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

Gracie or Giles on the grapevine. Though you’ll have other things to talk about, I imagine.’

Doddsy slit the envelope open with his forefinger and extracted a folded A4 sheet. Jude was still talking to him, but he wasn’t listening. All he could see was the sheet in front of him, four words, neatly typed.

DI DODD. You next.

*

‘Can we keep it short?’ Phil glanced at his watch. ‘I’m so busy I can barely manage a lunch break these days. You’ll know all about that.’

On the other side of the road an ambulance made its leisurely way on to the hospital campus. Aware of how bad it might look for Phil to be interviewed by the police at work, Jude had acceded to his request to come off-site, but that constituted the single table and chairs near the coffee machine in a petrol station. Phil was still wearing his pager clipped to his belt and kept a forefinger resting on it as if to remind Jude of his indispensability.

‘I’ll get to the point.’ If he hadn’t had a dozen other things to do he’d still have wanted to keep the meeting as short as possible, but he was even more keen to do so since the threat that had landed on Doddsy’s desk had thrown more fuel on the metaphorical fire. ‘I don’t think you were quite straight with me on Tuesday night.’

‘You think that?’ Phil was a big man and he put his shoulders back to make himself bigger.

Used to more direct challenges from more violent men, Jude ignored the implied threat but he made a mental note and it didn’t favour Phil. ‘I do. Remember you told me you didn’t recognise Gracie Pepper?’

‘I didn’t recognise her at first. It was dark, and she was covered in blood. And she didn’t look like I knew her. Anyway I told you later that I did recognise her.’

‘You told me you didn’t know her very well.’

‘She didn’t work in my department.’

‘No. But you participated in the same workshop with her a few weeks ago.’

‘Ah.’ Phil sat back and picked up his coffee cup. ‘Of course. Those bloody sessions. Complete waste of my time and of public money. We’re stretched enough without having someone making us all fart around telling everybody stuff they’d no desire to hear. Some people buy into that, but not me. I just made something up.’

And thereby confirmed himself to Jude as a liar. Not that Jude fundamentally disagreed with Phil’s assessment of the workshops, though the doctor was exactly the type of man they were meant to reach and yet the type who would ultimately remain unconvinced. ‘Do you remember Gracie from it?’

‘Now you mention it, yes, but I didn’t at the time.’

‘I understand she was a bit of a star turn.’

‘She may have been. I probably spent the afternoon thinking of all the paperwork I’d have to do that evening. If that’s all you’ve got to offer in the way of an interview, perhaps we could just have done it over the phone.’

‘You were out on your bike on the afternoon Len Pierce died. Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Where did you go?’ Jude had an OS map in his briefcase and fished it out, unfolding it. ‘Can you show me?’

Phil hesitated, just a fraction. ‘I don’t remember the exact route. Up along the hillfoot villages, anyway. I parked at Langwathby and went from there. Then I cycled down to Knock and back via Newbiggin.’ Phil reached for the map and his finger sketched a furtive route, carefully skirting away from Temple Sowerby. ‘I left late morning. I saw all your blue lights in the distance.’

‘Did you stop anywhere?’

‘I had a sandwich in the pub at Langwathby before I started.’

That would be verifiable, but how much of the rest of Phil’s route would be? ‘Did you have your phone with you?’

‘I left it in the car. I cycle where I feel like cycling. I have enough dealings with computers in the rest of my life. I don’t need them nagging at me about where to stop and start and where to turn left.’

For a moment Jude thought of Natalie, slave to her own obsession with the fitness tracker as its foreman, shouting orders she had to obey. ‘Okay. We’ll ask around.’

‘Let’s hope someone saw me, then, because if you try and finger me for a hate crime you’ll be the one who looks stupid.’

‘It’s murder,’ Jude said, folding the map and replacing it in the case, ‘twice over. That’s pretty serious.’

‘Sorry for being inexact. I’m not a lawyer.’ Phil fingered his pager again, as if willing it to ring. ‘If that was all? I need to get back to my patients.’

‘One more thing. You haven’t written to DI Dodd recently, have you?’

‘No.’ Phil got up and leaned forward, a sorry attempt to intimidate. ‘I don’t write to people. If I have something to say to that man, I’ll say it to his face. You can tell him that.’ And he turned and headed from the building.

Jude sat for a moment after he’d gone, watching him. Doddsy was right. Phil didn’t strike him as the kind of man to pussyfoot around, certainly not the kind who’d kill two people at random before he got to the person who triggered his fury.

And then there was Doddsy. He reflected a moment longer on the note. Faye, when he’d alerted her, had taken it as seriously as he’d expected but her intensity had been frightening. She’d had it off to the lab for assessment within a minute of being shown it, as if the whole thing was personal to her.

So she should. There was a clear and a present threat, now, not only to anyone in the area who was gay but to police officers in particular. But it was