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

‘Hopefully she’s right in what she said. If someone’s after Miranda, they’ve surely been put off.’

‘They won’t be put off for ever, though.’ There might already be someone moving in to take Ryan’s place as an executioner.

‘Poor Miranda. She did the right thing, speaking up for her friend. It’s awful how she was hounded for it.’

‘I don’t disagree. But if she had to kill Ryan to save herself, she should have told us. Straight away.’

The car crawled up over the hairpin bends beyond Howtown and down past the Martindale turn. The electric gates to Waterside Lodge stood open, as though the Neilsons hadn’t a care in the world — as if they knew any immediate threat had been eliminated. Jude drove through them and saw Aida’s red car parked outside. ‘Looks like we’re not the only ones who start work early.’

‘Maybe Robert’s been on the phone to Australia, too.’ Ashleigh stifled a yawn.

‘There’s always money to be made somewhere in the world.’ Jude parked his Mercedes neatly next to Aida’s car and got out. ‘Let’s go.’

It was Miranda who answered the door, apparently unsurprised to see them. ‘Chief Inspector. Sergeant O’Halloran. I’m afraid I’m in the middle of breakfast, but come in and have coffee. Do you need to speak to Robert?’

‘Just yourself right now, Mrs Neilson. Though I expect we’ll need to talk to him later.’

‘Who’s that, Miranda?’ Robert’s voice burst out from distant part of the house.

‘Just the police,’ she shouted back. ‘Routine. Nothing to worry about.’ And she led them into the kitchen. ‘Have a seat.’

They sat, while Miranda made them coffee and dealt the mugs out on the table with the skill of a saloon barmaid, then resumed her seat and looked down at the remnants of toast and honey on her plate. She was silent.

She hadn’t slept well, Jude judged. There was tiredness in her eyes — more than that, resignation. ‘Well, Chief Inspector. Please don’t tell me you’ve come to say someone else has died.’

‘I sincerely hope no-one else will die, Mrs Neilson. And I suspect no-one hopes that more than you do.’

Tears filled her eyes. Getting up, she tore a piece of kitchen paper off the roll on the kitchen unit and resumed her seat, dabbing at her eyes. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. I knew you’d find out about Elizabeth.’

‘It would have been more helpful if you’d told us straight away.’ He knew now that she must have killed Ryan, with or without her husband’s help, but surely she’d try to plead self-defence. ‘Begin at the beginning.’

‘You know about Elizabeth, of course.’ She began to pick the kitchen paper apart. ‘Everybody does. Drew — her partner — was a violent, manipulative man, and no-one believed her when she said so. I was the only person who would stand up in court and speak up for her. No-one else dared. Yes, she killed him. She admitted it. But she did it to save her sanity, if not her life, and if she’d gone to prison it would have destroyed her after what he did to her. I believed, at the time, that I’d saved her by speaking up.’

‘What you did was very brave,’ said Ashleigh, quietly.

‘I didn’t think so. I just thought it was the decent thing to do. Afterwards, of course, there was a whole lot of media attention and then it became a social media thing.’ She shook her head. ‘It was horrible. Constant. I was baffled by it. People wrote books about it. I got a lot of support but there was a lot of negative attention, too. And it was nothing to what poor Beth had to deal with.’

‘I believe that’s why she left England.’

‘Yes. I never heard from her after the trial.’ Miranda shook her head. ‘It was sad, but I’m not in any way bitter. She’d been through hell and she had to go somewhere where no-one knew her, or knew anything about her. But it left me isolated. I lost a lot of friends.’

Doing the right thing always did lose you friends. The more Jude saw it happen, the more he wondered why anyone bothered. ‘You bounced back.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Miranda placed the tissue on her plate, took a sip of coffee and looked at the two detectives in front of her. ‘You don’t have any choice in life, do you? You have to keep going or you go under, and you have to do it any way you can. I was sorry Beth felt she had to go, but I understood. I carried on. I went back to my job. I was still receiving a lot of the wrong sort of attention. Drew’s family threatened to break me. His brother took to following me around and I had to take a restraining order out against him. I received death threats on social media. A couple of years later I met Robert and married him.’

‘Did he know about Elizabeth?’

Her smile was tremulous. ‘I told him a few days ago, but he already knew. He’s a very thorough man, and he checks everything. He was very supportive, thank God. Because things changed for me, badly, three years ago. Beth died in an accident. They said she was on medication, but there was only one witness. Maybe that witness had caused the crash. Because she was in fear of her life.’

She picked up the tissue again. ‘I couldn’t sleep for worry. Maybe it was murder. I remembered a couple of the threats I’d had, before the fuss died down. One of them said: bitch, never sleep. We’ll come when we’re ready, when you don’t expect us. I started to believe that they were coming after me.’

Ashleigh put her coffee mug down and looked across at her. ‘That must have been hard.’

Once again, in some inexplicable way, a witness responded to her obvious sincerity and transferred her attention from the senior officer to