by Rebecca Tope
Her next dream included trees and police tape that was tied around the ankle of the Gentian child. Somewhere behind her she could feel Ben, but something was preventing her from turning round to look. It was a rope made of plaited rushes, wound around her legs. The other end was in the middle of Esthwaite, anchored by something heavy that she knew would be horrific if she managed to drag it out of the water. When she pulled, the tape attached to Gentian tightened and the little girl screamed.
At last it was morning, sunshine streaming through her window, and the hoped-for enlightenment was as far away as ever.
Over breakfast, she tried to convince Corinne that she would keep her informed of every move she made. ‘I’ll be at the shop all day, anyway,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to worry.’
Corinne merely sighed.
The shop was unlocked when she arrived shortly before nine. Simmy was in the back room constructing a colourful spray of flowers. ‘Got to take these to Newby Bridge in a minute,’ she said. ‘It’s for Moxon’s mother-in-law. Can you hold the fort till I get back? I’ll only be about forty minutes.’
‘Okay.’ It felt strange the way Simmy was carrying on as usual. ‘No news about Ben, then?’ she couldn’t resist adding.
‘Haven’t heard a word.’
‘So they haven’t found him.’ Again, the tightness, the inability to breathe, had her in its grip. He had been gone for two nights now. ‘Where is he? What’s happened to him?’
Simmy closed her eyes and said nothing. It was the most terrifying thing Bonnie had seen for ages.
‘You think he’s been killed?’ she said, in a choked whisper. ‘You do, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think anything. My mind’s paralysed. There’s nothing we can do, except just wait. So let’s get on with our jobs, and see what happens.’
Bonnie stared at her. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You can’t mean you’re just going to carry on as usual and hope something turns up? That’s like giving up altogether.’
‘I just don’t see—’
‘Well, I do. Melanie agrees with me, as well. We’ve got to sit down and make a list of every single little thing, all the facts, and the people, the times and everything. We might see a pattern, or a clue or something. It’s what Ben would do,’ she concluded fiercely.
‘You’ve spoken to Melanie?’
‘She came round last night. She said she’d tried your mum, but she wasn’t in. I don’t know what good that would’ve done, anyhow.’
‘None at all,’ agreed Simmy listlessly.
There was a silence, before Simmy returned to her flowers. She glanced out of the small window, looking onto the yard behind the shop. ‘At least it’s another warm day. He won’t be feeling cold.’
‘What? Why should he?’
‘Well, he was hardly wearing anything. Shorts and a T-shirt. He left his rucksack in my van.’
Bonnie’s head turned hot. ‘Shorts?’
‘Yes. His legs are quite brown, although he said some of it was dirt.’
‘No, no. That Barnaby said he had trousers. They were wet around the bottom. You heard him.’
‘Did I? I didn’t notice.’
‘Where would he get trousers from?’
Simmy was unbearably slow. ‘I have no idea.’
‘It must mean he was kidnapped. The people changed his clothes, in case the police were looking for someone in shorts. Did you tell them what he was wearing?’
‘I don’t think they ever asked.’
‘This is important, Simmy. It’s a massive great clue.’
‘It could be, I suppose. So phone Moxon. I’ve got to go. They want the flowers by ten o’clock.’
Bonnie lost it. ‘Go on, then. Can’t risk losing any business. Can’t let an old lady down. It’s only my boyfriend who might be dead. What does that matter, compared to a bunch of flowers?’
Simmy pretended not to hear. She lifted the finished spray, wrapped cellophane around it, raised her chin and walked out of the back door without a word. Bonnie watched her employer climb stiffly into the van, and then dug in her pocket for her phone. Her hands were shaking, as she realised she had no idea of Moxon’s number.
Melanie knew it, though. And Melanie arrived five minutes after Simmy left. ‘It’s here, look,’ she said, riffling through Simmy’s stack of business cards. ‘You must have seen her using it by now.’
Bonnie shrugged. ‘If I have, I forgot.’ She grabbed the scrappy object from Melanie and started keying in the number. ‘Oh bummer. My battery’s going. Can I use your phone instead?’
‘Why do you want to call him?’ Melanie wanted to know, handing over her phone. Bonnie merely flapped at her to stay silent. Melanie efficiently produced a charger and connected Bonnie’s phone to a power socket. ‘Never know when you’ll need it,’ she muttered.
‘Hello? Is that Inspector Moxon?’ the younger girl asked, making an effort to sound calm and responsible. ‘Good. It’s Bonnie Lawson. Um … I think I’ve found some evidence that Ben really has been kidnapped. That boy at the old school place yesterday said something about trousers. But Simmy says she’s certain Ben was wearing shorts.’
She pulled a handful of her frizzy hair in frustration, as she listened to his reply. ‘No, but how could he? He didn’t have any other clothes. He wouldn’t have bought some, would he?’ More listening, but little more speaking, before she finished the call. ‘He’s not very impressed,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think the man’s a fool?’
‘He’s probably just trying to stop you going up there again and interrupting things.’
‘Hmm,’ said Bonnie.
Melanie didn’t stay very long. ‘I need to call old Bodgett and find out where I stand. He might want me to go in today, if the police are packing up. Then I have to get the car off my idiot brother, before he takes it to Carlisle or Lancaster or somewhere. He’s always doing that without telling me.’
A customer gave Melanie her opportunity to depart. Bonnie called after her, ‘It was hardly worth coming, was it? Why’d you bother?’
The customer – a middle-aged man buying red roses, his face almost the same colour as the flowers – gave her a worried look. ‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ she snapped. ‘Do you want me to wrap some fancy ribbon round these?’
‘No, thank you,’ said the customer, almost throwing money at her.
She was tempted to throw it back, so foul had her temper suddenly become. What was the matter with the police that they could ignore such a clunking great piece of evidence? Moxon had sounded as if he was in a crowd of people all talking at once. His impatience with her had been offensive. She fumed for a further ten minutes, alone in the shop, before bringing her rage under a degree of control.
Her only hope was to go back to square one and think everything through all over again. Whatever his situation, Ben would try to send her a message. Or he would rely on her to work it all out from the facts available. The photos had to be significant. The anonymous legs encased in trousers, perhaps? But surely that picture had been taken during a struggle, not deliberately aimed? And before that, Ben could not have known he would be captured, chased, challenged – whatever it was that had happened to him. So in fact the pictures on his phone meant nothing. They told the police how and where Dan’s body had been lying, but said not a thing about Ben himself.
Which left the bizarre events in the middle of Hawkshead. Here she really got into the momentum of her enquiry into the most likely explanation. With Simmy due back in ten minutes, she forced herself to think quickly. Her fingers twitched as she made mental notes, ticking off facts and suppositions, moving on to assumptions. Ben had taught her how this should be done. They had practised, laughing together, inventing little scenarios for each other.
And thus it all clicked into place, from one second to the next. All thanks to a second look at the assumptions everyone had been making.
Chapter Nineteen
Simmy, too, had time for some calmer reflection that Thurs
day morning, as she drove down to Newby Bridge with the flowers for Sue Moxon’s mother. She had woken feeling depressed and useless. While expecting that she would be told if Ben was found, she could think of nobody she could phone for news. Not Helen, anyway. It would be a dreadful intrusion. When Bonnie arrived at work looking so wan and droopy, it was obvious that nothing good had happened.
Her advice about waiting passively for something to develop had been intended as mature and reasonable. Instead it came across as heartless and defeatist. No wonder Bonnie had been so angry with her. It was as if she had already written Ben off as gone for ever. How truly stupid she had been. When she got back, she would make amends.
The eighty-year-old looked closer to sixty, flinging the door wide and welcoming the flowers as if they were the one thing she had really wanted all her life. ‘How absolutely lovely they are,’ she cried. ‘Thank you ever so much. Did you do them yourself? What a talent you have!’
The accolade went a long way to putting some backbone into her again. She had no reason to give up. She had all kinds of abilities and characteristics that had helped in past situations to identify killers. Why was she being so pathetic now?
She drove as fast as she dared back up to Windermere. Bowness was as usual thronged with holidaymakers, coaches, bicycles, straggling families with tiny toddlers. It was not possible to speed through Bowness. But she got through more quickly than usual and was into her little backyard again by five minutes to ten.
‘Bonnie,’ she called. ‘I’m back. I want to say I’m sorry for what I said earlier on.’
But Bonnie wasn’t there. The shop was coldly, implacably empty. A note was propped on the cash register.
‘Gone to look for Ben. Don’t worry about me.’
Simmy’s immediate reaction was to distance herself. Let Bonnie do what she liked. The thwarted intention to apologise and try harder mutated into indifference. She had learnt before that anxiety and fear were self-limiting emotions, at least for her. The apparent permanency of her father’s condition had been a surprise. Was it possible to sustain a worry for weeks on end? She couldn’t see how. And fear was even more transitory. Fear for Ben’s welfare had started as an acute and overwhelming state of mind. Now, only two days later, it was a much duller sensation. Was this a defect in her, then? Bonnie evidently thought so.
She reviewed earlier occasions where she had blundered into hazardous situations involving malice and physical injury. None of them had required deliberate independent action from Simmy. She had been told what to do by others, or been on some innocent project that turned nasty. If she had been given any choice, what would she have done? There had been moments when she had put another person’s welfare before her own – moments she recalled with some relief. But she had seldom been decisive or shown much initiative. She was no eager amateur sleuth, as Ben very much was.
But Ben and Bonnie were little more than children. They were blundering about in a world of aggressive and unpredictable adults, where nobody knew for sure who might do something terrible. Detective Inspector Moxon himself appeared to be unprepared for what might happen. He did not feel like an adequate protector of vulnerable youngsters. In fact there was a definite suggestion that he regarded these youngsters as part of the problem.
Nobody came into the shop for the next hour. That gave her a great deal of time for reflection along these lines. She was aware of a persistent vision of herself inside a bubble, idling in a flower shop while in the world outside there were people dying and hating and kidnapping, playing games and feeling several strong and painful emotions. She was increasingly sure that this was a culpable detachment on her part. But she was at the same time being ignored by everyone. They had pushed her to the sidelines, and given her no sort of role. Even Ninian was more involved than she was, with his dubious sighting of Ben. And her mother had been sought out by Melanie as a confidante, rather than Simmy herself. Corinne was probably driving Bonnie back to Hawkshead and Helen Harkness would be hassling the police to find her boy. They were all doing something, while she remained in her lonely, floral tower.
Why had Bonnie been so excited by the detail of Ben’s clothes, she wondered. There were all kinds of explanation, surely, other than a sinister one. He might have friends in the area who’d lend him something warmer and agree to remain silent about seeing him. He might have encountered a walker on the fells and swopped his shorts for trousers. Anything was possible.
And yet, Bonnie knew Ben very well indeed. She was attuned to nuances and hints that nobody else could see. She had spent whole days with him since they first got together, and virtually every evening since Ben’s exams had finished. In the enforced separations, they texted and phoned and almost seemed to commune by telepathy. If anybody could find Ben it was Bonnie. And perhaps the fact that his clothes had changed was all the inducement she needed to get started.
At eleven o’clock she was rescued from increasingly tangled and self-reproachful thoughts by Melanie, who came bursting through the door in just the same fashion as she had on Monday. It was déjà vu, in fact. It made Simmy smile, and for a moment persuade herself that it was indeed Monday, when there was nothing to worry about, rather than this increasingly unsettling Thursday.
‘Can you drive me to Hawkshead?’ Melanie panted. ‘I can’t get my car. Gary’s gone off somewhere and isn’t answering his phone.’
‘Not really,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m here on my own. I can’t just close the shop.’
‘Yes you can. You’ve got to. Where’s Bonnie?’
‘Looking for Ben. Where do you think?’
Melanie pushed her fingers through her thick, dark hair. It was a gesture Simmy had not observed before. It indicated an unusually fraught frame of mind. ‘It’s a nightmare, Sim. He’s been gone two days now. What if he’s … you know … dead?’
‘He’s not. Of course he’s not.’ Again, Simmy felt old and tired and peripheral.
‘He might be. Dan is, remember? It can happen.’
Simmy said nothing. It had all been said already.
‘Anyway, I have to get to the hotel. Bodgett insists I turn up, unless I get a doctor’s note to say I’m too ill.’
‘They can’t say that. That’s not how it works these days.’
‘Tell him that. He’s going mad up there, from the sound of it. A group booking just came in. They’re arriving tomorrow. Eight people.’
Simmy blinked. ‘And you had all those rooms available? In July? At short notice?’
‘People cancelled when they heard what had happened.’
‘Did they? You’d think they’d be curious to see the place where there’d been a murder. Aren’t the general public meant to be ghouls about that sort of thing?’
‘Some are. But Mrs Bodgett had to phone them all and explain the situation, and some of them took the refund and bailed out. Mind you, they won’t find anywhere else up here. They’ll have to go to Norfolk or … Milton Keynes, instead.’
‘And then they’ll be sorry.’
‘I doubt if they will. It’s going to be pretty weird in Hawkshead. Somebody from an agency will have to do Dan’s stuff, and that’s going to be horrible, for a start. There’ll be mistakes. Penny’s never the most balanced person at the best of times. Any little thing can set her off.’
‘She’s the skeletal receptionist,’ Simmy reminded herself. ‘She did look rather flaky. If that’s the word. Ditzy? Volatile?’
‘She’s amazingly good at the job, most of the time. Makes people feel special. I’m supposed to be learning from her how to do it.’
‘I thought Dan was pretty good at it, too.’ She remembered how subtly the man had dealt with the complaining guest, offering him a free drink. ‘Although I did wonder whether the chap ended up feeling a bit of a fool.’
‘What chap?’
‘The husband of that couple. I forget their names. They’re on the ground floor.’
‘Lillywhite,’ said Melanie. ‘So – are you going to take
me, or what?’
‘Isn’t there anybody else?’
‘Who, for instance?’
‘What about the bus? There’s a perfectly good bus that goes every hour. Or the ferry. Why not use the ferry?’
‘I just missed the bus. And the ferry takes ages. I can’t face all that hassle.’
Simmy sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll have to take you, then. You’ll never speak to me again if I don’t.’
‘Believe me, I wouldn’t ask if I could avoid it. You’ve been really off, this past day or so, you know that? Anyone would think you didn’t care about any of this stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Dan and Ben, of course. See? That’s what I mean. You act as if nothing’s happened.’
‘Stop it, will you. I can’t take any more unfair criticism, when there’s absolutely nothing I can do. I don’t understand what people expect.’
Melanie was halfway out of the door. ‘Where’s your car?’ she demanded. ‘Where did you leave it this time?’
‘By the library, I think.’ Every morning Simmy had to find a space for her car in one of Windermere’s streets, and every evening she had to try to recall exactly which street it had been.
‘People expect you to care,’ said Melanie as they walked briskly along the main street. ‘They want you to take an interest and share in their feelings.’
