by Rebecca Tope
His surname was Henderson. Like an obsessed teenager, she played with the sound of it as she drove. It had a perfectly good rhythm to it, although her full ‘Persimmon’ was rather too close to ‘Henderson’ for a perfect fit. The whole name was cumbersome. But then, nobody but her mother ever called her ‘Persimmon’ anyway.
And all the time she knew that none of that mattered. Even the quality of their relationship, the chances of it succeeding for the next fifty years, the details of how they would organise work, house and money came second to the single big question: would they ever manage to become parents?
Chapter Six
In the end they talked much less than expected. Each had an instinctive resistance to dragging delicate emotions out into the daylight, where they might shrivel and die. ‘Let’s just go on as we are until after Easter,’ he said. ‘We’re both going to be dreadfully busy until then, anyway. I can get a week off over the holiday, but I don’t suppose you can. Isn’t Easter hugely important, flower-wise?’
‘Not desperately. I could give myself a week’s break from Easter Monday onwards.’
‘Great! Let’s go away somewhere. France or Spain. Somewhere we can rely on some sunshine.’
Simmy had never closed the shop completely, since starting the business. She had missed some days, but Melanie had always kept it going. Bonnie, however, was not equal to managing all on her own for a whole week. It was scary to think of hanging a sign on the door saying ‘CLOSED FOR HOLIDAY. BACK NEXT WEEK’. But it was not impossible, and everybody deserved to get away occasionally. ‘I’ve always fancied going back to Lanzarote,’ she said. ‘Do you think we could go there?’
‘Blimey! I don’t even know for sure where it is.’
She told him, along with the fact that one of Tony’s cousins had owned property there, and early in their marriage they’d spent a few days in a beautiful apartment, free of charge, thanks to the cousin’s generosity. ‘It’s always a perfect temperature, all the year round. There’s an open area on the roof, where you can just slob about and look at the view. Or you can go for boat trips to the other islands. It’s lovely.’
‘I believe you. But we can’t use Tony’s cousin’s place, can we? It’s probably pretty pricy to rent somewhere.’
‘Let’s find out, then. We can google it.’
But they didn’t, because they were too cosily entwined on the couch.
Monday morning was a scramble, with a very early start and a feeling of resentment at the violence of the separation after a thoroughly blissful night. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ Simmy found herself saying. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘It’s pretty normal. All across the land, people are heaving themselves out of bed and preparing for a long drive to work.’
‘You wouldn’t want to do it every day, though. It’ll take you at least an hour to get to Keswick.’
‘It’d be worth it,’ he said fondly. His grey eyes looked intently into hers. ‘Why on earth did I let you go when I had you, twenty years ago? What a stupid waste of time.’
‘We let each other go. We weren’t sure enough then.’
‘And are we now?’
He was literally on the doorstep. He was doing it again, and she gave him a little push. ‘I’m not answering that now,’ she said.
‘I know the answer anyway,’ he said airily. ‘After that night, who could doubt it?’ He pulled her to him and squeezed her tight. ‘Have a good day, my sweet.’
The goodbye kiss was witnessed by at least three drivers, hurrying through the village on the way to their own workplaces.
Bonnie still had her cold, but looked much better. ‘I’ve found this stuff called Sudafed,’ she said. ‘It dries up all the snot like magic. You’d never know you’d got a cold at all.’
‘Great,’ said Simmy doubtfully. The girl’s prediliction for non-prescription medicines appeared to be increasing. But, she reminded herself, that was perfectly normal. It was only the Straw family who regarded any medication as a personal insult, so that taking it was a sign of failure. It went back to Angie’s own mother, a latter-day Edwardian who believed firmly in the power of positive thinking. Her descendants had yet to shake off this attitude to life.
‘Three new orders, not counting the Mother’s Day ones. You’ve got to go to Bowness for two of them, and Brant Fell for the other. All nice and close together.’
‘When?’
‘First thing tomorrow, preferably. You might see Ninian.’ Bonnie had a soft spot for Simmy’s one-time boyfriend, who lived on the slopes of Brant Fell. Her foster mother was a friend of his, and everyone had felt mildly let down when Simmy transferred her affections to Christopher Henderson.
‘I won’t see Ninian,’ said Simmy firmly. ‘How many are there for Mother’s Day so far?’
‘Nine. And it’s still weeks away yet. I bet there’ll be at least thirty by the time the day comes.’
‘Last year there were twenty-eight. That felt like too many, at the time.’
‘People buy pot plants as well, don’t they? You should check there’s enough in stock.’
‘I should, you’re right.’
‘Melanie called me yesterday. She sends her love. She told me how much you hate the whole Mother’s Day thing. Obvious, really. I should have worked it out for myself, when you started being funny about it last month.’
‘Melanie was very sensible. She gave me a talking to. I am trying harder to keep my own feelings out of it.’
‘Think about the money,’ Bonnie advised.
‘I’ll try.’
The morning passed much as usual, with the mixture of preparing for the following day’s deliveries, checking stocks of potted plants, tidying up, and dealing with the overflowing compost bin in the little yard at the back. Dead flowers and foliage were an inevitable by-product of the business, and disposing of them was complicated. ‘You should have an allotment,’ her mother told her. ‘That’d be a constructive solution.’ Simmy didn’t want an allotment, but she did sometimes take a smelly black sack of detritus to her father for his struggling vegetable plot. His efforts at gardening had never been very consistent, and now he neglected it all for a lot of the time. Simmy tried to encourage him, and had a plan to get some seed potatoes and help him put them in.
Bonnie had taken her last Sudafed early in the day, and it had worn off by noon. She had got through half a box of tissues by the time Ben came in at half past three. He was all solicitude over the streaming nose. ‘I thought you were better,’ he accused.
‘I thought I was as well,’ she nodded. ‘It’s been nearly a week now. Lucky you didn’t catch it.’
‘A miracle,’ he grinned. ‘Lucky old me.’
‘How’s the work going?’ Simmy asked him.
He shrugged away the predictable question, and replied with one of his own. ‘What happened in Staveley, then? I’ve been wondering all weekend. There wasn’t anything else on the news last time I looked. That must have been Saturday.’
Simmy blinked. ‘I’d forgotten all about it. They said they’d tell me by now for sure whether or not the party was on. And I haven’t heard a thing. I suppose it’s off, and they’re too preoccupied to think about telling me.’
‘So – tell me the whole thing. And that business with your ex, as well. Those are the only two crime stories going on just now and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms.’
Bonnie giggled, and Simmy sighed. ‘Not much to tell,’ she said. ‘There’s a woman called Anita, who’s retiring from her job as a solicitor and her friend Gillian wants to give her a big party at her mother’s house. Gillian’s mother, that is. Anita and Gillian’s mother both live in Staveley, and I suppose Gillian’s in Kendal. At least that’s where the solicitors’ office is. Anita’s daughter has a husband called Declan, and he’s the one they’re worried about. When the police found a body last week, they must have known it was him, but they wouldn’t say for sure. If it is, they can’t have a party. It’s a fabulous house,’ she finished,
feeling wistful at the lost commission.
‘Okay,’ said Ben slowly. ‘So Declan’s not very old. Was he sick? Or suicidal? Did anybody hate him?’
‘Shut up. How would I know any of that?’
‘Observation,’ he told her severely. ‘At least some of it should have been mentioned.’
‘Not sick,’ she ventured. ‘The wife is called Debbie, and there’s a Matthew.’ She had to strain to recall as much as that. A lot had happened since Friday evening. ‘Anita was obviously very worried. She hardly spoke at all, and when she did she was a bit snappy. She’s nice, though. They all are. I liked the old lady, and Gillian’s sweet. Very short and dumpy and always smiling. I don’t think she’s well, though. She’s breathless, and seems rather stiff.’
Ben made a long sound of frustration. ‘You’re a hopeless detective,’ he moaned.
‘That’s because it’s the last thing I want to be. I just sell flowers. Why won’t people leave it at that?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Let’s check then.’ He devoted a minute’s attention to his device. ‘Well, as far as I can work out, the body they found was an old man who’d been dead in his garden shed for a week. And there was also a chap knocked off his bike in Crook.’ He looked up. ‘So what about this other thing? Your stalker husband.’ He gave an apologetic grimace, which carried little sincerity.
‘His mother phoned me on Saturday. She’s still very friendly towards me, which is a bit of a surprise. I’d forgotten how much we always liked each other. She’s remarkably realistic about Tony, and what he might be capable of. I think we both feel sorrier for the midwife than we do for him. Anyway, I told her I didn’t think there was much I could say that would help. I got the impression it had been her idea in the first place, to try and get me to provide some of the background. But I can’t remember very much. Tony wasn’t there when they gave me the baby to hold. He might have been in another room, crying on this woman. Something like that must have happened, to make him think there was anything between them.’
‘Like a baby duck imprinting on the first thing it sees when it hatches,’ said Bonnie.
‘No. Nothing like that at all,’ said Simmy crossly. ‘Much more complicated and embarrassing than that.’ She tried to ignore the pang of remorse she felt at the sight of Bonnie’s drooping response
‘Embarrassing,’ Ben repeated. ‘It is, isn’t it? Stalking is really very pathetic. Being caught doing it has to be embarrassing. And Bonnie’s right, actually. It must be a bit like imprinting. A powerful instinct that overrides common sense.’
‘Or a stray dog that follows you home and sits outside your door whining for days.’ Bonnie had bounced back at her boyfriend’s approving words. ‘In the end, you’d have to kick it or shout at it, to make it go away.’
‘But she stabbed him,’ said Simmy. ‘That’s going rather too far, surely? She must have taken a knife with her deliberately, as well.’
‘Where did this happen?’ asked Ben.
‘Um … I don’t actually know. It could have been at her house, I suppose, although she probably wouldn’t have let him in if he’d gone to the door. I haven’t been told anything much.’
Ben was activating his all-purpose phone. ‘Anthony Brown? Worcestershire … stabbing … last year. Let’s see …’ He stroked and prodded the screen for a whole minute, before proffering an item from the Gloucestershire Echo. ‘It was in Chedworth, in the Cotswolds. Look, it’s all here.’
Overcoming a mild resistance, Simmy took the phone and read the piece. ‘Okay,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘So I was right – she did take a knife with her. She must have been expecting him to follow her.’
‘She says she was trying to have a quiet day in the countryside, thinking he’d never find her there,’ Ben pointed out.
‘Oh. So she does. Well, it looks bad for her, doesn’t it?’
‘She’s bound to argue that it was self-defence. Some stalkers get very violent.’
‘There’s a wonderful book,’ Bonnie enthused. ‘It’s called Into the Darkest Corner. Really scary. Made you feel you were right there, with the poor woman who was being stalked.’
‘Stop it,’ begged Simmy. A residual loyalty to Tony was stirring inside her. ‘I was married to the man. He was nothing like a baby duck or a stray dog then.’ But she paused, remembering moments when Tony had indeed seemed less than competent, even less than rational when faced with difficulties. His attitude to work colleagues had sometimes been extreme, whether positive or negative. He still harboured bitter feelings towards a boy at school who had bullied him. Some of this came back to her now. ‘Poor old Tony,’ she breathed. ‘What a mess he must have been in.’ Another wave of remorse flooded through her. Perhaps she should have tried harder to stay with him and keep the marriage alive. Perhaps, indeed, this was at least partly her fault.
But Pamela had assured her this was not the case. ‘His mother was really nice to me. She said it wasn’t my fault.’
‘How could it be your fault?’ Bonnie looked genuinely blank.
‘Don’t do the guilt-tripping again,’ Ben warned her. ‘It’s not big and it’s not clever.’
A customer broke up the darkening atmosphere with a request for a large spray of the biggest spring flowers Simmy could provide. She disappeared into the storeroom to fashion something suitable. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ she said.
The man eyed the two youngsters carefully, and then mooched off to examine the stand offering greetings cards to go with flowers. Simmy was back sooner than predicted and the customer went off looking as if he’d escaped some unpleasant fate. ‘What a plonker,’ said Bonnie. ‘What did he think we were going to do to him?’
‘Talk to him, presumably,’ said Ben. ‘Some people think kids are a different species from themselves.’
‘We’re not kids,’ Bonnie protested. ‘You’re eighteen, and I nearly am.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Simmy went back to the storeroom and made three mugs of tea. She was still thinking about Tony, and how he had become so distant and alien to her since she’d left him back in Worcestershire. But even at a distance, he was interrupting her relationship with Christopher. The past and present were getting mixed up and that was uncomfortable.
When she took the tea into the shop, Bonnie was lavishly filling another tissue. ‘It just won’t stop,’ she said thickly.
‘It might be something allergic,’ said Ben, looking closely at her. ‘Have you got new plants in here?’ he asked Simmy. ‘Something you haven’t had since Bonnie started.’
‘Can’t think of anything.’ The idea of her assistant becoming sensitive to plants was alarming. ‘More likely to be that Sudafed stuff she’s been taking.’
‘Doubtful. What does it say about side effects?’
Bonnie shrugged. ‘No idea,’ she said.
Ben was already tapping busily on his phone, his eyebrows rising dramatically as he read the screen. ‘This is an American website,’ he realised. ‘They really go overboard on this sort of thing. If this is anything to go by, the stuff’s lethal. Seizures, sweating, quivering … but they’re all rare. Nothing about excessive mucus, though.’
‘That would be ridiculous, when the pills are designed to dry you up,’ said Simmy. ‘It’s probably just the tail end of the cold, and she’ll be fine by bedtime.’
‘Side effects was your suggestion,’ Ben reminded her.
‘A silly one.’
They drank their tea in silence. Outside there was enough sunshine to cast shadows, which were lengthening as the afternoon went on. ‘You can go early, if you like,’ Simmy told Bonnie. ‘On the grounds that you’re sick.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’ It was as if both youngsters had been waiting for those very words, and within sixty seconds they’d gone.
‘They really are a different species,’ Simmy murmured to herself. More like puppies than people, much of the time. Or skittish colts. She wasn’t sorry to be left on her own. There were things she wante
d to think about and get straight in her head.
But she had little time for her musing. Five minutes after Ben and Bonnie had gone, the door opened, admitting the person who had so very often come through that door with trouble and confusion in his wake. Meeting his eyes, she knew she’d been expecting him all day. The sense of him had been hovering on her shoulder, his face clear in her mind’s eye.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘And hello again to you,’ said Detective Inspector Nolan Moxon.
Chapter Seven
‘I thought you might be coming in sometime this week,’ she told him. ‘My mother-in-law warned me.’
He looked at her in astonishment, as if she had said something in Swahili or sworn at him. ‘Mother-in-law?’ he repeated. ‘Mother-in-law?’
‘Yes. Pamela Brown, who lives in Halesowen, near Birmingham. She wrote to me, and then phoned. I know what you’re going to ask me.’
‘I don’t think you do. This has no connection to Birmingham, or anyone called Brown. It’s about an incident in Staveley.’
‘Oh.’ She leant against her worktable, where the computer and till were sitting. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Again.’
‘You know what I’m talking about, then?’ He gave her another wary look. ‘People by the name of Kennedy?’
‘Not really.’ She recovered her balance, and with it an energetic resistance to whatever he wanted of her. ‘This honestly can’t have anything whatsoever to do with me. Just because I went there on Friday is no reason to try and pull me in to whatever it is that’s happened. Besides – Ben says it was an old man who died, presumably of natural causes, in a shed.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed to really mean it, she had to acknowledge to herself. ‘This is another matter, concerning a Mr Kennedy. We’ve been given your name as somebody who can confirm the whereabouts of Mrs Anita Olsen on Friday evening.’