Death on the Lake by Jo Allen (early reader books TXT) 📗

‘It’s not your fault.’ Now they were out of the house Becca’s good nature triumphed, as it always did, usually to her detriment. ‘He’s very old, and he hates having his routine disturbed.’ Sometimes she thought their great uncle’s bursts of irrational fury were all he had left, rage his only weapon against impending death. That was why she still kept coming along to see him, despite his undoubted malice.‘Besides, I think you struck a raw nerve with him. Mum says he never got on with your grandfather.’

‘You reckon that’s it? That it wasn’t me?’

‘I think you probably rushed him a little. And maybe you remind him a little of his brother.’

‘You think I do?’

‘I don’t know.’ She considered. The Barrett brothers existed as youths only in one or two sepia photographs, taken before Ryan’s grandfather had died in the 1950s and his widow had emigrated to Australia with their children. Ryan had a long thin face that sat strangely above his muscular torso and bore no resemblance to their matching square jaws, but he had sandy hair and she remembered her mother saying they’d been a trio of redheads. That might go some way to explaining George’s short fuse. ‘I wouldn’t take it to heart.’

‘Well, I’m here whether he likes it or not. I won’t bother him again if you think I shouldn’t, but I thought it would be a good thing for both of us. He’s not getting any younger and I won’t be here for ever.’

‘I can’t see George agreeing to it, I’m afraid.’ Becca took another look down towards the shore, her thoughts briefly with the girl missing on the lake. The police should come along and ask George about her, because if she’d gone past the cottage and he was awake he’d almost certainly have seen her. The cottage dominated the route down through Howtown to Sandwick and he liked to know what his neighbours were up to.

‘Maybe you’re right. And maybe he was right, too. Maybe I should get a tent and camp out for a bit. It’s so different to Down Under. I could learn to love it, but yeah. I don’t need a roof over my head. Not right now.’

Tactless he might be, but at least he could see sense. On balance, Becca thought she was entitled to heave a sigh of relief this ordeal was over. ‘Since you’re here, would you like to have a quick look at the church.’

‘Is it open?’

‘No, not at the moment. But we can look at the graveyard. Your grandfather’s buried here. So is mine.’ In time George would be buried next to them in a long-reserved plot, possibly the last of the residents of the dale to find eternal rest within it. Becca’s lips twitched at the thought of the three brothers bickering into eternity. She led Ryan around to the church, through the ancient gate with a heavy stone on a spring to close it. ‘Look how they do this. It’s a self-closing gate? Isn’t it clever? They have to be careful about keeping it closed, or the sheep get in.’

‘Doesn’t seemed to have worked,’ he said, looking round.

The nettles and brambles that burgeoned around the low slate building had been trampled and someone had forced back the branches of an ancient yew tree so that one of them had snapped and hung forlornly, glistening its rain. ‘I expect that’s the police, looking for that poor girl.’

‘They’ve made a right mess.’

They had, but Becca was glad of that. It spared her the thought of stumbling over a body, lying in the long wet grass that whipped around her legs. She led him to the two gravestones set close to the rear wall. ‘Here you go.’

Frank Barrett had died relatively young and lichen had had the better part of seventy years to climb over the unyielding surface, but his name and his date of birth were clear. There was nothing else, other than the terse note that he was of the parish — no words of love or comfort or regret from his widow and children. There must have been a reason why everyone disliked him, but for all that he was her family. Next time she came, she’d try and remember to bring some flowers.

Ryan spent ten minutes standing by the grave looking contemplative. Leaving him to enjoy whatever thoughts he could muster of his late grandfather — because something told her he wasn’t usually the thoughtful, sensitive type — Becca strayed out of the churchyard, past a couple of curious Herdwick sheep and up to the top of the rise where George’s house sat. The frantic activity still seemed to be ongoing at the lake, and as she watched a Range Rover eased over the bridge at Sandwick and through the electric gates at Waterside Lodge.

‘Okay,’ Ryan said, appearing beside her. ‘That’s me done my duty by the old bugger. I said hello and goodbye to him, and that’s all you can do, isn’t it? It’s not like I ever met him.’

As they headed back to the car the drizzle turned once more to rain and the wind flayed the drops into slingshots that came at them with force. With relief, Becca made the comfort of the car and as they headed up the dale she saw George, in his eyrie on the front room window, gesturing vigorously. He might have been waving, or he might have been shaking his fist. With George, you never knew.

Six

There was no shortage of opinions in and around Pooley Bridge and plenty of folk were keen to share them with the police. Though Summer Raine had passed only briefly through the lives of the villagers, many of them remembered her as an ever-cheerful, ever-bubbly, skimpily-clad visitor from the previous year and had been happy enough to see her back again, some of them for the full force of her personality but others, Ashleigh suspected,