The Hawkshead Hostage (11 page)

‘Oh, no – I didn’t mean … Just that she knew the man who died, and is so fond of Ben. I didn’t mean …’ She stumbled to a halt.

‘No, I’m sorry I snapped. You struck a nerve, that’s all. Not everybody gets Miss Todd, after all.’

Simmy thought she could see what he meant. ‘Some people think she
should
be helping you with enquiries? Is that it?’

‘Some people being my superintendent, for a start,’ he agreed ruefully. ‘Now then, we can’t stand here all day, can we? I suggest you go and find a coffee in the village, and then get back to Windermere. I should be in at least five places at once.’

‘Come on, then,’ said Simmy to Helen. ‘We’re not doing any good here.’

Unresistingly, Helen followed her back to the car. ‘Maybe we should leave it here, rather than pay for parking.’

‘Up to you. I don’t imagine anyone’s going to object, once they know who you are.’

‘Hawkshead hates cars, you know. They’ve been very brave about it, considering.’

It took them about four minutes to reach the heart of the little old village, where they opted for a cafe set below the church. They could see the high-class souvenir shop and the chemist and a lot of other buildings.

‘I can still
feel
him here somewhere,’ said Helen. ‘It sounds mad, but I really can.’

Bonnie Lawson sat quietly in the back of the police car, as she was taken home to Windermere. She had hitched a ride to Hawkshead at seven that morning with a man in a white van who was very vaguely known to her by sight. He had overtaken her just before she reached the bus stop, and made her a better offer than public transport could supply. She had no fear that there would be any misbehaviour on his part. Men had never been much of a bother to her, despite most people’s assumptions. Suffering from anorexia in her early teens, the counsellors and therapists and teachers had all started from the premise that one of her mother’s boyfriends must have abused her in some way. She had almost come to believe it herself, but the truth was much more complicated and bizarre. One of the many things she adored about Ben Harkness was his easy acceptance and extraordinary understanding when she told him the story.

They
had
to find Ben. She was consumed with a
passionate urgency that made her heart race and her fists clench. It was completely beyond acceptability that he should be gone for ever. If that happened, then she would starve herself to death in a month. There would be no sense or purpose in the universe, and she did not want to be part of it. Her need for him frightened her so much that she found herself turning it around, into his need for her. She was going to be the person who found him. The moment these dozy policemen dropped her at home, she’d be off again, back to the search. She’d hang about until they’d gone, hoping Corinne was still in bed, and then get right back to Hawkshead.

But the police turned out to be less dozy than she’d thought. ‘We need to speak to your mother,’ one said.

‘She’s not my mother. Even if she was, I’m
seventeen
. You’re treating me like I was ten.’

‘You’re behaving like someone who’s ten. You’re still a minor, and you’re putting yourself in harm’s way.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she muttered. The words were irritatingly familiar. People had been trying to show her what was in her best interests, and what she was doing to harm herself, for years now. Since getting to know Ben, she was even more certain than before that she knew better than any of them.

‘I didn’t hear that,’ said the man. He was about thirty, plain-looking and trying hard to follow the rules. But he was also human and sympathetic. Like most people in Windermere and Bowness, he was faintly familiar to her. Bonnie had known countless foster brothers and sisters, had been in and out of school, accompanied Corinne to all kinds of meetings and clubs, mostly associated with folk
music or dogs. Once you removed all the faceless tourists, the core population was close-knit. They mostly knew each other.

‘Is this the house?’ asked the other man, who was driving. He peered through the windscreen at the upper windows. ‘The curtains are still closed.’

‘She sleeps late. I’ve got a key.’

‘We have to speak to her.’

‘Good luck with that.’

But they were determined, and Corinne finally came down, bleary-eyed and ratty-tempered. ‘Bon? Aren’t you at the shop today?’

‘I went to look for Ben. The cops brought me back. They found me walking down to the hotel where he went missing. I hitched.’

‘I told you not to do that.’ Corinne sighed. ‘They haven’t found him, then?’

Bonnie considered a burst of tears as a useful strategy, but decided against it, not least because she was worried that once she started, she might not easily stop again.

‘She shouldn’t be out there on her own,’ said the conscientious policeman. ‘There’s been a murder, don’t forget.’

Corinne sighed again. ‘They’ll be long gone, won’t they? And nobody’s going to kill Bonnie. Why would they?’

Good question
, thought Bonnie. So why would they kidnap Ben? The explanation that everyone seemed to have accepted without question was still niggling at her, not ringing true at all.

‘All the same—’

‘Right, right. I won’t let her out, then. How long do
you want me to keep her tied up? She does have a job, you know.’

‘Just use your common sense,’ said the policeman impatiently. ‘It’s for her own good.’

He left then, scratching his head at the vagaries of women who didn’t know what was good for them.

‘I
know
he’s still around Hawkshead somewhere,’ Bonnie insisted. ‘Will you take me back there, Con?’

‘What about Simmy and the shop?’

‘She won’t be expecting me. She won’t even have opened up, I bet you. She loves Ben, same as I do. And there’s Melanie as well. She’s going to want us with her. What do they expect us to do – just carry on as if things are normal?’

‘My exhaust is falling off. Those roads’d finish the job. I was going to take it in today. What time is it?’

‘Not even ten yet. I was out early.’

‘The cops’ll just bring you back again, and give me a bollocking for letting you go.’

‘I’ll be more careful. Oh, go on, Con. The exhaust’s been rattling for weeks. Another day won’t hurt it.’

Corinne’s career as a foster mother was scheduled to end with Bonnie. Over the last decade and a half more than fifty children had passed through her hands, most of them under three years old. She could have carried on, except for the growing demands of her new interest in travelling the country at weekends to festivals, and a less easily defined weariness with it all. The Social Services had never fully got to grips with her ways, and constantly nagged her to tone down the excessive number of dogs around the place and – which was their final straw – her
smoking. ‘You’d never have been accepted in the first place if we hadn’t been so desperate,’ they said.

But her methods had worked. The children gained confidence in the world under her rather sloppy care. They were fed, cuddled, sung to and laughed with. In most cases they came to believe that life might be okay after all. She kept in touch with them when they left and often passed unofficial reports back to the authorities if she thought they were being harmed. She had saved one little boy from serious abuse, by the straightforward technique of collaring the abuser in the main street and shouting at him in the plainest possible language. At least twenty people passing by got the message, and gave him to understand that he was expected to reform or suffer the consequences. As it turned out, the consequences happened anyway and his life was effectively ruined. The Social Services cringed away from the whole incident, appalled by the direct action. One social worker called Corinne a vigilante, which she cheerfully agreed was accurate.

Bonnie had been a special case from the start. Older than the others, in and out of hospital, hopelessly behind with schoolwork, she had forced Corinne to focus. By this time they were much more like friends than mother and daughter. While family therapists might regard this as far from ideal, they were both thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement.

‘Oh, all right, then. But we’re never going to avoid attention with the noise the damn thing makes.’

‘You can drop me outside the town. Colthouse or somewhere. Actually, I might start there. Ben talked about it once.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’ Corinne, like Melanie Todd, had a strong preference for buildings and streets over the wild empty spaces of the fells. Never a walker, sailor or swimmer, she also liked to have a lot of people around her.

‘Quakers,’ said Bonnie vaguely. ‘He was on about the Quakers. There’s an old Quaker place there.’

Corinne gave up with a deep sigh. ‘Let me get my shoes on, then,’ was all she said.

Bonnie was reluctant to admit that she did not exactly know how to find Colthouse either. ‘Use the satnav,’ she urged.

‘You do it, then.’

Bonnie commanded the gadget to take them to Colthouse, and for seven miles they did as it ordered. Then, Bonnie found fault with it. ‘It’s trying to take us through Hawkshead. We don’t want that.’ She peered at the diagrammatic map on the little screen. ‘Take the next fork left,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a sort of loop on a smaller road.’

‘My God. Do they come smaller than this one?’

‘Just do it.’

They followed a tortuous route through Low Wray and High Wray, with the satnav doing its best to persuade them they were in error. They could see Lake Windermere not far off on their left. After High Wray they turned westwards, curling around a hill with a stone construction just visible on the top, and then a few degrees more southwards towards Esthwaite. Bonnie was concentrating as hard as she could on the layout, noting the position of the sun and the many place names that were signed along the way. ‘This must be it!’ she cried, after another half-mile. ‘Whoopee!’

‘Congratulations,’ said Corinne drily. ‘I can’t just leave
you here, can I? You’d never be found again. It’s the middle of nowhere.’

‘It’s practically on the edge of Hawkshead. I’ll be fine.’

‘No, Bonnie. If anything happened to you, they’d put me in jail. Plus, it would be a waste of all my good work.’

‘There are walkers all over the place. I’ve got my phone and a bottle of water. It’s a lovely, dry, warm day. I’ll be fine,’ she repeated.

‘But why this place? It’s got nothing to suggest Ben was here. It’s crazy to even think it.’

‘Yeah, probably. But it’s only half a mile from where he went missing. There’s houses and a road, and the caravan park’s only five minutes away. It’s a
feeling
, okay? It makes more sense than you think. I just want to have a look. He’ll have tried to leave clues, and I’m more likely to recognise them than anybody else.’

A car hooted behind them. Corinne drove into the entrance to a farmyard and let the other vehicle pass. Bonnie jumped out, and then leant back through the passenger window to say, ‘Wait for me in Hawkshead, then. Give me half an hour, right?’

‘I thought we wanted to avoid Hawkshead.’

‘Tell you what – isn’t there a garage there somewhere? Where Percy used to work? They might fix your exhaust while you wait.’ Connie merely shrugged, and Bonnie went on, ‘I’ll call you, I promise. Look – it’s twenty to eleven now. I’ll phone at eleven, exactly. Nothing’s going to happen in that time.’

‘Famous last words,’ said Corinne, but she drove away as instructed, the exhaust making a noise like a souped-up motorbike.

Bonnie waited until the car was out of sight and earshot, and then gave her surroundings a long careful examination. There was a sign beside her indicating the old Quaker Meeting House that was accessed through the farmyard. This much she already knew from Ben. It had a quirkiness that appealed to him. She walked through the quietness, barns on both sides, passing a stone trough with an iron pump above it. The Meeting House was behind a stone wall, gazing serenely at the trees before it and giving no hint that Ben was ever there. Turning back, Bonnie went down the slope to where the small road met a slightly larger one. On the corner was the burial ground that she and Ben had discussed more than once.

She had withheld a lot of her thinking from Corinne, as well as from the police and Ben’s mother. It would sound childish and silly to all of them. It very likely
was
childish and silly, a game she and Ben had been playing on and off for weeks. Using Google, along with scraps of history from local websites, and a few old books, they had been constructing a computer-based game based on the year 1780. It was a vast, sprawling virtual tour of all the people and places that were significant in that year, in the county then known as Cumberland. The central thread was a quest for objects connected to William Wordsworth, who at the time was a schoolboy in Hawkshead, along with his brother Richard.

Bonnie suspected that a lot of the purpose behind this project was to educate her in a range of disciplines, from history to computer programming, and including geography and logic. She was given small areas to work on and encouraged to come up with ideas of her own.
Within days it had become the greatest possible fun. To her amazement she found Wordsworth’s
Prelude
a brilliant read, and accounts of his childhood in hefty biographies downloaded onto her Kindle only enriched her grasp of his life and times. It thrilled her to find so much of her home area described by such a famous poet. Ben had watched with an almost paternal delight as his protégée blossomed under his tutelage.

Wordsworth had lodged with an elderly couple who had been shopkeepers before they retired. Bonnie and Ben became increasingly interested in the Tysons, Hugh and Ann, devoting much of their game to the young poet’s time in their care. They built up a fully furnished version – teaching themselves some crude graphic skills in the process – of the Hawkshead house, with candles and rush matting and pictures on the walls. Then Bonnie had discovered that they’d all moved to Colthouse, most likely in 1784 and requested Ben’s permission to include that in the game.

‘Not our year,’ he ordained. ‘You can’t muddle things up like that.’

‘It’s not certain,’ she persisted, showing him the results of her researches. ‘And there’s more scope if we have him walking into town from there every day. Plus we can include his other two brothers, who came to join them around then. It’s all here in the poem, Ben. Look.’

And she had won him over, at least on that small point. In the process she had stumbled across some wider history, discovering that 1780 was a dramatic year in all sorts of ways. Most of it involved war with America, but there were also some fairly major riots in London, which she found very diverting.

‘We can bear it in mind,’ said Ben doubtfully. ‘What were they rioting about?’

‘Anti-papists,’ she read. ‘Gordon Riots.’

‘Hmm,’ was all he said. ‘Isn’t that all in
Barnaby Rudge
? Charles Dickens,’ he added.

Bonnie had let it go for the moment. History was turning out to be a terribly large subject, woven in with literature and science and all sorts of other things. But she established that much of Colthouse had remained unchanged since 1780, including the Quaker element.

All that had been on the Friday just gone, the day before Ben and his friends had set off to go hiking near Hawkshead. Neither of them could properly visualise Colthouse, although Ben had an idea his family had gone there for a picnic at one time. ‘I’ll get a look at it while I’m up there, and take some photos,’ he said.