The Hawkshead Hostage (25 page)

Simmy took an unnervingly unprotesting Bonnie to a GP clinic to have her hand and wrist attended to, while Ben was taken by ambulance to hospital. His dehydration was a cause for concern, as well as possible nerve damage to his wrists from the tight binding. Bonnie had begged to go with him, but it was decreed otherwise. Ben himself promised to call her that evening. ‘How?’ she shouted. ‘You haven’t got a phone.’

He rolled his eyes and smiled. ‘Trust me,’ he said, just as they closed the ambulance doors on him.

Initially bursting with questions, Simmy soon found that a lot of the answers had already been supplied by the afternoon’s events.

‘It was Tom, then, pretending to be Ben in the shop and giving Barnaby that message?’

‘Right,’ said Bonnie.

‘But isn’t it a massive coincidence, that he knows Ben and Wilf? How does he?’

The girl sat up straighter in the passenger seat and sighed. ‘I’ve been wondering that as well. I’ve never heard of him before. It makes you think his parents might have been out to get Ben all along – but that can’t be right. They couldn’t have known he’d be at Esthwaite on Tuesday. And why would they have any reason to want him, anyway?’

‘Hang on.’ Simmy had a thought. ‘There was a boy called Tom hiking with Ben and Wilf, and those other brothers. He would have got to know them then. But it still must be a coincidence.’

‘He never said anything to me about it,’ Bonnie complained. ‘All those phone calls every evening and he didn’t mention him even once.’

‘You talked about your game thingy, I imagine.’

‘Nope. That never got a mention, either. I s’pose I did most of the talking. Corinne’s been saying I need to do a course or something, and get some qualifications, and that’s been bugging me. It was mainly that stuff we talked about.’

‘Hmm. So Tom and his mum and dad are here on holiday, and he doesn’t want to stay at the hotel with them, so he meets up with lads his own age and talks them into letting him go hiking with them. Where did he go after that? They came back on Tuesday. Where’s he been sleeping since then?’

‘At the hotel,’ Bonnie guessed. ‘Melanie told me their room’s ludicrously tidy. I bet there’s a single bed in there, and they’ve smuggled him in and needed to hide the evidence.’

‘Sounds very odd. Why not just tell the hotel he’s staying, if there’s a spare bed? And why not just tidy the bed, not the whole room?’

‘Dunno, but I bet it’s something like that. And he’s been hanging about in that big room upstairs. It might have been him I saw on the balcony. It’s easy enough to hide in a hotel.’

‘Gentian would agree with you.’

‘Who? Oh, that kid? Seemed like quite a little character.’

‘It makes the Lillywhites even worse, if they involved their son in what they were doing. If Ben’s right that they’re trafficking foreign girls for sex, that’s grotesque.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bonnie uncertainly.

‘Presumably, Dan Yates got wind of it all, and that’s why they killed him.’

‘Yeah,’ Bonnie said again.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’ve not been thinking much about Dan, have we? Melanie’s right about that. We should make sure she’s okay. She’ll be feeling left out.’

‘Again,’ said Simmy ruefully. ‘Melanie always feels left out. She phoned me while I was standing there in Hawkshead, trying to decide what to do. She’s found some emails between Dan and that Sheila woman.’ She frowned. ‘What’s going to happen to her, then?’

‘Depends, I guess.’

‘She’s some sort of estate agent. Not the ordinary kind, though. She wanted to have a seminar in the hotel. Something like that.’

Bonnie was losing interest, cradling her wrist in a hand still streaked with blood and grime. ‘I’m so dirty,’ she moaned. ‘Look at me.’

‘That’s why you need to see a doctor. Get all that muck washed out of your cuts. And that wrist is terribly swollen. They might want to x-ray it.’

‘I saved him, didn’t I? They’d have killed him if I hadn’t been there.’

Privately, Simmy thought this unlikely. The presence of Sheila-the-estate-agent suggested no such intention. But why had they gone to Hawkshead with her, anyway? ‘You were a hero,’ she told the girl.

It was seven o’clock before Simmy had a chance to sit down and drink tea and really think about the events of the past three days. Her mother had firmly ensconced her in the private sitting room, which had uneasy associations with previous brushes with violent death and personal injury. Melanie had phoned again and been invited to come round for a debriefing. Bonnie had gone home to Corinne, lavishly bandaged and perfectly clean. Detective Inspector Moxon had gone quiet.

Russell went to the door when Melanie rang, his newfound security rituals taking far too long. When the girl joined Simmy, she was flushed with impatience. ‘What’s with your dad?’ she demanded.

‘He’s scared of intruders. It’s all my fault.’

‘He needs therapy.’

‘He’s getting it. My mother’s got him an appointment. Have some tea and cake.’

‘Thanks. That’s good about the appointment.’ They looked at each other for a quiet moment. ‘So – it’s all sorted, then? Is that right?’

‘More or less. Ben’s going to be okay. Bonnie was heroic. Moxon was an idiot. Do you know anything about a boy called Tom? The Lillywhites’ son, apparently.’

Melanie shook her head. ‘Never knew they had a son.’

‘It still feels like too big a coincidence. He invited himself to go along with Ben and Wilf and the others, on their hiking trip at the weekend. Then, when Ben was abducted, he pretended to be him – to that boy Barnaby, in the Co-op. He knew Corinne’s car number – I don’t know how. It was a trick to make us all think Ben was all right, just doing one of his investigations.’

Melanie repeated what she’d just heard, with supplementary questions. Then she thought about it for a minute or two. ‘I don’t think it’s such a huge coincidence. It’s not such a stretch, really, for the Lillywhite boy to hook up with the hiking group.’

‘But it is for Ben to be the very person to witness his parents murdering Dan. Don’t you think?’

‘Maybe.’ Melanie leant back into the sofa cushions. ‘Well, not really. Ben gets everywhere, doesn’t he? Always spying on people and not leaving things alone. It
would
be him.’

Simmy nodded. ‘That’s true. But it must mean that Tom actually
saw
Ben tied up, in that empty shop, and recognised him. He might even have dreamt up the plan to pretend to be him, to put everybody’s mind at rest.’

‘That was clever. I was totally convinced.’

‘Bonnie wasn’t. I saw her talking to Barnaby in a field, earlier today. She must have worked out that it hadn’t been Ben at all.’ She paused. ‘I wonder if it really was him that Ninian saw in that car.’

‘Doesn’t matter now, does it?’

‘No, but – well, I still want to know.’

‘Never mind. But I’d bet a tenner that it wasn’t. Go on with what happened. How on earth did Bonnie manage to find Ben?’

‘That’s another amazing thing. She saw a date that Ben had scrawled on a dirty window, and she got in through the cellar and found him.’

‘Hang on!’ Melanie ordered. ‘Bonnie was in a
cellar
? Full of coal dust and cobwebs and dirt?’

‘Not sure about the coal dust. But plenty of the ordinary sort. She was filthy dirty, with blood from cuts on her hand and cobwebs in her hair.’

‘She must have been frantic. You think your dad’s got a phobia – what about Bonnie?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Haven’t you worked it out yet? She’s totally terrified of dirt. And blood. She keeps it under control these days, but it’s still there. I saw her freaking out, a year or so ago, when Corinne made her help with some car repair. She got engine oil on her, just a black streak on her arm, and she went into a real state.’

‘I didn’t know. I just thought she’d been anorexic.’

‘It connects, somehow. But the point is, being dirty is like walking through fire would be to you or me.’

‘Well, she did it for Ben.’ Simmy wiped away a sudden tear. ‘I said she was a hero.’

Again they sat quietly, each thinking hard. Then Melanie said, ‘Dan was a bit of a hero as well, believe it or not.’

‘Was he?’

‘I don’t know exactly, but he must have taken a stand with the Lillywhites, telling them he was going to the police, or something. He’d been googling them, and asking questions, until he’d got a fair idea of what they were up to. He’d actually got a sort of dossier on them. I found it today. They were up here sussing out likely
places for running a … well,
brothel
, he called it.’

‘Where did you find it – this dossier? Didn’t the police take his computer on Tuesday? That must be routine, surely?’

‘They took his laptop, but missed his iPad. He’d left it in the office, so they didn’t realise it was his. I went through the history and everything else I could find. It explains quite a lot.’

‘How were things at the hotel today?’

‘Not too bad. Gentian and her mum leave tomorrow. Mr Ferguson’s there till Sunday. They seem to be friends now. I saw the three of them playing cards in the lounge.’

Simmy smiled at the image. ‘The news will soon get round – about the Lillywhites.’

‘Well, nobody liked them.’

‘Can the hotel survive all this publicity, do you think?’

‘Bodgett thinks so. He gave us all a bit of a pep talk just before I left. Oh – and he wants you to bring more flowers tomorrow. Those Americans might have gone, but there are plenty of people who still have to be impressed, apparently.’

Simmy put a hand to her mouth. ‘But I haven’t ordered anything. Where am I going to find enough for two more displays? I should go now and order something.’

‘Too late, Sim. You’ll have to improvise. It won’t be the first time.’

‘Like stealing dahlias from people’s gardens, you mean?’

‘Are dahlias in flower yet? I thought they were August. It’s all crocosmia and delphiniums at the moment.’

‘Don’t be such a know-all. I suppose I can scrape enough things together from the shop, if I have to.’

‘You’ll do a wonderful job. You know you will.’

Ben was released from hospital into the arms of his bewildered mother, just after eight that evening. ‘Can I use your phone?’ he asked her in the car.

Wordlessly, she handed it over.

‘Bon? I’m on the way home. See you tomorrow?’

‘Okay. I won’t be in the shop. My hands don’t work.’

‘What did you think of the message in the burial ground?’

‘Yeah. It was okay.’

‘What’s up?’

‘You nearly
died
, you idiot. And there you are thinking about the game, as if nothing happened.’

He paused, glancing at his mother. ‘The game saved us,’ he reminded Bonnie. ‘It’s going to be so mega, when we tell the story. Mum says there’s already a couple of reporters hanging about, wanting to talk to me. She says we have to wait until Moxo’s given us the go-ahead – but honestly, Bon, this is totally great. I was a real
hostage
. It’s given me so many new ideas. My head’s bursting with them.’

Bonnie’s silence slowly made itself felt.

‘What? What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ she said at last.

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