Death in the Woods: A DCI Jude Satterthwaite novel (The DCI Satterthwaite Mysteries)

by Jo Allen

  ‘I’d need to know more. Need to think it through. I worked on the second case, very briefly, but I don’t know anything about the first and I didn’t have time to look at the case notes before I came out. I’d need to go back and see if there are any connections. As far as I can recall, there aren’t.’

  ‘We can go over that later.’ Jude had had the luxury of a few minutes to scan through the notes for the previous two deaths before coming out, but no more. There had been nothing in them to suggest anything more sinister than personal tragedy. Two such events were a sad coincidence, perhaps the one triggering the other. Three were potentially more serious. Faye, when she’d detailed him to drop whatever he was doing and get down to Cave Wood as a matter of urgency to manage the impact on the community, had talked about getting professional help as though he was the one who needed it. ‘Talk me through this one just now. Then we can see if there are any connections.’

  ‘There’s not much I can tell you. There hasn’t been time to get a formal ID done yet, but we know who he is from the possessions. He’s Charlie Curran. He lives in Penrith, down in Carleton Village. He’s twenty-one and he works as a builder.’

  Twenty-one. Mikey’s age, not the most common demographic for suicide but not one that could be overlooked. Jude worried too much about Mikey. He knew it, and he fought it, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘Do his family know?’

  ‘I’ve got someone going down to talk to them now. And we’ve assigned them a Family Liaison Officer.’ She checked her watch, as if this kind of thing went by the clock.

  ‘Relationships?’

  ‘He lives with his parents and he has a girlfriend, but as far as I know that’s a fairly recent relationship. I haven’t had time to go into anything in any detail but there’s nothing that leaps out as a reason to kill himself.’

  ‘Did he leave a note?’

  ‘Not that we’ve found.’

  Jude took another few seconds to stare at the place where Charlie Curran had died. Suicides raised questions and too many of them were never answered. ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Raven.’

  Jude, who was familiar with the hippies who’d recently moved in to the Eden Valley, lifted an eyebrow. ‘I see.’

  ‘I didn’t know they’d set up over here.’ He sensed a faint trace of dissatisfaction in Ashleigh’s voice and suppressed a smile. Like him, she was beset by the copper’s desire to know everything. ‘There can’t be anything suspicious about that, can there? Not after the last time.’

  He shook his head. Raven and her husband Storm attracted the wrong sort of attention for their alternative lifestyle, and a previous association with a series of gruesome murders several months earlier and elsewhere in the county hadn’t helped, but the situation had been neither of their making nor their fault. Nevertheless… ‘That’s two bodies that poor woman has found now.’

  ‘She certainly can’t have anything to do with this one. She’s so thin now the wind would blow her away. And you know me. Normally I’d be jumping at that, and feeling something.’ She fluttered her fingers in the air and rolled her eyes, in a gesture of self-mockery. ‘Not this time. No strange feelings, no red flags. As far as Raven is concerned, two and two make four.’

  A white suited CSI emerged from the woods, gave them the thumbs up and turned away again. Returning the gesture Jude turned his back, conscious there was only so much he could learn from the scene. There was plenty more casework resting on his desk. This would be a problem of a different sort, a matter of prioritising action in the interests of public confidence even though there was no evidence of crime. ‘There’s no point in hanging around. I don’t see there’s a lot more we can do here. Let’s go and get a coffee up in Lazonby. You can talk me through what you know of the other two cases and we’ll see if anything leaps out this time.’

  ‘I’ll be amazed, but yes. I could do with a coffee.’

  The path was narrow and he followed her along the river. ‘Have you had a chance to speak to Raven?’

  ‘Not yet. Whoever was first on the scene had a quick word, but she was too upset to tell them anything about it. I’m not surprised.’

  Raven was a gentle soul, who wished no ill on anyone as far as Jude was aware, though he was too cynical to believe she had no secrets and knew her well enough to think she’d withhold the truth if she thought it was the right thing. Raven might be cowed by the law but she never let it rule her. ‘I’d like you to go down and talk to her when she’s feeling a little stronger.’ There were more junior officers who would normally take on that job, but Ashleigh had the gift of opening up a witness. If Raven was hiding something, she’d know.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s a priority,’ she said. ‘Not with all the other things we have on.’

  ‘No, there’s no rush.’ He reached his car, parked next to hers in the lane. It was, after all, a question of visibility and reassurance. ‘I’ll catch up with you in Lazonby.’

  He waited for her to head up the lane, sat and checked his messages, and put in a quick call to his deputy. ‘Doddsy. Just checking in. It looks like a pretty straightforward suicide to me, I have to say. Something may come up from the CSI people, but there’s nothing there that looked out of kilter.’

  ‘Isn’t that what Ashleigh said about the first two?’ Back in the office, Detective Inspector Chris Dodd, aka Doddsy, sounded as if he had other things on his mind.

  ‘Yes. But the three together merit a closer look. I wouldn’t mind running the whole thing past you when we get back.’ He closed his eyes for a second and reviewed the resources he could spare. ‘Get Chris Marshall to come and sit with us. I suspect that most of what we find out will be down to digging about in the background. If there’s anything to find.’ Chris had many other things to do, but he was efficient and effective.

  ‘Sure. When will you be back up?’

  ‘Less than an hour. I want to go up to Lazonby. For a coffee.’ But there was more to it than that, just the inkling of an idea, a detail to check. ‘We’ll convene after lunch, maybe, if you’ve time.’ Because Charlie Curran’s death, with no evidence of wrongdoing, might stop all the clocks for his family and friends but it slid down a detective’s to-do list below any number of actual and potential crimes.

  ‘I’m busy, and I have the newspapers on my back. I fobbed them off, but they’ll be back.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep a low profile.’

  When he’d checked what he wanted to check at Lazonby, they’d sit down and discuss the case. If no leads came up, it would lie on the file alongside the others. Three deaths. He started the car and steered it up the lane, past the officer stationed at the farm gate that usually blocked it. If it stopped at three, that was one thing. But would it?

  The road to Lazonby took him along a network of narrow lanes and high hedges, from behind one of which rose a curl of smoke. Jude had the window down and the woodsmoke tickled his tastebuds. Someone was cooking something. On impulse, he turned off and headed towards the smoke, stopping in a gateway to peer through the gate. A haphazard assembly of canvas tents occupied one corner of a field. You wouldn’t be able to see the location of Charlie’s death from there, and the path was hidden, too, on the far side of the stone circle in the next field. And it was no short distance from there to Cave Wood, for someone like Raven, shuffling her way towards death at the hands of an illness that was, as far as he was aware, undiagnosed and that he suspected she didn’t have the energy to fight, to cover in the darkness of an evening.

  It would be interesting to see what Ashleigh got from her later on in the week.

  Three

  At Lazonby, Ashleigh parked the car, got out and went into the Co-Op, composing her expression into the blandest she could manage as she did so. The second suicide, a few weeks before, had been that of a local girl and she’d been in and about the place following up. The place would still be reeling from the shock of Tania Baker’s death and she’d be the focus of more attention, expected t
o field questions she couldn’t have addressed even if she knew the answers.

  She checked her phone as she waited in the queue, aware that the customers in the shop would be watching her, that news of the latest death would already be out there. There were half a dozen messages, most of which could be ignored, but one was more than welcome. Her colleague Chris Marshall — possibly prompted by Jude — had sent an admirable summary of both previous suicides, culled from what little was in the files.

  She snapped her phone off, managing to ignore the customers leaving the shop, and placed the coffee order.

  ‘More terrible news, Sergeant O’Halloran.’ The woman behind the counter flicked the switches on the coffee machine and delivered the two Americanos that Ashleigh had ordered. ‘Two young people taken from us so suddenly. I’m so shocked. We all are.’

  Ashleigh took her eyes from the phone, murmured something suitably regretful, and laid a five pound note on the counter.

  ‘It’s a wicked world,’ the woman went on. ‘It’s no wonder the kids don’t want to live in it, with what we’re doing to it. House prices and politics and global warming? What kind of future is that? Do we know who it was?’

  ‘Not yet. The identity has still to be confirmed.’

  ‘And it was suicide, wasn’t it? And one of those hippies up by Long Meg found him, they say? They’re a strange lot, aren’t they? Filling people’s heads with a lot of nonsense, no doubt.’ She slapped the change down on the counter. ‘But I dare say they mean well.’

  ‘We’re treating the death as unexplained.’ With relief, Ashleigh saw Jude’s Mercedes pull up outside. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘You make sure you do something to stop this happening any more.’

  As if she could. Ashleigh carried the two coffees outside to where Jude had got out of the car and was leaning on the door with an air of studied carelessness, looking like a sharp-suited businessman snatching a break before a meeting. It might have fooled any passers-by, but everyone who worked with him recognised that the casual outlook was a mask. He was always on the watch, always looking for the crucial detail everyone else had missed.

  ‘Here you go.’ She handed him one of the two disposable cups. ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Excellent. Thanks.’ He smiled at her as he took it. ‘I need something to sharpen my brain.’

  ‘Chris has sent me a note about the other suicides.’ Ashleigh sipped her coffee and found it as good as it was welcome.

  ‘Right. Do you want to talk me through them?’

  ‘One of them was here.’ Ashleigh stopped, out of habit, as a young woman came past, a stamped envelope in her hand, and thrust it into the post box. She’d seen her on the way into the village, a spindly figure distinctive in black, standing in one of the embayments of the solid old bridge over the river and staring down into the swirling waters. Ashleigh had slowed the car and looked twice, as a precaution, but her concern had been misplaced and the girl had jogged off with a sprightly step. ‘But you know that, don’t you, or we’d have been back at the office by now?’

  ‘I had a quick look through the files before I came out, but that was all I had time for. And I think we deserve a coffee. Let’s amble down along the railway, shall we?’

  ‘Do we have time?’

  ‘It’ll take us twenty minutes. Call it a coffee break.’ He set off with a long stride. ‘Begin at the beginning.’

  She followed, phone in hand, scanning the case notes and reading them out. Chris Marshall had many talents but his capacity for swift communication of key information was particularly useful. ‘In May, Connor Turnbull, a forestry worker from Stainton, took his own life. He was twenty-three and single. He hanged himself in a small wood within sight of his home. He left no note, but had struggled with mental health issues as a teenager. There were no marks on the body indicating any sign of violence. No-one was surprised.’ When you stripped a young life down to the bare bones it seemed simple and easy. Connor Turnbull’s past must surely have been more complicated than that.

  ‘No-one saw him the evening he died?’

  She consulted the notes. ‘No. He went out in the evening, spoke to a neighbour, who thought he was going to the pub. He was drinking in Penrith later that night, on his own, and CCTV shows him walking past the station. That’s all. Verdict — suicide. There was no reason to think otherwise. As far as I know there still isn’t. It was very straightforward.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jude turned left onto a road out of the village, up the hill and broadly alongside the railway. Like a spaniel on the trail, Ashleigh thought as she struggled to keep up with him. ‘What about the next one?’ He slowed to allow her to catch up and they took a more leisurely pace as the road levelled out. ‘It was up here, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Up at the bridge. Here.’ They were the better part of three quarters of a mile from where they’d left the cars and it would have been quicker to drive, but Jude was scanning the scene just as Ashleigh herself had done a bare three weeks earlier, when Doddsy had sent her down to oversee what was going on. ‘It was a young woman, Tania Baker. She was nineteen. She lived here in Lazonby, up at the top of the village, in a flat two doors along from her parents. She used to work in a shop in Carlisle but was made redundant about six months ago and was unemployed. Her financial situation was precarious but not desperate. Her parents kept an eye out for her and they were as astonished as they were devastated at what happened. She left no note, and she had no history of mental health issues.’ Unlike Connor Turnbull, Tania’s death had taken everyone by surprise.

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘She was in the village at about eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, where she stopped and chatted to a couple of people. Her behaviour seemed normal. No-one saw her go up Fiddler’s Lane. Here.’ They’d almost reached the bridge which crossed the railway line and they stopped to stare down on the bare tracks of the Settle-Carlisle line, gleaming away as they narrowed into the distance. ‘The last train leaves Carlisle just before twenty past eight and gets to Langwathby at about quarter to nine.’

  Jude placed both hands on the sandstone parapet of the bridge and frowned along the railway line. ‘It doesn’t stop here in Lazonby?’

  ‘Not that one. I think we can assume Tania would have known that, so she’d known it wouldn’t have been slowing down. As the train came under the bridge she dropped from this side onto the track in front of it. There was nothing the driver could do except shut his eyes.’

  They were silent. Down on the railway line, a ragged bouquet of flowers, long dead and with its cellophane wrapping in tatters, as a memorial to a life lost. For a moment they stared at it.

  ‘Okay,’ Jude said, after a moment’s contemplation. He strode up to the bridge, took out his phone and snapped a series of quick shots in both directions. ‘So no-one saw her.’

  ‘No-one saw her after she’d walked off the main street and up Fiddler’s Lane. No.’

  ‘And no-one saw her jump.’

  ‘Only the train driver. He didn’t see anyone on the bridge as he approached.’

  ‘But Tania was there and he didn’t see her. Okay. So if we want to look at this in a different way…maybe someone else was with her who he also didn’t see. So it’s theoretically possible she wasn’t alone on the bridge.’

  Ashleigh stared down at the track. ‘Theoretically, yes. But aren’t you overthinking it? It’s theoretically possible most suicides weren’t alone when they died, although almost all of them will have been. There’s nothing in this case to suggest she wasn’t.’

  ‘You’re probably right. And there’s nothing to suggest she didn’t jump. It’s just my suspicious mind.’

  Sometimes Ashleigh struggled not to laugh at Jude. There could have been no other career for him but the police, no other way of life for someone with as keen a sense of justice and so sharp a determination to see that evil never went unpunished. It had come at a cost for him — these things always did — but it had turned out all right. The
girlfriend who’d found his sense of fair play too much to handle when it had forced a choice between his friends and his job was firmly in the past, and Ashleigh had stepped neatly into her place. ‘The CSI people went over it pretty thoroughly.’ Perhaps, under time pressure, they hadn’t spent as long on it as they might have done if there had been a suggestion of foul play, but they’d been thorough enough.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. Nevertheless, I think I’d like to revisit that one, just on the off chance. Perhaps go back and talk to the train driver. He’s our only witness.’

  ‘Do we have the time?’ It wasn’t that she disbelieved him, but nor could Ashleigh bring herself to give full credibility to what he was suggesting. It was suicide. ‘Do we have the resources?’

  He was silent for a few seconds. ‘I suppose the answer to that is that if I seriously thought it was suspicious we’d find the time and the resources. But no. I don’t think that. I just think it bears another look. A call to the driver will take you ten minutes. And someone — Chris or Aditi, maybe — can go through the files and double-check that nothing stands out. For example, statistically it probably isn’t unusual to find three suicides in two months in this area, overall, but maybe it is in this age group. If that’s the case, it makes me wonder. Could they have known each other? Can you can find the time to check that out?’

  Ashleigh finished her coffee, cold now, and crushed the cardboard cup between her fingers. ‘If I put off doing something else. Or you could come round tonight and we could discuss it over supper. Or actually, as Lisa’s in tonight we can discuss it after supper. In private.’

  ‘I can manage that. I don’t have anything else on.’

  Jude never compromised. Work was everything and nothing got in the way of it, so that even this half-hearted recognition of the relationship they were in felt very slightly risky in office hours, but that didn’t bother Ashleigh, cut from the same cloth. ‘Excellent. Then let’s head back. I think we’ve stretched the coffee break to its limit.’