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

She made her way briskly through into the kitchen and crossed to the window, flinging open the curtains to let the light in. The place was strangely silent, though the curtains stirred in a draught from underneath the warped window frame. If she did buy Kirsty out, the windows would be just the start of the repairs. She turned around, wondering where to start. In George’s bedroom, perhaps, or the desk where he kept his few valuables and an old chocolate box filled photographs of people whose names he’d long forgotten.

She frowned as she turned. One of the kitchen chairs lay on its side, one leg cracked as if someone had smashed something against it. The photograph of George’s parents on their wedding day lay on the floor, face downwards in a crystal halo of shattered glass.

That wasn’t how she’d left the place, and she was sure her mother wouldn’t have left it like that either. She picked up the frame. A perfect circle, blurred at the edges, punched a hole between bride and groom. With growing dread, she crossed the room. Above the sideboard, where the photograph had stood, a hole of the same size punctured the wall.

Becca had learned a lot from Jude, and not of all of it had turned to bitterness and regret when the relationship had failed. Touching nothing, she backed out of the house the way she’d come, opened the front door using her elbow rather than her fingers, and set off down the hill towards the police officers gathered around the church.

‘Becca found that someone had been in the house,’ Jude was saying to Doddsy when Ashleigh appeared in the incident room on her return from checking in with the house-to-house team in Martindale.

She paused to suss out the body language before she interrupted. He had a grim expression on his face, the look of a man who thought he’d seen the pieces of a puzzle forming a shape in front of him and saw, in a moment, that they were illusory.

That would be down to the news from Martindale, no doubt. Unless there was more bad news to come.

‘Was she okay about it?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m mightily glad she didn’t go there at the wrong moment, though. God knows what she might have walked in on.’ He looked up, saw Ashleigh and gave her the warmest of smiles, as if to compensate for the fact that he’d just been caught being solicitous about another woman. ‘Good. You’re back. Have you learned anything?’

‘Up to a point.’ She sat down and placed her iPad and notebook on the table. ‘I know every detail of everyone’s comings and goings. I know how old their kids are and who does what day on the school run, and why it was so much of a hassle when we had to close the bridge and Mrs McGinty couldn’t get into Penrith to get her corns done.’ She laid the folder of witness statements down on the desk with an exaggerated sigh. ‘I swear I’m now so well-known in Martindale they’ll be fighting to invite me round for Christmas dinner.’ Everyone had an opinion — they always did — but nothing she’d heard shed any light on the mystery.

Jude took his usual seat at the table beneath the whiteboard, and motioned for Chris to join them. ‘I’m reeling from all sorts of things coming at me today. I don’t know where to start.’

‘Ryan’s maybe a good place,’ observed Doddsy, as Chris left his desk, picked up his cup of coffee and his pad and came over to join them.

‘Ah. Yes. Though obviously he isn’t Ryan, and we don’t yet know who he is, so we may as well keep calling him that until we hear something else. But we’ll find out. I’ve asked for DNA and fingerprint tests to be run through as soon as possible, and I’ve asked our colleagues in Australia if, when they’ve finished falling about laughing, they wouldn’t mind digging a bit further into who he might be and how he came to be impersonating the real Goodall. Though to be honest, I don’t hold out any hope from that direction. Not immediately, at least.’

‘In fairness.’ Chris checked his watch. ‘What time is it over there? Two in the morning or something?’

All of them saw two am more often than they’d like but, Ashleigh knew, none of them would have stayed up late for that if the request had been reversed. Chris’s time check reminded her that she hadn’t had any lunch. She reached into her bag for the sandwich and family-sized packet of crisps she’d picked up at the garage on the way back in. ‘Don’t mind me. I need food and coffee to function.’

‘Before you get stuck in.’ Over-familiar, Jude reached out and ripped into the packet of crisps. ‘Run us through what you’ve got. No-one saw or heard anything. Right?’

‘I’m afraid so. Whoever killed Ryan must have done it as quickly and as efficiently as whoever it was — possibly Ryan himself — did to Luke.’

‘It’s a bit early to get any responses from the press conference and TV appeal.’ Doddsy followed Jude’s lead, picking out a few crisps between his fingers. Before she knew it the packet would be gone. ‘We’ve had a couple of calls after the lunchtime news, but not many and nothing too promising, though those are being followed up. But maybe there’s someone out here who was up on the hills and saw something but didn’t realise. Or heard something.’

‘There has to be a chance.’ Ashleigh looked at the map on the board. Jude’s frustration showed in the web of lines he’d drawn on it, marking where the tent had been and what could be seen from it. ‘The difficulty is the topography. George’s cottage is on that wonderfully prominent spot, and you can see almost everything from there. But the church is down