Death on Coffin Lane: a gripping crime novel set in the heart of the Lake District

By Jo Allen

DCI Jude Satterthwaite doesn't get off to a great start with resentful Cody Wilder, who's visiting Grasmere to present her latest research on Wordsworth. With some of the villagers unhappy about her visit, it's up to DCI Satterthwaite to protect her – especially when her assistant is found hanging in the kitchen of their shared cottage.

With a constant flock of tourists and the local hippies welcoming in all who cross their paths, Jude's home in the Lake District isn't short of strangers. But with the ability to make enemies wherever she goes, the violence that follows in Cody's wake leads DCI Satterthwaite's investigation down the hidden paths of those he knows, and those he never knew even existed.

A third mystery for DCI Jude Satterthwaite to solve, in this gripping novel by best-seller Jo Allen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789543063

Jo Allen

Jo Allen was born in Wolverhampton and is a graduate of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and the Open University. After a career in economic consultancy she took up writing and was first published under the name Jennifer Young in genres of short stories, romance and romantic suspense. In 2017 she took the plunge and began writing the genre she most likes to read – crime. Now living in Edinburgh, she spends as much time as possible in the English Lakes. In common with all her favourite characters, she loves football (she's a season ticket holder with her beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers) and cats.

Book preview

Prologue

The first thing Cody saw was the noose.

She’d thought the kitchen empty, but as she flicked the switch on the wall the light illuminated the rope Owen held coiled loosely around his outstretched hand. The rest of him, hanging back, betrayed his cowardice. Even before she’d finished processing the scene she knew she had him on the run, ramming home her advantage with the speed of a prairie rattlesnake. ‘What the goddamned hell do you think you’re doing?’

She was quick but not quite quick enough and he jumped away from her in shock, thrusting the rope behind his back as she snatched at it. Owen was a pasty youth, too much in thrall to his books to fritter away precious hours in daylight. There was barely any colour in his face on the best of days and what there was had drained away the second they both understood that whatever he’d planned for her was doomed to fail.

But he tried. Give him his due, he tried.

‘Bitch.’ He forced the word out but his voice shook when he must have intended it to intimidate. Then, to her surprise, he launched himself, not towards her as she’d expected, but at the table in the centre of the room. A modern light fitting hung from the heavy oak beam which, black with age, supported the old slate roof of the single-storey cottage. His movement set the cord leaping as if in alarm, so that shadows danced around the edges of the kitchen where under-unit lights normally kept them at bay. In its spotlight, Owen clutched at the table’s edge, his knuckles the whitest part of his pale poet’s fingers. ‘Come here. I’ve had enough. You’ve bullied me long enough…’

Cody laughed. If there was one thing she’d learned growing up in Wyoming it was how to tell when a man was capable of handling a rope and Owen, running the rough hemp loosely between his twitching fingers as if it were woven from poison ivy, wouldn’t last half an hour out on the range. ‘Honey, spare me. I don’t have time for this. I have two hundred people coming to listen to me tomorrow morning and we need to be ready. If you want to talk to me about your employment conditions, fine. We’ll do it later.’

As the light stilled, the kitchen lost its air of menace. Sure of his impotence, she turned her back and crossed to the granite-topped unit to pick up the folder she’d come in for, though she kept a precautionary eye on his reflection in the plate glass window. The darkness outside hid the view of Grasmere lake and village in their daylight greys and greens, and the rearing Lakeland Fells beyond them. The only sign of life was the flickering fire from the hippy camp at the lakeside and the attendant shadows of its occupants, like a coven of witches casting their spells.

‘I’m going to kill you.’ He regrouped, though his voice still shook. ‘You’re a bitch.’

‘And you’re a child.’

‘I’m twenty-five!’ he shouted at her, like a teenager rowing with his mother.

‘Then act twenty-five. Get on with the job I’m paying you to do. Or is the pay part of your problem?’ She turned back to face him, ready to defend herself if she had to, to run as a last resort, yet certain that she’d have to do neither.

Owen was damned by his reasonableness. The pay was the one thing he couldn’t complain about. ‘Not the pay. But the conditions…’

‘Take it up with your union. If you dare.’ Which he wouldn’t. She softened her tone, but only in mockery, tapping her slipper-shod foot so that he knew she had better things to do. ‘Maybe you need a break, Owen. Maybe you’ve been working too hard. After tomorrow is over, we can both have a holiday.’

‘I’m going to hang you. I’m going to string you up from that beam and watch you die.’ Sweat gathered under his long black fringe, giving him the look of a vampire caught out by the dawn. ‘Full soon thy soul shall have her Earthly—’

She slammed the folder down on the table and had the satisfaction of seeing him jump a foot backwards, the quotation left incomplete. ‘All right. Let’s get serious. Who put you up to this?’ Because Owen sure as hell wasn’t capable of thinking it up for himself.

‘No one. You. You’re a bitch. You’re a bully. You’ve pushed me too far and you’re going to pay for it.’

For a man working towards a PhD in English literature, Owen’s vocabulary was sadly limited. No doubt there were plenty of words running through his head, rehearsed and ready to come out as the last thing she’d ever hear, but the way his mouth flapped open and shut as he fought to control his breathing merely increased her contempt for him. Even the Wordsworth quotation he’d chosen had been a poor one. ‘It isn’t your idea. I doubt you have the brains to plan it and you sure don’t have the balls. Who put the idea into your head? And why?’

In the silence generated by his abject humiliation, she glanced at the clock. ‘Tell whoever it is that they don’t frighten me.’

‘I’m going to tell everyone. I’ll tell the papers.’ His feet stuttered on the grey flagged floor as if he was urging himself on, but he made no movement forward.

‘I’m always happy to talk to the papers about my work.’

‘Not your work. I’m going to tell them about you. The truth. That you’re a liar and a fraud. And a murderer.’

‘Owen. I think you’ve just demonstrated why I don’t trust you with certain of my sources. You’re emotionally unstable and entirely unreliable. Tell whoever you like whatever you like. If you dare.’ She glanced at the clock again. There was still plenty of time. ‘You’re clearly upset so I won’t ask you to help me finish setting up for tomorrow. But I damn well expect you to be there in the morning, doing the job I pay you for.’

She walked past him slowly, closer than she needed to in a way that was intended both to show him how little she cared and to dare him to take her on because to show fear, even to admit it to herself, would be fatal weakness. Her heart hammered as she passed and his fingers tightened around the rope, but it was the limit of his fantasies and he stepped back in defeat.

‘Our best conceits do prove the greatest liars,’ he called as she left the room, but the words were barely audible and entirely bereft of threat. ‘You’re a liar, Cody Wilder. And a fraud.’

‘And a murderer,’ she mocked him before closing the kitchen door behind her.

1

The first light was beginning to illuminate the sky above Beacon Hill to the east when Jude Satterthwaite opened the front door of his house in Wordsworth Street and stepped out onto the pavement. Waiting while his girlfriend checked that she hadn’t left anything behind, he glanced at his watch. Eight-fifteen. That gave him plenty of time to drop Ashleigh at work before heading on to pick up his mother and take her through to Grasmere for Cody Wilder’s much-publicised lecture on Dorothy Wordsworth. Reading was a luxury for which Jude could rarely find the time and he didn’t regard himself as an intellectual, but he was looking forward to hearing the controversial American academic, even if only to see if the reality measured up to the hype. At the very least, it would be an interesting experience. ‘Come on, Ash. We don’t have all day.’

‘Yes, sir.’ She gave him a smart salute and followed it up with a wink; Jude couldn’t resist the temptation and leaned in to kiss her. A disapproving twitch of a curtain over the road didn’t bother him. The folly of love was a lesson he’d learned the hard way and wasn’t keen to repeat, but he was confident enough to allow himself to be besotted with Ashleigh O’Halloran, even if was largely at a physical level. There could be no risk to his heart in that.

‘Okay. That’s the fun over. Let’s get to work.’ They lingered for a moment on the pavement before he opened the driver’s door of his Mercedes, clipped his seatbelt shut and started the engine. Time with Ashleigh was hard to come by even though they worked together. He couldn’t resist a sly look at her profile before he pulled out of the parking space.

‘You’re such a hard taskmaster.’ Ashleigh pulled the vanity mirror down, fished in her bag for a tube of un-detective-like scarlet lipstick and recreated the subtle but perfect makeup he’d so spontaneously disarranged. ‘Look at me. It took me half an hour to get this look and you had to go and ruin it.’

‘It’s your own fault for being irresistible.’ He grinned as he negotiated the roundabout onto the one-way system, thinking about the day that lay ahead. It was no wonder he never had time to read poetry, even if he was so inclined. His work was all-consuming. He flicked a sideways glance and a smile at Ashleigh, thanking his stars he’d finally found someone who understood how much his job mattered to him. It was a bonus that the sparks flew when they were alone. And how they flew. ‘Are you about this evening?’

‘Wasn’t last night enough for you?’ She flicked long eyelashes at him. ‘You could come up to the house and tell Lisa and me all about your day.’

He shook his head, amused, and they drove the short distance through Penrith to the police headquarters in a companionable, early-morning silence. ‘I’ll call you when I’m done.’

‘Do you have any plans for later?’

Technically, he was on a day off. ‘I might pop into the office.’

‘You probably shouldn’t, but I don’t imagine that’ll stop you. Either way, I’ll see you later.’

As he drove into the car park, he switched into business mode. ‘Is there anything I need to know? Anything you need to ask me?’

‘Nothing I can’t ask or tell Doddsy. Now go away and enjoy your day off.’

He stopped the car outside the front of the building with unfortunate timing, picking the exact moment at which his immediate superior, Detective Superintendent Groves, emerged from the grey dawn and paused for a second beside the car as Ashleigh got out, eyeing the two of them with interest.

‘Been debriefing your colleague at home, have you, Satterthwaite?’ Groves’s wink added unnecessary emphasis on the double entendre.

‘Jude gave me a lift in.’ Ashleigh smoothed her skirt down, avoiding his gaze.

‘Day and night. Can’t fault your commitment to your job, either of you.’

Jude disliked his boss, as did everybody else he knew, and the feeling was mutual. Fortunately, Ashleigh had the knack of getting out of a car without losing control of her clothing. He sensed her hesitate for a second next to the car as she calculated how far she’d have to walk with the man, and opted to spare her the ordeal. ‘I might just pop into the office for a second. See how things are.’

‘It’s okay.’ She gave him a grateful smile. It wasn’t far from the car park to the office and she regularly handled people who behaved far worse than Groves, whose patter was more akin to that of a sleazy uncle at a wedding than anything directly threatening. ‘You’d better get away. You’ll be late.’

Groves’s presence prevented Jude from giving her the kiss he’d have liked, but he waited, nevertheless, while they covered the few yards to the front desk, noting the way Groves walked close to her and she stepped away, so that their path veered slightly from a straight line until they reached the doors. Restarting the car, he left Ashleigh to fight her own corner, as she could and did so well. She wouldn’t thank him for intervening and he was scrupulously professional, always wary of drawing attention to this blossoming workplace relationship. Normally they made a point of arriving and leaving separately, but the previous night they’d both ended up at his place and neither of them had planned that she’d stay.

It took a further twenty minutes to reach his mother’s cottage in the village of Wasby, on the edge of the Lake District, and by the time he got there the sun was climbing with confidence above the Pennines. Pulling up outside he checked his watch. As always, he was in plenty of time. For a moment he paused to look down the single street of the village where he’d grown up, and then got out of the car and strode up the front path.

‘Morning, Jude.’

‘Morning.’ He recognised the voice behind him, rang the doorbell and waited a moment before he turned, to show Becca Reid that he didn’t care. He might never forgive her the damage she’d once done to his heart but he was over it, over her, and Becca – with her no-nonsense manner, her smile for everyone that turned to a scowl for him, her sensible shoes and minimal makeup – might be a sweet saint of a woman but she’d never set his blood racing round his body the way Ashleigh O’Halloran did. ‘All well?’ He smiled. After everything that had happened, he liked her and he could afford to be generous.

‘Fine. I’m off to work. You?’ She turned the car key over on her finger, subjecting him to her cool gaze.

‘I’m on a day off.’ He looked past her to see if her cat, Holmes, was lurking in the receding shadows of what looked as if it would turn into a pleasant January day but Holmes who, to Becca’s obvious irritation, could always be trusted to make a fuss of him, didn’t show up. ‘I’m taking Mum down to Grasmere to hear Cody Wilder.’

‘The American academic?’

‘That’s the one.’ Footsteps inside the cottage heralded his mother’s arrival at the front door and gave him the opportunity to turn his back on Becca without formally concluding the conversation. The slam of her car door and the roar of the engine, as if she’d hit the accelerator more quickly that she’d intended, were her goodbye. With a greater measure of relief than he liked, he turned his attention to his mother as she appeared on the doorstep. ‘Ready to go?’

‘I know there’s plenty of time, but I do want to get a decent seat.’

‘You’re looking very smart.’

Linda touched her hair; she wasn’t used to compliments. ‘It’s only a lecture, I know, but appearances matter.’ She had on a black skirt and scarlet jacket and stepped through the door on heels an inch higher than usual, as if she wanted to make an impression. ‘I really appreciate you doing this for me, Jude. Thank you.’ She turned and called over her shoulder. ‘Come on, Mikey!’ And then turned back and offered Jude an innocent look. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I got an extra ticket and Mikey was very keen.’

Mikey, Jude’s stubborn, troublesome and vulnerable brother – very much younger and, both needing and resisting Jude’s attempts to be a father-figure – was the one person apart from Becca who never failed to bring a cloud with him when he crept into Jude’s mind. On reflection he was surprised, not that Mikey, an English student, was jumping at the chance to hear Cody Wilder, but that his brother was prepared to endure his company for it. ‘Is he speaking to me, then?’

It was meant as a joke but the finger Linda raised to her lips warned him that he was closer to the truth than he liked. ‘Sshh!’

‘Shall I wait in the car?’

‘It’s such an opportunity.’ Leaving Mikey to make his own way out, Linda accompanied him down the path, choosing to ignore the uncomfortable relationship between her sons. ‘You know I’ve always loved Wordsworth. I was devastated when they took him off the syllabus and left us teaching the modern poets instead.’

‘Yes, but you’re a traditionalist.’

In a whirlwind of black boots and faded denim, Mikey clattered down the path and into the back of the car. ‘Yo.’ Avoiding eye contact, he clamped huge headphones over his ears and subsided into his seat.

‘Yes, there’s that.’ His mother carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘But the Wordsworth-Dorothy relationship is an intriguing one, and Dorothy is always overlooked. Cody Wilder is the world’s leading expert on her, and everything I’ve read indicates that she has something new to say about it.’

The publicity material had trailed Cody Wilder’s conclusions as sensational, but Jude reserved judgement. ‘It’s a day out.’

‘I’m so glad I’m retired. It gives me the chance to follow these things more closely. We were lucky to get tickets. And it’s astonishing she chose to reveal it here. She could have gone to any conference on the Romantic poets.’

Cody Wilder, Jude knew from elsewhere, had fallen out spectacularly with every academic institution she’d worked for, so her choice of location didn’t surprise him. A paper delivered to an audience of hostile scholars on some campus university wouldn’t have the news impact of a public event in a picturesque Lake District village. ‘I’m sure she’ll go down a storm, but I’m afraid her wisdom will be wasted on me.’

‘Oh, don’t talk nonsense.’ Linda tutted at him as he were a child rather than a man of thirty-five. ‘Anyway, tell me your news.’

‘What makes you think I have any?’

‘About the new girlfriend. Who is she?’

Amused, when another time he would have found that annoying, Jude couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Who told you?’ It had been bound to get out despite the efforts he’d made to keep Ashleigh out of the clutches of the bush telegraph, though he didn’t know why he was so keen on secrecy. To spare Becca, perhaps, though she wasn’t showing any sign she cared.

‘Nobody. But either there’s a new woman in your life or you’ve taken to wearing Chanel, and I don’t think it’s that.’

The smile broadened into a grin. ‘You’re in the wrong job. I could use a detective like you.’

‘So I’m right, then? Is it serious?’

‘Do you really think I can answer that?’

‘It’s too early to say, then? Have you told Mikey?’

‘Not yet. Let me find the right moment.’ Looking in the driver’s mirror he caught Mikey, oblivious, staring in fierce concentration at his phone. Too much at ease with the world to allow either the perennial problem of his brother or the implications of a new romance to trouble him, Jude tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he turned the car up towards Ullswater.

*

Jude was a man who valued solitude and in his spare time he preferred to seek it, leaving the charms of Grasmere for the most part to the tourists. He stopped the Mercedes in the car park on the edge of the village, locked it and took a look around while Mikey, still protected from conversation by his headphones, distanced himself further with a few steps away. Today Grasmere was busier than he’d expected on a morning in January, so maybe Cody Wilder had more pulling power than he’d thought. As he and his mother walked briskly past the cafes and outdoor shops with Mikey trailing in their wake, doubt assailed him. ‘Do you two mind running on down to the venue and grabbing us some seats? There’s something I want to check up on.’

His mother turned reproachful eyes on him, as if she’d known he had an ulterior motive. ‘Jude. This is your day off.’

‘Yes, I’ll join you. But there’s someone I wanted to catch up with.’

He slowed to let them get ahead. Cody Wilder was trouble, a problem of her own making, and while her academic credentials were flawless and her research, as far as he understood it, regarded as outstanding in her field, her views on current affairs were a different matter. There wasn’t a matter of interest that she didn’t have an opinion on, regardless of how well qualified she might be to speak on it, and she never passed up an opportunity to share her thoughts. Inevitably, that created a spiral in which commentators were less interested in the trials of Dorothy Wordsworth two and a half centuries before than they were in what Cody thought of gun violence, feminism, immigration or whatever else was the trending topic in the media. Presumably, Jude thought with a sigh, she justified it on the grounds that at least it made her enough of a name to generate some exposure for her work. He hoped she knew what she was doing, because he could tell a deal with the devil when he saw one, and the results of it were all around him.

Just beyond the bridge, the square mediaeval tower of St Oswald’s church sat in judgement on the village. His brow crinkled a little as he approached a group of protestors, standing in the churchyard and waving banners calling on Cody Wilder to go back to America. They looked peaceful enough, a fusion of umbrellas and sensible rainwear jostling under the yew trees and trampling the emerging crocuses. One of them was engaged in what looked like good-natured conversation with one of the cohort of uniformed police officers he’d sent down to Grasmere in order to make sure there was no trouble.

There were more protestors than he’d expected though the small but obvious police presence ought to be enough to dampen any thoughts of law-breaking, and hopefully Cody Wilder would remember her priorities and resist the urge to engage with her opposition. Passing them on the other side of the road, he scanned the interested onlookers and was rewarded when a tall, fair young man in jeans and a good-quality walker’s raincoat detached himself from the group of them and came across. ‘Okay, Jude? It’s looking a bit busier than we thought.’

Pausing to rest his hands on the bridge and pretend to inspect the ducks squabbling on the water beneath, Jude relaxed. Chris Marshall, the detective he’d dispatched to keep an unobtrusive eye out for any activity that might be taking place out of sight of their uniformed colleagues, was capable of taking on far more responsibility than his rank of constable demanded of him. Nothing sinister would get past him. Even so, despite the four policeman who represented the compromise between what was available to him and what he’d have liked to deploy, he was glad he’d turned up. ‘So I see.’ He flicked a look across the road. ‘Who are that lot?’

‘They’re pro-choice.’ Cody’s views on abortion were open to interpretation, but so colourfully expressed that both sides of the debate viewed her as their implacable enemy, something which she probably considered a good result. ‘The gun lobby are at the back of the garden centre. The First Nation rights people are out in force at the Wordsworth Hotel.’

‘Seriously?’

‘No. That was a joke. The only protests are these guys and a couple of local nutters who’ve hung a banner out of their windows accusing her of being a murderer. I don’t know what that’s all about.’

No matter how serious the situation, Chris’s flippancy held firm. Amused at the limited extent of civil disorder in village Westmorland, Jude stuck his hands in his pockets. For a moment, Cody’s reputation as a troublemaker had concerned him. ‘Did you brief Dr Wilder on what we’re doing?’

Chris rolled his eyes. ‘As much as that’s possible.’

‘So far I’ve managed to avoid her.’

‘Lucky you. You wouldn’t get on. She’s the type that knows it all already.’

In fairness, Cody Wilder had far more experience with this sort of protest than any of the police present. ‘Do you reckon we can trust her not to court controversy until she’s safely off our patch?’

‘Who knows? I like to think so.’

According to Jude’s mother, Cody had been researching the lives of the Wordsworths for years so she surely wasn’t going to risk compromising her serious academic career for the sake of a few cheap headlines, but the one thing Jude knew for certain about her was that she was anything but predictable. ‘What do you reckon? Surely there isn’t going to be trouble?’

‘I don’t think so. She’s sensible enough – or maybe media-savvy enough – to have brought in some security to check everyone’s bags, so there won’t be any problems at the talk itself. Not that I think there would have been, looking at this lot. They’re harmless. But there’s a bit of me thinks it suits her to hype up the threat.’

Jude nodded. He’d reviewed the matter carefully before he’d delegated it to Chris and he couldn’t see any harm coming to Cody Wilder in genteel Grasmere. Most of the abuse she received came from behind the anonymity of a computer keyboard and fake social media profiles, but she was such an anti-hero that he didn’t dare take the risk. ‘Are you going along to the talk?’

‘Literature isn’t my thing. I’ll be floating about in the lobby and making sure no one puts poison in the post-lecture coffee.’

Chris’s enthusiasm was infectious. Jude allowed himself a smile, even as he was irritated at himself for having to check up when he was supposed to be taking time off to make up for countless extra hours worked. ‘It looks like you’ve got everything under control. I’d better get down to the venue, before I get in trouble with the boss.’

‘The boss?’ Chris’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Old man