Death at Rainbow Cottage, Jo Allen [top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT] 📗

Death at Rainbow Cottage

Jo Allen

Author Copyright Jo Allen 2020

Cover Art: Mary Jayne Baker

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be resold or given away.

This story is a work of fiction. The characters are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Some of the locations used are real. Some are invented.

 Dedication

To my lovely Beta Buddies. Thank you xx

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

More by Jo Allen

Prologue

Natalie Blackwell stood stock-still in the pool of blood, her eyes as wide as those of the stranger sprawled like a doll on the ground in front of her, her jaw as slack as his, but with stupefaction rather than mortality. She drew a hand across her eyes as if to waft this gruesome vision aside, but when the shadow had passed nothing had changed. The man still stared up at the blank white sky, the puddle of his blood still lapped at the soles of her muddied running shoes, and the deep scarlet stain had bled a few threads further into the Sunday-best starched white front of his shirt.

From somewhere nearby, a forlorn whimper penetrated the fog of confusion that had descended over Natalie’s brain. Her fear intensified. It took a second to understand that she was alone in the lane, quite alone, and the sound was only her pitiful cry for help.

He was dead. Surely he must be dead? But what if he wasn’t?

Clenching her teeth, she dropped to her knees on the edge of the grassy lane and, closing her eyes, laid a hand upon his chest as she’d seen paramedics do on the telly. His skin rippled under her fingers, the faintest rhythm of life showing he was no corpse. ‘You poor man,’ she whispered into the still March air. ‘You poor, poor man.’

No-one should die alone. She must do something, if it was only to cradle him while he died; but when she tried to lift him she succeeded only in pulling his dead weight against her. Fighting for balance she saw a macabre vision of herself, trapped under the body of a dying man, and pushed him away from her. He flopped onto his back in the emulsion of mud and blood and muck that had accumulated in the lane. It took a second attempt before she managed to cradle him against her.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m so sorry. I don't know what happened. I don’t know what to do.’

Even as she whispered, she knew. His body hung limp and unresponsive in her arms, and she could do nothing. After a moment of futile hope she let him fall. Her blood-stained fingers searched for some sign of life, but the throb of the pulse at his neck had stilled. The last whisper of this stranger’s mortal soul had left his body.

She bounced up to her feet and looked down at her bloodied hand in fascinated horror. Her breathing, which had been rapid as she’d run through the countryside of the Eden Valley, had slowed as she witnessed this death scene and now she became starkly aware of her own isolation. The closest building, a barn, was derelict. The fields around her were empty but for a few curious sheep nibbling at turnips. The hum of traffic along the A66 a bare quarter of a mile away might have come from the Moon.

A rainbow shimmered above Beacon Hill. She drew a deep breath, vibrantly conscious both of being alive and of how quickly life could slip into death with scarcely a sigh, and placed her hand on her chest like an actress in a Victorian melodrama.

‘Claud!’ she shrieked into the emptiness. ‘Claud, help me!’

The scream faded to an empty echo lost in the sky, in the traffic, in the song of the birds. Unable to take her eyes from the freshly-slaughtered corpse in front of her, she backed away towards the path along which she’d come and, reaching it, turned and ran for home, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the dry gravel track.

Chapter 1

The promise of a bright spring Sunday had faded into thin, cold drizzle, under whose shadow the soft green of the grass had lost its electric brightness and dulled to grey. From a distance of a dozen yards, outside the line of blue and white tape that marked the inner ring of a crime scene, Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite stood with his hands plunged deep in the pockets of his Barbour jacket and a customary frown of deep thought upon his face. Around him the police swung into the action that always accompanied the discovery of a body — uniformed officers steering away the odd interested onlooker whose curiosity impelled them to approach though they knew they shouldn’t; white-suited forensic investigators photographing the scene from every angle before beginning a fingertip search; a van bearing the white tent that would protect the scene from both the weather and the prying eyes of the public — but Jude, having issued his instructions, remained still at the edge of its frantic activity.

There would be no shortage of images available to remind him of every detail but he scanned the scene for a long moment. In the freshness of the golden hour after the crime there might be something to give him a head start in the hunt for a vicious killer. A man, about five foot seven and, as far as he could judge, in his late forties or early