by Rebecca Tope
Several things had to be achieved if the situation were to be saved. Firstly, any tiny hint that the Straws had provided the lethal poison must be firmly suppressed. Secondly, it would help if the whole story could somehow be given a romantic slant. Something about a jilted lover or tragic misunderstanding would be good. Thirdly, the stalwarts of Windermere had to stand beside them in full support. This was a lot to ask, given Angie’s persistent refusal to follow many of the guidelines about hygiene and good order. Her attitude to visiting dogs alone put her outside civilised public opinion. Fourthly, the solution, when it finally came, to the mystery of who supplied the poison should be made very public and be very dramatic. For that, they would need young Ben Harkness, and sadly, he was not available.
He got up and went looking for his wife, who had gone upstairs some minutes before. ‘We should be making a bigger effort to find out what happened,’ he blurted, seeing her in their bedroom. ‘We can’t just sit about doing nothing, can we?’
Only then did he observe that the stalwart Angie, the woman everyone listened to and obeyed, was in tears.
Russell Straw was no braver than any other man when it came to weeping females. His first impulse was to call Simmy and get her to come and put things right. But he couldn’t do that. It was half past nine, and she might already have gone to bed. And what a pathetic course of action that would be. ‘Hey!’ he said softly. ‘What’s all this?’
There was no immediate reply. When it came he supposed it would be about the business, and reputation and feeling helpless. Instead, she burst into louder sobs, her face blotching and her voice thick. The words came out loud and uncontrolled. ‘I keep seeing that man’s face. It’s in front of my eyes all the time. It’s worse since I read that speech. It makes him more of a real person. When’s it going to stop? I can’t carry on like this. I’ll go mad. Oh, Russ, I think I really might be going mad.’
This, he realised, was serious. She never called him Russ.
They spent a desperate night, Angie too distraught to sleep, and neither of them tired after an unprecedentedly idle day. They kept the light on between the hours of two and four, first talking, then trying to read. They had not spent such a night since their daughter’s baby had been stillborn and the world turned black. Angie’s tendency to exaggeration led to an obsessive listing of everything that could go wrong from this point on. Simmy’s new baby would die, there would be another world war, the roof of the house would blow off in the next big gale. Nothing was safe.
Russell was dumbfounded in the face of all this. In recent times, he had been the anxious one, verging on paranoia at times. But his fears centred around burglars and other vaguely defined invasions of his property. His own declining powers were at the root of it, as he sometimes recognised. He would forget something crucial, lose something precious, fail to fulfil a promise. It made him neurotic, endlessly worrying about his own mental state. Angie, on the other hand, had never doubted herself. The sudden apparent terror that her own mind was failing shook Russell’s world as nothing had done before.
And all because some swine had fed poison to one of their guests, with never a thought for the consequences.
He knew it was futile to offer empty reassurances in the face of such distress. Better to confront the fears and tackle them realistically. But the small hours were not conducive to rational discussion. Everything was out of proportion, values distorted by the silence outside and the cold, dark sky. Finally, they switched out the light and sank into muffled sleep that neither one expected to be restorative. Their pillows were hot and crumpled from the wakeful hours, the duvet heavy on their clammy skin. It’ll be better in the morning, Russell insisted to himself as he finally dropped into sleep.
It was almost nine o’clock when they woke. ‘What day is it?’ Angie mumbled. ‘Were we really awake half the night?’
‘I fear so. It’s Saturday, I think. We need to phone Simmy and see what she’s proposing to do tomorrow.’
‘You do it. I’m staying in bed this morning. You can bring me some tea and toast.’
‘I can do that. That will not be difficult. But are you sure?’ He examined her uneasily. ‘You’re not exactly ill, are you? Just overstressed and panicked. I realise I’m no expert, but it does strike me that it would be more therapeutic to get dressed and find something to do.’ At the back of his mind the word depression floated alarmingly. The very last person in the entire British Isles likely to succumb to such a state was his wife, Angie Straw. He was not prepared to allow such a thing to happen.
‘Therapeutic?’ she echoed.
‘Exactly. It looks to me as if it’s that or go on some despised medication. Like me,’ he added. His own tendency to anxiety had led to him resorting to chemical assistance, albeit at a low and diminishing level. ‘You wouldn’t want that.’
‘No,’ said Angie softly. She was fully aware that she’d boxed herself into an uncomfortable corner where she might be forced to contradict herself. ‘Although you must admit these are extraordinary times, where several assumptions are under attack.’
This was more like it, he thought. She was using long sentences, with long words, her mind evidently clear. Any hint of incipient insanity had gone. Perhaps his feeble arguments at three in the morning had worked better than he could ever have expected. He couldn’t recall exactly what he’d said, but it had been along the lines of ‘while fear of madness is frightening and self-perpetuating, the evidence suggests that you are in fact entirely rational’. Perhaps that was all she had needed to hear.
‘I admit it unreservedly,’ he said. ‘But I still think you ought to get dressed and take your place in the world.’
‘Whatever that might be,’ she muttered.
‘We could make the most of our freedom and go out somewhere. Coniston, perhaps? Or Hawkshead. It’s lovely there.’
‘The only sensible place to go would be Patterdale,’ she said. ‘I can barely remember what it looks like, and if Persimmon is going to live there, I should make an effort to get to know it.’
‘Good thinking,’ he applauded, with a vast inner relief. ‘We’ll do that, then.’
‘Just give me ten more minutes,’ she insisted, pulling the duvet over her head.
Telephone calls kept Russell busy for the next half-hour. He was on his mobile to Simmy when the landline summoned him. ‘Angie!’ he called up the stairs. ‘Come down and talk to your daughter.’ He left the mobile on the stairs and answered the house phone.
It was Suzy Gorringe, who for a shameful few seconds Russell could not place. ‘Oh yes, hello,’ he said, stalling for time. Then it came to him that it was the dead man’s sister, who should be treated with immense sensitivity. ‘What can I do for you?’
She was, it seemed, deeply unsatisfied with the lack of progress in the police investigation. ‘He was poisoned,’ she said shrilly. ‘Why can’t they use some of these hi-tech forensic tricks to find out who did it? All they have to do is work out exactly what the poison was, and trace it back to the killer. How many ordinary people know how to make a lethal dose of atropine or whatever it was?’
‘It’s sure to be on the Internet,’ Russell suggested.
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong. I’ve spent hours researching every known poisonous plant, and nowhere does it tell you exactly what to do with them. You have to have special professional approval before you can learn anything in detail. Like the police – they, if anybody, must be able to get at the facts.’
‘I suppose all the hedge witches are long gone,’ he said, unwisely. ‘They’d have known precisely what to do.’
‘What? Who? Are you taking this terrible thing seriously, or not?’
He bit his lips, literally catching both upper and lower between his teeth to stop himself from describing the night he and his wife had just spent, thanks to the seriously terrible thing that had happened under his roof. ‘I believe I am,’ he said, after a pause.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she groaned. ‘I s
houldn’t take it out on you. I was only phoning to see whether you’d heard any more. It’s very frustrating having to stay down here, miles from where it happened. And they haven’t released Grant’s body yet. We’re stuck in limbo and it’s driving us all mad.’
‘It must be dreadful,’ he said, as warmly as he could. ‘But I’m afraid we’re none the wiser than you are. All we know is that your brother was popular in this area, with everyone saying how shocked they are.’
‘Huh!’ she scoffed. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got that altogether wrong. As far as I can see, nobody liked poor Grant one little bit.’
Chapter Eighteen
Three minutes after the call from Mrs Gorringe, the landline pealed again. Russell assumed it was the same woman having remembered more she wanted to say. But it was Tristan Wilkins, of all people. ‘Russ, old friend,’ came the excessively hearty greeting, ‘how’s things?’
‘Not great,’ said Russell, who was never much good at prevarication.
‘No, I dare say not. Now listen, I’ve been chatting to dear old Stuart about this and that, including this Patterdale nonsense. He put me straight about your girl wanting to find a place to live up there, and how impossible it’s likely to be, unless she takes him up on this building plot suggestion. Not easy, timing-wise, I can see that – but surely good sense in the long run? That’s what Stu thinks, anyway. She’s obviously concerned about the planning thing, as we all are.’
‘I don’t think she is, actually. Even if it did happen, it’s small enough not to make a lot of difference to anything.’
‘Dangerous words, my friend. Anyway, Stu and I thought it would be constructive to have a proper talk about that, and a few other things, with Candy for good measure. You must be dying for some distraction from the ghastly Childers business. Why don’t you and Angie come down to mine for some lunch today? Say twelve-ish. Nothing fancy – just a cold collation as my mother used to say. Daphne’s a dab hand at that sort of thing.’
‘Oh!’ This was highly unusual, and Russell could not guess at Angie’s reaction. ‘Let me go and ask her. Hold on a minute.’
Angie had gone back upstairs with the mobile, but was not speaking into it. ‘She says we should go there for roast pork tomorrow,’ she reported. ‘She thinks it would do us good to get out of this place.’
‘Must be a conspiracy. Guess who’s just asked us to lunch today? At this rate, we’ll never need to cook again.’
‘Who?’
‘Tristan. Apparently Stuart and Candy are going to be there as well. Cold collation, he says. Sounds rather nice. Are we up for it?’
She frowned. ‘They’ll talk about the Childers man. It’ll be awful.’
‘So you want me to say no?’
She didn’t answer directly, still agonising about it. ‘They’ll try to make me describe exactly how he died, and I really don’t relish the thought of that.’
‘We’ll tell them the police asked you not to. And they might have interesting things to tell us. I think, you know, that we ought to be trying harder to figure out exactly who did the deed. If we combine forces with the others, we might make a bit of headway. This is so peculiar, being invited at such short notice, I think we really have to go along with it. He’s hanging on, waiting for an answer.’
‘I don’t know …’ Angie dithered.
‘Well, I’ve got to tell him one way or the other.’
‘Tell him yes,’ said Angie wearily. ‘I don’t want to turn into one of those women who can’t face social gatherings, do I?’ She was half-dressed, and started to pull on the final layer.
‘You do not,’ said her husband, and went to give Tristan the good news.
Angie finished dressing and joined Russell in the kitchen. ‘Don’t you think it’s highly likely to have been one of them?’ she said, as if this had been obvious for days.
‘Um … Er …’ said Russell blankly. ‘One of who?’
‘Candy or Stuart or Tristan − who poisoned our guest. Or all three of them together.’
Russell spoke cautiously. ‘Do you really think so? If I’ve got the logic right, having seen that speech, it strikes me they’d be the last people to do it. They needed him alive, surely? Far more likely to be the faceless developers wanting to build that park.’
‘I know that would make more sense. But you and Bonnie seem to think there are no such people, and it’s all some kind of smokescreen.’
‘Hm. That’s getting a bit deep for my simple mind. Tristan said they want to talk about Patterdale and Simmy wanting to live there. And Tristan’s always keen for people to admire his roses, isn’t he? He’ll probably take us on a guided tour of his garden.’
Eating scrambled eggs and drinking tea, ten minutes later, she said, ‘What was that about a hedge witch? Who were you talking to?’
He had forgotten Suzy Gorringe. ‘The sister. She thinks the police should have worked out the killer by now. I said we needed a hedge witch to talk us through likely poisons. We don’t know one, do we?’
She pondered this. ‘I always thought Simmy’s Ninian might have a bit of that about him. If a hedge witch can be male.’
‘Why not? Though I must say I’ve never thought of him in that sort of light.’
‘He’s a potter – he digs clay out of ditches. He experiments with chemicals, colours and so forth. It’s not a million miles from brewing up deadly nightshade concoctions, is it?’
‘Good God, woman! Ninian has no reason to murder anybody. He’s practically a hermit. He doesn’t know anybody.’
‘He knows Corinne, and us, and Dorothea Entwhistle.’
‘Does he? Who told you that?’
‘Persimmon said something about it last night. She was talking about the funeral, remember?’
‘I missed that part.’
‘There must be plenty of people around who know how to use wild plants. People who added hogweed and ransoms and nettles to their stews to bulk them out when times were hard. They’d have to know about hemlock and nightshades and yew and whatever else might kill you.’
‘Toadstools and henbane,’ he added.
‘Exactly. It’s a big subject, but we all know a bit about it, if we live in the country. Anyone over sixty, at least.’
‘What about Dorothea, then? She was the ultimate plant person.’
Angie sighed. ‘We can’t accuse her of murder. She was dead at the time.’
‘Not quite. I gather she died on Sunday night.’
‘Are we going to say all this at Tristan’s lunch? Flinging wild accusations about, based on what we think people might know about plants? A good way to win friends, I don’t think.’
‘Might be fun, though.’ He yawned. ‘Roll on bedtime, I say. We got less than four hours’ sleep.’
‘First we’ve got to go and be sociable, heaven help us. I feel as if a steamroller just ran over me.’
‘A bit of fresh air will put you right,’ he said with forced confidence.
Ten o’clock came and went, and once again they were left with nothing to do. ‘We ought to make some sort of effort to attract visitors,’ said Angie, with scant enthusiasm. ‘I suppose I could have another go at Facebook.’ Several years ago, she had allowed herself to be persuaded by Simmy that it would be a good idea to establish a ‘presence’ on the Internet. But her Facebook page had always been a pathetic shadow of what Simmy had envisaged, and Angie had not updated it for at least eighteen months. Instead she relied on Booking.com and word of mouth. She was vaguely aware that Twitter existed, and that numerous guests recommended Beck View via that medium, but provided no input of her own. The demand for accommodation in Windermere was such that she rarely saw any need to advertise.
Now there was still a scattering of bookings over the coming weeks, at least. There was no real cause for panic in the long term. Memories were short and habit a powerful force. At least half of her guests were repeaters, coming back year after year, as Grant Childers had been with Candy Proctor.
That
thought gave her sudden pause. ‘You know what,’ she said, ‘I can’t help thinking it’s odd that Candy hadn’t got Childers safely booked in ages ago? I mean, if he came up here two or three times a year, wouldn’t he book ahead, from one time to the next? That’s what people do, when they know how busy it gets. What if she deliberately shunted him onto us for some reason?’
Russell blinked. ‘Why would she?’
‘I don’t know, do I? Maybe she disliked him and couldn’t stand another visit from him. Maybe it’s more sinister than that. If there was a careful plan to kill him, it would throw suspicion off her if he was staying somewhere else. It could be that this has all been thought through for months, in every detail.’
‘Candy’s no murderer,’ said Russell. ‘And what possible motive could she have? What’s more,’ he went on with increasing energy, ‘if this has got something to do with that new holiday park, it couldn’t have been planned far in advance.’
‘That’s what I mean. You forget that it was six weeks ago that Childers booked with us, and they’d planned the meeting then. That’s ages ago.’
‘I did forget that, I admit. It’s not really so strange, though, is it? Planning business moves incredibly slowly. It might have been sitting on somebody’s desk for months.’
‘You’re back to believing there really are some plans, then?’
He scratched his head. ‘I don’t know. Bonnie asked about it and got an extremely vague reply. She thinks it’s nothing more than a rumour, with no basis in fact at all.’
‘But they called that meeting. Why would they do that? They must have something to go on.’
‘I intend to ask them about it over the cold collation, actually. We can ask Candy about the booking as well. All the main players are going to be there. The topic is sure to arise. In fact, I suspect that’s the whole point of the exercise. They’ll want to ram home to us the point that they only stood to lose by Childers dying.’
