The Coniston Case

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Just shows the power of language,’ Russell had added. ‘You’re right, of course.’ And he had added several more examples to the list. Simmy had listened in awe as her parents effortlessly critiqued a great range of contemporary positions, all of which carried fear of being seen as different at their heart. ‘No place for the individual in this society,’ Angie finished glumly. ‘If you say something on Twitter that’s disapproved of, you’ll have the police knocking on your door within the hour.’

  Which did, Simmy supposed, explain Pamela Johnson’s annoyance at being brought to the attention of the authorities. It also perhaps explained why she had come in person, to express herself in spoken words which were not recorded in any way.

  ‘Phew!’ she sighed. ‘Things have all got a bit deep this morning, haven’t they?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Surveillance society in its many guises. Even here in a humble flower shop in a faraway corner of northern England, the tentacles of the state have penetrated.’

  ‘Steady on!’ Melanie protested. ‘Where did that come from?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Is it a quote from Shakespeare or something?’

  ‘No,’ laughed Simmy. ‘Just my mother.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ben’s Saturday morning began irritatingly early, with his brother Wilf waking him at seven. They shared a room, to the disgruntlement of them both, although they conceded that there was no other option, where a family of seven had to fit into a four-bedroomed house. Ben, like Melanie, was the second child of five – but in his case they all had the same two parents.

  Wilf was nearly twenty-one and working his way towards becoming a chef. Always a keen cook, he had prepared entire family meals from the age of twelve, with creamy smooth sauces and legendary mashed potato. He worked irregular shifts at Storrs Hall hotel, south of Bowness and regarded his younger brother with an impatient sort of admiration. Ben had always been the bright one, sailing through school exams with ease and spending most of his waking hours on impossibly complicated computer games. His encounter with Simmy and a local killing four months earlier had almost instantly sparked an ambition to work in forensics. Within weeks he had landed an unconditional place in a top university at a freakishly young age, with the prospect of a postgraduate course in America.

  ‘Why are you up?’ Ben asked his brother now. ‘Are you doing breakfasts?’

  ‘Sorry. No – I’m going up to Coniston. Scott’s organised a day on the fells. There’s a gang of us going. I told you.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ mumbled Ben. ‘It’s February, you know. Cold. Windy. Dangerous.’

  ‘That’s how we like it. No grockles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they call them in Devon. I don’t think we’ve got a similar word up here.’

  ‘Ergghh,’ moaned Ben. ‘Just go, will you.’

  ‘Actually, Scott got the idea from that murder on Thursday. He thought we might stumble across some clues, daft bugger. He gets more like you all the time.’

  Ben finally opened his eyes. ‘Clues? What sort of clues?’

  ‘I have no idea. But the other bloke topped himself somewhere on the Old Man, didn’t he? I think Scott has some idea of re-enacting what might have happened.’

  ‘Then he’s thicker than I thought,’ scorned Ben, and pulled the duvet back over his head.

  But he couldn’t get back to sleep. Instead he visualised the group including his brother and Scott Reynolds tramping about on the icy fells, pretending to be Sherlock Holmes and probably managing nothing more than scaring some sheep. That wasn’t the way to solve murder investigations, he thought crossly. You had to work with whatever evidence and testimony you had, and test out a variety of theories. At least, that was one method. You also had to listen out for careless talk, and keep a very open mind. Most criminals were caught because they boasted to so-called mates about what they’d done. Boring but true, and not much credit to the CID. All they had to do was to link up fingerprints or DNA and there it all was, done and dusted. Which was why Ben had elected to work in forensics, rather than waste his whole working life trudging around asking for witnesses, who half the time couldn’t remember the most important details anyway.

  Getting to know Simmy and Melanie had been revelatory in many ways. The female angle on detection work was both infuriating and fascinating. Simmy’s squeamishness was often hard to understand, because the truth was, she had more courage than she gave herself credit for. She valued a clear conscience above all things, he realised, and would put herself at risk if it meant she was doing the right thing. Melanie was more complicated – seen by other teenagers as a freak, much as Ben was himself. Not because of her missing eye, but because she was determined to climb out of the disorganised mess that was her family, using her own wits and ambition to propel her. Melanie and Ben had both learnt early that the opinions of one’s classmates could not be allowed to matter.

  But when it came to solving crimes Melanie’s main usefulness, ironically, came from the very roots that she was trying to pull up. She knew the background connections of scores of local people, mainly through her grandmother’s remarkable memory for personal histories. When murder arose from murky past events and ancient antipathies, Melanie and her gran were real founts of knowledge.

  The Coniston thing was annoying because he had not learnt anything of significance about the way either of the men had died. He guessed there was a lot that Simmy knew, which he’d missed out on – and that seemed a waste, because Simmy only wanted to stay out of it all. She probably felt guilty about the flowers she took to Mr Hayter-stroke-Braithwaite, but this time there was obviously nothing she could do to make amends, since both men were dead.

  He had two substantial A-level assignments to be done over the weekend: one on a tricky piece of biochemistry and the other a translation of a long chunk of Catullus. He’d added Latin as an extra subject on a whim, given that he was deemed to be excellent at languages, but it was turning out to be harder than expected. The whole mindset was new to him, with every word needing to be examined to see what case it was in, in order for the sense to become clear. It was laborious, with no scope for short cuts. There were no teachers at the comprehensive equal to the task of instructing him, either, so he was muddling through an online course, with Mr Brent as a sort of mentor, making sure he stuck to the schedule.

  But there was acres of time before Monday morning, and he could easily fit in a visit to Simmy’s shop as well as a bit of homework after breakfast. He might even spend an hour or so analysing the known facts about the Coniston case and seeing if anything new jumped out at him. So he rolled out of bed, got dressed, and sat down at the desk in the corner of his side of the room. It held a computer, notebooks, maps, and stacks of printouts from various websites. On the floor were untidy heaps of textbooks. Somewhere in the muddle was the flow chart he had started the day before with Simmy.

  He was acutely aware of the danger of jumping to conclusions, having been lectured on the subject by DI Moxon more than once. Coincidences were possible but unlikely, and nothing anybody said could be believed. Even if not deliberately lying, they got things wrong or jumped to conclusions of their own.

  All of which led him to conclude that there was really no reason to think that Mrs Crabtree, Mrs Aston or Miss Drury had anything at all to do with the killing of Mr Braithwaite. The fourth order for flowers however – which had perhaps sparked everything off in the first place – was still unexplained. And regardless of logic, he still could not dismiss the strong instinct that said there were connections between all four of them. It was originally because Simmy had been instrumental in delivering upsetting flowers to all four of them that anybody thought there might be a link. Even though it seemed that three could be eliminated, he still wasn’t entirely persuaded. His wild idea about them all being part of a secret group, with a system of sending flowers as a means of communicating, now seemed childish; the sort of thing that would elicit a ste
rn word from Moxo, and make Ben feel ten years old – and yet it stubbornly persisted as a faintly possible theory.

  But if coincidence were to be discounted, then that must surely mean that there really were links between at least some of the people on his flow chart. It was no good – he needed a lot more data before anything would even begin to make sense. Perhaps Scott would disclose a few more details to Wilf during their freezing trek on the fells.

  Or perhaps he should call in on DI Moxon on the pretext of checking that the police did at least know everything that he and Simmy knew.

  It was only just after eight when he went down to breakfast, and the kitchen was deserted. His mother was an architect, working mainly from home, and his father taught languages at a different secondary school to the one his children attended. Ben’s three younger sisters seldom got up before ten at the weekend. Most likely, everyone was still asleep. Seizing his chance, he fried bacon, sausages, eggs and mushrooms, musing to himself that Simmy’s mum must spend her life cooking up huge breakfasts for her guests, thinking nothing of it. As it was, the eggs were done long before the sausages were halfway cooked, the yolks gone hard and the whites with crispy black edges. He decided to eat each item as it was ready, which at least had the virtue of passing the time before he could decently set out on the short walk to the police station.

  Before he could embark on the sausages, his youngest sister, Natalie, bounced in, wearing yellow pyjamas. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. ‘Are you taking all the food? I want some.’

  She was the younger of the twins by fifteen minutes, and Tanya never let her forget it. Zoe, almost fifteen, was balanced between two brothers and twin sisters, finding the position intolerable. They were all noisy and clever and very demanding.

  ‘Help yourself,’ he said, waving his fork at the fridge.

  ‘I want some of yours.’ She reached out and snatched a rasher of bacon, narrowly evading the fork that tried to stab her hand. ‘That would have really hurt,’ she said, with wide-open eyes.

  ‘Serve you right, you thief. Next time I’ll get you.’

  ‘You’re so horrible, Ben. Why can’t you be kind and nice like Wilf?’

  ‘It’s not in my character,’ he said, inwardly wincing at his own words. Basically, he believed, he was actually a perfectly benign and patient person. It was simply that young sisters were a trial that nobody with a morsel of self-respect could endure quietly. Which suggested that Wilf was a doormat, a martyr and a wimp for putting up with them.

  He gobbled down the rest of his breakfast, shielding it ferociously from the deplorable Natalie. Then he went back up to his room in a sour mood. Why couldn’t he have been an only child, he wondered for the thousandth time. Wilf wasn’t so bad, he supposed – his parents could have stopped after two, then, and saved the world a whole lot of grief.

  For want of anything else to do before he could decently call in on DI Moxon, he sat down to have a look at the Catullus. It was reasonably interesting stuff, once you got into it, with some very direct rude language in it. Most of the vocabulary was familiar to him. The man wrote over a hundred poems, in which he managed to cover most of human experience, but the ones to his friends in which he threatened buggery were a bit strong. Mr Brent agreed, and suggested Ben concentrate on something slightly blander. Ben had a sneaking admiration for poetry and had turned his hand to writing some of his own, once in a while.

  In defiance of his teacher’s advice, he was working on ‘A Warning: to Aurelius’. He scrupulously avoided other people’s translations until he’d arrived at one of his own, which turned the whole exercise into something of a game.

  He had reached the ninth line, where things became decidedly graphic – ‘uerum a te metuo tuoque pene’ – and was very thankful not to be studying the poem in a class full of sniggering boys. Even the dimmest one was likely to find an easy translation of the word ‘pene’. ‘Yes, Higgins,’ the teacher would sigh. ‘It does mean what you think it means.’ The poet was warning his friend off his own ‘boy’ in the most straightforward fashion. It wasn’t a very subtle matter, after all. The last two lines, as far as Ben could tell at a quick glance, were a very graphic threat as to the revenge Catullus would wreak if Aurelius ignored the warning.

  Sex, romance, pairing up – it was all unknown territory to Ben personally. Girls shied away from him, on the whole, nervous of his fearsome intelligence. People became stupidly jealous for no reason. They leapt to paranoid conclusions on the basis of a look or a word. They suffered agonies through misunderstandings that could easily be settled by a direct question. It was all a major distraction from the important things in life, as far as he could see. And yet here was Catullus two thousand years after his lifetime, still studied and admired because he wrote down, in plain language, the basic emotions that humans struggled with.

  ‘Hmm,’ he muttered to himself, and wrote ‘I’m scared of you and your dick’ as his translation of line nine. Then he checked two existing translations, on websites he’d bookmarked a week ago. ‘You are the one I fear, you and your penis’ seemed seriously clunky to him. And ‘truly my fear is of you and your cock’ struck him as unduly convoluted. ‘Onwards,’ Ben told himself, moving to line ten. This one was simpler, with line eleven the really crude one. ‘infesto pueris bonis malisque’ required careful attention to the cases, but ‘quem tu qua lubet, ut lubet moueto’ had a wicked poetry to it which called for a translation that would do it justice.

  At nine-thirty, he lifted his head from the work and looked at his bedside clock. Furiously, he grabbed his murder flow chart and ran downstairs. Throwing on his thickest hooded jacket, he left the house without further delay.

  The police station was on the southern edge of Windermere, or the northern edge of Bowness. It was only a few minutes’ walk from his house. Just before he got there, he saw two people going in. One of them was impossible to mistake.

  The tall figure of Solomon Samalar was strolling in a relaxed sort of way through the entrance, with a much smaller younger woman at his side, who looked very downcast. As if drawn by a string, Ben followed.

  Inside, the man spoke to a police officer on the desk. ‘I believe Inspector Moxon is expecting me. My name is Samalar.’ He made no reference to the woman, who leant forward and said something softly, which Ben couldn’t hear. The officer nodded, and lifted up a phone. Ben hovered in the doorway, suddenly aware of the ambivalence of his position. While a police station was to some extent a public place, it was not customary to enter one without due purpose. Simply following someone and trying to hear what they said did not constitute a valid reason for being there. And if Moxo was interviewing these people, he’d have no time for Ben. With an awkward little shrug – which he didn’t think anybody saw – he turned and went back into the street.

  Nothing for it, then, but to carry on northwards to Simmy’s shop. It was another ten minutes at least, past the Baddeley clock tower and into the town centre. Melanie would be there and the three of them could share all their findings and impressions about the case. They could reinvigorate the old gang, as he thought of them, and possibly plan some kind of action. The fact that Wilf had gone up to Coniston without him, with the express intention of looking for clues, niggled at him. That was his sort of thing, not his brother’s. Wilf was a cook, not a detective.

  It really was a very cold day, with a nasty wind blowing. He pulled the hood over his ears and wished he’d brought some gloves. His feet were cold, as well, in somewhat inadequate trainers. Why didn’t men wear fur-lined boots like women did, he wondered? The many follies of fashion had always been an annoyance to him. As a small boy he had loved dressing in frilly nylon frocks that the nursery kept in the dressing-up box. He still thought women had a far better deal when it came to clothes.

  It was shortly after ten o’clock when he got to Persimmon Petals. There were three women in the shop – Simmy, Melanie and Simmy’s mother. Ben felt a leap of anticipation at the sight of Angie. He liked her, from what he h
ad seen and heard of her, especially at Christmas. The fact that Simmy had a mother not totally unlike his own gave him an additional sense of fellowship with her. Angie was straight-talking, sure of herself and dependable in a crisis. His own mother was not entirely reliable on this last count. Her work mattered enormously to her, and there had been several times when she gave it priority over her family. Her attitude tended to be that where there were five children, they could surely watch out for each other, without troubling her too much.

  ‘Morning, Mr Harkness,’ Angie said now, with a friendly smile. ‘Cold for the time of year.’

  ‘Certainly is,’ he agreed. ‘My toes are frozen.’

  It wasn’t very warm in the shop, either. Flowers objected to excessive heat and while the back room was kept deliberately cool, the shop was never very much better.

  ‘Well, I’m not staying. Don’t get into any mischief, will you – you three. There was quite enough of that at Christmas. Maybe see you tomorrow, P’simmon. Come for tea, if you can. I’ve got a great big fruit cake that one of my returners brought.’