Death at Rainbow Cottage by Jo Allen (book club books txt) 📗

This was a forwarded email headed: source of printed material. He opened it up. The printed sheets you sent us have been scanned and the source is the printer with the following ID. The printer is registered to the business Blackwell Ltd.

He sat back, looking at it. ‘Chris. Are you busy?’

‘Do I look busy?’

‘I think we need to go out to Temple Sowerby and have a chat with Claud Blackwell.’

‘Sure.’ Chris bounced to his feet and stretched. ‘Anything more on him? I was just going back through those interactions he had on the local forums. Did you know Len Pierce was on one of them?’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes. He never commented but he liked the odd post. One or two of Claud’s, in fact.’ Chris lifted his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘You want to send Doddsy, if you want to get anything out of him. Or Faye. He likes those two way more than he likes the rest of us. If I was Mrs Blackwell, I’d be getting jealous.’

Jude had been turning towards the door, but at that, something clicked in his mind. He spun back on his heel and strode over to the whiteboard, stared at its confusion of maps and tracks and photos and the black dots on the tracks that marked the stops in Natalie’s complicated, obsessive runs.

If I was Mrs Blackwell I’d be getting jealous.

Of Len Pierce, if the two had ever met. Of George Meadows, so keen to help with the Rainbow Festival. Of Doddsy, to whom Claud had taken such an improbably liking, and of Faye, whom he so clearly admired.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get moving.’

Chapter 23

The sun had made a belated appearance in the Eden Valley. From the living room window, Natalie watched Claud as he moved among the roses that grew up against the fence. He was late pruning them. He’d been talking about doing it, she remembered, on that afternoon when Len Pierce had died in the lane.

It seemed so long ago, so distant. The image of the man, lying dead at her feet before she’d turned to flee to Claud floated across her mind like a cloud. Now even the last of the police tape had gone, and only the occasional tractor trundled up and down the lane. The cars that had stopped there for their owners to meet up and couple and leave no longer came, as if there were still a threat.

Eventually, no doubt, they’d forget all that and come back. People did.

She’d showered after her run and dressed, and towelled down her hair. The fitness tracker, heavy on her thin wrist, irritated her so she unclipped it and laid it on the kitchen table while she cleared up after the previous night’s supper. Claud had cooked a beef casserole and she’d barely been able to manage a few mouthfuls of it. He always cooked, she cleared up, but she’d been worryingly distracted and hadn’t been able to face it. On another day Claud would just have done it, but these days he seemed to tiptoe around her as if her emotions were too deep and too dangerous for him to disturb.

She rearranged the mess prior to washing it up. The curved blade of the kitchen knife Claud had used in his preparations troubled her, the beads of congealed red on the blade bringing up images of the dead — of Len, of Gracie, of George, who’d been so kind to them on the night of Gracie’s murder. Eventually time would close over them and their killings, unsolved, would be forgotten.

Or would they? Bending her head, she squeezed her eyes tightly together. It couldn’t go on.

Out in the garden, Claud moved along the line of rose bushes, clipping them back and dropping the cuttings in a bucket. Placing the carving knife on the table next to her fitness tracker, Natalie strode out through the conservatory and across the soft spring grass towards him. He was whistling. ‘Claud.’

‘Are you okay?’ He looked up, alarmed.

He was in a constant state of alarm these days. Every time she spoke to him he seemed to be expecting something, some bombshell that had burst in her mind, some new fear he alone could soothe. Claud did so much for her yet somehow that patience, that commitment, that consideration was never enough. She needed everything. ‘We need to talk.’

‘Of course.’ He straightened up and dropped the sprig of rose bush, with fresh green leaves on it, into the bucket. His face framed the ready smile it always took on when she was needy. ‘What about?’

She took a deep breath and met his questioning gaze. Sometimes Claud’s expression was thoughtful, sometimes it was concerned. Sometimes it darkened into an approaching storm, and those were the times when she was irrationally afraid he might hurt her. As if he would. Claud could never hurt anyone. ‘Who is your lover?’

His eyes widened in astonishment. His silence condemned him.

‘Claud.’

‘You’re my lover, Nat.’ He dropped the secateurs he’d been holding into the bucket, stripped off his gloves and tossed them on the grass next to the secateurs. The traffic hummed on the A66, the tractor rumbled in the lane. Startled by the sudden movement, a robin skidded from tree to hedge, its breast as scarlet with feathers as hers had been with Len Pierce’s blood. ‘Listen. We need to talk about this.’

At his ringing failure to deny it, an invisible knife sliced into her heart, just as a real one had ripped the life out of Len and Gracie and George. ‘I knew it.’

‘No. Listen to me. It’s you. You only.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘What made you think otherwise?’

She flicked a dry tongue around her lips. So often she’d rehearsed what she’d say to him when she challenged him, and already it