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

in a dip, a really beautifully sheltered spot, and the only place you can see it from is the farm. The farmer didn’t see anything, but he was up on the hill with his dog for a lot of the time, and in any case their living space looks the other way. He says he saw Miranda and Robert walking out towards the bridge when they said they were there, but he never paid them much attention as he was on his way elsewhere, and he never saw them heading back.’

Jude’s frown deepened. ‘Right. And the CSI team didn’t find anything outside the tent and the graveyard. Inside the graveyard is another matter. But we’ll get to that in a minute.’

‘What about the post-mortem results?’ asked Chris ‘Do they tell us anything? Was he shot?’

Jude’s expression darkened even further. He’d been away at the post-mortem for most of the morning, and it always left him out of sorts. None of them enjoyed watching the pathologist slicing open the remains of a human being, picking them apart and exposing their innermost secrets. ‘Two blows on the head. The first was on the temple, inflicted by some kind of blunt instrument. The skin isn’t broken although we think we may have the weapon. I’ll come to that later. That was sufficient to stun him. The second blow, to the back of his head, smashed his skull and killed him. He was dead when he was buried, and the time of death seems to be not long — maybe half an hour — before Ashleigh and I found him. The second blow was inflicted on him by the stone that controls the self-closing mechanism for the churchyard gate.’

Chris handed out some of the photos that Jude himself had taken in the churchyard. ‘It must have been inflicted in situ. You can see how the chain is screwed into the stone via that hook, and the ends of the chain are attached to the gate and the wall. None of those fixings has been moved in years. They’re rusted over.’

‘So, he was stunned.’ Ashleigh tapped fingers on the desk. She knew, from the find at the cottage, how it must have been done, and she could see that he did too. ‘Time’s of the essence. They’ve got their man, unconscious, but they need to kill him. For whatever reason they don’t use the gun. Do they?’ She looked at Jude.

‘No. They don’t. They may have been afraid of attracting attention.’

‘Of course. So they look for the nearest weapon. For some reason they don’t use whatever inflicted the first wound—’

‘It wasn’t heavy enough.’

‘Yes. So they look around and they find the first large stone they can.’

‘They have to stay in the graveyard,’ Doddsy supplied, ‘because if they get out of it they run the risk of being seen.’

‘Yes. The stone sits on that chain and although it’s heavy you can open the gate you can lift it off the ground and swing it. One good blow and the skull’s fractured. Your unconscious man is a dead man. And then they shovel the earth out of the grave — at a guess with their hands, which will have taken a while and been a messy business — put the turf back and get rid of the rest of the earth over the wall in the hope it won’t be spotted.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘Yes.’ Jude tapped his pen on the pad in front of him. ‘Is someone keeping a note of all these times? Because I think it’s important. They must have had some time in hand, but they were in enough of a hurry not to go and find something easier to handle than the stone. They could have found something suitable lying around outside the graveyard, for example. But they had enough time to excavate the grave and get rid of the surplus soil, though not very tidily. And then they must have done a runner.’

Chris had been sketching out what passed for a timeline on the pad in front of him. ‘Okay. So you and Ashleigh came down into the dale at about ten past eleven and Robert and Miranda say they were there at half ten, though neither of them could be specific about it. They say they walked down to the graveyard and although they didn’t go in, they didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. There’s a gap of about forty minutes between them leaving and you arriving, and in that time, if the post-mortem is correct, the person claiming to be Ryan must have been killed, buried, the grave refilled, the soil cleared, and then they made a clean escape.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not by car, though,’ Ashleigh noted, ‘because we didn’t pass anyone coming out of the dale and we’ve accounted for every one of the cars that was in it. It’s a dead end. The road forks before the bridge and you can go up Boredale or Martindale or into Sandwick, but everyone who has a vehicle there can account for where it was. The first thing we did was make sure anyone seen leaving the dale was intercepted and there was nobody suspicious.’

‘Could they have made it to the steamer on foot?’

‘Not without passing us. They’d have had to go right round the base of Hallin Fell. It’s about two and a half miles, and by then we’d alerted the constables who were already in Howtown. So, no. Whoever did it was still in the dale.’

‘And of course,’ Jude said, reviewing all the evidence, ‘it’s obvious where they were. Where Ryan was all the time.’

‘Up in the tent?’ Chris gave him a quizzical look. That’s not possible. You’d have seen them.’

Chris wasn’t up on the latest development. Ashleigh had been in Martindale when Becca had come running down the hill, close to tears, to tell them what she’d found. Perhaps it was as well Jude hadn’t been there. ‘They must have been in George Barrett’s cottage. Becca said it wasn’t