The Patterdale Plot

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Nice to know,’ he smiled. ‘Can I bring you some more next week?’

  ‘How many? I can’t really take more than three.’ They both cast their eyes around the shop, which was undeniably short of space. ‘They have to go somewhere they won’t get kicked over.’

  ‘I’ll bring two. There’s a rather pleasing blue one I think might find favour.’

  Tanya had been observing this exchange with interest, evidently unfamiliar with the potter. ‘This is Ninian,’ Bonnie told her. ‘He lives on Brant Fell and Corinne knows him. He makes pots. Simmy had a thing with him, a while ago.’

  Ninian bowed. ‘Pleased to meet you, young miss. At your service.’ Tanya giggled.

  ‘We’re discussing murder as usual,’ said Simmy. ‘You know that man who was poisoned on Sunday? Well, it must have been almost exactly the same time as you were there, chatting to me and Candy Proctor. Apparently, the police think he was on the cruise boat. And then he died at my parents’ house, while I was there. Can you believe that? It all seems to be a whole chain of coincidences.’

  Ninian shrugged away the latter part. ‘Nasty business. But I always did think murderers ought to consider poison more often. It’s a highly effective method if you want to escape detection – and who doesn’t? All the best crime novels feature poisoners, in my opinion.’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit near the bone if you sell plants for a living,’ said Simmy sternly. ‘Especially when the victim dies in your own mother’s arms. It was very upsetting, I might tell you.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ nodded Ninian with an unconvincing attempt at sympathy. ‘It must have been awful. But at least I assume you didn’t know the chap? I mean – you had no personal investment in him, as it were?’

  ‘That sounds a bit callous,’ Tanya ventured, her face very serious. ‘He was somebody’s son or brother or partner. You have to look at the wider picture – don’t you?’ She turned to Bonnie for support.

  ‘Absolutely. You do,’ came the quick response.

  ‘“No man is an island”,’ quoted Ninian languidly. ‘Although I do think that’s wrong. After all, I regard myself as a bit of an island, most of the time. Not many mourners at my funeral, I bet you.’

  ‘We’ll come,’ said Simmy. ‘Me and Bonnie. And Corinne. And all those shop women in Bowness who let you have things on credit.’

  ‘They’ll only be there to celebrate getting rid of such a nuisance.’

  ‘Why – are you going to die?’ Tanya seemed genuinely concerned, and Simmy remembered how young she was, and how confusing adult humour could sometimes be.

  ‘Not today,’ said Ninian lightly. ‘But then – that’s probably what the poor murder victim thought as well. We just never know, do we?’

  ‘Stop it,’ Simmy ordered. ‘Go away. There’s another order for the funeral. I’ve got to do it before I go home.’

  ‘Dorothea Entwhistle,’ nodded Ninian. ‘Nice lady. She used to babysit me when I was a terrible two-year-old and she was about sixteen. We lived in Troutbeck then – did I tell you?’

  ‘Probably,’ sighed Simmy, fully aware that she was never going to get to grips with all the subterranean connections between the long-term residents of the area. It could easily be two centuries earlier, the way everybody knew their place in the pattern, taking it for granted and seldom explaining it to more recent incomers. Ninian’s parents had both come from countless generations of Cumbrian folk, and although he had travelled briefly in his twenties, he was as much a native as Simmy’s first employee in the shop, Melanie Todd or Bonnie’s foster mother, Corinne.

  ‘Will you go to the funeral?’ asked Bonnie. ‘Miss Entwhistle’s, I mean.’

  He put up his hands in mock horror. ‘Who? Me? I don’t do funerals. What would I wear?’

  They all regarded his clay-smeared jeans and unravelling jumper and smiled. Nobody could imagine Ninian Tripp in a suit or properly polished shoes.

  The arrival of a breathless customer, parked on yellow lines and needing to be somewhere else ten minutes ago threw everyone into a dither. Tanya and Ninian both made an exit, while Bonnie escaped to a corner of the shop until Simmy had constructed a hurried bunch of hothouse gladioli. When the woman had gone, it was time to focus on finishing up the day’s tasks and preparing for the next morning. Simmy had a delivery to make to a house not far from Beck View, which was convenient. The plan was for her to share a quick supper with Angie and Russell, then to go with her father to the meeting in Bowness.

  She was there by six, both parents looking reasonably relaxed. The final set of guests had left that morning and everybody else had cancelled.

  ‘Really rather a relief,’ said Angie. ‘The police say I can use the back room again from Monday.’

  ‘We’re changing its name to The Murder Room,’ joked Russell. ‘And making people pay double to use it.’

  Neither of his womenfolk laughed. Then, just as they were sitting down to their cold meat and salad, the doorbell rang. Russell, with much more animation than he had shown for a year or more, jumped up to answer it. Simmy and Angie heard the conversation from the other end of the hallway.

  ‘Sorry to come at such a time, but there’s never a perfect moment, is there?’ came a female voice that Simmy recognised.

  ‘Candy! Always nice to see you,’ gushed Russell. ‘Come in and have a slice of ham.’

  ‘Oh dear – are you in the middle of eating?’

  ‘Not a problem. Is there something in particular you want to talk about?’ He had led her back to the kitchen, and ushered her in. ‘Look who it is,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Candy,’ said Angie, with her mouth full. ‘Sit down. Tea or something?’

  ‘If you’re making it. Thanks.’ There was a tightness to her tone, which Simmy experienced as repressed hostility. She was thinking about Tuesday’s encounter at the shop, in which Candy had been rather unpleasant. It appeared to her that the two of them were never going to be friends, and she wondered whether Angie and Russell felt the same. She waved a hand to make her own presence apparent, since nobody had bothered to draw the visitor’s attention to her. Candy responded with a brief, ‘Oh – hello.’

  ‘What’s your beeswax, then?’ quipped Russell, still in a buoyant mood. ‘Something to do with our murdered man, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘Has his family been yet? What’s going to happen about his funeral? I knew him, you know. He was my guest, by rights. But nobody’s told me anything. After I’ve been so forthcoming to the police, I’d have expected better treatment. Nobody’s said a word since Tuesday – and then it was just the bare minimum. I got very little more from you, Mrs Brown, in the shop. It’s all been terribly frustrating.’

  How does she know my name, Simmy wondered. The ‘Brown’ had acquired an oddly temporary aura, since she’d agreed to become Christopher’s wife. It was beginning to feel like nothing more than a bridge between Straw and Henderson, soon to be forgotten.

  ‘Nobody’s told us very much either,’ said Angie. ‘They mostly don’t, you know. After all, we must still be officially under suspicion, seeing that he died here. They’re not going to spill the details of their investigations to any of us, are they?’

  ‘Well I’m not under suspicion, am I? I’ve been extremely helpful, in fact. I’ve told them who he knew up here and what he generally did on his visits. If only I hadn’t been so busy he would have been staying with me this time, as well.’

  ‘And a great pity that he wasn’t,’ said Russell with feeling. ‘You could have had all the fun instead of us.’

  ‘Dad!’ Simmy couldn’t let him go on in the same flippant vein any longer.

  Candy Proctor pursed her lips and said nothing. Angie had made a perfunctory mug of tea from the perpetually hot water on top of the Rayburn and now proffered it. ‘Thanks,’ muttered Candy.

  ‘You’ll be going to the meeting tonight?’ Russell started on a different note. ‘Shall we walk down together? We’ll have to leave in about a quarter of an hour from now.’


  ‘Oh, the meeting,’ said Candy wearily. ‘All right, then. You know, of course, that Grant was meant to be one of the main speakers? I mean – that’s what he came up here for in the first place.’

  All three members of the Straw family stared at her in amazement. ‘No,’ said Russell. ‘Nobody told us that. Perhaps you could explain it to us.’

  Candy briefly complied. Childers, it seemed, had originally been scheduled to spend his visit monitoring red squirrels. But then Candy had asked him to attend the protest rally and speak against the plans for the tourist park. ‘He’s good with words, you see,’ she said.

  ‘So you’d been in touch with him?’ Simmy said. ‘Before he came up here on Friday?’

  ‘On and off, yes. I had to explain why he couldn’t stay with me, for one thing.’

  ‘But why couldn’t he?’ Angie frowned in bewilderment. ‘If you knew all along when he’d be coming back, why didn’t you keep a room for him? Doesn’t he make the booking from one time to the next?’

  Candy lifted her chin in resistance to Angie’s tone. ‘Because the dates were changed, and I was fully booked for the new date. He was originally going to come the first week of October, but the squirrel people wanted him to make it later. And Tristan was pleased because he’d get him as a speaker.’ She sighed. ‘It did all get rather complicated.’

  ‘So this meeting’s been planned for six weeks or more? That’s when Childers booked with us. We had to check all that for the police,’ said Russell.

  ‘Does Tristan know him, then?’ asked Simmy, trying to keep pace with what felt like a lot of new information. ‘Did, I mean,’ she amended.

  ‘I think they emailed each other – but they’d never actually met.’

  ‘And was he still intending to count squirrels? Nobody from the wildlife society or whatever it is has contacted us to ask where he is,’ said Angie.

  ‘Why would they? I don’t suppose they knew – or cared – where he’d be staying. They’ll have tried to get him on his mobile or computer, won’t they?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Angie. ‘Well, I hope they manage all right without him this evening.’

  The three of them set out as soon as the scanty supper was finished. Angie had never actually said she wouldn’t go to the meeting, but it had been assumed. She had always felt an obligation to be available for her guests during the evening, despite Simmy’s insistence that there was really no need, and the habit had become established, even when there were no guests. Russell seldom went out after dark, either, but in his case it was more from inertia than a sense of responsibility. Even after his descent into a strange form of paranoia, where he might have been expected to suspect his guests of theft or arson, he seemed less worried than Angie about leaving them alone in the house. ‘It’s as if he only sees danger on the other side of the front door,’ said Angie. But her own housebound evenings suddenly looked to her daughter as if they might stem from something rather more neurotic than first realised.

  ‘Why don’t you come as well?’ Simmy urged her. ‘You’ve got no reason to stay here on your own.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it,’ was all Angie would say.

  The walk down to the Belsfield Hotel was identical to the one Simmy and Russell had taken on Sunday with the dog. The hotel had a broad sloping garden that faced the lake. A path zigzagged up to the front entrance, but because the car park was at the back, most people went in that way. The meeting was to take place in a handsome room on the ground floor, with a capacity of eighty, according to Russell, who had swotted up on the hotel’s many facilities, as part of his perceived role as local provider of hospitality.

  ‘Eighty!’ gasped Simmy. ‘There won’t be that many, will there?’

  ‘We think there will,’ said Candy. ‘It’s a very controversial issue. It’s been simmering away for some time, until Tristan decided to do something about it.’

  ‘Aren’t you one of the organisers? Why aren’t you there already, testing the sound system or something?’ Russell asked. ‘Is there a PowerPoint presentation? I love PowerPoint presentations.’

  ‘Tristan’s doing all that, with his little team of helpers. All I do is organise leaflets and posters. I’m not needed this evening, except to just put in an appearance. I’ve been doing my best to rally support for weeks now. It’s an awful shame about Grant, of course. We’ve had to get some National Trust chap to come down from Carlisle, instead.’

  ‘Was Mr Childers in the National Trust?’ asked Simmy.

  ‘I assume he was a member, but not a paid official or anything.’

  ‘But he was against these new proposals? He was going to make a speech about how damaging they would be – something like that?’

  ‘He was going to talk mostly about the implications from a planning perspective. The defects in the original application.’

  ‘Sounds rather dry,’ said Russell. ‘Maybe we’ve been spared a pretty dull contribution.’

  Candy Proctor turned on him in fury. ‘This is serious,’ she snarled. ‘If this plan were to be passed, it would open the floodgates to countless others, all over the fells. It would be a disaster.’

  ‘Steady on! You’re getting a bit carried away, aren’t you? These little battles are being fought all the time, right back to a century ago. There’s no real risk to the fells – or the valleys, come to that. The whole area relies on the tourists, don’t forget – you and me included. If somebody has the idea of providing a few more places for them to stay, where’s the harm in that?’

  ‘You’re not in favour of them, are you?’ Horror was plain on the woman’s face.

  ‘I’ve got an open mind,’ said Russell piously.

  Simmy found herself channelling Ben Harkness, as happened quite a lot. He would be asking himself whether this was the answer to why Grant Childers had been poisoned. Somebody wanted to prevent him from saying his piece about the chalet development. It seemed both obvious and mildly disappointing. But what exactly had the man intended to say? His role was still obscure. ‘Would he have spoken against the plans, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course he would. Isn’t that obvious?’

  Simmy didn’t respond to this rudeness. Russell spoke for her. ‘We’re novices at all this,’ he said. ‘You’re saying that everybody at the meeting is going to be against the plans – right? No room for any arguments from the other side? Not so much a debate as a rabble-rousing exercise. But who are the rabble? The good people of Bowness, who are not terribly likely to care too much about events in Patterdale. You do know there’s a perfectly good hotel there, which could provide you with a room like this, probably for a quarter of the price?’

  ‘Whose manager can’t see any reason to challenge the planning application,’ Candy flashed back.

  ‘Even Troutbeck or Ambleside would have been closer, though. Or Grasmere. You’d get a lot more concerned citizens in any of them than down here.’

  ‘You’re wrong. There are several good reasons why Bowness makes an excellent control centre. You might understand it better once the meeting starts.’

  They had reached the meeting room, where Simmy immediately spotted Bonnie sitting in the second row with her foster mother. ‘Look – Corinne’s here,’ she said. ‘That’s a surprise.’

  ‘Keeping an eye on the girl, I presume,’ said Candy Proctor, who evidently knew exactly who the pair were.

  Simmy and Russell found seats in the row behind Bonnie and Corinne, while Candy made her way to the front row where a chair had been reserved for her. Bonnie turned round with a smile, but didn’t speak. Simmy smiled back and then said to her father, ‘Did she really say “control centre”?’

  ‘Delusions of grandeur, or something very like it. They’re all imagining themselves at the forefront of a vitally important campaign. Look at old Tristan Wilkins. Absolutely in his element. And those other two.’ Russell indicated two men flanking Tristan at the table sitting at the front of the room. ‘One of them’s in the Friends of t
he Lake District, I believe. I heard him speak at a lunch I went to ages ago, in Coniston or somewhere. That was when I was in the B&B group. Before you moved up here. I was quite sociable in those days. That’s definitely the same man. You couldn’t mistake that beard.’

  ‘And who’s the other one?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Simmy was still checking her observations against the few facts she knew about Grant Childers. It surprised her that her father was clearly not doing the same. There were leaflets on all the seats and she scanned through hers while they waited for people to settle down. It was a new one, taking everything a step further than the ones handed out the previous Sunday, with a tear-off section where people could pledge support and active assistance. There were impassioned pleas to ‘Save the Lakes’ along with assertions that the wildlife and ecology of the area could not withstand any more construction outside the strict boundaries already laid down. The proposed holiday chalets would breach this rule significantly. ‘So why are they worried that permission might be granted?’ Simmy muttered. ‘It looks obvious that there isn’t a chance they’ll be allowed. What about the latest Local Plan? That’s full of restrictions, isn’t it?’

  ‘I gather it leaves quite a lot of scope for development, actually,’ said Russell. ‘There’ve been arguments about it.’

  Simmy, like every other resident of the Lake District, was aware, if only dimly, that the Local Plan was a document of vital significance, which was updated and debated fiercely every few years.

  ‘So, what does that mean for this thing, then?’ she asked.

  ‘There must be more to it than they’re telling us,’ her father replied. ‘There’s politicking going on, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Enough to lead to murder?’ She was whispering, but the woman in the seat in front of her must have caught the last word. She looked round in alarm.

  Simmy smiled reassuringly, and was saved from having to explain herself by a sudden hush. Tristan Wilkins had rapped on the table, and everybody had instantly reacted. Simmy turned to check how full the room was, and realised there were a lot of empty chairs. A rapid count suggested there were between forty and fifty people. Still not a bad turnout, as Tristan was already bravely asserting.