The Hawkshead Hostage (5 page)

She ran back into the hotel, intending to find Melanie. But then she realised that help and reassurance were luxuries she could not rely on. Something terrible had happened to Ben, and suddenly it was as if her own most beloved child was in danger. His cry of
Hey!
echoed in her mind, swelling with a host of dreadful implications. He had been alarmed, angry, shocked and scared. It was all in that one little word.

The woman with the exaggerated lashes was standing in the foyer, gazing with modified rapture at Simmy’s flowers. Her head was on one side, and a hand extended as if – outrageously – to adjust a bloom. ‘Help!’ cried Simmy, ignoring pangs of embarrassment at her naked emotion. ‘Something awful has happened – is happening – down by the lake. I’ve had a message. We need to call the police. Quickly.’

The woman fluttered the heavy black fringes over her eyes. They made her look like a caricature of a doll, itself
already a caricature of a real child. They made one doubt whether there was a fully formed functioning individual behind them. ‘What?’ she said.

Penny was behind the reception desk, watching dispassionately and making no move to intervene. Simmy ignored her instinctively. Instead she waved her phone in the painted face before her. ‘A dead man!’ she shouted. Then she took a breath and understood that it was down to her. She squinted down at the screen and pressed the 9 digit three times. It was not the first time she had done this, but it still felt imbued with horror. Her stomach churned and her legs trembled.

When it came to explaining her problem, she floundered. ‘A friend just phoned me to say he’s found a dead body, in some woods on the banks of Esthwaite. Then he broke off, as if he was being attacked.’ That was what she
should
have said. But it didn’t come out like that. ‘He’s just a boy,’ she repeated. ‘He said somebody’s dead. It’s by the lake. I’m at a hotel.’ Phrases emerged that made perfect sense to her, but were clearly gibberish to the woman at the end of the line who repeatedly urged Simmy to calm down and to give helpful details such as her actual position. ‘Is somebody injured?’ she asked. And, ‘Can you see what’s happening from where you are?’

This seemed to go on for hours, before Mrs Bodgett snatched the phone away from her and tried in turn to provide useful information. Given that she still had little idea as to precisely what Ben had said – or who Ben was anyway – she did not do very much better than Simmy had.

‘We should go down there and see for ourselves,’ Simmy said, when the emergency person finally agreed
to send a police car to investigate. ‘Where’s Melanie?’

‘In the office.’ The woman gestured at a door across the hallway, which Simmy had barely noticed. In other hotels she had known, the office had generally been visible by anyone standing at reception through a glass partition or suchlike.

Penny leant forward. ‘Who is this Ben person?’ she asked in her high voice. ‘Not one of our guests?’

‘He’s a friend of mine. He came with me.’

The gesture of neck and chin clearly said,
Oh well – not a problem for the hotel at all, then
. Simmy felt hot and angry, but said nothing. Panic levels were subsiding, but there was still a great choking cloud of anxiety about Ben’s welfare. Melanie would understand, and even assuage to some extent. ‘Can you fetch her?’ she asked. ‘Please.’

Her plea was acted upon by the manager’s wife and suddenly there was the big dependable young woman standing right in front of Simmy, calmly prepared to hear whatever might be said. ‘Listen,’ said Simmy, holding out the phone. ‘It’s a message from Ben. On the voicemail.’

Melanie competently accessed the recording, a frown deepening on her face. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘That sounds bad.’ She blinked in rapid thought. ‘What time was this?’

‘I don’t know. Doesn’t it tell you?’

Melanie listened again. ‘Eleven thirty-two.’ She looked at the clock above the reception desk. ‘More than half an hour ago. We’ll have to go and see what’s happened.’ She frowned even more deeply. ‘That’s plenty of time for him to run back up here, isn’t it? Do you know where he went exactly?’

‘Something about a place called Colthouse. But he says he’s near some woods, doesn’t he?’

‘There are trees at the top end of the lake. It’s all very close. About two minutes’ walk from here. Where’s Dan?’ Melanie addressed the receptionist, wife of the manager, and apparently sole representative of the senior staff. ‘Where’s your husband? Who’s here?’

‘You know as well as I do,’ said Mrs Boddington-Webster. ‘Jeremy went into Hawkshead, and Jake doesn’t come in today. The lunches are all done in advance on a Tuesday.’

‘What about Dan?’

‘Good question.’

‘Come
on
,’ urged Simmy. ‘We have to find Ben. He sounded so … desperate. Didn’t he?’ She appealed to Melanie for confirmation.

‘He did rather. Not like himself. Something obviously scared him.’ The girl’s face had been steadily paling since she’d heard Ben’s message. ‘Why hasn’t he come back, or phoned again?’

‘I daren’t even think,’ said Simmy. She began to leave the building by the front door.

‘No, not that way. It’s much quicker to go out of the back,’ said Melanie, already leading the way. The others followed her out, across the gravelled area, past the stables and down a gentle slope to the lake, barely seventy-five yards distant. It was actually part of the hotel’s grounds until the final few yards, the water lapping almost imperceptibly at the grassy edge. The ground was unusually flat for the area; no great rising fells or dense woodlands bordered Esthwaite, which dreamt away the days in a glassy calm. As before, there
were two or three small rowing boats sitting motionless on the water, with anglers in them.

‘Won’t those people have seen anything going on?’ asked Simmy. ‘Should we shout to them?’

‘They won’t take any notice,’ said Melanie. ‘They ignore everything happening onshore. I think half of them are asleep most of the time, anyway.’

‘Trees. Ben said there was a body under trees at the top end of the lake.’ Simmy had been repeating the words to herself as they ran down to the water. ‘Must be over there.’ She pointed to her left, where a small path wound its way amongst a scattering of rocks towards a patch of woodland. She could see a dead tree and a section of new-looking fencing on either side of it. There was a small field between where they stood and the trees, containing several cows. ‘Do you think a cow attacked Ben?’ It was a hopeful, almost comical, idea. The ‘Hey!’ that she had heard might have been addressed to a belligerent animal. ‘He might have climbed a tree to escape.’

Melanie made a sound of restrained derision at this. The trees were not large, on the whole, and even if one had proved climbable, they both knew that Ben would not run away from a cow. He would stand his ground and shout at it until it backed off. There were no calves to be seen, and all country people knew that the only cattle to be feared were protective mothers and dairy bulls.

It was the manager’s wife who made the first discovery. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, as she bent down and picked up a black, rectangular plastic object from beside a tuft of long grass. ‘Is this your friend’s?’

Melanie snatched it and flittered a thumb over the
screen. No buttons these days, Simmy noted, with a sense of never having a hope of keeping up. Even in the midst of her horrified suspicions, she could hear her mother commenting on how useless the gadget actually was, however passionately it might be vaunted as indispensable.

‘Yes, it’s his,’ said the girl. ‘So he was definitely here.’

‘And just as definitely taken away against his will,’ flashed Simmy, impatient with Melanie’s faint attempt at being positive. ‘He’d never go without the phone if he could help it.’

‘So where’s the body he was talking about?’ asked Mrs Bodgett.

They all scanned the ground, moving to the fence and gazing at the dense undergrowth between the trees. ‘Nobody could get through there,’ said Melanie.

‘No,’ Simmy agreed. ‘How far does the wood go?’

‘Not very far,’ said the manager’s wife. ‘There’s a tarn through there, called Priest Pot. You can’t see it from here – or anywhere, really. It’s surrounded by trees and rushes and stuff.’

‘Which way is Colthouse?’

The woman pointed. ‘Over there. Why?’

‘Ben said he might go there.’

‘Well, he’d have to go round by the roads. Past the sewage works, up to the recreation field and it’s just a little way to the right from there. There’s not really any sort of shortcut, that I can think of.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘Fifteen, twenty minutes.’ The woman flapped impatiently. ‘There’s nothing here. We’ve called the police for nothing.’

‘There’s his phone,’ said Melanie. ‘That proves he was here. We should have a closer look.’

They walked along the fence, the ground muddy in places. They passed the dead tree that Simmy had noticed. For a few feet there was a wooden fence with rails, instead of the barbed wire along the rest of the stretch. ‘You could climb over here quite easily,’ said Simmy.

‘It’s been flattened here, look,’ said Melanie, pointing at a patch of bent bracken just beyond the barrier. ‘Somebody might have been lying there.’

‘There’s the police,’ observed Mrs Manager. She pointed to the road some distance away. A car could be seen turning into the hotel’s entrance. ‘I saw the markings on the side.’

‘We should go and meet them, then,’ Simmy decided. They began to walk towards Esthwaite, following the course of the fence again. ‘You know what? I bet Ben saw somebody asleep and thought he was dead. Maybe he was with a girl or something. Or not supposed to be here. So when he woke up and saw Ben on the phone he hit him, or chased him. And Ben dropped his phone trying to get away.’

‘Yeah? So where is he now?’ demanded Melanie. ‘It’s way over an hour ago. If he’s still running, he’ll have reached Ambleside by now.’

The jest went unheeded, because Simmy found herself watching a pair of swans making serene progress across the middle of the lake. They were so far removed from the turbulent worries of human life that she really wanted to join them, for a moment. Not just that, but to
become
one of them. Then she tracked back, her attention caught by a
plop
caused by a fish jumping out of the water. Another
creature disporting itself in mindless pleasure, little knowing that a fisherman was out to get it. The lake itself was an oasis of calm, lacking all pretensions, ignored by almost every tourist in the region. The stark disjunction between the tranquil summer day and the extreme concern she felt for Ben was almost enough to justify Melanie’s flippancy. It was all mad, after all. Senseless, stupid and insane.

‘What’s that?’ Mrs Boddington-Webster suddenly yelped. ‘Look!’

Warily, Simmy followed her pointing finger. Over the fence, where all three of them stood helplessly staring at the water, was a dark lump, almost entirely submerged. ‘It can’t be,’ she said, feeling horribly sick. ‘It absolutely can’t.’

With no thought for dignity and heedless of her smart work uniform, Melanie scrambled over the wire, her weight making the whole fence sag and buckle. ‘Come on!’ she yelled, as if the others were half a mile away instead of five feet.

Simmy’s long legs helped her negotiate the obstructing fence, but the other woman was a lot shorter and even more smartly clothed than Melanie. She hesitated and then withdrew, her face tight with apprehension. ‘I’ll go and lead the police down here,’ she said. ‘There’ll be nobody to meet them, otherwise.’

Melanie and Simmy waded into the shallows, the ground soft and squelchy beneath their feet. Simmy wished she’d taken her shoes off. They felt like lead weights as they filled with water. The object they sought was only a yard or so from the edge, the water hardly any depth. They would have seen it sooner if it had not been for the long grass growing below the surface, obscuring nearly everything.
Three days of heavy rain the previous week must have caused the lake to expand, washing over ground that was normally dry and grassy.

‘It’s a body,’ choked Melanie. ‘A man.’

‘Ben? It’s not Ben is it?’ The idea was as appallingly untenable as that of a nearby nuclear explosion or a huge dragon descending from the sky with outstretched claws. Something that would spell perpetual darkness and oblivion. Something that would render existence less than meaningless. If Ben was dead, there was no more hope for the world. All this went through Simmy’s mind even as she spoke the terrible words.

‘No,’ said Melanie. She was crying. Tears were running down her cheeks. She sat down in the water, holding a horrible sodden head between her knees. ‘No, it’s not Ben.’

‘Who then?’ It seemed clear that it was someone known.

‘Dan. It’s Dan, from the hotel,’ said Melanie.

‘Is he dead?’ Simmy asked the question with the merest scrap of hope. The water might be shallow, but the face had been immersed in it, and the whole aspect of the body screamed lifelessness. The uncaring lake and the sky above it had quite given up on him. He was an inert unthreatening mass of meat and nothing more.

Melanie shook her head and said nothing. Then she put two fingers on a place at the side of his head, where the hairline was. Simmy leant down to see, wincing with the horror of it, her throat stinging with bile.

‘The bone’s broken,’ she realised. ‘That’s terrible. That must be what killed him.’ She looked steadily at the handsome face and the wet hair. The skin was oddly loose on the bones, the mouth and eyes open. ‘Get up, Mel. You don’t have to do that any more.’

But Melanie was immobilised. Gradually it dawned on Simmy that there was nothing to be gained from dragging
the girl away. Mixed with the horror and grief was a kind of wonder. Mel traced the dead features with gentle fingertips, forcing Simmy to understand how a dead face is no more alarming or repellent than a live one. Why in the world should it be? She had known, for a few minutes, the same truth when her baby had died. But it was a slippery truth, and no two bodies were the same. Shivers of disgust and fear were slicing through her, as she formed part of the unhappy tableau on the edge of the lake.

Again, years seemed to pass. Simmy knew they were breaking rules, that they ought to be doing it all differently, but she felt weak and incompetent. Slowly the gears of her mind began to engage again until her head was almost bursting with questions, memories, implications. Twice before in the past year she had encountered the savage danger of water. A young man at a wedding had been deliberately drowned in Lake Windermere, and she herself had been pitched into water with malicious intent. It would seem that in an area known for its multiplicity of lakes and rivers, those intent on murder saw them as a convenient means of killing.

‘What happened, do you think?’ she ventured. ‘Somebody hit him with a hard object and then threw him into the lake as a way of hiding him? But
when
would they have done that? Ben saw the body under the trees.’ Her heart flinched. ‘He must have seen them do it. They must have needed to keep him quiet. He’s a witness to the whole thing.’ Desperation made her jiggle on the grass, and throw wild looks up towards the hotel from where help should be coming, and yet strangely wasn’t.

Melanie merely shook her head. Her tears had slowed,
but she continued to sit straight-legged in a few inches of water, Dan’s head and shoulders were on top of her at an angle. Simmy began to wonder at the level of emotion shown over the man who had been the girl’s superior, and who she had shown very little sign of liking much. Was it no more than a natural human response to the pity of a sudden death, a young man’s life cut off so horribly? Her own emotions were stubbornly fixed on Ben and the acute need to find him before a similar fate could befall him.

‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed. ‘You don’t have to sit there with him. The police and everybody will be here in a minute. They won’t want you getting in their way.’

‘I can’t move,’ whimpered the girl. ‘He’s so heavy.’

Simmy was not eager to help. They had succeeded in swivelling the body around, so the legs were still in the lake, while the head and shoulders were in Melanie’s lap, on a slimy, semi-dry piece of ground. Esthwaite did not have proper banks – at least on its western side. The water merely lapped at the edge of the field, its boundary never the same from one week to the next. Their efforts had created a muddy cloud in the shallows, slippery and sludgy. She looked all around. Why hadn’t one of those darned fishermen taken more notice and come to their aid? How could they have missed the fact of something ghastly going on? Perhaps if she shouted to them, they would respond.

But the idea of more people splashing about, asking questions, saying stupid things, was repellent. If the men in the little boats had actually witnessed the slaughter of Dan Yates and the dumping of his body in the lake, then surely they would have flown into action, phoning police and rushing to the shore to do their best to help? As it
was, they must have missed the whole thing and thereby rendered themselves useless.

At last – and it was probably well under ten minutes in reality – there was authoritative assistance in the shape of two policemen, the hotel manager and someone wearing a white outfit, who presumably worked in the kitchen. Stupidly, Simmy searched the little group for Ben Harkness, who would always have turned up for the excitement if he possibly could.

The sudden manifestation of a dead body threw everyone into a far more concentrated mode. The policemen had thought they’d been summoned to a smoke-and-mirrors scene, involving nothing more than a dropped mobile phone. Now they had a whole long list of procedures to follow, for which they had not been prepared at all. Their attention was directed for a minute or two to the intervening wire fence, separating them from the tableau in the water. ‘We’d better pull it down,’ said one.

‘Right,’ said the other uncertainly. ‘Just a bit, right?’ Together they pulled up two vertical wooden posts and laid them flat. The fence had been wobbly from the start, and Melanie’s assault on it had already accomplished half the job. The wire obligingly lay flat and the policemen walked over it.

‘Who is it?’ demanded the manager, trying not to look too closely. ‘Is it your friend?’

Melanie raised her grubby face to his. ‘It’s Dan,’ she said.

‘What?’ The manager turned green. ‘It can’t be. How can it be?’

Nobody spoke. The policemen were both eyeing their
glossy black footwear and equally pristine trousers, knowing they would have to get them wet. They also knew that they ought not to disturb the scene of a sudden death. But beyond that, they knew almost nothing. Accident, suicide, heart attack – anything was possible. Distressed colleagues and unidentified women had to be sorted out. One of them put out a hand to Melanie. ‘Come on, miss. Let’s have you out of there for a start.’

He planted his feet securely and exerted enough force to lever her out of the water. She came slowly, reluctantly, and then stood with bowed shoulders, shivering. The officer looked around the group for something to throw over her, but nothing was identified. ‘You need to get indoors and take those wet things off,’ he said. But words were not enough to achieve this, and Melanie stayed as she was.

Simmy lost patience, surprising herself as much as anyone. ‘There’s a boy missing,’ she said. ‘He’s seventeen. He found this body, over an hour ago. He phoned me. Now he’s gone. His phone was here, abandoned. We
must
find him before something terrible happens to him.’ Her voice rose to a shout. ‘We have to look for him.’

To their credit, the officers took her seriously, at least to the extent of looking at her and then looking at each other. ‘All right, madam,’ said one. ‘You’re telling us that this young man found the deceased and called you. What happened then?’

‘I didn’t hear the call. It was on my voicemail. When I found it, I came down here with Melanie and Mrs Bod— I mean the manager’s wife.’ She ignored Melanie’s alarmed gasp at the narrow escape from using the disrespectful nickname, other than to note that the girl was not entirely
traumatised if she could worry about such a detail. ‘But he said the body was under the trees, not in the lake. The killer must have moved it, and then taken Ben away. Ben’s been
kidnapped
.’ This time she wasn’t shouting, but choking out the word, unable to confront all the implications it carried.

‘Killer?’ repeated the policeman. His face was paler than before, as if the concept of deliberate murder was far beyond his scope. Perhaps it was, Simmy realised. Perhaps she had more experience of it over the past year than this young constable had. Perhaps, like Melanie, he hadn’t yet seen a dead body in all its fresh and gruesome reality.

‘And kidnapper,’ Simmy insisted.

A connection had apparently been taking place in the mind of the other officer. ‘We’re not talking about young Ben Harkness, are we?’ he said slowly. ‘You said the lad’s name was Ben.’

‘Yes!’ Simmy’s relief was entirely irrational, but somehow the fact that Ben was already known to this man made a huge difference. ‘You’ll have to call DI Moxon. He’ll understand.’

But she had gone too far. The hotel manager squared his shoulders and laid a hand on a uniformed arm. ‘We have a
body
here,’ he said thickly. ‘My employee is lying here dead. I think that ought to be your primary concern right now.’

‘I agree with you, sir. But if there is any suggestion of foul play, we are not permitted to move him. We need a police doctor, a senior officer, photographer …’ He was removing a device from his belt and frowningly trying to recall correct procedure. ‘Excuse me,’ he added, and walked a few steps away from the bewildered group. His
colleague, belatedly following protocol, made ushering motions. ‘Please move away now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here.’ He produced a device of his own. ‘If we could just have an identity for the deceased.’ He looked from face to face.

‘It’s Dan Yates,’ said the lad from the kitchen, speaking for the first time.

‘Actually, his name is
Ai
dan,’ said Melanie. ‘Dan for short.’

‘Do you have details of his next of kin? Is he married?’

The manager took over. ‘Divorced. No children. Parents in East Anglia somewhere. I’ve got it on record in the office.’

Simmy acknowledged to herself that she actually cared quite little for Dan and his horrible fate. She cared about
Ben
, primarily because he had been under her care when he disappeared.
What will his mother say?
became her dominant thought, followed rapidly by
and
Bonnie
!

She groaned aloud.