The Staveley Suspect

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Like who?’ Simmy blurted, eyes wide.

  ‘Oh, I’m not naming any names, but just let’s say a few people have made very unkind remarks, which Anita has taken to heart. I won’t let her anywhere near Facebook, for one thing. I took one quick look and it made me sick.’

  ‘Sicker than you were already,’ said Anita, with an angry sort of fondness. ‘And it’s all my fault.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Gillian.

  ‘I should go,’ Simmy said, feeling suddenly surplus to requirements.

  Chapter Twelve

  Simmy texted Ben to say she was home and available for debriefing if he wanted. Within ninety seconds he had phoned her demanding a complete account of what had taken place in Kendal.

  ‘First, tell me how you and Bonnie got on in Staveley,’ she insisted.

  ‘Not bad, considering. But I need to know what happened with you and the chief suspect.’

  ‘We can’t do it all over the phone, Ben,’ Simmy objected. ‘I thought we could, but we can’t. There’s too much.’ She was beginning to feel rather silly, back to the Famous Five with the clues and observations and gut feelings all bursting to be shared.

  ‘I’ve got a free period tomorrow, first thing. What if I come to the shop about eight-thirty, and we have an hour or so then?’

  ‘I suppose that would be all right. It depends on whether there are orders to fill, and people coming in. Thursdays can be busy sometimes.’

  ‘We’ll play it by ear,’ he said, sounding much more grown-up than the Famous Five ever did. ‘See you then, then.’

  She should make notes, organise her thoughts and make herself worthy of the brilliant Ben Harkness. Instead, she phoned Christopher Henderson and talked about things other than murder and suspicion. He expressed concern for her father, having known Russell all his life. ‘Bring him to another auction when he’s better,’ he offered. ‘He enjoyed it last time, didn’t he?’

  ‘He loved it. I might do that, but it won’t be for a while. I can’t get away from the shop before Easter.’

  ‘I was thinking about the holiday. I googled Lanzarote,’ he told her. ‘It looks idyllic.’

  ‘It is. Did you find anything affordable?’

  ‘If we go during term time, it’s not too bad. I was thinking the first week of June. How does that sound?’

  ‘A long way off. I want to go tomorrow.’

  ‘So do I, but we’ll have to wait. I’m coming over on Friday evening, okay? In fact, I’m coming whether it’s okay or not. The following weekend is going to be hectic for me, and the one after that you’ll be obsessing about all the Mother’s Day stuff. It’ll be June before we know it at this rate.’

  ‘Friday will be lovely. I’ll do some proper cooking. Unless you want to go for a Chinese in Kendal? It’s ages since I had a Chinese meal, and I’ve got a craving.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Even before he spoke she’d realised the possible interpretation of her words. Stupid, she snarled at herself. A stupid Freudian slip, she suspected. ‘No, not that sort of craving.’

  ‘Chinese is always good, but can we postpone it a bit? I won’t want to go out anywhere.’

  ‘What about a takeaway?’

  ‘Mm,’ he said with singular lack of enthusiasm. ‘Why don’t we cook something together? See how we work as a team now we’re grown up. Don’t you remember when we were twelve and took charge of that portable barbecue my dad had? We did the whole thing on our own, risking all sorts of injury and danger. It was probably illegal even then, to let minors handle glowing charcoal.’

  ‘I remember the sausages were a bit raw on one side. Your sisters spat them out.’

  They reminisced contentedly about their shared life, meeting every summer for seaside holidays before suddenly falling in love at the age of sixteen. For one glorious fortnight they’d been besotted, impervious to their families and everything else. Despite the jokes made from the day of their birth about their destiny being settled, their marriage inevitable, their parents took fright at the reality. Christopher was doing too well at school to embroil himself in a premature relationship. Nothing could be allowed to interrupt his university course and subsequent career path. Simmy had no particular ambitions, but could see that tying herself to the only boy she’d ever taken seriously might be unwise. So there were no more joint holidays after that. They wrote passionate letters, spent hours on the phone, and met infrequently. Things changed as they moved into their respective sixth forms, and they let each other go with surprisingly little complaint.

  Now, they assured each other that it had really been for the best. That they had experienced other people, other places (especially in his case) and come back together older and much wiser. The only regret – which she knew was irrational – was that she was convinced that if she’d married Christopher at the age of twenty-three, they’d have a whole litter of little Hendersons by now.

  ‘You know what I thought, as soon as my mother told me about his stroke – or whatever it was? I thought, Now he’ll never know the fun of being a grandfather. I thought how cheated he’d feel, as he died. Even more cheated than he’s been by my mother refusing to have more children. I know he wanted more than just me. He’d have been so good with them.’

  ‘Stop torturing yourself, you daft thing. He wasn’t so terribly special. You were an easy kid, he was proud of you, and you got along very nicely. Don’t romanticise it, Sim. Things are as they are, as a friend of mine in South America used to say.’ Christopher had spent some years travelling, dropping out of his planned career path more drastically than early marriage to Simmy could possibly have caused. Not so much a gap year as a gap decade, as his mother once said.

  Both his parents were recently dead, amidst considerable horror and confusion. Simmy assumed he was still recovering from the resulting damage, which was another reason not to hurtle too precipitately into anything permanent with him. ‘I expect you’re right,’ she said mildly. ‘And it’s academic now, because he’s not going to die. They think he’ll be back to normal in a week or so – whatever normal is.’

  ‘There’s a chance that some sort of blockage has cleared itself and he’ll be better than he was before.’

  ‘Really? Do you know of that ever happening? Or are you just being insanely optimistic?’

  ‘I knew someone who used to have terrible migraines, and then had a small stroke, and after that never had another migraine. Same sort of thing.’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’ It didn’t really sound like the same thing at all, but she wasn’t going to argue with him. They carried on for a few more minutes, chatting inconsequentially, enjoying the sound of each other’s voice and the sense that things between them were warm and easy, despite enforced distance and extraneous complications.

  It was mildly exciting to set out early the next morning with the intention of meeting Ben and Bonnie and comparing impressions of the Staveley people. All three coincided at the front door of the shop, laughing at the impeccable timing. ‘It’s no good,’ said Simmy. ‘We really are the Famous Five, even if there are only three of us.’

  ‘What a thing to say,’ chided Ben. ‘This is real life and death, not a silly story for kids.’ He took out a notebook and looked for a place to lean on. Yet again Simmy regretted the shortage of chairs, or space to put them.

  ‘We’d be better in the back room,’ she decided. ‘Then people can’t see us from the street. They might try to come in early and buy something if they think there’s someone here. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  They gathered around the workbench, all focusing on Ben’s notes. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We need to pool everything we know, from both sides. Simmy, I think it’s best if you give us the facts as you heard them last night.’

  She felt as if he was challenging her to do a good job and in consequence made every effort to impress him. ‘Declan was hit by a vehicle on the road from Crook to Staveley, sometime fairly early on Friday evening. That’s when h
e was found. He and his wife and her brother have all been hostile towards Anita, mother of Debbie and Matthew, because she and Gillian Townsend refused repeatedly to employ him in their law firm. Gillian is prepared to gather evidence in Anita’s defence, and pass it to a barrister, if it comes to the point of her being charged with murder or manslaughter. Gillian’s much more outraged by the idea than Anita seems to be. Their only real strategy is that they should try to find who did do it, even though it’s likely to have been a tourist who’s long gone by now.’

  She relaxed at the end of this little speech, feeling rather pleased with herself.

  ‘Well, we knew most of that already,’ said Bonnie, deflatingly. ‘And it wasn’t a random tourist, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Did you?’ To Simmy it had felt like a whole string of revelations, neatly and efficiently summarised.

  ‘You think the Townsend woman genuinely believes Anita’s innocent?’ asked Ben. ‘She’s not just trying to protect her?’

  ‘That’s how it looked,’ Simmy nodded. ‘She seems totally convinced, in fact.’

  ‘Right. Well, we got some more background, but it doesn’t contradict anything you’ve just said. Debbie’s accusing both her parents of all sorts of character defects, but mother’s a lot worse than father.’

  ‘Oh! I thought of something else. Declan’s father is a bigwig in Kendal, who always thought his son would go into a proper profession and make him proud. He’s mortified that Olsen and Townsend thwarted his ambition.’

  ‘Probably not enough to commit murder, though,’ said Bonnie. ‘We met him, actually. He was coming up the path as we were leaving. A right stinker he is, too. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if it turned out to be him who did it, on second thoughts. Except what father could kill his own son? That would be worse than the mother-in-law doing it.’

  Ben smiled. ‘Bon’s not at all happy with the notion of parents killing their children – are you? It is fairly grim, I agree. But they really do seem to believe Anita Olsen is capable of it.’

  Simmy sighed. ‘Anita thinks he married Debbie in order to pressure her to take him on in her office. Anita’s known him since he was a student – or just after. He did law, but was never any good at it. It would have been professional suicide to employ him.’

  ‘Did she say that? In those words?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Simmy admitted. ‘But that’s what she meant. It was one of the few times she said more than a couple of words. Gillian did nearly all the talking.’

  ‘Debbie thinks it was because they wanted to keep the place all-female. She thinks that’s actually illegal. Discriminatory,’ said Bonnie, enunciating the final word with care.

  ‘She’s wrong, of course,’ said Ben. ‘At least, it would be impossible to prove. They didn’t take anyone else on instead of Declan, did they? They probably just kept saying there was no vacancy.’

  ‘But it’s all the wrong way round,’ Simmy realised. ‘All this stuff would be more likely to provoke Declan into killing Anita.’

  ‘We thought that at first,’ said Bonnie.

  Ben took over. ‘But then we asked – why now? Is there something about the timing? And we remembered that Anita Olsen is retiring. And that means there definitely would be a vacancy.’

  Simmy gave this some thought. ‘Surely he doesn’t – didn’t – think he could apply again after all this time? He must be really stupid if so. But, of course, Gillian isn’t very well. She might be forced to give up work, which would leave the whole business up for grabs.’

  Bonnie chimed in, ‘I bet Debbie would have wanted him to give it a go. She seems to think Gillian is soft enough to be persuaded. It sounded as if they don’t have such a strong animosity towards Gillian.’

  ‘But why does that make Declan the victim?’ Simmy’s mind was struggling to keep up. She was becoming painfully aware that her initial masterly summary had been woefully incomplete. More details kept occurring to her.

  Ben took over. ‘It makes a sort of sense. Anita had simply had enough of him. He was a very persistent pest, after all, and there was no way she could risk Gillian capitulating. It probably wasn’t planned, but when she saw him biking along the road, she grabbed her chance.’

  ‘That’s what Debbie thinks, I suppose.’ Simmy was growing rather tired of hearing what Debbie thought, but there was no escaping the fact that the new widow had a remarkably clear set of ideas as to what had happened.

  ‘More or less. Well, a bit more, actually. She’s got an answer for everything,’ said Bonnie. ‘In fact, Anita might have known where Declan was,’ she added.

  ‘Oh?’ Ben and Simmy both looked at her.

  ‘Yes, because Debbie said she’d had a call from a man called Roger. He said Declan had been staying with him, and asked him not to say anything, so he lied about it. Remember?’ Ben nodded patiently. ‘So,’ the girl went on, ‘someone could have seen him while he was there and told Anita about it.’

  Ben pushed out his lips, in an exaggerated show of taking this seriously. ‘A bit of a stretch, kiddo,’ he said. ‘It’s possible, of course, but how could we ever prove it?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Simmy’s next thought sharpened her voice. ‘Wait a minute. You’re both talking as if Anita’s guilty. When did that happen?’

  Ben and Bonnie each took a long breath. Then Ben said, ‘Yes, of course. Of course she’s guilty. Anita Olsen killed her son-in-law. There’s no doubt about that. It all fits. It’s a horrible thing, I know. Bonnie’s very upset about it. But that doesn’t change the fact.’

  ‘What fact? Or facts, surely? I’m just as sure as you that she didn’t.’ Simmy’s tone was firm. ‘You haven’t seen her. She’s being so dignified and restrained, so grateful to Gillian – and me, in a small way. She seems stunned by it all, but still hanging on to her self-respect. She’s desperately upset by the way her children are behaving. And it sounds as if everyone except Debbie thought Declan was a bit of a waste of space.’

  ‘Name those people,’ said Ben. ‘It’s no good talking about “everyone”. The same as it won’t work to blame some faceless tourist. That’s too easy. It’s much more constructive to follow the sort of line Bonnie just suggested – try to find a thread of evidence to show Anita knew where he was and where she might best have a go at him.’

  ‘And we need to know what that row was about,’ added Bonnie. ‘That’s what started the whole thing off. We’re not even sure who was there when it happened. Was he fighting with Debbie, or Anita, or who?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Ben, admiringly. ‘The whole business probably hinges on that.’

  ‘So why wouldn’t Debbie tell us about it?’

  ‘I guess because it reflects badly on her.’

  ‘If her last words to Declan were something nasty, she’s sure to be feeling terribly guilty,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘We’re on different sides.’ Simmy repeated her discovery flatly, but the truth of it was deeply upsetting. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘No, Simmy, no we’re not. Not in a way that matters to us as people. It’s just an intellectual puzzle. It’ll help us work it all out together, don’t you see?’ Bonnie was urgent in her efforts to reassure. ‘If you take Anita’s part, speaking for her, and we do the same for Debbie, there’ll be a proper balance. Like in a real trial. That’s the best way to get the right answer. That’s how we reach justice.’

  Simmy could hear Ben’s thoughts coming through the girl’s lips. Ancient Rome came to mind, and Greek democracy and even the Icelandic Thingvellir, which Ben had delivered a lecture on, a week or two ago. ‘You won’t have time,’ she told him. ‘It’ll interrupt your revision.’

  ‘The timing’s awful,’ he agreed, with a small frown. ‘If there was a remotely rational education system in this country, it would be an ideal addition to the work I’m doing. As it is, you disturb the curriculum at your peril. In the long run, though, the experience will be very useful. It’s a bonus that the Staveley women are both solicitors. They know th
e law. That gives them power. You’re probably on the winning side, if that’s the way you want to look at it.’

  ‘Where does Anita live?’ Bonnie asked. ‘We couldn’t find that out.’

  ‘Oh …’ Simmy thought hard. ‘Somewhere in Staveley. She pointed it out, vaguely. There’s a row of big old houses overlooking a field, or village green. I think it’s one of them. But she’s staying with the Townsends in Kendal, now—’

  ‘Did you say Townsends, plural?’ Ben interrupted.

  ‘Yes, there’s a husband. He’s called Robin and he looks fairly fed up at having a guest. I suspect there’s no date for her to go home.’

  ‘You never mentioned him,’ Ben reproached.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t think he’s very relevant.’

  ‘Is he a solicitor as well?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I assume not. He’d be taking more of an interest if he was.’

  ‘Are there any children?’

  ‘I don’t know. All the talk was about Anita, not Gillian and her family.’

  ‘It all sounds very cosy, the way those two women are together. Partners at work, bosom buddies now, like babes in the wood, facing the big bad world side by side.’ He sounded alarmingly grown-up to Simmy, speaking as an adult in judgement on other adults. Insightful and in control. She knew that Bonnie regarded her beloved as a sort of hero, a figure from ancient Gaelic myths, groomed for glory from an infant. And now Simmy found herself harbouring the same sort of feeling towards him. There was something golden about him, something rare and precious. There had been a terrifying episode the previous year where they thought they’d lost him, which had served to cement the general belief that he was far too important to be allowed to vanish. Ben himself had learnt lessons about vulnerability and fear, but the essential message had been that you can think yourself out of almost any tight corner, if you stay in control of yourself.