Death on the Lake by Jo Allen (rocket ebook reader txt) 📕

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