Death at Rainbow Cottage by Jo Allen (novel24 TXT) 📕

Yellow markers showed the position of blood, the body, the cigarette end. ‘Let’s pull together a bit more information. Chris. What do we know about Len Pierce?’

While Chris opened up a document on his iPad, Ashleigh took another long swig of her coffee. It might be enough to get her through the meeting but Jude — and Faye — was right. Coming to the office was a misjudgement which clearly proved the point: she shouldn’t be at work. Her eyelids drooped. Stifling a yawn, she tried to catch up with what Chris was telling them.

‘…well-known locally,’ he was saying. ‘He part-owns a cafe on Boroughgate in Appleby. The Cosy Cupcake Cafe. It’s been there for twenty years, apparently. Anyone know it?’

‘I do. It’s a bit kitsch for my taste. Too much chintz and pink knitted tea cosies. But it does a decent chocolate brownie, if you’re ever out that way.’ Doddsy licked his lips.

‘I’ve been in it a few times, but I don’t recognise him.’ Jude was staring at the picture, in perplexity. Not knowing things hurt him, almost as much as a personal affront, and Ashleigh, who had been dating him long enough to understand the way his mind went, had to struggle to hide her amusement. ‘I’ve never seen him in the shop. There’s always a woman behind the counter.’

‘That’ll be his sister. Maisie Skinner. She owns it with him. She runs the shop. He does the baking — did, I should say.’ Chris flicked up a piece of paper. ‘I went to break the news to her yesterday evening and took her to Carlisle to do the formal ID. She’s devastated, of course, and didn’t really want to talk about it. But from what she did say – and what she didn’t – I thought she wasn’t really surprised.’

‘Oh?’ Jude raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes. Lenny was openly gay and it’s pretty clear she disapproved of him. She said he’d never had a steady partner but tended to go in for more casual liaisons.’

‘Did he tell her about them?’ Ashleigh yawned. ‘Or is she just assuming things?’

‘No, she said he never shared his business with anyone. She said she’d warned him off what she called that kind of behaviour but he just laughed.’

‘I think I’ll go down and have a chat with her myself,’ Jude said. ‘When we get the results back from the lab we might have a clue who he was meeting or why. But it sounds to me as though she’ll have a view.’

A lover or a would-be lover, even a spurned lover. A business associate, a stranger or a friend. Len Pierce could have arranged to meet anyone on that lane. His sexuality was only the starting point for the investigation. ‘No leads?’

‘Not yet. He had a Facebook account but he didn’t post very much.’

‘Only pictures of cake, as far as I can see.’ Jude licked his lips as though the thought made him hungry.

‘He wasn’t on any other social media,’ Chris continued. ‘At least, not under his own name. He may have had other accounts. We’ve got his laptop and his phone and the tech guys are going to have a look at those. It’ll be interesting to see what comes up. His sister certainly wasn’t aware that he was involved in the local gay community.’

‘There’s no need for stereotyping. Loads of gay people don’t play a part in the gay community.’ Doddsy’s normal sweet nature showed the slightest signs of strain. ‘Most of us are happy to be part of the same community as everyone else.’

‘We can’t assume he was promiscuous just because he was gay.’ Ashleigh turned a reproachful eye on Chris, why ought to know better.

‘I’m not, but his sister does, and that’s our starting point. That bit about the gay community was her phrase, not mine.’ Chris’s perpetual smile turned away any dissonance. ‘She’s the certain generation — his older sister, I’d say by a good ten years, and probably not far off retirement age. Anyway, before she dissolved into tears and couldn’t tell me any more she did say she’d always told him that kind of thing — her phrase again, Doddsy, not mine — would get him into trouble.’

For no real reason Ashleigh thought of Faye, and the affair of which they’d both been ashamed and tried to conceal. She had no idea of Faye’s motivations but her own had been rooted in a fear of her own vulnerability. There were many reasons for being furtive. ‘It does look as if he was meeting someone. Suit. Neatly ironed shirt. Shiny shoes.’ The photographs of Len Pierce, sprawled in the mud, were distressing in their sense of optimism. ‘Dressed to impress, I’d say.’

‘Yes.’ Jude scribbled a frowning face and a question mark side by side on his pad. ‘It’s possible. Meeting up with someone seems the obvious reason for him to be where he was, but it doesn’t necessarily give us a motive. And it doesn’t follow that his killer was the person he met.’

‘Could it have been robbery?’ Ashleigh asked.

‘No. His wallet was in his jacket pocket. Cards and cash.’

‘And what do we know about the woman who found him?’ Ashleigh looked down at the notes she’d been making as the conversation continued. The clue to Len’s murder would be in his personal life. It always was.

‘Natalie Blackwell. She lives in the cottage on the other side of the field.’ Briefly, Jude ran through a description of the circumstances in which Len Pierce had been found. ‘She claims to have seen nothing and nobody. The CSI team haven’t turned up any evidence that anyone had tried the riverside path. It collapsed into the river a few weeks back, and it’s closed. We know from the information on Mrs Blackwell’s fitness tracker that she did go on a run, and we know where it was and