Death on the Lake, Jo Allen [e reader TXT] 📗

because if Jude heard her, or if Lisa did, they’d mock her even more. ‘So I’m afraid I’m going to have to hurry you.’ No incense, no meditation, no time to stop and think. That wasn’t the way to make the most of a reading but she might get something out of it, if it was only a whistle to call her unruly thoughts to heel. She slid the cards out of their box and dealt out just one. There was time only for the briefest reading.

She held her hand above the card for a moment before turning it over and flipping it down onto the dressing table. The Seven of Swords. At one level that was no surprise. The suit of swords came up far more often than it ought to, as if the cards were connected with the job she did. This, with its message of diplomacy and avoiding confrontation, told her nothing she didn’t already know. ‘My whole life is about avoiding confrontation,’ she told the card, in mock-severity. And its alternative meaning was startlingly obvious as well, warning her of unknown opponents. ‘I’m a detective. Of course I have unknown opponents.’

‘Ash!’ Jude’s voice floated up the stairs from the kitchen. ‘What the hell are you doing up there? Your coffee’s going cold and your toast’s about to burn, and you’ll say it’s my fault.’

‘Just coming.’ She cut the Seven of Swords back into the pack, stowed the cards away and went back to finishing off her hair. It didn’t do to take yourself too seriously, and the cards didn’t always deliver.

When Jude arrived at the office, separating from Ashleigh in the car park by mutual consent so as not to make their relationship any more obvious than it needed to be, he found Detective Inspector Chris Dodd, widely known as Doddsy, standing by the coffee machine in the corridor close to the office they shared. Doddsy’s thoughtful look indicated that something had come up overnight — not so important that Jude, Doddsy’s immediate boss, would need to know about it straight away, but something troubling nonetheless. ‘Doddsy. Good weekend?’

‘Aye, passed without incident.’ Doddsy straightened up and examined the coffee in the cardboard cup as though he’d expected something better. ‘Tyrone was on shift yesterday, so I got a load of work done.’

‘Good.’ Jude felt in his pocket for some change. He’d managed a whole weekend with Ashleigh with neither of them on call or having to go in to work for unfinished business so a trip down to the canteen rather than straight into work via the machine seemed an unnecessary luxury. His brow creased. It was only just eight o’clock. A former girlfriend’s exasperation rang in the back of his mind. For God’s sake, Jude. You don’t have to work every hour you’re not sleeping just because you can.

That remark was one of the reasons she was his ex, but she’d been right. If he’d listened, who knew how that relationship might have panned out? He’d cared about her. ‘So what’s on your mind?’

Doddsy ran a finger round his collar, a gesture that signalled slight awkwardness. ‘I had a quick call from Tyrone just now.’

‘Personal?’ Jude kept his tone light. He’d known Doddsy for years and the two were close, but sometimes you had to tread carefully. Not everyone was as sanguine as Jude about the inspector’s relationship with a policeman less than half his age. Sometimes Jude wondered if Doddsy himself was quite comfortable with it, but when the two of them found time to go out for a drink together, that particular subject was left untouched. Doddsy had never been one to talk about his private life, even to his friends, but these days he never opened up at all.

Fair enough. There were plenty of things Jude himself preferred not to talk about.

‘No. Business. Something which came up first thing and he filled me in on it. Because he thought there might be more to it than meets the eye.’

‘And you have a bad feeling about it?’ Jude dropped two coins into the machine and was rewarded by a trickle of pale coffee that would do nothing to stimulate his brain. Thank God Ashleigh and Lisa had a decent coffee machine.

‘We don’t do feelings, though, do we?’ Doddsy grinned at him. ‘But yes.’

‘You sound like my good friend DS O’Halloran.’ Jude grinned. You had to give Ashleigh her due. It wasn’t feelings that made her such a success, but an instinct for understanding the human mind and its follies, harnessed to an uncanny knack for persuading the most cynical witness to trust her, often to the point at which they succeeded only in incriminating themselves.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ Swilling the coffee round in his cup, Doddsy nodded towards the door of the office. ‘Let’s go in.’

Jude followed him in, assuming his seat, stretching out a hand to switch on his laptop and setting the coffee down on the desk. ‘Go on then.’

‘There was a missing person reported very early this morning from Pooley Bridge. A young woman. Her name is Summer Raine.’

Jude laughed.

‘Yeah, I know.’ Doddsy’s own laugh was more sympathetic. ‘Some people, eh? What they do to their kids. Anyway. She’s up here for the summer, working down at the marina at Pooley Bridge. She’s a sailing and surfboarding teacher, been here for the last couple of years. She was on a day off yesterday. She went out for a walk and hasn’t come back.’

‘And it was reported…when?’

‘About half six. She lives in a bunkhouse just outside Pooley Bridge with a load of the other staff, but she has a boyfriend up in Howtown. It seem there was a bit of confusion. Her colleagues thought she was with him and he thought she was with them.’

‘Who reported her missing?’ Jude keyed in his password and sighed as a stream of notifications rolled across the screen like the closing credits of a long and complicated art house film, the