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

At least, Ollie thought, he could be reasonably certain that Will hadn’t been shagging the girl without him. ‘Where is she?’ His gaze raked the deck and there was nothing there except a pile of discarded clothing and a pitifully small pool of vomit. That must be why Will had crashed out onto the deck, just falling short of the side of the boat. Ollie, who had managed not to be sick, filed that triumphant detail away for later. ‘Where’s Summer?’

‘Isn’t she down with you?’ Will sat up, only to twitch forward again as his flaming back touched the rail of the boat. ‘Shit. I’m burned.’ He poked at the back of his neck with a tender fingertip.

‘That’s going to hurt later. Just as well you didn’t crash out on your back, or your bits would be fried.’ Briefly, Ollie considered the possibility that he’d somehow overlooked a naked woman in in his earlier survey of the cabin, only to dismiss it as bizarre. Nevertheless, as he reached for his shorts and briefs and pulled them on, he cast a quick look back down the hatch, only to crease his brows in a post-orgiastic puzzlement. The cabin wasn’t large and there was nowhere she could have hidden.

Drink and drugs rot the brain, their mother had always warned them, but his must have rotted on the instant if he couldn’t even see what must be in front of his eyes.

Must be. Because Summer’s clothes were in the middle of the cabin, and his and Will’s were on the deck, so if Summer had gone home she must have done it in the nude. And though she was a hell of a girl when the mood took her, he was reasonably certain the mood only ever took her in private and that walking five miles along the Ullswater Way with no clothes on was just not how she rolled.

Well. He shook his head. The fact he was even having that kind of interior monologue showed how smashed he must have been earlier on.

‘Has she gone home?’ In his turn, Will reached for his clothes, the follower not the leader in the major things as well as the minor. Ollie always capitalised on how the hour’s difference in age weighed disproportionately in his favour, how Will endorsed whatever idea he came up with, no matter how mad, how he aped every action, sooner rather than later. Inviting Summer along for the afternoon had been Ollie’s idea, and so had getting hold of some good-quality cocaine through a mate. No doubt in the reckoning — which, he now saw, was unavoidable — he’d be the one who took the lion’s share of blame.

That was probably fair enough; but the reckoning was for the next day, or the day after, and the puzzle of Summer’s whereabouts was immediate. ‘She can’t have done.’

‘She must have done. She’s not here.’ Will picked up Summer’s bra, which had somehow got tangled in his discarded shorts, and twirled it round his finger, staring at it in adolescent fascination.

‘She’s left her clothes. And the boat.’ They were moored fifty yards or so off shore, and the dinghy that ferried them to and from the landing bobbed at the back of the Seven of Swords. The line that tethered it hung limp in the silver water.

‘She must have swum for it,’ offered Will, by way of a solution.

Ollie’s brain told him both that she must have done or she’d be on the boat, and that she couldn’t have done because she’d left her clothes behind. The answer would be somewhere in between, but he was damned if he could see through his muddleheadedness to what it might be. Nevertheless, in a tentative search for a solution, he peered over the guard rail and down into the lake.

The answer was there all right. He opened his mouth to swear but all that came out was a child’s whimper.

‘Ollie?’ Will hauled himself to his feet, joined his twin at the rail, froze for a second and repeated the exact same sound. On the far side of the lake, a queue of traffic snaked along the road from Glenridding to Pooley Bridge and the shadow of Gowbarrow Fell began its evening stretch, flexing dark muscles in the late afternoon. A yard below them Summer Raine floated face-down in the lake. Her blonde hair drifted around her head like the tentacles of a pallid jellyfish, stranded and helpless in the shallows, and the tattoo of a butterfly that graced the back of her left thigh shimmered under half an inch of water. She was naked. A dark strand of water weed curled like a wound across her shoulder blade.

It was the tattoo that did it. Some time not that long before — three hours maybe — Ollie had spent several enjoyable minutes familiarising himself with that tattoo. Now its sodden blurriness brought reality home to him. Summer had been in the water a long time, maybe all the time he and Will had been asleep, and now she was dead. He found his voice. ‘Shit.’

‘What do we do? What do we do?’ Will could manage only an anxious bleat. ‘Dad’ll kill us.’

Robert Neilson, a man who was lighthearted and fun as long as he deemed the situation wholesome, was humourlessly upright when it came to morals. Maybe if he’d been more relaxed about things, thought Ollie in a moment of startling clarity as he stared down and watched a lap of water ripple the blonde hair he’d so recently laced his fingers through, there wouldn’t have been so much to tempt them in what had seemed like a good idea. ‘Yes.’

‘She is dead, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’ Ollie’s brain ticked. ‘We need to get rid of her.’

‘Get rid of her?’ Will’s jaw dropped. He looked about twelve years old.

If Ollie looked to his brother for leadership he’d do so in