The Threlkeld Theory, page 9
‘Right,’ said Jonty, obviously barely listening.
‘We’ll just have a quiet weekend, eh? Your mother’s got a load of Texans doing stone circles and old ruins. I doubt we’ll see much of her.’
‘Is that someone at the door?’ Jonty cocked his head. ‘I heard a knock.’
Eddie got up and went to see, coming back a minute later with a woman he barely knew and already disliked. ‘It’s Patsy,’ he said, unnecessarily.
‘Pats,’ Jonty acknowledged. ‘How’re you doing?’
Eddie watched the pair of them, trying to work out what they thought and felt about each other. Patsy was mid-twenties to his son’s eighteen. It seemed like a big gap. Bruno had obviously been far too young for her, making more people than Eddie wonder what she was thinking of.
‘I’m in pieces,’ she said flatly. ‘You must be as well.’
‘Yeah. Sort of. None of it seems real.’ He glanced at his father, as though wishing he’d take himself out of earshot somewhere. Eddie stayed where he was.
Patsy sat down close to Jonty and patted his leg. ‘What have they told you? All they did with me was ask a whole lot of questions about him. Made me miss two appointments, and then I got sent home on compassionate grounds. They didn’t even ask me – just said it was procedure.’
‘Bummer,’ said Jonty.
‘Upsetting for your clients, if you’re emotional,’ offered Eddie, curious to know more about her work. All he really knew was that she was employed by the council and mainly dealt with individuals adrift from society and suffering mentally. Homeless, jobless, witless – he could dredge up little sympathy for the people she called her clients.
‘Worse to have them left to themselves, when they’re so dependent on me,’ she argued. ‘Means they’ve got to spend even more time in limbo. There was nobody else to stand in for me.’ The implication was that she alone could conjure up accommodation, or hospital beds or practical advice, leaving the pathetic ‘clients’ to huddle in a doorway somewhere until she came to the rescue. For all Eddie knew, this was exactly the situation.
The garden was washed with the full blaze of the lowering sun, with no trees to cast any shade. Patsy shied away from it like a vampire, while Jonty unconsciously spread himself out to get the full benefit. He had the olive skin of his maternal grandmother, and instinctively sought the sun at every opportunity. Eddie thought of Eliza and her Americans up at Castlerigg or some equally exposed spot and gave a small rueful smile. If the visitors came from the southern states, they would much prefer cloud and rain.
‘They didn’t talk to me much,’ said Jonty, answering her question. ‘But Ben says they obviously think it was murder. Someone killed Bruno on purpose.’ His face went pinched and pale, and his father flinched at the pain he could do nothing to assuage. ‘And we saw him just before he died. You, me and his dad – we were all there. I still can’t believe it.’
‘It might not be murder,’ said Patsy. ‘And I don’t think they have done a proper post-mortem. I’ve got friends at the hospital, and I phoned one of them last night to check. No need, probably. They already know what killed him.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jonty with a frown. ‘But don’t you think it might have been an accident?’
Patsy shook her head. ‘Seems unlikely. Though whoever attacked him must have been pretty useless, just hitting him like that and then leaving him. If they’d wanted it to look like an accident – which they probably did – they should have pushed him off the top of a pike, not into a beck with hardly any water in it.’
Eddie flinched again at the tone. Bitter, he diagnosed. The woman was bitter. But Jonty seemed almost reassured by it. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But who?’ He stared from his father to Patsy and back again. ‘Who could possibly want to kill Bruno?’
Chapter Eight
Angie quite liked her dentist and felt no fear of drills or needles or antiseptic smells. The broken tooth was deemed just sturdy enough to take a crown.
‘At least for a few more years,’ said the woman heartlessly. ‘It’s a case of fire-fighting at this stage. Just keep everything going for as long as we can.’
‘Thanks,’ said Angie grimly.
‘I’ll put a temporary one on now, after taking a few X-rays and impressions, so they can make the permanent one. I’ve got an hour, which should be enough.’
‘Good,’ said Angie. There were two sets of B&B guests due at around six – she’d be back in plenty of time for them.
She relinquished all control to the pleasant forty-year-old dentist, and thought about her little grandson. She would have to put a baby seat in the car, for when Persimmon allowed her to drive him around. And she would buy a stack of books to read to him. The time when her daughter would get back to working regularly in the shop was fast approaching, and Angie would have custody of the baby for several hours a week.
It would be a mixed pleasure, she admitted to herself. A curtailment of a freedom she had not made the best use of in recent years. Now she was losing it, she regretted not getting about a lot more. But on the other hand she could take Robin out to a whole variety of places – with Russell sure to want to go with them. A change to their routine would be welcome.
‘All done,’ said the dentist, sooner than expected.
Angie barely waited for the adjustable seat to return to a position from which she could easily rise. But seconds after she was on her feet, she was gripped with a wholly unexpected cramp, all down the inner thigh of her right leg. She gasped and sat back on the dentist’s chair. It was agony. She couldn’t breathe.
‘Cramp!’ she said. ‘Oooh!’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said the dentist unhelpfully. ‘That happened to another woman last week. Something about the change of position.’
‘Never mind that,’ panted Angie. ‘Do something!’
From behind the dentist, a young nurse pushed forward. ‘Let me,’ she said, and started to knead the rigid muscles, having unceremoniously grabbed Angie’s leg inside the light summer trousers.
‘Ow!’ shrieked Angie. ‘That’s making it worse.’ She was drowning in the pain, her whole body tensing in sympathy.
‘You need to try to relax,’ said the girl. ‘It’ll go completely in a minute.’
‘Relax!’ shouted Angie. ‘You’re joking.’ Her body was betraying her, behaving entirely outside her control. It hurt prodigiously, lavishly, making her want to roll on the ground and cry. It frightened her and made her think of death. Was this what old people had to endure? People with cancer or angina? Regular violent assaults, wracking and beyond remedy? How was it to be borne?
‘Haven’t you had it before?’ asked the dentist.
‘Not there. The back of my leg, lower down, sometimes in the night. This is much worse. It’s unbearable.’
‘And yet you’re bearing it,’ the nurse pointed out.
Angie looked at her. ‘Am I?’
‘Take deep slow breaths. Don’t fight it. It’ll be gone in another minute. I can feel it getting softer. Can’t you?’
‘Yes, but it might come back.’ Angie was going to live in dread of it coming back, for the rest of her life, she was sure.
‘It won’t. You’ll forget all about it by tomorrow. Like childbirth.’
‘I hope so.’ She looked again at the girl. ‘You’re very good at this.’
‘I teach antenatal classes,’ came the surprising reply. ‘I’m trained for this sort of thing.’
‘Well, you can give me as a reference any time,’ said Angie, and cautiously got to her feet. ‘You’re right. It’s gone. I feel all soft and wimbly now.’
‘You’ll be back to normal in no time,’ the girl promised.
‘I won’t, though,’ Angie realised. ‘I felt as if Death was stroking me, with a horrible smile on his face. I won’t forget that – ever.’ She shuddered. ‘I really saw it for a second.’
The kind nurse had nothing to say to that and neither did the dentist. Angie had stepped quite a way over a line and could expect no comforting response. Nobody was going to accompany her down that road if they could help it. She was escorted to the reception desk and left to make the next appointment for her permanent crown. How will I feel about coming back here? she wondered. At least they’d make sure she got out of the chair with all due care.
‘People quite often die at the dentist,’ said Russell unsympathetically, when his wife tried to tell him what had happened. ‘But not of cramp.’
‘“Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love”,’ said Angie. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say?’
‘Oh, such glorious cynicism,’ sighed Russell. ‘We’ll have to teach it to Robin.’
‘If we live long enough,’ said Angie glumly.
‘Our daughter telephoned,’ he remembered to tell her. ‘Events are developing in Threlkeld and she assumes young Ben will have a theory about it any time now.’
‘Didn’t he have one already? Something about nowhere being as calm and innocent and bland as it looked on the surface?’
‘He did, and all of a sudden he’s proved right. He tempted the gods, silly fellow.’
Angie tried to think. ‘What if the killer was listening and wanted to make his point for him?’
‘Impossible. Nobody would be as insane as that. Even fictitious serial killers have a better motive than that.’
‘And the timing doesn’t work,’ said Angie, striving to think like a detective. She’d tried it before, and it never worked out successfully. The truth was, she had no idea about the timing of the latest murder. All she knew was that nothing untoward had happened by the time she and Russell had left the wedding party with Bonnie.
‘Simmy thinks it must have happened some time after four. So if a person was listening to Ben at about three, it would work perfectly well,’ Russell corrected her. ‘Christopher had a talk with Moxon today, and caught up with some of the story. Moxon went for a walk up by the beck some time after three o’clock and there was no dying youth there then.’
‘Yes, we knew that. Except he seems to think he might have walked right past without noticing. I imagine him with his head in the air, probably composing poetry, or at least quoting Wordsworth to himself. He’s an awful sentimentalist at heart, you know.’
‘I think we can safely discard any idea that he writes poems, all the same. He’s no Adam Dalgliesh, for heaven’s sake.’
‘He might be,’ Angie insisted. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me at all.’
‘Oh well. I agree with you insofar as he was probably lost in thought – most likely about Simmy – and wouldn’t have noticed a murder going on a few yards away.’
‘“Insofar”,’ she murmured. ‘That’s a new one.’
‘Good, though, don’t you think?’ he twinkled at her.
Angie wouldn’t think any more about dying, she promised herself. It did no good, and if she forced her husband to listen to musings about mortality it would only depress him. It would happen eventually of its own accord, after all, whether she contemplated it or not.
‘Don’t forget we’ve got Robin all morning tomorrow,’ she said needlessly. Russell had been accumulating items for the baby’s amusement for days. ‘I hope the guests don’t linger over breakfast.’
As if conjured by magic, the doorbell rang and a family of four flowed into the hall. Angie went into autopilot, reciting the details of keys, local eateries, location of various rooms, while Russell disappeared into the kitchen with his dog.
Another two guests turned up an hour later, filling the house to capacity. Much of the evening was going to be spent preparing for the next day’s breakfast, everything laid out with military precision, the sausages pre-cooked for rapid warming, fruit already in bowls, everything to hand for maximum speed and efficiency.
‘This is a mug’s game,’ Angie muttered to herself as she worked. She had never been a natural or enthusiastic cook, and the financial return for all this attention to food often seemed ludicrously inadequate, especially on a summer evening when she might be sitting out beside a lake somewhere.
But Russell liked the people, and it gave their lives a focus. And the money was actually far from derisory. Over the years they had accumulated an impressive amount of savings, joking about a world cruise or a hideaway on Malta or Fuerteventura for their old age. But now they had a grandchild and there was no question of leaving the area because they couldn’t miss a moment of his growing up.
Simmy was berating herself for a surprising level of anxiety about the prospect of spending a whole morning in the shop. She had always been vague about when she would return full time – if she ever did. Now it seemed to have rushed at her before she was ready. Robin was only four months old; it felt wrong, almost violent. But she assured herself that he would be perfectly happy with her parents and the shop would benefit from her attention. Bonnie was brilliant at the surface stuff – the window display and the friendly greetings she gave the customer – but she let dust accumulate in the corners and forgot to order boring things like cellophane for wrapping and new light bulbs. Verity was even worse, not seeing any of that as her responsibility. Simmy was going to be kept busy making lists and putting in orders.
‘You’ll love it when you get there,’ Christopher told her, noticing her agitation.
It had been a shock when, a week or two earlier, he had said he wouldn’t be able to promise to mind the baby while he was still so small. In fact, she had not believed him at first. When she chose a Saturday morning at the end of July, she made sure it would be a day when there was no auction. She had simply assumed he would do his bit as a parent when it came to the point. She began to explain about the bottle of expressed milk when he stopped her.
‘I told you before, I think it would be much better if he went to your parents,’ he said. ‘That’s who’s going to have him when you go back to work properly, so you may as well get him used to it now.’
‘That’s true, but this is just a trial run. It seems excessive to bother them when I can just leave Robin with you for a morning.’
‘I disagree,’ he insisted.
She might have understood if he’d used the death of Bruno as his reason, but he had told her long before that happened that he could not be relied on. ‘But why?’ she had demanded.
‘I need to be free to go out at short notice,’ he had said.
‘What for?’ It had been so unexpected, she could hardly speak. ‘I hope you’re not trying to tell me you’re never going to have him, in case he cramps your style. This is madness.’
‘When he’s a bit bigger,’ said Christopher weakly. ‘But now … it’s just …’
‘So where do you think you might have to rush off to?’ Hadn’t they discussed this, when she was pregnant? She tried to recall an actual commitment from the child’s father, in vain. ‘You knew I’d want to leave him with you sometimes.’
‘Not really. I always assumed you’d leave him with your mother when you were at the shop.’ There had been a hunted look on his face that scared her. Her heart had thumped with an irrational panic. They were newly married and were hoping for a second child. They had a new house and were even planning to acquire a dog. What had gone wrong at this very last moment? She stared at him. ‘Am I taking this too seriously?’ she wondered. ‘Is it something I need to worry about?’
‘It’s only while he’s so little,’ Christopher tried again. ‘What if he cries and won’t stop? And I don’t understand bottles. Give me a bit longer, OK? Don’t get worked up about it.’
Gradually, she accepted that he was genuinely frightened of being left alone with an infant whose mother was twenty miles away. Even his own familiar son, who trusted and loved him unreservedly, was frightening. It seemed mad, in the context of twenty-first-century fatherhood, but it would have been unremarkable a century earlier. Perhaps it was her own fault, not standing back enough to let Christopher learn and practise every aspect of baby care. Well, she could easily change that without making an issue of it.
‘OK, I’ll leave him with Mum and Dad, then. They’ll be delighted,’ she had added in a confused attempt to make Christopher feel bad.
It had not actually been a difficult decision, and nothing was lost by it – except for a spoonful of trust and respect she had automatically accorded Christopher. That had gone, and she felt a burning need to talk it over with someone. The fact that nobody came to mind as a reliable confidante worried her. She should have more friends, she concluded. Somebody her own age who understood these things.
There were two possible candidates – Helen Harkness and Corinne. Both in their fifties, with a lot of life experience. And both too closely linked to Ben and Bonnie to be trusted with something so intimate. It was all too close, too incestuous. That word occurred much too often as it was, with Simmy and Christopher so nearly siblings.
‘New blood,’ she muttered to herself. ‘We need new blood.’
There was a woman in Glenridding, only a mile away, with a baby the same age as Robin who had come for coffee a few times. The woman at the Patterdale pub had introduced them. But it had not developed into a genuine friendship. Abby was too risk-averse, too concerned about germs and sterilising everything to ever become a soulmate to the daughter of Angie Straw. Even the babies did not like each other much.
On this late Friday afternoon, it was apparent that Christopher could think of little else but the killing of Bruno Crowther. The childcare arrangements for the following day were all settled in his mind, and needed no more consideration. Instead, he made Simmy listen while he went over everything Moxon, Ben and Jonty had said that morning, with special reference to any implications there might be for the auction house.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Simmy. ‘How could it reflect on you, in any way at all?’
‘It was my wedding going on when it happened. I know all the people involved. And there’s a history,’ he finished miserably. ‘It only takes the slightest hint for everyone to start thinking the worst again.’
