by Rebecca Tope
‘We’re no closer to understanding the motive,’ said Bonnie. ‘Assuming it was Tristan who gave Grant the poisonous drink, why on earth would he do that?’
‘It can only be to stop the new tourist park in Patterdale,’ said Simmy. ‘Surely?’
Tanya wrote it down.
‘So how does he benefit from that?’ It was Bonnie, quick to get to the central question.
Angie and Russell understood that they were being edged away from the central conversation by the young folk. The excited brainstorming had at some point left them behind. Angie found herself yearning for a mug of tea and Russell remembered that his dog had scarcely been out all day. He was also annoyed that his own perfectly constructed narrative had not been received with the enthusiasm it deserved. ‘It all seems perfectly straightforward to me,’ he muttered.
But the quest for a motive was gathering momentum. ‘Obviously he wants to keep Patterdale as it is,’ said Christopher, whose world-weary tone had only increased as time went by.
‘But does he really believe those plans would ever have been given the go-ahead?’ wondered Simmy. ‘It felt like a pre-emptive strike, at that meeting we went to. Which makes it more sinister, somehow.’
‘More devious, certainly,’ said her father. ‘Is this going to go on much longer, because I should give the dog a walk before long? I can’t see the point of all this chatter, when you’ve got something concrete to show the police. Just go down there now and hand over your phone, why don’t you?’
‘They’ll be closed,’ said Angie. ‘You’ll have to phone Moxon directly.’
Bonnie and Tanya shrank into their chairs, once again looking like children trying to keep up with people much older and wiser than themselves.
‘Are you sure we should do that?’ said Bonnie.
‘Yes!’ said Simmy, Angie and Russell in unison. Christopher merely rolled his eyes.
‘Will you do it?’ the girl asked. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Simmy impatiently. ‘And I’ll come with you to see him. Whatever you want.’
Simmy called DI Moxon’s mobile, and he answered fairly quickly in a relaxed tone. She visualised him drinking tea with his wife, taking a break from murder. ‘We’ve got some evidence to show you,’ she said. ‘I think it’s important.’
It was sweet, the way he reacted. Any other police officer would probably laugh. ‘I’d better come and see it, then,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
‘At Beck View.’ A hissing sound from Angie alerted her. Her mother was flapping a hand and shaking her head, mouthing ‘NO-O-O’. ‘But I think my mother would rather we saw you somewhere else,’ she added.
Outside it was dry but grey. It was only an hour or so from sunset – not that there was any sign of the sun anyway. She looked again at her mother. ‘Although I can’t imagine where,’ she said.
‘I can open the police station. If it’s real evidence, it would help if we had some formality in place when you reveal it. Can you be there in ten minutes?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Simmy.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Angie was more than half-asleep, nodding uncomfortably in her husband’s fireside chair. Russell had insisted on taking the dog around the local streets, ignoring Angie’s claim that the animal would be quite happy in the garden. ‘I need to clear my head,’ he said. Christopher had gone off on his own, saying he needed to get petrol for his car, and may as well do it now as later. ‘Who knows what’ll happen next?’ he said. ‘I’m learning that it’s best to be prepared. For all I know, I’ll be needed to drive somebody to Birmingham or Edinburgh at a moment’s notice.’
Angie had just grunted and let him go.
When the doorbell rang, she was shaken awake, thinking it was Russell back again, and he must have forgotten his key.
But it was Stuart Carstairs, looking uncharacteristically abashed. ‘Hey, Ange,’ he said. ‘Can I come in?’
She opened the door wider and waited for him to walk past her down the passageway to the kitchen. On balance, she was glad to see him, but weariness was the dominant sensation. She flopped back into the same chair, and sighed. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘We were awake most of the night.’ Then she rallied. ‘Where were you today? Daphne wasn’t happy that you missed her lunch.’
‘I couldn’t face it, to tell you the honest truth. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain it was Tristan who poisoned your man. It can’t be anybody else. I’ve gone through it a million times, and it keeps coming back to him.’
‘It was him,’ she nodded, feeling perfectly calm. ‘The girls have gone to tell the police now. They’ve got evidence.’
He was struck dumb for half a minute. ‘What?’ he said then. ‘What evidence?’
‘I probably shouldn’t say.’
‘Must be about Dorothea, I suppose. She and Tristan were having a thing – did you know? They were growing those datura flowers in one of her greenhouses.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Who knows? Some sort of game, I fancy. I think they were excited to be producing something that was so lethal. Lots of people are like that,’ he added sententiously.
Angie’s brain was working in slow motion. ‘They plotted together to kill Grant Childers?’
‘I doubt it. Dorothea got diagnosed with incurable cancer only six weeks before she died. It occurs to me she might have wanted to polish herself off before it got too unpleasant. That would make sense, and explain the toxic plants. Tristan would have been dragooned into helping her. He’d have wanted to make it easy for the poor old girl. We all liked her, after all.’
The sound of the front door opening and closing announced Russell’s return. The dog skittered down the passage, grinning from his overdue walk, followed by his owner. ‘Russell,’ nodded Stuart.
‘He says Tristan poisoned Grant,’ said Angie.
‘We knew that already,’ said Russell.
‘He’s just in the middle of explaining. Dorothea Entwhistle grew datura, and wanted to use it to kill herself if her cancer got too horrible. That’s as far as we’ve got.’
‘She was diagnosed six weeks ago,’ Stuart repeated.
‘Ah! Is it coincidence, then, that Childers booked in here at that same time?’
‘No idea,’ said Stuart. ‘I don’t pretend to know the whole story, not by a long way.’
‘And Candy?’ Russell asked. ‘Where does she come in?’
Stuart looked blank. ‘She doesn’t, as far as I’m aware. Listen – all I’m doing is connecting the dots. Your man was poisoned with something botanical, and Tristan’s the only one who fits the facts. And Dorothea – but she was dying.’
‘She might have brewed up the lethal draught, though,’ said Russell, who appeared to be deriving considerable enjoyment from the whole conversation. Angie was a lot less enthusiastic.
‘Who knows?’ said Stuart again.
‘And we might never know,’ said Angie. ‘In any case, I’ve had enough of it all. I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for twelve hours.’
‘If you go now, you’ll be up at five,’ said Russell. ‘Try and last out another few hours. We can have a nice, quiet game of Scrabble, while everybody else is out there catching a murderer.’
Stuart took the hint and headed for the door. ‘Sorry if I’ve upset you,’ he said, with a slightly puzzled air. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’
‘We’re not upset,’ said Angie. ‘Just worn out. I know there’s a whole lot more we should have asked you.’
Russell went to the door with Stuart. ‘When did all this dawn on you?’ he asked.
‘Yesterday, at Dorothea’s funeral. I hadn’t given it much thought until then – been a bit busy with my own stuff, as it happens. Then I saw the wreath that Tristan sent – and thought “What a cheek!”. It was a home-made effort, already going droopy. I recognised the flowers from when Dorothea showed them to me a few weeks back. He’d put something sentimental on the card, and
called himself “Buzz”. That was what we called him when he first started keeping bees. Then it hit me – he just couldn’t help himself. Always was a big show-off. Thought he was beyond criticism, always knew what was best for everybody. It was a bloody cheek, you must admit – sending those exact same flowers to the funeral!’
They were on the doorstep, the road outside busy with Saturday evening traffic, streetlights giving it an almost wintry look. ‘So you knew what they were, as well?’ asked Russell. ‘And you never said anything to the police?’
‘They never asked me,’ said Stuart, with a cheesy grin.
Simmy, Bonnie and Tanya met Detective Inspector Moxon on the pavement outside the police station, as agreed. He unlocked the door, pressed some buttons and switches and ushered them into a plain room down a short corridor. There were four chairs waiting for them, tidily arranged around a table.
‘Thank you,’ said Simmy, a number of times. ‘It’s very good of you to take us so seriously.’
‘Remarkable as it might seem, I’ve learnt that it’s the wisest approach,’ he said.
Simmy recalled the Gibson woman calling Moxon ‘soft’. It was probably true, she concluded. He showed a rare respect for the teenage detectives, which probably went some way to explaining the impression. It was almost as if he regarded them as friends, or even the family he and his wife evidently never had.
‘I just have to leave you here for a minute,’ he went on. ‘I’ve got to make this official, which means filing a proper record. Talk among yourselves.’ And he went out, closing the door behind him.
At first, none of them could think of anything to say. ‘Why was Christopher in such a bad mood?’ asked Bonnie, finally. ‘Did you stop him from doing something? Or what?’
‘We were going to see his sister in Penrith. When you phoned, we were just leaving. He doesn’t like changes of plan, especially when it’s because of something like this. He gets very conflicted about it. Although I thought he’d relaxed a bit earlier. We saw the new detective sergeant in a pub, and she came over to chat. She’s nice. I told her about the datura flowers at the funeral.’
‘What?’ Bonnie stared at her blankly.
‘Oh gosh – did I forget to tell you? There’s been so much to think about, it got lost. Plus, I suppose once I’d told Detective Sergeant Gibson about it, I didn’t think I needed to give it any more attention.’
‘Explain.’
Simmy ran through what she had told the detective. ‘It’s probably not at all relevant. I can’t even swear that they were datura flowers. But they were something unusual that I didn’t recognise.’
‘Have you remembered the name on the label yet?’
‘I thought if I stopped trying, it would just come back of its own accord. The more I try, the more blank I get.’
Moxon came back, carrying a clipboard. He turned on a machine that could only be a voice recorder. ‘Right, then,’ he said at last. ‘What’s this evidence you’re talking about?’
Tanya produced her laptop and showed him the footage from Sunday morning, explaining as it ran. ‘What time was it?’ he demanded. ‘Why doesn’t it show the time?’
‘I never set it up for that. It was just before twelve o’clock. We can be sure of that, because that’s when the boat sets off from Bowness.’
Moxon looked at Simmy. ‘What time were you there? I’m right, aren’t I, that you and your father walked down to the same spot on Sunday?’
‘Right. It must have been a bit later. The boat was in the middle of the lake when we got there. And there wasn’t any sign of people with a table giving out drinks. Candy and Tristan were parading up and down with their placards. We talked to them.’
‘Well, this does help a lot,’ he said, with a hint of reluctant admiration. ‘It places Mr Childers at that spot at a specific time.’ He looked slightly stunned. ‘And he’s obviously drinking something he’d got from that stall. The cup’s identical to the others. And everything points to Mr Wilkins as the provider of the drink. But it’s not a hundred per cent conclusive. Someone else could have surreptitiously poured it out from a flask. That’s what a defence lawyer would say. There’s nothing to directly incriminate Wilkins. But we’re almost there. This really is something of a breakthrough.’
‘Hooray!’ said Tanya.
‘There must be something about you Harknesses. In your genes, maybe. It amazes me that you’d be there filming, at that very moment. What are the chances?’
‘Well, I’ve been filming a lot of stuff lately. It’s mostly for a school project. “Slice of Life” it’s called. We’re meant to capture ordinary events within a quarter of a mile of where we live. Things that represent what it’s like to live where we do. The real surprise is that I found it again, among all the other stuff I’ve got on here. I had actually forgotten about it.’
‘How did you know it was Mr Childers?’
‘I didn’t until Bonnie made the connection with the time and place. We found a picture of him on the news website, and worked out it was the same man. Then when we saw him with that drink, it started to seem important. But we ran it past Simmy and her parents first, just now. They confirmed that it was the right man.’
Simmy was gazing at the recording machine, half-listening and half-wondering how long this odd little meeting would take. Something suddenly clicked in her brain. ‘Buzz!’ she said. ‘The funeral flowers were from somebody called Buzz.’ The relief was out of all proportion. ‘Thank goodness I remembered.’
‘These are the flowers you told Gibson about?’ Moxon said. ‘We’ve been going through the list of people who sent funeral tributes. There were forty-one. Just about everybody from here to Ambleside is on the list.’
‘But only one looked to be home-made,’ said Simmy. ‘And using datura flowers, which must have come from a greenhouse.’
The detective pursed his lips. ‘Well, doesn’t it seem very unlikely to you that the person who poisoned Mr Childers would advertise him- or herself by publicly contributing the source of that poison to a funeral?’
‘That’s what I said to DS Gibson,’ Simmy admitted. ‘But my dad thinks it would be typical of Tristan.’
‘Who’s Buzz, then?’ asked Tanya.
‘That shouldn’t be too hard to discover, if we ask around,’ said Moxon.
‘Start with Candy Proctor,’ said Simmy on a sudden whim. ‘She knows everybody.’
Bonnie was jiggling in her chair. ‘But you can just go and arrest Mr Wilkins, can’t you? The other stuff can wait. You’ve got clear evidence in this video that he was giving out drinks in paper cups and Mr Childers had one of them.’
Moxon squared his shoulders. Even he wasn’t going to take orders from such a scrap of a girl. And he couldn’t even if he wanted to, as he went on to explain. ‘I have to take this higher up. There has to be enough to convince the CPS that a prosecution is likely, based on this evidence.’
‘So will you do it?’ asked Bonnie, trying to be more conciliatory.
‘Leave it with me. And thank you, ladies. You’ve given us some much-needed information, at last. I really shouldn’t say this, but I have a feeling we couldn’t have done it without you. Mind you, we’re not there yet. You have to wonder whether it was actually possible to simply hand the man a paper cup full of a deadly drink in full view of a hundred people. Think of the planning needed. How could they be sure he would be there? And if he was there, who could say he’d be wanting a drink?’
‘They’d have to have known every move he was going to make,’ agreed Simmy.
‘But it must have been Tristan Wilkins who gave it to him,’ said Tanya, tapping her phone. ‘He’s right there in the video.’
‘Christopher was right about that,’ said Simmy. ‘He was sure it was Tristan, days ago now.’
‘And I’m fairly sure he keeps bees,’ Tanya remembered. ‘Maybe people call him “Buzz”.’
‘If it was him, he’s got means and opportunity,’ said Bonnie. ‘But what on earth ca
n the motive be?’
Simmy went back to Beck View, where Christopher was waiting for her. He appeared to be more relaxed than he’d been an hour earlier. Angie and Russell were in the kitchen with him, but there was no sign of preparations for an evening meal. ‘We thought we’d go out for something to eat,’ said Christopher. ‘Your mother had a visitor, which meant she hasn’t got around to fixing anything.’
Simmy looked at her parents in surprise. They never ate out. ‘I thought you were dreadfully tired,’ she said. ‘Who was the visitor?’
‘We are. Too tired to cook. But I’ve got my second wind now, and your father’s up for it. It was Stuart – coming to tell me that Tristan Wilkins gave Grant Childers a fatal drink made out of datura from Dorothea Entwhistle’s greenhouse. I told him we knew that already – that it appears to have been Tristan, I mean. He filled in one or two pieces of the picture, but I must admit I was almost past caring by that point. Anyway, let’s go and eat. We were just waiting for you. How did it all go at the police station?’
‘Fine, thanks. Moxon’s going to apply for permission to arrest, or however they describe it.’ She turned to Christopher. ‘And I remembered the name on those flowers. The card was signed “Buzz”.’
‘That’s old Tristan,’ said Russell casually. ‘Everyone called him that when he got so keen on beekeeping. Must be ten years ago now. I haven’t heard anybody use it lately.’
‘Dorothea Entwhistle would have done, I suppose?’
‘Very much so. It might even have been her idea in the first place.’
