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

the noticeboard that rippled with worthiness — Lent lunches, prayer groups, services for Easter, a meeting about the proposed Rainbow Festival. ‘Anything?’

‘No sign of the weapon in the immediate area. we’re still looking. But we know who she is.’

‘Oh?’

‘Phil recognised her.’

‘Did he? He said he didn’t know who she was.’

‘He must have had a brainstorm, then. She’s one of the nurses from the hospital. Name of Gracie Pepper.’

He thought for a moment, running through the names of Becca’s nursing friends from three years back, but Gracie’s name rang no bells. ‘I don’t know her.’

They shared a moment’s silence. Doddsy would surely be thinking the same as Jude, that Phil was uncomfortably close to a murder scene. Things were difficult enough with Tammy as it was. Up in town she’d be waiting for Phil to come and get her while her colleagues set to imaging and assessing the body of Gracie Pepper, the nurse. ‘Okay. I’ll talk to Phil now.’

‘Good luck,’ Doddsy said under his breath as Jude turned away.

Phil, whose lean, spare frame was easily recognisable from the back, was sitting to one side in the nave, in deliberate isolation, staring towards the stained glass windows and the image of a risen Christ. One hand rested on the back of the pew in front and he was tapping his fingers in obvious impatience.

With a nod to Tyrone, Jude stepped across and slid into the pew beside Phil. ‘It’s not a great time to meet, is it? Sorry about Tammy’s birthday dinner.’

With a shrug, Phil ripped his attention away from a bunch of relentlessly cheerful daffodils in a jar on the windowsill. ‘Can’t be helped. It happens enough in my line of work as it is. Hers too. Birthday celebrations are moveable feasts anyway. You’ll know that.’

Jude’s rest day the following day, the one he’d planned to spend with Ashleigh somewhere where his phone didn’t get a signal, had already gone the same way as Phil and Tammy’s evening out. A good night’s sleep would make the ultimate sacrifice, too. ‘I won’t keep you too long. Run me through what happened and we can get the formalities done at the station. Then you can salvage what you can of the evening. And you can always contact me. You know that.’

‘Yeah.’ Phil took a blood-stained handkerchief out of his pocket, spat on it, and wiped blood from his fingers. The front of his coat was stiff with drying blood. ‘Not very hygienic, but I’ve got hand sanitiser in the car. Fire away, then. What do you want to know?’

The question, Jude recognised, was meant to buy a few seconds to compose himself. It didn’t matter how many deaths Phil had attended in the past. He would have had a few moments to prepare for most them, whereas the sudden discovery of Gracie Pepper, haemorrhaging her life out in the churchyard, seemed to have caught him by surprise. ‘Begin at the beginning and go on until the end.’

‘I’d arranged to meet Tammy at the pub. I finished my shift at the hospital at six, maybe, and parked in Friargate. I was going to cut through the churchyard.’ He picked up Jude’s questioning look. ‘Yes I know there are other places to park, but you know how it is. You do things from habit. I rarely come down through the town, and we were heading up to Roundthorn for dinner so I’d have had to go all the way round the one way system. And I thought I’d probably spend five minutes in the pub while Tammy finished her drink anyway, so I just parked where there was a space.’

He wiped his fingers for a second time, waiting while Jude scribbled down his notes. ‘Then the churchyard. I walked from the car park and I cut across the grass to the far side.’

‘Rather than go straight up and along King Street?’

‘It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. But actually the reason I went that way rather than the other was that I heard something.’

‘And that was?’

‘A voice. The sound bounces around, you know. And the place was quiet. Usually there’s the odd person cutting through, but there wasn’t anyone about at that end of the churchyard. I heard someone shouting into the phone about a body.’

That would be Claud. ‘Okay. And then?’

‘I ran across the grass. There was a man — I didn’t recognise him at first — kneeling on the ground next to something. I came running up and I could see that it was a woman and that she was badly hurt.’

‘What did the man say to you?’

‘He shouted out something like don’t touch the body, don’t touch the body. But I could see she was still breathing. I went through the whole trust-me-I’m-a-doctor routine but he kept on gibbering about a murder scene, so I shoved him out of the way and got on with it. She was bleeding very heavily and wasn’t conscious. At that point I couldn’t see her face. I tried to staunch the bleeding but there was nothing I could do for her, except hold her while she died.’

His tone was matter-of-fact, but there was the echo in it of the same desolation that had hung over Natalie's description of how she’d failed to save Len Pierce. If Phil couldn’t save a life in those circumstances, how could she have done? If, indeed, she’d really tried. ‘That was rough for you, Phil.’

‘Yes. Then the guy who was there started flashing his torch around. I recognised him then. The Blackwell chap who does those diversity sessions. And I saw who was dead. Gracie Pepper. That was a shock, too.’

Jude allowed himself a slight pause, made a mental note of the inconsistency. ‘Didn’t you say you didn’t know her?’

‘Did I? Maybe you misheard.’

‘Maybe.’ Jude met Phil’s