The Ambleside Alibi: 2 (26 page)

‘That’s the spirit!’ Melanie applauded.

‘I’m really sorry, Sim,’ grovelled Ben. ‘You’re not going to curse me as well, are you?’ His worry seemed genuine, and Simmy relaxed into a reassuring laugh.

‘Not if you promise to mind what you say in future.’

Melanie took them back to the main point. ‘Nicola Joseph really did confess, then? Just like that?’

Simmy did her best to fill in the gaps calmly. ‘Sort of. She was explaining it to Gwen. And Candida, in a way. Isn’t that
weird
, though? Your biological child that you didn’t carry for nine months or deliver or ever see or hold.’ As she spoke, she relived the minutes she had had with her stillborn daughter and almost counted herself fortunate. ‘It must feel so strange.’

‘Did they ever tell her there was a child?’ Melanie wondered.

‘They must have done, or she’d have had no reason to kill Nancy Clark. I suppose Nancy herself told her, actually. Then blackmailed her, because she’d found out how Gwen would react.’ She thought for a minute. ‘You can sort of see how that could have gone, can’t you? Nicola probably blurted it all out from the start. Something like, “Oh, God! If Gwen ever finds out, she’ll leave me” kind of thing. Gave Nancy her chance, there and then.’

‘Candida kept saying Nicola must be mad. She said, “I’m the daughter of a madwoman.” Not just mad, though. She could easily have killed five people – no, four. I’m counting myself twice.’ She laughed. ‘But what an awful business. Candida’s own mother seems really nice. Sensible, affluent, open-minded.’

‘The sort of woman who’d tell the kid the whole story from the start, you think?’ asked Ben.

Simmy thought for a moment. ‘No, Candida said she wasn’t told until quite recently. How
would
you explain it, anyway? You’d have to wait until the child understood the mechanics of reproduction.’

‘That’d be when it was about four,’ said Melanie, ‘if my sisters are anything to go by.’

Ben returned to the central issue of motive. ‘But she said she did it to stop Gwen finding out? And that meant killing everyone who knew about it – including the girl herself
and
her mother? That’s worse than mad, surely? That’s totally ludicrous.’

‘I’m not totally sure she seriously meant to kill us last night. She just wanted to stop the story spreading. She wanted the Hawkins women to go back home and never speak to her again. It was a sort of extreme warning.’

‘But she did want you dead, because she pushed you off that bridge. It
was
her, wasn’t it?’ The boy narrowed his eyes, thinking hard. ‘Is that for definite?’

‘Who else could it have been?’ Simmy shivered at the idea of a second would-be killer. ‘Of course it was her. When you think about it, it’s exactly what a woman like her would do. No blood, no getting her hands dirty. She could just walk away as if nothing had happened.’ The rage threatened to return. ‘What a foul person she must be. Look what she’s done to me.’

‘You’ll be fine in a few more days,’ Melanie assured her. ‘You’ll be bored stiff and wanting to get back to work.’

Simmy looked around the room and felt the walls closing in on her. The stack of DVDs by the telly looked painfully small. She wasn’t sure she could lose herself in a book for more than a couple of hours each day. ‘You could be right,’ she said.

In the calm that followed, she wondered about her father and his panic attack. ‘I ought to find out if Dad’s all right,’ she said. ‘He lost it a bit this morning.’

‘It must have been awful for them,’ Melanie sympathised. ‘You being their only one. All those
what ifs
must have got through to them by now. That’s what my gran said, when she heard. Says it would have been like killing three people, not one.’

‘At least nobody seems to be missing Nancy Clark much,’ said Ben, obviously striving to show appropriate feeling.

He got no reply, because the doorbell rang for the third time that morning.

‘Where is she? I must speak to her,’ came a strangled desperate voice from the front doorstep. When Simmy’s mother tried to prevaricate, having no idea who this new visitor might be, he simply swept her aside and limped into the living room. His face was twisted, his hair spiky, his shoulders jerking with tension. When he saw Simmy, he rushed at her. She cringed back in terror, but instead of striking her he flung his arms round her. It took some moments to understand that his intentions were anything but malign.

‘Hey!’ Ben protested. ‘Put her down. She’s hurt.’

Simmy pushed him away, more or less gently. ‘What’s all this?’ she asked, feeling weirdly maternal towards him.

‘I owe everything to you,’ wept Malcolm Kitchener. ‘I can never thank you enough.’

For the fiftieth time, Simmy wanted to argue this point,
to repeat yet again
But I didn’t do anything
. ‘Sit down and tell us what you mean,’ she ordered.

He was kneeling on the floor, all dignity abandoned. Not that he’d ever had much dignity, Simmy reflected. Poor man – he had been every bit as passive and victimised as she had herself, from the very start. ‘Here – sit here,’ Melanie suggested, shifting along the sofa to make space for him. With a scramble, he did as invited. ‘Now – talk,’ said Melanie.

‘It’s Brenda,’ he began. ‘My sister. She wants to see you as well, when the police have finished with her.’

Astonishment rendered Simmy, Ben and Melanie speechless. Mr Kitchener went on, ‘She had an email from the police, last week, and flew over right away. She’s been here since Wednesday.’

‘So it wasn’t her who pushed Simmy in the beck,’ said Ben. Everybody looked at him.

‘Of course not,’ said Mr Kitchener. He was slowly getting himself together, speaking more clearly, although it was plainly an effort.

‘Why didn’t you tell us she was here when we saw you yesterday?’ Melanie demanded. ‘We had all that talk in the car and you never said a word.’

‘She asked me not to. She wanted to do a bit of detective work of her own. She had an idea there was something about Nicola Joseph, you see. Some secret that only the two of them knew. It goes back to the time when she emigrated. She went all of a sudden, just vanished overnight, very nearly. My mother was terribly upset.’

‘Did they ever meet again?’ asked Melanie.

‘Oh, yes. Every year, actually. Mum went out there five or six times, and Brenda came here a lot. But she never stayed long, and never looked up old friends. Especially not Nicola.’

‘Is she married?’ Simmy asked.

‘Of course not. She’s a lesbian. She’s got a partner, Ellie. They live in Darwin. It’s very hot.’

‘So – Brenda knew about the egg donation. Did she know there was a child as a result of it?’

He stared at her. ‘Pardon?’

‘Didn’t you know about it, then?’

‘I don’t know anything about that time. Except I knew Nicola quite well, because I was working for her dad. She used to come in and do a bit of casual work when we were busy. And she always wanted the offcuts from the printworks, for some reason.’

‘It’ll all come out now, anyway,’ said Ben.

‘What will?’

‘The whole story,’ said the boy with some exasperation. ‘Haven’t you come to tell it to us yourself?’

‘Egg donation,’ the man muttered. ‘What’s that, anyway?’

‘That girl, Candida Hawkins – she’s Nicola’s biological daughter. She came from Nicola’s egg,’ said Simmy, hearing how peculiar it sounded, as she spoke.

‘Right.’ He was obviously having trouble grasping the concept. ‘Do I know Candida Hawkins?’ He blinked in confusion.

‘Let’s get back to Brenda,’ urged Ben.

Mr Kitchener complied with relief. ‘She went to the police yesterday afternoon, and demanded they exhume our
mother’s body. She’s convinced there was foul play. They fobbed her off, but she went back again first thing today, and they told her there was no need to do an exhumation, because Nicola had already confessed to killing her. After everything else she’s done, I’m quite surprised they even remembered my poor old mum. She used the same method as with Nancy. She must have been so happy when the police thought I did it.’ He gave Simmy a dog-like smile of devotion. ‘And thanks to you, that was never a serious proposition.’

‘But it does bring the total back to five,’ Simmy realised. ‘She’s practically a serial killer.’

Mr Kitchener was intent on a complete debriefing. ‘Brenda came and talked to me about a whole lot of things, last night. We had a bottle of wine and cried together. She’s always been a good sister to me. We’ve got a lot of history, with the way our dad was. She did her best to keep him off me. No wonder she never wanted any truck with men. And now our dear old mum gets herself killed by a madwoman.’ He sniffed ominously.

‘But
why
?’ Ben demanded.

‘Bren thinks it must have been that Mum knew something about Nicola that had to be kept from that partner of hers. Now I realise it was because of this egg thing.’

‘Hang on,’ said Ben. ‘This was ages before Simmy delivered the flowers, wasn’t it? So the whole thing goes a lot further back than we thought.’

‘Makes you wonder whether there were others, years ago, who might have gone the same way,’ said Melanie. ‘How could anybody live like that – always terrified of a
secret coming out and killing anyone who might give it away?’

‘So Brenda never said anything about the egg donation?’ asked Simmy. ‘Doesn’t she realise that that’s what this whole business is about?’

‘I expect she does, but she wouldn’t talk about that sort of thing with me.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Bit of a prude is our Brenda, funnily enough.’

‘If she killed Mrs Kitchener with an air embolism, there’ll be no way they can find evidence of it now,’ Ben asserted. ‘So no sense in doing an exhumation. Lucky she confessed. They’d never prove it otherwise.’

‘So how did they know Nancy Clark had been murdered, then?’ For the first time this detail occurred to Simmy.

Melanie and Ben grinned at her like clever twins. ‘A fluke,’ said Ben. ‘Miss Clark was diabetic, so she’d had countless insulin injections in the past few years. It was all rather obvious – especially because Moxo himself is diabetic, so he knew the procedure.’

‘Explain,’ ordered Simmy.

‘Okay. In a nutshell, you inject insulin into fatty tissue, in your stomach, hips – places where there’s some meat. Definitely not into a vein. But the air embolism thing obviously has to go directly into a vein. Moxo saw the site of the fatal injection and made an instant deduction. Plus she was lying on the floor with bruises in all the wrong places.
Plus
she’d been to the doctor the day before, as fit as a flea. He’d done some routine checks on her and swore there was no way she’d die of heart failure or a coronary the very next day.’

‘You got all that from your friend Scott?’ Simmy accused him. ‘And never told us.’

‘I told you it was a lethal injection, and it was.’

‘So that’s it,’ said Melanie. ‘It really is this time.’ She sighed. ‘Doesn’t seem worth killing anybody for, does it?’

‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Simmy.

‘I blame that Gwen,’ said Melanie. ‘She must be a real control freak.’

‘It does sound like that, but I really liked her,’ gloomed Simmy. ‘She gave me some bedsocks.’

Ben’s laugh lifted her spirits in seconds. Mr Kitchener added his own contribution, with a reassuring smile. ‘She’s perfectly decent,’ he confirmed. ‘Brenda went to see her today. Said she should have done it years ago and settled old jealousies. Turns out they’ve always been jealous of each other.’

‘All over the worthless Nicola,’ sneered Ben.

‘Nobody’s worthless,’ the man reproached him. ‘You have to learn that, lad. It matters more than anything.’

‘So, what
was
the motive?’ pressed Melanie.

‘Fear,’ said Mr Kitchener. ‘She was terrified that one of them would betray her secret. She’d spent nineteen years keeping it hidden, brushing it out of sight. And almost as bad as Gwen finding out, was her mother knowing about it as well. She simply couldn’t deal with the implications of a daughter showing up.’

‘And she thought I might betray her as well,’ said Simmy.

‘She
was
very angry with you,’ he nodded. ‘Must have been, we think. But perhaps it wasn’t planned like the others. She saw you at her mother’s front door on Sunday night and saw red, thinking you’d gone to drop her even
further into the doodah. It would appear she was panicking by then, and just firefighting, trying to keep the lid on the whole business.’

‘That’s exactly what she said last night,’ Simmy confirmed. ‘So we’ve got it straight at last.’

‘You know a lot about it,’ Ben accused Mr Kitchener, a trifle sullenly.

‘I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours and more making it my business to uncover the whole story. I saw these two ladies yesterday’ – he smiled at Simmy and Melanie – ‘and talked things through with them. It helped a lot. You told me about the girl, remember? That got me thinking along different lines. Then I popped into the Elleray for some lunch and the chap behind the bar started gossiping about two women he’d got staying there, and pennies began to drop.’ He shook his head in self-reproach. ‘It did occur to me to follow them, last night, but I didn’t know how to go about it, not having a car. I might have pulled you out of the lake a bit sooner, if I’d been there. As it was, it was far too late when I turned up. By then they were winching the car back onto dry land.’

‘How did you know where she was? Candida, I mean?’

‘They told the Elleray guy that they were dining at the Belsfield. He was not a little miffed about it, actually. Thought it meant his food wasn’t good enough for them.’

‘His food’s excellent,’ said Simmy absently. ‘And probably barely half the price.’

‘We’ll never know the finer details,’ Ben announced. ‘How A met B and what they said about C. It’d only drive us mad trying to guess. We know everything we
need to, now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And I’ve got to go.’

‘Hey!’ Simmy remembered. ‘How did the play go last night?’

‘Pretty well. Even better tonight, obviously.’ He drooped. ‘Shame you won’t see it.’

Simmy did a rapid inventory of her bones and bruises. ‘I wouldn’t give up hope just yet,’ she said.

Not many hours later, Melanie escorted her into the large school hall, assisted by Wilf, who was hovering near the door as they went in. ‘I’ve saved some seats at the front,’ he said.

The play was a revelation to Simmy. The antics of the lion gave rise to agonising laughter that set her broken rib back several days. Ben, the scrawny adolescent boy, was transformed into a gruff warrior wrestling with insuperable moral difficulties. The acting made Simmy’s head spin, until she forgot entirely that it was Ben Harkness she was watching. The message of the play seemed to come and go, until she gave up trying to grasp it. None of the characters seemed to be able to put their ideals into practice – that much she understood. It had unmissable implications for modern times, in the reaction of authority to unpopular sentiments and the power of the masses to demonise certain individuals. It raised questions of martyrdom and persecution and the lure of warfare with a light touch that turned uncomfortable moments quickly to comedy.

It bothered her not at all that Christianity came out of it so badly in the first act, because the direction of the play made it plain that the real Christian was Androcles, who
made the audience laugh and clap with almost every line. What bothered her more was that Ben had not been given the starring role. The Androcles boy was good, but Ben was light years better.

‘Wow!’ she gasped, when the final curtain came down. ‘That was amazing.’

She looked at the youngsters on either side of her, eager to debate the themes of the play. But they had no eyes for her. Wilf was leaning back in his chair, his gaze running past her to Melanie, who was equally canted backwards. Simmy sat forward, fumbling for her crutches. ‘You should have said you wanted to sit together,’ she complained.

‘Yes, we should,’ Melanie said. ‘Next time, we will.’

On the way out, they almost collided with Ninian Tripp, and Simmy automatically looked round for Julie, associating the two in her mind. But her friend was nowhere in sight. ‘Hello!’ she greeted him. ‘On your own?’

He pushed long hair from his face. ‘I am, yes.’

‘Do you know any of them? The people in the play?’

‘Oh, no. It’s just that I’m mad keen on Shaw, and when I saw they were doing it, I had to get a ticket. Wasn’t it wonderful? Didn’t they make a brilliant job of it!’ He was pink with enthusiasm.

Simmy wanted very much to stay and talk to him about it, but Melanie was clucking round her and insisting she be driven home immediately. ‘You’re dreadfully pale,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ she told him, helplessly.

Her mother helped her to bed, listening to an account of the play. ‘It puts things into perspective,’ Simmy said haltingly. ‘Made me see Nicola Joseph as a martyr, in her own way. Nobody likes major changes in their lives, do they? Look at you, and the way having me here has been so difficult.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Angie. ‘Have I been that awful?’

‘Not at all. It’s just human nature. But, Mum – can we make another change to the plan for Christmas Day?’

Angie looked wary. ‘What is it?’

‘Can we invite Ninian Tripp to join us for Christmas dinner?’