Death on the Lake

by Jo Allen

  ‘You’re such a star,’ Scott said to the waitress as she whisked away with every sign of urgency, and then he turned back to her. ‘How’s it going?’

  She tore her eyes from Jude, who was sitting in his car at the lights, fingers drumming on the steering wheel as he waited for them to change. He was looking particularly moody today, but maybe wearing black, or attending funerals, did that to people. Or maybe, knowing Jude, he was turning over the list of things to do, people who could be killers, who had means, motive and opportunity.

  Scott saw the look. ‘Is that the new boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes.’ Already on the defensive, she nevertheless gave him the chance to offer his blessing.

  ‘Everything you’re looking for in a man?’

  Scott was a reminder that the down side of a dream was a nightmare. ‘There’s no such thing as a perfect man, Scotty. But to answer your first question, it’s going really well. I’m settling in nicely.’

  ‘Do you miss me?’

  ‘No.’ She’d promised Lisa she’d be robust in the face of his inevitable attempts to sweet-talk her. ‘In one way, of course. You’re good company. And that’s how we’ll keep it.’

  ‘Did I suggest anything else?’

  His whole demeanour suggested something a lot more intense than friendship, but it always did. That was how he kept getting himself in trouble. Women heard promises of fidelity he swore he’d never made. She’d fallen for it herself. ‘I’m just warning you.’

  ‘I hope you aren’t going to cut me adrift. If I get this job, I’ll be relying on you to help me settle in.’

  The nightmare of having Scott permanently around was one she didn’t want to think about, but it was by no means a done deal. ‘If you get it, you’ll have plenty of other people to see you right. They’re a friendly bunch up at the watersports centre.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘I came across them through work recently.’

  ‘Oh, of course. They were talking about the girl who drowned. Fate, eh? It’s meant to be.’ His sandwich arrived, alongside pint-sized mugs of coffee for each of them, and he spared a moment to thank the waitress before he tucked in.

  Meant to be had been his favourite chat up line, and he’d delivered it so convincingly Ashleigh had overlooked the warning signs that flashed up as they’d approached the crossing point from lovers to marriage. ‘I can’t see you fitting in up here.’

  ‘That’s hurtful.’ He winked across a slab of bread and cheese. ‘You know I’m outdoorsy.’

  ‘I meant it in a good way. Of course you’re outdoorsy.’ He was lean and fit and had the right amount of muscle in the places where muscles looked good, and he liked to show them off. ‘But in a Mediterranean way, not a Cumbrian one.’

  ‘Cold water,’ he agreed with his mouth full, sending cheese crumbs flying in all directions.

  An inveterate fidget, Ashleigh began gathering them up. ‘You’ll need a full dry suit with thermals underneath. Gloves and woolly hats when you’re standing on the shore tutoring the beginners. Even in July.’

  ‘God, no. Spare me the woolly hat. It would ruin my hair.’ He was laughing at himself. ‘Nah, you’re right. I certainly wouldn’t last up here for ever. I find my balls far too useful to have them frozen off up here all year round. And I never thought I’d say it, but I’m getting a bit fed up of the sun.’

  He looked her in the eye as he said it and she was almost convinced, but all the time she’d known Scott he’d been a man who thrived on warmth and sunshine, on hot days and balmy evenings. He lived in shorts and sandals, sank shiploads of Spanish beer, and sported a tan that turned deep bronze over time. He was like a creature from a Greek myth, who came back to his country, and his wife for a season only, but had to return to the sun when the colour faded from his skin. ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Well, maybe not fed up. But it’s time for a change, perhaps. Maybe a summer somewhere else would be enough for me to learn to appreciate it. I could go to the Caribbean in the autumn. Call this idea wanderlust, if you like.’

  Only Scott could satisfy his wanderlust by coming home. ‘You’re one of a kind,’ she said and relaxed. Because it was only a couple of hours in his company and even if he was offered the job she was confident the privations of the Lakes would be too much for him and he’d refuse.

  Twenty-One

  It was warm, and Jude’s first action had been to open the windows and let in some fresh air. It was going to be a long day in the office for a lot of people as they picked over the bones of Luke Helmsley’s murder. Now, with the initial briefing over and the team of officers he’d called in allocated to their various roles on the case, he could sit down in the incident room with those who chimed closest with his thinking and hammer out possibilities.

  ‘Like a military killing, the doctor said.’ Chris Marshall’s talents lay inside the office and Jude included him in any general discussion where it was possible, because he could think outside the box — not so much in terms of the killer or any hypothesis about why and how a crime had occurred, but because he knew the best places to find information, and his instincts for an online trail were unerring. And he never gave up. His prize was the result, the piece of information which would confirm or deny the theories concocted by minds that worked in different ways to his. ‘Do we have the PM report?’

  ‘We do.’ Jude tapped his fingers on the desk and listened to the bells of St Andrew’s church, calling the faithful to Sunday service. Doddsy was listening to them, too, with a sigh, because he was the only one of them who was a regular churchgoer and somehow always seemed to end up working on Sundays. ‘It confirms the cause of death as a broken neck. Death was instantaneous. There was no water in the lungs and no other signs of immediate violence.’ Luke had had his share of bruises, some of them no doubt the result of brawling and others from a life of physical exertion, lifting rocks and manhandling livestock, but none was recent and there was nothing from the moment before he’d died. ‘He hadn’t picked up anything from his fight with the Neilson boys apart from a grazed knuckle and a black eye.’

  ‘Military style.’ Chris referred to his notes. ‘That’s what the doctor said.’

  ‘Yes. The report isn’t explicit as far as that goes, but it was a single, clean break consistent with his head being snapped backwards with considerable force.’ Matt Cork, the pathologist, was a friend of Jude’s and though he was overcautious and refused to commit himself, Jude had judged from his tone that he thought the crime had an element of professionalism about it. ‘It may have been lucky, but I’m inclined to think not.’

  ‘Time of death?’ Doddsy asked. He was looking particularly world-weary.

  ‘He can’t say for certain. Luke met the twins at one and parted from Miranda almost immediately after that. Miranda found him at quarter past two. On the basis of that, Matt reckons he must have been killed almost immediately before she found him.’

  The fourth member of the team, Ashleigh, had been silent up to that point, but at that she sat forward. ‘Are you seriously suggesting Miranda is capable of carrying out that kind of killing?’

  ‘No. Not at all. But if she narrowly missed seeing the murder, I think she’s lucky to be alive.’

  In the expectant silence, he got up and turned to the white board on the wall behind him. On the day of Luke’s’s murder it had sprung into being, with photographs, queries, maps all jostling for position on it. Jude unpinned a couple of pictures of Luke’s broken body and dropped them on the desk, then stood looking down on them, hands in his pockets. ‘Before we get to the why and the who, I think we can be fairly clear about what happened. I’ve spoken to Tammy and she’s built up a picture of a neat, clean killing. It looks as if Luke may have been on the road, possibly on his way back up to work. He may have met his killer or he may have been attacked from behind, but death was instant. He may never even have hit the ground.’ In his mind the killer caught Luke before he fell and tipped him neatly over the parapet in one smooth
move. The crime scene had been spectacularly clean. ‘There’s just one footmark on the bank, where someone must have braced themselves against it, possibly with the other foot in the water. It’s either a wellington boot or a walking boot or a Doc Marten. That sort, though the mark isn’t clear enough to distinguish between them. In Tammy’s reconstruction, the killer braced himself — or herself — like that while shoving the body under the bridge, jumped up onto the road and made off. As an aside, when I saw Miranda she was wearing trainers but she could have changed. And her feet are way smaller than the print.’

  ‘Size 12,’ noted Doddsy.

  ‘Yes. And now we need to think about why he was killed, and that will help us work out who.’ He picked up a black marker from the table and took off the cap. ‘This is where I want to add something else into this equation. Ashleigh and I were talking about this the other day. About the coincidence of an accidental death — Summer — and a sudden death from natural causes — George Barrett — within such a small area. She had suspicions about both.’ He gave her a half-smile. ‘I said if there was a third death I’d bring both of those two back into consideration, and that’s what I want to do.’

  Turning back to the board, he wrote Summer’s name in capitals, then George’s beneath it, a question mark beside each.

  ‘I want us to think about where there’s something linking those three. There may not be. It may be there’s a clear and separate motive for Luke’s murder.’

  ‘A lot of people disliked him,’ Chris said, running his hand through his fair hair. ‘But as far as I can gather the more aggressive ones were pretty much the same kind of people as he was. The sort who’d lose their temper and throw a punch and then run off leaving the body in the middle of the road, or hand themselves in. Whoever did this was clever.’

  ‘Yes. And if Summer was murdered then that person was also clever. Which makes me think that Luke stumbled across something — or someone — he wasn’t supposed to know about, and that meant he had to be removed instantly.’

  ‘It can’t have been planned. If it was, they’d have hidden the body.’

  ‘Unless they wanted someone else to get the blame. My guess is whoever it was who killed him saw Miranda coming and had just seconds to hide the body and themselves.’

  ‘Military killing, eh?’ Chris had his thinking face on.

  ‘Military style, at least.’

  ‘Didn’t I hear something locally about some army guy hanging around?’

  ‘You did. George Barrett’s great-nephew is a soldier in the Australian army and is over in the UK on leave.’

  ‘He didn’t get on with George,’ noted Ashleigh. ‘I’m sure I heard that somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, from me. A lot of people didn’t, including Luke, I believe. But I don’t know that this guy — his name is Ryan Goodall — was in the dale when Summer died, and to the best of my knowledge he isn't around now. The last I heard of him, he was floating about in some unspecified place in the Pennines.’

  ‘And that was when?’

  ‘A couple of days after George’s death. I heard that from Becca, but she hasn’t heard anything since then. He said he’d be back for George’s funeral but he never turned up.’ Becca had been worried about him; but Becca worried about everyone. From what he knew of Ryan Goodall from Mikey, whom he’d grilled on the subject, he was the type of man to change his plans with no regard for others. ‘I don’t know if that’s significant. It would probably have been more so if he’d been around.’ Nevertheless, he wrote Ryan’s name down on the board, too.

  ‘There are the twins,’ Ashleigh said, with a frown of doubt, ‘and there’s Miranda. The boys went to a good school and they may have been in the cadet corps or whatever.’

  ‘I’d like to think they don’t teach kids that age to kill.’

  ‘l’d like to think so, too, but you never know. Miranda says they were in the house, but I suppose it’s not impossible they carried on the row and she’s covering for them. Or sneaked out and she didn’t see them.’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ Jude allowed, with some reluctance, ‘but they’d both been drinking and my guess is the person who killed Luke had his wits about him. And I can’t see how he’d have let them get close enough to surprise him like that.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘We’ll get on. Ashleigh, you can go down and see how the door-to-door stuff is going. Chris, I’d like you to try and track down Ryan Goodall. Ask Becca if she’s got a number, though he probably won’t answer it. We may be able to trace the phone.’

  When they’d gone he stood up and crossed to the window, where he stared down on the scattering of cars in the car park. As he’d expected, Faye’s was among them, and he was only surprised she hadn’t drifted down to see what was going on. ‘I’ll leave you to it just now,’ he said to Doddsy. It was time to go up and have a chat with Faye.

  She’d been sitting making notes on a pad, but when he came into her office she flipped the cover closed. He came straight to the point. ‘I think I’d like the Neilsons’ property searched.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you would.’ She shuffled her coffee mug on top of the pad for extra security, guilty as a teenage boy caught writing poetry, then took it off again and flipped the pad open. ‘I’d love to, as well, and I was just working through the arguments for and against it. I won’t go through them with you. Some of them are things you don’t need to know and I’ll be putting this through the shredder when I’m done.’

  ‘Then you’ll authorise me to apply for a warrant?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m surprised at you. I’m as keen to go ahead with it as you are, but you should engage your common sense. Softly softly, and so on.’

  ‘I think the case is rock solid. A young man has a fight with two other young men who have been drinking and threatens their stepmother when she intervenes. Less than two hours later she finds him murdered and there’s no sign of anyone else around. How much more reason do you need?’

  ‘Jude.’ Like a schoolteacher with a particularly slow child, she shook her head at him. ‘Do I really need to remind you how clever Neilson is?’

  ‘You keep telling me he’s clever. I don’t know the man and I haven’t seen any evidence for it. I’m not suggesting he killed Luke Helmsley. In fact, we know he didn’t because he wasn’t there. We have his word for it. We have his PA’s word for it. And just in case she’s up to her eyes in some unspecified, well-concealed crime to go with it, we have CCTV of the two of them picking up a coffee at a petrol station on the A69. He was exactly where he says he was when he said he was there.’

  ‘Is that right? Though I expected nothing less.’

  ‘Yes. Someone dug it up for me yesterday afternoon.’ In fact Robert had gone out of his way to identify his whereabouts and the confirmation of it had been obtained within an hour, with suspicious ease. ‘But as I say, on those grounds I’m not suggesting he did it, but I am suggesting one of his family might have done it. Or the killer might have hidden on the Neilson property, or escaped through it.’

  ‘I wonder if they have CCTV footage,’ she mused.

  ‘They had cameras installed last week.’ Too late to be of any use in the investigation into Summer’s death. ‘I haven’t reviewed the footage myself, but Chris had a quick look and it didn’t show anything. But if there was something — if it shows the twins leaving the place when they said they hadn’t, for example — it might have been doctored, or we might find that a bit of it had gone missing.’

  ‘Were they difficult about handing it over?’

  ‘Slow, I’d say.’ Usually people were only too keen to provide any evidence to the police, and in this case it had been forthcoming, though not immediately, as if there had been a short delay to ascertain whether there was anything incriminating.

  ‘How very interesting,’ said Faye, as if it weren’t interesting in the least.

  He waited for a moment, testing her out. After all, he didn’t need her authority and he was only seeking it because
of her earlier warning about handling the Neilsons with care. ‘Supposing I were to approach the magistrate—’

  ‘You might get a warrant or you might not. But if you do that, and if that jeopardises any other line of investigation, then someone senior to me will kick me into the middle of next week, and when I get back I’ll give you your bits to play with. Understand?’

  He stiffened. ‘Three people have died and at least one of them was murdered.’

  ‘I’ve told you before. There is a very serious money-laundering investigation under way and a lot at stake.’

  ‘Murder trumps fraud, Faye. Every time. In my book, at least.’

  ‘I don’t deny it, but we don’t have to choose between them. As far as I’m concerned, this case will remain very much live. If Robert Neilson has anything to do with it, we’ll get him for it in the end. Never forget Al Capone.’

  And by then the person who did his bidding, the actual killer, would be out of the country, if they weren’t already. ‘If we don’t look for the evidence we may never secure a conviction.’

  She spread her hands in a gesture of resignation. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m sorry.’

  He left her to her paperwork, to her pointless thinking, and strode back down the corridor towards the incident room, racking his brain for an alternative, for inspiration. In his mind he saw Luke Helmsley’s face, lying in the mortuary, a face that had been so full of life and emotion, but had ended as a cold mask that showed nothing but shock.

  Twenty-Two

  Sometimes Becca worked on a Sunday morning, and sometimes she helped out at the Sunday school in Askham. Over the past month or so she’d mangled to wrangle both into passable excuses not to spend a Saturday night at Adam’s, and today she’d managed to extend avoiding action right into the Sunday afternoon by virtue of the son of an old friend of George’s having come up for the funeral and been invited to her parents’ for Sunday lunch. But eventually that drew to an end, and it was some time after four o’clock that she headed to Adam’s flat.