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

by Jo Allen

  ‘It’s probably best done informally anyway. I might take a run down there after work and have a chat with Storm. He may be able to shed some light on what’s going on, even if he doesn’t realise it.’ Under his shaggy, unkempt exterior Storm had a sharp businessman’s brain and though his knowledge of how business worked was way out of date, Jude usually managed a productive conversation with him. ‘Okay. Let’s wrap up. We’ve all got other things to think about.’

  ‘I don’t think Storm was telling the truth,’ said Ashleigh, as he was leaving. ‘Just a sense. But you might want to ask him about Geri and how long she’s been here.’

  ‘I’d had the same thought myself.’ He turned his back on the room and headed out. The meeting had provided him with plenty of food for thought.

  Thirteen

  ‘You don’t need to keep checking up on me.’

  It was always difficult to tell over the phone whether Mikey was genuinely aggrieved. Taking a moment to assess it, Jude reminded himself to tread carefully. Their relationship had improved rapidly over the past couple of weeks, but that didn’t mean the change was permanent. In the past such thaws had frozen again very quickly when Jude had trespassed too far on his brother’s goodwill. Sometimes Mikey reminded him of Holmes, setting and changing his own boundaries without warning. ‘It wasn’t that. I just wondered if you’d heard anything on the grapevine.’

  ‘You’re the policeman, not me.’

  ‘Yes, and you’re the one with the knack of getting people to talk to them.’

  ‘It’s because they feel sorry for me. Do you think they’d tell me if they thought I was going to tell you?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Privately, Jude thought exactly that. Before he’d divided the community by sending one of its more popular and charismatic young men to jail (or so the local narrative went) he’d been reasonably popular himself, someone people would have a quiet word with when they were concerned about something. Now half the population seemed to have decided anything they said to him would be held against them at some point in the future, but they still talked to Mikey, leaving him to decide what to pass on and what to keep to himself. That suggested to Jude that he, not his brother, was the problem. He could handle that. The only thing he really regretted about the Adam Fleetwood affair was the damage to his relationship with Mikey, and even that was finally healing.

  And there was Becca. More than ever, he regretted the way it had cost him Becca.

  ‘Well, yeah. Maybe. But I haven’t heard anything. I didn’t know the latest kid.’ A pause. ‘Bummer for you, though, Jude. Are you okay about it?’

  ‘I’d rather we could have stopped it, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You can’t stop it, though. No-one expects you to. These aren’t criminal matters. That’s what this psychiatrist the Council have brought in says.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to her?’

  ‘There’s no need to panic. No. She had a piece in the paper today. All very woolly and offering help to anyone who feels they need to talk.’

  Jude snatched at the moment. ‘Mikey. If you ever—’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Mikey laughed. ‘Look, I’m going to go now. Things to do. Places to go. People to see. That stuff. See you.’ The line went dead.

  Jude sat for a while, watching as the sun began to slip sideways towards the bank of cloud which lay behind Wan Fell in the west. He’d called Mikey from his car up at Long Meg, before going to speak to Storm. If he’d managed to keep him on the line any longer he’d have asked if he’d heard anything about Geri through his continuing — and contentious — association with Adam, but Mikey had the knack of sensing and avoiding difficult questions. And he probably wasn’t the best source of information. The person who would be bound to know, and who might conceivably speak to him about it, was Becca.

  Maybe. If it wasn’t too difficult, if he could find an excuse to talk to her, he’d ask her. He got out of the car in the fading light and looked down towards Long Meg, past the shadows of the dead oak stretching out its long, twig-less branches in defiance of gravity. No doubt Izzy Ecclestone would be back before long, dancing around it as she tried to summon enough courage to find out whether there was life after death, but there was nothing he could do about that. Her parents knew the score and she was their responsibility. She wouldn’t have her bicycle, so if she wanted to hang around Long Meg in the dark she’d have a four-mile walk, long enough to be a distraction if she was looking for reasons not to make mistakes, exactly as Mikey had confessed to doing.

  Geri’s car was parked just off the track which bisected the stone circle; it was both the reason for his momentary hesitation and the prompt for his call to Mikey. Locking the Mercedes, he strolled towards the New Agers’ field. The scent of cooking drifted across towards him. He detected meat, and onion, and some kind of herb he couldn’t identify. The camper van had gone, leaving a burned circle where the occupants had lit a fire, and the grass had already sprung back on the pale squares where the camp’s summer families had pitched their tents. He wondered what they really thought. A holiday? A glimpse at a life they yearned to live? A recharging of the batteries for themselves and their children? The views of the youngsters would be interesting, too. Did they enjoy the wholesome upbringing their parents sought for them, or did they long to be online, gaming with their friends?

  One thing was for sure. Whatever your parents did for you, you wanted the opposite. Proof of that was a few yards in front of him in the shape of Geri Foster, standing with her hands plunged into the pockets of her lightweight Barbour jacket, tapping a booted foot on the ground impatiently as she talked to — or rather, he thought, lectured — her mother.

  Raven and Storm’s tent had always sat a little way from the others, as if in a deliberate move to give her a little peace as she eased her way to the shadows. Now it looked furtive, crouched in a corner. Beside it, Storm was unpegging washing from a sagging line and dropping it into a tatty wicker basket. Looking up he saw Jude and abandoned the basket, striding across towards him. ‘Not you again. Don’t tell me there’s more bad news.’

  Such churlishness was untypical. Storm was a gentle man, whose main concern was negotiating life without causing trouble to, or being troubled by, anyone. Geri’s nagging presence could hardly be soothing, and Raven’s illness must be a drain on his physical and mental resources. ‘No, but I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything I can tell you.’

  ‘Storm.’ Jude liked him, so he softened his tone more than he might have done with someone else. ‘Let’s just cut out the middle man, shall we, and save me a lot of effort? Ashleigh reckons you haven’t been entirely truthful and it’ll save everybody a whole load of effort if you just tell me what’s going on.’

  For a moment Storm looked at him, then turned swiftly towards Raven and then back. ‘It’s nothing you can do anything about.’

  It was an implicit admission of a lie. Jude waited.

  ‘It’s Raven,’ Storm went on, moving closer so his voice didn’t drift along the field to where his wife and daughter were engaged in an unevenly-matched verbal tussle. ‘She’s dying.’

  ‘I thought so. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve known it for a while. I think she knows it too. Well, we’re all dying, aren’t we, if you want to think of it like that?’

  Jude didn’t think like that. He was too often in contact with people whose lives had been suddenly and violently, sometimes deliberately, cut short. They hadn’t been dying. They’d been busy living. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Right. She’s never admitted it. But when she met that girl in the woods she asked her to get in touch with Indigo. That said to me that she thinks she hasn’t got much longer. Because we’d talked about it. They don’t get on. Indigo intimidates her. You can see.’

  ‘Your daughter was here all the time,’ Jude said, ‘wasn’t she?’

  Storm put his head to one side, thoughtfully. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How lon
g has she been here?’

  ‘There’s no point in asking me about time. A couple of weeks, maybe? You’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘Why so secretive?’ asked Jude. It was falling into place; nothing sinister, but a domestic difficulty that loomed too large in Storm and Raven’s small world.

  ‘I asked her to. I asked her to come up a while back. She has a house here, comes up, visits, goes away again. I wanted her back nearby, in case something happens.’

  The something referred to Raven. Jude knew she didn’t like doctors, knew she preferred to let time and nature run her down, so there was every chance she’d had no diagnosis, but he could guess. His own mother had suffered a bout of breast cancer, caught early, and had survived it. The modern world wasn’t altogether destructive. ‘I understand. But why didn’t you tell Raven?’

  Storm’s face settled to a mutinous expression. ‘We talked about Indigo coming and Raven didn’t want to worry her. But it would have been Indigo who suffered for it if she wasn’t here when her mum needed her. I don’t always see eye to eye with the girl, God knows, but I had to think about that. So she’s been up here for a while, planning to spend the summer here. But it wasn’t the right moment to tell Raven.’

  ‘Until she asked Izzy to write a letter?’

  ‘Sometimes fate deals with things for you. Yes. She didn’t want Indigo to come. She just wanted to get the girl away from the woods. She asked me to write another letter and tell her to stay away, but I just told her Indigo left the minute she got the note. When you saw her, she’d decided it was time to tell her she was here.’

  Jude digested that. In the past Storm hadn’t always been honest with him, but the man was a poor liar and his anxious expression had given way to one of calm, as if the lie had blown away and he was free of it. ‘Simple as that, eh?’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m just trying to see things clearly, and the more honest people are with me the easier it is.’ And if, as seemed to be the case, this lie was tied to Raven’s protection, then who was he to argue with it?

  ‘You can speak to Indigo about the dates. She’ll know them.’

  ‘I’ll do that, then.’

  ‘Indigo!’ Storm raised his voice and the two women stopped their discussion and turned. ‘Someone here wants to talk to you.’

  Geri said something to her mother and turned sharply away, not waiting for an answer. ‘I was heading home anyway.’ She hadn’t brought the dog with her this time. ‘Bye, Dad. I’ll pop by tomorrow. If you need anything, let me know.’ As if Storm, who communicated only directly or, occasionally, by letter, was the kind of man to drop a quick text asking for a pint of milk.

  Jude opened the gate for her and followed her along the lane towards Long Meg. ‘How’s your mum doing?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re here to enquire about her welfare.’ Geri stopped at the edge of the field. The shadows of Long Meg’s daughters reached out towards them. As the brightness went out of the sun, the place acquired a strangely desolate air. ‘I’ve given her a phone so she can call me, but she’ll never use it. What do you want now? What am I suspected of?’

  ‘I live locally. I’m out for a walk.’

  ‘Just passing again? Okay.’

  Somehow someone like Geri, who seemed the type to call a spade a bloody shovel, was easier to deal with than someone who wriggled and hid and lied with subtlety. Jude sensed that if she was lying and he challenged her she’d come clean, just like Storm. ‘Fair play. I don’t come up here that often. I’m trying to get my thinking straight and that means clearing out all the stuff that isn’t relevant.’

  ‘I see. And now you know I was around on the occasion of two deaths in these woods.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about the first one.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me about the first one.’

  ‘When I first met you down on the river path you said you came as soon as I got Mum’s message.’

  ‘Goodness. What recall you must have. I think you’ll find I said I came as soon as I got my dad’s message, but as you never recorded our conversation, we’ll never know whether you misheard me.’ She leaned against the nearest stone, her back to the sun so he couldn’t see the expression on her face. ‘I see exactly where you’re coming from, and the last thing I’d want to do is lead you down the wrong path. I understand you’re doing everything you can to stop these copycat suicides and so I’ll do everything I can to help you. I have skin in this game. I have a teenage son.’

  He hadn’t forgotten. ‘Then do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’

  ‘I’ll be delighted to be eliminated from your inquiries,’ she said, dryly. ‘Ask away. But before that, I should tell you something you probably don’t know. Yes, I was here for the last two suicides and I shouldn’t have misled you. But I was also in the area for the one before that. The poor girl who jumped off the bridge.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Now that was a coincidence, possibly a coincidence too far.

  ‘Yes. I don’t imagine it’s relevant, and I can prove to you I was in Oxford at the time of the other death.’

  She must have thought it through, to have an alibi in place. Odd, when there was no suggestion in the media that it wasn’t coincidental, no conviction within the police apart from anyone other than Jude himself that it might be murder. ‘I don’t need you to do that.’ It was something Chris would be able to verify independently, if asked, with very little trouble. ‘Tell me a bit about yourself. You have an interesting background.’

  ‘Now you sound like my therapist,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘You have a therapist?’

  ‘As you say. I have an interesting background and life wasn’t always easy. At one point in my life a therapist was a luxury I could afford and I tried a few sessions. Well, let me tell you. That was a waste of time and a bigger waste of money. It’s a joke of a profession. Charlatans, the lot of them. In the end, time sorted me out.’ She tossed her head, the first sign of unease, and the sun caught her blonde hair. Behind her, seagulls dipped and swooped over a field on the other side of the river. ‘However. I’ll tell you about myself and I hope you’ll find it interesting but irrelevant.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘Okay. My parents, as you know, dropped out of the modern life very early on. My dad did ten years in recruitment and was very good at it but it nearly sent him mad. My mother was always a hippy child and didn’t get on with her family. Dad’s grandparents are from up Carlisle way and he likes this place, so they’ve always drifted around from here to there, staying a few years in one place, a few years in another.’

  Jude nodded. Cumbria attracted its fair share of those seeking an alternative lifestyle and he could see why. ‘You weren’t drawn to that life, then?’

  ‘It was forced on me.’ Geri’s frown deepened. A brief scowl crossed her face. ‘When I went to school the other kids had stuff and new clothes and watched telly. They were right up on all the latest gossip and the celebrity chat, such as it was in those days. They had nice things and they went away to exciting places on holiday. They had rules and I was allowed to do pretty much what I wanted, within our own little world. It was a bore. I did chores. It was positively medieval. I helped to cook and to clean and I sat round the campfire and was expected to enjoy it. Of course, I learned to love the place and I don’t regret spending time close to nature.’ She laughed. ‘That’s the one thing the shrink said that was true — that kids need boundaries and that I couldn’t forgive my parents for not giving them to me. But when she told me that deep down I regarded it as borderline abuse, I was done with them all.’

  ‘You’ve moved on, though.’

  ‘Yes.’ She stopped and looked down the slope towards the Sentinel Tree. ‘Maybe I still am a bit of a tree hugger at heart. I’ve tried to bring Josh up with proper sensitivity for the environment. Of course I went through a materialistic phase, and in fairness my parents taught me to work hard. Just not a
t the things other people thought were important. So I had a work ethic and I made the most of it. And as soon I was old enough I left home and changed my name.’

  There was something about her rueful smile and self-deprecating glance that Jude found irresistible. He laughed. ‘You must have been a Spice Girls fan.’

  ‘When I was that age they were the peak of sophistication. Geri was my heroine for years after I outgrew the music, and I don’t regret the name. For the first time people looked at me with a little bit of respect. It’s a bit dated now, but I’d rather have a name I chose for myself than an airy-fairy name picked to reflect someone else’s philosophy. One thing I did learn is that you have to be true to yourself.’

  Jude watched as a sheep ambled its way through the stone circle. ‘What then?’

  ‘I went to university. Of course, I did things my way. When I was nineteen I had Josh, but that was okay. I’d seen a load of people managing everything with a baby on their hip. That worked out fine.’

  ‘You never married?’

  ‘That’s a sly question, Chief Inspector. No. There was another thing I picked up from my upbringing and that was that sex is just an appetite, like eating or sleeping. I don’t know who Josh’s father is. Now you look shocked.’

  He wasn’t so much shocked — more taken aback by her complete frankness. ‘Not at all. Just interested.’

  ‘Then I’ll expand. Love is something you have for lots of people. It isn’t exclusive, or it shouldn’t be. If you make it exclusive you introduce jealousy and possessiveness and those are ugly and unnatural characteristics. Very few animals are monogamous.’

  Wings beating, two swans took off from the river at the bottom of the slope. ‘There are some.’

  ‘Yes. but humans aren’t naturally so. I take sex as I find it, and so I’m completely free of guilt or responsibility. It brought me my son and I’m very happy with that.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’m happy enough. My relationship with my parents isn’t all it should be, but that’s because I blame them for holding me back as a child and they dislike what they see as my materialism.’