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

fifties, lay lifeless on his back in the middle of the rutted track, suit jacket flung open, the front of his shirt stiff with semi-dried blood. His thin face, drained and grey, bore an expression of appalled surprise and his dark hair, showing signs of salt-and-pepper ageing at the temples, stood out in damp spikes. One arm trailed wide across the stain of blood which must mark the place where he’d died and the other lay limp across his body. The white VW Golf in front of which he lay had been parked carefully on the verge facing towards the main road. The driver’s door stood open.

Jude stared for a moment longer before turning east, where another set of blue flashing lights, late to the party, scythed along the A66 from Penrith. A flock of crows, startled by the activity, rose up from the freshly-ploughed field beside him and into the grey sky.

If only the birds could talk. He shook his head and turned his attention to the ground. Someone, presumably the police officer first on the scene, had used a plastic bag weighted with stones as an improvised cover for the blurred and bloody footmarks that led away from the scene towards a path across a field, but they’d petered out by the time they met the soft turf.

Something told him they were less of a clue than he might first have thought. He looked further. Three hundred yards beyond, on the far side of the field where the footsteps led, stood a stone bungalow, its picture windows facing towards them. That was where Natalie Blackwell lived, and the footmarks almost certainly belonged to her. Most murderers were too careful to leave so obvious a trail, and to his mind the main exit route for the killer almost certainly led along the lane towards the A66. From there, traffic permitting, someone could have made it a long way in the half an hour since the crime had been reported.

The man was very recently dead, he noted, grimly. ‘Tammy.’

Tammy Garner, the CSI in charge of the crime scene, had been working within the taped-off area. Handing her camera over to a colleague, she stepped towards him with care. ‘Hello again, Chief,’ she said from behind her forensic mask. ‘Not looking good, this one.’

Murder never looked good, or not to anyone with a shred of conscience or humanity. ‘What do you reckon?’

She ducked under the blue and white tape and, once securely outside it, pulled down the mask in a movement that blended into a shrug. Tammy, who was the best of the CSIs on the Cumbria force, had been short with him on the last couple of occasions they’d passed one another in the corridor of the police headquarters and today she avoided his eye, but whatever he’d unwittingly done to offend her wasn’t serious enough for her to carry it over into the professional arena. ‘First thoughts?’

‘Body’s been moved.’ She extended a gloved forefinger towards the pool of blood a few inches from the dead man.

‘I’m told he was still alive when he was found. That’s why.’

‘Curse those well-meaning civilians, eh?’ she said, cheerfully. ‘Have you spoken to whoever found him?’

‘Not yet. But she lives locally. Over there.’ He gestured to the cottage, separated from the village of Temple Sowerby by the A66 and with access via a narrow bridge.

‘Ah, okay. Then those might be her prints.’ Dissatisfaction creased Tammy’s brow as it always did at the first review of a disturbed crime scene. Later, she’d relish unravelling the puzzle. ‘You know I never speculate.’ She sniggered, a half-laugh at a running joke. ‘But it looks like whoever it was did a runner via the A66. There’s a second set of tyre marks just there on the verge. Fresh.’ She gestured up the farm track. ‘And they overlie the marks from this car, so I’d say our victim was here first and someone joined him, by accident or design.’

The lane wasn’t wide enough for two cars. The second must have blocked in the first. ‘If it’s his car.’

‘Yes.’

Both the track and part of the inside carriageway of the A66 had been closed off and Jude had parked in the village of Temple Sowerby and approached across the bridge, picking his way with care past the cottage and along the edge of the ploughed field. ‘Then our killer could be miles away by now.’

‘I expect so.’ She allowed herself a fractious sigh, and turned her back on him. ‘I’d better get on. I’ll get back to you when we’ve had a proper look.’

She was usually more chatty that that, even when there was work to be done, but he shrugged her coolness off, and turned back to the constable who had been standing just behind him. ‘Do we have anything on the car?’

‘It’s registered to a Leonard James Pierce.’ She jerked her head towards the east, along the A66. ‘A businessman. He lives in Appleby.’

‘Anything to suggest that’s Mr Pierce lying next to it?’

‘Yep. That’s Len Pierce.’

She’d been holding a tablet device which she tilted towards him. Modern policing gained from modern means, and she’d gone straight to social media for her information. Len Pierce’s Facebook profile, open in front of them, didn’t tell Jude everything he needed to know but it confirmed the identity of the corpse. In the image the middle-aged man smiling on the bridge in Appleby on a sunny day was lit up by the spark that death extinguished but it was unmistakably him who lay yards away, his empty eyes tilted up to a grey sky.

Jude flicked a finger and swiped through the life Len Pierce chose to make public. Pictures of a garden, bursting with blossom, of cupcakes and traybakes, of a grey-muzzled collie dog, tongue hanging out as it lay flopped down on the grass. Len’s life, it appeared, was anything