The Final Curtain (9 page)

Joanna continued, ‘Whatever happened in the past, I still don't understand why, if you're nervous, you live out here?'

Cat-like, Timony narrowed her eyes, leaned in close and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. ‘I'll tell you why, Inspector.' She flicked her head around to take in Korpanski. ‘Sergeant. In a town or a city anyone can come right up to you, unnoticed, and do what they like. That fan that nearly lost me the sight in my eye. He walked right up to me with a pair of scissors in spite of my having four bodyguards surrounding me. He still got to me. Here I can see if someone approaches. I can watch the track. I have fair warning of an intrusion. I have security lights and a burglar alarm.'

But you still think someone's getting to you
, Joanna thought and fleetingly reflected on the architecture and design of Butterfield Farm. Timony's words answered some of her questions.

Even Joanna felt spooked by her obvious apprehension. She actually looked around, then caught sight of Korpanski's bland face with its stolid expression, standing like the genie of the lamp, arms folded, thick thighs apart, and she felt ashamed of herself. ‘Well, Mrs Weeks,' she said briskly, ‘if all these events you've been reporting to the Leek Police really have happened, as you describe, your vigil isn't doing much good, is it?' She glanced down at her notebook. ‘Some of the reports are of incidents
inside
the house. The toilet seat left up? The mouse in the bread bin. And now the watch. You're sure all this isn't simply your vivid imagination?' What she had wanted to say was:
an attempt to retrieve your long-lost fame?
But she didn't dare. It was sailing a little too close to the edge. And she couldn't risk doing that. Particularly now with Chief Superintendent Gabriel Rush about to take up his post. So instead she asked, ‘You've lived here how long?'

‘A little over ten years,' Timony said warily. ‘When my last marriage broke up I decided to build in the moorlands. It was one of the few places with the space, you understand.'

‘But these little – for want of a better word – tricks have been happening for just over two weeks. Any idea why now?'

Both Timony and Diana shook their heads and looked mystified. There was a pause.

Suddenly Timony Weeks seemed to surface. She looked around her. ‘Where's the cat?' she rapped out. ‘Where is she? Tuptim? Tuptim?'

Diana spoke lazily from the doorway. ‘I'm sorry, Tims, I haven't seen her at all today.'

‘Not like her.' Timony swivelled her lizard neck around to stare at her companion. ‘Did she have her breakfast?'

‘No.'

‘Oh.' Timony looked distressed at this. ‘Well, now, Inspector, what is it you were saying, that it is all in my imagination?'

Diana Tong, dogsbody, spoke up for her. ‘It isn't her imagination, Inspector Piercy. It isn't. I've seen things happen.'

‘What things?' It came out sharper than she'd meant, as though she was challenging her, calling her a liar, a stretcher of truth. She had been extremely vague earlier when Joanna had asked her if she'd ever seen any tangible evidence. Joanna's eyes narrowed; she looked from one woman to the other and wondered. They were reading her mind as precisely as a stage psychic. She glanced at Korpanski. His face twitched as though he was swallowing a smile. He actually put a hand in front of his mouth. Joanna scowled at him.

‘Things in the wrong places,' Diana said irritably. Then, turning to her employer, ‘Oh, what's the use, Tims? No one believes you – or me.'

Unexpectedly a tear rolled down Timony's cheek. ‘Please believe me,' she begged. ‘Please. I know something – someone – is out there and wishes to harm me.'

‘I'm sorry,' Joanna said. ‘I'm really sorry. We have all your calls logged but there's no hard evidence.'

‘What about the watch?'

Joanna wanted to ask: how can you be sure it's his watch? Back would come the response. From the scratch. So, if it is, is it possible you might have been mistaken about burying it with your husband? Were you, perhaps, tempted to retain it? As a keepsake?

She said none of these things but picked up her statement solidly. ‘No break-ins, nothing stolen. No assault.' She felt she needed to say something more. ‘If anything it is, possibly, a mischievous neighbour. Nothing more worrying than that.'

‘But I'm frightened, Inspector.'

Joanna was adversely affected by the ‘little-girl-lost' voice. High-pitched and squeaky with just the right amount of cracking. She must have been a really great actress in her time.

‘We can't go out to every person who feels frightened,' Joanna said in exasperation, getting ready to leave. ‘All I can suggest is that you move to somewhere less remote. What about sheltered housing or a gated estate, somewhere secure? There are a few places going up here in Leek, old mills being converted into luxury flats. You'd be much safer there, Mrs Weeks. And happier.'

‘But I've explained,' Timony said frostily.

‘I understand you have a holiday booked?'

‘We go next week to a favourite hotel of ours in Devon,' Diana said. ‘We've stayed there before. It's rather lovely and has a pool.'

Joanna turned to Diana Tong. ‘Is it possible you could stay here until then?'

‘No.' Said flatly and without much sympathy.

Joanna looked at Mike for help. And he stepped right in with his size elevens. ‘You say money is no object, Ms Weeks. Have you thought of hiring private security?'

‘It's Mrs,' she snapped at him. ‘Weeks is my married name. Shore was my …' She hesitated, ‘. . . stage name. And I'm
still
legally married.'

‘Well, what about your husband then?' Korpanski was still trying. Hard.

‘Chance'd be a fine thing,' she snapped. ‘I don't think Rolf would come and act as nursemaid to me. He has Trixy.' Her face became vinegary.

‘Children?' Korpanski tried next. You had to hand it to Mike, Joanna thought. He really was trying very hard.

‘Child stars don't have children,' Timony said haughtily.

‘Not even when the child stars grow up?' Joanna asked.

‘Especially not then.'

Joanna looked at Mike. Neither knew how to proceed.

Timony Weeks made one more appeal. ‘Can't you get it into your heads? Someone is out there trying hard to get at me,' she said, as though stating an indisputable fact. ‘I can go away for a holiday but I will always have to return here, to Butterfield. If you can't find out what's going on and who is victimizing me this trouble will not go away, it will escalate. Do you understand?' Her tiny shoulders bunched together. She looked unhappy. ‘You have to solve this before something dreadful happens.' She looked at the watch, still held by Detective Sergeant Mike Korpanski.

‘We'll take the watch in for forensic examination,' Joanna said.

Timony said nothing but simply stared.

Joanna left feeling frustrated. She kept turning around as they drove back up the track. Timony Weeks was watching them through the window. She looked fragile and vulnerable. Joanna turned around in her seat and took the car all the way up the lane to join the road. Something was bothering her about the whole situation. It wasn't just the way Butterfield seemed to lie in permanent shadow on the brightest of winter's days or even the way the place nestled in its hamlet, almost as though it expected the hills to protect it, or even the fact that it was all too easy for anyone to spy on this isolated property. No. It was the story about the deranged fan who had tried to gouge little Lily Butterfield's eye out in spite of there being four bodyguards surrounding her.

She was quiet on the way home but Mike wasn't. He was whistling tunelessly under his breath. And the sound irritated her. ‘Stop whistling,' she said. ‘I can't hear myself think.'

‘Sorry. Can't get the tune out of my head.'

‘What tune? There isn't a tune. Just noise.'

He looked at her. ‘I think it's Ding Dong Bell,' he said apologetically. ‘Can't think what's set that off.'

She looked at him sharply. ‘It's the well.' The words were out before she'd thought about it. She looked at him. ‘I hope the damned cat hasn't fallen down the well,' she said. ‘That'd really set her off.' Then she muttered to herself, ‘Nursery rhymes, children's programmes that went off the air forty years ago. A Burmese cat with a strange name. A house that sits and watches for a stranger to call, practical jokes, a dead man's watch. I don't know what the police force is coming to,' she grumbled.

T
hey'd arrived back at the station. ‘Right,' Joanna said, feeling a sudden burst of energy as though she'd just drunk three large cans of Red Bull. ‘You make the coffee, Mike. I'll run a search about
Butterfield Farm
, the TV series.'

‘I don't know what you think you'll find looking at a kids' TV thing from back in the sixties,' Korpanski grumbled, but headed out through the door towards the coffee machine anyway. He was still chuntering when he returned with a couple of cappuccinos. A posh new coffee machine had recently been installed in the station and it was well used by the staff. No Styrofoam cups any more but thick cardboard mugs with corrugated aprons to stop their fingers from getting burned. Joanna took a big sip as they both peered into the Google search, Joanna reading aloud,
‘Butterfield Farm. Shown 1960–1972. The story of a saccharine rural Derbyshire family who milked cows, survived blizzards and power cuts, lost animals but usually found them again. It was mainly filmed in and around Buxton and in the Manchester studio. The most dramatic storyline was in 1965 with some cattle rustling. It was a deliberate attempt by the BBC to encourage family viewing of English rather than American series. Undoubted star of the show was Timony Weeks, who played Lily Butterfield, daughter of the household. With engaging sweetness, a mane of red hair and looking much younger than her years, she simpered and lisped her way through episode after episode. The public interest in her increased when she married her screen father in 1969, when she was just seventeen and he was fifty-six.

‘Nothing here about a murder,' Joanna observed. ‘It sounds a bit too much like family viewing for a storyline like that, particularly in the early sixties when family viewing meant just that. Mum, Dad and children all sitting round the one TV.' She'd seen the old movies: black and white, tiled fireplaces, coal fires and the cheery voice of the commentator.

‘So do you think Timony is mistaken about the cowhand found at the bottom of the well?' Korpanski queried. ‘She did seem a bit vague about it.'

‘I wonder.' Joanna looked again, frowning into the screen. ‘It clearly says here that the most dramatic storyline was about cattle rustling. Nothing about a murder or a body down the well.' She smirked. ‘Mind you, dead cowhand beats cattle rustling any day, eh, Korpanski? She did appear dubious, didn't she? And yet specific. Could she be blurring fact with fiction, I wonder? What if it wasn't part of the storyline of
Butterfield Farm
but something that really happened?'

‘Seems a bit far-fetched to me.'

‘The whole bloody lot's far-fetched. Let's just look through police files for murders in Derbyshire between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy-two and see if there's anything that appears similar.' She swivelled around in her chair. ‘I wonder. Fact or fiction?'

‘Something in her head, more like,' Korpanski said. ‘A figment of her over-excitable imagination and sense of drama. I'm sure she's exaggerating events.'

‘Probably. Look, we'll just have a quick check then get on with something real. OK?'

‘Couldn't agree more.' Korpanski felt he'd be relieved to move away from this to something concrete.

It was an easy task on the PNC 2 which rumbled into life. They found plenty of tragedies, climbing accidents, road accidents, a death in custody which had caused quite a stir, a couple of unexplained disappearances. But nothing even remotely like Timony's story of a body down a well. ‘So,' Joanna agreed wearily, ‘looks like you were right and it was something in her head. But that would suggest she
is
crazy.'

‘We-ell?' Korpanski challenged. ‘Would you give her a certificate of sanity?'

Joanna laughed and shook her head. For a few minutes she sat and thought. Everything screamed at her that Timony Weeks was not quite sane. And yet … Her toes were tingling with something. She had the oddest feeling that she was sliding into some parallel world, where fact and fiction merged and blurred and altered until they were so distorted it was impossible to tell what was true and what was false.

‘Perhaps we should run a check on Sol Brannigan,' she said.

‘That seems a better idea,' Korpanski said heartily.

‘OK, you do that.' She stood up. ‘I'm going to have a quick word with Colclough.'

‘Whatever for?'

She gave him a cheeky grin. ‘He just might remember something about the series. He's that sort of age.'

As she left, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Korpanski roll his towards the ceiling. She could guess what he was thinking, that this case had been bad news from the start and that she shouldn't waste any more time and energy on it. Trouble was, she agreed with him.

Colclough was in good humour. Very good humour. She could tell that from the way his eyes twinkled when he looked at her. ‘Piercy,' he said warmly. ‘Sit yourself down, my dear.'

From anyone else that would have sounded patronizing but from Colclough she could almost forgive him anything. With dismay she acknowledged that she was going to miss him like thunder every time she encountered Chief Superintendent Gabriel Rush.

‘Not long to go now,' he said cheerfully. ‘We're planning to spend the summer in Cyprus. Looking forward to it. Little Catherine will join us for the school holidays.'