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

vain. One of them had to take a decision. ‘Yes. Because Dad’ll kill us. But he’s not back until tomorrow night and Miranda isn’t back for another hour or so and so we have time to get rid of the body.’

‘But it was an accident. We’ll make it worse if we hide it.’

‘Just until the drugs get out of her system. And ours.’ Ollie’s palms were sweating and it wasn’t the sun. ‘We didn’t hurt her. It’s not our fault if she went for a swim somewhere on the way home. We’ll take her in the dinghy and leave her. Someone will find her but the drugs will be out of her system by then. It’ll look like an accident.’

‘But Dad—’

Ollie folded his lips at the thought. ‘Yeah. He might suspect. But he won’t know for certain.’

Will gripped the rail with white knuckles, but Ollie knew he’d go along with it. He always did. After a second he saw sense, stood up. ‘Her clothes. What about them?’

‘We’ll take them, too.’ The decision made, Ollie dropped down into the cabin, scooped up Summer’s jeans and pants and scrambled back up again to where Will, his face a mask of nausea and shock, stood at the back of the boat with the girl’s sandals, bra and flimsy cotton top.

‘Here’s her bag.’ Will poked it out from under one of the seats with his foot.

‘Okay.’ Ollie dropped it into the dinghy, jumped down and struggled to keep his balance as it rocked under his feet. ‘Let’s get her in here.’

As he looked towards the shore, the day got worse. Their stepmother’s car was parked in front of the house. ‘Miranda’s back. We’ll keep behind the boat and maybe she won’t see us.’

He waited for Will to jump down into the dinghy and take his place at the stern before he unshipped the oars and manoeuvred them into the shelter of the Seven of Swords. The sun was beginning to dip, so it must be almost five o’clock. Surely they hardly had a prayer of getting away with it, on a summer evening in the Lake District, with a public footpath along the water’s edge commanding one route of escape and their stepmother, who might be only slightly more forgiving than their father, having a full view over their path if she chanced to look out over the second? But Ollie was made of stern stuff, a teenager rapidly forming in the image of his father. There was no such thing as a hopeless case, no situation you couldn’t bluff or bluster or bully your way out of if you applied yourself to it. He paused for a moment before he dipped the first oar in the water, rotating the dinghy and sending it alongside Summer’s body. ‘Grab her feet.’

‘Her feet?’ Will seemed mesmerised by the ripples from the oar, the way they rolled up to the girl and ran up against her bare arm and side, ran down her leg, unfurled around her head and them went on out into the lake in disarray, fading, fading, fading into oblivion.

‘Yes. I’ll get her head’ Gritting his teeth, Ollie reached down and grasped Summer’s shoulder. Hours earlier it had been living, pulsing, exciting; now it was queasily flaccid under his hand.

The dinghy rocked violently as they tried to roll her waterlogged body upwards and it took two attempts. At the second, they heaved her over the gunwales and she sprawled in the bottom of the boat, face upward, eyes wide and glassy.

Will, visibly gagging, sent Ollie a troubled look, but he said nothing. What was there to say? They were Robert Neilson’s sons. Nothing defeated them. And, driven by the chilling sobriety of coping, Ollie began rowing and drove the dinghy, with its guilty cargo, into the shadow of the trees that overhung the shore.

Two

‘Breakfast in ten.’ Jude Satterthwaite closed the door of his girlfriend’s bedroom and his steps, firm and meaningful, descended the stairs to the kitchen. Left sitting at her dressing table, one towel wrapped around her body and another round her head, Ashleigh O’Halloran performed a quick calculation. Was ten minutes long enough to get dry, get ready for work and read the tarot cards?

It wasn’t. In a sense it didn’t matter; Jude would be quite happy chatting away in the kitchen to her housemate while he rustled up coffee and toast. He’d know what she was doing, because they’d been together for six months, and even if he didn't know he’d guess — or rather, deduce. He was a detective and knowing things was more than just a part of his job; it was rooted in his nature. Nevertheless, she’d rather not make it quite so obvious.

She towelled down her hair, tossed the towel on the bed and dried herself quickly, then got dressed. ‘I’ll just be a second,’ she said to the cards that sat on her dressing table wrapped in a pile of purple silk, ‘and I know I shouldn’t rush it. But I value your advice.’

That was why she was discreet. It wasn’t that he’d laugh, though he knew about the cards and teased her about them on a regular basis. It had taken her a while to persuade him tarot wasn’t about fortune-telling but about concentration and meditation and making the best of all the available information, but nevertheless he couldn’t quite bring himself to buy into them as the useful tool they were. For Jude detection was all about your brain and the evidence in front of it, whereas for Ashleigh the job benefited from intuition. You needed evidence but you needed intuition, too.

She never used cards for her work. It took a lot to keep your soul healed when every day carried with it the risk of coming across some kind of inhumanity, a crime perpetrated against the vulnerable or a violent death. The cards gave her a sense of perspective and kept her sane.

‘I don’t have very long.’ She kept her voice low,