Aunt Bessie Goes (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 7) (6 page)

Doona stood up
abruptly.
 
“We’re just speculating
and that’s making you miserable,” she said.
 
“Let’s go get lunch somewhere nice and
put the whole thing out of our minds.”

“I was suppose
to have lunch with John at
La
Terrazza
,
” Bessie said.
 
“I’m sure he’s forgotten all about it,
though.”

“So let’s go
and use his booking,” Doona suggested.

Bessie shook
her head.
 
“I’m sorry, but I’m
really not up to a restaurant meal right now.
 
Seeing Nancy’s house stirred up enough
bad memories; adding in a dead body has put me right off my food.”

“Well, you
have to eat,” Doona said practically.
 
“I’ll make you some soup.
 
How about tomato?
 
With some
garlic bread?”

Bessie nodded
reluctantly.
 
She really wasn’t
hungry, but Doona was right, she did need to eat.
 

“I bought some
new frozen garlic bread to try,” Doona said.
 
“It was on special at
ShopFast
and I thought it might be good enough for those
days when I don’t want to fuss and make garlic butter.
 
Not that making garlic butter is that
difficult….”

Doona droned
on and on about cooking and baking and all sorts of nonsense that just managed
to keep Bessie distracted.
 
Half an
hour later she served up bowls of piping hot soup and the garlic bread.

Bessie ate
mindlessly, trying to keep herself from thinking about John’s gruesome
discovery.
 
Doona was just scooping
ice cream into bowls when Bessie heard a strange buzzing noise.

“I think
that’s your mobile,” Doona said.

“Oh, yes, I
think you’re right,” Bessie said, annoyed with
herself
for not
recognising
the sound herself.
 
“I must find a ringtone that I like,”
she muttered as she dug in her handbag for the device.

“Bessie?”
John’s voice came to her when she’d answered.
 
“I’d like to talk to you about some
things, if I may.
 
I’m actually at
your cottage, but you’re not here.”

“I came to
visit Doona after, well, after the house tours,” Bessie told him.

“I’ll come to
you there, if that’s okay with you and Doona,” he replied.

Bessie checked
that Doona had no objection.

“I’ll be there
in a few minutes, then,” John said.
 
“Tell Doona I’d be grateful for any kind of sandwich she might be able
to put together for me.”

Doona quickly
put the cooker back on and slid more garlic bread inside.
 
“I’ll just heat up some more soup as
well,” she told Bessie.
 
“The poor
man never eats properly.”

Doona’s
doorbell rang only a few minutes later.

“I’ll go,”
Bessie said.
 
“You can get the soup
into a bowl.”

John gave
Bessie a hug as a greeting.
 
“Are
you okay?” he asked after he’d released her.
 
“I know that going around the King house
was upsetting for you, even before I started poking around behind that wall.”

Bessie
nodded.
 
“I’m upset, but I’m okay as
well,” she said.
 
“It just doesn’t
seem real, I suppose.”

John
nodded.
 
“I’ve been a policeman for
over twenty years and I thought I’d seen just about everything, especially
after all my time in inner-city Manchester, but this one surprised me.”

The pair
walked to the kitchen where Doona was just pulling more garlic bread from the cooker.
 

“That smells
wonderful,” John said as he took a seat at the table.

“It’s that
frozen stuff that’s on offer at
ShopFast
,” Doona told
him.
 
“It’s much better than I
expected.”

Bessie sat
back down and took a few polite bites of her ice cream.
 
The soup and bread had filled her up and
she really wasn’t in the mood for ice cream, but it seemed easier to eat it
than to argue with Doona.
 

Doona served
soup and bread to the inspector and then returned to her seat and her own bowl
of ice cream.

John’s head
went down and he spooned in many mouthfuls before he looked up.
 
“You’re both staring at me,” he said
with a sigh.
 
“I guess I’d better
fill you in on what I know.”

Bessie knew it
would be polite to tell him to finish first, but she was more curious than
polite at the moment.
 
“Please,” she
said.

John
nodded.
 
“You already know how I
came to find the body,” he said.
 
“It’s more of a skeleton than a body, though.
 
I’m pretty sure it was put in there many
years ago.”

“In 1967,”
Bessie said dully.
 
“At least I
think that’s right.”

John pulled
out his notebook.
 
“That suggests
that you know
who
we’ve found,” he said eagerly.

Bessie shook
her head.
 
“I’m just guessing, but
it’s really the only thing that makes sense.
 
I think it might be Adam King, Nancy’s
youngest son.”

John made a
few notes and then nodded at Bessie.
 
“That was my first thought as well,” he told her.
 
“Considering how the body was concealed,
it seems more likely to have been a member of the family than a random
stranger.
 
We can’t rule anything
out at this point, of course.”

“If it isn’t
Adam, it may be connected to his disappearance somehow,” Bessie said.

“The, um,
skeleton was dressed,”
John
said.
 
“And he was lying on some old newspapers.
 
Most of them had suffered badly with
water damage, but we were able to get a date off of one of them.”

“Which was?”
Doona demanded.

“22
^nd
September, 1967.”

“Adam’s
birthday was in early September,” Bessie told him.
 
“I remember him complaining once, when
he was quite small, about having to go back to school on his birthday one
year.
 
And he disappeared right
around his birthday.
 
I remember
that as well.”

“When we’re
done here, I’m going to drive down to Port Erin to talk to Sarah
Combe
, Nancy’s daughter.
 
I’m hoping she might be able to identify
the clothes and the suitcases that we found.
 
If she does think they might have
belonged to her brother, we’ll do DNA testing.”

Bessie
sighed.
 
“Poor Sarah.
 
This is going to hit her hard.”

“I wish I
could take you with me,” John said.
 
“But there are procedures to follow in a case like this.”

Bessie
nodded.
 
“If it is Adam, she’ll be
devastated.
 
And whoever it is, it
will be a huge shock that her parents were hiding a body all these years.”

“At the
moment, we don’t know anything for certain,” John reminded Bessie.

“We know
someone hid the body there,” Bessie replied.
 
“I can’t imagine that Nancy and Frederick
didn’t notice.”

“There are
hundreds of possible scenarios,” John said.
 
“And in at least some of them the Kings
are innocent bystanders.
 
Those may
all be highly unlikely scenarios, but at this point we have to consider every
imaginable possibility.”

Bessie nodded
though she was unconvinced.
 
“What
was in the suitcases?” she asked.

“Clothes,”
John replied, grabbing a slice of garlic bread.
 
“Both suitcases were full of
clothes.
 
There was a small bag of
toiletries as well in one of the cases.”

“I assume you
don’t want us repeating any of what you’ve told us,” Doona remarked.

John sighed
deeply.
 
“While I was working with
the crime scene team, Mr. Collins took it upon himself to ring the
Isle of Man Times
and give them the full
story.
 
Dan Ross, their intrepid
reporter, was waiting for me when I left the house and I had to give him a statement.”

“Oh, dear,”
Bessie said.
 
“I knew I didn’t like
that man.”

“Alan Collins
or Dan Ross?” John asked.

“Both,” Bessie
replied.

“The only
reason our friend Mr. Collins isn’t in trouble with the constabulary is that,
because the crime seems to have taken place such a long time ago, the Chief
Constable had already suggested that we release everything to the papers.
 
We’re hoping some witnesses might step
forward.”

“Witnesses to
the murder?” Doona asked.

“Witnesses to
the construction, at least,” John told her.
 
“We’d like to pin the date down
firmly.
 
And
at
this point, we aren’t certain it was murder
,
remember
.
 
The victim could have met with a tragic
accident.
 
Concealing the body is
illegal as well, of course, but it’s not murder.”

“Why conceal
the body if it wasn’t murder?” Doona argued.
 

“A very good
question,” John said.
 
He finished
off the last of his soup and then grabbed the last piece of garlic bread.
 
“I’ll take this with me, if I may,” he
told the women as he stood up.
 
“I
have breath mints in the car so that I don’t offend Mrs.
Combe
.”

Bessie and
Doona walked to the door with the man.
 
In the doorway, he turned back to Bessie.

“I am sorry
about lunch,” he said.
 
“I’ll make
it up to you one day soon.”

Before Bessie
could reply, he was off down the pavement towards his car.
 

“I’m going to
hold you to that,” Bessie said pointlessly to his back.

Bessie helped
Doona clear up the lunch dishes.
 
After they were finished, Doona insisted on driving Bessie home.

“If you feel
like you need a walk, you can walk on the beach,” Doona told her firmly.
 
“If you walk from here you’ll just get
stopped by all my nosy
neighbours
who’ll want to know
what’s going on at Nancy’s house.”

Bessie
couldn’t argue with that.
 
Even the short walk from
Doona’s
house to
her car was interrupted by a curious
neighbour
.

“Ah, Doona, I
noticed that Bessie was visiting.
 
I
don’t suppose either of you know what’s going on at the old King house, do
you?” Charlie Grieves,
Doona’s
next-door
neighbour
, asked.
 
He’d come racing out of his house as soon as Doona and Bessie walked out
the door.

Bessie
exchanged glances with Doona.
 
They
both knew that telling Charlie anything was much the same as telling the whole
island.
 
The man was bored with
retirement and he spent his time watching his
neighbours
and sharing every detail of their lives with anyone and everyone who would
speak to him.

“John Rockwell
was looking at the house,” Doona explained.
 
“He’s looking for a property here in
Laxey.”

“Finally split
with that wife of his, did he?” Charlie asked.
 
“I always thought he would be a good
catch for you,” he told Doona.
 

Doona
flushed.
 
“Anyway, apparently there
was quite a bit of water damage in the house and when John was checking it out
he found, well, he found a skeleton behind a false wall.”

“It’ll have
something to do with young Adam,” Charlie said, glancing back and forth as if
checking to make sure he couldn’t be overheard.
 
“He was a troublemaker, that one.”

“The police
are checking with Sarah to see if it might be Adam,” Bessie said.

“Oh, I don’t
expect it will be,” the man replied.
 
“I bet he killed someone and his parents hid the body for him.
 
That’s why he ran away to Australia, I
reckon.”

“Well, that’s
certainly one theory,” Bessie said.
 
“The police are considering every possible alternative.”

“Young Adam
moved away, what, like thirty years ago?
 
I wonder if he kept in touch with Nancy or Sarah,” Charlie mused.
  
“I hope they can track him down
and bring him back for the trial.”

“I think
you’re getting rather ahead of things,” Bessie said with a frown.
 
“At this point we don’t have any idea
who the person is, what killed him or her, or how they ended up behind the
wall.”

“Young Adam
was working for his father, you know.
 
He couldn’t get a university place, not with his A-level results.
 
He was doing something or other down at
the bank with Frederick,” Charlie said.

“I didn’t
remember that,” Bessie said.

“I bet he and
some friend of his hatched a scheme to rob the bank or something,” Charlie
continued.
 
“Heck, they might have
even managed it.
 
Frederick would
have hushed everything up, I bet, if his son
was
involved.
 
I bet Adam and his friend
had a falling out, and Adam killed him, took all of the money and ran away to
Australia.”