Death on the Lake Page 6

  ‘Yes. It’s midway between Sandwick and Howtown if you go by the lake route. About a mile, either way. Did anything come from the witness statements?’

  ‘Only that they all seem to think it was the boyfriend whodunnit, even though there’s absolutely no evidence of any foul play.’

  ‘Interesting. Okay, I’ll let you get on. You carry on. I’ll be about fifteen minutes behind you.’

  Ashleigh started the car and drove, without any particular urgency, along the narrow lakeshore road. On another day she’d have spent more time appreciating the beauty of one of Ullswater’s moodier days. The previous day there had been sun and the fresh green shoots of spring, a shimmering ripple of turquoise where bluebells were about to burst out, but today a clag of thick wet cloud smothered the tops of even the lower fells and shower after shower blew in on the westerly breeze. It took her ten minutes to reach Howtown, where she parked at the side of the road.

  Carly Bright, the uniformed policewoman who’d called her, was waiting for her. ‘We’ve closed the path to the public at both ends. I’ll take you along and show you the lie of the land. If you ask me it’s pretty clear what happened. She decided to go for a swim and couldn’t get out. Cramp, maybe. The water’s cold if you’re not used to it.’

  Ashleigh let the woman’s assumptions go unchallenged. It might be all there was to it. It might not be. Only a rigorous examination of the evidence would give them an idea and even then the circumstances of Summer’s death might never be established.

  Turning up the hood of her raincoat against the drips from the trees where the path entered the wood, she followed her uniformed colleague along the narrow path. About a mile, Jude had said, and the quick glance she’d snatched at the map showed her that it was, indeed, as far from the road as possible. That sparked a warning at the back of her mind.

  As they squelched through the last few yards, she saw Carly and her colleagues had been busy. The path had been closed off and blue and white tape fluttered in the breeze. A boat was just beginning to motor off down the lake and, from their elevated position, Ashleigh saw the black body bag inside it. She shivered. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘The divers found it. About fifteen yards off the shore.’

  They went no closer to the scene, but there was a clear enough view from the path. Not that there was much to see — just wind-driven wavelets running up to the shore and the drip-drip of overhanging trees. ‘They’re taking the body off now?’

  ‘The ambulance will meet the boat at Pooley Bridge and they’ll get it up to Carlisle. We’ve photos, of course.’ Carly took out her phone and flicked through them, her face a mask of forced indifference, but Ashleigh gave them barely a glance. There would be plenty of time for that later. ‘What about her belongings?’ There was no sign of them. ‘You haven’t moved them?’

  Carly allowed herself a look of sheer outrage at the suggestion. ‘They’re down below us. You can’t see them from here. They were stowed under an overhang. To keep them dry, maybe. I haven’t been down there but some of the lads came at it from the lake.’

  But it had been a beautiful afternoon and if the Neilson twins were to be believed Summer had been very drunk. Carly had photographs of Summer’s clothing, and Ashleigh was more ready to look at them — a pile of clothing, denim shorts, bra and pants, white cotton top.

  ‘Everything’s looking shipshape down here. You’ve done an efficient job.’ Jude’s voice, brisk and devoid of any emotion, drifted along the path behind them. ‘I can see it’s all under control. I won’t come any closer. I’m sure I’ll see everything there is to see later.’ He stood on the edge of the path and frowned down at the shore. His expression was one Ashleigh was too familiar with — concentration and faint discontent. Something was troubling him. ‘I overheard that last bit. It looks as if you’ve got everything organised. Site secured and everything. Excellent. I’ve asked for a CSI team to come down here as soon as possible.’

  ‘A bit of a waste of time, if you ask me,’ said the PC. ‘It’s pretty obvious what happened.’

  ‘Well, maybe.’ Jude seemed unperturbed. ‘But until we know any better we’ll just treat it as something a bit more sinister. Call it overcautious if you want. Most people do. But it’s procedure.’

  Carly must know that, and a light went on in her eyes, as if she’d suddenly realised what was odd. It would be that a chief inspector was down on site and taking an interest in a situation that was unarguably tragic but also routine. ‘Sir.’

  ‘You just carry on. I’ve asked DI Dodd to come down and help out here as well. Not,’ he added to Ashleigh in a undertone, as he turned away, ‘that I think you aren’t capable. Far from it. But as there seems to be very little doubt about the identity of the body, and as the buzz on the street seems to be that her boyfriend is a bad ‘un, I’d like to go down and talk to him before he knows that she’s been found and where. And it goes without saying I’d like you to come with me.’

  Leaving the scene in the hands of others, they walked back along the path. Jude had no hood, but he turned the collar of his coat up against the drips. ‘It’s the trouble with drowning, isn’t it? You never get to see the body in situ.’ He paused for a moment. ‘If it was drowning, but the PM will tell us that.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll say one thing for PC Bright. She made sure she had photographs of it from every possible angle. She was flicking through them like they were her holiday snaps.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said with a cheerfulness that had to be false. ‘Tammy and the CSI team will get the shoreline covered and checked. Interesting, though. I didn’t see any sign of anyone having gone down there from the path. Not even our lot. Although I expect we’ve lost a lot of evidence already, with the rain, and God knows who was along the path on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Evidence? Do you think it was murder?’

  ‘Did I say that? I think it’s a suspicious death. And until we’ve done everything possible to to establish what happened I’m keeping an open mind.’

  ‘I wondered if the body could have been hidden.’

  ‘It’s such a convenient spot, isn’t it? As far as possible from either end of the road.’ He frowned. ‘Yes. That was the first thing that struck me. The trees overhang. You can’t see it from the path unless you’re actively looking to see what’s down there, although there’s a clear enough view if you step off a bit. And it’s an extraordinarily odd place to choose for wild swimming when there are so many other, easier places to get into the water.’

  ‘And out of it.’

  ‘Yes. Though of course, if you’re right about drugs there’s definitely something suspicious about it.’

  ‘Jude.’ Ashleigh ran a few steps to catch up with him, just as the path emerged from the trees and onto the shore. ‘Level with me.’

  He stopped. ‘Yes, if I can.’

  ‘I’ve got two questions. Firstly, why are you getting involved in what looks for all the world like an accidental death and secondly, given that you are involved, why wouldn’t you authorise a search of the Neilsons property when I asked you?’

  ‘We didn’t need a search of the property to find her.’

  ‘It must have occurred to you that there’s a possibility she didn’t die accidentally. That she was killed elsewhere and the body was brought here. And even that she might not have died until recently.’

  ‘You saw the pictures of the body. I accept you aren’t a pathologist, but would you say she’d been in the water for longer than, say, twenty four hours?’

  Ashleigh allowed herself a shiver that she hadn’t dared give way to under PC Bright’s deadpan stare. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. So we wouldn’t have found her if we’d searched Waterside Lodge. But as it happens, I can answer both of your questions, and the answer is the same, although you won’t find it any more satisfying than I do. Faye has a bit of a bee in her bonnet about the Neilsons. I think I can tell you that. So she’s asked me to both keep an eye and keep my distance. Sati
sfied?’

  ‘Obviously not, but I imagine that’s all you’re going to tell me. There are a lot of lies being told up at Waterside Lodge.’ Most of them by two teenage boys who’d done some foolish things and were terrified their father would find out what they were.

  Seven

  To save time, they drove the few hundred yards from the pier car park to the farm where Luke Helmsley worked. Jude listened to Ashleigh’s succinct briefing with only half his attention. In a sense, she was right and he didn’t need to be there. She was right, too, about the Neilsons’ property. When he’d looked over the twins’ statements they’d had a pattern of phrasing that suggested they’d been agreed beforehand and that in its turn implied they had something to hide. Not the drink; they’d admitted to that. Drugs, then. Ashleigh was right about that, too.

  He pulled the car up rather too sharply at the farm gate. A few years before he’d found himself in a similar situation, when he’d discovered Mikey with a stash of soft drugs. His response then had been the one that Ashleigh was so insistent on now, and he’d done exactly what she wanted him to do now and pressed forward with it.

  When he’d marched Mikey up to the police station those few years before, it hadn’t turned out the way he’d expected. Mikey had got away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the police and an almighty dressing down from his mother, but there had been ramifications. The supplier of the drugs had turned out to be one of Jude’s own friends, and the police acted less charitably to those who dealt drugs for profit than those who experimented by way of rebellion.

  Adam Fleetwood was out of prison now, his feet firmly under Becca’s table. That was something else Jude hadn’t anticipated when he’d delivered his brother to the desk sergeant at Hunter Lane. He’d never thought Becca wouldn’t support him, that she’d see his actions as over-zealous and align herself firmly on the side of those who believed that you should live and let live.

  Mikey hadn’t got into any serious trouble, and all the signs were he hadn’t been tempted back into the wrong sort of company, though he still hung around with Adam and his mates, as if to make a point to Jude that he didn’t need his older brother looking after him. That was the only positive he could see that had come from it.

  ‘Okay, Jude?’ Ashleigh had got out of the car while he was still turning over the past, and was looking at him as if she understood.

  She probably did. He realised he’d been gazing down at the lake and the Seven of Swords as it floated so serenely just off the Neilsons’ manicured garden. Those kids, spoiled and entitled, believing themselves invincible, weren’t too different to Mikey at a slightly younger age and if Ashleigh was right they were already on a slippery slope.

  ‘Fine.’ He got out of the car and came round to join her

  ‘If the toxicology reports show there were drugs involved, will you have the place searched?’

  ‘That’s for Faye to decide.’ But there was a curl of yellow cowardice to the edge of his soul. He didn’t want to go through all that again, with someone else judging him if the drugs turned out to be locally supplied, and Faye’s insistence that he should stand back from the Neilsons looked as if it was all that was protecting him from it.

  ‘Hmm.’ She looked unimpressed.

  He managed a smile, though it was an ironic one, at the thought of the one girlfriend castigating him for not being tough enough on drugs where the former one had cut him off for precisely the opposite reason. ‘Let’s get on with the matter in hand, shall we?’

  The farmer directed them to a field a further half mile up the dale where Luke Helmsley, clad in wellies that were thick with mud, stained overalls that might once have been blue and a hat sodden with the last of the rain, was standing back and surveying a bulge in a dry stone wall with a pensive expression on his face. The cloud had thinned and the strong May sun was beginning to muscle its way through for the next phase of the day’s weather.

  ‘Mr Helmsley?’ Ashleigh called as they got out of the car.

  He looked at them, and waited as they approached, scanning them with the dispassionate eye of a stockman at a market. ‘Aye. You must be the police.’

  ‘Yes. DS O’Halloran and DCI Satterthwaite. We’ve come to talk to you about Summer, ask you a few questions.’

  Jude stuck his hands in his pockets. This kind of thing was best left to Ashleigh, with her knack of gaining people’s confidence. All the indications he’d seen from his quick glance over the witness statements had suggested Luke hadn’t been the sharpest tool in the box academically, but the way the man was looking at them implied an innate cunning. Even without that, he must surely know that, as a potentially jealous boyfriend, he was first in line for questions if Summer was dead and the automatic prime suspect if she turned out to have been murdered.

  ‘Okay.’ Luke took his cap off and turned it over in his hands. He was a tall man, and broad shouldered. His hands were those of a workman, blunt-fingered, calloused and with broken nails. A dirty fabric plaster was wrapped around a finger. ‘You’ve been looking for her. Have you found her?’ He spoke matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid we have.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yes. I’m very sorry.’

  Luke who, Jude thought, had a limited range of emotion, paused for a second to process the information. ‘I reckoned that would be the case, if she didn’t come back. Out drinking with the Neilson kids, they say.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was no point in denying anything when the local gossips were onto it.

  ‘Did you know she was there?’

  ‘Nah.’ Luke shook his head. ‘Didn’t know where she was, only I seen her going along the road. I was with Tom. He seen her too.’

  Jude nodded. Luke seemed to think this cleared him, but it didn’t account for his later movements.

  ‘She’d said something about going up to talk to Mrs Neilson about her masters degree,’ went on Luke, ‘but I reckon that was a line to get into the place and have a look round. Turns out she didn’t need it anyway, if she got in with the twins. Didn’t surprise me when I heard, though. She was more their sort than mine. Rich. Posh. What happened to her? Off her head and had a fall?’

  ‘It looks as if she went for a swim and drowned.’

  ‘That’s a real shame.’ Luke’s face creased into the briefest expression of sadness. ‘She was fun.’

  ‘You knew her quite well, didn’t you?’ Ashleigh was turning on the sympathy now.

  ‘She called me her boyfriend. But I never thought I was the only one.’ Luke laughed. ‘She wasn’t the only one for me, either. If there was anyone else around I’d have been interested. And she was only here last summer for the sailing season. She never said she was coming back, but she turned up looking for a shag. No strings. Why would I say no?’

  Luke’s convictions for violence, Jude recalled, had both related to the same woman, implying his jealousy might be specific, rather than inherent. He certainly didn’t seem bothered one way or the other about the death of the woman he’d been sleeping with, and Summer hadn’t been worried enough about his reputation to let it stop her having an afternoon of unleashed fun with the Neilson twins. ‘I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr Helmsley. About Sunday afternoon.’

  Something — fear? — flared briefly in the man’s face. ‘I thought it was an accident.’

  ‘It looks that way.’ Ashleigh jumped in to soothe him. ‘It’s procedure, Mr Helmsley. that’s all. Trying to pin down when and how it happened. Just boxes we have to tick.’ She made a face, as though she was confiding in him. ‘We’ll be asking the same of her colleagues. It’s in case anyone saw her.’

  ‘I didn’t see her after when I told you. Tom sent me further up the dale and I was there ’til about six o’clock. Then I went home.’

  Jude had fished a notebook out of his pocket and was jotting down a brief summary of the conversation. ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘Saturday. We went to the pub for a couple
of drinks. I went back to her place after that. Then I went home. I was working Sunday. Had to be up early.’ Luke rubbed a thoughtful hand around his chin. The stubble, Jude noticed, almost hid a swelling bruise.

  Ashleigh noticed it, too. ‘There was a bit of excitement in the pub, wasn’t there?’

  ‘One of them in the village tell you that, did they? Some folk can’t help but badmouth their neighbours.’ Luke touched the bruise again, as if there was no point in trying to hide it now he’d given himself away. ‘You might call it excitement. Just normal for me.’

  The definition of exciting varied from person to person and it was pretty clear Luke regarded a Saturday night punch-up as the rule rather than the exception. ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Some Londoner getting loud. I hate the bastards. They get mouthy when they’ve had a drink.’

  ‘Aye, some folk do,’ Ashleigh said. She’d changed her voice, Jude noticed with amusement, picking up a trace of a local accent in place of her usual private-school one, and Luke responded to it. ‘It all got sorted, your man at the pub was telling me.’

  ‘I bet he hates these folk as much as I do. But he can’t say anything because of the money. I better get on.’ He bent down to pick up a slab of stone and forced it into into a gap in the wall. ‘You want to ask George down at Martindale. Mardy old beggar, he is. But he sees everything from that cottage.’

  ‘We’ve already talked to him.’ George had seen Summer heading up the dale but not back again.

  ‘Is that right?’ Luke had lost interest in the conversation.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Helmsley.’ Ashleigh backed away. ‘I’m so sorry about Summer, again.’

  ‘I’ll miss her I suppose. But there are plenty of other lasses.’ His brow did darken at that.

  They left him staring at the wall, picking up bits of rock and weighing them in his hand, evaluating them and the spaces he wanted to fill. ‘It’s a dying art,’ Jude said, as she started the engine and drove along the narrow lane towards Howtown, ‘dry stone walling. Young Mr Helmsley is a bit of a craftsman. If I knew more about it I could have had a chat with him about it.’