by Rebecca Tope
Sitting in the car, she extracted her phone from the bag and tried to discover who had called her.
It quickly became apparent that the person in question was Helen Harkness. There was a voicemail message from her, saying ‘Simmy? Can you give me a call when you get this, please?’
So Simmy did as requested.
‘Hi. Thanks for getting back so quickly. I was wondering whether you’d have time to pop round here for a bit? Are you at home? I did try your landline, but there was no reply.’
‘I’m in New Road, sitting in the car. I can be there in about three minutes.’
‘Oh, thank you.’ Relief was so strong in Helen’s voice that Simmy suspected the onset of tears. ‘I really don’t know who else I can talk to.’
It was actually slightly less than three minutes later that Simmy pulled up outside the Harkness house in Helm Road. It was only a short way down the hill into the northern reaches of Bowness. She found herself worrying about Ben as she rang the doorbell, as well as wondering what was at the centre of the problem.
‘Oh, that was quick! Come in. I’m sorry to interrupt your day. What were you intending to do, instead of coming here?’
‘Nothing much. Go home, I think. It’s nearly dark already.’
‘Ghastly, isn’t it. Makes you afraid that summer will never come again.’
Helen waved Simmy into the front room, which was strangely empty. For a family of seven all to be scattered around the house, in kitchen and bedrooms, was highly unusual. It was impossible to miss the implication that Helen had banished them all.
‘Is Ben okay now?’ Simmy asked. ‘He wasn’t his usual self at all yesterday.’
‘That’s what I wanted to talk about. I can’t get him to open up to me at all. I suppose I’ve overdone the protective mother act, after what happened to him in Hawkshead. But I don’t see why that should stop him from talking to me about Kit Henderson.’
‘Have you tried asking Bonnie?’
‘She’s just as bad. He must have warned her to stay quiet. But I can see she wants to tell me what the matter is. I heard her trying to persuade him to tell me something. He really snapped at her, poor little thing.’
They were still standing in the middle of the room, Helen too wrought up for social niceties.
Simmy could not think of anything to say. Her own faint suspicions were coming into clearer focus, offering an explanation for Ben’s silence. She moved towards the sofa in the middle of the room and slowly sat down. ‘Oh dear,’ she said.
‘Never mind “Oh dear”. I want something better than that. You know how his mind works, at least as well as I do. His father is being useless. I can’t really blame him. He hasn’t got a moment to himself these days. That job’s going to kill him, the way it’s going. I keep telling him to take early retirement, but he won’t.’
‘He’s a teacher, isn’t he?’ Ben’s father had successfully remained detached from all her dealings with the family thus far. Simmy did not even know his first name.
‘Head of languages. It’s a nightmare most of the time.’
They were well off the main subject. While this might be seen as a waste of time, Simmy was actually rather glad. If forced to reveal to Helen the direction her thoughts were taking, there was likely to be considerable embarrassment as a result. And she could not be sure how Ben would react if Simmy were to speak for him. She might have it completely wrong. But from what she had seen of him the day before, she was convinced that some sort of intervention was required.
‘So – Ben,’ said Helen, with solid determination. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘I honestly don’t know for sure, but I think it’s a few things all wrapped up together. For one, he’s afraid for Bonnie.’
‘Rubbish! That girl’s as tough as the proverbial old boots. She bounces back every time. I’ve never known such a resilient creature. Compared to her, my girls are all as fragile as glass.’ Helen had three daughters, as well as Ben and his brother, Wilf. ‘I can see I’m not a patch on Corinne for mothering skills.’
‘Well, maybe it’s not about Bonnie so much. I think, actually, it’s to do with the fact that you knew Kit Henderson years ago.’
Helen sank into an armchair, having been walking round the room up to then. ‘What?’
‘I might have it totally wrong. He hasn’t said anything directly, but I got the impression that he’s worried about it. Kit had a reputation, apparently, as a ladies’ man. A few people have made comments along those lines, some of it bordering on some rather nasty implications. And I rather think he – Ben, that is – has put two and two together, and come up with an idea that he can’t talk about to you. Do you see?’
‘I’m not at all sure that I do. You’re telling me that my son thinks I had some sort of affair with the man who laid our carpets, twelve or fifteen years ago? God help us – I was pregnant with twins at the time.’
Simmy grimaced. ‘Really? That does make it rather unlikely, I suppose.’ She paused to think, ignoring Helen’s spluttering protest. ‘But you did other business with him, didn’t you? Later on? Recommending him to your clients, or something?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I don’t remember. It can only have been my mother, I suppose. I hardly ever saw Kit or Frances, once I was grown up, but I heard about them on and off. They’ve always been family friends of ours. Frances and my mum were pretty close.’
‘Let’s go back a step. Even if Ben does think there was something between me and Kit, that doesn’t explain the way he’s been these past couple of days. It’s more than that. It started after he’d been interviewed by the police on Wednesday. They must have said something to upset him.’
‘Bonnie said he thought they’d got some evidence to incriminate him. She really thought he might be accused of killing Kit himself. They were both pretty scared about it on Thursday morning.’
‘They can be such children at times,’ Helen murmured, with a sorrowful expression. ‘Just when you think your work is done and they can stand on their own two feet, they regress. Even Wilf still has his moments.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I do remember talking to Kit about it one day. We’d bumped into each other at a client’s house, and started chatting. My twins must have been about two, and were driving me absolutely mad. He was rather comforting, talking about his girls and the way one of them was always fighting with one of the boys. Like a little tiger cat, he said. I do remember that.’
‘Hannah,’ nodded Simmy. ‘I saw her yesterday. She did fight a lot with George, although I think he started it, and she was just defending herself.’
‘It was Ben and Tanya in my case. They’ve never really liked each other. And there was Kit, a sympathetic voice of experience, having gone through the same sort of thing twenty years ahead of me. He kept saying everything always turned out right in the end.’
‘It didn’t, though, did it? Not for him, anyway.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about. His children are all doing okay, aren’t they?’
‘More or less, I suppose. Funny how similar your two families are. That might have occurred to Ben, as well.’
‘We’re still not getting anywhere, are we? I still think there’s one big element in all this that’s reduced him to a wreck. I’ve never seen him like this. It’s unnerving.’
‘Well, I can only think of one other explanation,’ said Simmy carefully. ‘It’s a really wild idea, but I can just about see how it might have felt like a logical deduction. For Ben, anyway – since logical deductions are what he does.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, assuming he does think you and Kit were … you know … then he might also think that Kit was making some sort of threat against you. Blackmail, maybe. Threatening to tell your husband. Or even making fresh overtures once his wife had died. I am only guessing,’ she emphasised. ‘Just trying to think the way he would.’
Helen was certainly not slow on the uptake. She
got the message instantly. ‘And so, rather than let my life be ruined by a casual fling years ago, I killed the wretched man. Is that what my beloved son thinks of me?’
Simmy could see the woman was torn between horror and amusement, as well as a growing anger. ‘It would explain why he’s so upset,’ she said faintly.
Helen made a visible effort to treat the matter seriously. ‘And it would fit what he’s been like with me since Tuesday. Veiled accusations. All sorts of incomprehensible questions. I should have worked it out for myself,’ she sighed.
‘I don’t see how you could have done,’ Simmy reassured her. ‘And I think he feels that the adults are all swimming in much deeper water than he is. He feels young and ignorant, and vulnerable.’
‘And he thinks his own mother is a murderer,’ said Helen breathlessly. ‘Well, that’s certainly a new one on me.’
Simmy left ten minutes later, having had no offer of tea or other refreshment. Helen thanked her, in a choked sort of way, and they parted awkwardly. ‘I’m probably completely wrong,’ Simmy insisted.
‘If you are that must mean that you’re the one with the overactive imagination,’ the woman snapped. ‘Which would be good in one way, I suppose, but might make me wary of getting close to you in the future.’
On her drive back up to Troutbeck, these words rang painfully in her head. She had tried to do as Helen had asked, and in the process might well have made a lot of things very much worse. She should have simply professed ignorance of Ben’s thought processes and forced Helen to go back and get what she could out of the boy himself. She had not explained her ideas very well, she supposed. If she’d put more stress on the worries on Thursday morning, that might have helped with the logic of the whole matter. Ben could have been alerted to the fact that the police would follow evidence wherever it led – and therefore if there were events or relationships from the past that suggested reasons for Helen wanting Kit Henderson dead, that would have to be investigated. And if Helen had secrets, her clever son might well feel obliged to ferret them out, however scary and painful that might turn out to be.
But, of course, Helen hadn’t killed Kit. Of course she hadn’t. Moxon had implied that the killer must have been a man. But he had been wrong about that before. And Kit had evidently known his killer; they had been looking at that famous list together and drinking tea.
She could not resist reviewing the list of possible attackers. It must be a compulsion that gripped everyone involved, from Christopher to Angie Straw. And everyone’s list would be different, depending on who knew what about Kit’s life. She imagined the police asking that unavoidable question: do you know of anyone who might have had a reason for wanting Mr Henderson dead? Did he have enemies? Was he in any sort of trouble, financially or emotionally? Questions bred questions, delving into the darker side of the man’s activities and relationships.
It was relentlessly unpleasant. It was having a bad effect on Ben and therefore Bonnie too. And it was distracting Simmy from something that promised to be very much sweeter. She still had the image of Christopher in his role as auctioneer, scanning the room, efficiently rapping his hammer at the end of every lot. He had been the charismatic centre of the proceedings, all eyes and ears on him, and he had acted up to it beautifully. Finally, he had found his vocation, and it fitted him to perfection. The scope for learning, specialising, profiting was clearly enough to hold his attention, after a life spent in restless pursuit of just such satisfaction. His work was varied, exciting and sociable. At any moment a stranger could walk in off the street with a cameo or a postage stamp or a tiny ivory figure that would sell for a million pounds. This alone must give the work a perpetual thrill.
But Christopher himself must be distracted by the violent death of his father, so soon after his mother’s demise. His performance at the auction had perhaps been slightly too good, given the recent traumas. She niggled at this thought for the last mile. Did it mean he was cold and callous? Or a good actor? Or just a typical British man, eager to bury painful feelings and get on with normal life? She recalled how normal he’d been at the auction, and even earlier. On Wednesday he had shown much less emotion than might have been expected. Ben would probably see that as suspicious – as if he was really not so surprised at what had happened. But – terrible thought – if he had been the killer, then would there not be that gnawing sense of guilt distorting his features, a look that was so often mistaken for grief?
Her little house was in darkness, and not quite warm enough to be welcoming. The heating didn’t come on until four, which meant it had only had half an hour to take effect. ‘This is no way to live,’ she muttered crossly to herself. She always seemed to get home thirsty and hungry and in a dour mood. Evenings were long and boring and she spent far too many of them thinking about work.
She had retrieved Frances’s flower book from her car, feeling foolishly guilty towards the thing. It had remained in her car since she had shown it to her parents. The problem was, she didn’t know what to do with it. There was a depressing inevitability to its fate – tucked away in a cupboard upstairs and forgotten, most likely. She had shown it to all the people who might find it interesting, as well as inspecting every page of it herself. What more could be expected? It was one of those objects that had no real use or value, other than aesthetic, but unlike a picture or ornament, it could not be properly displayed.
Thoughts of pictures and ornaments took her straight back to Christopher, and that was regrettable. None of the images and notions going through her head were going to lead anywhere. She would be better employed in watching the news channel while sewing a button back onto one of her shirts. She had kept it safe for months, since it came off, and now seemed a good moment to deal with it. The news was going through a bland phase, with no terrorist outrages or natural disasters to agonise about. She put a Fray Bentos pie in the oven, as a treat for herself. Only when it was ready did she experience a powerful pang of nostalgia for times past. When first married, she and Tony had mutually confessed to a passion for the things and had them at least once a week.
She had not given her former husband a thought for weeks; had not heard from him or about him for at least a year. The divorce was over and done with, a clean break, with no reason to stay in touch. Memories involving him were imbued with a sense of failure, and a degree of bewilderment. His grief over the loss of their baby girl had taken such a strange course that she had been forced to accept that the tragedy had driven them apart. She barely recognised him, two months after Edith had died.
But she ate the pie all the same, enjoying it all the more for being so hungry. They were uniquely delicious, especially the steak and kidney version. No way was she going to let Tony spoil them for her.
She had not quite finished when somebody knocked on the door. Setting the tray down on a side table, she went to investigate. With a caution that she partly deplored in herself, she called, ‘Who is it?’ loudly through the closed door.
‘Christopher,’ came a faint answer. It was a sturdy door, close to being soundproof.
‘Good Lord, what are you doing here again?’ she said in disbelief, before the door was fully open. He pushed in, slammed the door behind himself, and then stood there in the hall, staring at a point above Simmy’s head.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help it. I thought you’d wait for the end of the sale and then we could talk. But you went. I never thought you’d do that.’
‘And I never imagined you expected us to stay. I did talk to Hannah for a bit.’ As if that was any consolation, she thought grimly.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I don’t seem to be functioning so well now. I held it together while I was doing the auction – and then I just sort of collapsed. It was awful.’
She could think of nothing to say to him. Two contrasting impulses were battling inside her. One urged her to grab him in a long hug and tell him everything would be all right. The other was to push him straight out again while or
dering him to find someone else to cry on. There were so many associations with another man in mourning; she doubted she was ready to deal with a new one yet. And besides, it was never actually going to be all right. Fran and Kit would stay dead, whatever happened. Unfinished arguments, failed apologies, misunderstandings – they would all persist in the survivors for a long time. It had not been like that, of course, when Edith died before she had ever even lived, but Simmy had glimpsed these frustrations in her customers. They would say things like ‘I never told him …’ or ‘I wish I’d said what I really thought when she was alive’ as they tried to compose the message on the card that went with the flowers. She could well believe that not one of Kit Henderson’s children had ever achieved a meaningful conversation with him. He wasn’t that sort of man.
‘It had to hit you eventually,’ she murmured. ‘You couldn’t hold it off for ever.’
‘I thought I could. I was feeling rather pleased with myself, rationalising it all so it would be bearable. Thinking how my dad would never have wanted to live on his own. That he’d been saved a miserable old age. Stupid stuff like that.’ He was very red in the face, his eyes blurry. He still avoided her gaze, as if ashamed to look at her.
‘You thought the murderer was doing him a favour?’ She could not stop herself from challenging this grotesque notion.
‘No, not really. Obviously not. But being dead, you see. That’s the real point. And I was trying to make it less ghastly, just for my own sake.’
‘Come and sit down. I was just finishing my supper. Do you want a drink or something?’
‘I shouldn’t have come. It was wrong of me, driving all the way over here, just to see you again. I don’t know what’s come over me.’
‘And now you can’t look at me,’ she noted. ‘What’s that about, Chris?’
It might have been the very first time she’d used the shorter name. It had not escaped her notice that both his sisters were doing it now, which they had not done as children. Frances had been so emphatic that his whole name must always be applied that everyone had automatically obeyed. Chris felt daringly intimate, marking a definite change between them.