Death on the Lake Read online

  Death on the Lake

  A DCI Satterthwaite mystery

  Jo Allen

  Also by Jo Allen

  * * *

  Death by Dark Waters

  Death Eden’s End

  Death on Coffin Lane

  Death at Rainbow Cottage

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  Author Copyright: Jo Allen 2021

  Cover Art: Mary Jayne Baker

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be resold or given away.

  * * *

  This story is a work of fiction. The characters are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Some of the locations used are real. Some are invented.

  To Terry Lynn Thomas, as wonderfully supportive a writing friend as I could hope for. Thank you xx

  Author’s Note

  ll of the characters in this book are figments of my imagination and bear no resemblance to anyone alive or dead.

  * * *

  The same can’t be said for the locations. Many are real but others are not. I’ve taken several liberties with geography, mainly because I have a superstitious dread of setting a murder in a real building without the express permission of the homeowner, but also because I didn’t want to accidentally refer to a real character in a real place or property.

  * * *

  So, for example, you won’t find Jude’s home village of Wasby on the map; you will find the church at Martindale but not George’s cottage nearby; you’ll find Hallin Fell but you won’t be able to place the Neilsons’ property beside it; and so forth.

  * * *

  And although I’ve taken these liberties with the details I’ve tried to remain true to the overwhelming beauty of the Cumbrian landscape. I hope the many fans of the Lake District will understand, and can find it in their hearts to forgive me for these deliberate mistakes.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  More by Jo Allen

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Ollie Neilson woke up groaning in the pool of sunlight that flowed through the cabin window and spilled over onto the bunk. Above the miasma of alcohol, the remnant buzz of a line of coke momentarily silenced him. He thought of Summer, rolled his naked body over and found the space beside him on the mattress empty.

  She couldn’t have gone far. For a second he lay with his mind racing in awed respect for Summer’s body, the way she used it, the talent she deployed, the tricks she’d taught him. Freeing his tongue, which clung mustily to the roof of his mouth, he ran it round his lips again as his blood pulsed at the thought of what had passed. He was eighteen, rich and fancy free; he’d tasted heaven and was ready to taste it again.

  The boat rocked as he rolled off the bunk and got to his feet. Or maybe it wasn’t the boat. The sunlight had been the herald of a still, perfect May afternoon and the only thing to disturb them had been the gentle wash of the Ullswater steamer as it forged its way to Patterdale.

  Hopefully none of the passengers had had a long lens on their camera — or rather, hopefully none of them knew who he was and thought it would be a prank to send pictures to his father. If they did that, he might have to re-evaluate the afternoon’s activities. But even as he thought about it, even as he steadied himself with a hand against the bulkhead, his feet braced slightly apart, he knew that Robert Neilson’s anger, though fierce, would be temporary; and the pleasure Ollie had had from Summer would live with him for a long, long time.

  If there were pictures, though. He smirked. His mates would think a lot of him then. Him and Will. There was a bit of him wouldn’t mind if there were pictures, as long as only the right people saw them.

  Focussing, he managed a look around. The cabin looked as if it had hosted an all-night party. Half a dozen empty beer bottles and one still with a sad half-inch of vodka lay on the floor, rebuking him. Any unsteadiness was his and his alone, and the Seven of Swords rested too gently on the lake to disturb them.

  Ollie looked further. Clothes — his, Summer’s and Will’s — lay strewn across the cabin floor. In a half-hearted attempt at restoring the damage before his stepmother got home, he picked up a pair of jeans and shook them into some sort of order. Summer’s panties dropped from them and he made a half-hearted snatch, but the legacy of his overindulgence was too much, and they fell to the floor.

  Bending down to pick them up wasn’t such a good idea, and the scrap of pale gold nylon only reminded him that however fragile his head was feeling, everything below the waist was in enthusiastic fettle. He picked his way to the ladder that linked the cabin to the deck four feet above and heaved himself into the sunlight, where Will sprawled naked over the deck. Ollie grinned. At least he’d managed to fall comatose somewhere in the shade and wasn’t going to suffer as his twin would, with a bad-tempered slash of sunburn flaming across the tender skin on the back of his neck. No doubt when Will came round he’d have the same thought that Ollie himself had had, and once Summer woke up no doubt they’d start all over again.

  It was Will’s turn first, though. They shared everything, and they did it fairly. Summer needn’t be any different.

  He hauled himself up over the last rung of the ladder, stretching in the sunlight, stirring his brother with his foot. ‘Okay, Willie, boy. Are you up for more? What have you done with her?’

  A yawn, a groan to match Ollie’s own of a moment earlier, and Will resurfaced in the land of the living. ‘Oh God. Oh my God.’ He paused, shook floppy fair hair out of his eyes and grinned. ‘Ollie. Jesus, that was some afternoon. That was fantastic.’

  At least, Ollie thought, he could be reasonably certain that Will hadn’t been shagging the girl without him. ‘Where is she?’ His gaze raked the deck and there was nothing there except a pile of discarded clothing and a pitifully small pool of vomit. That must be why Will had crashed out onto the deck, just falling short of the side of the boat. Ollie, who had managed not to be sick, filed that triumphant detail away for later. ‘Where’s Summer?’

  ‘Isn’t she down with you?’ Will sat up, only to twitch forward again as his flaming back touched the rail of the boat. ‘Shit. I’m burned.’ He poked at the back of his neck with a tender fingertip.

  ‘That’s going to hurt later. Just as well you didn’t crash out on your back, or your bits would be fried.’ Briefly, Ollie considered the possibility that he’d somehow overlooked a naked woman in in his earlier survey of the cabin, only to dismiss it as bizarre. Nevertheless, as he reached for his shorts and briefs and pulled them on, he cast a quick look back down the hatch, only to crease his brows in a post-orgiastic puzzlement. The cabin wasn’t large and there was nowhere she could have hidden.

  Drink and drugs rot the brain, their mother had always warned them, but his must have rotted on the instant if he couldn’t even see what must be in front of his eyes.

  Must be. Because Summer’s clothes were in the middle of the cabin, and his and Will’s were on the deck, so if Summer had gone home
she must have done it in the nude. And though she was a hell of a girl when the mood took her, he was reasonably certain the mood only ever took her in private and that walking five miles along the Ullswater Way with no clothes on was just not how she rolled.

  Well. He shook his head. The fact he was even having that kind of interior monologue showed how smashed he must have been earlier on.

  ‘Has she gone home?’ In his turn, Will reached for his clothes, the follower not the leader in the major things as well as the minor. Ollie always capitalised on how the hour’s difference in age weighed disproportionately in his favour, how Will endorsed whatever idea he came up with, no matter how mad, how he aped every action, sooner rather than later. Inviting Summer along for the afternoon had been Ollie’s idea, and so had getting hold of some good-quality cocaine through a mate. No doubt in the reckoning — which, he now saw, was unavoidable — he’d be the one who took the lion’s share of blame.

  That was probably fair enough; but the reckoning was for the next day, or the day after, and the puzzle of Summer’s whereabouts was immediate. ‘She can’t have done.’

  ‘She must have done. She’s not here.’ Will picked up Summer’s bra, which had somehow got tangled in his discarded shorts, and twirled it round his finger, staring at it in adolescent fascination.

  ‘She’s left her clothes. And the boat.’ They were moored fifty yards or so off shore, and the dinghy that ferried them to and from the landing bobbed at the back of the Seven of Swords. The line that tethered it hung limp in the silver water.

  ‘She must have swum for it,’ offered Will, by way of a solution.

  Ollie’s brain told him both that she must have done or she’d be on the boat, and that she couldn’t have done because she’d left her clothes behind. The answer would be somewhere in between, but he was damned if he could see through his muddleheadedness to what it might be. Nevertheless, in a tentative search for a solution, he peered over the guard rail and down into the lake.

  The answer was there all right. He opened his mouth to swear but all that came out was a child’s whimper.

  ‘Ollie?’ Will hauled himself to his feet, joined his twin at the rail, froze for a second and repeated the exact same sound. On the far side of the lake, a queue of traffic snaked along the road from Glenridding to Pooley Bridge and the shadow of Gowbarrow Fell began its evening stretch, flexing dark muscles in the late afternoon. A yard below them Summer Raine floated face-down in the lake. Her blonde hair drifted around her head like the tentacles of a pallid jellyfish, stranded and helpless in the shallows, and the tattoo of a butterfly that graced the back of her left thigh shimmered under half an inch of water. She was naked. A dark strand of water weed curled like a wound across her shoulder blade.

  It was the tattoo that did it. Some time not that long before — three hours maybe — Ollie had spent several enjoyable minutes familiarising himself with that tattoo. Now its sodden blurriness brought reality home to him. Summer had been in the water a long time, maybe all the time he and Will had been asleep, and now she was dead. He found his voice. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What do we do? What do we do?’ Will could manage only an anxious bleat. ‘Dad’ll kill us.’

  Robert Neilson, a man who was lighthearted and fun as long as he deemed the situation wholesome, was humourlessly upright when it came to morals. Maybe if he’d been more relaxed about things, thought Ollie in a moment of startling clarity as he stared down and watched a lap of water ripple the blonde hair he’d so recently laced his fingers through, there wouldn’t have been so much to tempt them in what had seemed like a good idea. ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is dead, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ollie’s brain ticked. ‘We need to get rid of her.’

  ‘Get rid of her?’ Will’s jaw dropped. He looked about twelve years old.

  If Ollie looked to his brother for leadership he’d do so in vain. One of them had to take a decision. ‘Yes. Because Dad’ll kill us. But he’s not back until tomorrow night and Miranda isn’t back for another hour or so and so we have time to get rid of the body.’

  ‘But it was an accident. We’ll make it worse if we hide it.’

  ‘Just until the drugs get out of her system. And ours.’ Ollie’s palms were sweating and it wasn’t the sun. ‘We didn’t hurt her. It’s not our fault if she went for a swim somewhere on the way home. We’ll take her in the dinghy and leave her. Someone will find her but the drugs will be out of her system by then. It’ll look like an accident.’

  ‘But Dad—’

  Ollie folded his lips at the thought. ‘Yeah. He might suspect. But he won’t know for certain.’

  Will gripped the rail with white knuckles, but Ollie knew he’d go along with it. He always did. After a second he saw sense, stood up. ‘Her clothes. What about them?’

  ‘We’ll take them, too.’ The decision made, Ollie dropped down into the cabin, scooped up Summer’s jeans and pants and scrambled back up again to where Will, his face a mask of nausea and shock, stood at the back of the boat with the girl’s sandals, bra and flimsy cotton top.

  ‘Here’s her bag.’ Will poked it out from under one of the seats with his foot.

  ‘Okay.’ Ollie dropped it into the dinghy, jumped down and struggled to keep his balance as it rocked under his feet. ‘Let’s get her in here.’

  As he looked towards the shore, the day got worse. Their stepmother’s car was parked in front of the house. ‘Miranda’s back. We’ll keep behind the boat and maybe she won’t see us.’

  He waited for Will to jump down into the dinghy and take his place at the stern before he unshipped the oars and manoeuvred them into the shelter of the Seven of Swords. The sun was beginning to dip, so it must be almost five o’clock. Surely they hardly had a prayer of getting away with it, on a summer evening in the Lake District, with a public footpath along the water’s edge commanding one route of escape and their stepmother, who might be only slightly more forgiving than their father, having a full view over their path if she chanced to look out over the second? But Ollie was made of stern stuff, a teenager rapidly forming in the image of his father. There was no such thing as a hopeless case, no situation you couldn’t bluff or bluster or bully your way out of if you applied yourself to it. He paused for a moment before he dipped the first oar in the water, rotating the dinghy and sending it alongside Summer’s body. ‘Grab her feet.’

  ‘Her feet?’ Will seemed mesmerised by the ripples from the oar, the way they rolled up to the girl and ran up against her bare arm and side, ran down her leg, unfurled around her head and them went on out into the lake in disarray, fading, fading, fading into oblivion.

  ‘Yes. I’ll get her head’ Gritting his teeth, Ollie reached down and grasped Summer’s shoulder. Hours earlier it had been living, pulsing, exciting; now it was queasily flaccid under his hand.

  The dinghy rocked violently as they tried to roll her waterlogged body upwards and it took two attempts. At the second, they heaved her over the gunwales and she sprawled in the bottom of the boat, face upward, eyes wide and glassy.

  Will, visibly gagging, sent Ollie a troubled look, but he said nothing. What was there to say? They were Robert Neilson’s sons. Nothing defeated them. And, driven by the chilling sobriety of coping, Ollie began rowing and drove the dinghy, with its guilty cargo, into the shadow of the trees that overhung the shore.

  Two

  ‘Breakfast in ten.’ Jude Satterthwaite closed the door of his girlfriend’s bedroom and his steps, firm and meaningful, descended the stairs to the kitchen. Left sitting at her dressing table, one towel wrapped around her body and another round her head, Ashleigh O’Halloran performed a quick calculation. Was ten minutes long enough to get dry, get ready for work and read the tarot cards?

  It wasn’t. In a sense it didn’t matter; Jude would be quite happy chatting away in the kitchen to her housemate while he rustled up coffee and toast. He’d know what she was doing, because they’d been together for six months, and even if h
e didn't know he’d guess — or rather, deduce. He was a detective and knowing things was more than just a part of his job; it was rooted in his nature. Nevertheless, she’d rather not make it quite so obvious.

  She towelled down her hair, tossed the towel on the bed and dried herself quickly, then got dressed. ‘I’ll just be a second,’ she said to the cards that sat on her dressing table wrapped in a pile of purple silk, ‘and I know I shouldn’t rush it. But I value your advice.’

  That was why she was discreet. It wasn’t that he’d laugh, though he knew about the cards and teased her about them on a regular basis. It had taken her a while to persuade him tarot wasn’t about fortune-telling but about concentration and meditation and making the best of all the available information, but nevertheless he couldn’t quite bring himself to buy into them as the useful tool they were. For Jude detection was all about your brain and the evidence in front of it, whereas for Ashleigh the job benefited from intuition. You needed evidence but you needed intuition, too.

  She never used cards for her work. It took a lot to keep your soul healed when every day carried with it the risk of coming across some kind of inhumanity, a crime perpetrated against the vulnerable or a violent death. The cards gave her a sense of perspective and kept her sane.