The Grasmere Grudge

by Rebecca Tope

Then Helen Harkness came to the top of the stairs. ‘David – call an ambulance. Tanya’s unconscious. I think it might be septicaemia.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was almost midnight when Simmy and Christopher got back to Troutbeck. Self-reproach had reduced Simmy to a quivering wreck. Septicaemia had been a growing terror in recent times. Renamed sepsis, much to Angie Straw’s disgust, it had killed a soap opera character, as well as one or two high-profile local figures. ‘Why didn’t we think?’ she moaned. ‘We just sat downstairs talking to that man and forgot all about the poor girl. What if she dies, Chris? Did you see that ambulance woman’s face? I’m sure she thought it was touch and go.’

  ‘She won’t die,’ said Christopher. ‘She wasn’t really unconscious. Just a bit out of it.’

  ‘Delirious. Terrified. Hardly able to breathe,’ Simmy corrected him. ‘And Helen’s going to blame me – quite rightly.’

  ‘She’ll blame herself more. She should never have gone out. She’s the mother, after all.’

  ‘It makes all that talk about Jonathan seem so silly now. Childish. We didn’t even get anywhere, did we? I can’t remember it all now, but I don’t think we made any headway at all.’

  ‘I guess not. It wasn’t a very focused discussion. We never even told them what Moxon had said. We were all over the place. Everyone kept interrupting and changing the subject.’

  ‘That was mostly you,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I never was very good at sticking to a logical thread,’ he admitted. ‘I’m hopeless in an argument.’

  ‘Oh, I hope Tanya’s going to be all right,’ she moaned. ‘It’s so scary, thinking of what could happen. There’s all this talk about sepsis these days, you’d think Ben would have realised the risk. He must be feeling awful.’

  ‘It’ll all be better in the morning,’ Christopher said, with little conviction.

  ‘Hmm. Well, whatever happens I’m going to see my mum and dad after work tomorrow. I’ve been a very neglectful daughter. They might want to talk about our wedding. Knowing my dad, he’s probably found us a house to buy by now.’

  ‘Are they going to think they’ve gained a son?’

  ‘They always did think you were a sort of son, anyway. My mother’s always been possessive about you, having known you since you were about two hours old.’

  ‘My head hurts,’ he complained. ‘We didn’t have a proper supper, and there’s been far too much talk. And I can feel that policeman hovering over me, trying to decide whether or not I’m a murderer.’

  ‘I’ll make us a milky drink and we can go straight to bed,’ she consoled him.

  But they both slept badly. At three in the morning, Simmy suddenly said, ‘We never once mentioned the Pruitt man, did we? Ben’s sure to have him on his flowchart somewhere. He’s just as likely to have had some sort of grudge against Jonathan as anybody else.’

  ‘Erghh?’ said Christopher.

  ‘And what about that wife of his? Beverley? She seemed to know everybody and everything that was going on. And you know what – she must have deliberately tried to fob us off about the stumpwork, on Saturday. She told us all sorts of nonsense about it, and Jonathan.’

  Christopher came more widely awake. ‘Beverley Pruitt? She’s an amazing woman. Didn’t I tell you? She does a lot of work for the National Trust, repairing ancient tapestries and so forth. Oliver was furious with himself, and me, when we never thought to ask for her opinion on Jonathan’s stumpwork.’

  ‘What?’ Simmy sat up. ‘But isn’t that crucially important?’ There were blurry threads inside her head, struggling to connect into a proper sequence. ‘She must have known Mrs Leeson – they lived so close to each other. She probably knew all about the embroidery. Good God, Chris! The woman told outright lies to me and Ben, in that case.’

  ‘Lie down,’ he ordered. ‘Lie down and go to sleep. It’ll all seem clearer in the morning.’

  She did her best and finally drifted off shortly before four. When the alarm went off at seven, they were both in the deepest of sleeps.

  ‘Jonathan’s been dead a week,’ said Christopher lugubriously, when he finally stirred into wakefulness. ‘And I still don’t believe it really happened.’

  ‘I’ll have to phone Ben. Or maybe Bonnie. Or should I wait to see if she comes to work as usual?’ The dithering struck her as a bad omen for the day, and possibly the week.

  ‘Why wouldn’t she?’ He was walking round the kitchen with a mug of coffee, waiting for the toast to pop up.

  ‘She can’t have got much sleep. Did she go home, I wonder?’

  ‘Doesn’t she sleep in Ben’s room these days?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I rather think not, actually. As far as I’m aware, they don’t have sex. That might have changed, of course.’

  He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘Is there something wrong with one of them? Or both?’

  ‘No, of course not. They absolutely adore each other – you can see that. But when I mentioned it to Ben, he said he didn’t think Bonnie was ready. Something like that. I knew exactly what he meant. And they seem to have a different take on all that than we did. It’s a different generation.’

  ‘No comment,’ said Christopher warily.

  ‘You should go. You need to go home for a clean shirt and pants. What happened to your packing? You usually plan better than you did this time.’

  ‘I was distracted. I still am. Did I dream it, or did you wake me up in the small hours to talk about Beverley Pruitt?’

  She laughed. ‘I think it was real – but I’d forgotten all about it. I still feel half-asleep. We only had about four hours, didn’t we?’

  ‘At most. There was a lot of tossing and turning between two and three, I seem to remember.’

  ‘And I’ve got to go and see my parents this evening,’ she reminded herself. ‘I won’t be staying long. Bed by nine tonight.’

  ‘I got the impression you thought Bev might be significant. When did you talk to her anyway?’

  ‘In your cafe on Saturday. She told us quite a lot about the stumpwork and how the V&A bought it, and Oliver had no idea what it was actually worth. Because if she had, she’d have told Kathleen, and they’d have got a proper price for it, a year or more ago. Wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Mm,’ mumbled Christopher.

  Simmy went on, ‘You think Beverley saw it back then, do you? So, what would she feel when she knew Jonathan had got it and sold it for all that money?’

  ‘I assume she never saw it. She can’t have done. Why would she?’ He looked away from her, out of the window. ‘I’ve gotta go. I’ll eat the toast in the car. I’m starving.’

  ‘Right.’ Already she was speaking to Ben in her head, adding to his notes, drawing new connections. The urgency and eagerness behind it were new to her, and she was still unsure of the reasons. ‘I’ll phone you – or you phone me. When will I see you?’ This last question pulled her up. They had no plans whatsoever for the coming week. It was still June, and there was still a promise of summer weather and glorious evenings. ‘We should go somewhere nice,’ she added vaguely.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What about Patterdale?’ The name came to her unbidden, apropos of nothing. She had seen the place barely twice, but remembered the fabulous scenery, the unpretentious pubs, forcing visitors to take whatever came their way, with few concessions. ‘The first nice evening, we should go there.’

  He was altogether bemused. ‘Why? Are you thinking we might buy a house there or something?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that, but—’ The idea took root instantly. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could? It’s sort of midway between Keswick and Windermere, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It’s on a road that goes nowhere, narrow and winding and slow. When the road was blocked between me and Grasmere with that landslide, everybody had to go that way, and it nearly drove them mad. The only time I’ve heard anyone mention Patterdale, it’s been to curse the small roads and impossible traffic.’
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br />   ‘But it won’t be like that now the road’s open again, will it?’

  ‘I can’t talk about it now. I’ll be late as it is.’ He was pulling the front door open, juggling his toast, phone and car keys. ‘We’ll talk later today.’ He almost ran to his car, with a brief wave before getting in and driving off.

  Simmy couldn’t blame him. The whole weekend had kept him rushing from point to point at other people’s urging. The hours spent auctioning antiques from the relative peace of his rostrum must seem like an interlude of blessed serenity in retrospect. For Simmy herself, those same hours devoted to watching and admiring him felt very much like that. Whatever scams and deceptions might have been going on amongst the bidders – and she had seen no sign of anything like that – did not affect her delight in the whole process. The days of Lovejoy when every item was a fake, and dealers crept around at night trying to kill each other, had seemed pure fantasy as she sat there with Ben.

  But a dealer had been killed, here and now. In Grasmere a week ago, he had been viciously strangled by a person unknown. It was an awful truth that made her angry and afraid. And it was very probably down to Ben and Bonnie to rectify the situation by identifying the perpetrator. Which they might well still believe was Scott Penrose, if she had properly understood their drift the previous evening.

  As she prepared to leave the house, she did her best to focus on her business. Monday morning in the shop was traditionally quiet. Simmy and Bonnie would review the events of Saturday and Sunday and plan the coming week. The income she derived from the shop was modest but adequate. She knew she ought to be introducing new lines, diversifying into baskets, small garden features, imaginative indoor displays. Every now and then she would have a creative burst, generally impelled by Bonnie, and then lapse back into familiar routine again.

  Flowers could represent such a huge variety of human emotions, integrally woven into all the major emotional landmarks. They brought her into contact with people at pivotal moments in their lives, with high drama often not far away. Which fleeting musings quickly brought her back to the unfinished business with Flo Penrose and her baby. There had been no phone calls during the night, and no texts were waiting to be read. Had Scott found them, then, with everything readily reconciled?

  The contents of her mind felt like a crazy conveyor belt of urgent topics, each one coming into focus for a few minutes, to be pushed aside by the next in line. After Flo came Tanya. Then Beverley Pruitt, followed by Daphne Schofield. They all came insistently to the forefront, their roles in Ben’s investigations still not clarified. There was poor dying Philip, as well. And chief suspect Nick. Valerie Woolley, too – who Christopher so oddly seemed to set aside until she was almost forgotten, only to reintroduce her as a diversion when it suited him. There was Malcolm Pruitt, and the CaniCare charity.

  And there was the dead Jonathan and the highly valuable piece of stumpwork.

  What hope could there be for any kind of work-based concentration, with all this going on? Any one of these claims on her attention was enough to drive all thought of floristry from her mind.

  She saw nothing of the mild June morning over Windermere as she drove to work. The fells dotted with sheep and enthusiastic walkers were an unnoticed backdrop to her thoughts. There was one big notion waiting behind all the others – the one that had prevented her from sleeping peacefully that night. Doggedly, she kept it away, encouraging the parade of names and faces, motives and mendacities to obscure it.

  But Bonnie Lawson was made of stronger stuff, and within five minutes of arriving at the shop, having conveyed reassuring news about Tanya, she was giving it voice.

  ‘Simmy,’ she said, in a tone that could not be ignored. ‘Ben says, have you thought that an awful lot of the evidence points to Christopher not being altogether honest with us, or the police? He says it’s obviously not definite, and he knows you won’t want to admit it, but when it’s all there on paper, it really looks a bit bad.’

  Standing beside a collection of buckets containing cut flowers, Simmy froze. Several instincts fought within her. Defensive anger, scornful dismissal, pained argument were all quite acceptable options. Instead, she said, ‘I have, yes. It’s what Moxon came to say yesterday. It’s been hanging over us all along, really – but we wouldn’t admit it at first.’

  ‘So – what if it’s true? You have to face every possibility, however horrible it might be. People never entirely know each other, do they? You can’t say “So-and-so would never do such a thing in a million years” because they would. They do, sometimes. I mean – every murderer probably has a wife or sister or somebody who refuses to believe they did it.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake – surely nobody’s accusing him of murder. It’s nowhere near as bad as that. And anyway, what am I meant to do about it? I’m going to marry the man. I love him, and he loves me. We fit perfectly together. But I do understand that I don’t know what he’s thinking much of the time. I’d even agree that he’s been rather odd over the past week and has said one or two things that I don’t believe can be true. I think he might well be hiding something about Jonathan. But I am as sure as I can possibly be that he didn’t kill him. And I’m also fairly sure that he doesn’t know who did. Not for certain, anyway.’

  ‘You think he has an idea?’

  ‘I think he does. And it must be somebody he likes, or relies on, or has some shady link with, that he doesn’t want made public.’

  ‘Ben’s coming in later. His mother’s in a real state about Tanya, and she’s blaming him. The hospital said another hour and she might have died. They spent hours keeping all her organs going, right through the night. But she’s all right again now. The infection’s almost gone already.’

  ‘So, it was septicaemia, then?’

  ‘So they say. All because of that cut. It happens really fast, you see. She was fine yesterday afternoon, and then just went all droopy after that.’

  ‘Her parents shouldn’t have left her. They must know that Ben’s not terribly good at practical stuff.’

  ‘Helen’s pretty hopeless when it comes to anything medical, as well. So is David. The whole family’s awfully airy-fairy in some ways. And I’m just as bad. I still keep seeing all that blood …’ She looked at the floor where Tanya had bled. ‘You’ve cleaned it all up, I see.’

  ‘It was nowhere near as bad as you said. Gosh – it seems days ago now. Such a lot keeps happening.’

  ‘What about the woman and the baby?’ Bonnie asked. ‘Wasn’t that weird, the way the man didn’t seem to care what happened to them? All he could think about was what Ben said to him, and how he had to prove he wasn’t the killer?’

  ‘Is that what he was doing?’ Simmy thought about it. ‘I suppose it was. He seemed desperate to defend himself – and I still think he’s been horrible to Flo in some way. You should have seen her texts yesterday.’

  ‘I expect she’ll be okay,’ said Bonnie vaguely.

  ‘Let’s hope so. I worry about that poor little baby.’

  ‘Babies are very tough, according to Corinne.’

  Simmy put both hands to her head. ‘I keep going over everything, again and again. In the middle of the night, I was quite certain that it must have been Beverley Pruitt. But Christopher doesn’t agree with me.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘I don’t remember now. She was so upfront with me and Ben on Saturday, it wouldn’t really make much sense. Unless she was bluffing or lying. Did we tell you about that?’

  ‘Not in any detail. So tell me now. No – wait till Ben gets here, although that might not be for a while. I think they’ve all gone back to bed for a couple of hours. Except David, of course. He’s got to go and take Year Eleven on an outing to Barrow or somewhere.’

  ‘Poor man. Couldn’t he get out of it, on compassionate grounds?’

  Bonnie shrugged. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘What about you? Aren’t you shattered as well?’

  The girl grinned. ‘Actual
ly, I fell asleep on the sofa, about two minutes after you and Christopher left. I missed the ambulance coming. Just crashed out like a dead thing. Woke up at seven with a blanket over me, and desperate for the loo.’ She looked down at herself. ‘These are the same clothes I had on yesterday. Do they look really, really crumpled?’

  ‘Not at all. Christopher’s got the same problem. He forgot to pack a bag before coming to mine yesterday.’

  A customer diverted them for the next ten minutes, followed by two orders on the computer and a list of upcoming funerals, with times by which flowers had to be delivered. The normal weekly processes were underway, and it was eleven o’clock before there was another lull. ‘I’ve got to go down to Newby Bridge this afternoon,’ Simmy said. ‘I’d better get cracking on the order. They want a large spray in purples and pink.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bonnie. ‘It’s somebody’s fortieth birthday.’

  ‘Life goes on,’ said Simmy, for no good reason. Again, she was reminded of Flo and baby Lucy May, and wondered with fresh concern where they might have found a bed for the night.

  When a text announced itself, she hoped it would be the missing woman, with news that all was well, but instead it was Christopher. ‘Summoned to Penrith. Will phone when it’s finished.’

  ‘Good God!’ cried Simmy.

  Bonnie looked up from the flower buckets. ‘What?’

  ‘He says he’s got to go to Penrith. He must mean the police want to ask yet more questions. That’s ridiculous after seeing Moxon yesterday.’

  Before Bonnie could speak, the door pinged and Ben Harkness appeared. ‘Hey, Ben,’ the girl greeted him. ‘Christopher has been taken off to Penrith again. It’s all happening.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ His face was pale and downward-drooping. He sighed and dropped into the chair in front of Simmy’s computer. ‘I think I’ve cracked it, though.’ He extracted a folder from his ever-present bag and opened it. ‘The Pruitts. If Penrose didn’t do it, then it’s got to be one of them – or both. The woman’s an expert needlewoman, and she must have known Mrs Leeson. It’s all fallen into place, knowing that.’