by Jo Allen
‘Was it an all-nighter?’
‘Not quite. But I didn’t get more than a couple of hours. That’s why I want you fully briefed, because if I fall asleep at my desk I don’t want anyone waking me up.’ He grinned at her. ‘Unless it’s an emergency.’
‘I’ll make your personal welfare my priority,’ she joked.
‘I hope somebody does.’ He frowned down at the list on his pad. Beside it he’d doodled the stick figure of a hanged man, just as in the child’s game. It was intriguing how people’s subconscious minds worked. ‘Okay. A lot’s happened since this time yesterday. Beginning with the discovery of Randolph Flett’s car.’
‘In Haweswater. Is that right?’
‘It is.’
‘Was it you who found it?’
‘No. If I’d thought to go looking for it there, I’d be due a promotion, though now I think of it I’m not really surprised it was there. I was early on the scene.’
‘Just by chance?’
‘It’s a place I go often. I was brought up in Wasby, so it’s my manor, and I love the Haweswater road. As it happens I went there for a bit of peace and quiet.’ His shrug told her how that had worked out. ‘As to why Flett’s car was there, who knows?’
Ashleigh hadn’t had the chance to drive along the Haweswater road, but she was familiar with it from the map and she’d seen it from the dam, snaking along the hillside into the embrace of the circling fells that cradled the valley of Mardale. Looking across at the whiteboard, she saw that Jude had already marked it up. ‘Do you think he was returning to the scene of the crime?’
‘It was certainly as close to it as you can drive a car off the road and submerge it, yes. My passing by was a coincidence, of a sort. However, why I was there doesn’t matter. The facts are these. A couple from Carlisle, Alice and Martin Cooke, had been for a Bank Holiday walk up High Street, and they were driving back along the road. They hadn’t noticed the broken down wall on the way – which, of course, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there – but pulled in because Mrs Cooke thought she saw a deer. She got out to take a photo, and then decided to take a panorama of the lake. Here.’
He flicked up the picture on his computer. Leaning over towards it, Ashleigh saw what others might easily have missed – the pale, whale like shape of the submerged Ford Fiesta in the dark water. ‘It’s not obvious, is it?’
‘No. It’s a terrific place to run a car off the road. If you don’t want it found.’
And if you wanted to kill yourself, you wouldn’t care who found you, or when, as long as they were those few seconds too late. ‘You don’t think it’s suicide?’
‘I don’t see any evidence for suicide. Do you?’ He stared at the picture himself, then flicked up some more. ‘Tammy sent me these. I’d like another opinion, but I trust her initial judgement. Look at the tracks. She suggests the car was driven at high speed at the wall, demolishing it. Then the brakes were applied. Then the car moved forward again, probably fairly slowly, into the lake until it was submerged. A controlled entry, in other words.’
‘You’d keep the door closed if you wanted to die, wouldn’t you?’
‘You would. And the preliminary search by the divers last night, and the exploration they started at first light, haven’t come up with anything. I don’t know when this incident occurred, but yesterday was calm and the lake at that point isn’t deep. They reckon they’d have a chance of finding a body very easily. They may yet do so, but I don’t think that body is there.’
‘Has anything else been recovered? Were there any personal effects in the car?’
‘That’s a good question. It’s been removed from the scene this morning and taken off to the garage for investigation, so I’ll be able to give you more information later on, though I imagine there will be very little in the way of biological evidence. But I certainly didn’t see anything. In fact it’s one of the things that struck me. The car is very bare.’ He flipped up more pictures taken from the shore, peering into the murky depths. ‘It isn’t very clear from these, and just because there’s nothing we can see doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there. But there’s not so much as a map in the pocket of the driver’s door – though that could have floated out.’
‘So we’re still looking for Randolph Flett.’ Inanimate objects couldn’t tell you the nuanced tales that people did. If she’d met Randolph Flett, or even seen film of him, Ashleigh was convinced that she could have divined something about his motives. And if only she’d had more time with Dawn, she was sure that there would have been more secrets forthcoming. Dawn Sumner was a woman so clearly starved of a confidant that she hadn’t even dared to tell her sister the whole truth, but, like so many others, she’d seemed keen to open her soul to Ashleigh.
‘Very much so. All the evidence points directly to him.’
And yet Dawn hadn’t believed it. ‘What about Dawn’s phone records? Do we have them yet?’
‘We do, and they make very interesting reading.’
She waited.
‘Dawn had been texting an unknown person – the content of the messages suggests a man – for some time. The messages and their replies were to an unknown, pay-as-you-go handset, which cannot now be traced.’
‘That might be one thing the divers recover from Haweswater.’
‘You may be right. The messages named no names – they were both very careful – but they were affectionate and indicated a degree of intimacy. There had been a break of several days, but there was a fresh exchange on Saturday afternoon, when Dawn was out for a walk. Max was worried about her and called her. She received a text from that mobile number while she was on the phone to him, and she replied immediately after the call concluded.’
‘What did the last exchange of messages say?’
‘They were an arrangement for Dawn to meet whoever that person was at Brothers Water at seven o’clock on Saturday evening. The implication is that they’d met there previously.’
Poor Dawn. Whether it was her husband or her probable lover who’d killed her, it was her capacity to love too much that had led to her death. ‘She didn’t believe that Randolph killed Greg. I think she still cared for him.’
‘There’s no one else on our list of suspects who could possibly have done it.’ He twisted the screen away from her. ‘Doddsy should be back in shortly. I’m planning to take the afternoon off, so, until he’s back in, you’re in charge. Sorry – it shouldn’t be for too long.’
‘Do you doubt my competence after Saturday?’
‘I don’t doubt your competence at all. Far from it.’
She could read him now. ‘Then who does?’
‘God, you’re smart. I wouldn’t take it personally. Max Sumner has come on fairly strongly about both of us, in fact. He’s adamant that we must have disturbed the evidence at Low Wood—’
‘That’s an insult.’
‘It is. We did disturb it, but I don’t believe we had any choice. We couldn’t leave her hanging there if there was the remotest chance of her being alive.’
‘He’d have been furious if we hadn’t done anything and she was still alive and could have been saved.’
‘Yes, rightly. But I think fury is his default setting. We’d always have been wrong.’
That was how Max Sumner’s vengeful mind worked. ‘Grief clouds your thinking, of course.’ But with him it wasn’t grief. It was as though he didn’t want the investigation to proceed. ‘What else? What am I supposed to have done?’
‘He says you overstepped your remit with regard to your relationship with Dawn.’ He lifted an eyebrow.
She’d done that. There was no disputing it. She’d cared too much for Dawn, but it hadn’t clouded her judgement, only meant that she hadn’t been able to handle the situation the day before when Max had been told of his wife’s death. ‘I have to hold my hand up to that.’
‘No. You don’t. I’ve made my position quite clear. Dawn trusted you, and she was right to do so. If she’d been able to trust some
one else while she was alive, we wouldn’t be in this mess. You’re one of the team, Ashleigh, and I’ll stand up for you.’ Right or wrong, his tone implied.
It was nine days since she’d started work, and the first flush of belonging ran through her. She was one of the team. ‘I’ll try not to let you down again.’
‘You haven’t let any of us down. Now. I’m going to spend the afternoon saving my sanity. Call me, of course. But only if there’s an emergency.’
*
‘Ashleigh. Come and have a look at this.’
‘You’re going to get square eyes if you stare at that screen for too long. Just as well Jude isn’t here. He’d be making you take breaks.’ She got up and crossed the room to where Chris had been hunched over his computer.
‘He won’t complain when he sees this. Look.’
She peered down at the picture he’d brought up on the screen. ‘What is it?’
‘We appealed for any information that could prove helpful. I’ve been inundated with stuff. Selfies, picture of dogs, casual snaps, endless out-of-focus views of Haweswater. Sometimes I feel I’m judging a primary school photographic competition.’ He turned his boyish grin on her. ‘Then I saw this one.’
She looked. Someone had taken a family snap by the pier in Howtown. In the background, a steamer was pulling away on the lake while two teenagers capered in the foreground, making ridiculous faces at the camera. And to the left of them, tucked into a layby off the road, was Randolph Flett’s Fiesta. ‘Whoa!’
‘That’s what I thought. I think we’ve nailed the bastard.’
‘Maybe we have. We’ve certainly placed him close to the scene of the crime. When was it taken?’
‘The time stamp has it at twelve minutes past two on the Sunday afternoon.’
‘That’s really good work. Well done. Take a break, Chris. You’ve earned it.’
Leaving his desk, she walked over to the whiteboard and added yet more information to the map, each new detail revealing a little more. Randolph, surely, had taken Greg to his death. But how had he persuaded the boy to go with him, and, if Greg had gone unwillingly, how had he got him there unseen?
Dawn had said that she’d had Greg with her when she’d met Randolph by chance. But if Dawn and Randolph had been having an affair, who was to say – unlikely though it was – that he hadn’t met the child more often? Who was to say that Greg, without understanding, hadn’t come to trust him? It was credible to think that he’d walked the boy over the hills without complaint, perhaps on the pretext that they were going to meet his mother? Greg, after all, was the kind of child who was always up for an adventure.
That being the case, Randolph Flett had an additional motive for murdering the child – not just because he was the surest way to gain revenge on Max Sumner, but because, once dead, Greg could never tell what he knew.
*
She couldn’t leave him alone and he couldn’t walk away. That should have passed long before. Stretching out in his mother’s living room and eating cake was a passable way of switching off, even though Jude’s mind was already turning to business as he left the cottage, but Becca, still picking away at her garden and watching him, was strolling casually towards the gate. And the worst thing was that he’d been hoping she would. He could have got in the car and driven away, but he lingered, giving her every opportunity to abuse and accuse him.
He was old enough to know better.
‘Okay, Jude? Not at work this afternoon?’
‘I’ve worked nine days solid. I took an afternoon off. You?’
She shrugged it off. She worked occasional weekends and somehow he always seemed to know when she’d be at home. His mother might mention it, or some faint memory of her shift patterns from three years before were stuck in his head.
‘I hear Kirsty’s had a little girl. Is that right?’
‘Yes. Very sweet.’
‘Give her my congratulations.’ Not that they’d be welcome, but goodwill never went amiss and offering it settled you firmly on the moral high ground.
‘I will. And I see you have a promotion. I didn’t know.’
He might have told her if he’d thought she’d care, but all it would do would be to remind her, just as it reminded him, of how his job had come between them. In the end, a chief inspector’s post was a poor substitute for the family life he’d hoped for, but it was all he had left. ‘I thought you’d have heard.’
‘I’m obviously out of the loop. But congratulations.’ She fixed him with a look that he didn’t think was meant to be scornful, yet which was. ‘No doubt this is you on your way up the greasy pole.’
Jude had no desire for an admin role. He’d got where he wanted to be, rather earlier than most, but that just meant he’d have longer doing the job he loved at the level where he was best at it. Weary of the discussion, he looked round for Holmes, but his ally was nowhere in sight. ‘Everything well with you?’
‘Oh, yes. Fine.’ She turned and looked down the dale. ‘What was all that fuss up at Haweswater yesterday? Police divers and all that? Anything to do with you?’
At least he was still of some value to her, even if it was only to fill her in on the local gossip. ‘A car came off the road. That’s all. We’re still trying to find the driver.’
‘Shocking.’ Now that she had all the information he was going to give her she stepped back, as if to dismiss him, but she didn’t turn away.
‘I’d better get back,’ he said eventually.
‘Of course. How’s Mikey getting on?’
‘Having too good a time in Ibiza, I imagine.’ And that was the point at which he did turn away, because he was hardly going to admit that even Mikey, for whom he’d done so much, for whose sake he’d ended up sacrificing not just Becca but a lifetime of friends, hadn’t a civil word for him, or any words at all.
His thoughts switched quickly to Ashleigh as he drove along. Anger rose within him. Max Sumner was right out of line criticising any of his team, but Ashleigh? She’d been parachuted into a new job with no warning, and given a challenging row to hoe. She’d succeed and he’d be right behind her, all the way.
Unlike Becca, Ashleigh understood what he had to do and why it drove him to pursue justice as he did. In a relationship with her, duty wouldn’t be an obstacle. He dipped down into the village of Askham still thinking of his new detective sergeant, and he was smiling.
27
Jude’s phone rang as he drove up through Penrith on his way in to work the following morning and he ignored it, waiting until he pulled up in the car park before checking the number and calling back. ‘Doddsy. What’s up? Something serious?’
‘I’m not sure I’d call it serious, but it’s the breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for. Your man Flett turned up at a farm outside Rosgill about half an hour ago and asked for the police to be called. To report a stolen vehicle.’
Jude sat there for a moment, phone to his ear, hand frozen in the act of running through his hair. ‘A stolen vehicle? And I suppose I have to guess what the vehicle is?’
‘It’s his white Fiesta.’
He laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it. ‘For God’s sake. Where did this come from?’
‘I imagine you’ll have to ask him yourself because, until you turn up, he isn’t keen to speak to anyone else. Funny how these guys are all the same. They only ever want to speak to the boss.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s just arrived here. In one of the interview suites.’
‘I’ll see you up in the incident room. Give me five minutes.’ Getting out of the car, Jude scooped up his jacket and laptop case from the front seat and jogged into the office. He felt better than he had done for months. Walking away from Becca had been brutally empowering, so that even the late night he’d spent going over the case hadn’t dampened his spirits, and now his prime suspect had appeared, on cue, to answer to his movements and fill in some of the blanks.
Doddsy was looking through a sheaf of no
tes when Jude arrived in the incident room. ‘I haven’t spoken to Flett myself. I thought I’d leave that to you.’
Jude nodded, dropping his jacket over the back of his chair. ‘You’d better notify Max Sumner that he’s in custody. That’ll make him a little less worried about his own safety and that of his family. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave that to you, since neither Ashleigh nor I seem to be flavour of the month with him.’ He paused. ‘I’m going to take Ashleigh in to interview him with me.’
‘That’s fine. I need to pull together all the stuff from the car scene, and see if anything ties in to what we have from the Low Wood site.’ Doddsy, unperturbable, couldn’t be unaware of how quickly Jude had come to value Ashleigh’s understanding. ‘Though who knows? Maybe in half an hour or so we’ll have a full confession and we won’t have to go through all the hoops. It’s always nice when crimes solve themselves. Or it would be, if they ever did.’
‘We’ll find out shortly.’ Crossing the room to where Ashleigh was staring hard at her computer screen, Jude tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Sergeant. I’ve got a job for you. It should be right up your street.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Interviewing Randolph Flett.’ He grinned at her. ‘This should be interesting. I can’t wait to see what kind of a man he is.’ What had Max Sumner said? You need to meet Flett. Now he was about to do so.
She picked at that curl again. The woman was the biggest, and the most teasing, fidget he’d ever met, the more so because he didn’t think it was deliberate. ‘Are you sure you want me to do it? Wouldn’t you normally take Doddsy?’
‘I’d normally take the person I think will do the best job, and that’s you. He knows that as well as I do.’ Doddsy’s strengths had always been more organisational. Like Chris, he was a thorough, diligent detective rather than an occasionally inspired one, and you needed both. Flashes of inspiration were all very well, but they had to be backed up by solid hard work. ‘You’ve got a talent for getting people to talk. Let’s go on down.’ And if she could get through Flett’s defences as easily as she’d ghosted her way through Jude’s own, they’d make a lot of progress.