Death by Dark Waters

by Jo Allen

She knew what he was thinking, pushed her own chair back to challenge him. In his eyes she read scepticism, rather than suspicion. ‘Maybe use your own analytical mind, Chief Inspector. Did I say anything about believing in it?’

  That moment of stillness again as he thought about it. ‘No, I don’t believe you did.’

  ‘Thank you. If you believe your own ears, you should trust them. Dawn’s pendant was the Wheel of Fortune. I recognised it from the deck of cards my grandmother had.’

  ‘And is the gift of telling fortunes one that’s passed down through the generations?’ He was mocking her now.

  ‘Jude. I raised the subject because I thought it was important to make some kind of connection with Dawn. That seemed the obvious way.’ But it hadn’t been at all cynical. She’d just wanted the poor, devastated mother to know that there was someone she could talk to and listen to, someone who would understand and be a conduit for help.

  ‘You certainly did that. But for God’s sake don’t encourage the poor deluded woman to think she can solve all her problems by talking to a pack of playing cards.’

  She sighed. This was why she tried never to talk about her fascination with the tarot to people who didn’t have an open mind. ‘Many rational people use the cards to help them focus. They use them as a self-help device. It isn’t about fortune telling and it isn’t about finding the answers to questions of fact. It’s about focussing on the positive energies and helping you to consider the situation rationally. That’s something everyone should do.’

  ‘I get the same result from going for a long walk or a short sharp run.’

  ‘That rather proves my point. Everybody approaches that problem in different ways.’

  He laughed, for the first time a laugh of genuine amusement, rather than sarcasm or irony. Its different tone, its warmth, wasn’t entirely welcome. ‘Fair point. All right, I apologise. But we come across a lot of people who are taken in by this kind of crap and it makes you ripe for fraud.’

  ‘Yes. I wonder if you’ve ever paid £150 for a pair of running shoes when you could have picked them up unbranded for thirty quid?’

  ‘You’ve got me again. Okay, I’ve done that. And yes, I accept your point. You certainly did make some kind of emotional contact with her, given she’s so keen to have you around as her liaison officer.’

  ‘He wasn’t though, was he?’

  ‘No. But he’s carrying his grievances too far. It was nearly twenty years ago some corrupt copper tried to set him up. We do things differently these days.’ He frowned.

  ‘He struck me as a man who’ll never let a grievance go. And that was a pretty major one.’

  ‘Yes, I guess so.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, what I wanted to ask you about was this liaison issue.’ He raised a hand to Chris as he came back with coffee. ‘You can have your chair back in a minute. I just wanted to run something past Ashleigh.’

  Ashleigh waited until Chris was out of earshot before she answered. ‘Was Dawn serious about it?’

  ‘She seemed serious to me, and it’s pretty clear she won’t have anyone else. I’ve never had someone refuse the offer of an FLO before, if only because it doesn’t look good if they do.’

  ‘He as good as said that.’

  ‘Yes. But I think she has the sense to realise that having someone around the family may help us to move on more quickly than otherwise.’ Too often, people didn’t understand that what they knew – the normal, the obvious – was a vital pointer to something more sinister. ‘You have some training as an FLO, I see. What happened with that?’

  The question had been bound to come. ‘I wanted to go down that line at one point. I did my training, and then never pursued it.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  She launched into her prepared answer. ‘They restructured the force. There weren’t so many opportunities for liaison roles after that. And I decided that, after all, I’d rather stick in the main stream of investigative work.’ He didn’t need to know that it had all happened at a time when Scott’s infidelity had become almost impossible to ignore, and being in close proximity to other people’s emotional outbursts had become just too difficult a prospect for her.

  ‘I see. And would you be willing to give it a go in this context?’

  ‘If you think it’ll help.’

  ‘I can’t see that it would do any harm. I’ll check with HR, but you’ve got the levels of training and, to be blunt, there probably isn’t anyone else available.’

  ‘Then yes, if they’re happy with it and you can cover my other duties, I’ll do that.’

  ‘Fine. I can ask one of the others to pick up any slack on the house-to-house work. Aditi, maybe. It’ll get her away from her desk and out into the countryside. She might even enjoy it.’ He got up, relinquishing Chris’s seat. ‘I’d better get onto our man, then, and tell him to expect you to call round tomorrow at some point.’

  ‘That’ll be good.’

  ‘Oh, and one other thing.’ He lowered his voice, though Chris was occupied on the phone and not listening. ‘All that tarot nonsense. You seriously see yourself as a fool?’

  ‘Not a fool,’ she corrected him. ‘The Fool. It’s a card in the tarot deck, and it’s the one my grandmother always seemed to turn over for me.’ And, though she prided herself on her common sense and pragmatism, in matters of the heart the Fool was the closest the deck had to offer. ‘You don’t understand the cards, Jude. They never mean what you think they do.’ Just as the Hanged Man never really meant a hanged man, and Death never really meant death.

  15

  ‘Can we wrap up?’ Jude had an eye on the clock. Most of the team working on the case had knocked off for the day, but the key members hung on. It was six o’clock, and he’d had a message to go up and see his boss before he left that evening. While he expected to stay later, it was obvious that everyone was itching to get away, and he could hardly begrudge them that – they’d all been in the office for far too many hours already, and they had lives to live. Embittered by his own experience, he always tried to impress on them – never neglect your families and your relationships. Doddsy, who lived alone, was different, but Tammy was married with kids and Chris, who was theoretically available to work, was equally entitled to his free time.

  And Ashleigh. His face creased up into a smile. She’d teased his own story – or most of it – out of him too easily and given away very little of her own. That was smart of her, the more so because he didn’t see how she’d done it, couldn’t quite work out how she’d managed to get behind his guard, unless it was that somehow she’d made him feel he was ready to talk. If he wasn’t mistaken she had her own story to tell, but she wasn’t about to make it public. In time he’d ask her, because he liked to understand the people he worked with. Officers came and went, lent an operation their expertise and passed on, but the ones who worked well together kept coming back. He could see she was shaping up to be a more than useful member of his team. In any future operation in which he was in charge, he’d want Ashleigh O’Halloran in it.

  He pulled himself back to the present. ‘Doddsy. Have you put together a summary of what everyone’s found out?’

  ‘Yes. But there isn’t much.’ Even Doddsy, now, was checking his watch and stifling a yawn.

  ‘Not much, maybe, but you know me. I like to go off in the evening knowing exactly what everyone else knows.’ That way, when he mulled over the case all evening, he wasn’t missing anything. ‘I know you’ve been round everyone. Let’s have a quick update. Do we have a positive ID?’

  ‘Yep. The DNA evidence wasn’t conclusive – the body was too badly degraded – but dental evidence confirmed that it’s Greg Sumner.’

  ‘Okay. Did anyone manage to check out the parents’ alibis?’

  Doddsy nodded, consulting his notes. ‘Sophie posted a picture of herself on a social media site for pre-teens – Snapkidz – baking with her mother at half past eleven. That seems clear cut.’

  ‘I’ll ask her about it when I go over
there.’ Ashleigh nodded.

  ‘And Max’s car was picked up on CCTV going through Windermere just after he said he’d left the house.’

  ‘Before Greg disappeared?’

  ‘Yes. It was also spotted a couple of other times, exactly where he said he was.’

  ‘Okay.’ That ruled out Max, or seemed to, but Jude let it go with some reluctance. Something about Max’s bullish approach troubled him. He was normally too hard headed to go with feelings about people but this time it stuck, as if Ashleigh’s ridiculous belief in intuition had rubbed off on him. ‘Chris. I know you’ve been digging a lot deeper into Max Sumner’s background, and I suspect there’s more to it than he’s told us. Tell me the full story, as far as you can work it out.’

  Chris sat back, a man with a story to tell. ‘Once upon a time there was a man named Max Sumner, and he was a very nasty piece of work. Am I allowed to say that?’

  ‘Strictly speaking, no.’ Jude lifted a rueful eyebrow. ‘In this case we might as well call a spade a spade, so I won’t argue. Go on.’

  ‘He made a lot of money – and I mean a lot – very quickly through his online dating interests, and although there’s no evidence of any financial impropriety, he did attract a couple of searching articles in some trade newspapers.’

  ‘Do we have copies of them?’

  ‘We don’t. They aren’t available online because he sued the journalists responsible. In both cases he won substantial damages. Legally, he’s squeaky clean.’

  Sometimes squeaky clean just meant that nothing had ever stuck. ‘He must have a smart accountant. When you say, legally, he’s squeaky clean, are you saying he’s a man who fights back via the courts?’

  ‘Yes. There’s not so much as a parking ticket on his record. I called a couple of people I know and they say the same. He’s hard, but he operates within the law. I don’t think either of them would call him fair.’

  ‘And do any of the people he crossed in his business dealings strike you as the type of people who would murder a child to take revenge on him?’

  Chris shook his head. ‘That’s where I drew a complete blank. Two of them are retired and don’t seem to care any more. One lives in New York and has gone on to much better things.’

  ‘Chris and I have spoken to them,’ chipped in Doddsy, ‘and none of the three of them seem to bear much of a grudge. They accepted their financial fate and moved on to other things. And none of them was in the Lakes, or anywhere near the Lakes, last weekend.’

  Jude nodded towards Chris. ‘You might want to check on their movements and see if there’s anything else there in the way of motive. What about his private life?’

  ‘Ah. This is where it gets interesting.’ Chris tapped his pen on his pad in a way that Jude noted, with amusement, exactly mimicked his own habit. ‘We touched on this before. His company. Three of the Best.’

  ‘The one he lost and got back again?’

  ‘Yes. He lost it to his business partner, a man named Randolph Flett who, by all accounts, is as big a bastard, if not a bigger one, than Sumner himself. They met at university and set up in business together afterwards. Flett forced Sumner out. And at that time, Flett was married to Dawn Whyte.’

  Jude let out a long whistle, though he knew the story. ‘You can’t help admiring Sumner, can you? First you marry your enemy’s wife and then you steal his business. Talk about revenge being served cold.’

  ‘Do we know why she left him?’ Ashleigh was frowning. ‘Dawn struck me as someone who sets a lot of store by the good things in life. Money, bluntly. So why leave a man who’s successful for the man he bankrupted?’

  Doddsy was looking at her as if she’d said something scandalous. ‘You can’t make that kind of assumption. Maybe she loved him.’

  ‘That’s something you can try and pick up on a little bit more when you engage with the Sumners.’ Jude nodded at her. In theory he should be siding with Doddsy but Ashleigh’s intuition – the word itself made him a little uneasy – had already coincided so much with his own thinking. ‘Of course, we don’t see the true state of anyone’s feelings under the kind of circumstances we saw today, let alone what they were like fifteen years ago, and Max strikes me as someone who sees emotion as weakness. But they certainly didn’t look like a couple who spend much time consoling one another. There might be love, of a kind, but there certainly isn’t much affection.’ He tapped the desk with his pen. ‘Time’s running out on us. Did Tammy manage to get a team down to the house at Windermere?’

  ‘She did. You’ll get the full report tomorrow, but I had a quick chat with her earlier. The garden fronts the road and there’s a gate into it in full public view. There was no sign at all of any struggle, and no snagged material on the fence along the lake shore, which is what you might expect if someone climbed over it there. They took casts of some footmarks and fingermarks, and we’ll run a check on those against the Sumners and anyone else we know came and went. But she said the marks were poor quality. I don’t expect we’ll get too much from that exercise, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Okay. I didn’t think we would. Is there any update from Forensics about the items recovered from the fire?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll chase them up tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. Anything else?’

  They shook their heads. ‘Okay. Then we’ll shut up shop for the evening. It seems there’s not a lot more we can do until the forensic results are in.’

  He checked his watch as the team dispersed to their desks. Six fifteen, a reasonable hour for once. Closing and locking his desk drawer, he walked along the corridor and up the flight of stairs that took him to his Superintendent’s office. Det Supt Groves kept his distance from his officers and maintained a high level of formality so that Jude, who took the opposite approach, inevitably regarded these summonses with an element of trepidation. He tapped on the door, waited a moment, then opened it and went in. ‘Sorry I’m later than I thought. We’ve been busy down in the incident room.’

  ‘So I should hope. This won’t take long – there’s no need for you to sit. I wanted to brief you on your murder case.’

  Jude stifled a sigh. Quite what Groves could tell him that he didn’t already know wasn’t clear. ‘We’re as far ahead as we can expect to be at this stage, given the location of the crime and the lack of any concrete information.’

  ‘You’ve identified the body, I understand. I should tell you I’ve had the poor child’s father on the phone, and I’m afraid he didn’t find you very sympathetic.’

  ‘I promise you, I tried my best.’

  A look of irritation crossed Det Supt Groves’s face. ‘It’s a difficult situation, Satterthwaite. You have to abide by the sensitivities of the parents, and they need to be reassured that we are doing all we can. I want you to make sure that you’re personally available to Mr and Mrs Sumner whenever they need to talk to you.’

  That was what a reputation for suing the police got you. Jude hadn’t a lot of admiration for Max Sumner, but he respected him for that. Losing a child to violence hadn’t stopped him from pursuing his normal modus operandi in terms of getting what he wanted and he must have gone in hard. Sort this matter or I’ll sue. Groves wasn’t the toughest officer in the force, but he was no pushover. ‘I understand that. I’ve appointed an FLO as my point of contact with the family.’

  ‘Mr Sumner tells me he doesn’t rate your FLO. Is she fully qualified?’

  That was too much. ‘Mr Sumner has met DS O’Halloran once. He can’t possibly make a judgement. She’s properly qualified, though she chose to continue in her previous role rather than take up an FLO post. And Mrs Sumner specifically asked for her appointment.’

  ‘Sumner likes to deal directly with the top ranks.’

  ‘I don’t think we can afford that luxury. I have a lot of calls on my time.’ And travelling to Windermere at Sumner’s beck and call wasn’t something he was prepared to take on. ‘Unless you’d prefer to deal with him yourself.’

  His sen
ior officer bristled. ‘I’m instructing you to treat the man with kid gloves, Satterthwaite. That’s all. We can’t afford to have him—’

  ‘I can’t afford to have him disrupting my investigation. I’ll make a point of liaising with him personally, if you think that will make him happier. But I can’t let a member of a family, or a suspect, run the operation for me.’

  ‘I know the way it works. I know you have to treat him as a suspect. But I want you to deal with him with extreme sensitivity.’

  ‘I like to think I treat everyone sensitively. We haven’t yet ruled either him or his wife out.’

  Groves was silent for a while. He would know that in cases of child murder, the first suspects were always the parents. But he wouldn’t give in. ‘Respect. Treat the man with respect.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ And Jude, infuriated, backed away to the door.

  16

  ‘It isn’t that Max didn’t feel he needed the police,’ Dawn confided to Ashleigh, once the sergeant had appeared at the door and introduced herself. ‘They gave him a brutal time of it, years ago. He could have gone to prison. He’ll never forget that.’

  Don’t be too hard on him, her smile pleaded.

  ‘I can understand that. And it happens. Every force has the odd bent copper.’ Ashleigh smiled back at her, answering the plea. ‘You can trust us, though.’

  Dawn shivered, as though she’d said the wrong thing. ‘Did I offend you? Oh, DS O’Halloran…’

  ‘Call me Ashleigh.’

  ‘Ashleigh. What a lovely name. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘I promise you, Mrs Sumner, you didn’t.’ She’d been in the police long enough not to be upset by someone misunderstanding what she was trying to do, or making a justified criticism of a member of her profession she’d never met. It was Dawn’s desperation that touched her, the fear that somehow the police would fail to find the killer and let this grieving woman down.

  ‘It’s Dawn.’ Dawn shook herself briefly, as if she’d managed to get a grip. ‘It’s such a lovely morning. We could walk down to Windermere and have a cup of coffee. I think a walk would do me good. That’s what I’d normally do when I have a problem.’ From the stubborn set of her chin to the toes of her black boots, she gave off a message of defiance.