The Ambleside Alibi: 2

by Rebecca Tope

  A big grown-up girl. She was thirty-eight, so it must be true. The fact that she felt about twelve was simply a consequence of being clucked over and patronised. But the prospect of being told a terrible truth that until then she had not even remotely anticipated sent icy waves through her veins.

  In the event, nobody told her anything until the following morning. Then an Indian doctor appeared at her bedside and started to explain about the construction of the pelvis and the nature of her injury. She watched his long, soft eyelashes intently. He could be Pakistani, she decided, with such fine bones to his nose and jaw. He was small and kind and conscientious. She made a token attempt to understand his message, but it remained obscure. All she grasped was that she had been lucky. Blood loss had been minimal, and internal damage entirely absent. ‘No blood in your urine,’ he announced with a smile. There would be another operation that afternoon, to insert a small metal plate that would hold the broken bones together. Then something about ten or twelve weeks in which no weight-bearing could be permitted. There was an elusive implication in those words that frightened her. When he invited questions, she simply sighed and shook her head.

  It was Tuesday, she calculated with dismay. Somebody had tried to kill her on Sunday, and now it was Tuesday and her attacker could be in Australia for all anybody knew, free to continue a life of liberty and ease. Was that what murderers did, though? As a deliberate exercise, Simmy tried to imagine herself into the brain of a killer. It would divert her from worries about the ban on weight-bearing, if nothing else.

  But before she got far, a nurse came in, holding a phone. ‘Call for you,’ she said.

  It was not her own phone. That was inside her bag, which was probably at the bottom of Lake Windermere by now. And for the first time she thought about her car, which was illegally parked in a yard in Ambleside. Another thing she had totally forgotten about. What would they do to it? She liked her car and hated to think of it being hauled off to a pound somewhere and finally crushed into scrap metal.

  But the call was waiting. She took the phone, holding it awkwardly to her bandaged head. ‘Hello?’ she said.

  It was Ben. ‘What happened?’ he breathed in a childlike voice.

  ‘Hasn’t anybody told you?’

  ‘Sort of. Melanie called last night. I had no idea,’ he complained.

  The day before, she had wanted to speak to him, more than to anyone else. Now he was far from the right person for her needs. She wanted a woman who would keep her warm and safe and shielded from worry. Or a very kind strong man who would settle everything in a calm, practical fashion. Neither of her parents quite fitted these requirements. Ben was a million miles short of meeting them.

  ‘I can’t tell you about it now,’ she said. ‘It’s too scary. Too complicated. I might have died.’

  ‘I know. So the person has to be caught, before they do it again.’

  Only moments before, she had been planning to meditate on the motives and personality of the mysterious killer. Now she cringed at the prospect. ‘Easy to say,’ she whined.

  ‘I’ll have to go to the police and tell them all that stuff about Mrs Joseph and her daughters. You were there, weren’t you? At her house? Did you see her? What happened?’

  ‘Oh, Ben,’ she moaned. ‘That would be such a relief if you did it, instead of me. I wanted to tell Moxon, yesterday, but it was too hard. You explain it all to him. The granddaughter stuff. And Mr Kitchener’s mother.’

  ‘I will,’ he promised stoutly. ‘Leave it to me. Because … Simmy …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It has to be one or other of them that did it. Hasn’t it?’

  Her mind thickened and clouded. ‘One or other of who?’

  ‘The granddaughter or Mr Kitchener,’ he repeated loudly. ‘I’ve thought the whole thing through, and that’s what it comes down to. One of them did it – Miss Clark and now you. Don’t you know if it was a man or a woman who attacked you?’

  She forced herself to think, conscious that she owed it to Ben to try. ‘There was a hand on the back of my neck.’ She felt it again.

  ‘Was it bare or wearing a glove? Was it strong?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was through my coat collar and hair. I was leaning forward anyway, so it was easy to push me.’

  ‘Where were you, exactly?’

  ‘Looking over that bridge, by the Giggling Goose.’

  ‘I can’t remember what it’s like. How high is it?’

  ‘Chest height, more or less. The person lifted my legs and sort of shot me over.’

  ‘A man, then,’ said Ben with certainty. ‘Only a man could have lifted you so easily.’

  ‘Or could be there were two of them,’ she mused.

  ‘You think? Didn’t anybody say anything?’

  ‘Not a word. That made it so much worse. More inhuman.’

  ‘Poor you,’ he said, with such sincerity she felt tears prickling. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘My head just aches, but the pelvis is agony if I move. They’re doing another operation this afternoon. I’m quite a mess, actually. I’ll miss your play. I’m really sad about that.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said bravely and she could hear how much it mattered. ‘No big deal.’

  ‘It’s a bummer,’ she insisted. ‘I was looking forward to it.’

  ‘At least you’re not dead,’ he said, with unarguable force.

  Chapter Fourteen

  She came round at six on Tuesday evening, to meet the eyes of her father, patiently sitting by the bed. He smiled and she moaned. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I don’t know. What’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve patched you up, and confirmed there’s no damage internally. You can start learning how to use the crutches tomorrow. It’s all miraculously fast, compared to the olden days. Same as the poor pusscat, actually. Must be improvements in the anaesthetics, I suppose.’

  ‘Crutches?’

  ‘That’s right. They said they told you about not putting weight on it.’

  ‘I didn’t realise that meant crutches. Can I have a drink?’

  There was a nurse in the room somewhere, and as before, the request was quickly obeyed. Then her vital processes were checked on the machine behind her head, and her father given an encouraging smile. It was all reassuringly human, Simmy thought comfortably – unlike the cruel impersonal attack on her. Even if nobody actually felt for a pulse with a warm fingertip any more, there was a kindness in the air. Perhaps she was just lucky. The news was always running reports of neglected old people dying of thirst in hospital.

  ‘They’re nice here, aren’t they?’ she said.

  ‘As good as good can be,’ he said, using one of his many catchphrases.

  ‘How’s the cat?’

  ‘Coming along brilliantly. He’s walking already. Still not allowed out by himself, of course.’

  ‘He can sleep in with me. You can set up a sickroom for us both.’

  ‘I was thinking that Bertie will probably want to cuddle up with you, as well.’

  Simmy grunted. ‘Or maybe not. He’s too smelly.’ The Lakeland terrier’s reputation for bad breath was legendary. He also had permanently muddy feet from his digging operations at the end of the garden.

  Russell shrugged and moved on to the next item on his mental list. ‘Your friend Ben phoned us. He’s been to the police, this afternoon. Caused quite a stir, apparently. I think you might get a visitation again tomorrow, if you’re well enough.’

  ‘From Ben?’

  ‘No, silly. From the police. They seem to think you’ve got a great deal that you can tell them. They wanted to come today, but the medics vetoed it. I’ve got to go in a minute, as well. I just wanted to make sure …’ He stopped and gave an artificial cough that did nothing to hide his emotion.

  ‘Oh, Dad.’ Tears ran down the sides of her face, and he managed a watery laugh.

  ‘Didn’t mean to set you off,’ he said. ‘But you can imagine the effect on you
r mother and me. It’s going to be all right, though. No lasting damage, they said. You’ll be back to normal by the New Year.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nearly,’ he amended. ‘No driving for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.’

  ‘So how can I go back to Troutbeck?’ Implications began to chip through the barrier she had unconsciously erected in her mind. ‘How can I run the shop? I won’t be able to make deliveries.’ Her breath began to catch. ‘I’ll go out of business.’

  Her father put a hand on her shoulder, pressing her into the bed. ‘Stop it,’ he ordered. ‘You’ve got nearly three weeks to sort it all out. Melanie can drive, if she has to. There are all sorts of things we can do, between us. Now get a good rest, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.’

  She passed a long tormented night, in a different room, containing two other women. Her recovery was so good, it seemed, that she no longer warranted the solitude she had come to take for granted. One of the women alternately snored and moaned, while the other clearly had no idea of where she was or why she was there. ‘Maisie!’ she called, approximately every thirty minutes. ‘Where are you, Maisie?’ Everything had suddenly become much more like the hospital stories so beloved of the media. Simmy felt sick, thirsty, sore and scared. When she slept, she dreamt that all the flowers from her shop were being hurled into Stock Ghyll by a hooded, faceless figure. Then she dreamt that a huge cat was sitting suffocatingly on her chest. When she fumblingly tried to push it off, she woke enough to understand that it was her own hands, pressing on the painful bruise that she had not noticed until then. Experiment showed her that it spanned an area including her breasts and extending down to her navel. Next morning, she would have to undress and have a good look at herself, however appalling it might be. Nobody in the hospital seemed to be aware of that aspect of her injuries at all, presumably because bruises were so much less interesting than broken bones.

  The first signs of morning were the raised level of lighting and a clattering of metal equipment in a nearby room, since the room had no windows. A nurse appeared, who proceeded to tinker with a plastic tube that mysteriously led from under Simmy’s blankets to something invisible on the floor. ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘A catheter. Why do you think you haven’t had to go for a pee in the past two days?’

  This took a moment to process. ‘Oh! You mean, it’s in my bladder? I had no idea.’ Her ignorance struck her as culpable in some way. It was, after all, her body. She should be taking more notice of what was being done to it.

  ‘It’s coming out soon. You’re to get walking later today. The sooner we get you out of here the better.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Simmy again, feeling alarmingly frightened, not least by the unfriendly tone. ‘On crutches?’

  ‘That’s right. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’

  ‘I hope so. Are you pushed for bed space, or something, to want me out so soon?’

  ‘Not specially. It’s the police guard in the corridor that we don’t much like.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Didn’t anybody tell you? You’re a security risk or something. Nobody allowed in to see you unless they satisfy the man on the door.’

  For a mad moment, she imagined DI Moxon sitting there all night, faithfully watching over her in case she was dragged from her bed and thrown once again into a freezing Lakeland river. ‘How long has he been there?’ she asked.

  ‘Half an hour, and we’re already fed up with him.’

  The nurse faded away, without making any further disclosures. Simmy rather missed her, feeling she might be due some further ministrations. She might have quite liked that warm finger on her pulse, and the briskly shaken thermometer that patients once had inserted under their tongues. Where was the upside-down watch for counting heartbeats, and the black rubber stethoscope? All gone, it seemed; replaced by digital read-outs on a screen on the wall above the bedhead. She had wanted to say something about her bruising, and the dressing on her head, that felt so weird. A delicate fingertip exploration suggested that much of her hair had been shaved off, which gave her another lurch of panic. There was every prospect that the day would bring a succession of such moments, as she was forced to abandon her passive horizontal position and return to some sort of normality.

  It made sense, she supposed, to have the police watching out for further attempts on her life, but it was unnerving to think such an attempt might happen in a hospital. Was it not far more likely to be when she was at her parents’ house, where the door was seldom locked and all sorts of people came and went? Her mother would not react well to a constant constable sitting outside in his steamed-up car, or – even worse – inside her hallway, with a rustling newspaper.

  Gradually, a belated sense of outrage took hold of her. She had been singled out from the start, with no say in the matter. All she had done was deliver a cheap bunch of flowers to an old lady, and listened to why the flowers could not have come from the person claiming to have sent them. And then, as an added insult, she had been cited as an alibi to a man suspected of murder. She had been twice victimised, even before being half killed. As Ben had said, there was every reason to suppose that the attack had come from one or other of those individuals who had already used her in some complicated plan to create an alibi, for reasons that remained stubbornly obscure.

  Candida Hawkins was tall, young, well muscled. She had added her weight to the strenuous heaving of her car back onto the road. She might be a black belt judo practitioner for all Simmy knew. All that had been required was to catch Simmy off balance, and gravity did the rest.

  Mr Kitchener was an inch or so shorter than Candida. He had a funny leg. He seemed to be vaguely unhealthy and definitely unfit. But he was a man, and men had a natural strength to them that automatically qualified them for physical aggression.

  The problem for Simmy was that she had believed that both Candida and Kitchener had liked her. She liked both of them, and the thought of either trying to kill her was abominable. How could either of them have turned so cold-bloodedly vile as to do such a thing, after showing such warmth beforehand?

  She was brought a melancholy breakfast of cold toast and tasteless cereal swimming in far too much skimmed milk. Weak tea eventually followed, very nearly stone cold. Nobody had asked her about any preferences. The old woman who had called all night for Maisie was now in a deep sleep, only to be roughly aroused to consume the unappealing meal. She gazed blearily at Simmy and made no attempt whatever to feed herself.

  The morning passed in a jerky alternation between dozing boredom and sudden activity. She was hauled out of bed and into a chair while the sheets were changed. Then two nurses took an arm each and effectively carried her to the bathroom where she finally had a chance to inspect herself in a mirror, having been subjected to an astonishingly undignified procedure during which she was positioned on the lavatory and expected to urinate despite tight dressings holding her pelvis in place. Everything hurt, including one knee, her head and the bruises on her chest. But the nurses were adamant, and gradually she confirmed that both hip joints were intact and worked well enough to enable her to sit down. The idea of a broken pelvis gained substance, as she examined the extent of the damage. Her left side was wadded with taped-on dressings, just above the hip. ‘You must not put any weight at all on that side for at least a month,’ said one nurse. The bone was badly cracked, she explained, and needed time to heal.

  ‘But even with crutches, you have to put some weight on your legs,’ she argued, trying to visualise how life would be.

  ‘That’ll all be explained to you later today,’ said the nurse.

  The bruise on her chest was already a nightmare mixture of black, purple and green. The green was on her breasts, and made her gasp in horror. ‘Look at me!’ she wailed.

  ‘Breast tissue always looks dreadful when it’s damaged,’ said one of the nurses. ‘You’ve got a cracked rib, apparently, but it’s nothing to worry about.’

 
‘What about my head?’ She’d been right about the shaved area, although it was smaller than she had feared.

  ‘We’ll have a look in a minute. Your vitals are fine, so it doesn’t seem to be causing any concern.’

  A doctor turned up sometime later and told her she was lucky. The pelvis had survived remarkably well, under the circumstances, and all she had to do was keep it straight and let it mend. It was an awkward bone to deal with, but she was young and healthy (‘and blessedly slim,’ he added boldly) and should have no lasting effects. ‘We’ll probably send you home first thing Friday,’ he added casually.

  It seemed sadistically irresponsible to Simmy. She couldn’t walk. She had a wound in her head. Her breasts were green and a rib was cracked. How in the world could she possibly go home like that?

  And yet it was no fun in hospital. She was already dreading the coming noisy night. The only hope was to be so exhausted by all the demanding daytime activity that she could sleep through anything.

  Nobody visited her before midday, but then a steady stream developed. First was DI Moxon, pulling rank and ignoring official visiting hours. He leant over her, with real concern in his eyes, and asked her how she was. When she managed to convince him that she was dramatically improved, he slowly came to the point. ‘Your young friend Mr Harkness came to see me,’ he told her. ‘Had quite a story to tell.’

  He expressed reproach via his eyebrows. ‘Couldn’t you have come to me sooner with your suspicions?’

  ‘Um …’ she began. ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘Those flowers, from a granddaughter who the family never knew ever existed, for a start. Wasn’t it worth telling me about that?’

  ‘I don’t see why.’ She was rallying in the face of his unreasonableness. ‘It couldn’t have been anything to do with the murder. At least …’