The Coniston Case by Rebecca Tope

Author:Rebecca Tope [Rebecca Tope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749016203
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Ben walked home and Simmy drove back to Troutbeck. The light on her landline phone was flashing. When she accessed the message, she heard: ‘Simmy? It’s Kathy. I don’t want you to worry about me, but I’ve got into a bit of a pickle. I won’t be back tonight. Sorry. I can’t stop now, it’s a payphone and I haven’t got enough change to call your mobile. Look – please don’t panic. I’m not in any danger. And whatever you do, don’t contact the police. See you tomorrow, I hope.’

Simmy stared at the phone in an agony of turbulent emotion. Questions danced through her head, with little prospect of any answers. Had Kathy also called Joanna? Was she somehow being coerced into making the phone call? What hope was there of finding her? And what harm might she, Simmy, have done by telling the police her friend was missing?

She sat down with a thump on the chair in her hallway and tried to think logically. If Kathy had been forced to use a payphone, she must have a reason to avoid asking someone for help. Otherwise, surely she would have knocked on a door or gone into a shop and asked to use a normal telephone. She could even have stopped any passing individual and borrowed their mobile. Payphones were vanishingly rare, after all. She knew from her mother that guest houses and self-catering holiday homes sometimes installed them for visitors, but out in the open, there could not be a working one left apart from perhaps on railway stations. Had Kathy got herself to one of the local stations, then?

Answers slowly came into focus. Kathy might well not know Joanna’s mobile number in her head, but did manage to retain Simmy’s landline number, having phoned her so recently. With such efficient electronic memories doing all the work, who bothered to commit them to their own brains any more? If Kathy’s phone had died, she could well be left helplessly unable to retrieve any but a shorter landline number that did happen to be easily memorised. 304506 was a sequence that Simmy had discovered stuck easily in many people’s minds. The area code would have been displayed on the payphone handset.

Quickly, before anyone else could call her, she keyed 1471, in the hope of discovering the number of the phone Kathy had used. Miraculously, the recorded voice told her a number she did not recognise, and she wrote it down. The police, she assumed, could readily locate the spot by tracing the number.

But Kathy had insisted the police should not be alerted. This led to a new line of questions and slowly formed theories as to why that might be. Kathy was a civil servant and might not want any smudge on her character. Even being logged by the police as a missing person might eventually lead to embarrassing publicity. That would be an understandable and innocent explanation and Simmy badly wanted her friend to be innocent. She also wanted her to be safe.

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