by Jo Allen
‘Do we know who she was meeting?’ Doddsy, this time.
‘I’m getting someone to check her phone records and any messages, existing or deleted. Hopefully we’ll have that soon.’ He turned and surveyed the team, his brain grating with exhaustion. ‘Ashleigh. You spent some time with her, so you may have some thoughts on that. I’ll be interested to hear them, when we have all the facts that we can and we come to making sense of them. In the meantime, Tammy, do you want to talk us through the crime scene?’
Tammy, glancing down at her watch as if she had somewhere else to go, spread some photos on the table with an audible sigh. Sometimes Jude thought that, of all of them, her job was the toughest. ‘As with Greg’s death, there’s very little we can take from the scene, certainly at first sight, although there may be something to come from the analysis of Dawn’s clothing.’ When she could, she used victims’ names, to humanise them. ‘Whoever killed her left very little behind. She was hanging in the woods, just off a narrow path. It’s possible something may come from the rope, but any evidence from the mechanism of the hanging was probably lost when you pulled her down.’
‘Yes.’ It had done no good in the end, and he’d always known that Dawn must be dead. He should have been harder and let the poor woman hang.
‘Though of course you had to try.’ She pulled forward one of the photographs and laid it on top. ‘There were two sets of footmarks leading across the car park, but none leading back. The top set belonged to Dawn and the bottom set, very slightly larger, are unidentifiable other than that they’re a man’s size ten shoe. Nothing was found on the path. I’m going to guess that the killer made quite certain that he didn’t leave any traces on the way back.’
‘We know that it was somewhere she’d been before,’ Ashleigh said, with a sigh. ‘I spent some time with Dawn before she died. Not much, but enough. She told me about the place she went, somewhere where she could be certain of being alone. But she never mentioned meeting anyone there.’
‘For obvious reasons.’
‘Yes. And she loved her husband.’
‘Or said she did.’ Doddsy put in the correction with the smallest tilt of the head.
‘She said she did, and I believe she did, but it was a strange kind of love. I honestly believe that Dawn is one of those people who is capable of loving more than one person at a time.’
‘That makes her husband a suspect, then.’ Chris frowned a little. ‘Doesn’t it? If he discovered that his wife was having an affair. But we don’t know that he did. And if he was planning to kill her, surely he wouldn’t have insisted that Flett was dead.’ He checked his notes. ‘It would have been so much easier to just let the blame – and all the suspicion – fall on him.’
‘Max Sumner never strikes me as a man to do things the easy way.’ Ashleigh suppressed a yawn. ‘Satisfaction is more his thing. He’d enjoy the act.’
‘I think that’s right. So he remains a suspect, but not, I think, our main suspect. The person I’d still very much like to talk to is Randolph Flett, and there’s no news on his whereabouts as yet. But, Chris, I believe you have some information on him.’
Chris’s grin was broad. Diligence, hard work and attention to detail would get him a long way and he never seemed to mind the jobs that others found dull. ‘I managed to get CCTV coverage from some of the car parks down in Ambleside. Flett drives a white Ford Fiesta, a couple of years old. We struck lucky very early on. His car was driven into the main car park at Rydal Road at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon and he left again at about six. He turned right but the car never appeared on the CCTV cameras further down the town.’
‘Suggesting he turned off up towards the Kirkstone Pass,’ Doddsy supplied.
‘And Brothers Water.’ Jude sighed. ‘Yes. Anything else? Ashleigh, I know you’ve been busy.’
‘Yes. I got onto the banks first thing this morning. They resisted a little, for data protection purposes, but a couple of dead bodies and a word from DCI Satterthwaite did the trick.’ She nodded in his direction. ‘They came up with the goods on Flett.’
‘What was his financial position?’
‘Not bad. He has limited income from long term investments. He gets virtually nothing from his company – the turnover is in hundreds of pounds – but he seems to live off a substantial amount of capital. The really interesting thing is this.’ She tapped her pad. ‘A week ago, the day after he was last seen at his home, Flett opened a bank account in Liverpool – not with his normal bank. He opened the account with a deposit of five hundred pounds, and on the day before Harriet Martin and Karl Boyes hired the camper van – the day before Greg Sumner was murdered – he withdrew that cash.’
Jude looked at the nodding heads around the table. ‘Okay. So what are our thoughts? Apart from that I’m even keener to speak to Flett than I was before.’ He frowned. Flett, it seemed, had disappeared without trace.
‘She said she still loved him,’ Ashleigh observed, thoughtfully, ‘but of course that needn’t mean she was having an affair with him, because, in that case, why would he have murdered her son, assuming he did? It’s possible she was having an affair with someone else and that Randolph knew of it and persuaded her to come up to Brothers Water under false pretences. But then there’s the scarf. The scarf around her face. That’s so interesting. Because it suggests that the person who did it loved her.’
‘Does it?’ Chris looked blank.
He could never have seen a dead body left out in the open, vulnerable to predators, the eyes pecked out by the birds. ‘Yes. It suggests somebody cared about her enough to give her a little bit of dignity in death.’ Unbelievably, since whoever it was who thought that also thought nothing of taking that life from her.
‘Let’s look at another possibility.’ Sitting back, his hands behind his head, Doddsy nodded. ‘We have two murders. They aren’t necessarily the same murderer.’
‘Yes. It’s possible that Max Sumner is correct and that Flett killed Greg and then took his own life. But if he did that, we have to account for his car heading towards Brothers Water at six o’clock on Saturday evening.’ Jude scowled at the whiteboard with its confusion of contradictory facts. ‘Okay. Let’s leave it at that just now and get on with what we have to do.’
They shuffled off to their various desks and he stayed standing at the board, trying to process the information in front of him. Everything pointed to Randolph Flett, yet there was nothing conclusive, and could be nothing conclusive until they’d spoken to the man himself. The absence of forensic evidence confused and confounded him. Every contact left some kind of trace, yet Tammy and her colleagues had uncovered nothing.
‘Jude.’
He’d sensed Ashleigh approaching before she did so. The tang of that perfume alerted him. He stepped back and turned to look at her as she shuffled from one foot to another like a nervous debutante. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes. I’m really sorry about yesterday. I was no use to you at all, or to Nicole. I let you down.’
Now wasn’t the time to talk to her about the risks of getting emotionally involved with witnesses. There was plenty more she could bring the team in other ways. ‘Sumner behaved appallingly towards you. I’ve made sure that’s on record.’
‘I’m absolutely fine, now.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. But make sure you don’t overdo it. I’m going to say that to everybody else. I need you all fit and sharp on this case.’
‘And you,’ she reminded him, cheekily. ‘You need to keep yourself sharp, too.’
‘I’ll knock off early tonight, then. Don’t worry about me,’ he said, and turned away to his work.
*
The information that came through that afternoon – and it came through in quantities, given that both the victim and the suspect were known – either pointed nowhere, or pointed in one direction only.
‘Before you go, Jude.’ Doddsy caught him picking up his jacket, his early finish having extended to five o’clock. ‘I thou
ght you’d want to see the results of the forensic analysis. I got them to rush them through as soon as they could.’
‘Does it help us?’
‘Not especially, I’m afraid. The only DNA found on Dawn was exactly what you’d expect.’
‘Her husband’s?’
‘Yes. She’d had sex with him in the past twenty-four hours, but that’s hardly a revelation. The scarf was interesting. Wonderful stuff, silk. It does attract fibres and hairs and anything else you care to mention. If there was anything to be found, we’d find it there. There were a couple of flakes of skin – probably his, but they’re going to check. Some make-up marks – again we’re going to follow those up, but they’ll lead us, I suspect, to either her sister or herself. And a couple of lovely long golden hairs that almost certainly belong to our Ashleigh.’
‘Dawn was very touchy-feely.’ Jude was annoyed with himself for being annoyed with Ashleigh. Of course she shouldn’t have got too involved with Dawn, but if it had helped the poor woman to deal with her grief, it was hardly fair to criticise her for it.
‘That’s obvious.’
‘So, in summary, we’ve gathered a whole load of information from it and there’s nothing there that we wouldn’t expect to be there.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘You think the killer wore gloves?’
‘Oh, you know how it is. There are far too many cop dramas on the telly. All it does is remind the smarter ones of the importance of covering their tracks. I’ll forward you the email and you can look through it at your leisure.’
*
Tomorrow, he told himself, he would take the day off. Or, more likely, half a day, if he couldn’t take more. But it was impossible to function properly at the pace that the investigation was moving at, and Doddsy was more than capable of dealing with anything that came in in his absence. He reviewed the situation. Eight days on the case. It was his responsibility to make sure they were all fine. The admin was tedious, but the rules were there for a reason. Some people drove themselves, or allowed themselves to be driven, too hard and didn’t see when they had to stop, and he was one of the worst offenders.
A walk would clear his head. Rather than go home, he turned south, through Askham and, unavoidably, through the village of Wasby. His mother was always out on a Monday, or he might have stopped by for a bite to eat and a gossip. And he might have picked up some chat about Mikey, if his brother’s reluctance to be in touch extended only to Jude himself and not to their mother.
He slowed as he approached the village. Becca was in her garden, fetching in her washing, and Holmes occupied his favourite spot on the top of the wall, watching all that went past. Eye level with Jude, the cat gave him an inscrutable look and ignored him, and Becca, if she saw him, chose to ignore him too. On Mondays she helped with the Rainbows, up in Askham. The session couldn’t have started yet, probably wouldn’t until the end of the summer holidays.
After three years, he really shouldn’t be so au fait with all her comings and goings, so that he almost felt like a stalker. He justified himself. His mother was always keen to fill him in on the gossip, and she got on far too well with his ex. ‘Kirsty and Calum have a new baby,’ she’d told him the last time he’d called. ‘Rosie. So sweet. Becca was showing me the pictures.’ And of course there was the subtext, the things she didn’t dare say to him but wanted him to know. Such a pity you didn’t stay together. Becca would make a wonderful mother.
She’d always wanted kids. They’d discussed it. He took one last glance at her, turning back to the house with the washing basket in her arms. Now she was thirty-two and no doubt the biological clock would be ticking. He tried to harden his heart because she had no one to blame but herself, but he couldn’t. Nature meant her to be a mother.
Safely out of the village, he relaxed as he drove through the broad Lowther Valley, still green in the parched summer, and turned up towards Haweswater. It was a fresh evening and he reckoned he’d have time for a quick hike up to Small Water, the shortest route he knew to the middle of nowhere and the place he often went to in an effort to save his sanity, and back down again. Then he could pick up a takeaway, and at least he’d have blown a few cobwebs away before he sat down to review the forensic report.
As he passed the turn for Burnbanks his thoughts drifted once more to Greg Sumner. Who, why and how? Those were the key questions that troubled him. If the motive was revenge, then he hoped Max Sumner’s security men were going to be a bit more effective, now that they’d let Dawn slip through their fingers. Max couldn’t have suspected that his wife – the woman everyone so readily described as good and loving – was having an affair, or he’d have made sure she went nowhere. As the car emerged from the trees just above the dam, he slowed to take another look at the scar of charred grassland on the opposite bank. The escape route must have been over the hill. Had anyone noticed a white Ford Fiesta parked beside the road in Howtown? And how had Flett, if it was he, got Greg to the place where he had died?
He slammed on the brakes in irritation as he came around a corner, shy of the hotel up on the hill. A young woman in walking shorts was standing in the middle of the road, waving him down. That was all he needed. An accident. Pulling the car up, he jumped out. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Yes. There’s a car off the road. Down there, in the lake.’ She pointed back over her shoulder.
‘Have you called the police? An ambulance?’ Jude ran the twenty yards to where a man came scrambling up the bank, white as a sheet.
‘We’ve called the police,’ the woman called back towards them. ‘They’re on their way.’
The low drystone walls along that road had, he recalled, already been crumbling and whatever had happened had taken them out completely, picking a weak point, taking it at an angle as the car had rounded the curve. He jumped down the banking where the car had left the road and stopped, giving a low whistle.
Randolph Flett’s white Ford Fiesta was submerged in the lake.
‘Did you see what happened?’ He approached the water’s edge with circumspection. The water was low and the rough pebbles rolled and clattered under his feet. The car was completely submerged in the brown water, its number plate shimmering just below the surface as the wind driven waves lapped over it.
‘No.’ The man looked grim.
Jude looked down at the water’s edge again. He might be taking care not to damage any evidence, but the man had no reason to think like that. Any footmarks on the dry ground would be his. ‘Let’s get back up onto the road.’
‘Here come the police!’ cried the woman, with relief.
Jude turned back up to see the blue lights screaming along the lakeside. Thank God – it was reliable old Charlie Fry again, enjoying a particularly exciting ten days or so.
‘Charlie. We meet again.’
Charlie Fry, with a young, bright looking PC beside him, heaved himself out of the police car. ‘What do we have here? Did you report this, sir?’
‘No. I came up through the village. Charlie, I need you to close the road. No one’s to come through unless they’re leaving the place, or going to or from the hotel.’ The road was a long dead end and the hotel was on the wrong side of it, not to mention all the walkers who’d gone for their Bank Holiday walk up Mardale or Riggindale, High Street or Harter Fell, and hadn’t yet turned to head for home. It would be impossible to close the scene completely. ‘I want full details of everyone who passes – not just names and addresses, but what they were doing here and when they arrived. We’ll need to know if anyone saw anything.’
Taking extreme care, he walked down to the waterside. The car had pitched forward at an angle, its bonnet six feet under the murky water. The driver’s door was open and the driver’s seat empty.
Dawn had implied that Randolph, had he killed in the heat of passion, would have torn himself apart with remorse. Max, speculating that his enemy would take his own life, had ascribed it to the less noble motive of fear. E
ither way, here, directly opposite the scene of the first murder and the acres of blackened hillside that testified to the loss of a young life, was the obvious place for a guilty man to take his life.
If that was what he’d done. Jude tracked the shore, but there were no marks of anyone coming out of the water. This was another job for Tammy. He got out his phone and began photographing the scene. There was a while before the light faded, but you could never have too many images. He’d better get Doddsy there, too. ‘Charlie. We’re going to need divers. See how quickly you can get them here for me, would you? It doesn’t look as if there’s anyone who can be saved, but if there’s a body, I want to find it as soon as possible.’
Jesus, he thought to himself as he turned back to look at the scene. It was going to be another long night.
26
‘You’ll have gathered by now that my quiet evening in didn’t proceed as planned.’ Jude swivelled in his chair and gave Ashleigh one of those long, peculiar looks, the sort that even she couldn’t quite work out, beyond understanding that they concealed some kind of shadow in his soul.
‘Chris said.’
‘Yes. Doddsy’s dealing with another incident for me and you’re the next in seniority. I don’t think there’s any need for a full team briefing right now, but I thought I should fill you in. Have a seat.’
She pulled up a chair. He had his desk installed in a corner of the incident room, far enough away from the others to be able to have a private conversation, but close enough to keep tabs on the whole room, to see everyone who came in or out, and he’d positioned himself right opposite the whiteboard, as if to be sure that the pieces of the puzzle were always in front of him. ‘You said “incident”. You didn’t say “crime”.’
‘I chose my words deliberately. I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about it.’ He ran a hand over his chin.