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

‘I had a two o’clock meeting with the town council. I left here at about half one.’

The detective, who seemed to miss nothing, lifted an eyebrow. ‘For a two o’clock meeting?’ The town hall was a couple of hundred yards away.

‘I like to be early. In my way I’m as bad as Nat.’ He smiled at her, a sign that his irritation was thawing. ‘Of course I got there far too soon, so I walked back to the square, got myself a coffee to take out and then turned up and drank it sitting on the wall outside. Right under the CCTV cameras, if you want to check.’

‘I don’t disbelieve you.’

The man would check anyway. Natalie, whose eyesight was good, noticed how he’d put an asterisk beside the word CCTV.

‘Good. And you obviously didn’t take your laptop with you. Is that normal?’

‘It was an informal chat, rather than a presentation. I took a folder with some hand-outs and a notepad. The meeting lasted for about forty-five minutes, and I came back via the arcade. I stopped at the bakery for a sandwich — I hadn’t had lunch. Then I cut through past the library.’ He gave a vague wave in the general direction of the churchyard. ‘As I got to the gateway I saw the door at the bottom of the stair was open.’

‘It’s not a shared stairway, is it?’

‘No. This office — office suite, they call it — is self-contained. It may once have been part of a flat overlooking King Street and the square, but it must have been partitioned. The stairs would originally have been the back stairs.’

‘And you normally keep the downstairs door open?’

‘If we’re in, yes. The bell doesn’t work. I didn't think anything of it, but I came up the stairs and the door to the inner office was open, too.’ He drew a short, sharp breath. ‘First up, of course, I thought the worst.’

That was what happened. Natalie felt a surge of pity for her husband. ‘But Claud,’ she pleaded from the other side of the room. ‘I left you a note.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t see it straight away. When I did see it, of course, it made sense.’

Jude Satterthwaite, she could tell, had already seen and read the note. He struck her as a man who already knew, or suspected, the answer to many of the questions he asked. Nerves rose in her stomach at the idea that the answer she might give him might be wrong, when everyone knew her anxiety made her an unreliable observer, prone to overstatement and always leaning towards the worst possible scenario. Would he understand that when he came to take her statement, or would he silently hold her to account for the inevitable mistakes she would make?

‘After that,’ Claud resumed, ‘I had a look round and saw that my laptop had gone. I guessed what had happened and went down to see if I could find Natalie. She wasn’t about, so I waited until she came back to make sure that we actually had been broken into. That must have been about ten past three. Then, of course, I called your sergeant immediately.’

‘Okay. Thank you.’ He drew a line under the notes on his pad, turned over to a new page and wrote her name at the top. ‘Mrs Blackwell?’

Her heart fluttered in her chest. It was always hard to explain herself to anyone who lived by the laws of hard-headed rationalism. Even Claud, who was endlessly tolerant of her many eccentricities, never made the fatal mistake of pretending to understand. ‘Well, it’s all very simple.’ Which it was, but how would it seem to any onlookers? ‘After Claud left for his meeting there was very little left for me to do. I’d been for my run this morning as usual, but we were in here early and so I’d cut it short. I wasn’t busy so I thought I’d take a quick run to get some of my miles in the bank. I do that sometimes. I always have my running gear with me, just in case.’

She looked at him, uncertain of his reaction. Some people laughed at her obsession and she struggled to sleep if the numbers weren’t safely logged, in her head or on the app, but he must have been used to hearing this kind of thing. ‘Where did you run?’

‘Just around the town. I have a route. It’s only a couple of miles. I run along Meeting House Lane, then up Wordsworth Street, along Beacon Edge past the cemetery, down Salkeld Road. Then Scotland Road and Middlegate and back. Sometimes I do it twice. Sometimes more.’

He smiled at her again. ‘I’ve seen you. I do that loop, too, though not often enough. It’s the hill that kills you. That’s why I always go up first.’ And then he moved her on, swiftly. ‘What time did you get back?’

‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Did you stop?’

‘Yes. I used to stop outside M&S to do my stretches but now I think that must be the way the killer got away.’ She couldn’t do that any more. Not after Gracie. The run along the end of the lane after Len Pierce had died had been hard enough and she had only a limited amount of courage to draw on. ‘I stop in Meeting House Lane, now.’

‘Okay. It doesn’t really matter, as your husband was already back, so we know when the burglary must have occurred. And you left the doors unlocked.’

‘Yes, because I didn’t have my key.’

‘Okay. No worries.’ He seemed very cheerful about it. ‘If you want my opinion it was an opportunistic theft, but given what’s been happening it’s probably wise to be extra vigilant. As I said, I’ll send a CSI round to look for fingerprints, but it might not be until tomorrow.’

Whoever it was