The Ambleside Alibi: 2 (21 page)

‘Why did I choose to live up here?’ Simmy moaned. ‘What was I thinking of?’

‘Don’t be daft. It’s lovely. Best of all worlds. I wish I’d had the sense to do the same.’

‘Where do you live, then?’

‘Bowness,’ he said shortly, and she realised it was a taboo question. Bowness, she supposed, was the
worst
of all worlds, if you liked solitude and wildness and unspoilt landscape.

‘We should swop,’ she said. At that particular moment, she would cheerfully have signed the papers without a second thought.

‘Gladly,’ he agreed.

‘So what exactly are we going to do?’ she asked. ‘How will we find these men? And what are we going to say to them?’

‘We’ll drive up to Town Head, and see how it goes.’

She stared at his profile as he drove slowly up the winding
little road. ‘What? You think they’ll just be standing out in full view, and I just have to point them out?’

‘I think we might get lucky.’

She knew he was teasing her; that there was some convoluted scheme afoot that she wasn’t privy to. He turned left at the church, and headed up the narrow lane towards the centre of the village. ‘I hope it’s not icy at the top,’ she said. It was a manoeuvre she habitually avoided. The final few yards involved a narrow steep turn which was a disaster in any weather if you met something coming down. In treacherous weather, it didn’t bear thinking about.

But it was not only easily accomplished, but Moxon began a wholly unexpected conversation in the process. ‘Ninian Tripp visited you in hospital – is that right?’

‘Er … yes, he did. Julie brought him. He said he’d run the shop for me if I needed him to.’

‘Did he indeed? How well do you know him?’

‘I’ve seen him three or four times. I’ve heard a bit about his background.’ She was stiff with defensiveness, her injured bones suddenly protesting. Dimly she imagined the official police impression of Ninian, with his peripheral lifestyle. They would automatically hold him to be a suspicious character, simply because he failed to adhere to the normal conventions.

‘He told you about his criminal record, then?’

She wanted to lie and say of course she knew the whole story. She refused to take the bait, feeling a sudden scorn for the transparency of Moxon’s thinking. ‘I don’t think I’d be very interested,’ she said coldly. ‘I take people as I find them, and I must say I liked him a lot.’

‘And Julie – what does she make of him?’

‘She likes him as well. And she’s much more selective about people than I am.’

‘Oh, he’s a charmer, all right. And you’ll let him loose on your shop, then, will you?’

‘I might, if it makes the difference between surviving and going out of business.’

‘Which it won’t. Don’t give me that.’

‘Well don’t you try to blacken a man’s character for no reason!’ she flashed back. ‘You’re lucky my mother isn’t here.’ She was overflowing with the many critical remarks she might make on behalf of her mother. They ranged from the way police officers assumed they could make judgements on people’s lives to the everlasting surveillance that amounted to outrageous intrusion on everybody’s privacy.

He sighed, and Simmy remembered how she had made him laugh when he visited her in hospital.
He likes me,
she thought.
And he wants me to like him
. It was a pity, she supposed, that she could only manage it about half the time.

‘Let’s stop at your house first,’ he suggested. They were almost at her door as he spoke. Her whitewashed cottage looked chilly and neglected, and she felt a pang of guilt at how little she had thought of it. There were modest drifts of snow on the flowerbeds and the front step had an unspoilt inch or so of white topping like the icing on a cake. Evidently the postman hadn’t been that day. Moxon turned off the ignition and opened his door. ‘Come on, then. I should come in with you and check there’s been no burst pipes or anything.’

Burst pipes were the very least of her worries. Lakeland
plumbing took freezing temperatures for granted and she knew there was barely any risk. There was more likelihood of a fire, given that she had left most of her appliances switched on, assuming she would be back on Sunday evening, rather than five eventful days later.

She had almost certainly left the back door unlocked, despite a previous experience of somebody simply walking in and making themselves at home. Given what had happened on Sunday, this might not have been too good an idea.

‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to help me out.’

Nobody had been in; the house was just as she left it. But her clothes were all upstairs and she had not yet tackled stairs. She looked at them dubiously. ‘I suppose it’s not so difficult,’ she said. ‘Just a matter of keeping my balance.’

‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘Did they really say you mustn’t put
any
weight on your feet? That doesn’t seem possible.’

‘Just use them for balance, they said. It’s not so bad when you get used to it. But
stairs
…’

They both knew he should offer to go up and make a selection of pants, jumpers, socks, enough to last a week or more. And they both found the fact that he was a professional male police detective came as a block to such assistance.

They were saved – or so it felt – by his phone going off. He answered it on the second beat and after twenty seconds thanked the caller with a tightness that Simmy interpreted as urgent excitement.

‘We have to go back to Windermere,’ he told her, looking at her with something like frustration. ‘They think they might have found her.’

‘Who?’

‘Your granddaughter person. In that same pub we were in last week, as it happens. The Elleray. She’s staying there with another woman.’

‘She told me on Sunday that she was going home,’ Simmy protested.

‘It might not be her. We don’t have a picture of her, remember. More likely, she lied to you. But we’ve got forty officers watching out for a young woman in a Mondeo, possibly acting strangely. Now they’ve found one, okay? And I’ve got you with me to identify her. We need to go.’

‘Isn’t it rather early to be in the pub? What time do they open? She must be very conspicuous.’

‘Precisely. That’s why they called me.’

‘Who did? The pub people?’

‘No more questions.’ He made as if to grab her arm, but did not make actual contact. Instead he flapped a hand at her. ‘Please come on.’

She looked around her house, disliking being rushed. ‘I should turn the heating down, at least. And switch the telly off on the wall. I don’t know when I’ll be back, do I?’ The clothes, so near and yet so far, nagged at her. ‘And I really do need some clean pants. My mother’s feel all wrong.’

Without a word, he ran upstairs, not asking her for any instructions. Less than a minute later he was back holding a canvas bag that had been in a cupboard, stuffed full of random clothes. Then he went into the sitting room and disconnected the TV. ‘The heating can stay as it is. Are you on gas or oil?’

‘Oil,’ she said, with a wince. ‘What a waste!’

‘You won’t want to come back to a freezing cold house. It’s best to leave it. Now can we go?’

It had only been five minutes since the phone call. She had no reason to reproach herself for delaying him – especially as it had been his idea to come to Troutbeck in the first place. She thought wistfully of the odd little piece of detective work he apparently had in mind, now no longer required, if it was indeed Candida at the Elleray. For the first time, her heart began to thump with anxiety.

It took two more minutes to get her back into the car, during which she said nothing. But once they were moving, she asked, ‘What if it was Candida who pushed me into the water? What’ll she think when she sees me?’

‘Well … she’ll know from the news that you’re still alive, so it won’t be a complete shock. Beyond that, I have no idea. That is rather the point of the exercise. Or part of it.’

‘Isn’t there some evidence at Miss Clark’s house? Fingerprints or something?’

‘A few, of course. Three or four sets from people we can’t identify, which might include your Hawkins girl. We haven’t got hers to match anything against. And there’s the usual collection of hairs and fibres and footprints, which may or may not have anything to do with her killer.’

Simmy sighed, wishing she’d watched the same forensic programmes as Ben and understood at least something of the way it all worked. She had a suspicion that she was in a very small, very ignorant minority, with virtually no working knowledge of how – for example – a DNA test was done, or what the vital signs of strangling might be. Even the garbled story of how Miss Clark had been killed by a hypodermic made very little sense to her. Moxon had
told her almost nothing about how the murder had been committed, leaving her to wonder about the accuracy of the rumours. Besides, there was still the major question of the alibi. Unless something new had been discovered about the time of death, Candida Hawkins was still in the clear.

Moxon sighed in unison. ‘The whole business has been frustrating,’ he confessed. ‘We might have come up with a whole lot of useful information, if we’d been cleared to do a deeper forensic exploration. But that’s expensive, and the powers that be wanted it done in the old-fashioned way, if possible. Asking questions and watching certain individuals can very often work better than sifting through a hundred evidence bags – which can have a very annoying habit of losing their labels.’

‘That must be expensive as well – in manpower?’

‘Less so. They’d mostly be working anyway. We’ve just diverted people from other jobs for a few days.’

‘It’s crazy, though, isn’t it, to think Candida killed the old lady? What about the timing? How come you were so sure about that, when you wanted me to give Mr Kitchener the alibi?’

‘Miss Clark’s neighbour spoke to her at ten-thirty that morning. A man delivering a parcel found her body at eleven-thirty, still warm.
Very
warm. And there were clear signs that her death was not natural.’

Simmy wished she hadn’t asked. But there was no retreating now. ‘How did the parcel man find her?’

‘He said he knew her slightly – well enough to try her door and open it when he found it wasn’t locked. She was lying in the hallway. But there is that hour, you see, when it was done. With some very clever footwork, it could just
possibly still be either of the people you saw in the café.’

‘And you’ve opted for the girl, because she can move faster and there’s a mystery around her? Seems to me you’re clutching at straws.’

‘When there’s only one or two straws available to clutch at, it might turn out to be a lot better than nothing.’

‘I don’t see how. You’ll drown in any case.’ Her mind filled with pictures of cold swirling water and a flimsy stalk offering no prospect whatever of rescue.

‘You’re forgetting Ben Harkness’s spreadsheets. He makes a credible case for there being a connection between the Josephs and the Clarks, even if it goes back to before this granddaughter was even born.’

‘And her being born seems to be a key factor,’ Simmy offered, feeling rather clever.

‘If she is what she says – which some people seem to doubt. We’ve gone into it thoroughly, and there’s no indication at all that either of the Joseph daughters ever gave birth to a child that could be her. Davida gave her child up for adoption, decades ago – I’ve lost track of how long it must be – something over forty years, I think – and then had a son who lives with her and her husband. The other one’s gay, and never had a child. In fact – and this is very weird – she produced an affidavit she signed when she and her partner first set up home together. It’s a sworn statement to the effect that she has never slept with a man. They produced it as final proof that the granddaughter couldn’t possibly be hers.’

‘That
is
weird. Who would ever go to so much trouble? I mean – whatever
for
?’

‘Something between the two of them, obviously. I didn’t think we needed to go any more deeply into it.’

‘Wait a minute. When did this happen – the police questioning, I mean? Why would you do that? What did you say to them?’ The realisation that the Joseph family now had plain proof that she, Simmy Brown, had disclosed their personal business to the police was disturbing. ‘I never imagined you’d do that,’ she complained.

‘Calm down. We had no choice when we knew what took you up Peggy Hill on Sunday. Somebody tried to
kill
you. We take that sort of thing extremely seriously. So we located Mrs Joseph and her daughters.’

‘I see that, I suppose. But Mrs Joseph is staying with Davy. And why would you need to speak to Nicola anyway?’ She looked at him. ‘Were you there personally?’

‘No I wasn’t, as it happens. The three women were all there together at the older daughter’s house. They seemed quite eager to tell the story. They expressed great concern for your welfare, and worried that they were somehow responsible. They volunteered the information about the granddaughter. At least, the old lady did.’

‘And Nicola had that affidavit about her person?’

‘In her bag.’

‘That’s bizarre.’

‘Maybe not, given that the whole question of the granddaughter was so central for them. I think she’d been showing it to her mother, to convince her there was no way it was her child.’

‘That makes sense,’ Simmy agreed. ‘So you didn’t tell them Candida’s name?’

‘No, we didn’t. But I don’t see why it would matter if we did.’

She frowned thoughtfully. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t. I just
feel it would be a bad idea, somehow. I’m not sure why.’

‘Because you know there’s a chance this girl is a killer,’ he suggested.

‘With no reason whatever to murder Miss Clark – or me. I’m sorry, but without some sort of motive, you’re never going to persuade me.’

‘I don’t really want to,’ he said, with a smile. ‘It’s not really about persuasion.’

But she was still immersed in the morass of questions that remained to be answered. ‘That brings us back to Mr Kitchener, doesn’t it? We know his mother and Nancy Clark were very far from being friends, for reasons even Mrs Ellis didn’t seem to know. Maybe it’s something really awful, and old Mrs K extracted a deathbed promise from her son to do the deed.’