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

flung it open, resting his brawny forearm on the wall. In some insane, inexplicable way she was afraid of Jude Satterthwaite. ‘Chief Inspector. We’re up here.’

The detective paused at the doorway to check a phone message, lifted an eyebrow and pocketed the phone. With enough urgency to show he was keeping a close eye on events but not enough for even Natalie to panic, he ran lightly up the flight of stairs from the ground floor. Claud, who seemed entirely oblivious to potential danger, had left it wedged open for him. ‘Good afternoon Mr Blackwell. Mrs Blackwell.’ He nodded in Natalie’s direction. ‘I understand you’ve had a break-in. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’ Claud turned his back on the policeman, who was already running his trained eye over the premises to see if there was any damage, any disturbance. ‘It wasn't exactly a break-in, though. Was it Nat?’ He sighed.

Finding herself the focus of the man’s attention, Natalie reluctantly unfolded herself from the secure and womb-like position she’d assumed and sat straight up on the chair to face him. He was looking down at her trainers, as if he expected to find their soles rimmed with blood as they had been after Len Pierce’s murder, but if he hoped for some clue to catch her red-handed, then he was doomed to disappointment. The trainers had gone straight in the bin, as had the pair she’d been wearing when Gracie was murdered, and she’d never be able to wear the same brand again. ‘No, it wasn’t. I’m afraid it was my fault. I let them in.’

‘You let them in? So you saw them.’

‘No.’ Claud interrupted, as if the detective were simple and Natalie herself obstructive, rather than just not quite able to answer the question. ‘She didn’t let them in. It was carelessness.’

‘Mrs Blackwell?’

She wilted a little under his gaze. ‘Claud’s right. I was careless. I went out and I left the door open.’

‘Where did you go? For a run?’

‘Of course it was for a run. I keep telling you, Nat. This running is an obsession. You need to break it. It does you more harm than good.’ He turned to Jude. ‘I wasn’t here. I was out at a meeting. At the town council. I’m discussing a program of workshops with them, similar to those we’ve been running up at your place. And while I was away Nat went for a run.’

His scorn rebuked her. ‘You’re right. I know I shouldn’t have done. But I didn’t have any work to do, and I thought if I went out while you were out then I wouldn’t have to go out later on.’ She stuck a forefinger under the black rubber band of her fitness tracker and tugged at it, but it stayed as firm as a handcuff. ‘I didn’t have my keys with me, so I left the door open.’

Jude Satterthwaite said nothing either to condemn or reassure her, but crossed to the window and looked out. Natalie stood up, too, so could follow his gaze. A dark grey sky brooded behind the huge sandstone edifice of St Andrew’s Church and the green sward around it. In the distance the snowdrops and crocuses that swamped the grass beyond the church in early spring had faded, and the sharp spikes of daffodils threatened to burst out into glorious yellow at any moment. Maybe flowers grew well in churchyards because of the dead below them.

It was reasonably certain that the man wasn’t interested in the daffodils but (she shivered) trying to see if there was any spot from which they could have been watched. There must have been a dozen. The north side of the church, the south side, the entrance to the arcade, the stairway into the library, the lane that dropped down to King Street, where she’d appeared to find Claud taking his turn at stumbling on the newly-dead. All of them were vantage points for a casual observer, and that didn’t include any passing opportunist who might have spotted her running out of the office leaving the door swinging open, and tried his luck.

Jude concluded his review of the churchyard and turned back, running his eye over the contents of the office. Trying to see it through his eyes, Natalie saw only confusion — a pair of rickety chairs, a desk stamped with the hallmark of Claud’s enthusiastic chaos, boxes of marketing leaflets and tee shirts with a rainbow logo. ‘Was anything taken?’

‘My laptop.’ Claud flapped his hand at Natalie. ‘It’s not valuable in itself. It was an old one. But I keep confidential information on it. If there’s a data breach I could lose a lot of business.’

‘It’s secured, of course?’ The grey eyes swept the room again.

‘Yes. There are passwords for the laptop, for every package and for individual documents. I dare say your people could break into it in pretty short order, but a casual thief wouldn’t be able to.’

‘A casual thief would be more likely to wipe the data and sell it on,’ Jude agreed. ‘I don’t see any sign of damage, so my instinct is to conclude that it was an opportunistic theft.’

‘I thought we lived in a honest neighbourhood.’ Natalie resumed her seat again, bolt upright on the edge of it.

‘We do, pretty much. I maybe wouldn’t have gone out leaving my door open quite so obviously myself, but if I did I wouldn’t expect to be burgled when I got back.’ He got out a notebook. ‘I’ll get someone down here to do a quick sweep for fingerprints, but it doesn’t look to me as though there will be many clues. In the meantime, could you just run me through what you were both doing, when you were out, how long and so on?’

Claud took the second seat, running his hand across his brow. ‘Shall I start? My version of events is pretty slim.’

‘Go