The Coniston Case

by Rebecca Tope

  Moxon nodded with a wry smile. ‘Somebody will be with her now, actually. If she confirms this cleaning woman’s story, that’ll be enough to take her out of the case.’

  ‘You can cross Mrs Crabtree off as well,’ Simmy reminded him.

  ‘Maybe. Now we need to have a talk with this third lady.’ He consulted his notes. ‘Miss Drury.’

  ‘Selena. I forgot to mention that her partner came into the shop this afternoon. He was fairly annoyed, but we managed to calm him down.’

  Again Moxon groaned, and ran his fingers through his hair in disbelief. ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Sorry. I suppose it has been quite an eventful day, one way and another.’

  The detective turned to a new clean page in his notebook. ‘At this rate, I’ll have to get you to brief the whole team. I’m not going to be able to carry it all in my poor old head. But let’s give it a go. Selena Drury, is that right?’ He wrote the name at the top of the page. ‘Address? Name of the partner? Any other observations?’

  Simmy felt a rare burst of anger. ‘Actually, I can’t tell you anything else. I told you the address already. It’s in Newby Bridge. His name is Solomon something. It began with an S. Look – I want to go and look for Kathy, not sit here doing your job for you.’

  Ben shot Simmy a horrified look at her rudeness. ‘He’s black,’ he said. ‘Tall. Dignified. Speaks with a posh accent.’

  Moxon nodded with transparent restraint. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ Simmy muttered.

  ‘Don’t mention it. I can see you’re under a strain. And I admit you are at least partly doing my job for me. I know it’s not deliberate, but you do very effectively position yourself at the heart of these things.’

  ‘It’s the job,’ Ben explained. ‘We worked that out a while ago. All these high moments in people’s lives, where they send each other flowers.’

  ‘It’s different this time,’ said Simmy tightly. ‘They’re using me. It feels very personal and I don’t like it.’

  Moxon visibly had a thought. ‘And you’re worried that the disappearance of your friend is directed at you as well? Is that it?’

  ‘No! My God – that never occurred to me. That would be insane, when I haven’t done anything to anybody. Why would they do something like that?’

  ‘A diversion,’ said Ben, holding up a finger to indicate a significant point. ‘Don’t you think?’ he asked the detective.

  Moxon said nothing. He seemed to think he had already said too much.

  ‘How did the Braithwaite man die?’ Ben asked, to Simmy’s surprise. Hadn’t the boy believed what she’d already told him? ‘Are you allowed to tell us that?’

  ‘“Allowed”,’ he repeated, wonderingly. ‘I’m a detective inspector. I don’t normally think in terms of what I’m allowed to do.’

  ‘But there’s quite a few ranks above you,’ Ben pointed out. ‘The detective superintendent, for a start. This must be his case, officially, not yours. Isn’t he the SIO? And more than that – if the victim was a friend of yours, doesn’t that mean you’ve got a conflict of interest? Or at least that you’re too closely involved to keep an objective mind?’

  ‘We’re a small team here, Ben. We all work together. Nobody pulls rank or tells the others what they’re allowed to do. We muck in and share the load. So long as I make it clear what my relationship was with Tim and his family, nobody’s going to stop me taking part in the investigations.’

  ‘Great,’ Ben approved, quite unfazed by the implied reprimand. ‘So how was it done? The murder, I mean.’

  ‘A sharp instrument into his back.’ Moxon couldn’t prevent a rictus of pain from crossing his face. ‘Between the ribs and into his heart.’

  ‘Did he die instantly? Takes some force, that, you know. A lot of tough muscle tissue to get through. Not to mention finding the right angle, and avoiding the ribs.’

  ‘I dare say that’s right.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Ben!’ Simmy burst out. ‘Don’t you ever consider people’s feelings? You’re talking about the inspector’s friend. He’s godfather to the man’s son.’

  Ben sagged melodramatically. ‘So?’ He addressed the detective. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘I can bear it,’ said Moxon.

  ‘Right. Good. Does the son live locally?’

  ‘Ambleside. He’s training to be a vet.’

  ‘Where’s his mother?’

  Moxon sighed. ‘Last I heard, she was in Glasgow. They divorced ten years ago.’

  ‘So the son lives with his dad?’

  ‘No – he lives in Ambleside. He’s twenty-three and his name’s Jasper. I don’t often see him these days, but I had to tell him about his father last night, which was extremely upsetting for me, because the two of them were always rather at odds. I’ve noticed, you see …’ He looked at Simmy, as if hoping she would understand, ‘that the grief and pain can be a lot worse when things weren’t right between you and the person who’s died. Something to do with unfinished business and not having a chance to get things straight.’

  Ben waited a beat, before saying, ‘But you’re bearing up, right?’

  Moxon smiled, seeming to be genuinely amused by the boy’s briskness. ‘I think so.’

  ‘So, can I ask just a few more questions? For instance – you said “instrument”. Did you mean “implement”?’

  ‘Is there a difference? Does it matter?’

  ‘I just like to be sure of the terminology. It can be important, you know. I don’t want to get it wrong. I am trying to learn, you see.’

  ‘Please, please, shut up, Ben,’ pleaded Simmy. ‘Listen – I really must see what’s happened to Kathy …’

  ‘How?’ asked Moxon gently. ‘It’s dark out there and you have no idea where to start.’

  ‘I can phone Joanna, for one thing.’

  ‘The best thing you can do is go home, and just wait for her to call you. I know that’s much more difficult than it sounds, but it really is the best course to take. From what I can gather, she came here on a mission that she hasn’t fully explained to you.’

  ‘She would never just leave me to worry like this. And not just me, but her own daughter. Joanna was really scared. What if she’s—’

  ‘Don’t start what-iffing,’ he begged. Again he scanned the notes in front of him. ‘I’m not sure we’re really finished here, but you’ve given me some new factors to go on. I’m grateful to you – really. It’s all a great muddle at the moment, for everybody. But we’ll sort it all out, I promise you. We’ve alerted the recipients of the flowers to be careful about who they let into their houses.’

  ‘Not Selena Drury, you haven’t. I’ve only just told you about her.’

  He shook his head in mild admonishment. ‘You told us this afternoon, remember. Somebody will have spoken to her by now, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘How, when she’s working somewhere miles away on the fells?’

  He frowned. ‘Leave it to us, all right? Nobody else is going to get hurt. The chances are, the killing had nothing at all to do with these other people, anyway. It looks connected, but it most probably isn’t.’

  ‘The woman who made the confession about sending the flowers,’ said Ben suddenly. ‘Isn’t that extremely peculiar, accosting Simmy in the street, when you think about it? Why would she do that?’

  ‘Because she was worried I’d be upset about the waste,’ said Simmy.

  ‘But the waste was hers. I mean, her money. She doesn’t sound very well off. Was she asking for a refund, do you think?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Simmy. ‘No way. How could she possibly think …’ She was breathless with outrage at the idea. ‘After I’d traipsed all the way up to that farm.’

  ‘Ben’s right, though,’ mused Moxon. ‘She does stick out, somehow, doesn’t she? As if she needed to make a special point. And why use a Windermere florist, when Ambleside is much closer?’

  ‘And Coniston closer again. We keep wonde
ring that,’ Simmy agreed. ‘But she made her point, loud and clear, didn’t she? Even so, it doesn’t seem especially odd to me. She might think I’d refuse to take any more orders from her, or something. So she wanted to keep on the right side of me.’

  Man and boy gave her long sceptical looks. ‘The order was anonymous – right?’ said Moxon. ‘So if you didn’t know who she was, how could you boycott her in the future?’

  ‘Daft idea, Sim,’ Ben confirmed. ‘And the old Crabtree person, too, come to that. She’s another one who went out of her way to set your mind at rest.’

  ‘Seems as if they might both have had a reason for speaking to you,’ Moxon continued. ‘After all, wasn’t it an incredibly lucky coincidence for the one in Coniston, seeing you at that exact moment, just where she happened to be? Remind me what you were doing there, anyway.’

  ‘Delivering flowers,’ said Simmy wearily. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘A woman who hasn’t much longer to live. Her son sent her a Valentine bouquet, because they’re not sure she’ll make Mother’s Day. It sounds very sad.’

  ‘Maybe this cleaning woman does for her as well, and knew there’d be flowers coming,’ said Ben. ‘So she lay in wait for you so she could make her confession.’

  ‘We keep calling it a “confession”,’ Moxon noted. ‘That’s strange, isn’t it? Given the circumstances.’

  ‘You think that I think she killed Mr Braithwaite?’ Simmy asked. ‘Because I really don’t. It never crossed my mind. I’m perfectly sure that none of these people have anything whatever to do with it.’

  ‘All the same, I’d like to find out who she is before much longer. She feels important.’ He slapped both hands on the table and levered himself out of the chair. ‘Action!’ he announced. ‘Thank you for coming, both of you. Now you can go. Don’t worry about your friend, Mrs Brown. If there’s no word from her by morning, we’ll get cracking on a search. Okay?’

  Mrs Brown, thought Simmy, half amused and half irritated. Well, fair enough. I still don’t know what his first name is. Which seemed surprising, after nearly six months’ acquaintance.

  Ben walked home and Simmy drove back to Troutbeck. The light on her landline phone was flashing. When she accessed the message, she heard: ‘Simmy? It’s Kathy. I don’t want you to worry about me, but I’ve got into a bit of a pickle. I won’t be back tonight. Sorry. I can’t stop now, it’s a payphone and I haven’t got enough change to call your mobile. Look – please don’t panic. I’m not in any danger. And whatever you do, don’t contact the police. See you tomorrow, I hope.’

  Simmy stared at the phone in an agony of turbulent emotion. Questions danced through her head, with little prospect of any answers. Had Kathy also called Joanna? Was she somehow being coerced into making the phone call? What hope was there of finding her? And what harm might she, Simmy, have done by telling the police her friend was missing?

  She sat down with a thump on the chair in her hallway and tried to think logically. If Kathy had been forced to use a payphone, she must have a reason to avoid asking someone for help. Otherwise, surely she would have knocked on a door or gone into a shop and asked to use a normal telephone. She could even have stopped any passing individual and borrowed their mobile. Payphones were vanishingly rare, after all. She knew from her mother that guest houses and self-catering holiday homes sometimes installed them for visitors, but out in the open, there could not be a working one left apart from perhaps on railway stations. Had Kathy got herself to one of the local stations, then?

  Answers slowly came into focus. Kathy might well not know Joanna’s mobile number in her head, but did manage to retain Simmy’s landline number, having phoned her so recently. With such efficient electronic memories doing all the work, who bothered to commit them to their own brains any more? If Kathy’s phone had died, she could well be left helplessly unable to retrieve any but a shorter landline number that did happen to be easily memorised. 304506 was a sequence that Simmy had discovered stuck easily in many people’s minds. The area code would have been displayed on the payphone handset.

  Quickly, before anyone else could call her, she keyed 1471, in the hope of discovering the number of the phone Kathy had used. Miraculously, the recorded voice told her a number she did not recognise, and she wrote it down. The police, she assumed, could readily locate the spot by tracing the number.

  But Kathy had insisted the police should not be alerted. This led to a new line of questions and slowly formed theories as to why that might be. Kathy was a civil servant and might not want any smudge on her character. Even being logged by the police as a missing person might eventually lead to embarrassing publicity. That would be an understandable and innocent explanation and Simmy badly wanted her friend to be innocent. She also wanted her to be safe. The big question was – could she believe the reassurances in the phone message? ‘A bit of a pickle’ sounded worrying. Taking into account traditional British understatement, which had always been a point of entertainment for the two friends, it was perfectly possible that it meant two broken legs and a severed artery. But it could equally well refer to the troublesome car or the malfunctioning mobile. And her friend had got herself to a working payphone, which was a major achievement in itself. It was also rather peculiar, and the more she thought about it the more peculiar it seemed. For a start, the closest railway station to Coniston was at Windermere. And if Kathy could get that far, she could surely manage the final quarter of a mile to Simmy’s shop. However strenuously she tried to believe otherwise, she could not shake off the conviction that her friend was not all right. There were no credible explanations that included her being fit and free. Everything pointed to her being some sort of captive, allowed a quick phone call from a public box to allay suspicions.

  But that sort of thing didn’t happen to ordinary innocent women in the small towns of southern Cumbria in broad daylight.

  Did it?

  Reluctantly, Simmy acknowledged that now and then it did. Something even worse had already happened in Coniston, with the killing of Mr Braithwaite. And she came to the conclusion that she could not afford to obey Kathy’s ban on calling the police – especially as she had already told them her friend was missing. Yet again, she was going to have to phone DI Moxon and try to explain a further worrying twist to the already tangled case.

  But first – of course – she could try the number herself. Somebody might hear it and answer, which might at least tell her where it was. She keyed it in and heard the ringing tone. It rang for ten or twelve unanswered peals, with no answer service cutting in. Eventually she put it down and phoned the detective inspector.

  He answered more slowly than usual, just as she was trying to compose a message to leave as a recording. ‘Simmy Brown,’ he said, the use of her first name a surprising deviation from the norm. ‘Again.’

  He was annoyed with her, she realised. Perhaps he had held the ringing phone in his hand for three or four long peals before sighing and then responding. He had had enough of her, with her endless string of encounters with individuals associated with the Coniston case.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be. Has something happened?’

  ‘Actually, yes. There’s a message on my home phone from Kathy. She says she’s in a pickle, and I’m not to call the police, whatever I do.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, plainly untruthfully. ‘And you ignored her instruction.’

  ‘Because it doesn’t make sense. I’ve got the number she called from. I tried ringing it and there was no reply. She said it was a payphone. I mean – there aren’t any payphones these days, are there? You can find out where it is, can’t you? It’s not a Windermere code.’

  ‘Let me have it then.’ When she’d done so, he immediately said, ‘Looks like Cockermouth to me. That’s a fair way from here. Can you think of a reason why she might be there?’

  ‘Absolutely not. So can you trace the number to the actual phone?’

&nbs
p; ‘Of course.’ She could hear a keyboard tapping. ‘It’s a pub in the main street. The Cock and Bull. And it’s not a payphone.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It’s an ordinary phone.’

  ‘Oh.’ She tried to think logically. ‘So she lied to me. Why would she do that? Somebody must be forcing her. She must have been kidnapped. And why didn’t anybody answer it just now?’

  She heard his deep sigh. ‘I doubt she’s been kidnapped. Perhaps she just wanted to keep you from worrying, while she does something of her own that she’d rather you didn’t know about. Did she sound frightened or hurt in any way?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Well, I suggest we just hang on for a while longer. You know where she is now. In the morning you can go up there and see for yourself.’

  ‘What about her car and the RAC?’

  ‘It can all wait until the morning,’ he insisted. ‘I’m at home now, hoping for a few hours’ sleep. This isn’t a serious enough matter for a police hunt tonight. We’re investigating a homicide, you see.’ He did sound tired, she realised. Tired, cross and just a bit patronising. ‘I can tell you’re worried and I’m sorry. But I don’t believe there are grounds for concern. All right?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I suppose so. But she did tell me not to call the police,’ she blurted. ‘That’s what worried me.’

  ‘Maybe she meant it at face value. A way of assuring you she’s all right.’

  ‘No. That wasn’t it at all. But thanks. I’ll try to get through the night without troubling you again.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he said. And that really was patronising.

  Chapter Twelve

  Melanie Todd often found Fridays frustrating because she had a full timetable at college, and that meant she couldn’t work in Simmy’s shop. Unfortunately Fridays were often quite eventful at Persimmon Petals. Twice before she had found herself sidelined during the climax of a murder investigation, and she was very much afraid it was happening again.

  At five o’clock, she was on her way home in the temperamental car she shared with her brother, convinced that Simmy had been having all sorts of excitement in Hawkshead or Coniston or Newby Bridge. During Simmy’s recovery from her injury at Christmas Melanie had shouldered more of the responsibility of the shop, and had found herself increasingly engaged, both emotionally and professionally. Six months earlier, she had scorned the frippery of flowers, only taking the job because the hours suited her. Since then she had discovered that there was a great deal more to floristry than she would ever have guessed. For a start, there had been all that feeling. People often cried as they composed messages of sympathy for a funeral wreath. Or they blushed and giggled over words of love that obviously reflected deep commitment. They told stories of long-awaited babies and unwise marriages. It was one long revelation to Melanie, who had until then focused exclusively on making an escape from her turbulent family by forging a career for herself in hotel management.