Death by Dark Waters

by Jo Allen

  ‘You had a lucky escape there, didn’t you, Becca?’ Kirsty had been fond of Jude in her own way, before blood had called upon her to side unconditionally with her sister.

  Unusually, she felt impelled to defend him. ‘He’s good at his job. You can’t deny that.’

  ‘Good at his job until it consumes everyone around him. You wouldn’t have been happy if you’d stuck with him.’

  There was something in that. The night before would have been another night when he didn’t come home, too occupied with someone else’s misery. A child. ‘I think Rosie’s asleep. I’ll go and put her down.’ She withdrew stealthily, waiting for the baby to stir, but she didn’t, sound asleep on her shoulder.

  If she’d stayed with Jude she’d have been married to him by now, stuck with him for better or for worse, and perhaps it would have been the wrong choice, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have regrets. A man with faults, he had virtues as well, and you loved someone for their virtues, surely? But in the end there had been that one moment when she’d judged that the faults had outweighed the virtues, and they were both paying the price for that moment of understanding.

  She was thirty-two and single, and even after three years she was still so trapped in the shadow of Jude Satterthwaite that there seemed no way for her to escape from him. She was condemned to cradling other people’s babies and mourning, at a distance, other people’s sons, and who knew what he thought of her?

  He’d be thinking of something altogether more brutal just then, someone’s child dead on the bare hillside. Trapped by the flames? Some teenager out on an adventure, camping out, exploring? A family waiting for the child to come home? Maybe, even now, someone was confronting the chance that their beloved son would never return.

  She stood for a moment longer, staring out of the bedroom window towards the smoke stained horizon, until eventually she could delay it no longer, but laid the sleeping baby down to rest, drew the curtains and stepped out of the darkened room.

  10

  ‘Ashleigh. Are you sure there isn’t any news?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Ashleigh checked the last lot of messages again, knowing that nothing had changed in the five minutes since she’d last looked. Jude wasn’t the only one who was frustrated about it. She’d never worked on an inquiry when everything had come to so complete a halt at so early a stage, when they’d chased up so many blind alleys.

  ‘I can’t believe this. I’ve been in here since eight o’clock this morning and I swear that no new piece of information has come up. Seriously? Hasn’t anybody missed a twelve year old child?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Doddsy was pulling on his jacket. ‘You’d think someone would have done, wouldn’t you? It’s been forty-eight hours.’

  They all felt the same. Even Chris Marshall, usually so cheerful, had become noticeably downbeat, sitting at his desk scanning through hours of CCTV footage from the motorway in an attempt to identify the camper van. Jude had sent him off half an hour before, despite his willingness to stay on, but now there wasn’t much more any of them could do and there was nothing to be gained by staying.

  ‘Nothing on the dental records?’

  ‘Not yet. Still waiting.’ A roll of the eyes indicated Doddsy’s impatience.

  ‘You’re quite sure nobody’s reported seeing anyone?’ Jude turned to Ashleigh again.

  She stiffened. You might interpret his interrogation of her as a desire to know what she’d come up with, or you might interpret it as a suspicion that she wasn’t doing her job properly. She was no fool and she suspected that she irritated him, but she also knew that she was doing the job he’d asked her to do as well as he could possibly expect her to do it. ‘Inquiries are ongoing, obviously. We’ve done most of the houses and I have officers going back to the ones where there was no one in. We should have completed those by the end of this evening. Should I run you through them again?’

  He looked at her for a moment, freezing into the fierce stillness she’d already identified as so characteristic of deep thought. ‘If it won’t take more than a minute. It won’t hurt to jog my memory.’

  ‘If you don’t need me, Jude.’ Doddsy, obviously with some alternative appointment, shuffled towards the door.

  He waved him off. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m going to find out who this kid is if it’s the last thing I do. Now, Ashleigh.’

  There was something about him. It wasn’t the physical attraction, though she couldn’t deny that it existed. She preferred someone a little less tempestuous and with a slightly sweeter nature, though experience and the wreckage of her marriage had taught her circumspection. Scott, her estranged husband, was living proof that sweetness and calm didn’t preclude a man being a two timing bastard.

  Ill temper aside, there was something about Jude that warned her he was going to be a very significant person in her life, and maybe it was more than the fact that he was her boss, and her work looked like being far more important than her personal life for the foreseeable future. ‘Nobody’s missing any children locally. I’ve been up to all the activity centres in the area and spoken to them.’

  ‘There are groups doing Duke of Edinburgh and the like, aren’t there?’

  ‘There are, but they’re usually older than twelve and every one of them is accounted for. I’ve thought of another couple of possibilities.’

  ‘Oh?’ He turned those appraising eyes on her again – always testing people, always wanting to see if they’d thought of things for themselves. Unlike previous superior officers, he didn’t need to be the only one with the answers. She approved of that.

  ‘I expect you’ll have thought of them yourself. Given all the coverage we had on the news last night and in the papers this morning, it’s barely possible that someone who knows their child is missing hasn’t come forward to report it.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Which leaves us with three possibilities.’

  He inclined his head.

  ‘Firstly, that the child isn’t meant to be in the country, and that the parents or guardian are too afraid to come forward.’

  ‘That’s one. Which is fine and reasonable in itself, but might be more plausible if we were dealing with a house fire in Carlisle rather than a grass fire in the Lakes. But yes. It’s something we have to consider.’ He turned back to the whiteboard and wrote it up. Illegal.

  ‘Secondly, that the child isn’t the only victim and that the parent or carer, or whoever was the responsible person, was also caught up in the fire.’

  ‘An outside possibility. If that was the case, we’d surely have come up with another body by now.’

  Ashleigh, this time, took the marker pen. Possible additional victim. ‘And the third possibility is because whoever did it was hoping the body wouldn’t be found and will never be identified. Which fits in with what you’re thinking, doesn’t it?’

  He flicked an eyebrow at her, as if he were amused. ‘You’re correct. That’s what I think. Now that two days have passed since this child died, I think it’s reasonable to assume that whoever is responsible for him didn’t want him found.’ He was still again. ‘Okay. That’ll do for now. Go home. Come back tomorrow. We’ll find whoever it was.’

  She picked up her bag and made her way down the corridor and out into the car park. In Reception, Tammy had been chatting to the receptionist, but she ended the conversation when she saw Ashleigh, and fell into step beside her as they went out into the warm evening. ‘I’m surprised we all got away this early. Glad, but surprised.’

  ‘Everything seems to have stalled.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tammy said, with a sigh, ‘it sometimes happens that way. In theory we could get the DNA results back from the lab in twenty-four hours, but there’s always such a backlog and everyone thinks that their stuff should be a priority. I’ve been on to them twice today. When we get that information we may find out who he is and then we can move forward. I expect it’ll be all go then, though more for you than for me. My side of this is mostly done and, b
y God, I’m glad of it.’

  Yes. Ashleigh thought of the photographs of the corpse, blackened and contorted. Jude had decided not to pin those up on the whiteboard with everything else, but she’d think of them before she fell asleep and she wouldn’t be the only one. ‘I wouldn’t do your job, Tammy.’

  ‘Nor I yours.’ Tammy stopped by her car and rummaged in her handbag for the key. ‘How are you getting on? You must feel like you’ve been here for ever.’

  ‘It feels great. I really feel part of a team.’

  ‘Oh, you would. Jude’s great. I love working for him. He’s so inclusive.’ Interpreting Ashleigh’s quizzical silence, she laughed. ‘I didn’t say he was easy. He certainly isn’t that. A busted relationship and too strong a conscience are his problems, but once you get used to his dark side, you’ll find it really rewarding working with him. No formality, playing to everyone’s strengths. I work with other DIs and DCIs and they treat me very much like the outsider. That never happens with Jude.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem very well liked locally.’

  ‘He’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Too uncompromising on too many fronts. He’s a bit like Marmite, I admit. But if you’re on his side, he’ll fight for you. Everyone who works with him is definitely Team Jude.’ She unlocked her car and slid inside. ‘With a bit of luck we’ll get the DNA results back tomorrow. That’s the first step.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Ashleigh waved her away and crossed to her own car, shaking out the ponytail in which she’d corralled her blonde curls. Opening the car door, she was met by a wave of stifling heat. With a sigh, she reached for the bottle of water on the passenger seat and took a swig, but it was too warm to be refreshing. Optimism asserted itself. The worst of the day’s heat had passed and the prospect of a long cold drink in the back garden with her housemate, an appealing dream all day, was within touching distance. Sliding into the driver’s seat, she turned the key in the ignition and the engine, as tired and overheated as everyone around it, turned over slowly once, twice, and refused to turn a third time.

  She tried again, with the same result. The prospect of sitting out in Lisa’s tiny back garden with that long cold drink receded as she got out of the vehicle and dialled the AA. ‘An hour? Yes, that’ll do.’ It would have to.

  11

  Once Ashleigh, the last of the team to leave, had gone, Jude grew tired of confronting a blank lack of information. It wasn’t that there was nothing for him to do – there was always something in the way of report writing and cross-checking and adding up on what others had been doing, but admin would wait, and the good night’s sleep he’d managed to put in the previous evening hadn’t compensated for his lost Sunday night. He locked his papers away, picked up his laptop bag and headed for home.

  Out in the car park, his newest recruit was leaning against the bonnet of her car, parked next to his, tapping away at her phone. Pausing for a moment, he took in the shapely legs stretched out in the sunshine, and the blonde curls lying loose on her shoulders. Ashleigh O’Halloran was going to make waves among her colleagues in more ways than one. You could tell already that Chris Marshall was smitten. Jude recognised that he’d been harsh with her, but in the past couple of days he’d been harsh with everyone to a far greater extent than they were used to. You could write it off against tiredness, or you could write it off against the particular nastiness of child murder, or, if you were Tammy, you might attribute it to concern about Mikey, remaining resolutely silent from his hiding place somewhere in the Balearics. Any of those would do as an excuse, but he’d prefer that they never got close to the real reason – Becca Reid.

  Becca was the community’s local angel with hardly a bad word for anyone, but that seemed to be because she saved them all for him. He slapped down the unwelcome thought, the memory of her hostility. Right in front of him, Ashleigh was sighing over what looked like a broken-down vehicle, and at least that gave him both the chance to stop dwelling on a problem he’d probably never be in a position to solve and the opportunity to mend fences instead, as he’d told Doddsy he would.

  He strode over to her. ‘They didn’t teach you to mend cars at that smart school of yours?’

  Startled, she turned towards him, thrusting the phone into her pocket. ‘Cars? No.’ She smoothed down her skirt and fired him an irritated look. ‘Deportment, drawing, needlework. If you want a biblical text embroidered on a sampler, I’m your woman. But that’s okay. As you’re a man, no doubt you’ll be able to sort my car for me.’

  For a second, he looked back her, and then he laughed. ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. I wasn’t gender stereotyping. No. I don’t do cars either. I’m far more interested in the way people work.’

  ‘As am I. Which is why I pay for my AA membership.’

  ‘Sound common sense.’ He gestured to the navy blue Mercedes that he’d just unlocked. ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’

  ‘I’ve called the AA. They’ll be here in an hour.’

  ‘So they say, but you’re hardly a damsel in distress, and you haven’t broken down somewhere where you’re a danger to others, so you’ll keep slipping down their list of priorities. Rightly so. Run and leave your keys with Security – they’ll look after the car for you, and you can pick it up tomorrow.’

  She hesitated. ‘I don’t want to put you out.’

  ‘It’s entirely self serving. I want everyone in my team sharp in the morning, and if you’re still here at ten o’clock, you won’t be.’

  ‘I don’t imagine I’ll have to wait that long. But if you’re sure, and I’m not taking you out of your way…’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘In Castletown.’ She flicked her long hair back over her shoulder and stowed the phone in her bag.

  ‘Then you aren’t out of my way. I can pick you up in the morning, if you want.’

  ‘Lisa can give me a lift. My housemate. Or I can walk. It’s only a couple of miles.’

  ‘Whatever’s easiest. Hurry up.’

  For God’s sake, he admonished himself as he waited while she went to leave her keys, stop being so irritable. Let things go. But it was easy enough to say that, less easy to do. He had to get a grip, though, if even Doddsy forgot himself enough to warn him about his behaviour. He smiled, wryly. Bad temper was one thing Becca would never have stood for. But then again, if it weren’t for Becca, his temper would be a whole lot sweeter. What went around came around, everyone locked into a cycle as certain as the seasons.

  By the time Ashleigh got back, he’d at least mustered a smile. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ashleigh opened the door of the Mercedes and slid into it with the elegance of a princess. Maybe she hadn’t been joking about the deportment. ‘Thanks again. I wasn’t looking forward to standing out here in this heat for an hour.’

  ‘The weather’s due to break properly at some point. Then perhaps we’ll get some traditional Cumbrian rain and see the end of these fires. The odd sprinkling does nothing.’ He turned out of the car park onto the A66. Most of the rush hour traffic had subsided. ‘Castletown, you say?’

  ‘Yes. Norfolk Road.’

  ‘Nice part of town. Are you settling in?’

  ‘Yes. I have an old school friend who lives up here. She works for the council, as an archaeologist. So when I decided it was time for a change it seemed the logical place to come to and she was looking for someone to rent a room to.’

  Being a policeman was a curse. He was always interested in other people’s business and too ready to ask about it. ‘What made you fancy a change of scene? Too much urban crime?’

  ‘My marriage broke up.’ She opened her handbag and got out her compact, as if she needed to look good, but he could tell a diversionary tactic when he saw one so he backed away.

  ‘Good location, too.’ Ashleigh interested him, but he had no right to know anything she didn’t choose to tell him. ‘We’ll be there in no time.’

  She peered out of the window, looking onto the town as if it wa
s all new to her. ‘This is a great place to live, isn’t it? I’m loving this small-town-community feeling.’

  ‘I don’t imagine it’s any better or any worse than it is in the city.’

  ‘Oh, it is. You must get used to knowing everybody. Certainly everybody I’ve spoken to locally seems to know you.’

  ‘I think you might be wasted on door-to-door inquiries.’ He took them onto the roundabout. What had she heard? Ashleigh’s attractiveness unnerved him, but not half as much as the sense that she was far too close to divining what was going on in his mind.

  ‘I like talking to people. They tell you all sorts of things, if you know how to ask. Sometimes without realising it.’

  He thought back to the reference her previous force had written. She had some training as a family liaison officer, though for whatever reason she hadn’t followed that path through. He’d have to check on that. Every bad cop needed a good one for balance, and Ashleigh’s sympathetic side was obvious. ‘And what sort of stuff have you learned?’

  ‘I don’t think Mrs Innes is your biggest fan.’

  He almost laughed out loud at that. As if he wanted fans like Andrea Innes. ‘Do you think that bothers me?’

  ‘No, but every second person I’ve spoken to raises their eyes to high heaven when they mention you.’

  ‘That suggests every second person has something to fear from me.’ Damn: he’d made himself sound like some rural Batman, cleansing Cumbria’s villages of evil. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Just that I don’t like to compromise too much.’

  ‘I think sometimes you have to compromise.’

  ‘And sometimes you don’t. I’m not going to give any ground at all in our current inquiry. No. No compromise at all. There can’t be any excuses for what happened on Sunday.’

  ‘No. The current one is different. I get that. That poor kid.’

  He struggled to concentrate on the road instead of that shrunken, blackened lump of humanity with a rope around his neck. ‘Yes.’