kind of situation was patience and, eventually, acceptance, but he knew from his own experience that it was harder to do it than think about it. Most of the time he managed to keep his mind free of Becca Reid and when she did trouble his thoughts it was almost always out of the office, but she’d crept under his defences. It was because her old uncle lived up in Martindale, and he’d been up there plenty of times to visit the old man when he and Becca had been together. He allowed himself a smile. George was a one-off. His views on the goings-on, and in particular the meteoric rise of local boy Robert Neilson, would be worth hearing.

  He looked up and caught Ashleigh’s eye and knew, by the sudden irritated pink that flooded her cheeks that he’d caught her thinking along the same lines. She’d never got over the breakup of her relationship, either, and the fling she’d had with Faye was her own way of lashing out at life. Maybe, after all, it was simpler to do it Luke’s way, to hit out with your fists and have done with it.

  ‘Luke mi
ght not be jealous,’ Doddsy pointed out, ‘but what about Miranda? I don’t hear anything about Robert Neilson being a womaniser, but suppose there’s something going on there.’

  ‘The Neilsons were away most of last summer.’ Jude frowned. ‘I remember hearing that. They were getting that vast extension built to the house and they decamped to the South of France. They do say the rich are different.’

  Summer could have met Robert Neilson somewhere else, of course, or there could be a whole lot more to learn. But there was a practical line that he had to navigate, one that took heed of time and resources. If Summer had been murdered, or even if there was any realistic suspicion that she’d been murdered, he might have been able to justify expanding the inquiry into her character, and Miranda, and the twins, setting Chris to follow a line of investigation that might show motive, or some connection between a drowned woman and a very wealthy family whose lives had barely touched. But there was no evidence at all that the death was the result of foul play. ‘Then it looks to me as if we hand this one over to the coroner, pending the toxicology tests and leave it at that.’ Because, as Tammy had reminded them, it wasn’t as if they didn’t all have more constructive things to do with their time.

  Ten

  ‘The least I can do is take you out for a drink.’

  After over a week in which she’d felt as if she’d spent every spare moment running around after her cousin while the rest of her family pleaded alternative arrangements, Becca couldn’t help thinking that a drink was, indeed, the very least that Ryan could offer her. ‘Better make it an Appletiser.’ Living out in the country, she was inevitably the designated driver and ended up ferrying everyone else back home. ‘Thanks.’ And she gave him a warm smile, because life, on the whole, was good. She was a social being, and here she was in the pub with a group of friends. What more could she want?

  ‘Thanks mate. Mine’s a pint. One of us needs to keep the breweries in business.’ Interpreting the offer as a general one, Becca’s boyfriend, Adam, slid an arm around her and accepted with a beaming smile. As she’d expected, there was a frisson between the two of them. Ryan was overly in-your-face and Adam tended to the possessive, but the posturing was soon over and done with and the pint sealed the deal. Adam was officially in a good mood. ‘Move along, Becca. Let Ryan sit down.’

  Moving along meant snuggling up close to Adam, something Becca was increasingly reluctant to do. When she summoned up enough courage and found the right moment, she’d need to sit him down and talk things through. A break from the relationship would be good for both of them. She needed a bit more time to get her head round her infernal jealousy of Jude and his new, blonde, curvy woman.

  Not so new, either. It had been going on for a few months. When she’d first heard about it she’d imagined it would blow over in no time, because she thought she knew her ex pretty well and she’d have bet Ashleigh O’Halloran was the type of woman who’d catch his eye but not be able to keep it. It wasn’t the first time she’d been badly wrong about Jude, so maybe she didn’t know him so well after all.

  ‘Enjoying your visit?’ Adam resumed, once Ryan had delivered the drinks. The pub was busy, and the group had split between two tables, half of them to the left with Becca, Ryan and Adam at the second table to the right. In between, Mikey Satterthwaite, Jude’s much younger brother, sat on a wobbly stool, part of neither one conversation nor the other.

  ‘Yeah, it’s great. Reckon I’ve stayed in town long enough though. I might go down and stay in Howtown for a few days, where the folks come from. Get to know it a little bit better. When I get back to Oz I don’t know how long it’ll be before I get enough leave to come here again.’ Ryan laughed, uproariously.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t try and talk to George again.’ Becca begged him. ‘I’d forgotten he and Frank didn’t get on. I did know, but I must just have assumed blood’s thicker than water.’

  ‘Brothers are always best friends, aren’t they? Eh, Mikey?’ Adam laughed.

  Mikey lifted an eyebrow in a way that added fifteen years to his age and made him look, for a second, Jude’s image, but when the eyebrow dropped again and the smile returned, he was back to being himself. ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Mikey was all right, and the continued socialising that Becca allowed herself with him was the sop to her conscience. He hadn’t long turned twenty-one, very much younger than the group he was with tonight, and she was fully aware that Adam nurtured their friendship just as he did his relationship with her, and she hers with him — to be a constant irritation to someone who no longer cared. When Jude and Adam had fallen out the one had moved on and the other, refusing to forgive, had not. Since coming out of prison Adam had turned over the newest of leaves, working in a charity for rehabilitating drug users, and Jude lifted a cynical eyebrow exactly as Mikey had just done whenever Becca reminded him of it.

  ‘Old George will come round,’ her cousin said with confidence. ‘I’m not my granddad. I’ll pop back some time before he’s had his tea and his tablets.’

  ‘I really don’t think you should.’

  ‘Christ, Becca, you don’t believe what he said about me wanting something from him?’ Ryan made a convincing job of looking hurt.

  ‘No, of course not. But it isn’t about what I believe. It’s about what he believes. And people sometimes get more entrenched in their views as they get older. George never could abide being argued with.’ She took a long sip of her Appletiser. ‘Bluntly, you’re much better off agreeing with whatever he says and leaving him be.’

  ‘I think it’s a great idea, staying with him.’

  Becca thought not. If nothing else, George was entitled to his privacy, and Ryan had already shown himself to be a man who had no idea of how to behave on other people’s territory. Or rather, she thought he knew exactly how to behave in order to get what he wanted, manipulating people with a smile and a constant, subtle pressure. He’d done it to her, with great effect, targeting the person least likely to resist, but she was thirty-two and resilient and George was ninety-five, argumentative, and set in his ways. ‘I know it seems like it. But he won’t have it.’

  ‘There’s got to be someone down in Howtown who’d take me in. Cumbrians are supposed to be a welcoming bunch.’

  Becca took that as an implied criticism but Adam, his hand on her sleeve as if he sensed it, laughed. ‘We are. But most of them down there aren’t locals.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Ryan drew the back of his hand across his top lip, and the foam from his pint collected on his fingers, which he wiped fastidiously on his jeans. ‘There are all those kids that come for the watersports, aren’t there? Where that girl died.’

  ‘Yeah, they come every year. You might find a space in the bunkhouse.’ Adam laughed again, good mood but bad taste. ‘If you don’t mind sleeping in a dead woman’s bed.’

  ‘What about up in Howtown itself? Any B&Bs?’

  Becca shook her head. There was something troubling about Ryan’s fascination with Howtown, even though there shouldn’t be. It was his ancestral home, just as it was hers. ‘Maybe George was right. You should get a tent.’

  ‘Either that or kip down with the Neilsons.’ Adam shook his head. ‘They’re locals, though you’d never know it by listening to them. Or the way they interact. Because they don’t.’

  ‘Do you know the Neilson boys, Mikey?’ Becca asked, to draw him into the conversation. ‘They’re a bit younger than you, aren’t they?’

  Mikey shook his head, almost in contempt. ‘Nope. Not my sort of guys. Spoiled pair of crackheads.’ He shot a nervous look across at Adam as he did so, the look of a young man who knew he nearly made the mistakes that led him into the same sort of trouble, or would have done if he’d had the money.

  ‘But local crackheads.’ Ryan threw his head back and laughed very loudly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘All of them the same? Mum, dad, kids?’

  ‘The woman’s the second wife.’ Mikey was like Jude in his extraordi
nary capacity for acquiring information even when it didn’t particularly interest him, and for once Becca could see that without any kind of irritation. ‘The first wife came from Patterdale, and she was great. She was a teacher. They were childhood sweethearts. But then they got rich and he dumped her for someone else.’

  ‘That’s the woman who’s down there now? Miranda, is it?’

  ‘Nope. It was some woman he met when he was working abroad, and he ditched her pretty sharply as well. He met Miranda down in London. She’s quite a bit younger than him.’

  ‘Hell, you’re a mine of information, aren’t you?’ Ryan turned to Mikey in what passed for awe. ‘You should be on some quiz show. The Lives of my Neighbours, we could call it. That would sell to all the networks, and you’d be rich.’

  ‘Nah. I just remember things I hear. Folk round here talk because they’ve nothing else to do. And I listen for the same reason.’

  ‘Collecting incriminating knowledge runs in the family, doesn’t it?’ A little jibe from Adam probably wouldn’t get back where it was intended to, to Jude, because Mikey’s relationship with his brother wasn’t an easy one, but Adam must deem it worth the try, leaving it there to fuel Mikey’s resentment. He was a more subtle operator than Becca had thought.

  ‘I just remember things,’ Mikey repeated, defending his position.

  ‘Mikey’s brother’s a detective.’ Adam ripped open a packet of peanuts and helped himself. ‘Anything we say may be taken down in evidence and used against us.’ He laughed.

  ’Oh, right.’ Ryan gave Becca sidelong look. ‘That detective?’

  ’Yes,’ she said, annoyed, ‘that one.’

  ’Better not tell you what I think of the police then, eh?’

  ‘Say it if you want. You’re among friends.’ Adam had had a pint too many to have a care for Mikey’s sensibilities and Becca’s restraining scowl passed him by. ‘It’s a fair bet I’ll share your opinion.’