The Coniston Case

by Rebecca Tope

  Simmy remembered the number. Kathy had been her friend for years. The fact that she’d added ‘from Worcester’ was strangely sad, as if she feared Simmy might have made new friends with the same name and forgotten her. Over the past ten years they had been constant companions, with or without their menfolk. Leaving Kathy to move to Cumbria had been a wrench. Neglecting to invite Kathy to come and stay had been an omission she could hardly explain to herself, other than a need to sever all links with the painful events leading up to her separation from Tony.

  She phoned back quickly, the sound of Kathy’s voice proving to be a treat out of all proportion. ‘I have missed you,’ she realised. ‘It’ll be marvellous to see you again.’ Then it hit her. ‘But I am insanely busy this week. We’re overflowing with orders.’

  ‘Not in the evening, surely? I thought we could go somewhere for a meal tomorrow night.’

  ‘Yes, we could,’ Simmy decided. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I could even come and help you in the afternoon,’ her friend offered. ‘I don’t have to be anywhere.’

  ‘So why are you coming? Will you be on your own? What about Simon?’

  ‘All will be explained. I need to do something on Friday and Saturday, so I thought I’d add an extra day at the beginning, to spend with you. Sorry it’s such idiotically short notice. I only decided today.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘That’s another thing. Do you think your parents might have a room for me? Are they still running the B&B?’

  ‘They are, but why stay with them when I’ve got a perfectly good spare room? You’re welcome to it for the whole weekend, if you like.’

  ‘Oh – thanks. I wasn’t sure you’d have the space. And I didn’t know … well, whether I’d be in the way.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s no new man in the picture, if that’s what you mean. Are you completely occupied for all of Saturday, or can we snatch some time together?’

  ‘I’m not sure at the moment. It’s a family thing. All a bit delicate. I promise I will explain when I see you.’

  ‘What time will you arrive?’

  ‘I’m leaving at first light, so should be there by lunchtime. I’ll come to the shop first, shall I? Are you easy to find?’

  Simmy gave brief directions, and tried not to think about the interruption her friend’s arrival would create on the busiest day for many months. ‘You might not get much sense out of me until the end of the day,’ she warned. ‘I’ll be knee-deep in red roses.’

  Only after the conversation ended did she remember she was supposed to go to Hawkshead and Coniston at lunchtime next day. Better, then, to do those deliveries earlier. Get into the shop by eight, make up the bouquets and take them to Mrs Crabtree and Maggie Aston right away. Melanie was primed to arrive promptly at nine. Everything would work out fine, she assured herself.

  When she opened the shop next day and checked the post, she was relieved to find no further suspicious orders. All she had to do was prepare the bouquets for Mrs Crabtree in Hawkshead, with her new home, and Mrs Aston on a fell-side farm, who had earned abject apologies from somebody nameless.

  She selected blooms from the cool back room, deftly arranging and securing them, writing the cards and wrapping them in cellophane, all in under half an hour. The florist van was parked at the back, taking two minutes to load. A scribbled message for Melanie was propped up beside the computer and the street door locked.

  The day was grey and drizzly, and nobody was about when she set out at half past eight, taking a route that Melanie had suggested months ago. It avoided the centre of Windermere and Simmy liked to think she would have eventually worked it out for herself. It was, she realised, a sort of rehearsal for the much more demanding set of deliveries the following day, winding her way through the small lanes and finding obscure addresses. Except that Melanie had ordained that she go southwards for the Valentine flowers, and here she was today heading north.

  Passing Rayrigg Woods, which rose steeply on her right, she was quickly on the road to Ambleside. The lake to her left was calm and very low cloud banded the fells beyond. A monochrome world, with the bare trees and shrouded hills, as if all thought of blue or yellow or red had been firmly forbidden for at least another month.

  Out past Ambleside, and through Rydal, she turned left for Hawkshead. Here it was impossible to hurry. The road was wet, with persistent lumps of dirty snow in places, heaped up on narrow verges. It curved and dived, forcing her to concentrate on every yard. Great trees, with their heads in the mist, watched her from behind stone walls. Sheep flickered like ghosts and she knew there was every chance of one appearing in the road, inviting her to run into it. A white-faced Herdwick stood like a sentry on top of a wall, staring up at the fells, ignoring Simmy as if she were the ghost. Herdwicks had caught her imagination over the winter, with their coloured fleece worn like a coat, the pale head creating the illusion that under the grey or brown body wool was a normal white sheep.

  She was in Hawkshead at five to nine, the house she sought easily located on the right, before the town itself. A newish array of white-painted houses with grey stone porches, all alike, was scattered on a gentle slope. Still no colour, and still no people.

  Holding the bouquet against her left shoulder, as she always did, she rang the doorbell. How many times had she done this in the past ten months? It was almost always a happy moment, but there had been exceptions. Mr Hayter in Coniston had been one of them. He had not expected or wanted flowers. He had almost shut the door in her face, before snatching the bouquet and bidding her goodbye. Charitably she had assumed he was busy, or embarrassed or overcome with emotion. Now that someone had reported him missing the whole episode gained an aura of darkness and mystery which coloured her expectations of this new delivery, four days later.

  A woman apparently in her sixties opened the door wide after a lengthy delay and stared at Simmy. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘Mrs Crabtree? Flowers for you.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Simmy silently proffered the bouquet. Slowly, the woman took them.

  ‘Who’re they from, then?’

  ‘There’s a card.’ Simmy took a step back. ‘You’ve just moved in, then, have you?’

  ‘“Good luck in your new home”,’ read Mrs Crabtree. ‘But this isn’t a new home. I’ve been here for twenty years. You must have made a mistake.’

  ‘I don’t think so. When were these houses built?’ The question was irrelevant, she knew, but she felt she ought to say something neutral.

  ‘Sixty years ago. Why do you ask?’

  Simmy shrugged. ‘They look more recent that that. Are you planning to move, perhaps?’

  To her alarm, the woman’s eyes filled with tears. ‘My children tell me I should but I don’t want to. This must be a horrible way of telling me to sell up.’ She shook herself. ‘But I won’t. Why should I?’ She blinked at Simmy. ‘Who sent them? You must know.’

  Simmy shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. Someone posted the order and payment, without giving any details. The letter came yesterday.’ It was a small but genuine relief to be able to explain truthfully, without hiding behind such notions as ‘customer confidentiality’, which always felt mean-spirited and obstructive.

  ‘My children live in Barrow and Kirkby Lonsdale, and I can’t imagine either of them using something as old-fashioned as a letter. You take orders online, I presume?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Well, that’s the way they’d do it. Or by telephone as a last resort. This sounds like somebody deliberately wanting to upset me.’

  ‘Although your children do think you ought to move,’ Simmy insisted gently.

  ‘They do, but neither one of them would ever use such a roundabout way of telling me. Besides, I already know what they think. No – I did them an injustice just now, thinking it was even possible. There’s malice at the heart of this, and that’s obviously not my Helen or Brian. They’re nothi
ng like that. It’s probably all a stupid mistake. These flowers aren’t meant for me at all.’

  It was tempting to simply admit that this was probably true. Simmy had very little pride as a rule. She could live with someone believing her to be capable of getting something wrong. But she remembered Mr Hayter and the police detective and the fact that somebody was surely up to something sinister, and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid they are for you, but I think perhaps we ought to tell the police about it. You’re not the only person this week, you see, to receive something like this. It’s probably just someone’s idea of fun, but we don’t know that for sure.’

  ‘Police?’ She looked aghast, and Simmy was reminded of her mother’s repeated assertions that nobody wanted to be drawn to the attention of the police, however innocent and blameless their lives might be.

  ‘Please don’t worry. It’s only that they might come along to ask a question or two. After all, if this person is sending flowers to random people with upsetting messages, they should be stopped, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh … I suppose so.’

  ‘I must get on now. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

  ‘I’m really not moving house,’ Mrs Crabtree repeated firmly, and closed the door. Simmy had a vision of the flowers being thrust head down into a pedal bin, and felt sad again.

  She drove over Hawkshead Hill to Coniston, her van making much of the steepness. The views were mainly hidden by the persistent mist, but suddenly Lake Coniston was a few feet away on her left, shortly after passing the turning down to Brantwood. Her father’s growing passion for John Ruskin had ensured that she’d paid an early visit to the house soon after coming to live in the area. She still remembered the romantic drawing by George Richmond, showing a delicately handsome young man who might break a hundred hearts. Combined with the story of poor Rose La Touche, whose heart had evidently suffered terribly through her relationship with Ruskin, the picture had given Simmy a lot to dream about.

  The farm she had to find was somewhere past the village on the road to Torver. She had learnt not to trust a satnav for the finer detail of Lakeland navigation, and instead relied on the large-scale Ordnance Survey map. Now it served her well, and she found a gateway proclaiming her destination and a blessedly short track up to the house.

  This order, she told herself, probably had nothing to do with DI Moxon’s investigation. Besides, it was convenient that it came so close to the Hawkshead address, enabling her to deliver both bouquets in one trip.

  The farm was to all appearances entirely traditional, with several barns and other buildings surrounding the house. Sheep were scattered across fields on all sides. The yard was relatively clean when she stepped out of the van and went around to the back. There was a smell of warm animal emanating from a nearby barn, along with sporadic bleating. She felt like an alien intruder, entirely out of place.

  There were no human voices to be heard. The house stood behind a stone wall, at an angle to the main yard. A black and white dog with a sharp nose came around a corner and began barking, while at the same time wagging its tail. Mixed message, thought Simmy, standing her ground.

  She walked firmly up to the house door, through a small gate and up a short path. She rapped the heavy knocker, and the dog barked more loudly. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ came a female voice. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Hello!’ called Simmy.

  At last the door opened and a woman a few years younger than Simmy materialised, with a toddler at her side. ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘Flowers for you.’

  ‘Me? What name did they tell you?’

  ‘Mrs Aston.’

  ‘There are two Mrs Astons. Me and my mother-in-law. Which one are they for?’

  ‘Mrs M. Aston,’ Simmy read from the card.

  ‘That’s me, then. I’m Maggie. The other one’s Susan.’

  ‘Here, then.’ The morning was running away with her and there was still an awful lot to do back at the shop. For a whole hour she had managed to forget about red-rose valentines, but she knew that couldn’t last.

  Maggie Aston read the message and went a nasty grey colour. She swallowed gulpingly, and Simmy braced herself for a second bout of tears that morning. People did cry on florists, more than might be expected, but this was becoming excessive.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. The child had disappeared inside the house, and was making contented animal noises. Simmy hoped that Mrs Aston would make every effort to control herself before rejoining her little one.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ The woman raised her arms over her head like a champion netball player and threw the flowers across the small front garden with the sort of strength that could only have come from hurling large bales of hay around, or bringing young beef animals down. The bouquet made it all the way over the wall and into the yard beyond. ‘I think I’m probably going to be sick,’ she went on.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Simmy did her best not to take this personally. Her flowers had not deserved such treatment; it was rude to reject them so wholeheartedly while their creator was still on the doorstep. ‘I’d better go.’

  There was no response to this, other than the door closing in her face. Such drama, Simmy thought crossly, as she went back to her van, trying not to look at the poor flowers on the cold concrete. The mist had cleared minimally, and the Old Man of Coniston was patchily visible, looming over the proceedings with utter indifference. He had seen millions of petty human exchanges in his time, like an exasperated god watching his subjects. Simmy ducked her chin at him, in a silent thanks for helping her to regain perspective.

  Even so, there was little romance in her thoughts as she drove back to Windermere as quickly as she could. Hawkshead Hill was easier in this direction, but still it was impossible to hurry. However light the traffic might seem, there were always delivery vans and farm vehicles highly likely to be around the next bend. There had been no road widening efforts on this side of Windermere, the narrow lanes rightly deemed to be part of the attraction for tourists. There were people who deliberately came in winter, seeking out the eerie sensation that all was not entirely safe, even if you kept to the roads and never left your car. There was ice, and inadequate signposting and sudden blanketing mist to contend with, even in this softer southern section of the Lake District.

  It was ten-forty when she got back to the shop and Melanie gave her a reproachful look. All Melanie’s looks – and she had a wide range of them – were enhanced by the fact of her artificial eye. There was always a hint of challenge lurking somewhere. The prosthesis was a good one, but it could never move in complete unison with its partner. The girl had learnt to capitalise on it in a variety of ways, but she was never going to be considered demure or compliant. Since her goal was a career in the hotel business, Simmy sometimes worried that she would find it impossible to abase herself before unreasonable guests or tolerate the many idiots she was doomed to encounter.

  ‘A whole lot of stuff’s been happening,’ she said. ‘Two more valentines, and that woman came back wanting Ninian’s vase. I sold it to her for thirty quid.’

  Simmy bit back a protest. It was her own fault, she supposed, for not phoning Ninian and asking him for a price. The place where the vase had been standing was now occupied by a lily in a pot, its buds just starting to swell. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘We’re keeping fifteen per cent commission,’ Melanie went on. ‘Peanuts, but it’s easy money, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that what we agreed?’

  ‘We didn’t agree anything, Sim. That’s the problem.’

  ‘I liked that pot,’ she said wistfully, realising this had been a strong element in her failure to sell it. The shop felt bereft without it.

  ‘How did it go in Hawkshead? What did the woman say?’

  ‘She cried. It was something horrible – intended to frighten or upset her. I ought to tell Moxon about it. He’ll have to take all these weird orders more seriously now. I’m sure it’s the same sender as
Mr Hayter’s, and the person’s a menace, whoever he or she might be. They need to be stopped.’

  ‘Wow! You sound really stressed about it. You were gone a long time. Did you have to console her?’

  ‘Not really. And it didn’t get any better after that. Remember I had to go to a farm near Coniston? That was really awful. The woman threw the flowers across the yard.’

  ‘What?’

  Simmy explained.

  ‘Can’t be a coincidence,’ Melanie mused. ‘That’s three unwanted bouquets this week. Something must be going on.’

  ‘I’ll call Moxon,’ she decided. ‘Then we can get on in peace, with any luck.’

  ‘Don’t rely on it.’

  In spite of herself, Simmy couldn’t stop thinking about the innocent-seeming messages embodied in her flowers. The flowers themselves had been entirely innocuous, of course. It was all in the cards that were attached to them. The words were the problem. ‘Isn’t it beastly,’ she said, ‘to associate something so nice with an upsetting or threatening message? What sort of mentality is it that can do such a thing?’

  ‘The farm one wasn’t nasty,’ Melanie pointed out. ‘It was an abject apology. Usually that works pretty well, in my experience.’

  ‘Does it?’

  Melanie flushed. Her various relationships supplied ongoing interest to Simmy and Ben, not least because Ben’s brother Wilf had briefly gone out with Melanie and harboured hopes that he could do so again. Meanwhile she had taken up with a police constable who was plainly her inferior in matters of wit and general desirability. No one seemed entirely sure where things currently stood. Joe sent frequent texts and Wilf was said by Ben to be hovering eagerly on the sidelines, awaiting an opportunity to resume his place in her affection. To Simmy’s knowledge, neither of her beaux had ever sent Melanie apologetic flowers. ‘My Dad does it sometimes,’ the girl mumbled.