The Hawkshead Hostage

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Isn’t it a huge risk for the kidnapper to take him into a public place? He’d be sure to try to fool her and escape.’ Helen looked extremely confused and unsure. ‘Although … well, some of it does sound like him, I must admit.’

  ‘It does,’ said Corinne. ‘Clever little beggar.’

  ‘Except – what does it really mean, that he says he’s okay?’ asked Simmy. ‘He’s really not, is he? He’s alive, which is probably what he meant.’

  They were standing at the front of the car, still passing the note back and forth, staring at it in turn as if to force a secret code to materialise if they only knew how.

  ‘Hiya!’ came a girlish voice from the rear of the car. ‘What’re you all doing?’

  ‘Bonnie.’ Simmy’s first, rather odd instinct was to hide the note from the girl. But as Helen was holding it, she had no way of doing so.

  ‘And me,’ said a man, coming up behind Bonnie. ‘I found her at the hotel – again. She’s obstructing police investigations. We were just going to call you and then drive off to Kendal, but Bonnie had to go to the Ladies first. She was a long time.’ He said it with a quiet smile, entirely removing any criticism from the words. Then he paused. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Um …’ said Simmy.

  ‘Hi, Nolan,’ said Corinne with exaggerated matiness.

  Simmy’s eyes widened. How come she was on first-name terms with him? Something to do with foster children, she supposed, although she’d been under the impression that her charges were all much too young to fall foul of the police.

  He rolled his eyes, and sighed. ‘Watch it,’ he said. This time there was no smile.

  ‘What’s that?’ Bonnie had seen the paper in Helen’s hand.

  ‘A note,’ said Helen, proffering it not to Bonnie, but to the police inspector. ‘From Ben. Sort of.’

  Moxon took it as if it might explode in his hand. He glanced at all the ungloved fingers, which he rightly assumed had touched it, and sighed.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Bonnie, threatening to snatch it. Moxon held it high, out of her reach.

  ‘Please,’ she begged.

  ‘Wait.’ He read it slowly, his brow creased in bewilderment. ‘Well …’ he said at last and handed the paper to Bonnie. ‘Hold it at the very edge,’ he warned her.

  She read it in a single glance and then turned it over. Nobody, not even Moxon, had thought to do that. It had a grey smudge on it from the wiper blade, but nothing else. Bonnie sighed.

  ‘What were you looking for?’ asked Simmy.

  ‘A sign,’ she said. ‘So Ben never touched this. He told someone else to do it.’

  ‘Have you any idea who?’

  ‘Someone who believed him and who had enough brain to remember the car number or description. Or who knows me and Corinne. “Early today”. That’s the important bit. Pity they don’t say an exact time. Then we could check the movements of all the women on the list.’

  ‘List?’ queried Moxon.

  ‘Of suspects. Hotel staff and guests, basically.’

  And Melanie, came the thought unbidden to Simmy’s mind. She kicked it away in horror. What was the matter with her? How could she be so idiotic, so treacherous, so peculiar as to think such a thing? Just that Mel was one of the hotel staff, of course. That’s all it was. Obviously.

  ‘We could have fingerprinted it,’ said Moxon. ‘Still can, of course, but we’ll have to eliminate you three ladies. And I don’t suppose it’ll be of any help.’

  ‘The person would have to be on your database,’ nodded Bonnie. ‘And I don’t think that’s very likely.’

  Simmy watched as he pursed his lips, in a silent reproach to the liberals who had ensured that no comprehensive database containing the prints of every individual in the land existed. Except, that was going to be DNA, wasn’t it, Simmy asked herself.

  ‘We worked out what might have happened,’ said Helen, and repeated Simmy’s theory almost verbatim. ‘We thought a kid – a big kid like Ben – was the most credible. But one that doesn’t know Ben. Of course, they go to a different school from here. It’s the John Ruskin. Ben goes to the Lakes.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s no sixth form at the JR,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘So?’ asked Moxon, a trifle impatiently.

  ‘So it’s more complicated than you think. If a person is over sixteen, they could go to a school somewhere further from where they live.’

  ‘This isn’t helping,’ said the detective. ‘As I see it, there are two very significant facts here. First, the boy is alive and well. Second, he’s with a woman.’

  Bonnie danced in frustration. ‘There’s no clue,’ she wailed. ‘Why didn’t he leave a proper clue?’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ said Helen. ‘You know what he’s like.’

  ‘You don’t think this whole business is one big game to him, do you?’ Simmy felt a sudden gust of rage at the very idea.

  ‘Do they know … ?’ Moxon asked Bonnie. ‘All that stuff you just told me?’

  ‘Um … probably not.’

  ‘What?’ said Corinne, Simmy and Helen in unison.

  ‘It’s just this game we’re putting together. It’s nowhere near finished. Just odd bits and pieces, really. But it’s what we’ve been doing for a month now. At least. It’s educational,’ she added defensively. ‘History and plants and all sorts. It’ll make a fortune when it’s finished.’

  ‘It just might at that,’ Moxon confirmed. ‘But first—’

  ‘First we have to find him,’ said Helen loudly. ‘Instead of just standing here.’

  Simmy gave voice to her main difficulty. ‘I still don’t get why his kidnapper would go out into the streets with him, for anyone to see. How did she know he wouldn’t be recognised? Or make a run for it?’

  ‘She could have threatened him,’ said Corinne. ‘After all, he knows she’s killed one person already. She could have said his sisters, or Bonnie, would be gone after if he didn’t do what he was told. He might well believe it.’

  Simmy recalled a highly unpleasant and frightening threat made to her parents not so long ago, and nodded. ‘Makes sense,’ she said.

  ‘Look – I have to get back to the hotel,’ said Moxon. ‘My superiors are not going to believe that any of this is helping with the murder investigation. The manager wants us to pack up and go by this time tomorrow, and until we’ve got every last detail out of all those people, that isn’t going to happen.’

  ‘It is helping, though,’ said Simmy. ‘Now you know the killer – or one of them – is a woman. You just have to work out where they all were early this morning, and see who was missing.’

  ‘Just,’ he repeated with a touch of scorn. ‘They’re all coming and going the whole time. The guests, especially, can’t be kept from doing what they want. That child, Gentian, drives her mother mad if she isn’t kept amused.’

  ‘I saw her,’ said Bonnie. ‘I saw most of them, actually. So did you.’ She looked at Simmy. ‘There were two swarthy foreigners as well. They look like drug dealers.’

  ‘Stop it,’ ordered Moxon.

  ‘What about that woman in a suit?’ Simmy asked suddenly. ‘Was she there as well?’

  Moxon and Bonnie exchanged a look. ‘Suit? What sort of suit?’

  ‘Dark-blue, short skirt. High heels. She was in the foyer yesterday, getting impatient. Then she went outside for a bit. Then she drove away. You must have seen her, when she was talking to the Lillywhites. You were right there beside her.’

  ‘Was I? I don’t remember.’

  Simmy looked under her eyebrows at him. She was at least as tall as him, and this look was one she had developed since meeting Ben Harkness. It conveyed, Have you really thought about what you just said? and I think you might want to try that again. It worked very effectively.

  ‘Do you know her name?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not. I got the impression she was trying to book into the hotel, and nobody was paying her any attention. She was fairly miffed about it. Then
I wondered whether she might have some connection to the Americans that Dan was so worried about. That seemed to make sense. They wanted to impress these people, because they could bring in extra business. That’s why I had to do the flowers yesterday. To make a good impression.’ She watched as Moxon tried to untangle this stream of information.

  ‘The ones in the foyer look gorgeous,’ said Bonnie, irrelevantly. ‘I noticed them particularly, just now.’

  Moxon had gone pink. ‘This sounds extremely interesting,’ he said. ‘I’m sure somebody will have spoken to this woman, and got a name. We’ll have to check through all the bookings.’

  ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ said Bonnie excitedly. ‘There is a clue, after all.’ And before they could stop her she was running across the car park, dodging vehicles and heading towards the church.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There would be people in Hawkshead who never quite forgot the scene of three women and a man chasing madly across the main car park and over the street in pursuit of a flaxen-haired girl. It was a distance of perhaps two hundred yards at the very most, but it made quite an impact.

  Bonnie came to a stop in front of the old schoolhouse, now a museum, which William Wordsworth and his brothers had attended. ‘School!’ she panted.

  Her elders surrounded her, braced for a renewed chase. ‘For God’s sake,’ panted Corinne. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Helen was holding both hands to a visibly agonising hip. ‘I can’t run,’ she moaned. ‘Don’t make me run again.’

  ‘The school,’ Bonnie repeated. ‘That’s the clue. The note written on a page from a schoolbook. Ben must have told the person to do that, deliberately.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Corinne again. ‘Why not just say “Go to the school”? Why make things so complicated?’

  ‘Because he didn’t dare. If the woman heard him, he’d be in deep trouble.’

  Simmy interrupted. ‘If she heard him saying anything to a passing schoolboy, it would be just as bad. Don’t you think? I mean – if he could speak to someone, then the sensible thing would be to tell them where he was being kept, and who by. All these clues and games are just ridiculous.’

  Bonnie looked hurt. ‘They’re not,’ she said.

  Moxon adopted a deeply severe expression. ‘There is a thing called “wasting police time”, you know. If you and young Mr Harkness are simply enacting parts of your game, without any danger to either of you, that would qualify. In that case, you would be in considerable trouble.’

  ‘A man’s dead,’ Helen reminded him.

  ‘Yes, he is. And your boy was at the scene. That much is understood. But beyond that is all conjecture. I’m wondering whether Ben took it upon himself to play detective, and has been following the killer or killers ever since. This message, “Ben says he’s okay” would fit that scenario only too well. In so many ways,’ he concluded wearily.

  ‘He wouldn’t leave his mobile behind,’ Helen objected.

  ‘He might,’ Bonnie corrected her with a worried glance at Moxon. ‘Having a phone would make everything too easy. And he probably wants us to see the photos on it.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The photos.’ Moxon nodded to himself. ‘I forgot about the photos.’

  ‘You’re forgetting rather a lot these days,’ said Simmy, thinking of how she herself had been overlooked the previous day.

  ‘Simmy!’ Helen gave her a horrified look. Her deference to the police was unexpected, given how bold her son was. Then Simmy realised that not everybody was like her own mother, who showed deference to nobody. Helen might have produced a boy who saw no reason to treat anyone as his superior, but all her other children were of ordinary talent and attitude. The courage and spirit Helen had shown so far that day might well be the result of Ben’s influence on her and not a central element of her character.

  Moxon took it better, but was still not happy. ‘I think I might be forgiven,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to think about.’ He wriggled his shoulders. ‘And I should be at the hotel thinking about it, not here with everyone who knows and loves young Ben. I’ll take this’ – he waved the sheet of paper – ‘and get forensics to look at it. And I’ll send a couple of men up here to have a look round.’ His eye fell on Bonnie. ‘I don’t understand the bit about the school.’

  They were standing on a path that led steeply up to the church. To their right was the museum, with its door standing half-open. It was a perfectly preserved eighteenth-century schoolroom, magically enhanced by the ghostly fact of young Wordsworth’s bottom having graced the seats and his elbows the desktops. A simple scrap of history, which a minority of tourists found tempting. Simmy herself had never been inside it.

  ‘It’s in our game,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘So … ?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could have got it wrong.’

  ‘It seems pretty tenuous to me,’ said Helen.

  Simmy became aware that Corinne had drifted back towards the street. ‘My car expires in a couple of minutes,’ she said, to nobody in particular. ‘And I did have something I was meant to do this afternoon.’

  ‘Go,’ said Bonnie. ‘I can get a ride with Simmy and … Mrs Harkness.’ She looked at Moxon. ‘Can we drop the Kendal thing for now?’

  He gave an old-fashioned little bow, while smiling at the adults. ‘I think so,’ he said.

  Helen didn’t correct Bonnie or suggest the use of her first name. After all, the girl was only seventeen: still a child in the eyes of the law. And in the eyes of anyone casually encountering her, thought Simmy. A volatile child, passionately in love with Ben Harkness, open to anything he might suggest to her and rendered delirious by his attentions. She would tell lies for him, break every rule, climb every mountain. Either she would find him when nobody else stood a chance, or she would ruin any hope of the police getting a result. Moxon obviously found her at least as baffling as he did Ben. As far as Simmy could ascertain, there were no Moxon offspring, which might suggest an ignorance as well as a failure of imagination when it came to grasping the nature of teenagers.

  Then a boy of perhaps fourteen emerged from the museum, followed by a man, woman and small girl. He assessed the group standing obstructively between them and the street, and looked meaningfully at the sheet of paper still in Moxon’s hand.

  ‘You found it, then,’ he said carelessly.

  Nobody reacted. Double and treble takes at his words made every face comical. Moxon looked at the paper, then at the boy, then at Corinne. Simmy looked at Bonnie. Helen was the first to regain her wits. ‘It was you? You saw Ben? Did you?’

  ‘Early this morning. He was with a woman.’ The words emerged flatly, as if learnt by heart. Which they had been, of course.

  ‘Who are you?’ Bonnie demanded. ‘Do you know Ben? Where do you go to school? Did he give you the paper to write on? How was he?’

  ‘Who are these people, Barnaby?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Dunno,’ he shrugged. But his eyes were on Bonnie, his mind on her questions.

  ‘We’re looking for my son,’ said Helen. ‘And it seems he spoke to this young man – presumably your son? This man is a police detective.’

  ‘What?’ The father of the family spoke up. ‘Police?’

  Moxon did his best to take charge. ‘Could I ask your lad a few questions, sir? There’s no need to worry, he’s not in any trouble. But he is an important witness. We do need to know just what was said earlier today. Perhaps we could find somewhere …’ He looked around. The group had grown uncomfortably large, and not one of them had any intention of missing what happened next.

  ‘We’re on holiday,’ said Barnaby’s mother. ‘We don’t know anybody here.’

  Moxon focused on the boy. ‘Were you alone when you met Ben? Or with your family?’

  ‘I was on my own. We’re staying at Ann Tyson’s House, and I went out to get a paper for Dad, and some milk. There was a guy in the shop, bit older than me. He whispered to me what he wanted me t
o do. There was a woman—’

  ‘Was she holding onto him?’ Helen interrupted. ‘If not, why didn’t he just run away from her? He’s a fast runner when he tries.’

  ‘Who was she?’ Corinne said. ‘Was she old or young?’

  Moxon cleared his throat. ‘If I might be allowed to ask the questions,’ he said ponderously.

  Barnaby stood tall, enjoying the attention. ‘She wasn’t holding onto him, and he didn’t look as if he wanted to run away. She wasn’t very near him, actually. He told me to watch out for an old blue car, and if I saw it, to put a note on it saying he’s okay. W456 OBY. Easy to remember. I got the right one, then?’

  ‘What were you doing in the car park?’ Moxon wondered.

  Barnaby flung out his arms in frustration. ‘No, no. We were in our car when I saw it first. We went to Coniston, but then decided to come back here for a bit. We can never decide what to do.’ He threw an accusing look at his father, who did have an indecisive sort of manner. ‘Anyway, I thought it looked as if it was going to the car park, so when we parked there as well, I had a look and found it.’

  ‘Ri-i-i-i-ght,’ said Moxon slowly. ‘Lucky for young Ben, then.’ He frowned at Corinne. ‘How could he possibly know you’d be in Hawkshead today?’

  ‘He’d know I would be,’ said Bonnie. ‘That I’d be searching for him. And it’s the obvious car I’d use to get here.’

  Moxon nodded doubtfully. Bonnie turned impatiently to Barnaby. ‘Did he give you the paper to write on?’

  ‘No, but he said to use something from school, if I had it.’

  ‘And did you?’ She stared at him in wonderment. ‘What year are you?’

  ‘Year Ten. I only had an old maths workbook, with a few pages left at the back. Dad was going to help me with some stuff.’

  ‘Year Ten hasn’t broken up yet. You – and your sister – should still be in school. What year’s she?’

  ‘Five. We always have holidays in term time. It’s way cheaper, even with the fine.’