The Coniston Case

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Who was the other one?’ asked Ben suddenly.

  ‘The other what?’

  ‘Fiancé.’

  ‘Oh, that was a really bad mistake. He was before Jasper, when I was only eighteen. My dad was absolutely furious about it, which made me more stubborn, of course. It all seemed so romantic at the time.’ She looked wistful. ‘He was much older than me, lived in a little cottage miles from anywhere, making pots, living on virtually nothing.’

  Simmy’s heart pounded painfully. Melanie spoke for her. ‘He wasn’t called Ninian, was he?’

  ‘What? No, no. His name’s Jeremy. He’s gone now. He emigrated to South America or somewhere, years ago.’

  It took a while for Simmy’s pulse rate to subside, and even longer for her to talk herself into a calmer frame of mind. Implications were pressing in on all sides, but this was not the moment to address them.

  Daisy also gave herself a little shake. ‘Why are we talking about me, anyway?’ she wondered. ‘You were telling me about the flowers that somebody sent to my dad, on the day he died. And you don’t know who – right? I mean, nobody ever does that, do they? Send flowers to a grown man, wishing him luck in a job he wasn’t going to have. It’s mean and nasty. It might even have driven him to do what he did.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Simmy faintly.

  ‘It’s okay – it wouldn’t be your fault. Didn’t somebody say that all suicides are selfish by definition? I’ve been thinking about that and it’s true. He couldn’t have given a thought to my wedding when he did it. That makes me so angry with him.’ She wept gently. ‘But I’m also terribly sorry for him. They told him the cancer would kill him by Christmas and he wouldn’t be able to eat properly for the rest of his life. He was already awfully thin. And he hated hospitals and pills and having to rely on somebody to look after him. So I can’t exactly blame him for what he did. Especially with my mother making everything worse.’

  ‘Were they divorced?’ Simmy asked.

  ‘Separated. She’s got another man now, ten years younger than her. Bill, he’s called. He’s a builder.’ She giggled miserably. ‘Bill the builder. He’s not very nice.’

  ‘What about Tim?’ Ben asked, with a cautious glance at Simmy. He seemed to think that questions were allowed now that Daisy had started to make disclosures almost without prompting.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He was murdered. Somebody stabbed him in the back with a long knife. That’s the only thing the police are interested in. You’re probably one of the few people who see how all this connects up – if it does. You’re really important to the case.’

  ‘Ben! For heaven’s sake!’ Simmy gripped his arm and shook him.

  Again Daisy showed a fighting spirit. ‘He’s right, though. You two are clever, aren’t you?’ She looked from Ben to Melanie and back. ‘I get your point. Poor old Dad’s been upstaged by Tim Braithwaite – again. They’ve never been proper friends. Dad always blamed bad luck for the way he constantly got the short straw. He lost three jobs before he was forty and ended up driving vans for a living, which he hated. Tim was rich and successful. When Mum threw him out, Tim came to the rescue, letting him live in his house, but that wasn’t working out. Then the cancer got him. When you think back over his life, it isn’t even very surprising.’

  ‘Poor bloke,’ said Melanie. ‘No wonder he topped himself, after all that.’

  ‘It must have taken courage,’ said Simmy.

  ‘That’s the funny thing. He never lacked courage. Even the van driving was quite brave, in a way. Getting up early, going off to places he didn’t know, having to stay cheerful when people moaned about stuff being late. But those flowers,’ she repeated. ‘Wishing him luck in a new job. That must have really upset him, because he’d kept the driving job for two years and was determined to hang onto it until the last minute. Even though he could hardly lift some of the boxes he was supposed to deliver, he wasn’t going to give up. No way was he getting a new job.’

  They were back full circle, Simmy realised. ‘We really need to know who sent the flowers,’ she sighed.

  ‘You think it’s the same person who killed Tim?’

  ‘No evidence that it is,’ said Ben. ‘But if it’s not, then there are at least two people out there with evil intent.’

  ‘“Evil intent!”’ Melanie echoed scornfully. ‘What’s that? One of your Latin poets?’

  ‘It’s a technical term, actually. It means exactly what it says.’

  ‘Shall I make coffee?’ Melanie said tightly. ‘We should have had it long before now.’

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Simmy, looking at her watch. ‘Ten to twelve! How did that happen? There’s no time for coffee now. We need to get going.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘Coniston. Look, we should let you go. It was a bit awful, the way Ben dragged you in here. Thanks very much for being so open with us.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’ve got nothing to hide. And you all seem to be nice people. I should get back to Coniston as well – but I think you’ve made me miss the bus.’

  ‘Come with us,’ Melanie invited. ‘We can drop you in the middle of the village.’

  ‘All right, then. Thanks. My mother’s sure to want to talk about wedding stuff.’ She sighed heavily.

  ‘Where’s it to be?’ asked Simmy.

  ‘The church in Coniston. It’s bound to rain.’

  ‘Where Ruskin’s buried? That’s lovely!’ Simmy was trying not to think about another wedding, four months earlier, where she had done the flowers and it had rained and a very young man had been killed.

  ‘Yeah. Well. First catch your bridegroom.’ Daisy smiled again. ‘He’ll show up. He does this disappearing act sometimes.’

  ‘Did he grow up around here?’ Melanie asked. ‘Because if so, it’s a local habit. People just take off into the hills for no good reason.’

  ‘That’s what we thought my father had done,’ agreed the girl, with another big sigh.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kathy could hear voices above her and tried shouting to them, but her throat was too dry to make a decent noise. It was finally morning, she supposed dully. She had slept in brief uncomfortable snatches, very much like being on an overnight long-haul flight. She had passed beyond fear some time ago and was now angry and determined to get even with the beast who had done such horrible things to her. It was cold and dark and airless in this dungeon where he had pushed her the previous evening, after she had managed to escape for an hour. A futile escape that did her no good at all.

  He had kept her in his van for most of the day, apparently parked somewhere remote, because nobody came when she banged and kicked on the sides. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said repeatedly. ‘I just can’t afford to let you go until everything’s finished up here. I can’t trust you, you see.’

  ‘I won’t tell anybody anything,’ she promised hopelessly. ‘And there will be a huge search for me by now. They’re bound to find me.’

  There should have been a chance to escape when he drove her to Cockermouth. But he stood over her while she telephoned Simmy’s home from a phone in a corridor that the pub landlord said they could use, and by then she was too stiff and bruised to contemplate running anywhere. She tried screaming, but the sound that emerged was nowhere near loud or urgent enough to attract attention. It wasn’t easy to scream or shout, she discovered. Inhibitions against making a spectacle of yourself overrode even being kidnapped, it seemed.

  ‘Leave a message,’ he ordered. ‘Tell her you’re perfectly all right.’

  She saw no way of making a coded reference to her situation, but simply hoped that Simmy would find the whole thing so strange that she would defy instructions and notify the police. She was desperate for the loo, which her captor knew full well and used as a means of controlling her. As soon as the phone call was over, he had allowed her to go to the ladies in the pub they’d gone to. He was clever, she had to admit that. No way would he us
e his own phone, only to have it traced in no time. He made sure nobody else was in the toilets who might lend Kathy a mobile. While she was in there he bought her a soft drink and a sandwich and waited while she ate and drank. He was unobtrusively presentable and not one of the handful of people there gave them a second look. If she had stood up and yelled, ‘This man is holding me hostage’ nobody would have believed her.

  If she staggered out into the street, clutching the sleeves of passers-by, he would easily catch her and make it seem that she was merely annoyed with him. British people were notoriously slow to interfere in anything resembling a domestic tiff. They would either stand passively staring, or take the man’s side, because he was the saner-looking of the two. She had untidy hair and grubby clothes. Nobody would take her seriously, whatever she said.

  He locked her back in the van and went to use the gents in the pub. She was in a windowless self-contained section of the vehicle, with no access to the driver’s seat. She couldn’t hoot the horn or break a window. Banging on the side was an option, of course, but she’d tried that already. They were in a town now, but it was getting dark and few people were on the streets. Nobody was going to risk breaking a lock and investigating muffled sounds. That way lay far too much unpredictable trouble. Even if they suspected illegal people trafficking, they wouldn’t feel equal to confronting it personally. The chances of a pair of police officers patrolling the mean streets of Cockermouth on foot were minuscule. She was aware of her own self-defeating thinking, of her loss of fight. She was disappointed in herself. But she had never even imagined a situation like this. She had never thought through how she would behave, with clever tricks and subterfuges to outwit her captor. The sheer shock of it was paralysing. Her main concern was the worry that must be consuming her daughter, husband and friend. She was desperate to contact them, and despite its misleading words, she was glad to have at least left a message to reassure Simmy that she was alive.

  They drove for an hour or so, with Kathy still in the back where there were no seats. She lay face down flat on the floor, cushioning her head with her arms, and keeping herself rigid to prevent rolling over the floor every time they went round a bend. Already her hips and shoulders were bruised from the ridged metal base. There was a thin cloth covering which was a very slight comfort. She ended up wrapping it round herself, making a cocoon and trying to formulate plans for an escape.

  When she heard the gears changing down and felt the van slowing, bumping over ground that could surely not be a road, she unwrapped herself and sat up close to the back door. As much for her own self-respect as anything else, she knew she had to make a bid for freedom. Afterwards, when she told the story, she did not want to sound feeble and passive in her own ears. Neither did she want to invent heroic deeds that never happened. So she crouched, bouncing on the balls of her feet, testing her knees for strength. Squatting had been part of her exercise regime for years, all her joints in full working order as a result. She would surprise him by leaping out and running away before he knew what had happened. After that, everything was in the lap of the gods.

  It worked, after a fashion. She pushed the slowly opening door violently into his face, with a loud cry, and jumped down onto cold scratchy heather. Then she ran into darkness, with no idea of where she was going. ‘Come back, you fool!’ called the man. ‘You’ll fall and hurt yourself.’

  His concern surprised her. Hadn’t she just banged his face with a heavy metal door? But there was no way she was going to obey him. Instead, she paused and looked all around. Ahead of her and on a lower level were lights. A glow from a town, where there would be houses and telephones and people who might shelter her. She glanced behind and saw a looming shape against the sky, black against very dark grey. Its outlines were sharp, at the extreme edges of her vision, as she tried to understand what it was. The mountain, she realised. Very likely the same mountain she had been exploring when the man had popped out of the ground that morning.

  He was still at the van, slamming its door and calling out to her again. ‘You can’t go anywhere. Get back here, you stupid woman.’

  Then a light flashed and she understood that he had a powerful torch. Quickly, she made use of the light to run forward, towards where the town of Coniston must be. She jumped over the tufts of heather and other vegetation, spotting a rock not far ahead. She reached it safely and glanced back. The torchlight was zigzagging all around, as he tried to locate her. It seemed impossible that he couldn’t see her as clear as day with such a strong beam. Old films about prison camps came to mind, but in those the light came at predictable intervals and you could count on dark shadows for whole minutes at a time. This was very different – he was swinging it wildly, erratically, and presumably scanning the area intently as he did so.

  She could see another rock not far ahead, and the hint of a third beyond that. Getting down onto her front, she slithered uncomfortably along the prickly ground, assuming the man would be instinctively looking for an upright figure. Movement, however, would attract his attention, so she crept slowly, despite every nerve telling her to hurry.

  It worked for a long time. She progressed downhill for probably two hundred yards, with the man still shouting and flashing his light, until suddenly it went dark and she realised the battery had died. She knew they didn’t last long on those powerful torches. Now she was free to stand up again and jog determinedly down to Coniston.

  But he defeated her all too easily in the end by turning the van and beaming the headlights in the direction he guessed she had gone. He drove the vehicle slowly down the hill, over the bumpy heather and stones, and found her in about two minutes. Leaving the lights on, he ran and caught her and bundled her back into captivity with remarks more of reproach than anger.

  ‘You never stood a chance, you know. The way you were heading doesn’t lead to the town at all. You have to go way over to the right before there’s any kind of a path.’

  He had brought her back to the Old Man, and now he was telling her it was already after nine and nobody would be anywhere near her again that night. He drove the van over frozen bumpy ground, and then got her out and pushed her ahead of him off the track into dark prickly terrain. They reached the hole from which he had emerged so many hours earlier, and he ordered her into it. ‘Don’t worry – it gets wider once you’re through,’ he said. ‘It’s only for one night. I’ll let you out in the morning.’

  He had forced her down the tunnel, then tied her hands together and left her there, a long way below the surface, in something she assumed must be an old copper mine. It was pitch-dark and very cold. ‘I’ll die down here,’ she whimpered. ‘What if something happens to you? Nobody will ever find me.’

  ‘Oh, they will,’ he assured her. ‘I’m not the only one who knows about this place. If I drop dead, there’ll be others around tomorrow afternoon. Now, just one more thing. I need your email account details. Address and password, if you please.’

  She resisted for a few minutes, before giving in. Why, after all, did it matter? What further harm could it do? He might even inadvertently leave some clues as to what was really going on.

  He pulled some sort of obstruction over the hole, once he’d climbed out. There were metal rungs set into the tunnel, which rose at a sharp angle but was far from vertical. A combination of climbing and crawling was required to get in and out, relatively easy for all but the most infirm. At the bottom was a pitch-dark space the size of a small bedroom with old timber supports that she repeatedly bumped into.

  ‘Don’t touch the equipment,’ he ordered her. ‘It’s at the back. You can lie down well away from it. There’s a bit of water.’

  ‘Come back!’ Kathy screamed, at the very last minute, knowing he would ignore her.

  She had the whole night to review the situation. Her kidnapper was also her daughter’s seducer. There could be no good outcome to all this for poor Jo, who would either feel a painful self-disgust, or a towering sickening rage against the man – or bo
th. Baz was a maniac, intent on his scientific researches at all costs. At some point he had evidently lost all sense of proportion, dreaming of glory to come as a result of his findings. That alone was bad enough, given the alarming involvement of her daughter. But a man in Coniston had been killed with a knife only the day before, and that made it far, far worse. It meant she could neither believe nor trust him because he was probably fleeing from the police, who would arrest him and charge him with murder the moment they caught him. This was what had been in her mind when she said ‘What if something happens to you?’ No way had she imagined that he would simply drop down dead.

  The cold was actually less severe than she’d expected. Wasn’t there something about the temperature underground remaining the same all the time? They’d said that when she’d gone down to some amazing caverns in the south of France. Baz had given her a blanket, and with her coat, she felt warm enough. She also had a bottle of water and two slabs of Kendal mint cake, which seemed a witty sort of touch – although the contortions required to get at them were unpleasant. Unable to use her hands, she had to lift the bottle in her mouth and tilt her head back to get a drink. She achieved two good swallows before dropping the bottle and losing the rest of the water. The candy bar had been helpfully unwrapped, so it was now slightly gritty and also in danger of getting lost.

  Even if nobody came for her, she thought she could probably crawl up the shaft to the surface and use her back to push aside the large rock or whatever it was at the entrance, once it was daylight. An escape into the dark fells with every sort of hazard to trip and ensnare her would be worse than foolish. If that failed, there was still a good chance of people coming past the next day, so she would climb as high as she could up the tunnel and make a great deal of noise. Eventually she must surely attract attention. It would be a Saturday and there would be weekend walkers, even in February.

  Darkness, she had discovered, could be a friend if you managed to develop the right attitude. Where most people might imagine rats and huge spiders and wriggling insects waiting to pounce on them, Kathy visualised a warm enveloping blanket, keeping all such beasts at bay. The very restriction of it was a kind of comfort. She felt around her awkwardly shuffling in a rough circle about a yard in radius and leaning back on her bound hands. The ground was packed hard and smooth and blessedly dry. There was nothing within reach except a stout wooden box, presumably containing Baz’s ‘equipment’. Other than that there was not a stone or stick or wriggling insect. All she could do was curl up, close her eyes and try not to think.