The Staveley Suspect

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘So Debbie’s wrong in assuming you wouldn’t arrest her mother if you thought she was guilty.’ She stated it as a fact, not a question. Simmy Brown, daughter of Angie Straw, might have been raised in an atmosphere of cynicism towards the police, but her own experience had taught her to trust them.

  ‘Of course. But it’s not about thinking she’s guilty, is it? It’s about finding evidence against her.’

  ‘And that’s not going well?’

  ‘I can’t say much, as you know. But her car’s in the clear. If it was her, she didn’t use her own vehicle.’

  ‘It wasn’t her,’ Simmy said.

  ‘You can’t be sure. Does Ben Harkness agree with you?’

  She had wanted to avoid that question. It still bothered her that she and Ben were both so certain, when one of them had to be wrong. She shook her head. ‘Apparently, Debbie Kennedy has convinced him.’

  ‘And that counts for something. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it? I don’t know. It has to be some very nasty family stuff at the heart of it. I know some of it – how Declan wanted Anita to employ him, and how unpleasant she was to him. I wouldn’t want to be the object of her contempt, I must say. But that doesn’t explain why she would kill him. Much more likely to be the other way around.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, portentously. ‘And doesn’t that make you think perhaps she knew that, and took pre-emptive action?’

  ‘Killed him before he could kill her, you mean? That’s awfully melodramatic. She’s retiring from the business. Declan wasn’t going to be her problem any more. It would make more sense for Gillian to kill him, than Anita.’ She put her hand to her mouth, hearing her own words. ‘No! I didn’t mean that. Gillian’s really nice. Full of good feeling. She’d never do anything like that. She really seems to like people, and wants everyone to be friends. But she is quite ill, as you said last time I saw you. I can’t see her working for much longer. And that must have a few implications.’ She stopped herself again, hearing all the wrong sort of accusations about to emerge.

  ‘You seem to know her rather well. How many times have you seen her?’

  The flash of triumph was warm inside her. So not everybody tweeted their every movement, after all. Not Anita Olsen or Gillian Townsend, for a start. ‘I was there last night. At Gillian’s house in Kendal. They seem keen to get me on their side, for some reason.’

  He was disappointingly unimpressed. ‘I’m sure they do,’ he nodded. ‘Because they know full well that you have a special direct line to me, which they must be eager to exploit.’

  ‘Oh.’ Deflation made her shoulders sag and her jaw relax. ‘I never thought of that.’

  ‘I could be wrong, but it’s unlikely. Our names have been linked a few too many times in local news stories for anyone to miss the connection.’

  ‘I suppose they have.’ She treated him to a frank and friendly smile. A year earlier, she’d have been too wary to behave in such a way, worried that he would take it as an invitation. Now she knew better. He was fond of her, certainly, and concerned for her at times, but nothing more than that. She presumed he had got wind of her new relationship with Christopher and could be relied on to be glad for her.

  ‘So you should be careful,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be too trusting. Don’t commit yourself to anything. I know Gillian Townsend slightly, and agree she comes over as all sweet and girlish, bouncing with energy. But she’s had some knocks in her life, and she’s no fool. She knows the law inside out, and won’t be afraid to make good use of it.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Simmy. ‘You make it sound horrible. I’m not such a hopeless judge of character, am I? My impression of her is of somebody entirely sincere. She never shows a shadow of a doubt about Anita’s innocence.’

  ‘You’ve made a few mistakes that I can think of,’ he said. ‘Like the time you got yourself into such a pickle in Bowness, remember? That was almost culpably naive of you. And you were still being worryingly reckless just a few months ago, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘With hindsight, yes, I see I can be a bit foolhardy, I suppose. But I expect I’d do the same again. I mean – you have to trust people, don’t you? The alternative is just too awful.’

  ‘In general, yes. But on that occasion, when you knew there was somebody out there with malicious intent towards you, you were altogether too trusting. You might have died. Instead you appear to regard yourself as indestructible.’

  ‘I know. I think it has to do with losing the baby. It feels as if the worst that can happen has happened already, so I’m sort of immunised against any major disaster now.’

  ‘Not logical,’ he said gently.

  ‘Not a bit logical. Ben said I was too dumb to live, that time last winter. Apparently, that’s what Americans say when someone in a crime thing on the telly goes willingly into danger. I never dreamt it would apply to me. I do think I’ve been a bit more sensible since then, on the whole. And surely you don’t think Gillian Townsend is going to kill me?’

  ‘I hope not,’ he said, without a smile.

  Chapter Fourteen

  She had heard nothing from her mother all day, leading her to hope this meant there was no bad news from that quarter. Despite – or perhaps because of – the growing concern over her father, there had developed a distance between Simmy and her parents. She withheld much of her own daily life from them, and had told them nothing of the past few days’ events. No mention of Tony’s trouble, and certainly not a word about the death of a man in Staveley. The growing pressure of Mother’s Day was another taboo subject. She could provide practical help at the B&B in a limited way, but was on her own when it came to wanting anything in return. It was a point everyone reached eventually, of course. Parents lost the capacity to support, advise or even listen, as they faded out of the world. Even Angie, still vigorous and entirely competent, was losing her grip on the rapidly changing reality around her. Her temper, never altogether sunny, was worsening as the truth of this dawned on her. More and more aspects of daily life made her furious. Frustrating regulations, obstructive bureaucracy, small-minded people on every side – it all ran counter to her lifelong philosophy conceived in the nineteen sixties. More and more she looked like an isolated throwback, refusing to adapt as almost all of her contemporaries had done.

  Simmy presented herself on the doorstep just before six o’clock, pleasantly surprised to find the door unlocked. One of Russell’s disconcerting symptoms of mental decline was a paranoia that meant everything had to be kept firmly locked and barred. The reversion to normality was, though, not necessarily a good sign. It probably meant that Angie had taken control, because her husband was too unwell to resist. Russell might be suffering agonies of anxiety at being overruled.

  ‘Hello!’ she called, having walked into the hallway. ‘Anybody home?’

  ‘In here,’ came a low voice from the dining room. ‘Thank goodness you’ve come. I expected you forty minutes ago.’

  Simmy went in to find her father sitting on the floor surrounded by broken china and her mother standing over him. ‘What on earth—?’ she began. ‘Is he all right? Has he had another thing?’

  ‘No. He’s just being very stupid,’ snapped Angie. ‘Decided to dust all the ornaments on the high shelf, and managed to sweep everything off in the process.’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’ Simmy surveyed the wreckage, with the rueful old man at the centre of it. ‘What were you thinking, Dad? You never clean the china. And I did it a few days ago anyway.’

  ‘It needed it.’ He spoke as if his position was easily defended, his wife not entirely in the right.

  ‘He was standing on a chair,’ said Angie, slapping an out-of-place dining chair. ‘Lucky he didn’t break that as well. They’re not meant for that sort of thing.’

  ‘I was all right until you startled me. You made me lose my balance.’

  ‘How long have you been sitting there like that? Have you hurt yourself? For heaven’s sake, Dad, you’ve only just got home from hos
pital,’ Simmy burst out.

  ‘He’s been sitting there like that for close to a quarter of an hour,’ Angie replied for him. ‘I can’t make him stand up.’

  Simmy recalled recalcitrant toddlers going limp as their mothers tried to make them stand. It was a strategy that Russell might well choose to adopt in his alarming reversion to childish ways. Not that Angie was rash enough to attempt to physically manhandle him. While not a big man, he was far too much for one person to manage. Simmy doubted that the two of them together could move him very far.

  ‘Have you had supper?’ she asked, hoping to approach the problem sideways.

  ‘Not yet,’ Angie sighed. ‘I was just serving it. It’ll have gone cold by now.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I made a chicken casserole, actually. It’s sitting on the kitchen table.’

  ‘Well, it’ll soon warm up again, won’t it? Come on, Dad. It sounds great, and if there’s enough I want to stay and have some with you.’ The temptation to lapse into hospital-style baby talk was hard to resist. She was already speaking in a fashion quite foreign to the usual banter between father and daughter. He evidently noticed this and gave her a hard look.

  ‘Can you stand up, or do you want us to call another ambulance for you?’ Angie was far less inclined to skirt around the issue. ‘It’s one or the other. Make your choice.’

  It worked, albeit slowly. Russell turned onto all fours, then pulled himself upright with the help of the misplaced dining chair, taking most of his own weight on his right arm. Both legs looked too wobbly to support him. The women hovered, arms out like fielders, but not actually touching him. ‘Does it hurt anywhere?’ asked Simmy.

  He shook his head. ‘I fell quite gracefully. Shame about the pots.’

  Angie was picking through the wreckage, extracting three unbroken items and placing them carefully on a table. ‘Serves me right for hanging onto them all this time,’ she murmured. ‘I knew they’d get broken one day.’

  ‘They should have been safe enough up there,’ said Simmy, thinking of all the visiting children who’d rampaged around the room without a single breakage. ‘And so many of them gone.’ She spotted a piece of a handsome blue jug she knew she had been fond of as a small girl. ‘I used this jug every morning,’ she said mournfully.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Russell crossly. ‘But your mother startled me. I was perfectly all right until then.’

  ‘You’d have broken them trying to dust them, in all probability,’ said Angie. ‘What were you going to use, anyway? I can’t see a duster anywhere.’

  ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter any more, does it?’

  ‘It does matter,’ Angie hissed at him. ‘You know how I hate it when anything gets broken.’

  The words took Simmy back to childhood days, where Angie would become a raging fury if her careless child broke something. She had seen her mother weep over a glass ornament or china mug lying in pieces on the floor. By some unspoken bond, Simmy understood that it made life itself feel fragile and vulnerable to destruction. She felt a similar hollow sense of loss, and the futility of trying to keep things safe. She would watch her mother erect another section of defensive wall against such feelings, trying not to care or invest too much in possessions. By extension, Angie sometimes seemed to reduce her investment in people as well. Simmy had assumed that it was the same for everyone, and that a broken cup was a universal tragedy. It had been Tony, her husband, who taught her otherwise. When one of their wedding present plates slipped out of his hand and ended up in three pieces on the floor, he showed no sign of distress. ‘We can get another one,’ he said.

  ‘Not easily. They discontinued the line soon after my cousin bought them for us,’ she’d told him.

  ‘Oh, well – we’re never going to need more than five, are we? It’s only a plate, after all.’

  She had left the room in confusion, questioning the strength of her own sense of loss at the wreckage not just of a plate, but the whole set, which was now forever incomplete. The damage seemed to lodge somewhere inside her, just as it did with her mother.

  Christopher, of course, would understand. He would be as horrified as Angie was at the destruction wreaked by Russell. He worked with precious pieces of china and glass, after all. But then, Simmy wondered whether he might see them only as manifestations of monetary value. With every breakage, the scarcity value of the survivors increased. When Simmy told him what Russell had done, he was quite likely to suggest she come to his saleroom and buy replacements.

  They escorted her father unsteadily back to the kitchen, where Angie put the casserole back in the Aga to warm up. Russell became impatient for his meal, and Simmy herself was hungry. There was an uneasy silence, hurt feelings and dawning suspicions swirling around. All because Russell had given a disturbing little smirk at his wife’s words. ‘You know how I hate it when anything gets broken,’ she had said, and he had lifted his chin in a kind of triumph. Was it possible that he had done it on purpose, in a furtive piece of sabotage, or even aggression? Her sweet soft-hearted father was surely not capable of such a deliberate act? But perhaps his damaged brain had released age-old resentments that he now felt free to act on? Perhaps, like Tony, he was much less predictable and dependable than everybody thought.

  The meal was a disappointment, with the potatoes crumbly with overcooking, carrots gone cold and the casserole not adequately reheated. It was another small sadness in a day that had contained a number of threats to Simmy’s equilibrium.

  It was half past eight when she got back to Troutbeck. She’d swept up the broken china, putting all the pieces in the dustbin as if disposing of a dead pet. Angie had still said little, which Simmy found worrying. The demands of the bed and breakfast guests were predominant, and perhaps provided a useful outlet. It was, after all, familiar and constructive work. It earned money and provided distraction. But without reliable help from her husband, Angie would struggle to maintain the same level of efficiency. The quality of her attention would drop, and the numbers of guests she could process would likewise fall. But it was less than two days since Russell’s ‘episode’ or ‘accident’, or whatever they chose to call it. The shock itself would go a long way towards explaining his changed personality. He ought not to be out of bed, let alone climbing on chairs. It was far too early to predict how he would be in the coming months. All his basic functions had been unimpaired, and with modern medication, he might easily make a full recovery. ‘Look at Peggy, in The Archers,’ Simmy muttered to herself. The woman was in her mid nineties, and was returned to complete normality after a full-blown stroke. If that was anything resembling real life, there was considerable hope for Russell Straw.

  The cottage, as always, was in darkness, but less chilly than usual, because she had adjusted the timer on the thermostat to get the heating going at four-thirty instead of six. It felt wasteful, but the east winds of March were behaving in their traditional fashion with the result that it felt colder than it had in January. For a florist, Simmy’s failure to properly appreciate the month of March seemed perverse. ‘Yes, the flowers are lovely,’ she admitted to Melanie, who first observed this anomaly. ‘But it’s always so disappointing, somehow. The handful of nice days only seems more tantalising, so it’s all the more depressing when it’s cold and wet for weeks on end.’

  There were no messages on her landline, no interesting letters on the doormat, and no lurking visitors leaping out from the garden shadows. ‘Just me, then,’ she murmured. Nearly two years of living alone had not made it any more palatable. Another anomaly, she supposed. An only child should be accustomed to her own company, even preferring it to society. But Simmy liked people. She liked being part of a lively group, all talking at once. She liked watching faces and listening to different accents. These repetitive evenings, from Monday to Friday, week after week, were weighing her down. The hours from seven to ten dragged tediously, imbued with a sense of waste. Time was passing, everyone was getting older, and n
othing was changing. She couldn’t allow it to go on.

  At least it was only an hour or so till bedtime, having devoted half the evening to her parents. And this could be the pattern for quite a while. Tiring and unsettling as it might be to watch the decline of Beck View, it would at least resolve the issue of what to do at the end of the day. She could take charge of the evening meal, giving her mother the chance of a rest, and ensuring that all three of them ate properly. She could assess her father’s condition more closely, and even perhaps have a word with his doctor. She could behave like a fully responsible grown-up daughter – even if the day when that was necessary had come twenty years sooner than anticipated. Russell was not yet seventy, Angie a few years younger. It wasn’t right that they should be tipped over into old age so soon.

  The day ended on a note of resignation. Simmy Brown had never been one to make things happen, being of the view that they happened anyway, and the best thing was simply to react as required. Not everybody operated on the same basis, of course. In fact, almost none of her immediate circle took the line that she did. Perhaps, she thought, as she snuggled down beneath her warm winter duvet, that was why they were her friends in the first place.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Friday. It’s Friday,’ she told herself when she woke up. It was generally her first thought every morning – keeping track of the days, orienting herself in the real world, and shaking off the all-too-powerful dreams that she was prone to.

  There was a delivery to be made sometime during the morning, to a house in Helm Road, which was where the Harkness family lived. That would take no time at all. There was no reason to rush, as she had for the meeting with Ben and Bonnie. But her early night meant an early awakening, and it was barely seven. Birds were singing outside, rehearsing for spring. The predominant species was evidently crows or rooks, however, which were very far from tuneful. They always seemed to be having violent arguments amongst themselves, with special grievances aired first thing in the morning. They favoured a large ash tree not far from her window, and she knew they’d wake her most mornings at an unsocial hour for some weeks to come.