by Rebecca Tope
Everything in Hawkshead was packed in close together and higgledy-piggledy. The buildings had obviously come in a haphazard fashion, narrow streets winding around and between them, as well as crooked little alleyways. There were square gaps clearly designed for a horse and carriage to go through, and sudden spaces between the buildings that pedestrians could use. Standing at any point, it was possible to view almost the entire settlement. She stared about her as she strolled along, noticing a large shop offering superb quality gifts, including Wedgwood and Moorcroft china. There was a chemist shop, too, and a National Trust outlet selling expensive tea towels and jigsaws. All the buildings looked historic and a few of the streets were cobbled. She could see three pubs, at least – as well as the same number of tea rooms. She spotted a gallery full of fine paintings, and then a surprisingly utilitarian Co-op, which stayed open until 10 p.m. Dominating the whole village was an empty shop that had once sold books. Its abandonment added a dimension of dereliction and financial difficulty to what had at first seemed to be quite a thriving little place. The sounds were all of human voices, with music wafting from some unidentified point. A dog barked and a baby cried. The absence of traffic made a huge difference, she realised. When a delivery van or misdirected car did appear, it was at a crawl, seeming embarrassed to be there. Her father was right, she decided. Hawkshead was stuck in a bygone time.
But she couldn’t linger any longer. Just a quick visit to the Co-op for something to eat, perhaps, and then back to Windermere, where she had things to do and places to go.
Going back to her car, she noticed again the four-wheel drive vehicle with the four men in. It had just parked close to her, and the men were getting out. She heard one say, in an American accent, ‘Did the right thing there, pal. No way we’d want to stay out there tonight. We can try again in the morning. Thank the Lord for Mattie, hey?’
Another man said, ‘Can’t see the problem with the hotel, anyhow. They’d have been happy to have us an extra night.’
The first man turned round, looking annoyed. ‘Listen – we booked for Wednesday, we show up Tuesday. That looks bad. They’ve got plenty of problems already. We’d just get their backs up.’
‘Don’t let’s quarrel over it. It’s done now.’
Simmy tried to make sense of this exchange, with difficulty. The men seemed respectable enough, giving no grounds for suspicion. Whatever reason Dan might have had to impress them, it would have to wait for the following day. Like everything else, she decided wearily.
She went first to her shop, to check that Bonnie had left it secure. Where was Bonnie now, anyway? If Ben’s mother was up at Hawkshead, who would the girl find to share her anxiety? Corinne, presumably, or Ben’s brother Wilf. In any case, Simmy found herself feeling superfluous. There was one new order on the computer, and a mildly chaotic list of takings in the till. Not a busy day by any standards, when it came to the business of selling flowers.
Almost without thinking, she walked down Lake Road to the large house where her parents lived. Beck View had five bedrooms, four of them let out to Bed and Breakfast guests. In July, the constant stream of customers kept Angie and Russell wholly occupied. Since Russell had begun to cause concern, Angie had looked increasingly tired and unhappy. It was a situation that Simmy feared would require drastic decisions before another year was out. As she got closer, she resolved to be of practical help to her mother, and possibly even refrain from telling the story of the day’s events. No good could come of it, and in her father’s more fragile condition, he might find it damagingly upsetting. It would be enough to spend some time with them, while more capable people than she conducted the search for Ben Harkness.
She had to go around the back since her father had started to insist that the front door be kept constantly locked and bolted, day and night. It was only by a strenuous exertion of will that Angie had managed to convince him that no harm could come from leaving the back unlocked while they were at home. ‘One of us is always in the kitchen, anyway,’ she said. But such assurances meant little to a man suffering from such paranoia as Russell was. He easily argued that it was not true. In the end Angie simply said, ‘Well, you’ll have to live with it, then. I’m not going to be made a prisoner in my own home by your demented imaginings.’
It was exactly the sort of thing you were not supposed to say, but somehow she got away with it. Russell’s wretched little Lakeland Terrier was given the role of guardian of the back door whenever his people were somewhere else in the house, and that enabled an uneasy compromise to be made.
And through it all Simmy knew that her mother was experiencing a persistent sense of herself as the victim of a certain betrayal. She knew because she felt it herself. It was as if Russell’s accord with his wife’s attitude to life had always been a pretence, which he could no longer sustain. He had merely gone along with her cavalier approach to warnings of danger and patchy adherence to rules because it had seemed the easy way. Now, something had shifted and the real Russell Straw had emerged, timidly seeing robbers and murderers behind every tree. It infuriated and alienated Angie, who made no secret of the fact that she now liked him a lot less than she once did.
For Simmy the feelings were even more complicated, because they included a large dose of guilt. It was because of the succession of alarming and dangerous situations she had fallen into since moving up to the Lake District that Russell had lost his nerve. Or perhaps it had begun even earlier than that, when her perfect baby daughter had died unborn, thereby demonstrating that the universe was unstable and hostile and in no way to be taken for granted.
She deliberately rattled the door and stamped her feet as she entered, to give due warning of her presence. Guests would most likely be arriving at just this time, with all the explaining and settling that went with it. A Tuesday was not usually a popular day for B&B guests to start their holiday, but by July there were always individualists who constructed their own itineraries, regardless of usual patterns. Angie would be weary from changing sheets and duvet covers, as well as probably getting in fresh supplies for the immense breakfasts she continued to offer.
As luck would have it both her parents – and the dog – were in the kitchen. Coming through the small storeroom between the back door and the main room, she had a moment to observe them, slumped in chairs on either side of the Aga like two aged characters from a Victorian novel. The Aga was emitting its usual wasteful heat, even on a warm day in July, making the kitchen uncomfortably hot. ‘No wonder you’re both half-asleep,’ she said cheerily. ‘It’s stifling in here.’
‘It’s the Aga,’ said Russell.
‘I know it is.’ His statement of the obvious caused her a pang of distress. Her father had always prided himself on imparting new information and anecdotes, very often surprising in their detail. He had explored almost every inch of the southern Lakes, as far as Grasmere to the north and Kendal to the east. He read forgotten little histories and produced nuggets from them, often for the entertainment of his guests at breakfast time. Simmy hoped that this still happened.
‘Where have you been? I hear the shop’s been closed all afternoon.’ Angie spoke incuriously, most likely assuming there had been a distant flower delivery to make.
‘I went to Hawkshead, actually.’
‘Ah!’ said Russell. ‘The town that time forgot. I spent a night there some years ago and it was the quietest night of my life. No traffic, birds, radios. It was uncanny.’
‘I’d never walked through it before. It’s a funny mixture of old and new. Galleries and upmarket souvenir shops, as well as little tea rooms and cobbled streets. I guess it’s all focused on tourism now. None of it’s really authentic. The bookshop’s closed down.’
‘Ann Tyson’s House hasn’t changed much. You can imagine how it was three hundred years ago. That was where I stayed, before we came to live here.’
‘Did you? And Esthwaite’s nice.’ She winced at the realisation that the calm little lake would never feel ‘nice’
to her again, with its grim associations.
‘Taken over by fishing folk. Not much use to anybody else. Been the same for over a century now.’
‘Maybe that’s why it’s so unspoilt.’
He looked at her with a little smile. ‘Maybe it is, old girl. You could be right about that.’
‘Why Hawkshead, though?’ asked Angie with a faint frown.
‘Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I’ve got a big flower job at a hotel there. It goes on all summer, and maybe longer. Although—’ she realised too late that when the news finally emerged about Dan and Ben, her mother would make an instant connection. Miserably, she concluded that she would have to tell them at least something of the story.
‘What?’
‘There was some trouble this afternoon. It involves Ben Harkness. He’s missing.’
‘That boy!’ scoffed Russell. ‘Always into something. He’ll turn up.’ He spoke as if Ben were twelve, rather than seventeen. ‘He must be somewhere.’
‘Obviously,’ snapped Angie. ‘What happened then, P’simmon?’ Only her mother called her that, and only her mother could say it exactly right. It was always a funny little pleasure to hear it on her lips.
‘Well …’ she glanced at her father, wondering whether there was any way to get him to leave the room. ‘Haven’t you got things I can help you with? I know you’re busy this week.’
‘Only one lot have arrived so far. There’s another couple and a family with a small child. They’ll be here at any moment. They’re late, actually.’ Angie consulted the large clock over the door. ‘I hope they’re not standing outside – the doorbell doesn’t always work.’ She threw a wrathful look at her husband, which he failed to observe. ‘Russell – can you go and have a look? Make sure there’s room for them to drive in and unload. And can you please leave the door unlocked, just for a bit?’ The final part was uttered in a supplicatory tone that carried with it the knowledge that it was almost certainly spoken in vain.
‘I can watch out for them if you like,’ he offered.
‘Yes, do that.’
As soon as he had gone, she turned to Simmy. ‘Is that what you wanted? To get him out of the way?’
‘I suppose so. The thing is, there’s been a murder at the Hawkshead Hotel. Melanie and I found the undermanager dead in the lake. And Ben’s disappeared. We think the killer – or killers, more likely – took him because he’d seen them. Something like that, anyway.’
‘Mere. Esthwaite’s a mere, not a lake.’
‘Shut up. You sound just like Dad. What does it matter? Didn’t you hear me?’
Angie sighed. ‘I heard you. I’m just too tired to adequately respond, I suppose. Is it the hotel where Melanie works now?’
‘That’s right. And apparently she’s been seeing the man who was killed. She’s very upset.’
‘It all sounds highly upsetting. What about Ben’s mother? She must be distraught.’
‘I saw her briefly. She seemed very calm, actually.’
‘Shock,’ Angie diagnosed. ‘Disbelief.’
Simmy nodded, saying nothing.
‘So why aren’t you out looking for him?’ Angie went on. ‘Were you the last person to see him?’
‘Probably. He went for a walk by the lake – mere – and found Dan’s body. He called me, but I didn’t hear the phone. It was in the van. So he left a message. It was cut off. He made a sort of shout and it went dead. We found it down where he’d been walking. There was no sign of him. He just disappeared.’
‘But the body was there?’
‘Sort of. I mean, yes it was, but it wasn’t under the trees like Ben said, but in the water. Melanie and I fished him out. Poor Mel,’ she finished miserably.
‘He wasn’t drowned, then?’
Simmy stared at her mother’s face, without actually seeing it, her inner eye filled again with the image of the dead face. ‘No. He’d been hit on the head. Moxon says there must have been more than one person. They lifted him over a fence and dumped him in the water. A horrible thing to do. Melanie sat there with him on her lap. All dead and soaking wet and heavy.’
‘Poor Melanie,’ Angie murmured. ‘What a dreadful thing.’
‘The really terrible thing is Ben, and what must have happened to him, because he saw them, so they kidnapped him to stop him talking.’ She was gabbling, trying to explain the theory of what had happened.
Angie sighed and gave a sceptical look at her daughter. ‘You can’t be sure that’s how it was. That boy’s got plenty of native wit. He’ll turn up any moment, you see.’
‘No, Mum. I’m sure he’s in trouble. Nothing else would make any sense.’ Her voice rose. ‘And if that was it, then they won’t ever be able to let him go, will they?’ The idea of Ben being permanently silenced returned to her with renewed force. It paralysed her with fear and horror. ‘I would be looking for him if I thought it would do any good. But where would I start? There isn’t a single clue.’
Angie glanced nervously towards the front of the house, clearly hoping her husband couldn’t hear them. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Calm down, for heaven’s sake. There must be something. If the same person or people killed the hotel chap and then abducted Ben, there’ll be footprints and – I don’t know. All that forensic stuff.’
‘I don’t know, Mum. There might not be anything useful. I can’t believe they could find much in that marshy ground, and there aren’t any CCTV cameras down there, either. I don’t think the hotel has anything like that.’
‘They must have taken him off in a car. Somebody will have noticed it. Where will it have been parked?’
Simmy finally got herself in check and regarded her mother with surprise. ‘You’re really thinking about it, aren’t you?’
‘Well, you’ve got me worried now. I like that boy. He’s an original. We can’t let him come to any harm.’
‘A bit late for that.’
‘And what about Bonnie? What does she say about it?’
Simmy moaned. ‘I don’t know, Mum. I suppose she’s as helpless as the rest of us. I left her all alone in the shop, so she closed up early. I have no idea what she did after that.’
‘She’ll want you, won’t she? You’re getting to be like another mother to her.’
‘No, I’m not. She’s got more than enough mother figures already. Everybody mothers her, because she looks so small and fragile. She’s seventeen and a lot more streetwise than I’ll ever be.’
‘Hmm. And Melanie? She’s only young, as well, and it sounds pretty traumatic, what she had to go through.’
Simmy felt crushed by the needs of so many distraught females and her mother’s apparent assumption that she, Simmy, could somehow be of help to them. She also felt a pang of guilt at having allowed Melanie to slip from her thoughts. ‘She was very horrified. Moxon says she was sleeping with him. She cried when we found him. I thought it was just the shock, but now I suppose it was more than that.’
‘This murderer has obviously done an awful lot of damage,’ said Angie coolly.
The understatement was too much for Simmy. It brought home to her – as understatement so often did, of course – just how immense the damage actually was. Whatever happened next, a man was dead. The hotel would be thrown into disorder. The police investigation would disrupt its daily doings, and probably drive some guests away. It could spell disaster for the business, just as it seemed to have found its feet. And that was at the trivial end of the spectrum. The other end scarcely bore consideration.
‘I don’t know what I should do,’ she wailed. ‘I can’t see anything I can do. I’ve told the police everything I can think of. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to go back on Friday with more flowers.’ She knew it was unworthy, but she did wonder about the promised five hundred pounds a week for the rest of the summer. To lose it before she even had it felt cruel. Yet more damage inflicted by the cursed killer. No punishment would be vile enough for this person or persons who had done such a terrible thing.
/> ‘We must keep all this from your father,’ urged Angie. ‘He won’t take any more, the way he is now. I’ve got him signed up for a course of CBT, and that won’t work if he has proof that his fears are all quite justified.’
‘CBT?’
‘You know. Cognitive behavioural therapy. They make you focus on the positive and examine your fears in the light of logic and reason. For most people, that makes them see that there’s nothing to worry about.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not exactly so in our case. He’s terrified for you, you know. If he gets the slightest hint that you’ve brushed up against another murder, I daren’t even think what that’d do to him.’
‘I know.’ More damage, Simmy realised. Ripples spreading forever outwards, from a moment of violence.
‘So we’ve got to be normal. Can you do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Simmy admitted.
‘You do see, don’t you?’ Angie was uncharacteristically intense. ‘It really matters. I can’t go on with him as he is. If we can’t get him right, well …’
‘God, Mum – you’re not saying you’d leave him? What happened to “in sickness and in health”?’
‘Don’t give me that.’ Angie’s eyes flashed in anger. ‘Don’t you dare.’
Simmy was both contrite and intimidated. ‘Sorry,’ she said thickly. ‘Look, let me do something useful for a bit, and then I’ll go. I’ll chat to Dad first, shall I?’
‘He knows Ben’s missing.’ Angie sighed. ‘I hope he’s not going to dwell on that.’
‘Sorry,’ said Simmy again. ‘What needs doing?’