The Coniston Case

by Rebecca Tope

  Hotels were exciting, too, of course. Her long-term ambition had not changed. But the prospect of leaving Simmy’s employ in another three or four months’ time was more and more unpleasant. She liked to think she had brought a degree of order and discipline to the business, insisting on proper spreadsheets for the finances and using the flowers strictly in rotation. She hated the thought of a new young assistant taking her place and messing everything up.

  Valentine’s Day had proved, on the whole, rather a washout. Joe had sent a boring card, which the idiot had actually signed. Wilf Harkness had sent nothing, much to her disappointment. Wilf was an ongoing problem, for which she could blame nobody but herself. They had briefly gone out together, over a year ago now, and somehow she had managed to give him the idea that she wanted nothing more to do with him. When Joe Wheeler had made his move, she had hoped it would galvanise Wilf into renewed efforts to get back to her. Instead he had receded out of sight, leaving a clear field to Joe. Not until Ben had hinted at his brother’s continuing interest had she come to see herself as in a dilemma. At Ben’s school play, a few days before Christmas, Wilf had made eyes at her and chatted briefly, but nothing more than that. So she stayed with Joe, fully conscious that he was second best. If it hadn’t been for his useful police connections and his reliable car, she’d have packed him in months ago.

  They always went out on a Friday evening, and this one ought to be at least a bit special, given the date. The fact of a murder investigation underway was sure to add some spice to the occasion. If Wilf couldn’t get his act together to send her a card or even a text or something, then sod him. She’d stick with Joe for a while longer and make the best of it.

  She was ready by six, and was in the noisy family sitting room, two younger sisters fighting over the TV remote, and her brother loudly on his phone to some girl or other. Their father – or stepfather in Melanie and Gary’s case – was singing tunelessly in the kitchen. The dog was whining to go out, ignored by everyone. Melanie knew the wretched animal was doomed to be returned to the rescue place the first time it peed on the floor or chewed something precious. Her mum was always getting a new pet and then sending it back within weeks. She ought to be blacklisted, by rights, but she always managed to convince the people she’d give the creature a good home.

  Then little Maxie wandered in, holding a Nintendo DS and wailing. ‘It’s brogen,’ he wept. ‘The DS is brogen.’

  ‘Come here,’ said Melanie with a sigh. ‘Let’s see.’

  Maxie was five, the tail-ender that had been the final straw for their mum. The other kids had effectively reared him, changing nappies, feeding him and mopping up his many tantrums and troubles. Their mother had sunk hopelessly into an uncoping lethargy that wasn’t quite depression or bipolar or OCD, but a weird combination all of her own. She could be bright and funny on occasion, but her default condition was a vague smile as she flipped through a magazine or simply stared out of the window. The family conspired to pretend that all was well – and this extended to the regular acquisition of abandoned dogs, which Mum genuinely loved, at least to start with. Their stepfather was a soft, selfish man who sat about waiting to be fed, often with Maxie on his lap or one of the girls leaning against him, telling him a long story about school. He earned reasonable money as a plumber and was good with his hands. Melanie did not dislike him, since he was harmless, but she had never managed to feel any affection for him. Her own father was a different matter – resentful at his many failures and pathologically obstructive of anything his children wanted to do. Gary and Melanie had long ago lost hope that he would ever be of use to either of them.

  ‘It just needs charging, I think,’ Melanie told her little brother. ‘Let’s see if we can find the lead for it, shall we?’

  But then the doorbell made its usual discordant jangle and Melanie went to answer it. Joe stood there, as he always did, half afraid to venture into the midst of the swirling family. ‘Clo – find Maxie’s charger thing, will you?’ Melanie ordered one of the sisters, before pushing Joe ahead of her out into the street.

  She pulled the door shut behind her and closed her eyes. ‘God, it never gets any better in there. I’m twenty, for God’s sake – time I had a place of my own.’

  Joe eyed her worriedly. ‘Um …I’m not sure …’ he stammered.

  ‘Don’t be stupid – I’m not asking you to do anything. I can sort myself out, thanks very much. You know that.’

  He changed the subject. ‘Did you get the valentine?’

  ‘Oh – was that from you? I never would have guessed.’

  ‘But I put my name on it.’ He paused, catching her eye. ‘Ah! I get it. Very funny.’

  ‘They’re meant to be anonymous, you idiot. That’s what’s romantic about them. The thought of a secret admirer and all that stuff.’

  ‘Well, then,’ shrugged Joe vaguely. ‘What’s your problem? Why would you want a secret admirer when you’ve got me?’

  There was at least a hint of self-mockery in his words, she told herself. Nobody could be such a plonker as to mean it literally. ‘Where are we going, then?’ she asked.

  ‘How about hopping down to Kendal? There’s that Balti place in Wildman Street. My mate Kev says it’s great.’

  Melanie weighed it up. ‘Okay,’ she said. The drive would make a change, and an Indian place probably wouldn’t be fully booked with Valentine couples. ‘On condition you don’t order the hottest thing on the menu and then barf on the way home. Like last time.’

  ‘There was something bad in it,’ he defended.

  ‘Just the same …’

  ‘Okay. I’ll have something milder, if it matters to you.’

  Joe was a decent lad, she reminded herself. He’d never take a bribe or get involved in dodgy goods. He liked working in the police, being kind to old ladies and lost dogs. He sometimes got overexcited when there was anything more serious going on, but basically he did as he was told and made himself agreeable to his colleagues. His ginger hair and freckles made him look young and oddly old-fashioned. Some people called him ‘Ron’ after Harry Potter’s sidekick. Others would use ‘Wheels’ as a nickname, both because of his surname and his devotion to his car.

  They chatted idly for the first few miles, and then Joe said, ‘Your boss lady’s been in again – did she tell you?’

  ‘What? Today? I haven’t seen her. Did something else happen?’

  ‘Just a bit. Seems she’s got a friend from the south staying, and she’s gone missing. Moxo logged the report, but said no action needed till tomorrow soonest. Thing is, everyone’s doing the headless-chicken thing about this Coniston business, and there’s nobody free to go searching for a grown woman. Different if it was a kiddie, obviously.’

  ‘You’re telling me that Kathy thingummy has got herself lost? When? How?’

  ‘Search me. I just saw it on the computer, with Ms P. Brown the one reporting it in. Thought it must be your lady – with the Troutbeck address, an’ all.’

  ‘Simmy had wall-to-wall deliveries for most of today. All morning, anyhow. She wasn’t meant to go gallivanting with her friend.’ Melanie frowned in puzzlement. Yet again something big had happened on a Friday, just when she wasn’t there.

  ‘You can ask her all about it in the morning,’ he said curtly, apparently regretting ever mentioning the matter. As a humble uniformed constable, his access to the inner workings of murder investigations was severely limited – a fact he tried to conceal from Melanie. Any small nugget of information was treated like gold dust and conveyed to his girlfriend as if central to the whole process.

  There were still a couple of tables free in the Balti and they settled down to study the menu. ‘You paying?’ she checked before ordering.

  ‘I surely am. How can you even ask?’

  Her natural caution where money was concerned prevented her from choosing anything too costly, but she didn’t stint herself. Pappadoms and nan bread, she insisted, to go with the rogan josh.

  As
they waited for the meal to arrive Melanie looked around her. Kendal was far enough from Windermere for there to be little chance of seeing anybody she knew, but it was a habit with her to examine all the other diners and try to see what they were eating. A man sitting two tables away with his back to her seemed familiar, hair tied back in a ponytail and wearing a red quilted jacket that looked handmade. Opposite him was a very attractive woman whose hair was dyed a dramatic coppery shade. Melanie had never seen her before.

  Ninian! It was Ninian Tripp the potter, who was meant to be soft on Simmy. What was he doing with this classy-looking creature? Her clothes were obviously expensive, her make-up immaculate. To Joe’s detriment, Melanie spent the next ten minutes trying to hear what the couple were saying, and to figure out the precise nature of their relationship. By the time the first course was finished, she could bear it no longer. ‘Just popping to the loo,’ she told Joe, and then wove her way between tables in entirely the wrong direction, so as to bring herself face to face with Ninian.

  ‘Hey! Is that you?’ she cried, in a piece of appalling acting. ‘Fancy that.’

  He frowned up at her, clearly unable to place her. ‘Melanie,’ she prompted him. ‘From the flower shop.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course. Sorry.’ He seemed distracted, his eyes returning constantly to the face of his companion. ‘Melanie. Hello.’

  ‘I’m with my boyfriend, Joe. Valentine’s meal, see.’ She waited expectantly, glancing at the pretty woman.

  ‘Nice,’ said Ninian.

  ‘I’m Selena Drury,’ said the woman, with a little laugh. ‘No point expecting him to introduce me. He’s hopeless at all that sort of stuff.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Melanie, with raised eyebrows. ‘From Kendal, are you?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she agreed. ‘You could say I’m between houses at the moment. I’m in Coniston most of the time.’

  ‘You weren’t in the shop today,’ Ninian observed. ‘So you won’t know who Selena is. This isn’t how it looks. She’s my sister’s oldest friend, as it happens. But she’s had some dealings with your employer today, and needed someone to talk it over with. So she’s taken me out for a slap-up meal.’ He beamed gratefully at the woman across the table.

  Melanie could think of nothing to say, other than ‘Dealings? What dealings?’

  ‘It’s a long story, and I’m sure your boyfriend wouldn’t want to sit there by himself while I told it. Besides, Selena and I were in the middle of something. You can ask Simmy to explain it all tomorrow. It’s been a very busy day for her. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’

  She had no choice but to return to her table and try to focus on Joe. He hadn’t even noticed what she’d been doing, being occupied by selecting a dessert. ‘There isn’t much of a choice,’ he grumbled.

  ‘It’s not about the puddings in a place like this,’ she snapped. ‘Haven’t you had enough already?’

  He looked up in surprise. ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Fine cop you are. I’ve just been talking to two people from Windermere – well, he lives near Bowness, actually and she says she’s between houses, whatever that means – who’ve been involved in this murder of yours, and you never even noticed.’

  ‘I thought you were in the loo.’

  Only then did she realise she’d never got that far, and that she really ought to have done. She sighed. ‘Ninian Tripp and a woman called Selena something. They’re talking about stuff that happened today, to do with Simmy and the shop. I missed the whole thing, damn it. Again. Everything happens on a Friday.’

  Joe ordered mango sorbet and Irish coffee. Melanie got up again and went off to the Ladies, in a very un-Valentine mood.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Simmy slept badly, tormented by dreams in one of which Ben fell down a deep chasm on the side of a mountain and DI Moxon hauled him out on the end of a rope. Following closely on that one was another in which Simmy’s mother berated her for wearing her best shoes to walk through a snowy field to reach her car, which had one door dangling off.

  Nothing about Kathy, she noted when she woke up at seven-thirty. At least, nothing she could remember.

  The lack of urgent cooperation by the police was worse than frustrating. It implied that she was overreacting, and that was humiliating. If they would only instigate a search for the Subaru, as well as visit the Cockermouth pub where Kathy had used the phone, then everything might have quickly come right. As it was, she, Simmy, felt she had little choice but to go to the pub herself and see if Kathy was there. But she had a shop to run, and Saturday mornings often saw a good deal of business. She might leave Melanie in charge, of course, but would have to explain the whole story first. And Melanie preferred not to be left alone without a good reason. She liked to chat between customers, and there was undeniably plenty for them to discuss.

  It would have to wait until after they closed at one, she decided with a sigh. Perhaps by then everything would have come right by itself.

  Melanie was in the shop before her, at the indecently early hour of eight forty-five. ‘Blimey!’ said Simmy. ‘Why so keen?’

  The girl gave her one of her accusing looks. ‘I missed out again,’ she said bitterly. ‘Why does everything have to happen on a Friday?’

  Simmy tried to remember all the events of the previous day, and was forced to concede that there had been a lot. ‘Good question,’ she smiled. ‘It’ll take all morning to bring you up to date.’

  ‘You can start with a woman called Selena Jury.’

  ‘Drury. Do you know her?’

  ‘I met her last night in a restaurant in Kendal. She was with Ninian Tripp.’

  Simmy took many seconds to absorb this news. ‘She can’t have been,’ she concluded flatly.

  ‘Well she was. She’s an old friend of his sister, he says. And something happened to her yesterday. Here in the shop, apparently.’

  ‘No. It was in Newby Bridge – sort of. Someone pretending to be a boyfriend sent flowers to her real boyfriend’s address. Obviously aiming to cause trouble.’

  ‘Like the others.’

  ‘Very much like the others, yes. Although a woman in Coniston says she sent the ones to Maggie Aston, and Mrs Crabtree says it was her sister who’s a bit demented, so perhaps they don’t count any more. So that only leaves two, I suppose. Hayter and Drury, and we think Drury has an innocent explanation as well. But now my friend Kathy’s gone missing and I need to get to Cockermouth and try to find her.’ But still at the front of her mind was an image of Ninian spending Valentine’s evening over a romantic meal with a woman. She already thought she knew what her dreams would bring that night. Most likely she would be gouging eyes out or using a silver fork to stab the creature through the heart.

  Melanie slumped dramatically as if impossibly overburdened. ‘All that in one day!’ she moaned.

  ‘There’s probably more that I’ve forgotten. At least I got all the Valentine roses delivered and nobody’s complained. Except Solomon from Somalia, of course.’

  ‘That’s a joke, right?’ Melanie’s false eye seemed to glitter ominously.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. Selena Drury is in a relationship with a man called Solomon, who she said is a Somali. He speaks perfect English and seems to be doing very nicely for himself. He saw me trying to deliver her flowers, but never came out of the house while I was there. Later on, he came here and I had to tell him what’d been going on.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘I just told you. Someone pretending to be a boyfriend sent them. Another lover.’

  ‘But she doesn’t live with this Solomon. She told me she was between houses, but was based mainly in Coniston.’

  ‘Yes, that’s more or less what she told me. She sounded cross but not panicked at all. I thought they both seemed grown up enough to deal with it. Except …’ she frowned, ‘she should have been out with him last night, not Ninian.’

  ‘I’m only guessing here,’ said Melanie, ‘but I’d say the
y aren’t dealing with it too well, actually. If she felt the need to run to Ninian for comfort, that suggests things aren’t so good with the boyfriend, doesn’t it?’

  Simmy chewed her lip. ‘He didn’t look the type to make a big thing of Valentine’s Day. He probably thinks it’s just a stupid commercial frivolity, not worthy of his attention. He was a very serious sort of chap.’

  ‘Hmm. Well you can’t say that about Ninian.’

  ‘Or Joe?’

  ‘Joe’s fairly serious in his way.’ Melanie sighed. ‘When he does try to be fun, it’s mostly to do with football or drinking.’

  They fell silent, thinking about men and the difficulties they presented in so many ways. Then Melanie shook herself. ‘What’s this about Kathy? Where did she go?’

  Simmy did her best to summarise the sequence of events since the previous morning. ‘DI Moxon doesn’t seem at all worried about her. I suppose if she can make a phone call and tell me lies about it, she can’t be in too much trouble.’

  ‘I’d have thought the opposite, actually. Why would she lie to you if she wasn’t being forced to? It’s irresponsible of the police just to brush it away like that. But listen – I’ve got a mate in Cockermouth. She’s called Mary Ann and she works in a hotel there. We can get her to go round to that pub at lunchtime and see what’s what. She’ll be up for that.’