The Ambleside Alibi: 2

by Rebecca Tope

  She came back with a shapeless jersey two-piece outfit, in a colour between grey and lilac. ‘I thought a skirt would be easier than trousers,’ she said. ‘It’s got a stretchy waistband.’

  Simmy grimaced, before putting it on. ‘Where did it come from?’ she wondered. ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘I think I got it in a jumble sale ages ago. I quite like the top.’

  The top was long and spacious, with full sleeves and a high neck. ‘It’s silk!’ Simmy realised. ‘Silk and wool, look.’ She showed Angie the label. ‘It must have cost a fortune when it was new.’

  The skirt was full and reached almost to her ankles. ‘It’ll trip me up,’ she worried. But when she swung her way down the passage to the kitchen, the skirt simply adapted itself to her movements as if it knew what was required. It was a strangely feminine sensation that she had almost forgotten. ‘It must be a year or more since I last wore a skirt,’ she laughed.

  ‘You look fantastic in it,’ said Angie.

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised. Look at me, Dad.’

  Russell was in the kitchen with the local paper, a mug of coffee at his elbow. He looked up, cocking an eyebrow. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Only then did she remember the snow. ‘How’s the weather?’

  ‘Just as your young friend predicted. Sunny spells. No more snow. All a flash in the pan.’

  ‘Good,’ said Simmy. ‘I might get you to take me up to Troutbeck later on, then. I need to get some clothes and things.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘Much better than I should. I feel a real fraud. I’m going to take this stuff off my head, I think. It’s been on for ages.’

  Angie gulped audibly. ‘Do you think you should? What’s underneath?’

  ‘A few stitches, and a big bald spot. How long does hair take to grow again?’

  ‘Better ask the cat,’ said Russell. ‘His is coming through a whole different colour.’

  ‘He’s got stripes. It’s not the same. Isn’t there something called “underfur”?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I suppose yours will take a while. You could have it cut all over, to match. The Sinéad O’Connor look.’

  ‘Careful, Dad. She’s a bit recent for you. Can’t be much more than twenty-five years ago she first had a hit.’

  ‘I don’t care for the music, but I can recognise her by her head.’ He ran a hand over his own luxuriant grey covering. ‘I’ve often wondered what mine would look like if I went bald. We don’t know the shape of our own heads, do we?’

  It was going to be a good day. She could feel it. Her injuries were healing, her brief but dramatic collapse the day before almost forgotten. Ambleside seemed a long way off, and entirely different from the gentle lowlands of Windermere. ‘I think I’ll just wear a woolly hat for a few months,’ she decided.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Angie. ‘And don’t pull the dressing off, there’s a good girl. You might damage something.’

  ‘Somebody said there might be a nurse calling in to look at me,’ she remembered. ‘Will they phone first, I wonder?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. They’ll expect you to be here, won’t they?’

  Conversation continued in a desultory way, Angie unnaturally idle, in the absence of any B&B people. Only gradually did Simmy grasp the reason for the difference in atmosphere. ‘Where are they?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t you have people coming?’

  ‘We put them off,’ said her mother easily. ‘It was only a few, and we’d intended to be closed for the next two weeks, anyway.’

  ‘But you had bookings for this weekend.’ Her own self-absorption seemed shameful to her. ‘I never even thought about it.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Russell emphatically. ‘We needed the break. It’s only brought it forward by a few days. You’re the priority now. And the cat,’ he added. ‘He’s much happier with all this peace and quiet.’

  A quiet that was abruptly shattered by the pealing of the doorbell. ‘Damn!’ said Russell. ‘When will I learn not to tempt fate like that?’

  He slapped his paper down, and made a big production of hauling himself to his feet and shambling down the passage like a much older man. ‘Maybe it’s my nurse,’ Simmy called after him.

  It wasn’t a nurse. It was Detective Inspector Moxon, freshly shaven, but not very thoroughly brushed. Her father escorted him into the kitchen, with eyes wide. ‘It’s the cops,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve only just heard about you being discharged,’ Moxon began accusingly. ‘It’s a wonder I didn’t waste half the morning driving down to Barrow. Luckily I called them first.’

  She bit back an apology. Since when had she been expected to inform the police of her movements? She could feel her mother bristling with these and similar thoughts, as she leant back against the worktop by the sink and gave the detective a hostile stare. Simmy remembered that they had never met before. ‘So what now?’ she asked.

  Her father indicated a wooden chair tucked under the big pine table; Moxon pulled it out and sat down. ‘We’re still trying to find that girl,’ he explained. ‘But we have far too little to go on.’

  ‘Didn’t the Troutbeck men help?’

  ‘Nobody knows who they are. It’s as if that whole incident never happened.’

  ‘Well, it did.’

  ‘I believe you. But we need more help.’

  ‘From me?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. How are you now? You look … fine.’ He smiled stiffly. ‘You look like a whole new person.’

  ‘I think it’s just that I’m forty years younger than most people the hospital has to deal with. My bones mend more quickly.’

  ‘So …’ He gave Angie and Russell a look that mixed authority with polite placation. ‘Would there be a chance of you riding with me up to Troutbeck to try and sort this out?’

  Simmy was amazed at the leap of excitement the suggestion produced. She had believed herself to be quite content to spend a week reading and doing puzzles and watching old films. Now, it seemed, she was every bit as keen as Ben Harkness to get on the trail of a murderer. But she needed to think logically before responding.

  ‘Can’t you just ask at the shop for the name of a man who takes The Independent and lives at Town Head?’

  Moxon grimaced. ‘We could, yes. But it’s not always a good idea to jump in like that, in a small community. What if the chap’s already got gossip going about him, over something else? It would unbalance things if word got out that the police were interested in him. And …’ he held up a silencing finger ‘don’t say we could do it under cover, anonymously. There’s no such thing as an undercover detective out here. We’re all much too well known. Especially in a place like Troutbeck, where there’s such a tight network of old friends and relations.’

  ‘You sound like Melanie,’ she said.

  ‘Miss Todd understands how it works, as well as anybody does.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘You were ahead of us on that – getting her granny to talk like that was an inspiration.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have done it with you, though. She doesn’t really like the police.’

  A quiet snort from Angie made it plain that Mrs Ellis wasn’t the only one.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Simmy decisively. ‘You can take me to my house at the same time. Can I go like this?’ She looked down at herself, in the elegant suit that had settled itself around her as if finally finding the exact right person to wear it. In Angie’s hands it had seemed baggy and old, to the point of embarrassment. Now it was rapidly establishing itself as the best thing she’d ever worn. ‘I don’t think there is anything else here, actually.’

  ‘You look splendid. But you’ll need a coat as well.’

  Her mother made no difficulty about finding a fleecy jacket and a pair of gloves for good measure. ‘And a hat,’ Simmy reminded her. The hat turned out to be a floppy blue beret that hid the damaged area without pressing uncomfortably.

  She made mu
ch of showing off her proficiency with the crutches, out on the pavement. Moxon’s car was thirty yards distant, and she swung along confidently, enjoying the chance of a clear straight course. The trick was not to think about it, she realised. Once problems of balance and weight distribution became conscious, the whole thing collapsed into wobbles and panics and a bent back. Elbow crutches only worked if they were long enough for the person to stand up straight. Simmy’s were extended to their maximum length, making her wonder how anybody taller than her might manage.

  ‘Your parents seem a bit thunderstruck,’ Moxon commented, once they were comfortably in the car.

  ‘No wonder. They expected to have to cosset and entertain me all day, not wave me off with a detective. They’ll think I’ve been malingering all along.’

  ‘They didn’t see you screaming, the way I did.’

  ‘True. I was much better by the time they turned up.’

  The road northwards was bordered on both sides by a monochrome wintry landscape. The lake on the left reflected a looming mass of grey clouds, like a leaden mirror, Russell’s sunny periods proving to be very short-lived. On the right, the bare trees had a sprinkling of snow on the boughs, and the spaces between them were splotched with white patches. The road was clear, but a grubby few inches of splashed grit and old snow had banked up on either side. When they turned up towards Troutbeck, these edgings grew cleaner and deeper. Before long, a strip of snow remained down the middle of the road. Ahead of them, the fells were shapeless white mounds, merging into cloud with no discernible differentiation.

  ‘Why did I choose to live up here?’ Simmy moaned. ‘What was I thinking of?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. It’s lovely. Best of all worlds. I wish I’d had the sense to do the same.’

  ‘Where do you live, then?’

  ‘Bowness,’ he said shortly, and she realised it was a taboo question. Bowness, she supposed, was the worst of all worlds, if you liked solitude and wildness and unspoilt landscape.

  ‘We should swop,’ she said. At that particular moment, she would cheerfully have signed the papers without a second thought.

  ‘Gladly,’ he agreed.

  ‘So what exactly are we going to do?’ she asked. ‘How will we find these men? And what are we going to say to them?’

  ‘We’ll drive up to Town Head, and see how it goes.’

  She stared at his profile as he drove slowly up the winding little road. ‘What? You think they’ll just be standing out in full view, and I just have to point them out?’

  ‘I think we might get lucky.’

  She knew he was teasing her; that there was some convoluted scheme afoot that she wasn’t privy to. He turned left at the church, and headed up the narrow lane towards the centre of the village. ‘I hope it’s not icy at the top,’ she said. It was a manoeuvre she habitually avoided. The final few yards involved a narrow steep turn which was a disaster in any weather if you met something coming down. In treacherous weather, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  But it was not only easily accomplished, but Moxon began a wholly unexpected conversation in the process. ‘Ninian Tripp visited you in hospital – is that right?’

  ‘Er … yes, he did. Julie brought him. He said he’d run the shop for me if I needed him to.’

  ‘Did he indeed? How well do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve seen him three or four times. I’ve heard a bit about his background.’ She was stiff with defensiveness, her injured bones suddenly protesting. Dimly she imagined the official police impression of Ninian, with his peripheral lifestyle. They would automatically hold him to be a suspicious character, simply because he failed to adhere to the normal conventions.

  ‘He told you about his criminal record, then?’

  She wanted to lie and say of course she knew the whole story. She refused to take the bait, feeling a sudden scorn for the transparency of Moxon’s thinking. ‘I don’t think I’d be very interested,’ she said coldly. ‘I take people as I find them, and I must say I liked him a lot.’

  ‘And Julie – what does she make of him?’

  ‘She likes him as well. And she’s much more selective about people than I am.’

  ‘Oh, he’s a charmer, all right. And you’ll let him loose on your shop, then, will you?’

  ‘I might, if it makes the difference between surviving and going out of business.’

  ‘Which it won’t. Don’t give me that.’

  ‘Well don’t you try to blacken a man’s character for no reason!’ she flashed back. ‘You’re lucky my mother isn’t here.’ She was overflowing with the many critical remarks she might make on behalf of her mother. They ranged from the way police officers assumed they could make judgements on people’s lives to the everlasting surveillance that amounted to outrageous intrusion on everybody’s privacy.

  He sighed, and Simmy remembered how she had made him laugh when he visited her in hospital. He likes me, she thought. And he wants me to like him. It was a pity, she supposed, that she could only manage it about half the time.

  ‘Let’s stop at your house first,’ he suggested. They were almost at her door as he spoke. Her whitewashed cottage looked chilly and neglected, and she felt a pang of guilt at how little she had thought of it. There were modest drifts of snow on the flowerbeds and the front step had an unspoilt inch or so of white topping like the icing on a cake. Evidently the postman hadn’t been that day. Moxon turned off the ignition and opened his door. ‘Come on, then. I should come in with you and check there’s been no burst pipes or anything.’

  Burst pipes were the very least of her worries. Lakeland plumbing took freezing temperatures for granted and she knew there was barely any risk. There was more likelihood of a fire, given that she had left most of her appliances switched on, assuming she would be back on Sunday evening, rather than five eventful days later.

  She had almost certainly left the back door unlocked, despite a previous experience of somebody simply walking in and making themselves at home. Given what had happened on Sunday, this might not have been too good an idea.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to help me out.’

  Nobody had been in; the house was just as she left it. But her clothes were all upstairs and she had not yet tackled stairs. She looked at them dubiously. ‘I suppose it’s not so difficult,’ she said. ‘Just a matter of keeping my balance.’

  ‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘Did they really say you mustn’t put any weight on your feet? That doesn’t seem possible.’

  ‘Just use them for balance, they said. It’s not so bad when you get used to it. But stairs …’

  They both knew he should offer to go up and make a selection of pants, jumpers, socks, enough to last a week or more. And they both found the fact that he was a professional male police detective came as a block to such assistance.

  They were saved – or so it felt – by his phone going off. He answered it on the second beat and after twenty seconds thanked the caller with a tightness that Simmy interpreted as urgent excitement.

  ‘We have to go back to Windermere,’ he told her, looking at her with something like frustration. ‘They think they might have found her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your granddaughter person. In that same pub we were in last week, as it happens. The Elleray. She’s staying there with another woman.’

  ‘She told me on Sunday that she was going home,’ Simmy protested.

  ‘It might not be her. We don’t have a picture of her, remember. More likely, she lied to you. But we’ve got forty officers watching out for a young woman in a Mondeo, possibly acting strangely. Now they’ve found one, okay? And I’ve got you with me to identify her. We need to go.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather early to be in the pub? What time do they open? She must be very conspicuous.’

  ‘Precisely. That’s why they called me.’

  ‘Who did? The pub people?’

  ‘No more questions.’ He made as if to grab her arm, but did not
make actual contact. Instead he flapped a hand at her. ‘Please come on.’

  She looked around her house, disliking being rushed. ‘I should turn the heating down, at least. And switch the telly off on the wall. I don’t know when I’ll be back, do I?’ The clothes, so near and yet so far, nagged at her. ‘And I really do need some clean pants. My mother’s feel all wrong.’

  Without a word, he ran upstairs, not asking her for any instructions. Less than a minute later he was back holding a canvas bag that had been in a cupboard, stuffed full of random clothes. Then he went into the sitting room and disconnected the TV. ‘The heating can stay as it is. Are you on gas or oil?’

  ‘Oil,’ she said, with a wince. ‘What a waste!’

  ‘You won’t want to come back to a freezing cold house. It’s best to leave it. Now can we go?’

  It had only been five minutes since the phone call. She had no reason to reproach herself for delaying him – especially as it had been his idea to come to Troutbeck in the first place. She thought wistfully of the odd little piece of detective work he apparently had in mind, now no longer required, if it was indeed Candida at the Elleray. For the first time, her heart began to thump with anxiety.

  It took two more minutes to get her back into the car, during which she said nothing. But once they were moving, she asked, ‘What if it was Candida who pushed me into the water? What’ll she think when she sees me?’

  ‘Well … she’ll know from the news that you’re still alive, so it won’t be a complete shock. Beyond that, I have no idea. That is rather the point of the exercise. Or part of it.’

  ‘Isn’t there some evidence at Miss Clark’s house? Fingerprints or something?’

  ‘A few, of course. Three or four sets from people we can’t identify, which might include your Hawkins girl. We haven’t got hers to match anything against. And there’s the usual collection of hairs and fibres and footprints, which may or may not have anything to do with her killer.’

  Simmy sighed, wishing she’d watched the same forensic programmes as Ben and understood at least something of the way it all worked. She had a suspicion that she was in a very small, very ignorant minority, with virtually no working knowledge of how – for example – a DNA test was done, or what the vital signs of strangling might be. Even the garbled story of how Miss Clark had been killed by a hypodermic made very little sense to her. Moxon had told her almost nothing about how the murder had been committed, leaving her to wonder about the accuracy of the rumours. Besides, there was still the major question of the alibi. Unless something new had been discovered about the time of death, Candida Hawkins was still in the clear.