The Ambleside Alibi: 2

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Perhaps it could,’ he supplied heavily.

  ‘Ben told you what Mrs Ellis said, did he? How Mr Kitchener’s mother was her best friend, and the Clark twins were at different schools? Penny married a farmer and had five children, while Nancy never married and worked in a clinic. She carried on with the consultant there, according to rumour. Did Ben tell you all that?’ She gave a weary exhalation after the long speech.

  Moxon had a notepad on his lap. ‘You’re telling me everybody knows everybody, right? Kitcheners, Clarks … what about these Joseph people?’

  ‘Matthew Joseph – her husband. He was at school with the others. Not her, though. She came from somewhere else.’

  ‘Why do you think you were attacked?’ he blurted suddenly, cutting through the complex network of local affiliations. ‘What had you done? What did you know?’

  She had still not expressed the questions to herself in quite such terms. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wondering whether they’ve been using me all along, somehow. It’s a horrible feeling.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘He. She. Whoever’s behind all this.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘I thought perhaps a person called Candida Hawkins might have done it.’ There – she had committed the betrayal that she’d resisted so earnestly a few days before. ‘She’s the granddaughter who sent Mrs Joseph the flowers. Or says she is. But it might have been Mr Kitchener. Something to do with the alibi I gave him. Or both of them together. I think they might know each other. But of course if you’ve got the timing right for Miss Clark’s murder, then it couldn’t have been either of them, could it? Because they were in the café with me.’

  Moxon closed his eyes. ‘This is not the way murder investigations generally go,’ he complained. ‘As a general rule, the police officer has at least some idea of what the witness is trying to tell him.’

  ‘Sorry. Which bit didn’t you understand?’

  ‘More or less all of it. You obviously know far more about this whole case than I do – which is tantamount to obstructing the course of justice, if we’re being particular about it.’

  ‘I’m doing my best. What’s wrong with what I’ve just told you? What’s wrong with me, that you get so cross?’

  ‘You’re unusual,’ he told her. ‘You don’t seem to have any idea about rules of evidence, for a start.’

  ‘That’s true. It’s never occurred to me to pay them much attention.’

  ‘You’ll have to if you’re ever called for jury service.’

  ‘I expect I will,’ she said. ‘Except you’ll have explained it to me before that, I imagine.’

  His lips tightened. ‘This is the first time I’ve heard the name Candida Hawkins. Do you have an address for her? Any other details? Reasons for your suspicions? What car does she drive?’

  The mention of a car triggered a memory. ‘There was a car on Sunday,’ she said. ‘At the top of Peggy Hill. It had two people in it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It might have been them who threw me over the ledge. They could have followed me down the ginnel and crept up behind me.’

  ‘Describe the car.’

  ‘Pale colour. Middle-sized. Quiet engine.’

  He waited, with little sign of anticipation. Simmy tried to capture more descriptive detail in vain. ‘Isn’t there a CCTV camera up there anywhere?’ she asked, eventually.

  He shook his head. ‘One further up the hill, that’s all.’

  ‘Nothing in the ginnel? That might have been useful. It would have shown anybody following me.’

  ‘There’s one at the Unicorn pub, which has a shot of you,’ he said. ‘On your way up to Peggy Hill.’

  She shivered at the idea. ‘How beastly,’ she said. ‘And how useless.’ Her mother’s abiding rage at being so constantly monitored and surveyed flickered in her own breast.

  ‘You’d have been glad of it, if the attack on you was on film.’

  ‘Not really. It wouldn’t have saved my poor pelvis, would it?’

  ‘But it would stop the attacker hurting anybody else.’

  That thought had never crossed her mind. ‘Somebody else? Who?’

  He sighed. ‘If we knew that, the case would be solved. We have no idea what’s behind all this. We don’t even know if the same person is responsible. There’s no forensic evidence whatsoever surviving from your hour in the water. It was a very efficient crime.’

  ‘Nancy Clark was killed by a lethal injection – is that right? I’m lucky I didn’t go the same way, then. I wonder why that was.’

  His eyes bulged. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Grapevine,’ she shrugged. ‘What does it matter? That murder sounded pretty efficient as well.’

  ‘The cause of death is meant to be totally confidential. If the means is kept out of the public domain, it gives us a better chance that someone will give themselves away.’

  ‘Like I just did,’ she said, with a stab of anxiety. ‘It could have been me that killed Nancy Clark. I was in town at the right time, after all.’

  ‘Yes, you could,’ he nodded. ‘Except that alibis cut both ways. Mr Kitchener is yours, the same as you’re his. And I can’t for one second imagine what possible motive you could have had.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound very nice, does she?’ Simmy was feeling slightly giddy, from a new throb inside her head, and a returning ache in her chest. ‘Nancy Clark, I mean. Nobody seems to have liked her.’

  ‘Not many friends,’ he agreed. ‘But we learnt about the consultant. It often happens, don’t you find? A woman who carries on with a married man forfeits most of her female friends. They don’t approve.’

  ‘That’s rather outside my experience. Were they still carrying on, then, up to when she died?’

  ‘Oh, no. He’s ninety now and in a home.’

  ‘Do you think they had a secret love child?’

  He shook his head. ‘The post-mortem showed she’s never had a child.’

  ‘You should talk to Mrs Ellis,’ she said, feeling again the guilty stab of treachery. Melanie’s gran had no love for the police, and would not be pleased at being questioned. ‘She seems to know most people’s secrets.’

  Moxon looked doubtful. ‘Why would anybody care enough to kill Nancy Clark now? That’s one of the first questions we ask, you see. Why now? What changed?’

  ‘Old Mrs Kitchener died,’ she suggested. ‘That seems to have some significance, don’t you think? It sounds very sudden.’

  He made a note, but continued to look doubtful. ‘It could be anything,’ he muttered. ‘Something nobody’s thought of.’

  Simmy felt sorry for him. His hair still looked greasy, his shoulders slightly dingy. She remembered their lunch in the Elleray, as if it had been months ago. Most murders had totally obvious perpetrators, she understood. There would be a distraught husband standing over his dead wife with the kitchen knife still in his hand. Or the dazed boy nudging his lifeless friend in disbelief that a blow from a tyre iron could actually kill anybody. Devious plans involving hypodermics fell well outside the usual pattern, as did pitching harmless florists into the freezing waters of Stock Ghyll.

  ‘You’ve put a guard outside,’ she said. ‘That’s very scary. What do you think might happen?’

  ‘There was an attack on your life. We don’t want that to happen again.’

  ‘The hospital people don’t like it. They want to be shot of me.’

  ‘Too bad,’ he said unfeelingly.

  ‘And how would anybody know how to find me, anyway?’

  He sighed. ‘It was on the news. It named the hospital.’

  ‘Did it name me?’

  ‘It said you were believed to be the proprietor of a floristry business in Windermere. More than enough to identify you. The point is, the attacker knows you survived. We can’t avoid the assumption that he’ll try again.’

  ‘No wonder the hospital’s annoyed.’

  ‘You’d rather be at home anyway, wouldn�
�t you?’

  ‘I won’t be at home. I’ll be at my parents’ house, like a child. That won’t be entirely wonderful.’

  ‘It’s Christmas. Wouldn’t you have gone there in any case?’

  ‘For the day, yes. Not for weeks and weeks.’ She groaned, largely from the pains making themselves felt in all parts of her. ‘I’m just like my father’s wretched cat.’

  He kinked an eyebrow at that.

  ‘It’s got a broken pelvis as well.’

  The detective inspector laughed. He dipped his chin and put a hand to his face and abandoned himself to a long minute of the most musical chuckling Simmy had ever heard. When he finished, he looked up with damp eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s funny, really. It’s just that I haven’t had much sleep …’ He held her gaze. ‘And you, Ms Persimmon Brown, have a very strange effect on me.’

  Before she could find a response to that, a small team of medical people materialised at her bedside, and made it clear that Moxon had to leave. She was almost sorry to see him go.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It felt like wanton cruelty to make her start learning to use crutches, barely twenty-four hours after surgery on her pelvis. The crutches were full-length, and bulky, designed to be positioned in the armpit. The soreness in her chest flared as she tried to hold the pads under her arms and rest all her weight on them. A muscle somewhere had been wrenched, and gone unnoticed until then. She dangled pathetically between two nurses and the disconcerting crutches not knowing which part of her hurt most or what to do about it.

  Respite came when she was lowered onto the side of the bed and the newly-discovered sore place examined. For good measure, the site of the pelvic fracture was also given a close scrutiny, and judged to be doing remarkably well. ‘Hardly any swelling,’ the junior doctor reported. ‘Nice clean wound.’

  Pills were administered, and soothing cream rubbed onto the bruises. Her green breasts were turning blue, which was marginally less horrifying. But it hurt to breathe, which they agreed was a result of the broken rib. Trying to use crutches with such an injury might not be entirely wise, somebody pointed out. ‘But we need to get her ambulant,’ somebody else replied.

  ‘Elbow crutches,’ came a suggestion which drew general agreement.

  ‘Should have gone for them in the first place,’ said the first somebody.

  Simmy let them talk with no sense that she needed to participate. Probably she would have been ignored even if she had made a contribution.

  Different equipment was produced and she was urged to try again. With all the weight on her forearms, she made much better progress. The leg on the unbroken side of her pelvis was to be used for minimal weight-bearing while she swung along between the crutches. Balance was difficult, the whole business awkward, but she could glimpse a time when it might just work.

  ‘We’ll try again later today,’ she was promised, before being permitted to go back to bed. Exhaustion sent her into an abrupt sleep that lasted for over an hour, and blotted out all activity in the room around her.

  When she awoke there were two women at the bedside, apparently only just arrived. ‘It is you,’ said one of them. ‘We thought it must be.’

  There were three nurses in the small ward; two of them doing something to the confused old lady in the next bed. The other was standing by the door, arms folded, as if the unseen police guard had somehow metamorphosed into a hospital employee. She was closely watching Simmy’s visitors.

  ‘They said you were only meant to have visits from relatives,’ said Gwen, with a defiant toss of her finely shaped head. ‘But we persuaded them we were harmless. Even so, we’re under surveillance, look.’

  At her side, Nicola coughed a brief laugh. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We promise not to ask you any more questions.’

  ‘Nicola and Gwen,’ Simmy said aloud, to show she still had the use of her mental faculties. ‘This is a surprise.’ It was rather more than that, she discovered. The women hardly knew her. What in the world were they thinking of?

  ‘It was my idea,’ said Gwen. ‘When we saw it on the news, about what had happened to you, I thought we should call in and see for ourselves how badly damaged you are.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We thought perhaps you’d been to visit Nic’s mother and got in the way of some low-life mugger, really because of us.’ Gwen’s expression was fierce at the very idea of what could happen to a woman in the streets of Ambleside.

  ‘Not entirely because of us,’ Nicola tried to explain. ‘I mean – we still haven’t the slightest idea who sent those flowers, or why – or anything. But Gwen’s always been very particular about responsibility and that sort of thing.’ She sighed and shifted her chair slightly further from the bed. ‘I hope you’re not too badly hurt,’ she finished.

  ‘I am, quite,’ said Simmy, aware of at least three separate sources of pain. ‘But I can’t see why you should feel the least bit responsible.’

  ‘Were you going to see the old lady?’ Gwen persisted.

  ‘Actually, yes, I was. But she wasn’t there.’

  ‘No – she’s staying with Davy until after Christmas. That’s what I mean. If she’d been in, and given you a cup of tea, you’d never have been attacked.’

  Simmy began to wonder exactly what the news report had said. ‘I wasn’t mugged,’ she began. ‘Nothing was taken. Although I did lose my bag, I suppose.’ Another major implication only just got through to her. Phone, credit cards, driving licence, house keys, car keys, were all in that bag. Perhaps someone had fished it out of the ghyll and it was safely at the police station already. Perhaps some efficient person had dealt with all the bureaucracy such losses entailed, without worrying her about it.

  ‘Well, we were coming to Barrow anyway,’ said Nicola. ‘And Gwen has a thing about hospital visiting. That’s all it is, basically. Oh, and we thought we might see Davy. She’s a radiographer here.’

  ‘Steady on!’ protested Gwen. ‘It’s rather more than a casual visit, my girl. We marched into this poor woman’s shop and tried to bully her into betraying a professional confidence, and the next thing we hear, she’s half dead in a freezing river. Think how we’d have felt if—’

  ‘It wasn’t in any way your fault,’ Simmy insisted. ‘And you weren’t especially unpleasant to me. I really can’t see the connection.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ muttered Nicola, rolling her eyes. ‘Because there isn’t one.’

  ‘Good old-fashioned human kindness,’ said Gwen. ‘All girls together, sort of thing. For all we know, you’ve got nobody to visit you, and could do with a bit of cheering up. Look – we brought you some chocs.’ She proffered a box of truffles that looked madly expensive. ‘And I got you a pair of angora bedsocks. I discovered recently that the key to all happiness lies in warm bedsocks.’ She brayed a startlingly loud laugh at her own remark.

  Simmy thought of her distant feet, under the flimsy hospital bedcovers and decided the socks would probably be rather nice. ‘But I can’t get them on,’ she said. ‘My pelvis is broken. I’m hopelessly immobile.’

  ‘Let me do it for you,’ said Gwen, jumping up.

  ‘I don’t think—’ Simmy began, only to be cut off by the watchful nurse leaping forward.

  ‘Don’t touch her!’ she ordered. ‘You’re not allowed to touch her.’

  ‘My God!’ Gwen fixed an imperious gaze on the buxom girl. ‘Do you think I’m going to kill her? What with?’

  ‘Probably some sort of poisoned dart,’ said Nicola tightly. ‘Leave her alone, you fool.’

  ‘It’s only a pair of bedsocks.’ Gwen proffered the items. ‘You do it, then. She said she’d like to have them on.’

  ‘Hospital patients do not wear bedsocks,’ argued the nurse. ‘Or if they do, we provide them ourselves.’

  ‘Not angora ones,’ said Gwen. ‘Just do it, there’s a good girl. And stop being such a twit.’

  Simmy was beginning to like Gwen quite a lot. Perhaps she was
thwarted of her do-gooding intentions by small-town attitudes to her unorthodox lifestyle. Perhaps the Women’s Institute had shunned her, or the Red Cross given her the cold shoulder. Beside her, Nicola seemed colourless and somehow secondary. Nicola was a reactor, Simmy decided. No initiative and entirely dependent on Gwen for everything.

  The nurse made no attempt to obey Gwen’s instruction, and the socks were left on the bed. Simmy looked from one visitor to another, trying to summon a degree of clarity. They still had no idea of the identity of Candida Hawkins, then. The girl had not made herself known to them, as Simmy had expected her to by this time. And that was confusing, because it left Simmy unsure of her own position. Was it all right now to name the girl to these putative relatives? Would she be doing good by finally bringing them together? On the face of it, she thought she might. But there was still a thread of caution keeping her silent. Gwen was a tough woman, she suspected, capable of real anger if thwarted or provoked. There was an uncompromising look in her eye, as if she never felt ambivalence about anything. Besides, Simmy thought weakly, how would she ever broach the subject, here in the ward where interruptions were so frequent?

  A clattering trolley could be heard approaching and Simmy realised she was yet again painfully thirsty. ‘What time is it?’ she asked. ‘How long was I asleep?’

  ‘Half past three,’ said Gwen, without consulting a watch or clock. ‘We should go. You don’t look so bad to me. Does she, Nic? Do give a shout if we can help with anything.’ She handed Simmy a business card. ‘Everything’s on there. We can post Christmas cards or do some shopping, whatever. I’ve got to work the rest of this week, but Nicola’s got time on her hands. Davy’s got everything covered with the old girl – and it doesn’t look as if we’ll be bothered by any more nonsense from the phantom granddaughter.’ She laughed easily. ‘So it’s all going to settle down nicely. Don’t you think?’ She looked around, not just at Simmy and her partner, but at everybody else in the room. All activity seemed to have been suspended from the moment the guardian nurse had shown her mettle. The tea trolley was coming closer.