Death by Dark Waters

1

A hot Sunday in the dying embers of a hot summer. Thunderclouds, squaring up in the west a dozen miles beyond Helvellyn, massed shoulder to shoulder in preparation for an assault and a breeze, scorching and stiff as a desert wind, crushed the fellside. Standing on the top of Harter Fell, Jude Satterthwaite breathed in the free, fresh breaths of the just and looked down on the dark sliver of Haweswater.

‘Okay, Mikey?’ He turned to his younger brother, who was perched on the cairn, snatching a sullen selfie and frowning at the phone before sighing and thrusting it back into his pocket.

At twenty Mikey had outgrown the awkwardness of his teenage years, but he’d carried the resentment of authority onwards into adulthood and showed no sign of letting it go. He grunted, and slithered down from his rocky perch. ‘Let’s get back down to the pub. I let you drag me up here, so the least you can do now is buy me a drink.’

‘Fine. We’ll go and get a pint.’ Jude lingered, staring northwards. The caustic taste of ash caught at the back of his throat. A haze, part heat, part smoke, hung in the shimmering air and a low pall of smoke cast a dark shadow over the water, far below them on the opposite side of the lake. Another fire, by the look of it. Always alert to anything out of the ordinary, he took a second, longer look, as if there was something odd about it, but there was nothing there to justify his suspicions.

Mikey took his phone out again, stared at it, sighed once more and returned it to the pocket of his shorts. The backdrop of the fire, its thin bright line already attracting blue flashing lights along a lakeside track towards it, drew no more than the most casual glance from him before he set off back the way they’d come, sliding his brother a sideways look as he did so. He could be naive and clumsily poor at communication, but he was bright enough to know that the two of them never ended up, on these walks, without some kind of attempt at a heart-to-heart.

Reading that glance as the opportunity he’d been looking for, Jude stepped onto the downward path behind him, tossing out a tentative invitation to chat. ‘Everything going well with you?’

‘Sure. Everything’s always fine.’

‘You know what I mean.’ The blue lights had come to a standstill now, and a helicopter joined the fray, swooping low over the lake, dangling a bucket from its undercarriage. Jude’s professional interest was caught. It might be a fresh fire, but it was attracting more attention than most of the others, probably because the nearby village meant there was more at risk than a few acres of bracken and the odd unlucky sheep. He reckoned the fire service had a fighting chance of stopping it before it reached the clustered bungalows of Burnbanks; if they didn’t, then come the morning, he or someone else would almost certainly be dealing with the after-effects of someone’s misplaced idea of fun. ‘I wondered if there’s anything you want to tell me. Any problems. Anything I can help you with. You know I’m always here if you need me.’

Reaching a drystone wall across the path, Mikey was forced to face backwards as he swung himself over the stile. Once on the other side he turned and leaned his elbows on the wall, staring back with a soot black scowl, eyes narrow and hostile in a face that begged to be happy. ‘Jude. Butt out. You’re not my dad. Stop trying to be.’

‘I’m not trying to be your dad. I’m trying to be your mate. Because one day you’re going to need one.’ He should pull back from the confrontation, but it didn’t matter how often he told himself not to be heavy on the kid, he had to keep weighing in. This must be what parenthood was like, seeing someone you cared about charging their way to self-destruction and having to stand back and watch them learn their lesson the hard way.

Except that Mikey never seemed to learn. ‘I’ve got plenty of mates.’

‘Yes, the wrong sort.’ Too late, Jude bit his tongue, but at least he’d stopped before he could mention Adam Fleetwood and doom the conversation still further.

‘Let’s not go through this crap again. I’m an adult, now.’ Mikey dropped down from the wall and turned his back, striding down the rutted path.

Jude followed him, with a sigh at the expected response. He’d try again, and be rebuffed, because Mikey, who hadn’t spoken to their father in the best part of a decade and had gone spectacularly off the rails in the absence of sufficient parental guidance, knew as well as he did that the responsibility for his misjudgements now devolved almost entirely to his older brother.

When David Satterthwaite had walked out of the door on his sick wife and younger son leaving Jude to pick up the pieces, he probably hadn’t realised the damage he’d eventually do. There had always been a chance that someone as rebellious as Mikey would have run with the wrong crowd – God knew, you saw it often enough in the most stable of families – but if their father had tried to maintain some kind of contact, it could have tipped the balance. An independent adult when his father left, Jude struggled to maintain the most fragile of father-son relationships, let alone a civil one, so Mikey had no chance. Abandoned before he became a teenager, he had become imbued too early with an old warrior’s entrenched refusal to forgive.

Understanding this, Jude trod carefully. He needed to treat his younger brother with kid gloves, absorb his resentment, make it clear that there was somebody ready to listen to him if he ever needed help. And he would need help, because his rebellion wasn’t over and Jude, a policeman, had seen the consequences of that kind of desertion far too often to think the way ahead would be easy. I want to help you, he sighed internally, but the world and his wife would know that there was nothing anyone could do for a young man so convinced he didn’t need help.

Where the path broadened, Mikey paused to allow Jude to catch up, stopping to look towards the downward slope where the route snaked away from them. They took the next hundred yards side by side in silence, until the offer of help and its summary rejection were forgotten, left behind on the fell top. ‘See those fires. Man, Jude, but there are some idiots around. That’s a new one, isn’t it?’

‘Looks like it.’ The fire that seared a bright line down through the heather and the tinder dry bracken caught Jude’s attention again, because it hadn’t been burning when they’d started to climb. Whatever had caused it, it hadn’t taken long to get a hold and fires that gripped so strongly and so swiftly were rarely works of nature.

‘Someone setting them deliberately?’

‘Some of them.’ Jude frowned at the building clouds, a suitable backdrop to layer on layer of smoke. Later it would thunder, but the brief deluge wouldn’t be enough to smother the grass fires that plagued the Lake District, or prevent any more from starting. He couldn’t remember a summer like it, with blaze upon blaze flaring up as soon as others were beaten down. Some of the perpetrators, whether careless or malicious, were already in the sights of the authorities. ‘The fire investigators reckon the big one down in Borrowdale last week was started by lightning. Some of them are carelessness. Maybe one or two are deliberate. We’ve got some ideas, but I don’t imagine we’ll ever catch anyone for them.’

‘Oh, hey. That’s disappointing. I thought you caught all the bad guys.’ Mikey, too, sniffed the air and coughed. ‘Brainless halfwits, though. Not even I ever did anything as stupid as that.’

Jude smiled. So he was forgiven, even if his intervention had been unwelcome. ‘I’m only looking out for you.’

An uncomfortable pause. ‘Yeah. I know. But you don’t need any more grief on my account.’ Mikey took off again, pausing to look back over his shoulder only when the danger of any more awkward conversation had passed. ‘Step on it, old man. I’d like to get to the pub before it burns down.’

*

Becca Reid, bored with sitting in the sun, swung her legs over the side of the sun lounger, slipped her tanned feet into her flip-flops and stood up, just in time to see Jude’s car pull up in the lane outside and Mikey leap out.

‘I’ll be five minutes!’ he called back into the car and ran across the street, unlocking the cottage door.

Linda Satterthwaite was out, away to spend a long Sunday with friends in the sun. Knowing that, Becca had calculated that she was reasonably safe in the garden that wrapped itself around her own cottage and that there was no chance of her bumping into Jude. It got tedious, having to keep a low profile every Sunday afternoon to avoid the inevitable, uncomfortable conversation with her ex when he turned up to visit his mother. And although she hadn’t forgotten that Mikey was back from university, she hadn’t expected his brother to come rolling through the village on a Sunday afternoon to see him.

Still, it was done now. If Jude had seen her, he’d seen her. She stood and waited as the first of Mikey’s five minutes ticked by, until her cat ran across the garden, dipped under the gate and miaowed at the car.

That did it. If there was one thing she couldn’t bear it was that Holmes, who was as smart a cat as his name implied, adored Jude while continuing to treat her with complete contempt. ‘Holmes!’ she called in irritation, just as the door of the car opened and Jude got out.

‘Hello, old fellow.’ He dipped down, presumably to scratch behind the fawning Holmes’s ears. A moment later the cat jumped onto the wall, Jude turned towards him to continue the fuss and somehow Becca found herself standing two feet from them, stretching out her hand as territorially as the cat itself towards the drystone barrier that separated her from Jude.

Silence.

‘Well, Inspector.’ Her voice sounded crosser than she’d intended it to. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here. I thought you’d be out catching criminals. Isn’t that your job?’

His face had broken into a smile when he’d seen her, but at the sharpness of her voice the smile, thank God, faded. That was why she was always so shrewish with him. She couldn’t afford to fall for that knowing smile again. ‘Give over, Becca. It’s a Sunday.’

‘I thought you were never off duty.’

‘Mikey and I have been for a walk. Up Harter Fell.’ He leaned in to scratch behind Holmes’s ears and the cat, smoke grey on the wall between them, rubbed up against his fingers in ecstasy.

Smoke masked the delectable smell of Jude. That was something else to be grateful for. She was brave enough not to look away from him, staring thoughtfully at those grey eyes. ‘I heard sirens. And a helicopter.’

‘There’s a grass fire up beyond Burnbanks. Picnickers, maybe. It seems to have come on very suddenly and taken hold.’

She shook her head. The sun was beginning to drop and the smoky haze blurred any chance of a sunset. In the far distance, a rumble of thunder shook the sky on the other side of Helvellyn. ‘Another one?’

‘I don’t think you need to worry about this one. It looked as if they had it under control when we came past.’ He turned to look back at his mother’s cottage, eyes slightly narrowed. No doubt he was willing Mikey to come out and end his ordeal. ‘And it looks like it’s started raining over that side of the hill. It’ll be with us in a while, I expect. Not that it’ll do much good. It won’t last long enough.’

She stepped back, lining up a dozen excuses to walk away from him when she shouldn’t need any of them. Aware of her inability to leave him be, she nevertheless couldn’t help herself, so that sometimes she thought she spent all her time watching out for him, not so that she could avoid him, but so she could give him grief. Sometimes when she looked at Jude, with his cool determination to stay civil, she realised she didn’t like herself very much, that there was a bitterness within her heart that surfaced only when she was with him. Three years after they’d split, she should have been over it.

Not that she’d take him back. The attraction she still felt for him came with a price tag attached and she wasn’t prepared to pay what it would cost in compromise, in time and in his hard headed devotion to something that was, in the end, more important to him than she was. ‘Are you and Mikey off out somewhere?’

‘I said I’d take him up into Askham for a pie and a pint. But you know what he’s like. He won’t go anywhere where someone might see him looking like a normal human being. He had to change back into grunge.’

She stifled a smile. Whatever she thought about the older brother, she had a soft spot for the younger. ‘He’ll grow up.’

‘Eventually.’

Holmes, fed up of being ignored, turned his back on her and head butted Jude’s elbow. He gave in, putting his hand down to resume the required worship, but he kept looking at Becca, holding her gaze with that unsmiling face.

‘Here he comes.’ The interruption would be a relief for both of them. ‘Hi, Mikey. How’s it going?’

‘Oh, as usual.’ He’d shed the shorts and the walking boots and was back behind the protection of his usual clothes – black jeans, black tee shirt, Doc Martens. ‘Come on, Jude. I need a drink after all that exercise.’ He swung around to the passenger side and Jude, barely bothering with anything more than a shrug of farewell, followed.

‘You should get back together with Becca.’ Mikey, blithely oblivious to the fact that he might be overheard, smiled out through the car’s open window.

‘It’s not going to happen.’ And any more conversation was lost in the turning over of the engine.

She stared after the disappearing car. As if she wanted him back. All she saw when she looked beyond the attractive facade was eight years of her life wasted, and three more in which she’d failed to move on. Even at their closest there had always been a part of his soul that he’d held back from her, one that she’d seen in moments of silence when he should have been thinking of her, but his mind had seemed far away, preoccupied with someone else’s problems, some stranger’s loss. The only thing she had to thank him for was Holmes, a birthday gift in the early part of their relationship, and these days even Holmes betrayed her with his disloyal devotion.

‘Come on,’ she said to the cat, with a sigh and the smallest of shivers as a sudden chill wind flicked across the garden. ‘Let’s get inside before it rains.’

2

Joe Stevenson, firefighter, ran a gauntleted hand across his forehead at the conclusion of what had been a neat, quick job. The fire was out, barely four hours after it had been reported. It had flared up somewhere on the fell above Haweswater, ripped its way through a mix of heather and bracken and leapt into the belt of trees at the lakeshore before the water stopped it going any further. Then it had burned its way steadily through the trees until it had reached a natural break, before running on back up the hill. The alarm had been raised rapidly and reasonably easy access, plenty of water to hand and a timely, intense thunderstorm had contributed to make this, if not an easy fire, certainly more of a Sunday afternoon stroll than most of the ones they’d become used to dealing with. Joe was quietly satisfied.

‘D’you reckon that’s it out?’ he called across to his colleagues, and was rewarded with a thumbs up. It was all over then, bar a bit of damping down, and someone else would appear soon to keep an eye on that. He checked his watch. It was time for them to get off shift and have a break while they waited for the next one to flare up. Sometimes he thought the enveloping damp of the Cumbrian winter couldn’t come soon enough. He ran a parched tongue over dry lips, almost tasting the beer waiting in his fridge.

Pulling his mask off, he strode across the sodden, blackened ground towards the fire appliance that was parked a hundred yards up the track. A tumbledown barn, half ruined before the fire had overtaken it, had lost what was left of its roof and the smoke marked interior walls testified to the way the fire had roared over and through it.

In passing, he peered through the doorway. A pile of rubble and charred wood, stacked against the wall, looked strangely out of context. With no more than the tired curiosity of a man on his way back home, Joe took a few steps inside the blackened shell, his eyes fixed on the gaping window with its view of a blackened hillside. He didn’t see the charred mass just inside the doorway until he’d stumbled over it. In irritation, he kicked it away, turning it over.

That was when he knew the beer was going to have to wait.

*

Mikey had drained his pint of Jennings and Jude was rattling the ice in his empty glass of Coke by the time the waitress made it across with their meal. The thunder that had been threatening all afternoon had broken over them just as they’d reached the pub and the rattle and patter of solid raindrops flung down on the slate roof drowned out the sound of Sunday evening.

‘That’s been a while coming,’ the young woman said, setting the two plates down on the tables. ‘The rain, I mean, not your meals. Though they could’ve been a bit quicker. Sorry. We’re short staffed.’ She gave Jude an apologetic look and Mikey a more flirtatious one before she whisked off to the next customer, ready to serve up a side order of apologies alongside the steak.

‘I’d have asked her for another pint.’ Mikey, back inside and with the distant prospect of food finally made real, had resumed his natural cheerfulness. ‘But I don’t think she’d thank me for hassling her.’

‘Run over to the bar.’ Jude dug in his pocket for a ten pound note. Along with the role of surrogate father came the requirement to pick up the tab, but at least it meant he didn’t have to stir himself to go over and fetch the drinks. ‘I’ll have the same again.’

‘Have a pint. You could leave the car and walk.’

‘I could. It’s only five miles back home. But even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’m on call.’

Mikey’s eye roll was surely an ironic one, because he’d have been counting on Jude as his taxi back home to Wasby. Though Jude made a note to keep a very careful eye out for Becca the next time, and every time after that that he was back in his home village, and make sure he took avoiding action.

It would be impossible to avoid her all the time – or rather, to do so would mean giving in, changing his normal pattern of activities to suit other people, choosing what he did around others when they gave no thought to him. He shook his head as he watched Mikey standing at the bar. Becca had been the same age and stage in life, twenty and back from university for the summer, when he’d first realised that the girl he’d grown up over the road from had somehow metamorphosed from a friend’s irritating younger sister into an attractive woman. He replayed the moment in his mind. He’d been kicking a football around in the garden with Mikey when she’d come swinging down the road and smiled at him. The smile, and the realisation that Becca Reid was a beautiful butterfly looking for a flower on which to rest, had knocked him off his normally confident stride. It had taken him a year to ask her out, though she’d needed barely a second to accept. Eight years of semi-domestic bliss had followed, the two of them embedded in a relationship that seemed destined to end in forever. And then there had been that one moment of choice, the decision he made that had ended everything.

He didn’t think he regretted it, and sometimes he wondered whether she did. Though there was never anything but animosity when she spoke to him, she didn’t have to seek him out the way she did. The opposite of love, after all, was not hate but indifference, and she was anything but indifferent to him. Which might have made perfect sense, if she didn’t keep on carping away at him as if he were the one who’d ended it and she the one who’d been hurt.

His phone rang and he looked down at with a sigh. He’d got through the best of the weekend without a call so he should be reasonably grateful for that. Nevertheless, he let it ring a couple of times before he answered it. ‘Jude Satterthwaite.’

‘Hey, Jude.’ It was the joke everyone made, thinking it original. Not for the first time, he cursed his mother’s fondness for Thomas Hardy. ‘Busy just now?’

‘Not at all.’ He didn’t recognise the disembodied female voice at the end of the line. All the call centre operatives seemed to know him, all of them assuming a familiarity that irritated him. He was a man who liked to know the people he spoke to.

‘Good. I’ve got a Signal Seven for you.’

He sighed. A Signal Seven meant a dead body, the end of his evening and, if he wasn’t mistaken, a late night. Even something straightforward would be time consuming, and he suspected this was complicated, or it would have been referred to someone of lesser rank. ‘What do we know? Male or female? Age?’

‘I don’t have any details. All I know is that it was a fire.’

‘Where?’ Already, Jude was pushing aside his plate, trying and failing to signal to Mikey and cancel the order for the Coke.

‘The west bank of Haweswater. South of Burnbanks.’

In Jude’s head, the vivid image of the afternoon’s fire reignited, making such rapid progress along the lakeside and up the hill. The speed of its spread, so unusual, now made tragic sense. The chances were that whoever had got so casual with their campfire had paid a grim price for it. ‘I know where you are. I can be there in fifteen minutes. Are there uniformed officers on the scene?’

‘Yes. They were already on site and secured the scene the moment the body was found.’

‘Just the one body?’

‘Just the one that’s been reported. The fire brigade are still in attendance, but the fire’s out.’

‘I’ll need a CSI. Who’s on call?’ He stood up, digging out his wallet, peeling off a couple of notes and tossing them on the table. ‘Mikey. That’ll cover the drinks and the food. And a taxi back, if you can’t get a lift.’ Then he turned back to the call. ‘Tammy Garner, did you say? Good. I’ll pick her up.’ Tammy lived just outside Penrith and it would cost him a few minutes in the way of a diversion to pick her up on the way, but the time would be well spent in discussing the case. ‘And thanks. Bye.’

He rang off. ‘It’s just as well you’re hungry, Mikey. That’s two meals for you to polish off.’ But he helped himself to a chip or two knowing that it would be a long night, dialling Tammy even as he ate. ‘Jude here. I’ll be with you in ten minutes. Get a bite to eat if you haven’t already. And