Simmy, too, had time for some calmer reflection that Thursday morning, as she drove down to Newby Bridge with the flowers for Sue Moxon’s mother. She had woken feeling depressed and useless. While expecting that she would be told if Ben was found, she could think of nobody she could phone for news. Not Helen, anyway. It would be a dreadful intrusion. When Bonnie arrived at work looking so wan and droopy, it was obvious that nothing good had happened.
Her advice about waiting passively for something to develop had been intended as mature and reasonable. Instead it came across as heartless and defeatist. No wonder Bonnie had been so angry with her. It was as if she had already written Ben off as gone for ever. How truly stupid she had been. When she got back, she would make amends.
The eighty-year-old looked closer to sixty, flinging the door wide and welcoming the flowers as if they were the one thing she had really wanted all her life. ‘How absolutely lovely they are,’ she cried. ‘Thank you ever so much. Did you do them yourself? What a talent you have!’
The accolade went a long way to putting some backbone into her again. She had no reason to give up. She had all kinds of abilities and characteristics that had helped in past situations to identify killers. Why was she being so pathetic now?
She drove as fast as she dared back up to Windermere. Bowness was as usual thronged with holidaymakers, coaches, bicycles, straggling families with tiny toddlers. It was not possible to speed through Bowness. But she got through more quickly than usual and was into her little backyard again by five minutes to ten.
‘Bonnie,’ she called. ‘I’m back. I want to say I’m sorry for what I said earlier on.’
But Bonnie wasn’t there. The shop was coldly, implacably empty. A note was propped on the cash register.
‘Gone to look for Ben. Don’t worry about me.’
Simmy’s immediate reaction was to distance herself. Let Bonnie do what she liked. The thwarted intention to apologise and try harder mutated into indifference. She had learnt before that anxiety and fear were self-limiting emotions, at least for her. The apparent permanency of her father’s condition had been a surprise. Was it possible to sustain a worry for weeks on end? She couldn’t see how. And fear was even more transitory. Fear for Ben’s welfare had started as an acute and overwhelming state of mind. Now, only two days later, it was a much duller sensation. Was this a defect in her, then? Bonnie evidently thought so.
She reviewed earlier occasions where she had blundered into hazardous situations involving malice and physical injury. None of them had required deliberate independent action from Simmy. She had been told what to do by others, or been on some innocent project that turned nasty. If she had been given any choice, what would she have done? There had been moments when she had put another person’s welfare before her own – moments she recalled with some relief. But she had seldom been decisive or shown much initiative. She was no eager amateur sleuth, as Ben very much was.
But Ben and Bonnie were little more than children. They were blundering about in a world of aggressive and unpredictable adults, where nobody knew for sure who might do something terrible. Detective Inspector Moxon himself appeared to be unprepared for what might happen. He did not feel like an adequate protector of vulnerable youngsters. In fact there was a definite suggestion that he regarded these youngsters as part of the problem.
Nobody came into the shop for the next hour. That gave her a great deal of time for reflection along these lines. She was aware of a persistent vision of herself inside a bubble, idling in a flower shop while in the world outside there were people dying and hating and kidnapping, playing games and feeling several strong and painful emotions. She was increasingly sure that this was a culpable detachment on her part. But she was at the same time being ignored by everyone. They had pushed her to the sidelines, and given her no sort of role. Even Ninian was more involved than she was, with his dubious sighting of Ben. And her mother had been sought out by Melanie as a confidante, rather than Simmy herself. Corinne was probably driving Bonnie back to Hawkshead and Helen Harkness would be hassling the police to find her boy. They were all doing something, while she remained in her lonely, floral tower.
Why had Bonnie been so excited by the detail of Ben’s clothes, she wondered. There were all kinds of explanation, surely, other than a sinister one. He might have friends in the area who’d lend him something warmer and agree to remain silent about seeing him. He might have encountered a walker on the fells and swopped his shorts for trousers. Anything was possible.
And yet, Bonnie knew Ben very well indeed. She was attuned to nuances and hints that nobody else could see. She had spent whole days with him since they first got together, and virtually every evening since Ben’s exams had finished. In the enforced separations, they texted and phoned and almost seemed to commune by telepathy. If anybody could find Ben it was Bonnie. And perhaps the fact that his clothes had changed was all the inducement she needed to get started.
At eleven o’clock she was rescued from increasingly tangled and self-reproachful thoughts by Melanie, who came bursting through the door in just the same fashion as she had on Monday. It was déjà vu, in fact. It made Simmy smile, and for a moment persuade herself that it was indeed Monday, when there was nothing to worry about, rather than this increasingly unsettling Thursday.
‘Can you drive me to Hawkshead?’ Melanie panted. ‘I can’t get my car. Gary’s gone off somewhere and isn’t answering his phone.’
‘Not really,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m here on my own. I can’t just close the shop.’
‘Yes you can. You’ve got to. Where’s Bonnie?’
‘Looking for Ben. Where do you think?’
Melanie pushed her fingers through her thick, dark hair. It was a gesture Simmy had not observed before. It indicated an unusually fraught frame of mind. ‘It’s a nightmare, Sim. He’s been gone two days now. What if he’s … you know … dead?’
‘He’s not. Of course he’s not.’ Again, Simmy felt old and tired and peripheral.
‘He might be. Dan is, remember? It can happen.’
Simmy said nothing. It had all been said already.
‘Anyway, I have to get to the hotel. Bodgett insists I turn up, unless I get a doctor’s note to say I’m too ill.’
‘They can’t say that. That’s not how it works these days.’
‘Tell him that. He’s going mad up there, from the sound of it. A group booking just came in. They’re arriving tomorrow. Eight people.’
Simmy blinked. ‘And you had all those rooms available? In July? At short notice?’
‘People cancelled when they heard what had happened.’
‘Did they? You’d think they’d be curious to see the place where there’d been a murder. Aren’t the general public meant to be ghouls about that sort of thing?’
‘Some are. But Mrs Bodgett had to phone them all and explain the situation, and some of them took the refund and bailed out. Mind you, they won’t find anywhere else up here. They’ll have to go to Norfolk or … Milton Keynes, instead.’
‘And then they’ll be sorry.’
‘I doubt if they will. It’s going to be pretty weird in Hawkshead. Somebody from an agency will have to do Dan’s stuff, and that’s going to be horrible, for a start. There’ll be mistakes. Penny’s never the most balanced person at the best of times. Any little thing can set her off.’
‘She’s the skeletal receptionist,’ Simmy reminded herself. ‘She did look rather flaky. If that’s the word. Ditzy? Volatile?’
‘She’s amazingly good at the job, most of the time. Makes people feel special. I’m supposed to be learning from her how to do it.’
‘I thought Dan was pretty good at it, too.’ She remembered how subtly the man had dealt with the complaining guest, offering him a free drink. ‘Although I did wonder whether the chap ended up feeling a bit of a fool.’
‘What chap?’
‘The husband of that couple. I forget their names. They’re on the ground floor.’
‘Lillywhite,’ said Melanie. ‘So – are you going to take me, or what?’
‘Isn’t there anybody else?’
‘Who, for instance?’
‘What about the bus? There’s a perfectly good bus that goes every hour. Or the ferry. Why not use the ferry?’
‘I just missed the bus. And the ferry takes ages. I can’t face all that hassle.’
Simmy sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll have to take you, then. You’ll never speak to me again if I don’t.’
‘Believe me, I wouldn’t ask if I could avoid it. You’ve been really off, this past day or so, you know that? Anyone would think you didn’t care about any of this stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Dan and Ben, of course. See? That’s what I mean. You act as if nothing’s happened.’
‘Stop it, will you. I can’t take any more unfair criticism, when there’s absolutely nothing I can do. I don’t understand what people expect.’
Melanie was halfway out of the door. ‘Where’s your car?’ she demanded. ‘Where did you leave it this time?’
‘By the library, I think.’ Every morning Simmy had to find a space for her car in one of Windermere’s streets, and every evening she had to try to recall exactly which street it had been.
‘People expect you to care,’ said Melanie as they walked briskly along the main street. ‘They want you to take an interest and share in their feelings.’
‘I’ve done that. I’ve done it religiously since Tuesday. I’m worn out with it, because it doesn’t seem to be helping anything.’
‘I think you’re tired because of the effort to keep a lid on it,’ said Melanie. ‘We all know how much you love Ben. I think you’re scared stiff that he’s been hurt or worse. So you just shut it all off, and try to carry on as usual.’
‘Thanks very much,’ Simmy muttered, fighting against tears. ‘I didn’t realise I needed a psychiatrist.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Just don’t pretend everything’s okay. It’s not fooling anybody. It looks cowardly to me, if you want the truth.’
‘Who said I wanted the truth? Look, there it is.’ She pointed ahead, over the busy Lake Road, to a small white car just visible in a side street. ‘I knew it was near the library.’
They drove in near silence, Simmy wrestling with a mass of wounded feelings and confusions. Melanie was right, of course. Reared in a family where emotions were all too readily expressed, where nothing felt safe and nobody could be relied upon, the girl had acquired a wisdom that Simmy could barely aspire to. Hadn’t Ninian assured her that Melanie was essentially tough? Her traumatic encounter with a dead body might have rocked her back for a day or so, but it hadn’t flattened her.
‘You know, I’m more concerned about my job than anything else,’ Melanie confessed, shortly before they reached Hawkshead. ‘That makes me cold-blooded and selfish. So I’m not saying you’re any worse than me. I didn’t even mean to criticise. I just thought you were fooling yourself. Okay?’
‘Yeah, it’s okay. I am a coward. I know I am. I always have been.’
‘You’ve got a right to be. After your baby died, I would think any danger of something terrible like that happening again would be scary. Terrifying. And Ben’s a bit like your kid sometimes, isn’t he? So that would count. If you see what I mean. It’d be like putting your hand into a fire, knowing already how much it’d hurt.’
‘I do love Ben,’ Simmy said huskily. ‘But there are people with much more claim to him than I have.’
‘It’s not about claim, is it? That’s not how it works. You’re allowed to love him as much as you want. And you can be as panicked about him as the rest. They’ll be glad if you are. It makes them feel better.’
‘And what about you and Dan?’
‘That’s different,’ said Melanie quickly. ‘Absolutely different. The main thing about Dan is that if they catch his killer, they’ll most likely find Ben at the same time.’
‘I know. So I have to pull myself together and see if I can be of any use in catching the killer, then. Not that I see much scope for that. Whoever did it has probably left the area completely by now.’
‘I doubt it. I doubt it very much. That’d be like confessing to it. And if they’ve got Ben, that’ll just make it more difficult. Unless the people Ninian saw really were them, of course.’
‘In that case, they were driving northwards on Tuesday evening. They could be in Inverness by now. Or anywhere.’
‘So why would Bonnie be looking for him here?’
‘Wishful thinking. Or maybe they were just taking him somewhere discreet to buy him a pair of trousers.’
‘What?’
Simmy told the story, along with some of her theories as to how it might be significant. ‘Bonnie got very excited about it,’ she concluded.
‘It can’t have been him in the car, then,’ said Melanie after such a long pause that they were driving up to the hotel before she spoke. ‘Because he was in Hawkshead yesterday.’
‘Doesn’t follow. They might have brought him back again. Here you are, then. Should I come in with you, do you think?’
‘Oh!’ Melanie gave a startled laugh. ‘I never gave that a thought. How will I get back again, if you leave me here?’
‘Get the bus, like I said before. They run all evening.’
‘Yeah,’ said Melanie without enthusiasm.
‘Or make Gary come for you.’
‘Not likely. I’m not having him coming here the way he looks. Have you seen him lately? He’s got a nose stud that went septic. His face is like a horror movie.’
‘Yuk!’
‘Yuk’s not the word. He might have to have a whole piece cut out if it doesn’t clear up soon. He’ll be way weirder to look at than me, at that rate.’
Simmy knew better than to offer glib reassurance, even though Melanie’s eye was not weird. Most people barely even noticed it.
‘I’ll hang about then, I suppose,’ she offered. ‘How long will you be? You’re not here for a full shift, are you?’
‘Well … I might be. Let me go and ask. If I’m on until the evening, could you come back for me after work, maybe?’
‘Try to find someone to take you to the ferry. That’s the easiest way.’
‘There won’t be anybody.’ The girl forced a smile. ‘That’s why it was so simple just to stay over with Dan.’
‘I’ll wait while you go and see what they want you to do,’ she said. ‘No rush.’ She tried not to think of people trying the door of the shop and finding it locked. The lost business would be minimal, she assured herself. It was a warm, dry day. They’d all be walking up Wansfell and Kirkstone and the Old Man of Coniston. Nobody would want to buy flowers on a day like this.
Without thinking, she got out of the car along with Melanie. It would be too warm to sit inside the vehicle for long. ‘I’ll just potter about in the garden,’ she said.
It was forty-eight hours since she had last been there, or a bit less. Moxon had kept her waiting for much of Tuesday afternoon, she remembered. Her time had been wasted. Her presence had been overlooked and forgotten. The only person to refer to her part in what had happened was Bonnie, and she probably blamed Simmy for taking Ben there in the first place. It was little wonder she felt so remote from everything. It was obviously everyone else’s opinion as well. Melanie was using her as a free taxi, and nobody else was thinking about her at all.
The day was turning very warm, which was sure to get people talking in terms of a heatwave. Three nice days in a row was something to be celebrated. Meandering around the side of the hotel she got a panoramic view of Esthwaite and the dozen or so small boats strewn upon the surface. The water looked utterly calm, more like a pond than a lake. The idea that the most extreme act of violence had been committed on its banks was almost inconceivable.
‘Doesn’t seem possible, does it?’ said a man behind her.
She turned to face the bearded hotel guest she had first seen on Tuesday. ‘Ferguson,’ he said. ‘Forgive me if I startled you.’
It was a line from a bygone time, probably before even this elderly gent was born. It made her smile. ‘Persimmon Brown,’ she replied. ‘I’m the florist. I saw you earlier in the week.’
‘I remember. And you found the body of the unfortunate Mr Yates. It surprises me to see you here again, when the place must hold such unpleasant associations. But of course, life goes on, and there will be more flowers to arrange.’
There was a slight foreignness to his accent and something strange about his tone. ‘You’ve stayed on, then,’ she said. ‘I gather quite a lot of people left early, and others have cancelled their stay here.’
‘I believe in getting my money’s worth,’ he said gravely. ‘And I have not found myself particularly incommoded by the dramatic events. In fact, I have been a model citizen and conveyed to the police what I hope has been useful information.’
‘Really?’
He made a rueful face. ‘It seems I blundered a little. I reported a conversation I overheard between two guests, which appeared to suggest suspicious behaviour. On closer examination, it turns out that I was mistaken.’
‘I’m sure they were grateful to you, all the same.’
‘I doubt if they were. They were obliged to bring me back here from Windermere, after my interview, and that was inconvenient.’
‘So why not interview you here? Wasn’t there an incident room set up for that very purpose?’
‘They did not wish to draw attention to the fact that I was giving information. I like to think that was due to a concern for my safety.’ He shook his head. ‘The whole experience was profoundly interesting, I must say.’
Simmy was confused. It seemed to her that Moxon could easily have asked this man to repeat the overheard conversation as part of routine interviewing of staff and guests. Taking him away in a police car, and then bringing him back the same way, would surely attract considerably more attention. She could hear Ben’s ghostly voice, hypothesising that this had been Moxon’s intention all along. ‘Flushing them out,’ he would say. ‘Making them nervous that old Fergy had seen something he shouldn’t.’
‘Who were the two guests?’ she asked him. ‘The ones you overheard.’
‘Two men, who have American accents, but look Hispanic to me. That is, of Mexican or Central American origin. They were staying here, looking very conspicuous, but this morning I hear they’ve gone again.’ He worked his shoulders irritably. ‘I only wish everyone else would do the same. That Appleyard woman and her child are a constant aggravation, and the Lillywhite couple show no signs of enjoying themselves at all. They stay out all day long, and then come back with stony faces, not saying a word. Definitely not my idea of a holiday.’
‘Did that smart woman come back? The one who was here on Tuesday – do you remember? She was in a bad mood because nobody was attending to her.’
Mr Ferguson brightened. ‘Oh yes! She comes every day, but doesn’t stay. Her name is Sheila. I think she’s trying to organise some event in the big room on the first floor. The one with balconies overlooking the mere. And nobody ever has time to discuss it with her. I have her down as some kind of businesswoman, offering seminars in how to be more successful, hoping to hire the room over the winter.’
‘But it would have been Dan Yates’s job to sort it all out with her?’
‘So it would seem. And Miss Todd has been absent, too. I imagine she might have managed to agree some details.’
‘How do you know all this?’ she blurted.
‘Simply by sitting behind a newspaper in the lounge for an hour every morning. I have heard a great many conversations that way.’
She laughed. ‘No wonder Inspector Moxon wanted to talk to you,’ she said. ‘He must think you’re very useful.’
‘And I disappointed him,’ sighed the old man. ‘It was ever thus.’
‘What do you think of Penny, the receptionist?’ Simmy asked, after a quick glance around. It belatedly occurred to her that it could be embarrassing if this conversation were to be overheard.
‘Far too thin for comfort,’ he responded. ‘But much less unbalanced than she appears at first sight. All she wants is to ensure the guests have their needs met, and she does a sterling job in that respect. I have learnt very little about her personal life, but I detect a severe degree of trouble.’
‘She must have anorexia, surely,’ said Simmy, thinking of Bonnie.
‘I fancy not. I have an impression of a physical disorder. In fact, I should not be surprised if she has a lethal tumour, and knows her time is limited.’
‘Heavens! Would she still be working if that was the case?’
‘If that were the case, then she might well welcome the distraction from her woes,’ he said, reminding Simmy powerfully of her father’s insistence on the correct use of the subjunctive case.
‘Do you think she’s in pain?’ The idea was growing increasingly alarming. ‘How sure are you about this?’
He waved a hand, sweeping her questions aside. ‘Pure supposition,’ he said. ‘Think no more about it.’
What an annoying man, she thought. Eavesdropping, gossiping, jumping to conclusions. Sneaking up on her the way he had, and forcing her to talk to him. Thinking about it, she wasn’t sure she could believe a word he’d said.
‘Well, I must get on,’ she said firmly. ‘I just came over here for a look at the view.’
He bowed his head and gave her a look that suggested he was unconvinced of her veracity. She wished she could find Moxon and ask him for his opinion of Mr Ferguson. Something about him was decidedly disconcerting. Perhaps he knew who had killed Dan – even the whereabouts of the missing Ben.
Perhaps, she thought wildly, he was a murderer and a kidnapper, posing as a harmless old holidaymaker.