by Rebecca Tope
Simmy kept her counsel, and merely said, ‘Oh?’
‘Actually, it was your mother I really wanted. I know her B&B is just up here somewhere. I thought you might be there as well.’
‘She’s terribly tired,’ said Simmy. ‘I don’t think she’s really up for visitors. And isn’t it rather a bad time, anyway?’
‘It’s the only time I could manage,’ said Cheryl Wetherton, looking very flustered. ‘We’re off on our cruise tomorrow, and I wanted to drop in and ask if one of my cousins could stay there after Christmas.’
‘Why not just phone her?’
‘I know. I should have. But I thought a little chat might be nice, as well. I wanted to ask her something a bit personal.’
‘What time are you leaving tomorrow?’
‘Soon after nine. We’re flying from Manchester. I can’t really believe it – me on a cruise. I’ve never been anywhere. This is my first passport. Of course, Malcolm says I deserve it, that it’s about time something nice happened. We’ve had another disappointment lately, you see.’ She lowered her gaze, and Simmy waited for the all-too-predictable revelation. ‘We’ve been doing IVF, for a baby, and the third attempt has just failed. I’m too old. I keep telling him we’ve missed the boat. It’s all my fault, I know. I was just so … scared, for so long. But I don’t mind too much, really. I’ve never been the type who craved for a baby. I’m just so grateful to Malc for taking me on, as he did.’
‘Well, you won’t have time to have a proper talk with my mother,’ said Simmy briskly. ‘She’ll still be doing breakfast at nine. I can take the booking details if you like. As for the other thing …’
‘It was about Kit Henderson,’ said Cheryl. ‘But it isn’t important. He’s better off dead, you know. He did an awful lot of damage to people like me.’ She flushed. ‘I can’t tell you anything else. It’s all over with now. I’ve got Malcolm to look after me, and Kit can’t bother me ever again.’
‘Was he bothering you, then? After you were married?’
‘Oh, no. Not at all. It was just knowing he was still there, just a few streets away, that I could never quite forget.’
‘Was he the father of June’s child?’ Simmy burst out, her suspicions forming an unstoppable volcano inside her. ‘The boy, Rowan, is Kit’s, isn’t he?’
‘What? Who told you that?’
A man’s voice broke into their intense conversation, there on the pavement. ‘Cherry? What’s going on?’
‘Oh, Malc – how did you find me? I was going up to see Mrs Straw, and bumped into Persimmon. I was just saying, it’s not such a bad thing that Kit’s dead. You know you think so as well.’ She seemed to Simmy in that moment quite blithely oblivious to the poor taste behind her words. She tucked her hand between her husband’s arm and chest, squeezing close to him. ‘It’s not important. We can go home and make sure everything’s packed.’
Simmy took a deep breath, but it did little to calm her shivers of apprehension. ‘Cheryl – did you kill Kit Henderson?’ she asked. ‘Because it really looks as if you of all people had the most reason to hate him, and want him out of the way. June, too, perhaps, but I think it must have been you.’
‘Shut your mouth, you bloody stupid woman,’ said Malcolm. ‘What insanity is this? Cherry wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s only just managing to feel like a normal woman, after being exploited and abused all her life. You’re right she has good reason to want the man dead. But she didn’t do it, you idiot.’
‘Malc, don’t,’ begged Cheryl. ‘She’s just talking nonsense.’ She laughed, sounding genuinely amused. ‘I mean – it wasn’t just me, was it? Kit was the same with loads of girls. It was just that I – I was different. I took it all much too much to heart.’
Simmy heard a line echoing inside her head, spoken by Wetherton on Saturday: ‘The ladies like him, just like his old dad.’ That’s what the man had said about Christopher and Kit, and nobody had taken much notice. But now it reverberated, combining with the hypotheses that she and Ben and Bonnie and Angie had all created and tested in recent days.
‘You did it, then,’ she said, calmly. ‘As revenge for what he did to Cheryl. Wasting the best years of her life, leaving it too late to have a baby. You did it. Didn’t you?’
The man gave her a long complicated look. ‘In your dreams,’ he said. ‘Now leave us alone before we sue you for slander. We’re off to the Caribbean tomorrow and nothing’s going to stop us.’
‘You killed Kit Henderson with a pair of scissors. Fran sent you a set of instructions for him, encouraging you to go and wreak vengeance, not just for yourself, but for her as well. You read it out to him, put it in his hand, made him see what damage he’d done to at least four people, and told him how his wife knew about it all, and wasn’t willing to just let it all go. She turned the names into trees to make a sick joke out of it, and maybe protect her children. You sat there drinking tea with him, and then you stabbed him where you knew it would hurt. Did you stand over him while he bled to death? Did you put a hand over his face to muffle his screams?’
‘That’s enough, Simmy,’ said DI Moxon, stepping out from the shadow of a nearby tree, like Orson Welles in The Third Man. ‘I think we can take it from here.’
‘No-o-oo,’ screamed Cheryl. ‘No, no, no. Malcolm, tell them they’re crazy. Malcolm, oh Malcolm.’
Epilogue
Two Weeks Later
‘We were right about our low fertility,’ Simmy told Christopher. The chronic post-menstrual depression that had become a permanent feature of her life was more acute this time. She had become more and more hopeful with every passing day since the first night with Chris. At least, her rational mind had kept away from the subject, but her body and instincts had yearned and clamoured for fulfilment.
‘Ah,’ he said warily. ‘Do I detect disappointment?’
‘Apparently so. I’m thirty-eight, Chris. And I need a baby. Preferably two.’
‘It’s only been two weeks. How can we know what sort of parents we’d make? I’m the son of a philanderer. I live twenty-five miles away. How would it work?’
She looked around the hall; the same hall in which she and all the Hendersons had drunk tea after the funeral of their mother not many weeks earlier. Now her husband had been cremated in like fashion – but the family had agreed that the two sets of ashes should not lie together. ‘After all, she set Wetherton onto him,’ said Lynn. ‘What a dreadful thing to do.’
‘She never forgave him for the damage he did to Cheryl,’ Angie had summarised. ‘And to herself. For a long time, she hated Cheryl most of all, until she realised what a victim the wretched girl had been all along. He threatened her with dismissal from work, and all kinds of other things. Then he promised her he would always love her.’
‘You can’t know that for sure,’ objected Simmy.
‘Oh, but I can,’ Angie corrected her. ‘Cheryl came to see me yesterday and poured it all out. Apparently I’m the closest thing she can find to a sympathetic ear.’
The funeral was soon over, the mourners there on sufferance, unsure whether or not they should be regarding Kit Henderson as so reprehensible as to deserve his fate.
Simmy had closed the shop at lunchtime, seeing Bonnie go off to the funeral of her foster-mother’s mother, in the other chapel at the crematorium, twenty minutes before that of Kit Henderson. She had almost flown to Christopher’s side at the first opportunity, heedless of what anybody thought of them. She was impatient for them to get free of the defilement that hung around the Henderson family, and begin their headlong romance, which was twenty years overdue.
‘We can make it work,’ she told him firmly.
‘All right, m’lady,’ he smiled. ‘Who am I to argue with a woman who can catch murderers single-handed?’
‘I didn’t catch him single-handed. The clue was really in that letter your mother enclosed with my book. It just came to me, somehow – female solidarity, the way Fran was with letters, all the things my mother had been saying
about Kit, and there she was taking the time and trouble to make sure I had something of her own mother’s. It sounds whimsical, but everything just fell together and made a complete picture.’
‘A picture that nobody but you could see.’ He frowned. ‘I still don’t entirely follow.’
She tried again. ‘It was the tone. The letter to me was so warm and affectionate. But that list with the trees and so forth, was utterly different. Cold, callous, not a hint of affection. It was not the sort of thing a dying wife would leave for her husband, unless it had an ulterior motive. Well, Ben and Bonnie and my mum all came to that conclusion on Monday, and decided it pointed to June, because of her boy, Rowan.’
‘Who is not my half-brother, incidentally,’ said Christopher. ‘That was proved conclusively when he was nine.’
‘But he might have been, by the sound of it. But I started thinking about the Wethertons, and all I’d heard about them, and decided to confront Cheryl. I was wrong, though – I was sure it was her, not her husband. He practically told me my mistake, standing there by the clock tower. And Ben sent Moxon to find me, which wasn’t difficult, seeing as we were only about a hundred yards from the police station.’
‘I still think it shows you to be a formidable woman,’ he insisted, ‘which is just how I like you.’
And he gave her a long sensual kiss, right in front of twenty people.
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If you enjoyed The Bowness Bequest,
read on to find out about more books
by Rebecca Tope…
A COTSWOLD KILLING THE FIRST COTSWOLD MYSTERY
Nestled in the fertile hills of the Cotswolds, the village of Duntisbourne Abbots is a well-kept secret: beautiful, timeless and quintessentially English. When recently widowed Thea Osborne arrives to house-sit for a local couple, her only fear is that three weeks there might prove a little dull. Her first night’s sleep at Brook View is broken by a piercing scream outside but she decides such things don’t require investigation in a sleepy place like this. At least not until a body turns up.
When Joel Jennison is found slaughtered in the same field where his brother’s corpse had lain ten weeks previously, a whole community falls under suspicion. Was it a family feud? An act of revenge? Could Thea’s employers, now relaxing in the Bahamas, have anything to do with the murder? In calling on her neighbours to get some answers, Thea uncovers more tragedy and intrigue than she thought possible behind the chocolate-box façade of a peaceful Gloucestershire village. As a forty-something woman with no previous experience of detective work, she knows she shouldn’t be getting involved. But as her new friend Harry points out, ‘sometimes a fresh eye can see through the superficial tangles and grasp just where the truth lies’ …
A DIRTY DEATH
THE FIRST WEST COUNTRY MYSTERY
When irascible farmer Guy Beardon meets a very dirty death in his own farmyard, at first it seems like an accident – despite the fact that he was widely disliked. Only his daughter Lilah is prepared to defend his memory. And when, slowly, she begins to suspect foul play, no one is eager to help her investigate. Suspicion becomes certainty when two more deaths occur – both of them are unmistakably murder.
The difficulty lies in discovering who, among Guy’s many enemies, hated him enough to want him dead – and who went on killing to conceal the truth. There is certainly no shortage of suspects and it falls to local policeman Den Cooper to investigate the mysterious deaths …
MORE COSY CRIME AT ALLISON & BUSBY
KILLED IN CORNWALL
JANIE BOLITHO
DI Jack Pearce is investigating a series of burglaries and brutal attacks on young women which have broken out in Cornwall. Once again his on-off girlfriend Rose Trevelyan finds herself at the heart of the investigation.
With her intimate knowledge of the private lives of those connected to the case, Rose must work hard not to jump to conclusions about the innocence of those she knows. As the crimes become more serious, both newcomers to the area and familiar faces become suspects. But who should Rose – and Jack – believe?
BURIED IN CORNWALL
JANIE BOLITHO
Rose Trevelyan lives peacefully in Cornwall after the death of her husband, working as an artist and photographer. But when she hears terrified screams as she paints the rugged Cornish countryside, and a local woman is reported missing, Rose finds herself suddenly caught at the centre of a police investigation.
With so many people who trust her, Rose is – reluctantly, at times – privy to the secrets of many. When the things she is told in confidence appear connected to the investigation, Rose must decide how far the bonds of friendship reach.
CAUGHT OUT IN CORNWALL
JANIE BOLITHO
When Rose Trevelyan sees a young girl being carried away by someone who appears to be her father, she thinks nothing of it. Until, that is, the appearance of a frantic mother who cannot find her child. Beth Jones is only four years old, and her mother is adamant that the man Rose saw taking her away must be a stranger.
Wracked with guilt for not intervening, Rose once again finds herself entangled in a criminal investigation. As time passes, it becomes clear that the chances of getting Beth back unharmed are very bleak indeed …
About the Author
REBECCA TOPE is the author of three bestselling crime series, set in the stunning Cotswolds, Lake District and West Country. She lives on a smallholding in rural Herefordshire, where she enjoys the silence and plants a lot of trees, but also manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time. Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later.
rebeccatope.com
By Rebecca Tope
THE LAKE DISTRICT MYSTERIES
The Windermere Witness
The Ambleside Alibi
The Coniston Case
The Troutbeck Testimony
The Hawkshead Hostage
The Bowness Bequest
THE COTSWOLD MYSTERIES
A Cotswold Killing
A Cotswold Ordeal
Death in the Cotswolds
A Cotswold Mystery
Blood in the Cotswolds
Slaughter in the Cotswolds
Fear in the Cotswolds
A Grave in the Cotswolds
Deception in the Cotswolds
Malice in the Cotswolds
Shadows in the Cotswolds
Trouble in the Cotswolds
Revenge in the Cotswolds
Guilt in the Cotswolds
♦
A Cotswold Casebook
THE WEST COUNTRY MYSTERIES
A Dirty Death
Dark Undertakings
Death of a Friend
Grave Concerns
A Death to Record
The Sting of Death
A Market for Murder
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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London W1T 6DW
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2017.
This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2017.
Copyright © 2017 by REBECCA TOPE
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resem
blance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–2112–2