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

younger female staff, but that was before she’d realised who his replacement was. She stole a sip at the coffee while Jude gathered up his change, waiting for the buzz of caffeine to jolt her back into the real world. There would be plenty of time later to formulate a strategy to deal with Faye, and in the meantime the best tactic was silence. ‘Okay. Let’s get to work.’

‘Did you enjoy Sri Lanka?’ He held the door open for her and fell into step beside her as they made their way back along the corridor.

‘Apart from that nightmare of a journey, yes.’

He looked at her. ‘The new Super might be right. Maybe you should go home and catch up on some sleep.’

‘I’m not going to lie. I’m knackered. But if we’re busy—’

‘I did a full briefing first thing and everyone’s off doing their stuff. Shame you missed that, but I’m about to sit down with Doddsy and Chris. I’d like you there too. Sit in on that, then go home and get some sleep. I’d planned on having you out supervising the house-to-house inquiries, but you can pick that up tomorrow.’

‘Maybe I will.’ Aircraft cabins sucked you dry, aircraft seats cramped your limbs, airport lounges denied you your last hope of sleep. ‘I’m feeling rough.’

‘You’re looking great.’ He lowered his voice, in case anyone should overhear the compliment. ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘You, too.’

‘Next time you go away for three weeks, take me with you.’ He stepped ahead of her, opened a door. ‘We’re in here. Morning everyone. Look who I found wandering about in the corridor.’

Three faces looked up at her — Doddsy with his usual thoughtful nod, the newly-promoted sergeant Chris Marshall, and Tammy Garner, the CSI. Tammy was normally the most placid, but today her greeting was cursory and she sat turned half away from the table.

‘The sun suits you, Ash.’ Chris Marshall gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. ‘You’re looking great. Here. Have a seat.’

She pulled up a chair next to him. The table sat beneath a whiteboard adorned with the grim collage of information that accumulated in the wake of a homicide, and she gave it a quick look. A nasty one. Great. Opposite her, Tammy scowled when Jude sat down, then remembered herself and uncapped her pen, scrawling her name and the date on a sheet of paper. ‘Sri Lanka, did someone say you were? It’s on my bucket list.’

‘Yes. We were there for three weeks. Amazing place.’

‘That’s enough chat.’ Jude set his coffee down on the table and stood up again in front of the whiteboard. ‘I’ll just run over the background to bring Ashleigh up to speed.’

‘If you don’t mind, Jude, I’ll say my piece first. I’ve a dozen other things to do and I don’t have the time to go over old ground. It’s not as if we didn’t cover this in the 7.30 briefing.’ Tammy drew a savage line under the heading Second Team Meeting.

Ashleigh, who noticed everything even though today she was too exhausted to pick up on its significance, saw Jude lift an eyebrow and direct the swiftest, most discreet glance towards Doddsy before passing on. Small group sessions with his smartest, most complementary thinkers were his favoured method of focussing on an issue once an investigation was in full swing. Tammy knew that. ‘Yes. Of course. But I’d like to bring Ashleigh up to speed first.’

Tammy was displeased, or so Ashleigh thought, but Jude ignored her, rattling off the briefest outline of what had happened the previous day. As he spoke, Ashleigh jotted down the details of Len Pierce and Natalie Blackwell’s macabre encounter in the bright March afternoon.

‘So,’ Doddsy said, with a suppressed sigh as Jude concluded his summary and sat down, as if he knew he’d get no joy from the question he was about to ask. ‘What did you make of it, Tammy?’

She ignored both him and Jude, turning her attention to Ashleigh instead. ‘You probably don’t know the place. It’s a farm track off the A66, on the right hand side, just after the turnoff for Temple Sowerby.’ She roughed out a rapid pencil sketch of the scene. ‘It’s a dead end. It goes down to some ruined farm buildings and there’s a riverside footpath cutting across the end of it, which cuts through a field to the Blackwells' cottage. That’s where Natalie was running. You’d expect there to be very little traffic other than the occasional farm vehicle, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are plenty of tyre tracks there.’

‘People turn their cars there if there’s a queue on the road.’ Jude looked up at the map on the board. ‘I’ve done that myself before now. But I’ve never gone all the way to the end of the lane.’

Doddsy rubbed his chin. ‘It’s well known locally as a bit of a lover’s lane. But more for…shall we say casual encounters.’

‘Dogging?’ Chris had none of Doddsy’s slightly old-fashioned restraint.

‘That would explain a lot.’ Tammy sniffed. ‘I did wonder. There are plenty of tracks, and we got some good readings. I’ll send you a list of everything we retrieved but the best ones are for what look like the two most likely. They’re the only fresh ones. One belongs to the Volkswagen car recovered at the scene.’

‘Owned by Len Pierce.’ Jude nodded towards Ashleigh.

‘I’ve had someone run the second through the databases. The best match I can come up with suggests a passenger vehicle that arrived after the VW and parked ahead of it in the lane. There was no room for the two to pass. You might speculate about whether this was done to prevent the VW driving away.’ She didn’t look towards Jude as she spoke, keeping her head down, pushing her glasses up her nose as she stared at her notes. ‘The tyres were