Death on Coffin Lane by Jo Allen

Author:Jo Allen [Allen, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789543063
Publisher: Head of Zeus

12

‘I can’t wait to hear how you got on with the mad professor.’

Chris and Doddsy were at the table in the incident room when Ashleigh came in, and Jude was a couple of steps away from them on the other side of it, trying to sign off a phone call without sounding rude. ‘I’ll get back to you. Yes, as soon as I can. Certainly by the morning. What’s the latest I can call you?’ He wrote something on a pad, made an extravagant face, and ended the call. ‘Okay. Sorry about that. Yes, Ashleigh. Let’s find out what you learned from Cody Wilder.’

She watched him as he slid into his usual seat beneath the whiteboard and glanced down at his pad. Jude was an inveterate doodler and almost certainly gave his thought process away more often than he realised. Today, it was revealed to anyone who cared to see it in a series of question marks. It was going to be that sort of day.

‘Did she talk to you?’ Chris’s bad mood of the previous couple of days had improved. That meant he had something up his sleeve he was dying to reveal.

It would wait. They were looking to her first. ‘I never said a word.’

Jude threw back his head and laughed. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

She smiled back at him. ‘Sometimes it’s better to watch and listen, though there wasn’t much new.’ She checked down at the notes she’d made that morning. It would have been good to have a tape recording of exactly what Cody had said, because the clues were in the inflections, in the tension between interviewer and interviewee. ‘There was one thing Cody said that struck me, but which may be coincidental.’

‘Go on.’ Doddsy suppressed a sigh, as if his mind were elsewhere.

‘Fi Styles had been talking to Owen Armitstead. Apparently, he’d suggested to her that there’s some doubt about the provenance of the letters on which Dr Wilder’s research is based. Fi challenged Cody on it. Cody denied it.’

Jude rubbed a hand on his chin. ‘I read up about her and none of the reports of her launch questioned the authenticity of the letters.’

‘That was what I thought.’

He scribbled over one of the question marks, almost in frustration. ‘That’s not a reason for Owen to kill himself, though I can see why he might have wanted to use that to get back at his boss if she was making his life miserable. How did Cody react?’

Ashleigh thought about it. Sitting silently, watching the interplay, had been revealing. Cody’s response to the accusation had been realistically appalled. ‘She insisted that the letters had been independently authenticated, but Fi challenged her further on it. She suggested Cody had had an affair with the expert who undertook the verification and Cody denied it, although not particularly strenuously.’

‘That’s damaging for her, is it?’

‘Potentially. I don’t imagine there’s anything criminal about a soft verification and if there was, it isn’t our jurisdiction. But it’s interesting.’

‘What was the body language like?’

‘Tense, but you’d expect that.

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