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

‘I wonder if they meant to come back later and move him.’

‘Maybe. There’s blood on the stone that controls the gate, and on the grass. I’m not the one who makes hypotheses. That’s your job. But it looks pretty clear to me.’

‘Killed on the spot?’

‘Probably. Though quite how someone like that would allow himself to be killed with a stone chained to a gate is beyond me. Maybe the post-mortem will give you an idea.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway. The body was in the grave, but as you’ll have found, not very deep. The gun — I’m not up on guns, but it looked a modern one, a handgun — was in there, too.’

‘Thrown in to be retrieved later?’

‘Possibly. It has all the hallmarks of a temporary disposal of the body for me. And there are a few interesting things, from your point of view at least. One’s that the gun had been fired.’

Jude sat back and looked at her. He said nothing.

‘It would be more accurate to say there was one bullet missing from the chamber. The PM will tell you how he died, but I didn’t see any gunshot wounds. And we haven’t found a bullet.’

‘Okay. So we might be looking for a bullet, or an injured person.’ More than ever he itched to search the Neilson property. Was it possible the missing bullet had been sent to Robert as a threat and so he’d been forced to strike first? ‘What else?’

‘He had two mobile phones on him. Doddsy’s passed them on to the tech guys. We’ve taken dabs off them. I’ll prioritise that for you, but I expect they’ll have been Goodall’s prints only.’

‘And the tent? Was that his?’

‘Maybe. There wasn’t a lot in it. Not even a sleeping bag. Certainly no ID. Just binoculars and cooking gear. Almost as if he was only there for a day. He’ll have dumped the rest of it somewhere I expect, and just done a lightning raid into the dale. For all the good it did the poor sod.’

Jude succumbed to black humour. Becca had wasted time worrying about Ryan not being there for George’s funeral. He’d probably been up on the fellside the whole time, watching the proceedings. ‘Well, well. That’s fascinating.’

‘I thought you’d think so. It’ll be interesting to see what else comes up.’ She turned towards the door. ‘I’ve emailed you some of the pictures we took. See if those offer you any inspiration.’ She whisked out.

Jude sat down for a moment, and thought about it, then got up. ‘Chris. Get home. There won’t be a lot more for you to do tonight.’ Then he headed up to Faye’s office. She, in her turn, was clearing and locking her desk. ‘Can you do one thing for me before you go?’

‘I imagine so.’

‘Ryan Goodall had two phones on him. I need to know what’s on them.’

‘Isn’t that already in hand?’

‘I need it hurried along. I’d like to know what’s on them by tomorrow morning. And you know how it works. The higher the rank the more weight you can bring to bear.’ His relationship with the technical team was, at best, fraught.

‘Okay,’ she said with a sigh, ‘leave it with me. You won’t get anything tonight but I can get them onto it sharp.’

Jude went back to his office and sat down to scroll through his emails. Buried among them was one from Lorraine Broadbent, informing him that the anonymous complaint against him had been withdrawn by a person who preferred not to be identified and whose subsequent account of events had tallied more closely with his own. The tone of the email, he thought, lacked the relish with which she’d pounced on him originally.

He sighed, writing off the incident as an unnecessary distraction, and got on with his work.

When the doorbell went, very late in the evening as the May sunshine was fading into darkness and the very last stripe of sunlight touched the top of the Lowther escarpment and gave it an otherworldly look, Becca jumped to her feet and brushed Holmes off her lap and onto the floor. She wasn’t expecting anyone but it was bound to be Jude. She’d taken Doddsy’s advice and contacted the police to withdraw the complaint Adam had made, and now she was ready for him to turn up and talk about it. And other things, of course. The village was buzzing with gossip about what had happened up in Martindale.

Composing her face into an expression of contrition and preparing to apologise for something she hadn’t done, she strolled towards the door with exaggerated calm and opened the door. ‘Hello. Oh.’ She checked herself. ‘Hi, Doddsy. Come on in.’

‘I won’t, if you don’t mind.’ He hovered on the step, his long shadow stretching behind him. In Linda Satterthwaite’s cottage opposite, a lamp went on and Mikey’s thin figure glided across the window.

‘Is everything okay?’

He spread his hands out in a gesture of futility, and Becca felt ridiculous. Of course it wasn’t all right. ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘I thought you might be Jude.’ She might as well be honest about it, since Doddsy was the one she’d trusted for advice.

‘He’s working late tonight. You’ll have heard there’s bad news from Martindale.’

‘I know.’ She gave him a troubled look. ‘My dad called. Is it right they think they’ve found Ryan?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Death was something Jude kept close in his soul, had never shared with her during their relationship, though he dealt with it on daily basis. She did, too, though in a different way; slow decay of the living who were approaching their time to die, rather than the short shock of a violent and unexpected death. Perhaps, if they’d talked more, if she’d asked him to share and been able to bear it, they might still be together. ‘What happened to him?’

‘We don’t know yet, but I think we can be pretty certain it wasn’t an accident.’

Becca wasn’t squeamish and she