The Hawkshead Hostage

by Rebecca Tope

  More confusion as the people stared from him to Simmy and back, unable to draw any rational conclusions from the few facts they could see for themselves. One or two plainly thought Moxon as unreliable as Simmy, if not more so. ‘You’re never a policeman,’ said a young woman. ‘Where’s your badge, then?’

  With only a shred of dignity, he produced it. Simmy had not been sure that detectives carried such things, but supposed there must be times like this when credentials were required.

  She tried to think. Inside the building there were three criminals and two young innocent victims. The noise outside must surely have got through to them by now, which meant they knew they couldn’t hope to escape. So what would they do? Who had broken the window, and why? Were they planning to burn the whole place down, with Ben and Bonnie inside? Or to leap from the upper window, in a desperate effort to get away? Why had they gone in there, anyway? Had they left possessions there that had to be retrieved?

  Questions flocked through her mind, each one wilder than the one before. And then it struck her that she need no longer hesitate in phoning Bonnie. There was no possibility that the girl was hiding quietly in a cupboard. Her phone was still in her hand, and she activated it quickly.

  By a miracle, Bonnie answered. More than a miracle – a sort of madness, in the midst of such chaos. It almost made Simmy laugh. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘Was that you who screamed?’

  The girl’s voice was impossibly calm. ‘It’s nearly all over now,’ she said. ‘I can come down to let you all in. We need an ambulance for Ben. And me, I suppose.’

  Simmy couldn’t speak. Her head had filled with cotton wool, born of relief and amazement and a renewed desire to laugh for several minutes. She turned to Moxon, who was fending off demands for information from the ever-growing crowd of Hawkshead worthies. ‘Call an ambulance,’ she told him, after twice trying to get the words out and failing. ‘Bonnie says it’s all over now.’ She could feel hysteria bubbling somewhere in her chest. ‘She’s done it all without us.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Mr Lillywhite advanced on the two youngsters, his eyes bulging. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded of Bonnie. ‘How did you get in here? What do you think you’re doing?’

  She cuddled closer to Ben and scowled up at the man. ‘You killed Dan Yates, and half-killed Ben,’ she accused. ‘You and these women.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Lillywhite. ‘What a ridiculous accusation.’ She glanced at the other woman, looking worried.

  ‘So why are you here? How did you get in?’ Bonnie felt light-headed from the sense of having nothing to lose. If these people murdered her and Ben, at least they’d be together for ever. And there was no chance at all that the killers would escape punishment. There was definitely satisfaction in that thought. But before that happened, she was determined to put up a fight. ‘You came to finish him off, is that it?’

  ‘We’re thinking of taking this place on. This is Sheila, the agent. We’ve been looking around for somewhere all week, and this seems our best option.’ Mrs Lillywhite spoke calmly, her words clipped and firm, but her eyes flickered from face to face, and her skin looked bloodless. ‘We had no idea at all that there was anybody up here until we heard you moving just now.’

  ‘Liar!’

  They all looked at the boy, curled on the ground. His revival was a greater shock to Bonnie than to anyone else. She had believed him to be lost in unconsciousness. The word came out loud and clear, but his eyes remained shut.

  ‘What did he say?’ Mr Lillywhite growled.

  ‘He said you’re a liar and I believe him. I think you murdered Dan Yates by Esthwaite and kidnapped Ben because he saw you there, red-handed.’

  ‘Sheer fantasy,’ snapped the man. ‘Childish storytelling.’

  ‘So why’s Ben here, then? How did he get here?’ Bonnie looked from husband to wife, her face an unwavering challenge. ‘You can’t even invent a credible denial,’ she added with scorn. Beside her, Ben gave a low chuckle of approval. In spite of everything, she was enjoying herself. It got even better when the other woman joined in.

  ‘This is all highly peculiar,’ she said. ‘How do you explain this boy being here?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as ours,’ said Mrs Lillywhite. ‘I’m telling you, we had no idea he was here. You saw for yourself that the padlock was undisturbed. These children must have got in through a window or something. And the boy’s been fooling about, tying himself up, and got more than he’d bargained for. Who knows what kids like this get up to?’

  ‘Liar, liar, liar,’ said Ben with growing strength.

  ‘And the man who was murdered?’ Sheila pressed on. ‘I have been wondering, actually. I knew him slightly – we’d been discussing a plan and I met him once or twice. I’ve got to organise a seminar about local businesses. I was hoping to use their conference room in the autumn. He told me there were other people who wanted it that same weekend, and we’d have to try and work something out.’ She frowned. ‘But he was killed before I could get anywhere. It’s been extremely frustrating, I can tell you.’ She looked at Mrs Lillywhite. ‘I did give you the key to this property last weekend. You could have got in, just as this little girl says.’

  ‘And they’ve kept Ben here since Tuesday,’ said Bonnie, wearily.

  ‘No!’ Sheila’s voice rose. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Ask them. They’ve been doing something illegal and Dan found out – that’s my guess. So they murdered him in the woods by the mere, but Ben caught them, so they had to keep him from saying anything, until—’ She stopped. Until what? Were they hoping to get away undetected, and then somehow send an anonymous message to the police, so he could be found before it was too late?

  It was surreal, making the worst of all imaginable accusations against two people, who simply stood there with wooden faces.

  ‘Prostitutes,’ said Ben, just thickly enough for the word to be in doubt.

  ‘What?’ Bonnie bent over him.

  His eyes flickered open. ‘Girls from poor countries. It’s a network. They talked about it. More water,’ he finished, his voice expiring.

  She jumped to comply. Nothing else mattered. Ben would repeat everything he knew once the police had arrested the couple and taken them away. She didn’t have to get everything straight now.

  But Sheila had different priorities. ‘What did he just say?’ she demanded, her eyes bulging. She went up to Rosemary Lillywhite, jabbing at her with a thin finger. ‘Have you been trying to drag me into this? Was this going to be a bawdy house?’ She looked around at the echoing room. ‘In the middle of a lovely place like Hawkshead?’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic,’ said Mr Lillywhite. ‘Have some sense, woman.’

  Ben managed a much better intake of water, swallowing steadily, and letting it do its restorative work. ‘Better,’ he said. Then he flexed his hands. ‘Hurts.’

  Bonnie began to wonder how much time had passed, and what was going on outside. The windows only showed roofs and the fells beyond. There were faint voices, but nothing that made her confident that police were there in force, ready to capture the murderers. Despite her determination to take things in the right order, questions were flooding her mind. One stood out. ‘How did you manage to write that date?’ she asked Ben, with a tender smile.

  ‘Soon as we got here. They didn’t tie me up right away. I knew you’d see it.’ He returned the smile with interest.

  ‘What?’ said Mr Lillywhite.

  Bonnie smirked at him. ‘You kidnapped the cleverest boy in England, you fool. He wrote that, look.’ She pointed at the window, with the mirror-image numerals written in the grime. ‘That’s how I knew he was here. That’s what’s cooked your goose.’

  Incomprehension was written on three blank faces.

  ‘1780. Wordsworth was here then. We’ve been studying him together.’

  ‘Wordsworth?’ Sheila spoke first. It was almost possible to believe she had never heard the name before.<
br />
  ‘Poet,’ said Ben. Bonnie laughed, not just because it was very funny, but because her beloved’s improvement was progressing so prodigiously.

  Rosemary Lillywhite approached the window, incredulously. She looked through the glass and down, and saw something that evidently maddened her. ‘No-o-o-o!’ she screamed, and snatched up a leather briefcase that her husband had brought with him. She hurled it with full force against the panes, smashing three or four of them.

  Sheila retreated to the other side of the room, visibly shaking. Mr Lillywhite appeared to be mainly concerned with his bag, which was balancing half in and half out of the window. He stepped forward and retrieved it, before taking a fragile hold of his wife’s sleeve and pulling at her. ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Think of Tom. Get a hold of yourself, woman.’

  Tom? Bonnie gave Ben a sideways glance. ‘He’s their son,’ came the answer. ‘He’s involved in all this as well.’ He made an expression of disgust. ‘I thought he was my friend.’

  This was altogether new to Bonnie. But before she could ask for further detail, there was a phonecall from Simmy, which she handled with outrageous confidence, and a little while after that there were footsteps on the stairs, and everything was very nearly over.

  A man they didn’t know led the way into the room, followed by another stranger and then DI Moxon himself appeared. It was highly disorganised and nothing remotely like any police raid they’d all seen on television. Simmy rushed to Ben and grabbed him. ‘He didn’t believe me,’ she wept. ‘He said you were safe and sound with Wilf.’

  ‘Tom,’ said Ben, with a nod. ‘He can do Wilf’s voice.’

  Moxon stood in stark perplexity at being the solitary police officer at a scene of such complicated and contradictory crime. ‘Don’t let them go!’ shouted Bonnie – not at Moxon, but the two other men. ‘They’re murderers.’

  Their blood up, the men willingly responded. ‘All of them?’ asked the larger one.

  ‘Not her,’ pointing at Sheila. ‘The others.’

  But the Lillywhites showed no resistance. ‘You can’t prove anything,’ said the husband. ‘Not a thing.’

  Bonnie’s heart thumped. ‘Is that right?’ she whispered to Ben.

  ‘Of course not,’ he told her. ‘There’ll be evidence galore all over the place. Did you find my phone?’

  She nodded. ‘They’ve looked at all the photos.’

  He smiled. ‘Oh good. That’ll be your evidence then. His shoes …’ He spoke to DI Moxon, and at last revived enough to sit up straight. ‘But for a start you can hold them on a charge of abduction and deprivation of freedom. I hereby press charges against them.’

  Simmy had said nothing, after her first outburst. Now she said to Bonnie, ‘But how in the world did you find him? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘Our game,’ was the deeply unsatisfactory answer.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Simmy took an unnervingly unprotesting Bonnie to a GP clinic to have her hand and wrist attended to, while Ben was taken by ambulance to hospital. His dehydration was a cause for concern, as well as possible nerve damage to his wrists from the tight binding. Bonnie had begged to go with him, but it was decreed otherwise. Ben himself promised to call her that evening. ‘How?’ she shouted. ‘You haven’t got a phone.’

  He rolled his eyes and smiled. ‘Trust me,’ he said, just as they closed the ambulance doors on him.

  Initially bursting with questions, Simmy soon found that a lot of the answers had already been supplied by the afternoon’s events.

  ‘It was Tom, then, pretending to be Ben in the shop and giving Barnaby that message?’

  ‘Right,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘But isn’t it a massive coincidence, that he knows Ben and Wilf? How does he?’

  The girl sat up straighter in the passenger seat and sighed. ‘I’ve been wondering that as well. I’ve never heard of him before. It makes you think his parents might have been out to get Ben all along – but that can’t be right. They couldn’t have known he’d be at Esthwaite on Tuesday. And why would they have any reason to want him, anyway?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Simmy had a thought. ‘There was a boy called Tom hiking with Ben and Wilf, and those other brothers. He would have got to know them then. But it still must be a coincidence.’

  ‘He never said anything to me about it,’ Bonnie complained. ‘All those phone calls every evening and he didn’t mention him even once.’

  ‘You talked about your game thingy, I imagine.’

  ‘Nope. That never got a mention, either. I s’pose I did most of the talking. Corinne’s been saying I need to do a course or something, and get some qualifications, and that’s been bugging me. It was mainly that stuff we talked about.’

  ‘Hmm. So Tom and his mum and dad are here on holiday, and he doesn’t want to stay at the hotel with them, so he meets up with lads his own age and talks them into letting him go hiking with them. Where did he go after that? They came back on Tuesday. Where’s he been sleeping since then?’

  ‘At the hotel,’ Bonnie guessed. ‘Melanie told me their room’s ludicrously tidy. I bet there’s a single bed in there, and they’ve smuggled him in and needed to hide the evidence.’

  ‘Sounds very odd. Why not just tell the hotel he’s staying, if there’s a spare bed? And why not just tidy the bed, not the whole room?’

  ‘Dunno, but I bet it’s something like that. And he’s been hanging about in that big room upstairs. It might have been him I saw on the balcony. It’s easy enough to hide in a hotel.’

  ‘Gentian would agree with you.’

  ‘Who? Oh, that kid? Seemed like quite a little character.’

  ‘It makes the Lillywhites even worse, if they involved their son in what they were doing. If Ben’s right that they’re trafficking foreign girls for sex, that’s grotesque.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bonnie uncertainly.

  ‘Presumably, Dan Yates got wind of it all, and that’s why they killed him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bonnie said again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘We’ve not been thinking much about Dan, have we? Melanie’s right about that. We should make sure she’s okay. She’ll be feeling left out.’

  ‘Again,’ said Simmy ruefully. ‘Melanie always feels left out. She phoned me while I was standing there in Hawkshead, trying to decide what to do. She’s found some emails between Dan and that Sheila woman.’ She frowned. ‘What’s going to happen to her, then?’

  ‘Depends, I guess.’

  ‘She’s some sort of estate agent. Not the ordinary kind, though. She wanted to have a seminar in the hotel. Something like that.’

  Bonnie was losing interest, cradling her wrist in a hand still streaked with blood and grime. ‘I’m so dirty,’ she moaned. ‘Look at me.’

  ‘That’s why you need to see a doctor. Get all that muck washed out of your cuts. And that wrist is terribly swollen. They might want to x-ray it.’

  ‘I saved him, didn’t I? They’d have killed him if I hadn’t been there.’

  Privately, Simmy thought this unlikely. The presence of Sheila-the-estate-agent suggested no such intention. But why had they gone to Hawkshead with her, anyway? ‘You were a hero,’ she told the girl.

  It was seven o’clock before Simmy had a chance to sit down and drink tea and really think about the events of the past three days. Her mother had firmly ensconced her in the private sitting room, which had uneasy associations with previous brushes with violent death and personal injury. Melanie had phoned again and been invited to come round for a debriefing. Bonnie had gone home to Corinne, lavishly bandaged and perfectly clean. Detective Inspector Moxon had gone quiet.

  Russell went to the door when Melanie rang, his newfound security rituals taking far too long. When the girl joined Simmy, she was flushed with impatience. ‘What’s with your dad?’ she demanded.

  ‘He’s scared of intruders. It’s all my fault.’

  ‘He needs therapy.’

>   ‘He’s getting it. My mother’s got him an appointment. Have some tea and cake.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s good about the appointment.’ They looked at each other for a quiet moment. ‘So – it’s all sorted, then? Is that right?’

  ‘More or less. Ben’s going to be okay. Bonnie was heroic. Moxon was an idiot. Do you know anything about a boy called Tom? The Lillywhites’ son, apparently.’

  Melanie shook her head. ‘Never knew they had a son.’

  ‘It still feels like too big a coincidence. He invited himself to go along with Ben and Wilf and the others, on their hiking trip at the weekend. Then, when Ben was abducted, he pretended to be him – to that boy Barnaby, in the Co-op. He knew Corinne’s car number – I don’t know how. It was a trick to make us all think Ben was all right, just doing one of his investigations.’

  Melanie repeated what she’d just heard, with supplementary questions. Then she thought about it for a minute or two. ‘I don’t think it’s such a huge coincidence. It’s not such a stretch, really, for the Lillywhite boy to hook up with the hiking group.’

  ‘But it is for Ben to be the very person to witness his parents murdering Dan. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Melanie leant back into the sofa cushions. ‘Well, not really. Ben gets everywhere, doesn’t he? Always spying on people and not leaving things alone. It would be him.’

  Simmy nodded. ‘That’s true. But it must mean that Tom actually saw Ben tied up, in that empty shop, and recognised him. He might even have dreamt up the plan to pretend to be him, to put everybody’s mind at rest.’

  ‘That was clever. I was totally convinced.’

  ‘Bonnie wasn’t. I saw her talking to Barnaby in a field, earlier today. She must have worked out that it hadn’t been Ben at all.’ She paused. ‘I wonder if it really was him that Ninian saw in that car.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter now, does it?’

  ‘No, but – well, I still want to know.’

  ‘Never mind. But I’d bet a tenner that it wasn’t. Go on with what happened. How on earth did Bonnie manage to find Ben?’