Aunt Bessie Goes (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 7) (10 page)

Doona
laughed.
 
“How often do you do
that?” she asked.

“Not as often
as I used to,” Bessie replied, patting her friend’s shoulder.

The sound of
the kettle boiling interrupted briefly.
 
Doona fixed the tea while Bessie put out biscuits.
 
Hugh’s eyes lit up when he saw the plate
that Bessie put on the table.

“You have some
of those special chocolate ones,” he said enthusiastically.

“I thought you
might appreciate those,” Bessie said.
 
“And since I had so much lovely food at tea with Sarah, I decided to be
generous tonight and share them.”

Everyone
laughed and then fixed their tea and chose a few biscuits before John picked
back up with the conversation.

“So it didn’t
feel strange when
Elinor
told you that Adam had
gone,” he checked.

“Not really,”
Bessie said.
 
“Most kids left at
that sort of age to go to school or just to get away.
 
The island can feel a bit claustrophobic,
and I knew the boy hadn’t had a particularly happy childhood.
 
If anything, the only surprise was that
he went to Australia, rather than simply across.”

“Did anyone
ever give you any reason why he picked Australia?” John wanted to know.

“I remember
discussing it with
Elinor
.
 
I recall her hinting that he’d found
himself in some trouble.
 
I’m sure
it had to do with Mark Carr.
 
Maybe
there’ll be more details in my diary,” Bessie said hopefully.

“Did Sarah say
anything else that you found interesting?” John asked.

“She said she
recognised
all of the clothes,” Bessie replied.
 
“Even the ones on the skeleton.”

“Yes, but that
isn’t conclusive,” John said.

“I think it
was Mike who told me that you can’t find Mark Carr,” Bessie added.
 
“That’s unfortunate.”

“We weren’t
looking for him too hard before,” John answered.
 
“But we are now.”

“Do we know if
he ever actually came to the island?” Bessie questioned.

“Nothing is
definite at the moment,” John said with a sigh.

“What was he
even in prison for?” Doona asked.

“Theft,” John
told her.
 
“It’s all public record,
so I can tell you that he was working for a bank across and was caught helping
himself to a bit of cash at the end of the day.
 
He’d have been out a lot earlier, but he
managed to get himself into trouble inside just often enough to keep him
incarcerated a lot longer than the original sentence.
 
Then, every time he did get out, it
didn’t take him long to get sent back in.
 
About a year ago he suddenly seemed to come to his senses and straighten
out.
 
He suddenly became a model
prisoner.”

“And now he’s
disappeared,” Bessie said.

“His last
cellmate was interviewed about that.
 
He says that in the last year all Mark would talk about was coming back
to the island.
 
Allegedly Mark told
him that he still had friends here who would look after him.”

“I can’t imagine
who,” Bessie exclaimed.
 
“He’s been
away thirty years and the only real friend I can remember him having was Adam,
anyway.”

John
shrugged.
 
“He is going to inherit
something from his mother’s estate,” he said.
 
“She left most of her assets to a cancer
charity in memory of her daughters, but Mark should get a decent amount once
the estate is settled.”

“I’m surprised
Joan didn’t cut him out of her will entirely,” Bessie said tartly.

“He was only
left a fraction of the estate,” John told her.
 
“But the house is worth quite a bit, even
in its rather poor condition, and she had some other assets as well.
 
Even that fraction will probably seem like
a lot of money to Mark.”

“Once he’s
found,” Doona added.

“Which brings
me to my next question,” John said.
 
“Who else did
Mark
and Adam spend time
with?
 
Who were Adam’s friends?
 
And who might
Mark
turn to if he needed a place to stay?”

“I guess the
easy answer is the rest of the Raspberry Jam Ladies’ kids,” Bessie said with
shrug.
 
“I mean, they were more or
less forced to spend time together over the years.
 
Mark and Adam were some of the youngest,
but they all would have played together.”

“So I need to
talk to Spencer Cannon again,” John said.
 
“I understand he’s moved back to the island.”

“He has,”
Bessie confirmed.
 
“He’s renting a
flat in Ramsey for the moment, while he looks for a house.”

“I’ll ring him
tomorrow,” John said, making a note in his small notebook.

“Adam’s
brothers might be able to help as well,” Bessie suggested.
 
“Sarah said that they’re coming across
in the next few days.”

“Oh, they’re
already on my list,” John assured her.
 

“Okay, let me
run through the other jam ladies,” Bessie said.
 
“Agnes only had Matthew and he passed
away before she did.
 
Elinor’s
son Nathan also passed before his mother.
 
We already talked about Joan’s only
remaining child, Mark, and we talked about Nancy’s children.
 
Spencer is here and he was Peggy’s only
child.
 
Elizabeth Porter had two
children who’ve been across for many years.
 
Her grandson was here in July, though.”

“We have
people talking to both Ted and Tom Porter,” John told her.

“That just
leaves Margaret Gelling.
 
She had
two children as well and neither of them came back for her funeral.
 
She told me, not long before she died,
that Hazel is in Manchester and Jack is in Rugby,” Bessie said.

“I don’t
suppose you know Hazel’s married name?” John asked.

Bessie shook
her head.
 
“Margaret didn’t talk
about her children very often,” she replied.
 
“I can’t remember ever hearing it.”

“Spencer might
know,” Doona suggested.
 
“I gather
he made some effort to keep in touch with the other ‘jam children,’ as he calls
them.”

“So I guess
having a chat with Spencer Cannon is my next job,” John said.
 
“But that’s for tomorrow.
 
It’s getting late and we don’t want Hugh
to be late for his date.”

Hugh
flushed.
 
“If we have more that we
need to discuss, it’s fine,” he said.
 
“Work has to come first.”

“In this case,
I think you’re in luck,” John said.
 
“We’ve pretty much finished, unless Bessie has anything else to add.”

Bessie gave
them all a quick rundown of her conversation with Sarah and Mike.
 
“I think I’d already covered most of
that anyway,” she said at the end.

John had taken
a few notes.
 
“You mentioned a
cuddly toy that she was holding.
 
Where does that come in?
 
Has
she had it all these years?”

Bessie shook
her head.
 
“She found it in a box in
her mother’s desk when she cleared out the house after her mother died.”

“Do you think
she’d be terribly upset if I took it for forensic examination?” John asked.

“I think she’d
be heartbroken,” Bessie answered.

“If it’s been
sitting, untouched, since Adam left, it’s just possible we could find something
like blood splatters on it, assuming he had it with him when he died,” John
argued.

“It looked
very clean, if a bit misshapen,” Bessie told him.
 
“Surely if it had blood on it, Nancy
would have destroyed it or, at the very least, left it behind the wall with the
body.”

“Which raises
the question of why she did keep it,” Hugh spoke.

“From
everything I’ve heard about her, she wasn’t the type to keep things out of
sentiment,” Doona said.

“Not for her
children, anyway,” Bessie told them.
 
“The rest of the box was full of cards and notes from her husband.
 
There wasn’t anything in there from any
of her children.
 
According to
Sarah, there wasn’t anything elsewhere in the house, either.”

“And yet she
kept a cuddly toy that belonged to the son she knew was dead,” Hugh said.

“Unless it
isn’t Adam that we found,” John suggested.
 
“If Adam killed someone and his parents hid the body and sent Adam away,
maybe she kept the toy as something to remember Adam by.”

“But why would
he have to run away?” Bessie asked.
 
“If it wasn’t Adam, who was it?
 
I’m sure you’ve checked the missing person reports from the time, and
maybe I’ve forgotten something, but I certainly don’t remember anyone else
disappearing around that time.”

“There were a
few missing person reports on the island that were active that September,” John
told her.
 
“Two of the three people
eventually turned up and the third was a young child.
 
The body we found was not that of a
child.”

“Myrtle
Kincaid,” Bessie muttered.
 
“I
haven’t thought about her for years.”

“Who’s Myrtle
Kincaid?” Doona asked.

“She was a
little girl in
Lonan
who disappeared in July,
1967.
 
I think she was five or six
and she was playing in her garden behind her house.
 
When her mother called her to come in
for lunch, she never came.”

“How awful,”
Doona said.

“In those
days, no one panicked.
 
Her mum just
assumed she’d gone to a friend’s house or something.
 
I don’t think the police got involved
for several hours, by which time, apparently, there was no trace,” Bessie
added.

“One of the
things I’m doing at the station is reexamining cold cases,” John said.
 
“I actually had the Myrtle Kincaid file
on my desk when we found the body at the King residence.”

“What a
strange coincidence,” Bessie said.

“Really
strange,” Doona said with a frown.
 
“But you’re sure it isn’t her?”

“Ninety-nine
per cent sure,” John told her.
 
“The
coroner’s preliminary findings are that the body is that of a young male, maybe
eighteen or nineteen.”

“That
certainly fits for Adam,” Bessie said.

“And not for
Myrtle,” Hugh added.

The gathering
broke up after that.
 
Hugh rushed
off for his date and Doona wasn’t far behind.

“There’s this
new American comedy on
telly
tonight that I want to
try,” she told Bessie.
 
“I know you
don’t even have a television, but some
programmes
are
very funny, and you can never have too much laughter in your life.”

The inspector
was just tidying away the last of the tea things when Bessie shut the door
behind Doona.

“I can manage
that little job,” Bessie told him.

“Just trying
to be helpful,” he replied.
 
“I
stayed behind to ask you how you’re feeling.
 
I know everything that happened in July
was very upsetting for you, and then I was gone for most of August.
 
Now, this has to have dragged a lot of
unpleasant memories back up for you, hasn’t it?”

Bessie nodded,
swallowing hard.
 
“I wish I could
say no,” she told him.
 
“But what
happened with the jam ladies was a huge shock.
 
I thought I knew them all reasonably
well and I never expected that any of them would, well, I never expected what
happened.
 
Now, to find out that
Nancy hid a body in her own home for thirty years, well, that’s another big
emotional blow.
 
Nancy and I were
never close friends, but I never would have considered such a thing possible
just a few days ago.”

John crossed
to Bessie and took her hands.
 
“You
never know what people might do in unusual circumstances,” he told her.
 
“Most parents would kill to protect
their children, for instance.”

“But that
doesn’t seem like the case here, does it?” Bessie asked wryly.
 
“It seems as if they killed their
child.”

“Were Nancy
and her husband close?
 
Would she
have lied for him and helped him conceal a body?”

“According to
Sarah, her mother was devoted to her father, so much so that the children felt
unloved,” Bessie replied.

“So if
Frederick killed someone, Nancy would have helped him hide the body?”

“From what I’ve
heard of their relationship, yes.”

“Even if the
victim was their own son?”

Bessie
sighed.
 
“Yes, even then,” she said
sadly.

Chapter
Six

The next day,
after breakfast and her walk, Bessie dug out her old diaries from a pile of
boxes in the back of the spare room’s wardrobe.
 
She flipped through them, resisting the
urge to actually read the entries.
 
Today was for helping John, not strolling down memory lane, she told
herself sternly.
 
When she found the
book that covered the relevant period, she took it downstairs and curled up in
a chair with it.

It wasn’t long
before she was up again, grabbing a box of tissues from the kitchen.
 
Only a few entries into the book she was
remembering old friends, long since deceased or moved away, and unwanted tears
wouldn’t be far behind.

Bessie read
through entries about little Myrtle Kincaid and sighed.
 
Her first mention of the subject was
full of misplaced confidence.

“A small child in
Lonan
has gone missing, but no doubt she’ll soon turn up, having decided to hide at
the
neighbour’s
house or spend the night with a
little friend.”

The next
entry, a week later, was less optimistic.

“They have yet to find little Myrtle Kincaid
in
Lonan
.
 
Her mother was interviewed by the local paper
.
 
Apparently the child’s sixth birthday is
next week and the mother said she was still going to make a cake and buy her
missing daughter a present, just in case.
 
It’s all very sad.”

 
Bessie turned the pages, her eyes
skimming through boring entries about her everyday life.
 
It wasn’t until early October that she
found something relevant to the current case.

“It seems young Adam King has decided to
move to Australia.
 
I saw
Elinor
today and she told me that he left some time in
September.
 
Apparently Nancy is very
upset and
Elinor
asked me to not mention it to
her.
 
That doesn’t really sound like
Nancy, but as I don’t plan on speaking with her in the foreseeable future, it
presents no great difficulty.”

Bessie shook
her head at the somewhat harsh words.
 
If you can’t be totally yourself in your diary, then where can you be,
she asked herself.
 
She flipped
through a dozen more pages before she found another interesting note in early
January 1968.

“Saw Nancy King at
ShopFast
today.
 
She told me that Fred and
James are both well and that Sarah is settled in Port Erin and rarely
visits.
 
(Hardly surprising.)
 
I asked about young Adam and she told me
that she’d recently had a postcard from him.
 
Apparently he’s settled in Sydney or
Adelaide, she couldn’t actually remember which.
 
As her husband isn’t terribly well at
the moment, they aren’t planning a holiday this year, but are considering going
to visit Adam in the summer of 1969, if all goes well.
 
It’s a long journey with many stops,
apparently, but she’s looking forward to it.”

Bessie looked
up from the book and stared into space for a few minutes.
 
No matter how hard she tried, she
couldn’t recall the conversation well enough to guess now whether Nancy had
been lying or not.
 
Her husband had
passed away in 1969, having never really recovered from that illness that began
in January 1968, so the proposed trip never happened.
 
But was Adam really in Australia, or was
Nancy just making it all up?

It’s no use
speculating, Bessie told herself firmly.
 
Once the body was identified, at least some questions could be
answered.
 
She turned the rest of
the pages in the book
slowly,
looking for anything
else that might help, but couldn’t find any further reference to any of the
relevant people.
 
While she had the
box out, she flipped through her later diaries as well, racing through the
seventies and eighties, looking for anything that might be relevant.

While she
found more than one reference to Nancy King, and quite a few to other members
of her group, Adam’s name never came up again.
 
With a sigh, she rang John.
 

“I’ve been
through my diaries,” she told him.
 
“And I’m afraid I haven’t much to add to what I said last night.”

She read out
the relevant passages, word for word, from the book.
 
“I’m sure that doesn’t help at all,” she
said when she was done.

“It’s
interesting,” John replied.
 
“I know
Sarah didn’t think it was possible for her father to hide the body without her
mother knowing about it, but what do you think?”

“I suppose
anything is possible,” Bessie replied thoughtfully.
 
“I’m probably the wrong one to ask, as
I’ve never been married.
 
I know a
lot of married couples keep secrets from one another.
 
This is a pretty big secret, but I
suppose if I’d killed someone I might not want my spouse to know.”
 

“The only
correspondence Nancy seems to have kept over the years was the box of things
from her husband and a few letters from her friends,” John told her.
 
“Sarah let me go through the box she has
and there certainly wasn’t any postcard from Adam there.
 
I wish the woman had kept more.”

“You’d have
much better luck with me,” Bessie laughed.
 
“I keep just about every letter or card I receive.
 
I won’t promise they’re terribly well
organised
, but they’re all here somewhere.”

“So when we
find the body you’ve hidden, we’ll have a place to start with solving the
crime,” John teased.

“Oh, if I had
a body to get rid of, I’d make sure you never found it,” Bessie told him.

“Scarily, I
think I believe that,” John said with a laugh.
 
“You read enough murder mysteries; you’d
probably get away with the perfect crime.”

On that rather
odd note, they hung up.
 
After so
many years on her own, Bessie was well accustomed to entertaining herself, but
today she found she had trouble settling into anything.
 
She’d just completed revising a paper
she’d given at a recent conference at the Manx Museum so that it was ready for
publication.
 
She felt as if she was
ready to start some new research, but she couldn’t seem to decide on a suitable
subject.
 
After spending an hour
looking through piles of old research notes, she rang her friend Marjorie
Stevens, the museum’s librarian and archivist.

“
Moghry
mie
,” Marjorie greeted her
in Manx.
 
“
Kys
t’ou
?”

“Ta
mee
braew
,” Bessie replied, slightly
frustrated by how awkward it felt to speak in the language she’d taken classes
in so many times.

“What can I do
for you today?” Marjorie asked in English.

“Thank you for
asking in English,” Bessie replied with a laugh.
 
“I’ve no idea how to say what I want in
Manx.
 
I’m looking for some advice
about what to research next,” she continued.
 
“Maybe I need a new challenge.”

“Why don’t we
have lunch tomorrow and discuss it?” Marjorie suggested.
 
“We can meet here at the museum, or how
about that little Italian place on the promenade that does that amazing garlic
bread?”

Bessie was
quick to agree and then let her very busy friend go.
 
With nothing to do on that front but
wait, Bessie spent the rest of her Monday cooking.
 
She usually prepared several things on a
Sunday for the week ahead, and also for the freezer, but her Sunday had been
too busy this week.
 

Now she made a
vast pot of tomato sauce for spaghetti and
lasagne
and several servings of potato and leek soup.
 
She had a small bowl of soup for her lunch
and froze the rest in single servings.
 
Similarly, she froze most of the spaghetti sauce, just keeping enough
out for her evening meal.
 
By the
time she’d put the last of the containers in the refrigerator, it was just
about time for that meal, but she took a quick walk on the beach first.
 
After dinner, she curled up with the
book on Anglesey and read until she was tired enough to head for bed.

Tuesday was
dry and cool and Bessie kept her walk fairly short.
 
Back at home, she spent some time
sorting through her many notebooks full of research notes, jotting down a few
ideas for new projects that she could discuss with Marjorie.
 
At half eleven, the taxi she’d booked
the previous day arrived, with her
favourite
driver
behind the wheel.

“Good morning,
Dave,” she called as she locked up her front door.
 
The man had climbed out of the taxi and
was walking towards her.

“Good morning,
Bessie,” he replied.
 
He took her
arm and led her to the taxi, carefully tucking her inside it before walking
back around to the driver’s side.
 
“How are you this morning?” he asked after they were under way.

“Oh, I’m
fine,”
Bessie
replied.
 
“I’m meeting a friend for lunch in
Douglas.”

Dave kept the
conversation flowing on the short drive.
 
That was one of the things Bessie liked best about him.
 
There was no doubt he’d heard about the
body at the King house, but he also knew that Bessie was bound to be upset by
it, so he deliberately didn’t bring up the subject.
 
They were discussing
favourite
colours
when he pulled up in front of the restaurant
where Bessie was meeting Marjorie.

“If I could,
I’d wear nothing but black or grey,” he told Bessie.
 
“But that’s mostly for convenience.”

Bessie
laughed.
 
“I love bright
colours
and I try to wear them as much as possible, but you
make a good point.
 
If I only wore
dark
colours
, my laundry would be easier to manage.”

Dave parked
and helped Bessie from the car.
 
“Shall I collect you in an hour?” he asked.

“That sounds
about right,” Bessie replied.
 
“Marjorie will be on her lunch hour, so we won’t be able to dawdle.”

Inside the
restaurant, Marjorie was already seated with a plate of garlic bread in front
of her.

“Oh, thank
heavens you’re here,” she exclaimed when she saw Bessie.
 
“Hurry up and eat your share of this
bread.
 
I was worried I was going to
eat it all before you arrived.”

“I’m sorry, am
I late?” Bessie asked.

“Oh, no,”
Marjorie assured her.
 
“I was a
couple of minutes early and I thought I’d order the bread.
 
I really only just arrived.”

Bessie glanced
at the half-empty plate.

“Yeah,”
Marjorie laughed.
 
“I pretty much
inhaled my half.”

Bessie
insisted that Marjorie have one of the remaining slices.
 
The bread was fabulous, but Bessie
wanted to save room for her meal.
 
Over
lunch the pair discussed Bessie’s different ideas and Marjorie gave her a few
other things to consider.
 
By the
time the sticky toffee puddings arrived, Bessie was pretty sure she knew what
she wanted to do next.
 
The museum
was having a special class in reading old handwriting and it intrigued Bessie.

“If I can get
a space on the paleography course next month, then I’ll definitely tackle some
older wills,” she told her friend.
 
“It sounds really interesting.”

“The course should
be very good,” Marjorie replied.
 
“It’s only a single day, from nine to four.
 
I’ll be teaching some of it and we have
an expert in seventeenth-century handwriting coming over from London to teach
parts as well.
 
Mark Blake, the head
of special projects, is going to be helping out as well.”

“Can you sign
me up, or do I have to complete some paperwork?”

“I can sign
you up and post the paperwork to you,” Marjorie offered.
 
“You can send it back to me at your
convenience.”

With that
settled, Bessie was in a happier frame of mind as Dave drove her home.
 
As she’d have to wait until after the class
to begin her research, she didn’t have to feel even the littlest bit guilty
about doing nothing until then.
 
While she loved doing research and she only did it because she enjoyed
it, it was nice to take a break now and then, especially a guilt-free one.

Back at home,
her answering machine light was flashing.
 
She deleted a number of messages from nosy friends and
neighbours
who wanted the latest skeet on the body.
 
There was only a single message she was
interested in returning.
 
She played
it again before she returned the call.