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

‘And out of it.’

‘Yes. Though of course, if you’re right about drugs there’s definitely something suspicious about it.’

‘Jude.’ Ashleigh ran a few steps to catch up with him, just as the path emerged from the trees and onto the shore. ‘Level with me.’

He stopped. ‘Yes, if I can.’

‘I’ve got two questions. Firstly, why are you getting involved in what looks for all the world like an accidental death and secondly, given that you are involved, why wouldn’t you authorise a search of the Neilsons property when I asked you?’

‘We didn’t need a search of the property to find her.’

‘It must have occurred to you that there’s a possibility she didn’t die accidentally. That she was killed elsewhere and the body was brought here. And even that she might not have died until recently.’

‘You saw the pictures of the body. I accept you aren’t a pathologist, but would you say she’d been in the water for longer than, say, twenty four hours?’

Ashleigh allowed herself a shiver that she hadn’t dared give way to under PC Bright’s deadpan stare. ‘Yes.’

‘Okay. So we wouldn’t have found her if we’d searched Waterside Lodge. But as it happens, I can answer both of your questions, and the answer is the same, although you won’t find it any more satisfying than I do. Faye has a bit of a bee in her bonnet about the Neilsons. I think I can tell you that. So she’s asked me to both keep an eye and keep my distance. Satisfied?’

‘Obviously not, but I imagine that’s all you’re going to tell me. There are a lot of lies being told up at Waterside Lodge.’ Most of them by two teenage boys who’d done some foolish things and were terrified their father would find out what they were.

Seven

To save time, they drove the few hundred yards from the pier car park to the farm where Luke Helmsley worked. Jude listened to Ashleigh’s succinct briefing with only half his attention. In a sense, she was right and he didn’t need to be there. She was right, too, about the Neilsons’ property. When he’d looked over the twins’ statements they’d had a pattern of phrasing that suggested they’d been agreed beforehand and that in its turn implied they had something to hide. Not the drink; they’d admitted to that. Drugs, then. Ashleigh was right about that, too.

He pulled the car up rather too sharply at the farm gate. A few years before he’d found himself in a similar situation, when he’d discovered Mikey with a stash of soft drugs. His response then had been the one that Ashleigh was so insistent on now, and he’d done exactly what she wanted him to do now and pressed forward with it.

When he’d marched Mikey up to the police station those few years before, it hadn’t turned out the way he’d expected. Mikey had got away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the police and an almighty dressing down from his mother, but there had been ramifications. The supplier of the drugs had turned out to be one of Jude’s own friends, and the police acted less charitably to those who dealt drugs for profit than those who experimented by way of rebellion.

Adam Fleetwood was out of prison now, his feet firmly under Becca’s table. That was something else Jude hadn’t anticipated when he’d delivered his brother to the desk sergeant at Hunter Lane. He’d never thought Becca wouldn’t support him, that she’d see his actions as over-zealous and align herself firmly on the side of those who believed that you should live and let live.

Mikey hadn’t got into any serious trouble, and all the signs were he hadn’t been tempted back into the wrong sort of company, though he still hung around with Adam and his mates, as if to make a point to Jude that he didn’t need his older brother looking after him. That was the only positive he could see that had come from it.

‘Okay, Jude?’ Ashleigh had got out of the car while he was still turning over the past, and was looking at him as if she understood.

She probably did. He realised he’d been gazing down at the lake and the Seven of Swords as it floated so serenely just off the Neilsons’ manicured garden. Those kids, spoiled and entitled, believing themselves invincible, weren’t too different to Mikey at a slightly younger age and if Ashleigh was right they were already on a slippery slope.

‘Fine.’ He got out of the car and came round to join her

‘If the toxicology reports show there were drugs involved, will you have the place searched?’

‘That’s for Faye to decide.’ But there was a curl of yellow cowardice to the edge of his soul. He didn’t want to go through all that again, with someone else judging him if the drugs turned out to be locally supplied, and Faye’s insistence that he should stand back from the Neilsons looked as if it was all that was protecting him from it.

‘Hmm.’ She looked unimpressed.

He managed a smile, though it was an ironic one, at the thought of the one girlfriend castigating him for not being tough enough on drugs where the former one had cut him off for precisely the opposite reason. ‘Let’s get on with the matter in hand, shall we?’

The farmer directed them to a field a further half mile up the dale where Luke Helmsley, clad in wellies that were thick with mud, stained overalls that might once have been blue and a hat sodden with the last of the rain, was standing back and surveying a bulge in a dry stone wall with a pensive expression on his face. The cloud had thinned and the strong May sun was beginning to muscle its way through for the next phase of the day’s weather.

‘Mr Helmsley?’ Ashleigh called as they got out of the