The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

  Simmy peered over his shoulder. ‘Why couldn’t Fabian tell us that? It’s obviously not a secret. He must have deliberately decided to say as little as possible. I’m telling you – it was hopeless trying to get any hard facts out of him.’ She spent a few minutes going over everything again, with a few added details. By the end of it, she was almost certain that Ben knew everything that she did, and there was a feeling of relief as a result.

  Ben made copious notes, and then doodled as he let his thoughts run free. ‘So why does Fabian want to build bridges with this uncle? After all, the house is lost to the family now, whatever happens. Even if they all knew Josephine, I can’t see what they could gain by her death. From what you’ve told me, they’re all a lot more fixated on their aunt.’

  ‘It’s early days,’ she reminded him. ‘We’ve got no idea how everything fits together.’

  ‘True. What if the family sent Fabian round to you on Sunday as a sort of smokescreen? He’d bone on about Africa and aged relatives while one of the cousins popped over to Keswick with a knife.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure it was a knife,’ she said with a frown.

  ‘It’s an educated guess, listening to what the police have put out in their statement. What does Christopher think was used?’

  ‘He said it was most likely to have been a knife,’ she conceded ruefully. Ben nodded his silent satisfaction.

  ‘See what you can find out about Richmond,’ Simmy urged him, pointing at the laptop. ‘While we’re here.’

  ‘Ooh, families!’ Ben sang cheerfully. ‘I do love all these connections, don’t you? With any luck, all this is going to go back a century or so, and we can delve around in all sorts of history.’

  ‘You’re really not going back to Newcastle, then?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s all up in the air. Mum and Dad aren’t too chuffed about me doing history at all, for some reason – they think I’ve let myself in for a whole lot of complication.’

  ‘They’re probably right. But better to do it now than later, I suppose.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Gosh – it’s quarter past eleven already. I should rescue your mother from Robin, pop back to the shop and then get to Beck View for lunch. We’ve probably only got another fifteen minutes. Less, actually.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘I can carry on without you, now. I’ll email anything interesting and print it out as well. I’ll start a file.’

  ‘A dossier,’ said Simmy, remembering earlier episodes, where the schoolboy Ben had assembled impressive quantities of information and insight concerning local killings.

  ‘Bonnie says I shouldn’t call it that any more,’ he said. ‘For some reason she thinks it’s a nasty word.’

  ‘Does she?’ Simmy repeated it to herself, thinking of the way her father would analyse individual words, unpicking them and tracing their origins. ‘I suppose it sounds like “doss” or “dosser”.’

  ‘Right. Something like that,’ he said absently, his attention back on his screen. ‘This is going to be a lot of fun,’ he went on enthusiastically. ‘So many hidden connections. I can’t find a single thing about Fabian Crick, though. I’ve just done a search for him.’

  Simmy had got up to leave but remained standing near the door for several more minutes. ‘I’m not surprised. I doubt if he’s computer literate, or even that he’s got a job worth mentioning. Come to think of it, he never said a word about any kind of work. Christopher might remember what he was doing before he went to Africa, I suppose.’

  ‘The police are going to be all over him, of course. Once they find out about his aunt leaving the house to Josephine, they’ll want to check up on the whole family.’

  ‘You think?’ The idea made her wince. ‘Surely only if Christopher tells them about him.’

  ‘Which he will – obviously. How could he not?’

  ‘He won’t want to. He’s already got a bit of a reputation for dropping people in it after the Grasmere thing. And we both think it’s completely impossible that Fabian attacked Josephine.’

  ‘Yes, you said. Even so, he’s the key to it. Got to be. There’s a clear chain, connecting you to him, and him to her.’

  ‘You make it sound far too simple. It doesn’t feel simple at all to me.’

  ‘No, well, you’re right, I suppose. But it’s somewhere to start. The police are going to think so, too.’ He tapped his front teeth thoughtfully. ‘It would help to know more about the victim. How well did Christopher know her?’

  ‘Less well than he thought, probably. He’d only been to her house once and doesn’t seem to have much idea of what she did outside work.’

  ‘So we’ve got two dead women, from different generations, then. And Uncle Richmond, who suddenly feels like a bright scarlet herring to me. Or perhaps I mean he’s a smokescreen. Did you not get a feeling that Fabian was throwing him at Christopher as some sort of punishment?’

  Simmy struggled to keep up. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘There’s no hint of a credible reason why he was brought in, unless we’re missing some big piece of the story.’

  ‘I expect we are. Obviously we are, given what happened to poor Josephine.’

  ‘What if there’s no connection? What if we’re looking at two quite different matters?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences.’

  ‘Sometimes I do,’ he said, to her irritation. ‘So let’s get back to Aunt Hilda. Ninety-one years old. That’s wild. Just think – if she knew her grandparents, they’d go back to about 1860 or so. They’d remember times that seem impossibly distant to us now.’ He sighed happily. ‘Just confirms what I’ve been thinking about history. It’s all so fabulously rich.’

  It made Simmy’s head hurt to scan back through the centuries like that. The past had never held very much interest for her, other than the enjoyment of her father’s tales of local celebrities like John Ruskin and Fletcher Christian. And they tended to feel more like fairy tales than actual historical reports. ‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘Josephine must have had a feeling for history, I suppose, with all her collecting.’

  ‘You mean she and Aunt Hilda were both collectors?’

  ‘I told you that already. But I’m a bit vague as to exactly what they collected. Hilda liked stuff they call “memorabilia”. I’m never too sure what that means.’

  ‘Old letters and diaries, basically. Photos. Postcards. Personal writings, you might say. Notebooks. You remember Chris talking about that lot at Saturday’s auction. A box of papers from a family, all chucked in together. You can get a lot of information into one big cardboard box.’

  Simmy thought of her own very small packet of documents. Passport, birth certificate, car insurance. Three or four letters she’d kept from her father, and a few of the nicest cards people had sent for various birthdays. In total they would easily fit into a shoebox. ‘Right,’ she said uncertainly. ‘All very old-fashioned. That stuff all exists on people’s phones now, I guess.’

  ‘For our sins,’ muttered Ben. ‘So what did Josephine collect?’

  ‘China, apparently. Lots of little Limoges boxes, Christopher said. I can’t remember what else. No mention of memorabilia.’

  ‘Hm. So why in the world did Hilda leave her the house? That’s got to be crucially important.’

  ‘No idea.’

  Again, the youth tapped his teeth. ‘I can think of several theories that would connect all this up together. Might be these collections did overlap somehow. Could the two women have been fighting over something? Or’ – he looked up excitedly – ‘what if someone else, a third party, wanted this thing, whatever it might be, and assumed they’d get it when Hilda died. But instead she gave it to Josephine, which meant she had to be bumped off, so they could nab it.’

  Simmy took a deep breath. ‘That’s a theory, yes, but I can’t see one single shred of evidence to lead you to think it might be right. And quite a few details that make it extremely unlikely. This isn’t like you, is it? Starting from the wrong en
d, you used to call it. What changed?’

  He gave a rueful grin. ‘Can’t get anything past you, can I? The thing is, since I decided to abandon the forensic studies, I’ve been trying a whole new approach. Not just to things like this, but everything. Bonnie says I get too bogged down in the minutiae, picking people up on tiny mistakes, agonising over small problems, and forgetting the big picture. So this time I thought I would try to see it from the other end, so to speak. Start with motives and relationships and personalities and see if it works that way.’

  ‘And does it?’

  ‘Too soon to say. We still have to have some hard facts, and they seem pretty scarce so far. The other thing I never gave enough attention to is context. What else was going on in people’s lives – what their priorities were, what they wanted. I’m trying to think more like a historian, see?’

  ‘I do see,’ she agreed. ‘And I suppose now you put it like that, you’ve been drifting in that direction for a while now. Ever since last summer when you were with your relatives in the Cotswolds.’

  ‘Right. I learnt a whole lot about families and their complicated histories when I was down there. And this looks as if it might be more of the same.’

  Simmy leant back. Complicated families were well outside her experience. The Straws had all been boringly lower-middle-class, working in offices or factories for generations. On her mother’s side, Angie stood out as a stark aberration. Everyone else was as dull and dutiful as the Straws. Not a whiff of adultery or secret love children, no embezzlements or bankruptcies. But Ben had a very different experience – he had come to realise that the family his mother came from was far from immune to lurking secrets and tangled motives. And as for Bonnie Lawson, the very mention of families made her flinch.

  And then Helen was coming downstairs with Robin, who was bleating anxiously, and Simmy rushed to collect him. She watched apprehensively as Ben’s mother took the steps with agonising care. ‘Don’t want to fall,’ she laughed. Simmy could see that she was finding it difficult, startled to observe how much worse the arthritis had become since their last encounter. She went up a few steps and took the baby.

  ‘Stairs are the worst thing,’ panted Helen. ‘It’s my knees. They won’t bend, and they hurt. It doesn’t seem fair, when for years it’s just been my hips. Hips are a lot easier to deal with.’

  ‘Are you booked for replacements yet?’

  Helen blew out her cheeks in exasperation. ‘They don’t know where to start, now I’m in such a state. This last winter was ghastly. Every day’s worse than the last. And I’m not even sixty yet! I’ll be in a wheelchair for twenty years at this rate.’

  ‘We keep telling her to go private,’ said Ben from the dining-room doorway. ‘Start with the knees this year, and when they’re working nicely, go back for the hips. Probably less than a year from start to finish, and she’d be a new woman.’

  Simmy winced away from the prospect of four major operations for poor Helen, however quickly or slowly they might be performed. Like caesarean births, or heart bypasses, the mere fact that they were common did not reduce the deep physical trauma of any surgery. There was a kind of conspiracy to pretend that the whole thing was routine and nothing to get excited about. Simmy herself found even a minor thing like removing an appendix dreadful to contemplate. But I’m just a wimp, she reminded herself.

  ‘I’ll give him a quick feed, if that’s all right, and then get out of your way,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Ben.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Oh – reassuring me that my brains haven’t melted, I suppose. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to function now I’ve got a baby. I wouldn’t say I was altogether back to normal, but at least I can follow a logical thread.’

  ‘I had five,’ said Helen mildly. ‘And still managed to do a decent day’s work after the first few months were behind me. That’s all nonsense about motherhood rotting your brains. The opposite happens, if anything. You get more focused, more observant – and you’re always having to keep one step ahead. I pity the poor things who never even have one.’

  Simmy smiled and said nothing. She and Christopher had already decided to let nature have her own way when it came to contraception. If another baby came along quickly, that would suit them very nicely, they agreed. Privately, Simmy envisaged them as a proper family of four by the end of the next year. Which reminded her – ‘Oh, by the way – we’re getting married in June. Only small, but you two are invited, of course.’

  ‘Great,’ said Ben carelessly.

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ said Helen, with little more enthusiasm that her son. ‘Make everything official.’

  Some people disliked weddings, Simmy remembered. She wasn’t madly keen on them herself, as it happened. And she’d done it all before, with Tony. ‘That’s the thing,’ she said. ‘It still works better in a lot of ways. We really should all have the same surname.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Helen. ‘Let us know when it’s all fixed.’

  After that, there was nothing to do but give Robin a swift snack and head back to Windermere, which was less than five minutes’ drive away.

  Chapter Seven

  Bonnie was busy when Simmy got back to the shop, with a small impatient queue of customers. There was an air of suppressed panic, emanating chiefly from a large woman who was muttering relentlessly at the back of the queue. ‘Shouldn’t leave a slip of a girl like this in charge. How’s she meant to cope? All I came in for was a quick bunch of tulips. I’ve got to be in Bowness in exactly five minutes from now. I’ll be getting a parking ticket at this rate.’ A man in front of her felt compelled to make sympathetic grunts and nods, while casting embarrassed glances all around.

  Simmy parked Robin at the back of the shop, in his bulky carry-seat and mentally rolled up her sleeves. ‘Who’s next?’ she asked brightly.

  The only man in the queue took a step sideways. ‘Better deal with this lady first,’ he said gallantly.

  Bonnie was wrapping a large sheaf of lilies, freesias and gypsophila, refusing to be hurried, her face very pink. The customer was a young woman who was obviously itching to help, her hand hovering near the cellophane, making Bonnie’s task more difficult. ‘Right then,’ said Simmy to the large woman. ‘Tulips, did you say? What colours?’

  ‘Red and pink, please. A dozen. No need for any fancy wrapping. Just let’s get on with it.’

  ‘We haven’t got any pink,’ Bonnie said softly.

  ‘Let me see what I can find,’ said Simmy with a broad, insincere smile.

  Five minutes later, the shop was empty except for Bonnie, Simmy and little Robin, who was curled up in his portable chair, a white milky dribble trickling from his mouth. ‘That woman’s never going to come back,’ said Bonnie with a sigh. ‘Don’t you hate people who are in a rush?’

  ‘Can’t win ’em all,’ said Simmy. ‘The man was nice.’

  ‘Verity’s going to be back soon. Quick – tell me what you and Ben worked out.’

  Simmy’s mind went blank, much to her alarm. ‘Er … he’s checking everybody on the Internet. He thinks there’s an obvious connection between Fabian turning up and Josephine being killed.’

  ‘Who’s Fabian?’

  ‘Oh Lord, Bonnie. I can’t go right back to the beginning again. You’ll have to ask Ben. And I should phone Christopher and find out what happened this morning. He was due for a police interview at ten o’clock. The auction house has closed for a couple of days, out of respect for Josephine. Plus, I suspect nobody’s sure how to carry on without her, anyway. She was the one they all relied on.’

  ‘Surely it’s all on the computer? All the buying and selling and prices and so forth?’

  ‘There’s always something that isn’t, though. Little details that never got logged, because they were all in Josephine’s head, and everyone knew to ask her if they were stuck.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Simmy shook her head irritably. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Why are you being so … picky? Asking about
things that are obvious. The point is, they’re going to be lost without her.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Bonnie pantomimed excessive meekness, designed to make Simmy feel awful. ‘I just wanted to try and get the whole picture. I’ve never been to one of their auctions, remember. I can’t really imagine what it’s like.’

  Simmy responded precisely as she was meant to. ‘No,’ she moaned. ‘I’m the one who’s sorry. It’s been a bit of a busy morning, and my head isn’t working like it should. Helen says motherhood gives you focus and sharpens your wits, but it’s not working for me just at the moment.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry about the shop. You caught me at a bad time just now. It’s never like that usually. Thanks for rescuing me.’ There was a hint of resentment in the girl’s tone, or at least impatience, which Simmy fully understood. Just when Bonnie had wanted to demonstrate how effortlessly she was coping, fate conspired to show things at their most dysfunctional. ‘I should have ordered more pink tulips,’ she accused herself.

  ‘I shouldn’t leave you to do the ordering. I can easily manage that myself. There’s plenty I can do, if we’re organised about it. I can park Robin with my mother for an hour or so, two or three days a week, and we’ll muddle through like that until September or thereabouts.’ Again, the mention of a date reminded her. ‘Oh – and we’re getting married in June. I keep forgetting to tell people.’

  ‘Wow!’ Bonnie was visibly taken aback by this news and greatly cheered. ‘Who’s doing the flowers?’

  ‘You, obviously. It’ll just be small.’

  ‘Small! I can already think of at least fifty people who’ll absolutely have to come. Chris’s family for a start must be a dozen or more, counting the children.’