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

An inveterate fidget, Ashleigh began gathering them up. ‘You’ll need a full dry suit with thermals underneath. Gloves and woolly hats when you’re standing on the shore tutoring the beginners. Even in July.’

‘God, no. Spare me the woolly hat. It would ruin my hair.’ He was laughing at himself. ‘Nah, you’re right. I certainly wouldn’t last up here for ever. I find my balls far too useful to have them frozen off up here all year round. And I never thought I’d say it, but I’m getting a bit fed up of the sun.’

He looked her in the eye as he said it and she was almost convinced, but all the time she’d known Scott he’d been a man who thrived on warmth and sunshine, on hot days and balmy evenings. He lived in shorts and sandals, sank shiploads of Spanish beer, and sported a tan that turned deep bronze over time. He was like a creature from a Greek myth, who came back to his country, and his wife for a season only, but had to return to the sun when the colour faded from his skin. ‘Rubbish.’

‘Well, maybe not fed up. But it’s time for a change, perhaps. Maybe a summer somewhere else would be enough for me to learn to appreciate it. I could go to the Caribbean in the autumn. Call this idea wanderlust, if you like.’

Only Scott could satisfy his wanderlust by coming home. ‘You’re one of a kind,’ she said and relaxed. Because it was only a couple of hours in his company and even if he was offered the job she was confident the privations of the Lakes would be too much for him and he’d refuse.

Twenty-One

It was warm, and Jude’s first action had been to open the windows and let in some fresh air. It was going to be a long day in the office for a lot of people as they picked over the bones of Luke Helmsley’s murder. Now, with the initial briefing over and the team of officers he’d called in allocated to their various roles on the case, he could sit down in the incident room with those who chimed closest with his thinking and hammer out possibilities.

‘Like a military killing, the doctor said.’ Chris Marshall’s talents lay inside the office and Jude included him in any general discussion where it was possible, because he could think outside the box — not so much in terms of the killer or any hypothesis about why and how a crime had occurred, but because he knew the best places to find information, and his instincts for an online trail were unerring. And he never gave up. His prize was the result, the piece of information which would confirm or deny the theories concocted by minds that worked in different ways to his. ‘Do we have the PM report?’

‘We do.’ Jude tapped his fingers on the desk and listened to the bells of St Andrew’s church, calling the faithful to Sunday service. Doddsy was listening to them, too, with a sigh, because he was the only one of them who was a regular churchgoer and somehow always seemed to end up working on Sundays. ‘It confirms the cause of death as a broken neck. Death was instantaneous. There was no water in the lungs and no other signs of immediate violence.’ Luke had had his share of bruises, some of them no doubt the result of brawling and others from a life of physical exertion, lifting rocks and manhandling livestock, but none was recent and there was nothing from the moment before he’d died. ‘He hadn’t picked up anything from his fight with the Neilson boys apart from a grazed knuckle and a black eye.’

‘Military style.’ Chris referred to his notes. ‘That’s what the doctor said.’

‘Yes. The report isn’t explicit as far as that goes, but it was a single, clean break consistent with his head being snapped backwards with considerable force.’ Matt Cork, the pathologist, was a friend of Jude’s and though he was overcautious and refused to commit himself, Jude had judged from his tone that he thought the crime had an element of professionalism about it. ‘It may have been lucky, but I’m inclined to think not.’

‘Time of death?’ Doddsy asked. He was looking particularly world-weary.

‘He can’t say for certain. Luke met the twins at one and parted from Miranda almost immediately after that. Miranda found him at quarter past two. On the basis of that, Matt reckons he must have been killed almost immediately before she found him.’

The fourth member of the team, Ashleigh, had been silent up to that point, but at that she sat forward. ‘Are you seriously suggesting Miranda is capable of carrying out that kind of killing?’

‘No. Not at all. But if she narrowly missed seeing the murder, I think she’s lucky to be alive.’

In the expectant silence, he got up and turned to the white board on the wall behind him. On the day of Luke’s’s murder it had sprung into being, with photographs, queries, maps all jostling for position on it. Jude unpinned a couple of pictures of Luke’s broken body and dropped them on the desk, then stood looking down on them, hands in his pockets. ‘Before we get to the why and the who, I think we can be fairly clear about what happened. I’ve spoken to Tammy and she’s built up a picture of a neat, clean killing. It looks as if Luke may have been on the road, possibly on his way back up to work. He may have met his killer or he may have been attacked from behind, but death was instant. He may never even have hit the ground.’ In his mind the killer caught Luke before he fell and tipped him neatly over the parapet in one smooth move. The crime scene had been spectacularly clean. ‘There’s just one footmark on the bank, where someone must have