The Patterdale Plot

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘At least I haven’t been agonising about Bonnie coping with the shop.’

  ‘True. So, this is the plan. Shopping first, then lunch somewhere, then up to see Lynn, then home for a movie. Right?’

  She blinked at this sudden onset of efficiency and authority. Something snagged. ‘Does Lynn know we’re coming? Have you said something to her, without telling me?’

  ‘Nothing definite, but she wants to talk to you about babies and indigestion. Heartburn. Cravings. That sort of thing.’

  Lynn was the youngest in the Henderson family, and had two little girls. She and her sister, Hannah, had been adopted as small children by Christopher’s parents, who already had three boys. To her own subsequent disbelief and embarrassment, Simmy had unquestioningly accepted the sudden appearance of these young sisters as entirely straightforward natural acquisitions. They had appeared suddenly on one of the annual joint seaside holidays when she was about eight, and it never occurred to her to wonder how it had happened. The whole complicated history that existed between the Straws and the Hendersons centred around Simmy and Christopher, born on the same day, but who had spent more than half their lives apart, scarcely even thinking of each other. His parents were now dead, under extremely painful circumstances. The facts around his father’s demise were still causing unease.

  ‘I don’t get heartburn,’ she said. ‘And I don’t really want to talk about babies.’

  ‘Don’t be stuffy. She wants to be friends, that’s all. The whole family’s thrilled about the baby.’

  Simmy had forbidden him from revealing the news to his siblings until she was well past three months in the pregnancy, something he thought unfair since Angie and Russell had known from the start. Now he was eager to make up for the lost time and ensure that the new Henderson would be fully embraced by one and all.

  ‘I know. It’s just … there seem to be more important things to think about at the moment. Houses, for a start. And money, my parents, the shop.’ She grimaced. ‘We can’t just dither about, not getting anything settled.’

  ‘Money?’ He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘What about money?’

  ‘I keep telling you – if I put the shop in mothballs, or whatever they call it, while the baby’s small, I won’t have any income. You’d have to pay for everything. And until you sit down with pen and paper to do the sums with me, I’m not convinced we can manage.’

  He sighed. ‘You don’t have to worry. Worst case scenario is I move in here and the three of us can live as cheaply as one. We’ve got a house, after all, it’s just not terribly convenient. Other people survive in much worse situations than this. I could easily pay your mortgage here, for as long as you like. It’s hardly any more than the rent I’m paying now.’

  She was saved by the telephone from going round the same old circle yet again. ‘It’s Bonnie,’ she said, with an alarming sense of relief. To be summoned to the shop to deal with some sort of minor crisis would rescue her from the sense of being stuck in a loop with Christopher where nothing was ever decided and time passed while they went round and round, getting nowhere.

  ‘Hey, Bonnie. Everything all right?’

  ‘Don’t panic. There’s no problem. Just that we can’t find that box of oasis. Tanya’s doing a little display for the window and she needs it. I told her to improvise, but she says that won’t work. It’s looking nice, actually. You’ll like it.’

  ‘I used it all up on the wedding thing yesterday. I had to pack masses of it in to keep those hollyhocks upright. I forgot to order any more.’

  ‘Oh. Pity. I’ve heard from Ben, by the way. It’s all going to plan. I can spend all tomorrow with him.’

  This, Simmy suspected, was the real reason for the call. Bonnie’s excitement was spilling over, and she had to share it. Tanya, as Ben’s sister, would be unlikely to appreciate the depth of the older girl’s emotion. And Bonnie had no real friends of her own age.

  ‘That’ll be lovely,’ said Simmy ‘Just don’t talk to him about murder.’

  Bonnie laughed. ‘Tanya’s determined to have it all solved by the end of today, though I can’t imagine how. She keeps having crazy ideas about it, something different every time. Her latest is all about infusing the seeds of the datura plant, and making such a concentrated poison out of it that just a few drops would be enough to kill someone. She’s good at chemistry, would you believe? So she understands about stuff like distillation. Doesn’t make much sense to me.’

  ‘It all sounds very clever,’ said Simmy doubtfully. ‘Unless she actually tries it for herself. That might turn dangerous. Does she know where to get the seeds?’

  ‘Luckily, no. It’s all theory at the moment. She has found a few more snippets on the Internet, but not enough to worry anybody.’

  ‘That’s a relief. If it’s not busy you can go home a bit early, you know. You must want to—’ She bit back the rest of the sentence, but Bonnie heard it anyway.

  ‘You were going to say I must want to get myself ready for seeing Ben,’ she accused. ‘Like what? Wash my hair? Paint my toenails?’

  ‘Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to for a minute. I don’t do any of that stuff for Christopher, so I have no idea why I should think it appropriate for you.’

  ‘Right.’ Bonnie laughed cheerily and changed the subject. ‘It would be great, though, wouldn’t it, if the murder was all sorted today, and then we could tell Ben the whole story and he wouldn’t be distracted by thinking he had to be a detective again, and he wouldn’t be cross that I hadn’t told him about it.’ The girl was evidently regretting the drastic change from earlier times when she and Ben had thrown themselves into murder investigations to the exclusion of almost all else.

  ‘Tanya would be off the hook as well,’ said Simmy.

  ‘That’s the thing. She’s hogging all the research to herself. All that stuff Ben and I always did together. She hasn’t explained it very well to me, even though she keeps showing me pictures on her phone. The datura flowers look nice. But I’ll never understand all the science side of it. I mean – what’s distillation anyway?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. It sounds like what they do to make whisky in illegal stills.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ said Bonnie. ‘And she keeps talking about Breaking Bad. I think she’s too young to watch that, don’t you?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Simmy, feeling too old for such issues. Then she remembered that she would one day have her own teenager who would watch unsuitable material and have to be monitored by parents who were in their fifties and struggling to maintain a footing in a world she could not at that moment even imagine. She tried to focus on what Bonnie had been saying, something niggling at her. Suddenly she got it. ‘You know – I’ve seen a datura flower just recently. Devil’s trumpet. It was in one of Miss Entwhistle’s funeral tributes.’

  ‘Sorry. Gotta go,’ said the girl. ‘There’s a customer.’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘What was all that about?’ Christopher wanted to know. ‘Whisky and devil’s trumpets? Sounds like a film by that Spanish chap.’

  ‘You don’t want to know. It’s about murder and poison, and things you prefer not to think about.’

  He flushed. ‘That makes me sound awful. If it concerns you, it concerns me. Isn’t that the way it works? I was hoping the cops would have solved it all by now. It’s a week ago, isn’t it? Every contact leaves a trace, and all that stuff. Of course, without Ben Harkness, they must be very handicapped.’

  ‘Don’t start on Ben. It’ll be a week tomorrow since it happened. And there isn’t any contact when the killer uses poison, is there? That’s the main point, I assume. It’s much easier to get away with it, because there won’t be any forensic evidence. It’s probably a good thing Ben isn’t here. He’d find it very frustrating.’

  ‘Right. Except the actual toxin used must be traceable, surely? That’s evidence.’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘You sound as if you’ve thought about it.’

>   ‘Not really. I used to read a lot of Jeffery Deaver. His detective could tell you where the poisonous plant had been grown, and how it had been delivered. Believe it or not, I used to find all that stuff quite exciting. But then it all got too close for comfort when my dad died and I lost my appetite for it. And poison seems weirdly old-fashioned now. Which is odd, when you think about it. Maybe nobody has the brains any more to plan a really good murder. They just stab and slash and shoot.’

  ‘This one certainly must have been well planned,’ she agreed. ‘Last I heard, they still didn’t know how he was actually persuaded to take whatever it was. Bonnie and Tanya have been trying to find out how poisonous berries or seeds can be processed to make them effective. The Internet is very shy about going into detail, apparently.’

  ‘There’s a surprise,’ said Christopher, not entirely sarcastically. ‘I would have thought you could get complete instructions on how to make a lethal concoction, if you search hard enough.’

  This sudden interest from him made Simmy ridiculously happy. She had resigned herself to shouldering the trauma and worry arising from the murder all by herself. She would have to deal with her parents and Moxon and all the unpredictable variety of people who dropped into the shop to talk about it. Now, perhaps, she could dump at least some of it into her fiancé’s lap and let him try to sift through it. ‘I’ve never heard of Jeffery Deaver,’ she said.

  ‘You have. I was there once when Ben mentioned his books. You just don’t remember names very well.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ This felt like an unfair accusation. ‘I remember the names of my customers, and your sisters’ children. And your brothers’, come to that.’

  He laughed at her. ‘Stick to the point, woman. What was that about devil’s trumpets?’

  ‘It’s a plant called datura. Moxon mentioned it right at the start as a likely source of the poison. There’s a family of plants that all produce similar toxins, but I think the police are sure now that it was datura. I still don’t know exactly what it does to a person – what it is that actually kills you. We don’t know where Mr Childers went, or when, the day before he died. He knew lots of people up here and was scheduled to speak at a meeting on Thursday. He seems to have gone on the lake cruise from Bowness on Sunday. Rightly or wrongly, there’s an assumption that whoever killed him did it to stop him delivering his speech. Last I heard, anyway. The police have shown the speech to my dad, apparently. I ought to ask him what it says.’

  ‘Stop, stop,’ begged Christopher. ‘I realise I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but don’t blind me with details. Do you sell these trumpet things in the shop?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But I’ve seen some recently. It came back to me when I was driving back from Patterdale last night, which is why I went to the churchyard to see if I could find them on the grave. I saw them at the undertaker’s in the morning, but didn’t have time for a proper look. It was one of the wreaths for Dorothea Entwhistle. There were masses of them. They had to use a second car for them.’

  He flapped a hand at her. ‘Slow down,’ he said.

  But she couldn’t stop, now the full significance was getting through to her. ‘It had been nagging at me since yesterday morning. There was so much else to think about, I never made the connection properly. Not that it gets us anywhere, I suppose.’

  ‘It might. If you could find out where they came from, you might at least help the police make a comparison – or something.’

  She was enchanted by his sudden involvement. Until now, it had always been a struggle to get him to accept Ben and Bonnie as part of a package with her. Even when he discovered a body in Grasmere, finding himself under close police scrutiny, he resisted the youngsters’ efforts to share in the experience. It was that, Simmy guessed, that had made him so slow to admit that this was something that might well occur again, and that he had little choice but to take an interest. His automatic inclination to look away and pretend it wasn’t happening was never going to work. Perhaps at least he had come to understand that.

  ‘I don’t know where they came from,’ she sighed. ‘I remember noticing the bouquet was home-made, and signed by someone just with a nickname, which I can’t now remember. It was just a couple of seconds, and I was looking at all the wreaths, not just that one. A whole shelf-ful, or more. Bob made me move before I could have a really good look.’

  ‘So did you find it on the grave?’

  ‘No – there were only a handful of wreaths left, and it was very dark, as you said. The rest were all taken to nursing homes and places like that. The vicar must have said he didn’t want a great mound of them slowly rotting away in his nice tidy churchyard.’

  ‘But they’re poisonous,’ he protested.

  She smiled. ‘I doubt if anybody’s going to eat them. If I remember rightly, they wilt quite quickly. They’ll just go into a compost bin somewhere and never be seen again.’

  ‘It’s only yesterday,’ he said, suddenly urgent. ‘You should tell your policeman chum and he can track them down. What do they look like?’

  ‘White. Not as trumpety as daffodils. More like big convolvulus, really. You know – bindweed. They’re rather lovely, although they grow bigger and better in hotter countries.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t know I knew all that.’

  ‘They’d grow all right in a greenhouse, I suppose?’

  She stared at him. ‘That’s right. You’re sparking off all sorts of murky ideas that I’ve had floating around my head all week, and I never linked them together. I’ve been such a ditz lately.’

  He clearly knew better than to comment on this. ‘So – are we going shopping, then?’

  ‘We’ve got no choice, as we’re catering for visitors. Joint of pork, vegetables, drink. I’ve forgotten how to do it.’

  ‘I like being hospitable. I’m already looking forward to our housewarming party in Patterdale.’

  Wary of being called stuffy again, she smiled. ‘You think it’ll really happen then, do you?’

  ‘How can it not? I’ve always believed in autonomy and willpower and all that. Making your own destiny, and taking charge.’

  ‘Not like me,’ she said, on a sudden insight. ‘I just let it all happen around me. I’m being a drag on you, aren’t I? If it was up to you, you’d be knocking on every door up there and offering to buy the house whether or not it was for sale.’

  ‘It might yet come to that,’ he warned. ‘You’re not a drag – just a useful counterbalance. Now, unless you want to rush off and share your thoughts with the Moxon man, I suggest we get on with our programme.’

  She wrinkled her brow. ‘I ought to phone him,’ she worried. ‘But I suppose it can wait a little while. Maybe I can do it in the car, on the way to the shops.’

  Christopher drove them northwards, without consultation. The biggest shopping centre was Keswick, about sixteen miles distant, the route not only running through Patterdale, but also passing via the ‘other’ Troutbeck. The fact there were two settlements carrying the same name, both on the A5091 had caused Simmy and her friends great confusion when she had first moved to the Lakes. Her cottage was in the larger version, which was the default destination of satnavs and anyone living in the southern reaches of the area. Driving through the smaller one always gave her a shock. How did we get here? she would wonder, on seeing the name on the sign.

  She tried to phone Moxon once they were on the A66, but could only get voicemail. She left a message saying she had something to tell him, but didn’t expect it was of any great importance. ‘Well, I’ve done my civic duty,’ she said, putting the phone away.

  The shop was busy, but they made a game of it, blithely throwing cakes and soups into the trolley as if feeding ten people rather than four. ‘We don’t do it very often – we have to give them a feast,’ said Christopher. Simmy laughed and hoped he was intending to pay for it all.

  It felt inefficient to be going all the way up to Keswick – a town Simmy had still not properly explored. ‘Where are we goin
g from here?’ she asked. They had not stopped in Patterdale, which struck her as strange. ‘No time,’ Christopher had said, quite rightly. But they had slowed down when passing the house they had looked at the previous evening. ‘It is very dark,’ he conceded. ‘On the outside as well as in.’ The grey stonework was quite usual for the area, but somehow this particular house had an extra level of shadow. The two Patterdale pubs were painted white, and many buildings had decoration around the windows. In contrast, this was a gloomy-looking building.

  ‘It’s dour,’ said Simmy, giving the word two long syllables.

  The road meandered up to the dramatic modern slash of the A66, and Simmy found herself trying to give Christopher a more comprehensive résumé of the story concerning Tristan Wilkins and his fellow protesters. She reminded him of the bumpy little field, which was said to be earmarked for development. He shook his head. ‘As Robin said last night, there’s no way they would allow a load of new chalets. The idea’s ludicrous.’

  ‘Well, in that case, there’s something extremely odd about the whole thing. There has been from the start.’

  ‘Are you thinking it’s connected with the murder of your parents’ B&B guest?’

  ‘I think it must be,’ she said.

  Having accomplished their shopping, Christopher announced that they were going to return by the A591, lunching at one of his favourite pubs just north of Grasmere. ‘The Traveller’s Rest is calling me,’ he joked.

  She was quite content to let him have his way. The day was still rose-tinted with everything between them so harmonious that nothing seemed to matter very much. ‘But aren’t we going to see Lynn?’ she remembered. ‘That’s back the other way, isn’t it?’ His sister lived a little way east of Penrith. ‘We’ll be driving round in circles at this rate.’

  ‘We’ve got to get this meat and stuff put away first,’ he pointed out. ‘Lucky we didn’t buy anything frozen, but we still can’t carry it round in the car all day.’