Death on the Lake by Jo Allen (rocket ebook reader txt) 📕

Dry soil, he said to himself again. Dry soil. He dropped to his knees by the grave, moved the flower arrangement, and unrolled the turf that had been laid upon it.

‘’What are you doing?’ said Ashleigh behind him, scandalised. ‘You can’t dig up George!’

If he was wrong, he wouldn’t find anything. He’d dig down a couple of inches, realise the effort was futile, replace the soil and the turf and leave the graveyard with no-one but Ashleigh and himself aware of how he’d desecrated George’s grave. If he was right, he’d be disturbing the crime scene.

But if he was right whatever — whoever — was in there might not have been there long and so, if it was human, might still be alive. He thrust both hands into one end of the loosely packed soil and his fingers touched something solid, a bare few inches below the surface. ‘Ash. Call for help.’

Down in the dale there was a signal and she was already on her phone, calling in to Doddsy as Jude kept on, turning the soil, scraping it away with little care for anything other than speed. But he was too late. He knew he was too late but still he kept scraping the earth away until the shape of a face emerged. ‘Ah, hell.’

‘Jude’s found a body,’ Ashleigh reported, ‘in the graveyard up at Martindale. In George Barrett’s grave. I don’t know. Hold on a minute.’

‘No rigor,’ Jude reported, his voice terse. ‘It hasn’t been here long.’ His fingers closed on something hard and cold. ‘Bloody hell. It’s a gun.’ And then, scooping away soil by the handful, he revealed a head, the skull marked with a bloody mess of soil, blood, matted hair. But beneath all that, a recognisable face.

He sat back on his heels. ‘It’s Ryan Goodall.’

Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that.

Twenty-Four

The patrol car from Martindale had reached them in minutes, and it was another half an hour before the CSI team rolled in. ‘I should just set up camp in this place,’ Tammy had said to them, in passing. ‘And I hear you’ve contaminated the scene, too. Can’t trust you clodhoppers.’

Jude had shrugged the objection aside. She might joke about it, and he’d unquestionably made her job more difficult than it needed to be, but she’d know as well as he did that he’d had to be sure the man couldn’t be saved.

‘He can’t have been there very long,’ he said to Ashleigh as they left the scene to the experts and more cars poured down the dale.

‘No. And that’s the puzzle. If you’re right and he killed Luke, then who the hell killed Ryan? Or are we on the wrong track altogether?’

Instinct and experience told him not. Luke’s death bore the hallmarks of a killing of which Ryan was eminently capable, while Ryan’s own murder looked messy and opportunistic. ‘We’ll find out. Eventually.’

‘Here’s Doddsy.’ Ashleigh made a general wave in the direction to accompany her statement of the obvious. She was frowning, as though something troubled her about it as much as it troubled him. He strode away towards his friend’s car. ‘Good to see you. All we need — another dead body. Charlie Fry will fill you in on the detail, but I think you might want to get a drone up and see if there’s anything untoward. He can’t have gone far.’

‘I don’t know how it can have happened,’ Ashleigh said, her voice rich with frustration. ‘He’s barely dead. How didn’t we see anything?’

Jude thought back. They hadn’t looked in on the churchyard on the way, and when they’d been scrambling up the fellside and down again they’d been paying more attention to where they were going than to any activity below. And there were blind patches, hidden by a wall or a clump of trees or the solid bluff of Winter Crag. The killing could have taken place almost under their noses or, at the very least, immediately before they arrived. ‘I don’t know. But he sure as hell didn’t do it himself. We’ll stop any cars leaving the dale, of course.’

‘I’ve got a couple of uniforms stopping people at the footpaths at the Pooley Bridge end,’ said Doddsy, scratching his head. ‘But yeah, a drone would help.’

‘I’ll leave you to sort all that.’

‘Does that mean you’ve got something more important to do?’ Doddsy put his head to one side and gave his friend a quizzical look.

‘Possibly. I want to get down to Waterside Lodge and see what kind of response this news gets. And I’d like to get there before the gossip mill.’

The police cars had come without sirens but some of the locals had already spotted that something was up. Luke’s boss was looking from the cab of his tractor, as if he didn’t quite dare ask what was going on, and was already picking at his phone. The Neilsons might not be locked into the heart of the local news network, but it was only a matter of time before Robert’s PA headed out again, or someone from the hamlet of Sandwick came past, and then the news would spread. ‘Then I’ll need to get back into town and have a word with Faye.’

‘Ah. Yeah, leave it with me, then.’ Doddsy drifted off, his brow crinkling as he in his turn took in the scene.

Jude and Ashleigh drove the three quarters of a mile to Waterside Lodge, but he pulled up in a lay-by just before it. The gates were open. ‘That’s handy,’ he said. ‘I like a bit of a surprise. We’ll walk the rest.’

They got out of the car and he turned to look back. You couldn’t see the church from the gates, nor the entire length of the winding road, but you could just see George’s cottage and the point on the hill where the tent crouched behind the wall. Interesting. ‘Right. Let’s see what the Neilsons have to say.’

They