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

we’ll pop in and catch Mum some time before then, if we’re passing.’ And his lips touched the top of her hair, an offer she wouldn’t refuse.

Chapter 7

The search for Len Pierce’s killer moved with infuriating slowness. Whoever had murdered him must have taken advantage of Sunday afternoon traffic, perhaps even counted on it in a carefully-worked plan, and slipped easily from the side road on to the main arterial route to make their escape. Work on the case had slowed to a mosaic of shaken heads and blind alleys, of apparently random intervention by Faye Scanlon and a run of unrelated activity elsewhere in the county which had to be dealt with immediately.

In his office Jude checked his watch as an email pinged into his inbox. Half five. He scanned the email, hit the print button and got up to collect the sheet from the printer before heading into the corridor.

Faye was walking along towards him. In a week she’d established the habit of being visible, one that attracted irritation from others apart from him. She slowed as she reached him and he, perforce, had to stop. ‘Jude. I’ve observed from my past experience that walking about carrying a piece of paper is a useful screen for doing nothing on a Friday afternoon. But of course that’s not the case with you.’

It had to be a joke, or he thought it did, but it annoyed him nonetheless, as though there was something about him that brought out the most waspish side of her character. ‘It’s an email from the Intelligence Unit, about the Pierce case. I was taking it down to talk it through with the team before we finish. Routine and almost certainly futile, but I like to make sure I know everything that’s new before I go off.’

‘A good idea. Regular briefing meetings help keep us all fresh, don’t they?’ As if he was a probationer in need of constant supervision. ‘I saw you did the TV appeal. Any joy from that?’

‘Not so far.’ He checked his watch again, so that she saw it, but she wasn’t a woman to take that kind of a hint when she could assert her professional superiority over him. Instead she stood there looking at him, nodding. In her gaze Jude, who was attracted to confident women, recognised a suppressed sexuality without falling victim to it. When she didn’t reply, he nudged a little further. ‘They’ll be waiting for me.’

‘Who’s your meeting with?’

As he named Ashleigh, Doddsy and Chris he sensed a shift in her expression, as though she’d changed her mind. ‘I wondered if I should sit in, but perhaps not this time. It’s been a long week. You’ll all want to get home as soon as you can.’

Occasionally on a Friday the late afternoon team meetings led on to a drink or two in the pub with some other strays from the office. Today was one of those days and if it had been someone other than Faye he might have invited her along, but he wasn’t in the mood for her judgemental presence. If he mentioned it without an invitation, she'd probably commend him for his team-building and he didn’t need her approval for the way he worked. ‘We’ll stay until the work’s done.’

‘In which case, none of us will get away. Don’t work yourself into the ground.’ Still she lingered. ‘You’ll have seen my email about the diversity workshops.’

‘I saw it.’

‘It’s a matter of priority. Of course I wouldn’t suggest that anyone here is guilty of any conscious level of discrimination but it’s the unconscious bias we need to work at. And from a public perspective it’s very important that these processes are visible. You’re reasonably high-profile it seems to me, so it’s important to me to have you on board.’

‘Obviously I’m on board.’ Would the woman never stop talking and let him get on? ‘I’ve cleared Monday morning.’

‘Good. I’ll see you there. No excuses.’

At last she moved on, the click-click of her low heels fading away behind him as he headed down to the incident room. She’d made him late. The place was all but deserted except for the last of the detective constables working away at the background of the case, and even they were packing up their bags and putting on their coats. Around the table under the whiteboard, Doddsy, Ashleigh and Chris were waiting for him.

‘Sorry.’ He slid into his seat and laid the printed email down in front of him. ‘I bumped into Faye and she wanted to go over things.’

‘There’s not a lot to go over.’ Doddsy gave a petulant, Friday-afternoon sigh as Jude pulled up a chair in front of the white board. ‘Whoever he is, he’s vanished. Into thin air. I haven’t any leads.’

‘I might have something to add. I’ve been on at the guys in intelligence about Len Pierce’s computer all week, but they’ve waited until five o’clock on a Friday to get back to me.’

‘That’s quick for them.’ Doddsy sniggered. Jude wasn’t the only detective to have trouble extracting information from the Intelligence Unit.

‘They must have been bored. I haven’t had time to look at it in detail. Talk us through what we’ve learned this week, would you, and I’ll see what information they’ve got for us. If anything. The sooner we can all get down to the pub, the better.’ He dared to flash a smile across the room at Ashleigh in a way he wouldn’t have done if Faye had been present.

‘There’s the post-mortem results. They don’t show us anything that we couldn’t have guessed from the body, other than that we know Len had had sex, with an unknown man, shortly before his death.’

‘And didn’t resist his killer.’ Other than the single knife wound that had ripped into his heart the body bore no signs of violence, and all the