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

by Jo Allen

  ‘All I saw was a young man trying to protect an older one. I’d have said that was admirable.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Finally, she’d pushed him too far. ‘Let’s not pretend. In your words, the man did a runner. What do you expect me to do? Watch him go?’

  ‘I don’t know what I expected, but three police cars is overkill. What’s he supposed to have done?’

  He looked at her, read her cold simmering fury. ‘Why did you tell me you didn’t know who Josh’s father is?’

  ‘I don’t know. For certain,’ she qualified, when he lifted an eyebrow. ‘Steve’s an old mate. I see him from time to time, when he’s in the area. And that doesn’t answer my question. What’s this all about?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you about his past then?’

  ‘He doesn’t tell me anything, and I don’t ask. He’s a free spirit. I like that, and I respect it. So no, I don’t know anything about it, except that he has a healthy suspicion of you and your people, because he and his people get the blame for everything you get wrong.’

  ‘He’s been on the run for the best part of forty years.’ That was no secret. Anyone who wanted could look up on the internet and find the hue and cry that had followed the Hexham murder and the warrant that was out for Steven Lawson’s arrest.

  ‘Forty years? Your people have very long memories,’ she scoffed.

  ‘We do if it’s about murder.’

  The blood drained from her face even though she somehow maintained her expression of scorn. ‘Is that right? I can quite see why he didn’t mention it to me. Or to Josh. Careless talk costs lives and all that.’

  ‘More lives,’ he corrected her.

  She turned away with an impatient shrug. ‘I’m done with this. I’ll tell your man what I saw and then I’m going home for a triple vodka.’

  ‘DS O’Halloran is on her way here just now, Madam,’ said Tyrone, intercepting her smoothly, ‘and she’ll be very interested to speak to you.’

  Two steps behind Geri, Adam was lurking like a shadow. ‘Want a lift when you’re done, Geri? I’m going your way and I don’t mind waiting.’ He looked at Jude and Doddsy and laughed.

  ‘Thank you, but I haven’t had anything to drink.’

  ‘You need to keep your nose clean with these guys,’ he said, with another sideways, look. ‘They’ll fit you up if they can’t get you any other way.’

  ‘I can look after myself, thank you.’

  ‘If you need someone who saw it the way it was, not the way they wanted it to be, you just ask me, okay?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous,’ said Geri, and pushed past him.

  ‘Let’s brief Tyrone and get out of here,’ said Doddsy with a sigh.

  No-one would listen to Adam’s embroidered version of events; the personal grudge he bore Jude in particular and the police in general was too well-known. Nevertheless he was a constant thorn, rubbing away at Jude’s peace of mind as Mikey did, and Becca, and now Ashleigh herself.

  Ashleigh would have a job on her hands interviewing Geri, he thought to himself as he followed Doddsy back to his car and left Tyrone charming statements out of the witnesses. He’d find out soon enough how it went.

  Twenty-Four

  Vanessa was already at Eden’s End when Jude arrived, sitting with her father in the lounge. She stood up when she saw him, but she kept a hand resting on Leslie’s shoulder as if she were his bodyguard. She gave Jude an amused look; she could hardly fail to notice the fresh bruise on his cheekbone that sat so ill with his sharp work suit that Chris had joked it made him look like a bouncer at a Mayfair nightclub.

  ‘It’s the police, Dad,’ she said, bending down to him, her voice carefully neutral as if not to harm him. ‘Remember what I told you. They aren’t here to upset you. You aren’t going to get into trouble. DCI Satterthwaite just wants to talk to you about Nicky.’ Then she straightened up and addressed Jude, quietly. ‘Can we keep this short? This whole thing has been very distressing and I don’t want him upset again.’

  Nodding his acceptance, Jude declined a seat, but held out his hand to Leslie Chester. ‘Mr Chester. Thank you for sparing me a few minutes. I won’t keep you long. I wondered if you have Nicholas’s diary.’

  Vanessa rolled her eyes as if he’d got it wrong already. A fat tear rose in Leslie’s already-rheumy eyes, overflowed and trickled down his cheek. ‘No.’

  ‘You did have it,’ Vanessa prompted him, her fingers tightening slightly on his shoulder, ‘didn’t you?’

  Lesley looked to her instead of Jude. ‘You know, Vee. I kept it for years, but I never really read it. After he died I opened it up but it hurt too much. I understood how we’d let him down.’

  ‘Dad. I’ve told you over and over. You didn’t let him down.’

  ‘I know he said we didn’t, but we must have done. Otherwise he wouldn’t have died.’

  ‘But if it was an accident—’ prompted Jude, fascinated.

  ‘Yes. It was an accident.’ She sat down and took Leslie’s hand. ‘We’ll talk about it later, Dad. But the Chief Inspector needs to know if you still have the diary.’

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’ Ellie Jack, the head nurse, rumbled the tea trolley past them. ‘Come on Leslie, sweetheart. Let’s find you a cup of tea.’

  Doling out coffee wasn’t part of Ellie’s job but even she had to pitch in when they were shorthanded. ‘Dr Wood? Chief Inspector?’

  ‘We aren’t staying,’ Vanessa said, speaking for both of them, and Ellie, who was intolerant of other people’s intolerance, for once found herself in common cause with Jude and gave him an exasperated look. She dispensed Leslie’s tea and biscuits with characteristic swiftness and moved on.

  ‘Okay, Dad. Thanks.’ Vanessa patted his frail hand. ‘So now you know, Chief Inspector. Dad doesn’t have the diary. As I told you.’

  ‘What did you do with it, Mr Chester?’

  ‘Threw it out,’ Leslie said, indistinctly. He held the cup and saucer on his lap and the teaspoon trembled, ringing against the china. ‘Before I came here.’

  Vanessa’s shrug was aimed at Jude. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s all. I know that was difficult. We’ll leave you alone, now.’

  Her protectiveness was dutiful but misplaced. Jude rarely left an interview with a question unanswered. ‘I wondered if you remembered anything else from the diary.’

  A second tear followed the first, then another, and another. Vanessa produced a tissue, then stood up and addressed herself to Jude. ‘I understand you had to ask, of course, and I do realise you can’t pick and choose your moments. But if you won’t leave, I’ll have to get the manager.’ She steered him away towards the door. ‘If I’d known the diary was important I’d have looked for it, but when Dad had his clear-out before he came here I didn’t look through the bags. God knows what else went.’

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ Jude said. ‘Thanks for being so understanding.’ Though she hadn’t been.

  She dipped her head. ‘All right. I realise I was a little short with you, but Dad’s been very distressed over this whole business, and that upsets me. That’s no excuse, of course, but I’m sorry nevertheless.’

  Thanking her, he excused himself and left. As he paused to sign out, Ellie appeared from one of the corridors, white plastic pinny tied around her waist and a tea towel flung over her shoulder. ‘Chief Inspector. My, you’ve been in the wars, haven’t you? I heard there was a bust-up at Lazonby last night. Was that you?’

  Ellie could be just as cantankerous as Vanessa, but the obvious dislike which framed the psychiatrist’s dealings with him was absent. He smiled. ‘I was just having a quiet pint in my free time.’

  ‘Trouble always finds you, doesn’t it? Do you have a minute?’

  ‘Of course.’ Jude knew Ellie of old. She was waspish, astute and made her own self-interest her priority. If she had something to say, it was likely to be worth his while to listen.

  ‘Shall we step outside?’ She swiped her key fob to let them out of the building and fo
llowed him across the gravelled frontage to stand by his car. It was parked to the side, invisible from the windows of the lounge. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing what you were saying to Leslie.’

  Jude suppressed his amusement. Couldn’t help hearing? Ellie Jack was an avid gatherer of information, someone who missed nothing. ‘Sorry if I upset him. I imagine there’s been a lot of talk about the suicides.’

  ‘Probably too much, if I’m honest.’ Ellie, who was normally brazen in challenging everyone about everything, fidgeted with the plastic pinny, rolling its edges between slender fingers. Above them, the breeze rustled in the yellowing leaves of the big chestnut tree that dominated the lawn. ‘In this place anything local is exciting, and everyone knows someone who’s caught up in it. I’m sorry for poor old Leslie, but he wasn’t being entirely straight with you.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. You mentioned a diary. I heard him say he doesn’t have it, but that’s not true. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Really?’ Jude had had a sense that Leslie was holding something back, but with Vanessa there he couldn’t press the issue. ‘When?’

  ‘As recently as last week. He was reading it in his room when I went in to give him his warfarin. That must have been the Wednesday. There’s no mistake. It was a notebook — A5 size with a brown paper style cover on it. Very tattered. Someone had written on the front. You know the way teenagers do. Nicky’s Diary. Top Secret. I remember, because it made me smile and later I felt guilty about finding it so funny.’

  Jude allowed himself a wry smile of his own. Ellie wasn’t prone to guilt. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’d swear to it. He kept a couple of photos in it, in an envelope. He’d showed them to me once.’

  As he had done to Becca. ‘What were the photos?’

  ‘I can’t really remember. One was a boy he said was his son. The other was a group picture. I didn’t really pay a lot of attention at the time. I was busy, and he can talk for hours if you let him.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘If he doesn’t have his watchdog with him. And I’ll tell you something else. I took a bit of a liberty. You’d better not rat on me. But I ran down to his room and had a quick look in the drawer where I saw it, and it isn’t there. I had a quick look in the other drawers. No sign.’ She pivoted on one foot, turning her back on Jude and staring out towards the horizon as if to distance herself from what she’d just said, what she’d done. ‘I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate that.’

  Unexpectedly, she turned back and smiled at him. ‘You’ve given me a bollocking before for not telling you stuff I thought was trivial in case it was important. But you’d better not tell anyone what I’ve said. Because then I’ll get a bollocking from that daughter of his, not to mention the boss. Can’t do anything around here without getting on the wrong side of someone.’

  Without a word of goodbye, she marched off, not the way she’d come but around to the side entrance of the building, no doubt so Vanessa wouldn’t see her. Left alone, Jude leaned on the bonnet of the Mercedes in the sun, reflecting on what she’d said and checking his messages. It was obviously impossible that Leslie could have anything to do with the Eden Valley suicides. If he’d destroyed the diary it was most likely to be because he felt it cast some blame towards him for the loss of his son. A pity Vanessa hadn’t read or interpreted it.

  If she hadn’t. It was extremely unlikely she didn’t know what was in it, but plenty of people colluded to keep information from the police to protect their reputations or a family secret, rather than to hinder an investigation.

  He flicked through his messages. Ashleigh. Call me about last night.

  A few days before that message would have had an entirely different meaning. Now it just meant she’d got something to say about the fracas in the pub. He called her back, waiting while the phone rang a couple of times, wondering if she’d had to interrupt an evening with Scott to head down to Lazonby or whether she’d been sincere when she’d claimed she was playing it cool. He and Doddsy had left before she’d arrived. ‘Any joy?’

  ‘Not a lot of joy with anything. No.’ Her sigh, at the other end of the phone, was fractious. For a moment Jude’s sour temper weakened. In the months that they’d known one another they’d become friends. You might stop sleeping with someone overnight but you didn’t shed the emotional intimacy as easily. Sometimes that hurt. At other times it was a comfort. After Becca had ended their relationship, the very thought of her had been wounding but he was happy enough to hear Ashleigh’s voice. That was just as well. Many a workplace romance had hit the buffers less neatly. ‘The opposite, in fact. My night’s work didn’t turn out anything like I was expecting.’

  ‘Why not?’ Surely he and Doddsy couldn’t both be wrong. ‘It was Steven Lawson, wasn’t it?’ He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Oh yes. That was all very straightforward. He admitted who he is, the warrant stands, the CPS are going ahead with a murder charge. He says he’s going to plead not guilty and fight them all the way, but that hardly surprised me. But we have a real headache, Jude.’

  ‘I’ll say. And a lot of other aches, too.’ He felt in the compartment between the front seats for a packet of paracetamol and a bottle of water.

  ‘Wait until you hear this. We took his fingerprints and Chris got the guys to run them through the database to see if there was a match with the ones from the Stoker and McDougall murders. I’ve just got the results.’

  ‘Is there a match?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t him.’

  Jude took a moment to think about it, popped two tablets, washed them down with a swig of tepid water. He’d been so sure. ‘There’s nothing else to tie him to the killings?’ His phone pinged with a message. He looked down at it. Mikey. Can’t get hold of Izzy. God, that was all he needed. Panic rose within him and he fought it down.

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jude put Ashleigh on speaker and his common sense reasserted itself. He flipped off a quick couple of questions in reply to his brother. When had Mikey last heard of Izzy? Where was she last seen? ‘What about Josh?’

  ‘Charged with assault. Released on bail.’

  Went for a bike ride. Didn’t say where, came Mikey’s succinct reply.

  ‘Right.’ Leave it with me, he messaged back, snatching a quick look across the valley. ‘What does Geri have to say about it?’

  ‘Insists on his innocence, of course. But honestly, Jude. You don’t need me to tell you. Just because Steven Lawson can’t be definitively linked to two murders almost forty years ago it doesn’t mean Josh is nothing to do with the Eden suicides.’

  ‘No.’ But Jude was only half listening. Strictly speaking, he didn’t have the time to go careering the four miles up to Cave Wood to see if he could find Izzy Ecclestone, but if he could somehow justify it as a trip to speak to Geri, it would do no harm and barely add three quarters of an hour to his day. And it might save a life. ‘Are the two of them up at Eden Lacy?’

  ‘I think Josh is there now. She came to pick him up this morning, and she said something about going to see her parents.’

  Geri was brisk to the point of being offhand, but she was properly dutiful. Her mother was fading away before her eyes, barely a shadow, and she looked the type who’d stick it out to the end so she could leave with no regrets. She was no Leslie Chester, tortured by unnecessary guilt. ‘I’m at Eden’s End. I think I’ll pop up there just now.’

  ‘Do you want me to come along?’

  He considered. Sometimes a second person made a difference and Ashleigh had a sense for things he missed. Raven liked her, and if there was anything to be learned about Izzy’s state of mind, Raven would be the one person who knew. ‘If you can spare the time.’

  ‘I was up half the night. I think I’m probably almost on my lunch break, such as it is. Shall I see you up there?’

  ‘Yep. See you.’

 
He pocketed the phone, drove out of the car park and swiftly covered the four miles or so to Long Meg and the New Agers’ field. As he’d hoped, Geri’s Land Rover was pulled up off the edge of the track that ran through the stone circle. He took a quick look down past the Sentinel Tree but no body hung from it, no bicycle lay abandoned against its trunk. He hadn’t expected it; all the suicides had taken place at night, or when the despairing darkness had closed in on its victims and light must have seemed so distant as to be unreachable.

  Ashleigh’s car appeared in the lane a minute or so later, just as he was letting Mikey know there was no sign of Izzy. ‘Okay?’ he said, as she got out.

  ‘Oh, fine.’ He thought she sounded weary, as if the long night had taken a toll on her. ‘What about you? I don’t know if you’ve seen Doddsy this morning, but he’s got a wonderful black eye.’

  ‘I’m fine, too.’ The paracetamol was already at work on the aches and pains. ‘But bothered.’

  ‘I know.’ She frowned at the tree. ‘If it wasn’t Lawson who killed those other two, who was it? And how is it connected to the suicides, if it is? And I think it is.’

  ‘You don’t have any clues from the cards?’ he asked her, daring to joke.

  She frowned. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I suspect the last lot of advice they gave me did more harm than good. What are we here to talk to Geri about?’

  ‘Nothing, really.’ For once he was the one driven by gut instinct, but he couldn’t see what they might learn from this visit, whether it was from Geri, from Raven or from the elusive Izzy herself. ‘I wonder if it’s even worth talking to her.’

  ‘This isn’t like you.’ Her brows crinkled again, this time, he thought, with concern.

  ‘Well, what are we going to ask her? If she knows anything about Josh, if he is implicated, she isn’t going to tell us.’

  ‘She wouldn’t let him help Lawson get away. That’s what Doddsy said.’

  ‘No, but I don’t get the impression Lawson is anything more than she says he is — an old friend who happens to be the father of her son. She’ll think he can look after himself. Josh is different.’ Geri was a woman who would kill for her child. ‘Maybe we won’t speak to her, after all. Sorry about the wild goose chase.’