1 Aunt Bessie Assumes (4 page)

Hugh noticed where she was looking and
exchanged a quick glance with Bessie.
 
“Let’s get going then,” he blustered.
 
“Off we go.”

Vikky was shaking as Hugh took her arm and
guided her out towards his car.
 

“Thank you, Aunt Bessie,” he called over
his shoulder.
 

“It was no problem,” she replied to the
man, waiting for a similar word of thanks from Vikky.

Vikky climbed into the passenger seat of
the police car without looking back.
 

Bessie frowned.
 
Manners should always trump tragedy, she
thought to herself as she went back inside.
 
She tried hard to understand the other
woman’s feelings, but there were no two ways about it.
 
Bessie couldn’t make herself like Vikky
Pierce, no matter how sorry she felt for her.

Chapter Three

Bessie bustled around her cottage, quickly
washing the lunch dishes and tidying them away.
 
She went back upstairs and rescued the left-behind
nightie.
 
The label identified it as
pure silk and dry clean only, so Bessie simply threw it into a shopping bag to
take back to Vikky later.
 
If it had
been sensible cotton, Bessie would have washed it for the other woman out of
simple courtesy.
 

She folded the police blanket carefully
and put it into a second bag.
 
She
would return it to Doona, who would take care of laundering it.
 
Even if she did wash it, Doona would
have to do it again anyway.
 
Doona
had explained it to her once, something about having everything the police used
washed in the same detergent for reasons having to do with evidence. Bessie
wasn’t sure she understood, but she knew there was no point in washing the
blanket herself.

Chores finished, she sank down on a couch
in the sitting room and then realised that her morning routine had been
completely disrupted by events.
 
She
hadn’t even turned the ringer on her phone back on.
 
She sighed as she got to her feet again.
 
Her mobile phone was used for
emergencies only and was in her handbag, probably switched off. She had a
single line into the house, and that phone sat in the kitchen next to the
overpriced answering machine that her advocate had nagged her into getting.

When she went to bed at night, Bessie
always turned the phone’s ringer off.
 
It was a minor concession to her age.
 
She felt she was too old now to be
running up and down the stairs in the middle of the night if the phone rang.
 
Any call between nine at night and six or
seven the next morning was going to be a wrong number anyway.
 
Bessie’s friends would never bother her at
those hours, and she couldn’t imagine any emergency that couldn’t wait until
morning.

With all of the comings and goings with
the police cars and the ambulance, Bessie was unsurprised to find that she had
twenty-two messages on the machine.
 
She made herself a cup of tea and pulled out a pad and pen to write down
the important ones.

Bessie split the list into two columns,
those who had called because they were genuinely concerned and those who had
called out of sheer nosiness.
 
It
didn’t take long to return the handful of calls from the sincerely worried.
 
The others could wait a bit longer to
get their skeet, she decided.
 

She was just reassuring her advocate that
the excitement hadn’t been too much for her when she heard a knock on her
door.
 
Hugh Watterson was back.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Bessie, but I’m meant to
ask you to come into the station to make a statement,” he said
apologetically.
 
“I told Inspector
Rockwell that I could take your statement here, but he wants to talk to you
himself.”

“I suppose inspectors can make whatever
rules they like,” Bessie shrugged.
 
She had no real objection to going to the station; she often spent time there
visiting with Doona anyway, but it would have been nice to
have
been
given options.

Hugh opened his mouth and then snapped it
shut.
 
Bessie wondered what he
wanted to say, but didn’t pry.
 

“Just let me get my bag,” she told
Hugh.
 
“You pop in and make yourself
a cuppa.
 
The kettle has just
boiled.”

Hugh grinned at that and Bessie could hear
him grabbing a cup and making himself tea as she headed towards the
stairs.
 
She always welcomed houseguests
and the neighbourhood children always knew they could “run away” to Aunt
Bessie’s whenever they felt the need, but Bessie wasn’t the sort to wait on her
guests hand and foot.
 

As soon as they were old enough to not get
hurt, she taught them to make their own tea and where the biscuits were
kept.
 
Everyone knew that, at
Bessie’s, biscuits
had to be put
on a plate and then
eaten neatly so that the plate caught the crumbs.
 
Visitors also quickly learned that they
should wash their cups and plates for themselves when they were finished.
 
Bessie was terrific at providing tea and
sympathy, but she wasn’t going to clean up after everyone on top of that.

A few minutes later she was bundled up
into Hugh’s police car and whisked away into the centre of Laxey.
 
Hugh pulled into the police station car
park and grinned at Bessie.

“At least the rain has stopped,” he
remarked.
 

Bessie looked up at the grey skies and
grinned back.
 
“Could start again
any time,” she replied.

“Hardly surprising in March,” Hugh
shrugged.
 

They climbed out of the car and headed
into the station through the back door.
 
Bessie had never entered from the back; when she visited Doona she always
came in the front way.
 
Doona’s desk
was in the building’s lobby, and Bessie had never had any reason to go past it
into the station itself.
 
Now she
looked around with interest at the small offices that they passed as they made
their way into the building.

She was disappointed in what she saw.
 
Many of the doors were closed, but the
ones that were open just looked like ordinary offices.
 
Their occupants could have been advocates
or insurance agents as much as policemen.
 
She saw no sign of Vikky Pierce, or indeed anyone else.
 
The station felt almost deserted.
 

Doona had told her that there were a few
small temporary holding cells in the basement of the building, but Hugh didn’t
take her anywhere near those, either.
 
Instead, he escorted her into the lobby
and left her with Doona while he went to let Inspector Rockwell know that she
had arrived.

“Oooo, there you are,” Doona squealed when
she spotted Bessie.
 
“How are
you?
 
Was it frightfully awful?”

Bessie hugged her friend and was surprised
to find tears welling up in her eyes as she was squeezed tightly.
 
Doona was in her mid-forties,
twice-married and twice-divorced.
  
She was a few inches taller and about thirty-five pounds heavier than
Bessie.
 
She wore her heavily
highlighted brown hair in a short bob and
alternated
between thick glasses and contact lenses that artificially gave her sparkling
blue eyes.

“Oh now, don’t you be crying,” Doona told
her.
 
“That widow woman has used up
every blessed tissue in the whole station and I haven’t had time to pop out to buy
more.”

Bessie smiled.
 
“Vikky Pierce?
 
She used more than a few tissues at my
house as well.
 
In between gossiping
and eating like a horse.”

Doona shook her head.
 
“Come and sit down.
 
Inspector Rockwell won’t be ready for
you for a bit.
 
You can tell me all
about it.”

Bessie handed the bag with the police
blanket to her friend and then slid into the chair next to the reception desk
that Doona manned.
 
She smiled at Doona,
feeling lucky that they had met and become good friends before today’s events.

“Fastyr mie,” she told Doona.

“Oh aye, fastyr mie,” Doona replied with a
laugh.
 

“We really have to stay in practice,”
Bessie insisted.
 
The friends had
met a few years earlier in a beginning Manx language class for adults.
 
While neither had developed any
proficiency in the native language of their homeland, they had quickly become
close friends.
 

Doona had grown up in the south of the island.
 
She and Bessie only crossed paths when
Doona moved to Laxey to take the job at the Laxey station as a civilian officer,
following her second divorce.
 
At
their first language class Bessie had confessed to feeling bad that she had
never learned the language that her parents and especially her grandparents had
spoken.
 
Everyone laughed when Doona
announced that she had just signed up in the hopes of meeting single men.
 
It was especially funny since the class
consisted of six women,
all falling
somewhere between
Bessie and Doona in age.

“I’ve signed up to start again in April,”
Bessie told Doona.
 
“I’m taking Beginning
Manx again, since I haven’t exactly mastered it.”

Doona laughed.
 
“I’ll sign up, too.
 
Maybe this time there will be some men
in the class.
 
Or maybe the teacher
will be a single middle-aged man looking for the perfect woman.”

“You’ll be lucky if there’s a stray man in
the class,” Bessie laughed.
 
“Marjorie’s
teaching it again, so you’re definitely out of luck there.”

Doona shrugged.
 
“It’s fun anyway, even though I’m
terrible at it.”

“It’s a tough language,” Bessie told
her.
 
“I heard my parents speak it
occasionally and I still can’t manage it.”

“They should have taught it to you,” Doona
sighed.
 

“Once we moved to America, they didn’t see
any advantage to doing so.
 
And once
we’d moved back, I moved out.”

Doona nodded.
 
She knew Bessie’s story well.
 
“I should be glad they didn’t teach it
to you as a child,” she remarked.
 
“If they had, we wouldn’t have met.”

“I guess we would have met today,” Bessie
said wryly.

“Yes, I guess so,” Doona laughed.
 
“
Anyway, what happened?”

Bessie fought back a sigh.
 “I went for my regular morning walk and nearly tripped over a dead man.
 Luckily, that's an unusual morning for me.”  

Doona nodded.  “It's
pretty unusual for us as well,” she confided.  “And from what I hear, he
didn’t get dead accidentally.”

Bessie stared at her
friend.
 
“What do you mean?” she
demanded.

“I can only tell you what I’m
hearing through the grapevine,” Doona told her.
 
“None of this is official.
 
But I’ve heard he had a knife stuck in
his chest.”

Bessie sat back in her chair,
stunned by the news.
 
“But no one
gets murdered on the Isle of Man,” she argued.
 
“Okay, there was that man in Douglas in
1982, but he was from across and brought his troubles with him.”

“There’s more that goes on
than makes the papers,” Doona confided.
 
“But even so, Laxey has always been one
of the safest places on the island.”

“What else don’t I know?”
 
Bessie demanded.  “I know the widow
was brought in for questioning; how did she seem to you?”

Doona shook her head.
 “I could get fired for talking about an active investigation,” she told
Bessie with a frown.  

Bessie frowned herself.
 “What good is having a friend on the inside if I can't get any good skeet
out of her?” she demanded.

Doona grinned.  “I told
you the most exciting thing I know,” she reminded her friend.
 
“And I can tell you that Inspector
Rockwell is stepping on just about every set of toes he can find,” she
whispered.  

“Why am I not surprised?”
Bessie asked.  “He seemed like the type when I met him on the beach.”

“Oh, he is,”
Doona
agreed.  “Inspector Kelly isn't very happy with
the way the CID is taking charge.  He thinks that, since Laxey is his
jurisdiction, he should be in charge.  Inspector Rockwell insists that the
CID trumps local jurisdiction.  At this rate, the Chief Constable might
have to separate them.”

“Men!”
 
Bessie rolled her eyes.  “They
should all be focussed on finding the killer, not worrying about who gets to be
in charge.”

“I think they're both more
interested in who gets the credit when the killer gets locked up,” Doona said.
 “The family is important across.
 
This case is going to get lots of publicity, here and there.
 
I think Mr. Pierce already has the Chief
Constable on speed dial so he can keep up-to-date with developments.
 
There will be lots of plaudits for the
person who catches whoever did it.”

Bessie groaned.  She
liked to think of Laxey as an undiscovered gem; the last thing she wanted was
any publicity.