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

‘Okay,’ said Jude to Doddsy. ‘I’m out of here.’ Discretion was the better part of valour, especially knowing Faye’s opinion on the matter. Something told him there would be plenty of opportunity to speak to Robert Neilson in the future.

Nineteen

Tammy and her team had put in a superhuman effort to get the road reopened, even though work continued around the bridge. The dale’s children slept in their own beds on Friday night and Robert Neilson was able to return to the bosom of his family; but that was only the beginning of it. Inevitably, Jude took the flak for the ongoing disruption and the effect it had on George Barrett’s funeral.

He’d been tempted to give it a miss and get on with the more immediate problem of what had happened to Luke, but there was only a limited amount he could do without the post mortem and the full results of the crime scene investigation, and anyway it was important to keep himself connected to convention. Missing funerals was a level of casual disrespect his mother would never have stood for, and he was in bad enough odour with Becca as it was. And he’d liked George. That, above all, counted for something.

The family could have delayed the funeral if they wanted, and he understood why they hadn’t, but the irritation he’d observed from the mourners as they’d passed the uniformed police officer guarding the bridge had struck him as flimsy at best.

‘And now we have to walk back past the whole thing again,’ a woman in the row in front of him said to her neighbour as George’s coffin was lifted by a collection of his distant male relatives at the conclusion of the service. ‘You’d think they could have stood their men down, just for an hour. And taken away that white tent, for heaven’s sake.’

He shook his head at that, hoping Tyrone, the officer on duty, had had the sense to show the coffin a little respect as it had been taken in to the church. The final leg of George’s life journey, from the church to his interment, was a matter of yards. Thank goodness that, at least, was out of sight of the crime scene.

The coffin passed down the aisle and he looked away as Becca, her sister and her mother walked after it, at the head of the mourners. George had been well-known if not enormously popular, and the place was packed. He recognised plenty of faces, though it seemed most of them shared the prevailing view, that the taint of murder that lingered in the dale was his fault. Few of them spared him a smile.

It was as well he hadn’t come to the church in the hope of increasing his approval rating. Fretting a little, he looked down at his watch. There would be time to attend the burial but he was keen to get back to the office to see what new information had come in. And there had been a message from Faye, the last one he’d had before he’d entered the church and turned off his phone, asking to be kept updated as a matter of priority.

As if he could forget. But he wouldn’t be going to the wake and he was mighty glad to have an excuse not to.

He waited in his pew for the church to empty, so that he could be at the back of the collection at the graveside just as he’d been in the back row of the congregation, scanning the mourners as they left. Miranda and Robert were there, she in a neat black silk suit and tiny black hat, walking down the aisle with her hand tucked through her husband’s arm. She didn’t look at Jude. There was no sign of the twins. In disgrace, or just not trusted out in public wearing the visible signs of a violent altercation with a man who’d been murdered barely an hour later?

Outside in the dale a soft summer breeze tickled the long grass in the churchyard and rippled the fresh ferns on the slopes of Hallin Fell and Steel Knotts as the mourners gathered for the committal. At the western wall of the graveyard, a pile of earth lay on a tarpaulin by the empty grave. When the short service of burial concluded with an amen that disappeared to heaven on the wind, the pall bearers lowered the coffin into the grave; Becca’s mother laid an arrangement of flowers on the ground beside it; and as the mourners headed through the gate the undertakers moved in to shovel in the earth and smooth out the wrinkles in three rolls of turf they laid on top. And that was that, the end of George Barrett. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Jude hung back once again as the line of mourners funnelled towards the bridge and their parked cars, and that somehow brought him closer than he’d ever intended to Becca. She was groping in her handbag, clearly fruitlessly, and couldn’t have seen him for the tears that shone in her eyes.

No-one else had noticed, so in the end he gave in to gallantry he didn’t feel.‘Do you need a hanky?’

She took the one he offered without a word, dabbed at her eyes, blew her nose and only then seemed to realise who her knight in shining armour was. ‘Oh, Jude. I didn’t think you’d come. I told Mum you’d be too busy.’

The dig annoyed him. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. George was a great guy. Which isn’t to say I’m not busy. Just that he was worth it.’

She blew her nose again. ‘Did we have to have all these police around? On a Saturday, and at a funeral? And that horrid tent under the bridge? Couldn’t you have stood them all down?’

She should know better than that: they’d been together long enough. ‘The tent’s a crime scene. The officers are protecting it. We went all out