Death at Rainbow Cottage by Jo Allen (book club books txt) 📗

‘Dunno. I might come back from uni tomorrow. I might leave it until Saturday. It depends on what’s going on here.’

‘Give me a shout if there’s anything else I can do.’

‘Will do. Cheers then.’ For once, Mikey managed to end the conversation without a sarcastic comment, but whether that was a sign of maturity or of something more interesting going on at his side of the country, Jude didn’t know.

It didn’t matter. The end result was still silence. He stood for a moment, weighing the phone in his hand and dithering over the eternal, knife-edge judgement of how far he should interfere, whom he risked alienating, whether it was worth the gamble to try yet once more to heal a gaping emotional wound.

Mikey would always forgive him. That they were still speaking four years on from the younger brother’s experiment with soft drugs and the older’s dramatic intervention testified to that. And there was something else Jude had learned throughout his career, and that was that too many people went out one day with rage buzzing in their hearts and a critical word on their lips and never came back, or came back to find that death, natural or unnatural, had taken their loved ones. One day Mikey would grasp that. With that in mind, Jude steeled himself to call his father.

The moment David Satterthwaite answered the phone, the buzz in the background told Jude he’d timed it wrong and the conversation would be short. ‘Dad. Hi. How’s it going?’

‘Fine, Jude. Fine.’ He must have covered the phone with his hand, but only partially. ‘No, it’s only Jude. My round, but give me a minute.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t know you were busy.’

‘I’m in the pub with local history society.’

His mother had been an English teacher and his father taught history, but Jude had never been remotely tempted to hide for the rest of his life in either books or the classroom. Since the divorce, his father seemed to have developed the knack of finding companionship in the pub. ‘I won’t chat, then.’

‘Are you calling to cancel Saturday?’

Jude winced. All too often that was the reason he called, and because a trip to the football on a Saturday or (occasionally) a midweek evening was the only real situation in which father and son were completely comfortable, he never cancelled easily, but David could be as touchy as Mikey, as easily offended. ‘No.’ But when he reviewed his workload, and the glaringly open case of the murders of Len Pierce and Gracie Pepper, he backtracked to honesty. ‘Not yet, and hopefully not at all.’

His father declined to comment and chose, instead, to condemn him with a very obvious sigh.

‘Anyway.’ You could love someone and have no patience with them. Even when David hadn’t been drinking he was prone to theatricality ,and since he’d ditched the needs of his family he’d become increasingly self-centred. Jude sighed, ran his free hand through his hair and looked out of the window. A dog walker paused on the glistening pavement for a greyhound to lift its leg to a lamppost and on the edge of his vision a light went on in Adam’s living room. He turned to look the other way. ‘I was calling about Mikey.’

‘Is that right?’

‘About his birthday.’

David made him wait. ‘What about it?’ he asked, after a moment.

‘His party. I wondered if you might come.’

‘I haven’t been invited.’

‘No. He hasn’t invited you because he’s afraid you won’t come.’

David sighed, so obviously it could only be deliberate. ‘I’m not going to come if he doesn’t invite me.’

Jude shook his head in frustration. ‘Can’t we break this cycle, Dad? Can’t we try? Just once more?’

‘If he invites me, I’ll come.’

‘Mikey’s still a kid.’

‘Mikey’s nearly twenty-one.’

‘But you’re the real adult here. You're his dad. You’re the one who has to—’

‘To make the first move? I’ve done that before. Time and time again.’

‘Yes, and you have to keep trying.’

‘When I get the invitation, I’ll come. You’re a good man, Jude. Thanks for trying. But it has to come from Mikey not from you. Got to go.’ And silence.

Chapter 15

‘All right. Fill me in. What have we all got from our collective labours?’

Jude was in a flippant mood, Doddsy thought, though God knew why. He contemplated his boss and friend. It had been too long since they’d met up for a quiet pint and a heart-to-heart and the thread of close knowledge — how Jude felt about Mikey, how Doddsy himself felt, in love for the first time in middle age — had stretched so that he couldn’t divine the source of Jude’s light-heartedness. Maybe it was the first signs of spring. Maybe against the odds he’d managed a good night’s sleep. Maybe it was the prospect of taking Ashleigh to meet his family and, by so doing, draw a line under the relationship with Becca that Doddsy knew he’d struggled so long to shake off. He smiled at Ashleigh across the table, but she didn’t smile back.

‘Chris?’ Jude prompted. ‘Do you want to start?’

‘I think we’d better let Ashleigh start.’

The two of them had been comparing notes in a corner before the meeting, while Doddsy had been standing in serene contemplation of the additional information on the incident room board as if they were an aid to meditation. He’d noticed that Chris was looking unusually severe.

Jude must have noticed it, too, because his good mood visibly dissipated. ‘Okay. Go on.’

Doddsy abandoned the board and slid into his seat.

‘This is a bit of a bugger Jude, if I’m honest with you.’ This time she did look at Doddsy and her expression was almost apologetic. ‘It’s getting a bit close to home.’

‘Oh?’

Ashleigh allowed herself a fractional pause. ‘You know I had people doing the door-to-doors and talking to people