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

‘I think the case is rock solid. A young man has a fight with two other young men who have been drinking and threatens their stepmother when she intervenes. Less than two hours later she finds him murdered and there’s no sign of anyone else around. How much more reason do you need?’

‘Jude.’ Like a schoolteacher with a particularly slow child, she shook her head at him. ‘Do I really need to remind you how clever Neilson is?’

‘You keep telling me he’s clever. I don’t know the man and I haven’t seen any evidence for it. I’m not suggesting he killed Luke Helmsley. In fact, we know he didn’t because he wasn’t there. We have his word for it. We have his PA’s word for it. And just in case she’s up to her eyes in some unspecified, well-concealed crime to go with it, we have CCTV of the two of them picking up a coffee at a petrol station on the A69. He was exactly where he says he was when he said he was there.’

‘Is that right? Though I expected nothing less.’

‘Yes. Someone dug it up for me yesterday afternoon.’ In fact Robert had gone out of his way to identify his whereabouts and the confirmation of it had been obtained within an hour, with suspicious ease. ‘But as I say, on those grounds I’m not suggesting he did it, but I am suggesting one of his family might have done it. Or the killer might have hidden on the Neilson property, or escaped through it.’

‘I wonder if they have CCTV footage,’ she mused.

‘They had cameras installed last week.’ Too late to be of any use in the investigation into Summer’s death. ‘I haven’t reviewed the footage myself, but Chris had a quick look and it didn’t show anything. But if there was something — if it shows the twins leaving the place when they said they hadn’t, for example — it might have been doctored, or we might find that a bit of it had gone missing.’

‘Were they difficult about handing it over?’

‘Slow, I’d say.’ Usually people were only too keen to provide any evidence to the police, and in this case it had been forthcoming, though not immediately, as if there had been a short delay to ascertain whether there was anything incriminating.

‘How very interesting,’ said Faye, as if it weren’t interesting in the least.

He waited for a moment, testing her out. After all, he didn’t need her authority and he was only seeking it because of her earlier warning about handling the Neilsons with care. ‘Supposing I were to approach the magistrate—’

‘You might get a warrant or you might not. But if you do that, and if that jeopardises any other line of investigation, then someone senior to me will kick me into the middle of next week, and when I get back I’ll give you your bits to play with. Understand?’

He stiffened. ‘Three people have died and at least one of them was murdered.’

‘I’ve told you before. There is a very serious money-laundering investigation under way and a lot at stake.’

‘Murder trumps fraud, Faye. Every time. In my book, at least.’

‘I don’t deny it, but we don’t have to choose between them. As far as I’m concerned, this case will remain very much live. If Robert Neilson has anything to do with it, we’ll get him for it in the end. Never forget Al Capone.’

And by then the person who did his bidding, the actual killer, would be out of the country, if they weren’t already. ‘If we don’t look for the evidence we may never secure a conviction.’

She spread her hands in a gesture of resignation. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m sorry.’

He left her to her paperwork, to her pointless thinking, and strode back down the corridor towards the incident room, racking his brain for an alternative, for inspiration. In his mind he saw Luke Helmsley’s face, lying in the mortuary, a face that had been so full of life and emotion, but had ended as a cold mask that showed nothing but shock.

Twenty-Two

Sometimes Becca worked on a Sunday morning, and sometimes she helped out at the Sunday school in Askham. Over the past month or so she’d mangled to wrangle both into passable excuses not to spend a Saturday night at Adam’s, and today she’d managed to extend avoiding action right into the Sunday afternoon by virtue of the son of an old friend of George’s having come up for the funeral and been invited to her parents’ for Sunday lunch. But eventually that drew to an end, and it was some time after four o’clock that she headed to Adam’s flat.

As she drove, she found herself reflecting uncomfortably on the funeral. It wasn’t Jude’s fault she’d been so upset. It wasn’t his fault that whenever she met him she couldn’t control her bad temper and ending up abusing him in a way she’d never dream of doing to anyone else. It wasn’t his fault she’d made a fool of herself when he’d taken her home, either.

Now, at least, she knew his patience had an end. She could hardly blame him for losing his temper with her on the way back from George’s grave. He was a good man, one of the better ones. It was just a pity that his goodness and his attention were focussed on other people, on the never-ending pursuit of what he thought of as justice, rather than looking out for those who were close to him. You couldn’t live like that.

She wasn’t prepared to admit she’d been wrong about Adam, though she allowed that Jude’s motivation, which had been Mikey’s welfare, had been a noble one. She knew he wouldn’t give an inch on the morality of it, but he didn’t have to. She’d let it go.

Jude lived on the same street, half a dozen doors up and