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

in the town. I also had a couple of PCs down at the hospital, talking to Gracie’s colleagues to see if we could pick up any leads.’

‘Obviously you got something.’

‘Yes. You know Tammy’s husband works up at the hospital.’

Jude nodded.

‘You might say he’s quite outspoken. Hates political correctness. Is a bit right wing. There have never been any serious allegations against him, but one thing I did pick up, from a number of his colleagues, is that he has a reputation for homophobia.’

Doddsy rubbed his chin. Bloody Phil. No-one in their right mind would suspect him of murder but it wouldn’t be the first time narrow-minded intolerance had made an innocent man a suspect. He caught himself up for making assumptions. You shouldn’t presume innocence any more than you should presume guilt but he couldn’t pretend to himself and if asked he wouldn’t be able to pretend to Jude. He desperately wanted Tyrone’s father to be innocent.

‘Okay.’ Jude digested that. ‘I take it when you say there were no allegations you mean there’s nothing serious, if I dare put it that way. By which I don’t mean any derogatory comments are acceptable. I mean he said nothing indictable and nothing justifying disciplinary action.’

‘Nothing like that. It was more of a historic thing, an attitude. He’s been there a long time — twenty years or so. They came to Penrith just after Tyrone was born, I think. But there are certainly a few people who raised the comment that Phil has made some unfortunate remarks in the past.’

‘I hope you weren’t allowing your boys and girls to ask any leading questions.’

Ashleigh looked momentarily outraged. ‘They asked if they knew of anyone who had anything against Gracie, for any reason whatever.’

‘Okay.’ Jude must have sounded sharper than he intended, because he lifted his hand in a general apology. ‘It just seems very…unusual that they mentioned it.’

‘I don’t think so.’ She turned her watch around on her wrist, unclipped it, clipped it back on. ‘I think we all have rather heightened sensitivities to these things these days. Rightly so.’

‘Claud took his diversity roadshow down into Tynefield, too, didn’t he?’ said Chris.

Doddsy spared a thought for Faye’s pet project. Good or bad? In the long run it was probably a good thing to talk about your sexuality and he’d been pleasantly surprised by the positive response, but he was a private individual and never welcomed the encouragement to bare his soul. It wasn’t as if no-one knew. Tyrone, openly and proudly gay, was one side of that coin. He was the other. Opposites attracted. He smiled.

‘Yes, but no-one seemed to think that’s what changed it.’ Ashleigh pointed out. ‘There’s nothing recent and nothing specific. It was just that several people mentioned that Phil had always been a bit intolerant of people who didn’t fit the mould. Mostly it was in the context that his kind of attitude is the exception these days rather than the rule.’

‘I imagine Tammy will have knocked a lot of that sort of nonsense out of him over the years.’ Doddsy was losing his objectivity. He knew Tammy well, knew that she was single-minded and determined in her pursuit of what was right and there was no way she would let anyone, even her husband, cause trouble for her child. In his heart he could understand and forgive her hostility towards him.

‘Maybe. But Phil lied to me.’ Jude looked as if a bad smell had wafted under his nose — not something as nauseous as the stench of death and decay, but an unexpected whiff of the sewer. ‘On the night of Gracie’s killing he first told me he didn’t know who she was, then he said he hadn’t recognised her at first but that he knew her by sight only. But according to Becca he did know her, reasonably well.’

‘She wasn’t the kind of person to slip under the radar.’ Ashleigh looked down at her notes again. ‘Even after a short acquaintance.’

‘No. And they participated in the same workshop.’

‘That doesn’t look great, does it?’ Ashleigh appeared unconvinced of Phil’s innocence. ‘He wasn’t initially in the frame for Len’s killing, but I took the precaution of going back and checking what he was doing on the Sunday afternoon when Len died.’

‘And?’

‘Tammy was at work and so was Tyrone. He was on his own. I asked Tyrone about it, as casually as I could, and apparently Phil had said he was out on his bike. He said he left the house in Stainton, drove to Langwathby, cycled about for a bit and came back again.’

Doddsy pushed his chair back six inches, not needing to look at the map as Chris was doing in order to see the implications. That placed Phil Garner comfortably in the zone where he might, if he’d lied about his route, have been present in the lane where Len had died on the Sunday afternoon.

‘There were no bike tyre marks at the scene.’ Jude tapped his pen on the table.

‘He could have left the bike somewhere and walked.’

‘There were no footmarks.’ But even as he said it, Doddsy remembered Phil’s words to Jude on the night of Gracie Pepper’s killing. ‘But he knows all about crime scenes. He may not have had any forensic training himself, but he’ll have picked up a lot along the way from Tammy. He’ll know exactly what to do to avoid contaminating a crime scene.’

‘And exactly what to do to avoid incriminating himself, as well.’

There was a short silence. Doddsy felt his own face twisting up in displeasure, just as Jude’s was doing. Sometimes crime came a little too close to home, and sometimes they had to remind themselves that circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough.

‘Yes, that’s true,’ Jude acknowledged. ‘But we need something more than that. As far as I can see, there’s no reason