The Hawkshead Hostage

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Is this the house?’ asked the other man, who was driving. He peered through the windscreen at the upper windows. ‘The curtains are still closed.’

  ‘She sleeps late. I’ve got a key.’

  ‘We have to speak to her.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  But they were determined, and Corinne finally came down, bleary-eyed and ratty-tempered. ‘Bon? Aren’t you at the shop today?’

  ‘I went to look for Ben. The cops brought me back. They found me walking down to the hotel where he went missing. I hitched.’

  ‘I told you not to do that.’ Corinne sighed. ‘They haven’t found him, then?’

  Bonnie considered a burst of tears as a useful strategy, but decided against it, not least because she was worried that once she started, she might not easily stop again.

  ‘She shouldn’t be out there on her own,’ said the conscientious policeman. ‘There’s been a murder, don’t forget.’

  Corinne sighed again. ‘They’ll be long gone, won’t they? And nobody’s going to kill Bonnie. Why would they?’

  Good question, thought Bonnie. So why would they kidnap Ben? The explanation that everyone seemed to have accepted without question was still niggling at her, not ringing true at all.

  ‘All the same—’

  ‘Right, right. I won’t let her out, then. How long do you want me to keep her tied up? She does have a job, you know.’

  ‘Just use your common sense,’ said the policeman impatiently. ‘It’s for her own good.’

  He left then, scratching his head at the vagaries of women who didn’t know what was good for them.

  ‘I know he’s still around Hawkshead somewhere,’ Bonnie insisted. ‘Will you take me back there, Con?’

  ‘What about Simmy and the shop?’

  ‘She won’t be expecting me. She won’t even have opened up, I bet you. She loves Ben, same as I do. And there’s Melanie as well. She’s going to want us with her. What do they expect us to do – just carry on as if things are normal?’

  ‘My exhaust is falling off. Those roads’d finish the job. I was going to take it in today. What time is it?’

  ‘Not even ten yet. I was out early.’

  ‘The cops’ll just bring you back again, and give me a bollocking for letting you go.’

  ‘I’ll be more careful. Oh, go on, Con. The exhaust’s been rattling for weeks. Another day won’t hurt it.’

  Corinne’s career as a foster mother was scheduled to end with Bonnie. Over the last decade and a half more than fifty children had passed through her hands, most of them under three years old. She could have carried on, except for the growing demands of her new interest in travelling the country at weekends to festivals, and a less easily defined weariness with it all. The Social Services had never fully got to grips with her ways, and constantly nagged her to tone down the excessive number of dogs around the place and – which was their final straw – her smoking. ‘You’d never have been accepted in the first place if we hadn’t been so desperate,’ they said.

  But her methods had worked. The children gained confidence in the world under her rather sloppy care. They were fed, cuddled, sung to and laughed with. In most cases they came to believe that life might be okay after all. She kept in touch with them when they left and often passed unofficial reports back to the authorities if she thought they were being harmed. She had saved one little boy from serious abuse, by the straightforward technique of collaring the abuser in the main street and shouting at him in the plainest possible language. At least twenty people passing by got the message, and gave him to understand that he was expected to reform or suffer the consequences. As it turned out, the consequences happened anyway and his life was effectively ruined. The Social Services cringed away from the whole incident, appalled by the direct action. One social worker called Corinne a vigilante, which she cheerfully agreed was accurate.

  Bonnie had been a special case from the start. Older than the others, in and out of hospital, hopelessly behind with schoolwork, she had forced Corinne to focus. By this time they were much more like friends than mother and daughter. While family therapists might regard this as far from ideal, they were both thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement.

  ‘Oh, all right, then. But we’re never going to avoid attention with the noise the damn thing makes.’

  ‘You can drop me outside the town. Colthouse or somewhere. Actually, I might start there. Ben talked about it once.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ Corinne, like Melanie Todd, had a strong preference for buildings and streets over the wild empty spaces of the fells. Never a walker, sailor or swimmer, she also liked to have a lot of people around her.

  ‘Quakers,’ said Bonnie vaguely. ‘He was on about the Quakers. There’s an old Quaker place there.’

  Corinne gave up with a deep sigh. ‘Let me get my shoes on, then,’ was all she said.

  Bonnie was reluctant to admit that she did not exactly know how to find Colthouse either. ‘Use the satnav,’ she urged.

  ‘You do it, then.’

  Bonnie commanded the gadget to take them to Colthouse, and for seven miles they did as it ordered. Then, Bonnie found fault with it. ‘It’s trying to take us through Hawkshead. We don’t want that.’ She peered at the diagrammatic map on the little screen. ‘Take the next fork left,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a sort of loop on a smaller road.’

  ‘My God. Do they come smaller than this one?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  They followed a tortuous route through Low Wray and High Wray, with the satnav doing its best to persuade them they were in error. They could see Lake Windermere not far off on their left. After High Wray they turned westwards, curling around a hill with a stone construction just visible on the top, and then a few degrees more southwards towards Esthwaite. Bonnie was concentrating as hard as she could on the layout, noting the position of the sun and the many place names that were signed along the way. ‘This must be it!’ she cried, after another half-mile. ‘Whoopee!’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Corinne drily. ‘I can’t just leave you here, can I? You’d never be found again. It’s the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘It’s practically on the edge of Hawkshead. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, Bonnie. If anything happened to you, they’d put me in jail. Plus, it would be a waste of all my good work.’

  ‘There are walkers all over the place. I’ve got my phone and a bottle of water. It’s a lovely, dry, warm day. I’ll be fine,’ she repeated.

  ‘But why this place? It’s got nothing to suggest Ben was here. It’s crazy to even think it.’

  ‘Yeah, probably. But it’s only half a mile from where he went missing. There’s houses and a road, and the caravan park’s only five minutes away. It’s a feeling, okay? It makes more sense than you think. I just want to have a look. He’ll have tried to leave clues, and I’m more likely to recognise them than anybody else.’

  A car hooted behind them. Corinne drove into the entrance to a farmyard and let the other vehicle pass. Bonnie jumped out, and then leant back through the passenger window to say, ‘Wait for me in Hawkshead, then. Give me half an hour, right?’

  ‘I thought we wanted to avoid Hawkshead.’

  ‘Tell you what – isn’t there a garage there somewhere? Where Percy used to work? They might fix your exhaust while you wait.’ Connie merely shrugged, and Bonnie went on, ‘I’ll call you, I promise. Look – it’s twenty to eleven now. I’ll phone at eleven, exactly. Nothing’s going to happen in that time.’

  ‘Famous last words,’ said Corinne, but she drove away as instructed, the exhaust making a noise like a souped-up motorbike.

  Bonnie waited until the car was out of sight and earshot, and then gave her surroundings a long careful examination. There was a sign beside her indicating the old Quaker Meeting House that was accessed through the farmyard. This much she already knew from Ben. It had a quirkiness that appealed to him. She walked through the quietnes
s, barns on both sides, passing a stone trough with an iron pump above it. The Meeting House was behind a stone wall, gazing serenely at the trees before it and giving no hint that Ben was ever there. Turning back, Bonnie went down the slope to where the small road met a slightly larger one. On the corner was the burial ground that she and Ben had discussed more than once.

  She had withheld a lot of her thinking from Corinne, as well as from the police and Ben’s mother. It would sound childish and silly to all of them. It very likely was childish and silly, a game she and Ben had been playing on and off for weeks. Using Google, along with scraps of history from local websites, and a few old books, they had been constructing a computer-based game based on the year 1780. It was a vast, sprawling virtual tour of all the people and places that were significant in that year, in the county then known as Cumberland. The central thread was a quest for objects connected to William Wordsworth, who at the time was a schoolboy in Hawkshead, along with his brother Richard.

  Bonnie suspected that a lot of the purpose behind this project was to educate her in a range of disciplines, from history to computer programming, and including geography and logic. She was given small areas to work on and encouraged to come up with ideas of her own. Within days it had become the greatest possible fun. To her amazement she found Wordsworth’s Prelude a brilliant read, and accounts of his childhood in hefty biographies downloaded onto her Kindle only enriched her grasp of his life and times. It thrilled her to find so much of her home area described by such a famous poet. Ben had watched with an almost paternal delight as his protégée blossomed under his tutelage.

  Wordsworth had lodged with an elderly couple who had been shopkeepers before they retired. Bonnie and Ben became increasingly interested in the Tysons, Hugh and Ann, devoting much of their game to the young poet’s time in their care. They built up a fully furnished version – teaching themselves some crude graphic skills in the process – of the Hawkshead house, with candles and rush matting and pictures on the walls. Then Bonnie had discovered that they’d all moved to Colthouse, most likely in 1784 and requested Ben’s permission to include that in the game.

  ‘Not our year,’ he ordained. ‘You can’t muddle things up like that.’

  ‘It’s not certain,’ she persisted, showing him the results of her researches. ‘And there’s more scope if we have him walking into town from there every day. Plus we can include his other two brothers, who came to join them around then. It’s all here in the poem, Ben. Look.’

  And she had won him over, at least on that small point. In the process she had stumbled across some wider history, discovering that 1780 was a dramatic year in all sorts of ways. Most of it involved war with America, but there were also some fairly major riots in London, which she found very diverting.

  ‘We can bear it in mind,’ said Ben doubtfully. ‘What were they rioting about?’

  ‘Anti-papists,’ she read. ‘Gordon Riots.’

  ‘Hmm,’ was all he said. ‘Isn’t that all in Barnaby Rudge? Charles Dickens,’ he added.

  Bonnie had let it go for the moment. History was turning out to be a terribly large subject, woven in with literature and science and all sorts of other things. But she established that much of Colthouse had remained unchanged since 1780, including the Quaker element.

  All that had been on the Friday just gone, the day before Ben and his friends had set off to go hiking near Hawkshead. Neither of them could properly visualise Colthouse, although Ben had an idea his family had gone there for a picnic at one time. ‘I’ll get a look at it while I’m up there, and take some photos,’ he said.

  Which was why she wanted to go and check for herself now whether she could find any sign that he had done as he intended. Listening closely to Simmy’s account of the boy’s movements, she concluded that he could have had time to walk over to Colthouse and back before running into trouble and dropping his phone. She also wanted to discover whether there were any pictures on the phone, which would not be easy. The police would presumably have the sense to look – but she could hardly expect them to tell her what they found.

  When she had talked to him about the Meeting House, Ben had directed her to the burial ground instead. Now she went into it and paused. There were rows of plain stone grave markers, on sloping ground above the road. There were wooden seats, long grass, brambles and patches of fern. She closed her eyes and called Ben to mind. Where are you? she called silently. What had become of the bond between them, that they couldn’t send telepathic messages? Did it mean he was dead or unconscious? The idea was literally stunning. It prevented any coherent thought, like a thick, damp blanket being wrapped around her head. But she threw it off, telling herself that she was by far the most likely person to come to Ben’s rescue. Nobody knew him better than she did.

  One aspect of their game – which would remain at the notes stage for probably at least another year, and then somebody far more skilled at computer techniques than Ben would have to take it on – was secret messages. ‘The best ones are the most obvious,’ said Ben, and he had demonstrated a few while they sat on a patch of rough grass on the edge of Rayrigg Wood. First he plaited three tough grass stalks together to make a short green rope. Then he pulled together the stems of eight or ten tall fronds of bracken, being careful not to break any of them, and bound them with his cord. The result was a fan of bracken which was highly visible to anybody alert enough to spot it, while at the same time just an innocent overgrown patch of vegetation to almost any casual passer-by. ‘It works with anything with a fairly long stalk,’ he said. ‘Nettles are good, or docks.’

  He encouraged her to experiment with her own variations, which she did with enthusiasm, weaving together stalks of timothy grass that she had cut down. She bent them over, leaving their distinctive seed heads as a fringe at the bottom. She then hung the finished product on a low elder branch. ‘Would people think it was something sinister?’ she wondered.

  ‘They wouldn’t think anything,’ he assured her. ‘But you really ought to leave them growing, not cut them down. They dry out and die too quickly your way.’

  She remembered the wondrous model that Ben and Simmy had made the previous year and used for a window display at the shop. That had been created from sticks and dried seed heads and leaves. ‘This is a thing with you, isn’t it?’ she had said. ‘I bet you could build a whole house from dead branches if you had to.’

  ‘I bet I could, too,’ he agreed.

  So when she saw a clump of ferns, their feathered stems held together with a twisted length of rushes, she knew for certain that Ben had been there. What she did not know was what the message conveyed. If her theory about the timing was correct, then it probably conveyed nothing at all, but was merely an example created for the game and photographed, while Ben killed time. Simmy had told him to get lost for an hour or so, and this was a typical example of how he might amuse himself. The unfortunate fact was that it must have been created before he went back to the lake and got himself abducted.

  It told her nothing directly about where he was and what was happening to him. But it greatly boosted her confidence that he was all right. Ben was simply too clever to allow himself to be wiped out by a gang of criminals. She and Helen Harkness had agreed on that the previous day, although Helen had repeatedly dissolved into tears of despair as well. Bonnie had left her as soon as she decently could, afraid that the negative stuff would wash off on her if she wasn’t careful.

  Which meant that she had to get herself to the hotel, doing her best to work out Ben’s route and then trying to understand what had happened next.

  She left the burial ground and looked around. The way lay over a stone wall, across a field and then into a very inhospitable-looking wood. It would be a slow and difficult walk, pushing through prickly vegetation, probably marshy underfoot, with fences on all sides. Somewhere in the middle of it all was the invisible Priest Pot. Ben wouldn’t have done it readily. Instead he’d have gone around by the road, so Bonnie opted
to do the same.

  Hawkshead was only five minutes away, by road. Then she worked out, after a brief moment of confusion, that she had to turn left at the junction and carry on down the road that led towards Satterthwaite, on the western side of Esthwaite. The hotel was off to the left, with a helpful sign to show the way.

  She walked briskly, knowing she was due to phone Corinne in another minute or two. She paused beside a bend in the driveway, from which she could look down to the place that had seen such dramatic activity the day before.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she reported, when Corinne replied. ‘Give me another hour, and then I’ll walk back up to the road and find you. I want to pop into the hotel and see if Melanie’s there. Did you find the garage? I passed it just now and didn’t see you.’

  ‘What road do you mean?’ came the irritable reply. ‘This place is a nightmare. There are roads and tracks everywhere. I still haven’t found the garage. Tell me exactly how to get there.’

  ‘It’s a bit late now. They looked rather busy. I’ll need you to drive me back. Tell you what – go to the car park and I’ll find you there. You’ll have to pay.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Bon. What am I meant to do for all that time?’

  ‘Go and have coffee. Then go back and wait for me in the car park, right?’

  ‘This is crazy, you know. A total waste of time.’

  ‘Yeah. You could be right.’

  But Bonnie knew she had to keep looking. What she’d seen in Colthouse confirmed her hunch that Ben had been there.

  Chapter Twelve

  She toyed with the idea of reporting her find to the police. There were good arguments both ways – they would gain a better idea of Ben’s abilities and be more alert to clues. But they would also get most of it wrong. They wouldn’t listen properly and even if they did, they’d say – rightly, in a way – it wasn’t relevant. Even though she felt a growing need to confide in somebody, she didn’t think the cops, even the familiar DI Moxon, would meet her requirements.