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

let it drift, dropping the pound that came in his change in the tips jar, picking up the remaining glasses and leading the way across the bar to hand them out. He didn’t take a seat at once, but stood back and waited for Doddsy to do the same. ‘I’m not going to talk shop all evening. But what do you reckon to Len Pierce?’

‘Are you asking me because I’m gay? Because if you are, you’re wasting your time. I’m not into the gay scene at all.’ Church and folk music were Doddsy’s interests, two more things that suddenly made him feel older than he was. The shadow of a mid-life crisis lengthened behind him, stealing ever closer to his shoulder.

‘I’m asking you because you’re a detective,’ Jude said, ‘and because I value your opinion. But yeah, Len being gay may be significant.’

‘My opinion? Right. Then I don’t understand why he was skulking at the end of a lane when there’s nothing in the character profiles to suggest he cared what other people think about him.’ Doddsy picked up his drink. It wasn’t always self-doubt that held people back from being themselves, but doubt about the open-heartedness of their neighbours and friends, unspoken judgement behind a mask of tolerance. ‘I’ll ask Tyrone. He’s much more into that kind of scene than I am. But I think we’ll find Len wasn’t part of anything. I think he was just an ordinary bloke who met another ordinary bloke and maybe fell in love with him. As you do.’

‘My thoughts, too. Okay. Now let’s forget about it.’

Stepping away, Jude sat down in the space that Ashleigh had made for him. On the other side of the table Tyrone pulled up a chair and Doddsy sat down behind him and smiled. He’d never hidden his sexuality, never made much of a thing about it and accepted the quiet celibacy that life had placed in his path, and now a strange thing had happened to him, as if Tyrone had somehow led him out of the closet to blink in the daylight.

*

There was a chill in the March night air as Gracie got out of her car, turned her back on it and looked towards the west. Civil twilight, her father called it – daylight was done, darkness yet to come upon them. Only the glow over the Lake District fells and the light from the car headlights offered her any comfort. The lane where Len Pierce had died was bleak and cold.

‘This is it?’ she asked, to break the silence.

Giles closed the car door and walked round to join her, his body breaking the beams as he walked in front of them. ‘Yes.’

He was nervous. Attuned to him in a way she rarely was with others, Gracie could sense it in the tone of his voice. If it hadn’t been so spookily dark, if he hadn’t had his back to what was left of the light so that his face was a pit of emptiness, she thought she’d have seen him licking his lips.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Again, short and terse.

‘You can’t see anything,’ she said, after a moment during which the soft light faded even further and the harsh beam from the headlights drew sharper, starker lines. Suddenly the world was divided into black and white, all shades of grey departed. ‘Perhaps we should have come another day.’

‘I don’t want to see anything. In any case, there’s nothing to see.’

Gracie ran her forefinger around the neck of her coat, hooked her scarf up and tried to seal the gaps, but still that knife-like easterly wind crept in. A man had died here, where they stood. ‘You know they’ll find you, don’t you?’

‘Do you think so? They’d have found me by now.’

These things took time. Giles ought to know that. He knew how long it took to get a sample off to the lab and analysed. He must know, too, that if there was no question of saving lives there was less urgency. Would the police be able to accelerate matters when there was murder involved? ‘They must have your DNA.’

‘They won’t know it’s mine. They won’t have any to compare it with. Because I’ve always been such a law-abiding sod.’

Sometimes she thought that about herself, how much easier life would have been if she’d had the courage to rebel in the short term and take the hit, for the sake of her own peace of mind. It was hard not to empathise with the bitterness in his tone. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.’

A pause, longer than was comfortable. ‘You think?’

‘Yes.’ She made herself sound brisk, confident even. And reminded herself that the chill was the wind, not fear. And then, in a moment of pure madness, because if she was going to die at the hands of the man she’d foolishly trusted she was going to let him know, she said: ‘Giles. You didn’t. Did you?’

A long, long pause. ‘No.’ His voice cracked. ‘No. Why would I? I loved him.’

Giles loved too many people. He loved Janice. He loved Gracie herself, to a degree. One of the people he’d loved, the one he claimed to love most, had died, at this very spot. The thought chilled her.

‘Let’s go.’ She opened the driver’s door, slid in and closed it again. Her finger hovered over the lock, just in case, but he made no move towards her, only walking slowly, with his head bowed, back round the car to the passenger door. There he paused for a moment to look at the shadows pooling round them, and opened the car door.

Gracie tightened her grip on the steering wheel. ‘Okay?’ she said, with false brightness.

‘Yes.’ He snapped his seat belt back in place. ‘Let’s get back. Janice will be wondering where I am.’

*

The early evening drinks