The Ambleside Alibi: 2

by Rebecca Tope

  Moxon seated himself close to her shoulder, and said, ‘I see you have young Mr Harkness’s spreadsheet as well.’

  ‘It’s not a spreadsheet,’ she argued. ‘It’s a dossier.’

  ‘Comprehensive, anyway. Very helpful. That boy will go far.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you got to the end?’

  She shook her head, reminded as she did so that there was still a bulky dressing above her ear that pressed unpleasantly when she made the gesture.

  ‘He recommends a comprehensive follow-up to our questions of the townspeople in Compston Road, exactly a week after the killing of Miss Clark.’

  ‘That was today,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed. We would, actually, have done it without the boy’s input. But it did turn out to be reasonably productive.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘A man in a shop opposite her house says he saw a person going in, without knocking or ringing the bell.’

  Simmy waited expectantly. Suddenly it seemed to matter tremendously what was said next.

  ‘A woman wearing a hat and black boots, carrying a bag on her shoulder. We think we know who it must have been.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Candida Hawkins!’ Simmy supplied, before he could say anything more.

  ‘That’s one rather remote possibility,’ he agreed carefully, with a glance around the room. ‘But we can’t make assumptions based on such a vague description, especially when we have you as an alibi for the Hawkins girl. This is one witness, a week after the event, who can’t be totally sure he’s got the right house. It’s a long way from a convincing case.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘And we can’t find her, anyway,’ he said, as if making a confession. He shifted on the chair, scratched an ear and sighed. ‘We’ve been trying to trace her credit card, and it looks as if she’s got into some trouble with the bank. Probably not her fault, just one of those glitches that take ages to iron out. I’m very sorry to tell you I don’t think you’ll be getting any money from that order.’

  ‘But the card worked. It was confirmed by the whatsit thing on the computer.’

  Moxon simply shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you exactly what happened, but it’s possible you’ve been scammed. There are a lot of serious questions hanging over that young lady.’

  ‘But I met her! When her car skidded. I spoke to her. She was natural and sincere. She told me personal things that she didn’t have to. I liked her.’

  ‘Her car skidded?’

  ‘Outside my house. In the snow. I helped to push it free. All that seems a long time ago now.’

  ‘What day was that?’

  ‘Sunday. Yes, definitely Sunday.’

  He gave this some thought, cocking his head as various hypotheses came and went. Simmy could almost see the workings. ‘Do you think she could have been there with malicious intent?’ he said. ‘It seems highly unlikely she’d have been there by coincidence.’

  ‘What? You think she meant to kill me in my own home on a Sunday morning?’

  ‘It would be logical, if she was your attacker later the same day.’

  It made very little sense to Simmy, the way her thoughts were swirling. ‘You mean, if she was the one who killed Nancy Clark as well? But why? And how, if the Giggling Goose alibi counts for anything.’

  ‘Exactly the question we’re stuck on,’ he nodded. ‘Why indeed.’ He stretched his legs as far as they would go, in an unselfconscious move that revealed his weariness. He looked at her for a long moment. ‘How are you now? I should have asked before. Does it still hurt?’

  ‘Not much. It all seems to be progressing very quickly. They’re sending me home on Friday.’

  ‘Amazing what they can do. I’m very glad to hear it. You were in a bad way on Monday.’

  ‘There’s a lot I still haven’t thought about. I feel as if I’m hiding away here, evading all my responsibilities. Although you’re my seventh visitor of the day, so I suppose you could say I have been keeping in touch.’

  ‘Who came?’

  She listed them, and showed him the bedsocks from Gwen. ‘She’s nice. Nicola says she’s a compulsive hospital visitor. Sounds rather a sweet thing to do, to me, but her partner doesn’t appear to think so.’

  ‘I’m with the partner,’ he admitted. ‘I can’t pretend to like these places. Tell me more about this Ninian bloke. Sounds as if he’s got some kind of hidden agenda.’

  She made an expression of mock outrage. ‘Can’t he just fancy me?’ The idea hadn’t formed itself until that moment.

  Moxon was wrong-footed and had no idea what to do about it. He shrugged, and his colour heightened. ‘Of course,’ he muttered. ‘But that’s not really my line of enquiry, is it?’

  ‘Your guard dog let him in, so he can’t be on your list of assassins.’

  ‘We’re taking him off duty, from tonight. The hospital people have promised not to let anyone see you without supervision. We managed to persuade them it’s in their interests – they keep everything secure in the baby unit, so they can probably manage it over here.’

  Simmy remembered the locked doors and tedious systems for getting in and out, in Worcester, when she delivered her own baby. Tony had complained loudly about it. ‘All because somebody stole a baby, back in 1981, or whenever,’ he fumed. Simmy had noticed, even through the fog of misery, how like her mother he was. In some ways, at least.

  ‘I’m not expecting anybody tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ll be busy practising how to walk with the crutches. What about my bag? Has anybody found it? It’s got my phone in, and a whole lot of other things.’

  He turned his gaze to the ceiling in an effort to remember such a trivial detail. ‘I’ll ask,’ he said. ‘It’ll be very wet.’

  ‘I imagine it will,’ she said solemnly, meeting his eye. Once again, she reduced him to giggles. His melodic chuckles burst out, with no warning. What a strange man he was! Every time she saw him, she changed her mind about him. He was astute, careful, committed – but also slightly sleazy, unshaven, almost unwashed. And he laughed. She had never heard of a laughing detective.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he sighed. ‘There I go again. Listen – that car. The one in the snow. We need to find it. What can you remember about it?’

  ‘A big thing, silvery colour. Wait a minute – it was a Mondeo. I can’t remember any more than that. But the men who pushed it out probably do. You should ask them.’

  ‘Men?’

  ‘I told you, just now. There were four of us pushing it back onto the road. Two local men were helping.’

  ‘I thought it was just you and the young woman.’ He smacked himself lightly on the forehead. ‘That’s what comes of relying too much on the Harkness boy. There’s nothing about two men in his … dossier.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’ Simmy reached for the papers on her bedside table and shuffled through them. ‘You’re right. Perhaps I forgot to tell him, as well.’

  ‘So who were they?’

  She grimaced. ‘One of them lives at Town Head – the top end of Troutbeck. I don’t know his name, although he knew mine. The other one’s from somewhere in the village as well. I knew him by sight.’

  ‘Who else was there? Somebody must have seen the whole thing.’

  ‘It was quite early on Sunday morning. One or two cars went past, but I’ve no idea who they were. You could try asking at the shop. The Town Head man is about forty, good-looking. He’s got a wife and two or three children. He works somewhere. I mean, he’s not a farmer. He reads The Independent.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I heard him complaining when it didn’t get delivered one day. In the shop.’

  Moxon blew out his cheeks. ‘Perfect job for a detective, then.’

  ‘Candida said it wasn’t hers. She borrowed it from someone.’

  ‘What did you think of her? As a gut reaction?’

  Simmy closed her eyes. ‘She was confident, a
bit self-mocking. She’d seen my shop window. She didn’t know it was me.’ Her eyes flew open. ‘She only made the connection when I told her my name. So she can’t have been planning to kill me, can she?’

  ‘She could have been lying.’

  ‘Oh. No – I don’t think so. It was too natural. Nobody could pretend like that. Could they?’

  ‘People are clever. And devious. Have you never been lied to before?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She tried to think of instances. ‘Not really. My mother used to say she hadn’t put mustard in the Welsh rarebit, when she had. I could taste it.’

  Moxon visibly suppressed another chuckle. ‘Lucky you, then,’ he said. ‘If that’s all you can come up with.’

  ‘And what about Mr Kitchener?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well – it was in the Giggling Goose that I saw him, last week, and then it was right beside the same place that I got pushed into the water. That seems like rather a coincidence.’

  ‘He lives up there. It’s not so surprising.’

  ‘Does he?’ This was a piece of news she wished she’d had before. ‘I had no idea.’

  He shrugged uncomprehendingly. ‘Why would he attack you? You’re his friend.’

  She closed her eyes again, thinking it felt very much like bedtime, even if it was only seven-fifteen. ‘Something Mrs Ellis said. Some falling out between his mother and Nancy Clark. It’ll be in Ben’s notes.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘So what?’

  ‘Because the Hawkins girl was there as well, in the café. He kicked her chair and she looked at him. Didn’t I tell you that already?’

  ‘I fear not.’

  ‘I told someone. I’m sorry. I’m dreadfully tired. I think they want to give me more painkillers and put me to sleep for the night. Why did you come?’ she mumbled, unable to grasp any convincing reason he might have had. His questions had felt almost casual, his attention not entirely on them.

  ‘I wanted to see how you were getting on. The first time I was here, you were howling in agony. It left a very unpleasant impression on me. I’m very relieved to find everything so much better now.’

  ‘Thanks. I get better every day, in every way.’

  ‘Good. I should go, then. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Did I help?’

  ‘I think so. Do you realise you’re the only person who’s seen this girl, whoever she is? Apart from two nameless men in Troutbeck, of course. And Mr Kitchener in the café. It’s obvious that she’s playing some game.’

  ‘Murder’s not a game.’

  ‘No, I know that. But sending flowers to an unsuspecting old lady is. Mischief, I call that.’

  ‘I should have refused to take the order. The whole thing’s my fault.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said softly. She was more than half asleep before he reached the door.

  She slept quite well and dreamt of Melanie, who was organising a big Christmas party with a lot of flowers everywhere, and a lot of bad temper. She blamed Simmy for everything that went wrong, stamping her foot and shouting. Ben was somewhere on the sidelines, dressed as a court jester and declaiming gibberish. When she woke, she looked around in blank bewilderment, unable to think where she was. Melanie was still reproaching her, somewhere inside her brain.

  It was early morning, but the lights were being turned on, and a nurse was beside the bed of the old woman with the new hip. She was speaking in a loud urgent tone, first to the inert patient, then to the world in general. ‘She’s gone! Mrs Savage – she’s gone.’

  Simmy was fairly sure that this was not in the rules about how to proceed. There should be calm discretion, the curtains drawn around the bed and orderlies summoned. ‘Do you mean she’s dead?’ she called across the room.

  She received no reply. The nurse fled, returning seconds later with two colleagues. They huddled inside the quickly pulled curtain, before emerging with surprisingly pale faces. Surely they must be used to this happening? The woman was very old and had endured major surgery. Anyone could see she had been barely alive for days. Simmy felt no grief for a room-mate who she had never got to know at all. It seemed, if anything, quite a positive outcome.

  Except for the poor old husband, of course. He would have to be told. He would crumple and weep, and grope blindly for some comfort. She hoped he had attentive children who would guide him through the funeral and perhaps even take him to live with them, where grandchildren would cheer his final years.

  ‘Is Maisie dead?’ called the occupant of the other bed. ‘I do hope not. I want Maisie.’

  Nobody had visited her and she received minimal attention from the nursing staff. Abandoned and forgotten, it seemed to Simmy that the kindest wish for her was that she too would slide quietly into death during the night; it was beyond Simmy to understand. Why anybody should think it worthwhile to replace the knee joint of a person who showed no sign of animation for large parts of the day, and when she did, it was to call for an invisible unknown daughter, sister, friend – who never came. It was an insight into a melancholy twilight world that Simmy would very much rather not know about. If she thought about it too much, she would end up like Gwen, visiting virtual strangers in hospital, in some inchoate attempt to make things just a little bit better.

  She only had one more night here, she reminded herself. She was the lucky one in this trinity of medical dependency. She was young, her bones healed miraculously fast, and she had all her wits intact. If somebody had tried to kill her, then the fact that they had failed ought to boost her spirits. If she still had no notion as to what she might have done to warrant such violence and antipathy, then she trusted that one day it would all become clear. There were people working hard to achieve this end. Ben and DI Moxon stood shoulder to shoulder in her mind’s eye, doggedly pursuing clues and making deductions that would identify the aggressor.

  And Melanie. Her dream returned to her, with its very obvious message that she must not neglect Melanie.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By breakfast time, Mrs Savage had been tidied away, and a crisp new bed awaited the next inmate of the little ward. Simmy asked no further questions. She was preoccupied by the difficulty of contacting her assistant, with no mobile phone, and no memory of Melanie’s number.

  ‘Is there a phone I can use?’ she asked the girl who brought her cereal. ‘I’ve lost mine.’ She remembered the call from Ben, on something that she had at the time assumed to be a mobile. ‘What about the one I had a call on the other day?’

  ‘Sorry. We only use it for incoming calls.’

  She remembered a time, nearly twenty years earlier, when a college friend had her appendix out and Simmy visited. There had been a trolley arrangement, on which a coin-operated telephone sat. It could be moved from bed to bed, cumbersome but efficient. Gone were those days, she thought gloomily.

  ‘How am I meant to contact people, then?’

  The girl spread her hands helplessly. ‘Everyone has mobiles. You could borrow one, maybe.’ They both looked at the old lady in the bed by the window, and grimaced ruefully. ‘Bad luck. I’ll see if I can find someone who’ll let you make a call.’

  ‘Thanks.’ It would be two calls, at least. The only number lodged in her head was the landline at her parents’ house. She’d have to ask them to track down Melanie’s number, or at least pass on a message. Plus, she found herself wanting to speak again to Julie, her hairdresser friend. But she couldn’t remember her number, either.

  The need to contact Melanie took greater priority, having a higher moral urgency to it. Her assistant would be feeling neglected, unsure of her role regarding the shop, if any. She would be jealous if she learnt that Simmy had spoken to Ben, and not her. Melanie had a knack, Simmy was discovering, of not being in the right place at the right time. And with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the community, this was a waste.

  But the nurse did not come back with a borrowed mobile. Instead, there was an atmosphere of bust
le. After her charts had been inspected and annotated, there followed an alarmingly prompt exercise session, which covered a substantial panoply of movements designed to cope with the demands of daily living. She was told how to sit, and how to stand up again without putting strain on her pelvis. How to manage steps – terrifyingly difficult – and how to get in and out of a car. ‘I’ll never remember it all,’ she complained.

  ‘We’ll do it all again this afternoon. Meanwhile, you can stay out of bed for the rest of the day, and take yourself to the loo and back when necessary.’

  ‘Gosh!’ said Simmy, with a flash of apprehension. ‘Am I ready for that?’

  ‘You’d better be. There’s a review of discharges in a little while. Don’t want anybody to be stranded if we can help it.’

  ‘Stranded? What do you mean?’

  ‘Weather, pet. We’re due a whole lot of snow tonight. Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘How would I?’ Had her parents not seen the forecast, either? Had it changed since the previous afternoon? ‘Are you saying I might go home today?’

  ‘It’s possible. You’re doing well. No sign of infection, reduced pain, bruising fading. Not much we can do for you here that can’t be done at home. Someone will pop in and see you over the weekend, I expect, to check you over.’

  ‘Weather permitting,’ added Simmy, her old forebodings about snow returning with a rush.

  ‘It’s never as bad as they say it’ll be,’ chirped the woman. ‘And you’ll be snug indoors. Still, it’s a pain, I know. Everything grinds to a halt when it snows.’

  Back in the ward, she sat in a hospital chair with a soft seat and adjustable back, trying to read a book that a woman had given her from a mobile library trolley. The words on the pages entirely failed to hold her attention. She could not have recounted the story or named the characters, two minutes after putting it down in despair. She found she was shivering, despite the overheated room. Her teeth were chattering. There was a sour taste in her mouth. Sweat was trickling down from her armpits and her chest started to constrict. I’m having a heart attack, she thought wildly, and tried to find the button they’d told her to press if she wanted anything.