The Staveley Suspect

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘I expect I could think of some.’ He got up with no hint of complaint, although the look he threw at Anita as he left the room did suggest a degree of resentment. Husbands famously resented visitations by friends of their wives, after all. The tall woman showed no sign of noticing the look.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Gillian. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  Simmy had snatched some random bites of food at Beck View but had not stopped for tea or coffee, so was thirsty. ‘Would coffee be an awful nuisance?’ she said.

  ‘No, of course not.’ The slight hesitation before these words gave them the lie. ‘Could you bear instant?’

  ‘Absolutely. I prefer it, actually.’

  ‘Neet?’ Gillian asked her friend. ‘I’ll do some for all of us, shall I?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Anita, already halfway to the door. ‘You need to rest. You’ve done far too much already today.’ She left the room with a warm smile at her colleague, having made no enquiries about milk or sugar.

  ‘She’s still not entirely with it,’ Gillian apologised, a moment later. ‘All this business with Declan has upset her dreadfully. The family were already having trouble before this happened, and now … well, it’s all too much for her, I think. There’s likely to be a dreadful injustice if we can’t do something about it. And now she’s worrying that I’ll make myself ill with it all.’

  ‘Oh? You don’t seem entirely well, if you don’t mind my saying.’

  ‘I’m all right. It’s a chronic condition that flares up from time to time. I’ve lost quite a lot of weight, believe it or not.’ She laughed, and plucked at the baggy garment she was wearing, showing that beneath its folds there was much less flesh than appearances would suggest. ‘All my clothes are too big now.’

  Simmy still wanted to ask the same question she’d voiced rather too many times – But how does this concern me? But then she remembered that she had come quite willingly, because Ben and Bonnie wanted her to, and that if she could help avert an injustice, she had a moral duty to do so. She had involved herself and could hardly blame or complain. All she could do now was make the best possible job of it. ‘Could you explain some of the background for me?’ she asked. ‘I really don’t know anything at all. I’m still wondering how on earth I can be of any help.’

  ‘But didn’t that police detective explain it to you? He said he would. It was funny, you know, his face when I told him you could confirm what we told him about Friday. It went all soft for a second or two, and he was obviously glad to have an excuse to see you. He’s fond of you, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not in the way you mean, no. It’s just that we’ve got to know each other quite well over the past year or two. He knew I wouldn’t want to be drawn into another violent crime. He was probably worried about how he’d approach me.’

  Gillian said nothing at first, glancing from Simmy’s face to the carpet and back. Then she began slowly, ‘The trouble is, you have been helpful already, just by being willing to hear our side of the story. It was Anita, you know, who first suggested we ask you to do the flowers. She knew a bit about you, from things in the paper last year, and someone she knows in Ambleside had been speaking favourably about you. She got me to phone you last week. I’d taken a little while to get around to it, I must admit.’ She sighed. ‘It’s such a shame about the party. We were all looking forward to it so much – especially my mother. She keeps saying we ought to go ahead with it, regardless, but you can’t do that, can you, when there’s been a death in the family?’

  ‘What does Anita say? After all, it’s her party, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, well, she knows there’s no choice in the matter. To be honest, she’s not entirely thrilled at the prospect of retirement, either.’

  ‘So why not keep working for a bit longer?’

  ‘There are several reasons. Most of them are my fault, I suppose. We couldn’t avoid making changes any longer.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, Anita’s got much more pressing things to worry about now. She’s a person of interest to the police. You know what that means, don’t you?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Well, it means they’re actively looking for evidence against her. They’ve listened to those awful children of hers, and are intent on building a case for the prosecution. They’ve crawled all over her car and asked a lot of very intrusive questions. It’s a disgrace, quite honestly. In all my years working in the law, I’ve never seen anything so blatantly unjust.’

  The door was pushed open then, and Anita came in with a tray. On it were three porcelain mugs, with milk jug, sugar bowl and a plate of mixed biscuits. ‘Hope I’ve done it right,’ she said.

  Gillian gave a little squeal. ‘I haven’t used those mugs for about ten years. Where did you find them?’

  ‘On the top shelf in the cupboard over the toaster. I thought they looked so pretty I couldn’t resist using them.’

  ‘Robin’s mother gave us a set of six when we got married. These are the only ones left now.’ She turned to Simmy. ‘He does break things rather a lot. Some men are so clumsy, aren’t they?’

  Robin Townsend had seemed a fairly well-balanced man to Simmy, with no discernible tremor. But she could imagine him losing focus and accidentally swiping delicate china off a surface.

  The coffee was hot and strong and Simmy drank it with enthusiasm. ‘You were saying “blatantly unjust” when I came in,’ said Anita. ‘Presumably in reference to my situation with regard to the police.’

  ‘That’s right. I wanted to explain to Mrs Brown what a scandal it is. I’m sure it isn’t all the fault of her friend, Detective Inspector Moxon, but he has to have a hand in it.’

  ‘Evidently he does. But I really don’t think you need to get quite so agitated about it. They can’t get anywhere without proper evidence, and since there isn’t any, it will all come right. Probably before we know it.’

  Simmy remained silent, wondering at the roles of these two women. The calm suspect trying to reassure her inflamed legal advisor struck Simmy as incongruous. Then she corrected herself – nobody had actually said whether or not Gillian had taken a formal part in the case. There probably wasn’t even a case at all, until someone was arrested and charged. ‘You’re both solicitors, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Working in the same practice.’

  Gillian nodded energetically. ‘Yes, yes. I told you that last week. We’ve been equal partners for fifteen years now. Anita was senior to me before that, but when her partner left, she replaced him with me.’ She gave her colleague a big smile. ‘We’ve always got along wonderfully. We’d worked together for ages before I was promoted, you see. I was over forty, and thinking that was my perpetual station in life – a junior solicitor.’

  Anita responded with a tight smile of her own, indicative of painful gratitude and affection, overlaid with other more urgent matters. Simmy was still groping for any clues as to the essential personality of this woman. She had an air of martyrdom, which was only to be expected. She looked tired and stiff, as if she’d spent a night trying to sleep on a sofa that was too small. Her grey hair was wavy and slightly greasy, in need of a wash. A resemblance to her daughter Debbie could be discerned, not so much in the features as in the reaction to trouble. Carelessness over how one looked, and a whiff of despair, had characterised them both. But Debbie did have her mother’s greeny-blue eyes and small chin, as well. Don’t mention Debbie, Simmy reminded herself.

  ‘So you’re going to be Anita’s legal representative, are you, if it comes to that?’ she asked, boldly cutting to the chase.

  ‘Well, no, not exactly. I’m not a criminal lawyer. I couldn’t handle the defence in a full-blown trial. But I can gather the evidence and pass it to a barrister, and stay closely involved. But it won’t come to that, will it?’ Again she beamed at her friend.

  ‘I hope not,’ said Anita. ‘Apart from anything else, it would waste months of our lives. These things go on forever.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Simmy.

  �
��Really? Haven’t you been part of a number of criminal investigations since coming to live here?’ Gillian’s voice was gentler than the words would suggest. Nothing accusatory in her tone. But it left Simmy in no doubt that she had been thoroughly researched, and that the findings were the reason why she was here now. A thought came to her that stopped her breath, and made her momentarily dizzy.

  ‘Did you know all that about me when you phoned on Friday about flowers for the party?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Gillian frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  Simmy waited, refusing to repeat the question, which had surely been clear enough. The little woman looked around the room for an answer, finishing up with a wide-eyed gaze at Anita. ‘No, not at all. There’s no florist in Staveley, so you were the next closest.’

  ‘There are several in Kendal, though. Why not use one of them?’

  ‘Because we were holding the party in Staveley. What are you suggesting, anyway? Some sort of ridiculous conspiracy?’ Gillian laughed scornfully. ‘Don’t forget that on Friday we had no idea that Declan had been killed. We knew he’d gone missing, but we weren’t especially worried. He hadn’t been gone very long.’

  ‘Oh, but wasn’t there something on the news about a body being found in Staveley, and weren’t you worried that it might be him? That’s how I remember it, anyway.’

  Anita leant forward, still holding her mug of tea. ‘You’re right, up to a point. But I was really more worried about my daughter, who easily flies into a panic.’

  Oops, thought Simmy at the mention of the forbidden Debbie. Proceed with caution. ‘Yes, I remember. You said she was terribly concerned about her husband. You said he’d been gone for a day or two.’

  ‘Oh, well, as it turns out, he was only up the road in Crook,’ said Gillian. ‘We’re not sure what he was doing there, but we think he might have left messages for Debbie that she never saw. I mean, you can walk from Crook to Staveley in an hour at most. And Anita thinks they could have had an argument and he went off to cool down.’

  ‘Crook? I was there myself on Friday,’ said Simmy. ‘I’d hardly ever been there before, which is a bit embarrassing after all this time.’

  ‘Yes, you told us that when I phoned you on Friday afternoon. We thought it was all very nice and convenient, didn’t we, Neet?’

  Anita nodded.

  Simmy was clutching at every word, Ben’s example on her shoulder. Even if she chose not to share everything with him, she still wanted the picture to be as complete as it could be. ‘Was he staying with somebody there, then?’ she wondered.

  Gillian made a sound like a snort. ‘Nobody will tell us. There’s been a news blackout, with the police keeping everything close to their chests. I suppose Debbie knows a lot more, but … well …’

  ‘My daughter and I are not currently communicating,’ said Anita, with the same formal delivery that Simmy remembered from their first encounter. ‘I can’t deny that there is bad feeling between us. It hasn’t always been as extreme as it is now, let me assure you. But I imagine it must be blatantly obvious to you.’

  Simmy nodded uneasily. ‘Had he gone back to Staveley when he was run over?’

  ‘No, no.’ Gillian was impatient. ‘He was killed in Crook. He was cycling along that fast bit of road, this side of the village, and some swine mowed him down and left him to die.’

  Simmy’s heart lurched. ‘Do they know what time that was?’

  Gillian shook her head. ‘It’s extremely difficult to pinpoint the precise time of death, you know. In any case they wouldn’t tell us any details. All they said was that he died sometime that evening.’

  Simmy shuddered. ‘Horrible. What a dreadful thing to do. I mean – you couldn’t be in any doubt as to what you’d done, hitting a person on a bike, could you? Even a rabbit makes quite a bang.’ Simmy had been haunted for weeks by a rabbit she’d hit on the road to Troutbeck one morning. ‘There must have been a loud noise. You’d think somebody would have heard it.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Gillian. ‘It has to have been some drunken pig, too worried about his licence or being somewhere he shouldn’t, to own up to what he’d done. And probably hundreds of miles away by now, and the car in a scrapyard somewhere. But we’ve still got to do everything we can to find out whether it was somebody local, who knew Declan and had reason to kill him. That’s the only realistic hope of exonerating Anita completely. Otherwise, there’ll be a cloud of suspicion over her for ever, even if it can never be proved.’

  Simmy nodded, thinking that the drunken pig theory was tempting, but probably not very likely. ‘So you don’t know why he was cycling along the road,’ she summed up weakly.

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ said Anita, with an expression bordering on contempt. ‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Who could have known he’d be there? How could it possibly have been a deliberate killing?’

  ‘Right!’ crowed Gillian. ‘Which is why it’s so ridiculous to suspect Anita of having anything to do with it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Simmy could hardly disagree. ‘And before there can be the slightest risk of Anita being charged, they’d have to have evidence from her car, and where she was, and motive – a whole lot of stuff. But mainly the car.’ Wary of being sneered at again, she avoided eye contact with Anita. ‘I don’t really see why you need worry about it, given all that.’

  ‘If only,’ said Gillian. ‘The awful thing is that Debbie and Matthew are both convinced that Anita – their own mother – was responsible. That’s what we’re up against, you see. That’s why the police are so suspicious.’

  ‘But they have to have evidence,’ said Anita calmly. ‘As Mrs Brown so rightly says.’

  Mrs Brown was once again lost in contemplation of the horror of a relationship so bad between a mother and both her children that there could be accusations of murder arising from it. It was beyond her imagination’s scope. What would Christmases be like? How would it affect the children? Who was going to acknowledge Mother’s Day? What could Anita have done to earn such dislike?

  ‘They must think there’s something, though,’ she said. ‘Why else would they say what they did? Presumably you had some sort of problem with Declan?’ At the very least, she added silently.

  Gillian hurriedly spoke before Anita could react. ‘It all goes back a long way. Declan did a degree in law, and graduated at about the same time as Jeremy retired. Jeremy was Anita’s partner before me. So Declan assumed he could just walk into the business and become a partner in no time, before he was even twenty-five. I had to wait until I was practically twice that age.’ Simmy heard something sharp in the final words, playing them again in her head, and filing them away for further consideration.

  ‘Was he your son-in-law by then?’ Simmy had thought Debbie Kennedy to be only in her early thirties, which made the idea untenable.

  ‘No, no. That’s the thing.’ It was still Gillian giving the explanations. ‘We told him there was no space for a third partner, not enough work, he was far too young and we thought he ought to go and get experience somewhere else first. Then we’d reconsider.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable,’ said Simmy, trying to avoid any more direct questions, much as she wanted to hear the full story. Far better to let it all dribble out in its own way, as Ben had told her.

  ‘It was perfectly reasonable. But he didn’t like it. We never quite understood his thinking, but he was absolutely intent on getting a position with us. Yes, we had a good reputation in the town, and we were making money quite nicely. But it was nothing special. He would have been the only man in the office – maybe that appealed to him.’

  ‘He was fundamentally incompetent,’ said Anita. ‘That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. He couldn’t concentrate for five minutes, made the most terribly inappropriate jokes and was barely literate. Three extremely sound reasons for refusing to employ him.’

  Gillian flushed. ‘Yes … well … that’s as may be. So, anyway, much to our horror, a few years after that, he started going round
with Debbie, and ended up marrying her. That was about twelve years ago now.’

  ‘Thirteen,’ said Anita.

  ‘Right. And they seemed quite happy. Two lovely little girls.’

  Simmy wanted to say several things, but held her tongue. The picture was coming into focus quite nicely as it was. Anita gave her a direct look. ‘And we still wouldn’t take him on. He married my daughter in order to get a foothold, thinking we’d have to do as he wanted then. And Debbie thought so too. She’s always been completely blind to his faults. The man wrecked my family. Even my son turned against me and took Declan’s side. They sent him to argue with me, many a time.’

  ‘But we really couldn’t take him,’ said Gillian, almost pleadingly. ‘He was such a fool to keep on and on trying, when it was more and more obvious that it would never work. Although we often thought it was really his father pressuring him, rather that what Declan himself wanted. Left to himself, he’d probably have settled down quite happily.’

  Simmy allowed herself a question. ‘So what did he do instead?’

  Both the older women drooped. ‘Well, nothing to boast about,’ said Gillian. ‘He was self-employed, a sort of woodsman, I suppose you’d call it. The National Trust gave him quite a lot of work, and the Tourist Board as well. He had a big project at Grizedale, in the forest there. That lasted two or three years.’

  ‘He earned good money, much of the time,’ said Anita. ‘Fresh air, good physical work. It suited him far better than huddling in a law office would have done.’

  ‘Except there were unfortunate social implications,’ said Gillian regretfully. ‘You know how small-town solicitors have quite high status. He would have liked that for himself. His father’s a prominent local politician, and a Freemason and in the Rotary and all that business, and never let Declan forget what a failure he was. In fact, he came to plead with us once, as well. It was all rather unpleasant, I have to say.’

  ‘Very,’ said Anita.

  ‘What we need, of course, is to work out who really killed him. If we had someone else, with evidence to back us up, the whole thing would be resolved.’ Gillian repeated urgently. ‘Even though the chances are it was some stupid tourist going too fast in a big car, and we’ll never find them, I’m not giving up yet. I’ve phoned about twenty local people, calling in every favour anyone in Cumbria owes me. If there’s anyone out there who saw or heard what happened, I’m going to find them.’ Anita gave a small cough. Simmy and Gillian both looked at her. ‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say. But I can’t agree with you. The idea that it might have been someone else in the family is as awful as saying it was you. I don’t know how you can think such a thing.’