by Rebecca Tope
‘How long would that take?’
‘Fifteen, twenty minutes.’ The woman flapped impatiently. ‘There’s nothing here. We’ve called the police for nothing.’
‘There’s his phone,’ said Melanie. ‘That proves he was here. We should have a closer look.’
They walked along the fence, the ground muddy in places. They passed the dead tree that Simmy had noticed. For a few feet there was a wooden fence with rails, instead of the barbed wire along the rest of the stretch. ‘You could climb over here quite easily,’ said Simmy.
‘It’s been flattened here, look,’ said Melanie, pointing at a patch of bent bracken just beyond the barrier. ‘Somebody might have been lying there.’
‘There’s the police,’ observed Mrs Manager. She pointed to the road some distance away. A car could be seen turning into the hotel’s entrance. ‘I saw the markings on the side.’
‘We should go and meet them, then,’ Simmy decided. They began to walk towards Esthwaite, following the course of the fence again. ‘You know what? I bet Ben saw somebody asleep and thought he was dead. Maybe he was with a girl or something. Or not supposed to be here. So when he woke up and saw Ben on the phone he hit him, or chased him. And Ben dropped his phone trying to get away.’
‘Yeah? So where is he now?’ demanded Melanie. ‘It’s way over an hour ago. If he’s still running, he’ll have reached Ambleside by now.’
The jest went unheeded, because Simmy found herself watching a pair of swans making serene progress across the middle of the lake. They were so far removed from the turbulent worries of human life that she really wanted to join them, for a moment. Not just that, but to become one of them. Then she tracked back, her attention caught by a plop caused by a fish jumping out of the water. Another creature disporting itself in mindless pleasure, little knowing that a fisherman was out to get it. The lake itself was an oasis of calm, lacking all pretensions, ignored by almost every tourist in the region. The stark disjunction between the tranquil summer day and the extreme concern she felt for Ben was almost enough to justify Melanie’s flippancy. It was all mad, after all. Senseless, stupid and insane.
‘What’s that?’ Mrs Boddington-Webster suddenly yelped. ‘Look!’
Warily, Simmy followed her pointing finger. Over the fence, where all three of them stood helplessly staring at the water, was a dark lump, almost entirely submerged. ‘It can’t be,’ she said, feeling horribly sick. ‘It absolutely can’t.’
With no thought for dignity and heedless of her smart work uniform, Melanie scrambled over the wire, her weight making the whole fence sag and buckle. ‘Come on!’ she yelled, as if the others were half a mile away instead of five feet.
Simmy’s long legs helped her negotiate the obstructing fence, but the other woman was a lot shorter and even more smartly clothed than Melanie. She hesitated and then withdrew, her face tight with apprehension. ‘I’ll go and lead the police down here,’ she said. ‘There’ll be nobody to meet them, otherwise.’
Melanie and Simmy waded into the shallows, the ground soft and squelchy beneath their feet. Simmy wished she’d taken her shoes off. They felt like lead weights as they filled with water. The object they sought was only a yard or so from the edge, the water hardly any depth. They would have seen it sooner if it had not been for the long grass growing below the surface, obscuring nearly everything.Three days of heavy rain the previous week must have caused the lake to expand, washing over ground that was normally dry and grassy.
‘It’s a body,’ choked Melanie. ‘A man.’
‘Ben? It’s not Ben is it?’ The idea was as appallingly untenable as that of a nearby nuclear explosion or a huge dragon descending from the sky with outstretched claws. Something that would spell perpetual darkness and oblivion. Something that would render existence less than meaningless. If Ben was dead, there was no more hope for the world. All this went through Simmy’s mind even as she spoke the terrible words.
‘No,’ said Melanie. She was crying. Tears were running down her cheeks. She sat down in the water, holding a horrible sodden head between her knees. ‘No, it’s not Ben.’
‘Who then?’ It seemed clear that it was someone known.
‘Dan. It’s Dan, from the hotel,’ said Melanie.
Chapter Six
‘Is he dead?’ Simmy asked the question with the merest scrap of hope. The water might be shallow, but the face had been immersed in it, and the whole aspect of the body screamed lifelessness. The uncaring lake and the sky above it had quite given up on him. He was an inert unthreatening mass of meat and nothing more.
Melanie shook her head and said nothing. Then she put two fingers on a place at the side of his head, where the hairline was. Simmy leant down to see, wincing with the horror of it, her throat stinging with bile.
‘The bone’s broken,’ she realised. ‘That’s terrible. That must be what killed him.’ She looked steadily at the handsome face and the wet hair. The skin was oddly loose on the bones, the mouth and eyes open. ‘Get up, Mel. You don’t have to do that any more.’
But Melanie was immobilised. Gradually it dawned on Simmy that there was nothing to be gained from dragging the girl away. Mixed with the horror and grief was a kind of wonder. Mel traced the dead features with gentle fingertips, forcing Simmy to understand how a dead face is no more alarming or repellent than a live one. Why in the world should it be? She had known, for a few minutes, the same truth when her baby had died. But it was a slippery truth, and no two bodies were the same. Shivers of disgust and fear were slicing through her, as she formed part of the unhappy tableau on the edge of the lake.
Again, years seemed to pass. Simmy knew they were breaking rules, that they ought to be doing it all differently, but she felt weak and incompetent. Slowly the gears of her mind began to engage again until her head was almost bursting with questions, memories, implications. Twice before in the past year she had encountered the savage danger of water. A young man at a wedding had been deliberately drowned in Lake Windermere, and she herself had been pitched into water with malicious intent. It would seem that in an area known for its multiplicity of lakes and rivers, those intent on murder saw them as a convenient means of killing.
‘What happened, do you think?’ she ventured. ‘Somebody hit him with a hard object and then threw him into the lake as a way of hiding him? But when would they have done that? Ben saw the body under the trees.’ Her heart flinched. ‘He must have seen them do it. They must have needed to keep him quiet. He’s a witness to the whole thing.’ Desperation made her jiggle on the grass, and throw wild looks up towards the hotel from where help should be coming, and yet strangely wasn’t.
Melanie merely shook her head. Her tears had slowed, but she continued to sit straight-legged in a few inches of water, Dan’s head and shoulders were on top of her at an angle. Simmy began to wonder at the level of emotion shown over the man who had been the girl’s superior, and who she had shown very little sign of liking much. Was it no more than a natural human response to the pity of a sudden death, a young man’s life cut off so horribly? Her own emotions were stubbornly fixed on Ben and the acute need to find him before a similar fate could befall him.
‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed. ‘You don’t have to sit there with him. The police and everybody will be here in a minute. They won’t want you getting in their way.’
‘I can’t move,’ whimpered the girl. ‘He’s so heavy.’
Simmy was not eager to help. They had succeeded in swivelling the body around, so the legs were still in the lake, while the head and shoulders were in Melanie’s lap, on a slimy, semi-dry piece of ground. Esthwaite did not have proper banks – at least on its western side. The water merely lapped at the edge of the field, its boundary never the same from one week to the next. Their efforts had created a muddy cloud in the shallows, slippery and sludgy. She looked all around. Why hadn’t one of those darned fishermen taken more notice and come to their aid? How could they have missed the fact of something ghastly go
ing on? Perhaps if she shouted to them, they would respond.
But the idea of more people splashing about, asking questions, saying stupid things, was repellent. If the men in the little boats had actually witnessed the slaughter of Dan Yates and the dumping of his body in the lake, then surely they would have flown into action, phoning police and rushing to the shore to do their best to help? As it was, they must have missed the whole thing and thereby rendered themselves useless.
At last – and it was probably well under ten minutes in reality – there was authoritative assistance in the shape of two policemen, the hotel manager and someone wearing a white outfit, who presumably worked in the kitchen. Stupidly, Simmy searched the little group for Ben Harkness, who would always have turned up for the excitement if he possibly could.
The sudden manifestation of a dead body threw everyone into a far more concentrated mode. The policemen had thought they’d been summoned to a smoke-and-mirrors scene, involving nothing more than a dropped mobile phone. Now they had a whole long list of procedures to follow, for which they had not been prepared at all. Their attention was directed for a minute or two to the intervening wire fence, separating them from the tableau in the water. ‘We’d better pull it down,’ said one.
‘Right,’ said the other uncertainly. ‘Just a bit, right?’ Together they pulled up two vertical wooden posts and laid them flat. The fence had been wobbly from the start, and Melanie’s assault on it had already accomplished half the job. The wire obligingly lay flat and the policemen walked over it.
‘Who is it?’ demanded the manager, trying not to look too closely. ‘Is it your friend?’
Melanie raised her grubby face to his. ‘It’s Dan,’ she said.
‘What?’ The manager turned green. ‘It can’t be. How can it be?’
Nobody spoke. The policemen were both eyeing their glossy black footwear and equally pristine trousers, knowing they would have to get them wet. They also knew that they ought not to disturb the scene of a sudden death. But beyond that, they knew almost nothing. Accident, suicide, heart attack – anything was possible. Distressed colleagues and unidentified women had to be sorted out. One of them put out a hand to Melanie. ‘Come on, miss. Let’s have you out of there for a start.’
He planted his feet securely and exerted enough force to lever her out of the water. She came slowly, reluctantly, and then stood with bowed shoulders, shivering. The officer looked around the group for something to throw over her, but nothing was identified. ‘You need to get indoors and take those wet things off,’ he said. But words were not enough to achieve this, and Melanie stayed as she was.
Simmy lost patience, surprising herself as much as anyone. ‘There’s a boy missing,’ she said. ‘He’s seventeen. He found this body, over an hour ago. He phoned me. Now he’s gone. His phone was here, abandoned. We must find him before something terrible happens to him.’ Her voice rose to a shout. ‘We have to look for him.’
To their credit, the officers took her seriously, at least to the extent of looking at her and then looking at each other. ‘All right, madam,’ said one. ‘You’re telling us that this young man found the deceased and called you. What happened then?’
‘I didn’t hear the call. It was on my voicemail. When I found it, I came down here with Melanie and Mrs Bod— I mean the manager’s wife.’ She ignored Melanie’s alarmed gasp at the narrow escape from using the disrespectful nickname, other than to note that the girl was not entirely traumatised if she could worry about such a detail. ‘But he said the body was under the trees, not in the lake. The killer must have moved it, and then taken Ben away. Ben’s been kidnapped.’ This time she wasn’t shouting, but choking out the word, unable to confront all the implications it carried.
‘Killer?’ repeated the policeman. His face was paler than before, as if the concept of deliberate murder was far beyond his scope. Perhaps it was, Simmy realised. Perhaps she had more experience of it over the past year than this young constable had. Perhaps, like Melanie, he hadn’t yet seen a dead body in all its fresh and gruesome reality.
‘And kidnapper,’ Simmy insisted.
A connection had apparently been taking place in the mind of the other officer. ‘We’re not talking about young Ben Harkness, are we?’ he said slowly. ‘You said the lad’s name was Ben.’
‘Yes!’ Simmy’s relief was entirely irrational, but somehow the fact that Ben was already known to this man made a huge difference. ‘You’ll have to call DI Moxon. He’ll understand.’
But she had gone too far. The hotel manager squared his shoulders and laid a hand on a uniformed arm. ‘We have a body here,’ he said thickly. ‘My employee is lying here dead. I think that ought to be your primary concern right now.’
‘I agree with you, sir. But if there is any suggestion of foul play, we are not permitted to move him. We need a police doctor, a senior officer, photographer …’ He was removing a device from his belt and frowningly trying to recall correct procedure. ‘Excuse me,’ he added, and walked a few steps away from the bewildered group. His colleague, belatedly following protocol, made ushering motions. ‘Please move away now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here.’ He produced a device of his own. ‘If we could just have an identity for the deceased.’ He looked from face to face.
‘It’s Dan Yates,’ said the lad from the kitchen, speaking for the first time.
‘Actually, his name is Aidan,’ said Melanie. ‘Dan for short.’
‘Do you have details of his next of kin? Is he married?’
The manager took over. ‘Divorced. No children. Parents in East Anglia somewhere. I’ve got it on record in the office.’
Simmy acknowledged to herself that she actually cared quite little for Dan and his horrible fate. She cared about Ben, primarily because he had been under her care when he disappeared. What will his mother say? became her dominant thought, followed rapidly by and Bonnie!
She groaned aloud.
Chapter Seven
In the hotel foyer, Simmy noticed her newly arranged flowers with surprise. Such a lot had happened since she’d done them that she felt they ought to be looking wilted by this time. Instead they were fresh and undeniably beautiful. The sinuous shape created by the eucalyptus and honeysuckle suggested, with the very faintest of hints, an air of sensuality and luxury, heightened by the scent. She waited for everyone else to reach the same conclusion – but they all seemed far too distracted. As she ought to have been herself, of course. But then she remembered poor Dan Yates, and how pleased he would have been to find how capably she had met his requirements. Along with that thought came an alarming one: would the hotel management still want her to provide flowers twice a week, now their under-manager was dead? Would they close down out of respect – or what?
Such selfishness, she reproached herself, was a disgrace. The world of flowers and holidays and harmless fell-top walks had been shaken by violence and confusion. It was of no help at all to remember that she had encountered not just murder but kidnap in the recent past. To have it happen again was so appalling, she just wanted to dig herself a hole and hide away in it. A filament of guilt was gaining ground inside her, too. Not only for her selfishness, but for her failure to hear Ben’s frantic message on her phone when he first called her. How could she have been so stupid as to leave it in the van? She couldn’t have saved Dan, but she might well have been in time to interrupt Ben’s captors, and save him from abduction.
People were swirling about, asking questions and making demands. Not a single hotel guest was amongst them, for which Mr and Mrs Boddington-Webster must surely be thankful. There was more than enough confusion already with the staff all clamouring for information. Melanie seemed to form a still centre, silently distressed, her soaking clothes marking her out as especially significant. Simmy herself was wet, but nowhere near as much as Melanie. And because nobody knew her, or understood her part in the story, she had been shifted to the outer edge.
Finally, reinforcements
arrived in the shape of DI Moxon, already well known to Simmy and Melanie. With a singularly unprofessional smile, he went first to Simmy, both hands extended. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
She waved at the manager and his staff. ‘Their colleague’s dead, down in the lake. And Ben’s missing.’ She choked on the last word. ‘He’s been abducted. There’s no other explanation.’
‘Okay. Leave it to us,’ he said, in a tone that did little to inspire confidence. ‘Don’t go away, though. I gather you’re a crucial witness.’
‘What time is it?’ Only then did she remember other commitments and obligations.
‘Um … Twenty to three.’
‘It’s not, is it? What will Bonnie think? Why hasn’t she called me?’ Then she remembered. ‘Your men have got my phone. There’s a message from Ben on it. She must be going crazy, wondering where I am.’
‘Call her on the hotel’s phone, then.’
‘Right.’ At first glance there was no phone available on the reception desk. ‘Where is it?’
He made a small gesture of impatience. ‘Ask someone.’ His gaze fell on Melanie. ‘Miss Todd’s here as well?’
‘She works here. She knew Dan. I think, actually, she must have had feelings for him. She’s very upset.’
‘So I see.’ He sighed. ‘Well, let’s get some sort of order established. One thing at a time. Don’t go away,’ he said again.
Simmy went around the same circuit of panic, paralysis, mistrust and misery as before. She could see that Moxon had an uphill struggle ahead of him, when it came to achieving order. Melanie, still wet and shocked, was leaning against the reception desk. The skeletal Penny was standing back, eyes wide, making small shooing motions with her hands. The manager and his wife were whispering together, apparently arguing over the best place to put the police personnel. It was a miracle, Simmy thought foolishly, that nobody had knocked her flowers over.
