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

from work and join him. If she’d been in Adam’s living room, or if he were to meet her on the way, he’d have shrugged her off just as he’d done the previous occasion. Jealousy wasn’t his besetting sin, and he was almost over her.

But she wasn’t there and unlikely to be in the pub. Walking briskly along Meeting House Lane, he dropped down through the church close. The light shone out from the church and a couple of dark figures scuttled across the churchyard and in through the north door. Tuesday night was bell-ringing practice. The daffodils thrashed in the stiff breeze and a starling, disturbed, screeched above his head. On the far side of the church close, Claud’s short and stocky figure moved about in a well-lit first-floor window. For a moment Jude watched him as he peeled off his jacket and tossed it to one side, until the church clock, always three minutes slow, struck the half hour and reminded him to move on. An hour in the pub would be enough and then he could decently disengage himself, see if Ashleigh could be tempted back for a bite to eat.

It wasn’t quite dark. The rush hour had died down but the square was still busy with traffic sliding around the curves of the A6 as it slalomed through the town centre. Emerging from the churchyard, Jude crossed the road and headed the hundred yards up the hill to the pub.

Inside, what looked for all the world like an uneasy truce prevailed. At one end of a long table, Tammy nursed a tumbler of gin and tonic and at the other, Doddsy stared into the depths of a glass of orange juice. Between them, an assortment of detectives and crime scene investigators, with Ashleigh and Chris among them, kept the peace. Tyrone was notable by his absence.

‘Happy birthday.’ He gave Tammy a decorous peck on the cheek as she stood up to greet him and then slid into a seat between her and Ashleigh. ‘Sorry I’m late. I got held up.’

‘No let-up, eh?’ Tammy said. ‘You need to take more time off, Chief. You’ll work yourself into an early grave.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘We got you a pint. Was that right?’ She swirled the glass in her hand. ‘I’m not driving. Phil’s coming to pick me up when he’s finished up at the hospital. We’re going out for dinner.’

Jude unbuttoned his coat, laid his phone on the table and took the opportunity to sidle closer to Ashleigh as he took his seat. ‘Cheers, then. Here’s to many more birthdays.’

‘What kept you so long?’ Ashleigh asked him.

‘I bumped into Faye.’

‘Has something come up?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. She just doesn’t seem able to let me out of the building without a word in my ear.’

She smiled at him. ‘Relax. It isn’t you.’

‘You reckon?’

‘I know for sure.’

He lifted a questioning eyebrow.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said as his phone rang, and he turned it upwards with a sigh. Claud Blackwell’s number, which had somehow found its way into his contacts over the past couple of weeks, flashed up.

‘No peace for the wicked, eh?’ He picked it up, stood up and stepped away from the table. One day he’d learn to switch it off. Claud had struck him as a man who never let anything go, who worked long hours and never respected anyone else’s time off and now, it seemed, he had the proof of that. ‘Hi Claud. What can I do for you?’

‘You need to come down to the churchyard. Now!’ Claud’s voice, so unlike his normal hectoring calm, was squeaky with panic. ‘Someone’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ Jude needed only a second before he was on his feet, holding the phone away from his ear. ‘Doddsy, come here a minute, would you?’ He was already moving towards the door. ‘Who is it? How? And where?’

‘I don’t know. There’s a lot of blood. It’s in the churchyard. A woman. I’ve dialled 999 but you said you were at the pub. I thought you’d want to know.’

Jude flipped the phone to speaker mode. Equally alert, Ashleigh appeared at his other side and the three of them crowded in over it. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute. Is anyone else there?’

‘A couple of people came by. I—’

‘Don’t let them touch anything.’

‘It’s like last time. All the blood.’ Claud’s self-confidence degenerated into a scared man’s whimper.

‘I’ll be right there.’ The churchyard. Not an isolated lane this time. And Claud Blackwell, close to the spot.

A hundred yards or so separated the pub from the churchyard and he covered them in seconds, racing up the opening from the square. The church bells were ringing a strangely cheerful peal. There was already a knot of people in the alley and he shouldered his way through them. ‘Police! Let me through!’

‘Oh my God,’ one of them was saying. ‘Did you see who it is? Someone says it’s one of the nurses from up at the hospital. Dead.’

Jude’s feet overrode his heart, which had somehow stopped while he ran on. Dozens, probably hundreds of nurses worked up at the hospital, but Becca always signed off her rounds there and the churchyard was on her direct route to Adam’s flat.

She’d have driven. Surely she wouldn’t have walked.

Don’t even think that.

Deep darkness lay against the church’s north wall, out of reach of the streetlamps and the floodlights that illuminated the square sandstone tower. A shadow moved within the shadow. On the wall someone sat sobbing, someone else talking on the phone. ‘Oh God, Mum, I was walking through the church close—’

‘Police!’ said Jude again, his voice less authoritative than he’d have wanted. No-one moved. He put his shoulder to a gap in the group of onlookers and pushed his way through it. The inner shadow took on a