The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘It’ll be a weekday. Children will be at school.’

  ‘Even so – Melanie, Ninian, Ben and his family, me, Corinne, Verity – loads of people.’

  ‘Ninian?’

  ‘Why not? He’s a good mate. And you’ll have people from where you used to live, old friends.’

  Where Ben and Helen’s reaction had seemed a trifle lukewarm, Bonnie’s was definitely excessive in its enthusiasm. ‘Stop it,’ Simmy begged. ‘It’s just a formality, really. Nothing to make a great song and dance about.’

  But Bonnie wouldn’t be repressed. ‘Moxon’s going to want to come. You know how he loves you.’ Detective Inspector Nolan Moxon had crossed paths with Simmy many a time in her accidental involvement with successive murders. He had worried about her, admired her, lost patience with her, always with an avuncular air of concern for her welfare. It was highly likely that he would want to come to her wedding, she acknowledged with a resigned smile.

  ‘He’ll be welcome,’ said Simmy.

  ‘When in June? It’s not long, you know.’

  ‘The first.’

  Bonnie squawked and opened her mouth to protest, when Simmy interrupted her. ‘Let’s not talk about that now. I really do have to phone Christopher and get over to Beck View. And Robin must need a new nappy by now.’

  ‘I won’t say anything about the murder to Verity. She’ll be silly about it. There’s another order just now, so I can send her out again this afternoon.’

  ‘Is she terribly hard work for you?’ Simmy asked worriedly.

  ‘I told you – it’s good for me. She could be ever so much worse. And it’s not her fault if she’s so ordinary. Anybody would be compared to you and Ben.’

  ‘Me? I’m as ordinary as they come.’

  Bonnie merely laughed at that.

  ‘Sorry I went to see Ben without you. I remember when Melanie got upset because she always seemed to be left out of the most interesting bits of the murder investigations. It just seemed to work out that way, but I was always sorry about it.’

  ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to be left out. I’ll make him tell me every detail this evening.’ Bonnie’s eyes sparkled. ‘And there’ll be a whole lot more by then, anyway. I’ll be more up to speed than you.’

  Simmy didn’t doubt it. A lot could happen between lunch and dinner, in her experience.

  Christopher had a lot to tell her when she phoned him. ‘They didn’t reveal any details, obviously, but reading between the lines, it looks as if poor Jo was killed somewhere around midnight on Sunday. She’s got a cat, and I guess somebody saw her letting it out – something like that. They wanted every little fact about Fabian, going back umpteen years, trying to figure out the connections. I ended up telling them practically everything he told us Sunday night. Uncle Richmond – the lot. I have to admit they were quite clever about it. Caught on a lot faster than I expected.’

  ‘Were they friendly? I mean – they don’t think you did it, do they?’

  ‘God, Sim – you don’t mince your words, do you? There’s certainly no evidence against me, is there? Luckily, they seem to have cottoned on to my links with the Moxon man, through you, which gives me a bit of kudos. At least they were careful not to be too unpleasant.’

  ‘Kudos,’ Simmy repeated thoughtfully. ‘Haven’t you got that anyway? Prominent local figure with respectable credentials and so forth.’

  Christopher laughed. ‘I’m not sure selling second-hand junk counts as respectable. They’ve all seen Lovejoy, don’t forget. They’ve got a very warped idea about what goes on at auctions.’

  ‘I saw Ben,’ she interrupted. ‘Helen was thrilled with the baby. But her arthritis is terrible now. She can hardly move, poor thing.’

  ‘Oh dear. She’s not very old, is she?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s awful bad luck.’

  ‘So – what time will you be home? I’m back already. Should I go and get some shopping?’

  ‘Good idea. Get lots of meat for the freezer. I feel horribly carnivorous. Is Humphrey there?’

  ‘He is. They’ve made brilliant progress already today. We’ve got a corridor halfway along the upstairs landing now. It looks great.’

  ‘Gosh! I should be back by three. I’m excited to see what they’ve done.’

  She heard a knocking sound coming down the phone. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Somebody at the door. Bloody hell – it’s Fabian back again. What does he want?’

  Simmy didn’t like to think and said nothing. Christopher went on, ‘He doesn’t look very happy. I can see him through the window.’

  Simmy struggled with visions of the man wielding a knife in his rage at her fiancé. Because, whatever her good sense told her, and the apparently impossible logistics, she found herself perfectly able to view him as a murderer. ‘Don’t let him in,’ she said urgently.

  ‘Too late. He’s just walked through the door.’

  Simmy was sitting in her car outside her parents’ home as she spoke to Christopher. Beck View was a large handsome house with five bedrooms and an adequate garden, situated on the main road running down to Bowness. The Baddeley clock tower, which marked the boundary between Windermere and Bowness could be seen from the front gate, not many yards away. She remained gazing blankly at the traffic, reminding herself that Christopher could not possibly be in any danger. There were two burly builders upstairs who would fly to his defence if necessary. And Fabian was undeniably weedy. There really was nothing to worry about, even if the beastly man did look cross and marched into someone else’s house without invitation. She unloaded the baby yet again and carried him into the house, forcing herself to concentrate on her parents and set aside any worries about her fiancé.

  Lunch with Angie and Russell was generous and Simmy ate well. ‘Eating for two,’ said Russell, with a smile. ‘Got to keep up your strength.’

  ‘Two clichés in two seconds,’ said his wife, raising her eyebrows. ‘That’s your ration for the day.’ Both the Straws were very resistant to popular idiom and general misuse of language. They would never say ‘hopefully’ to mean anything other than ‘optimistically’. They avoided ‘devastated’ and used ‘seated’ where everyone else said ‘sat’. Russell was by far the more pedantic, but Angie entirely approved of the basic principle.

  Simmy let her thoughts settle comfortably on the family chit-chat, encouraging tales about B&B guests, their dogs and fatuous demands – and avoiding any mention of a killing in Keswick or an unwanted visitor in Hartsop. Russell’s latest anecdote was about a man who insisted on being told the precise provenance of every item of food, including the teabags. ‘I thought it was very rude,’ said Angie.

  And then, with a faint feeling of reluctance, Simmy told them of the decision to arrange a wedding. ‘Very small,’ she added firmly.

  ‘Good,’ said Russell. ‘Do we have to get you a present?’

  Chapter Eight

  She was back in Hartsop before three, having left her parents with all the work that she had helped with throughout the previous year. The fact of her baby excused her now. She had no idea what she would find when she got home but persuaded herself that it would be nothing nasty. Presumably Christopher would be there, most likely having managed to send Fabian packing. She supposed the builders were still on site. He might, however, be needed by Oliver or the police. Much depended on what had taken place between him and Fabian.

  What she did not expect was a note, left conspicuously on the kitchen table, which said: Gone up to Ullswater with Fabian. Shouldn’t be long.

  ‘What?’ she said aloud. She looked at Robin, asleep in his seat. ‘What’s going on?’ The idea of Christopher complying with some crackpot scheme orchestrated by Fabian Crick was outrageous. Completely out of character. And potentially dangerous. What would the police think? And what was there to do in Ullswater?

  The only answer she could think of was that they must be visiting Aunt Hilda’s house. If they’d gone to Fabian’s rented place, whatever
that comprised, he’d most likely have said ‘Glenridding’ not ‘Ullswater’, although locally the terms appeared to be almost interchangeable. She desperately wanted to follow the men and find out what they were doing. But she couldn’t because she had a baby to think about. She started to call Christopher on the phone, and then killed the call before it could connect. Instead she phoned Ben Harkness.

  ‘Any progress?’ she asked, with a strong sense of self-control. She wasn’t going to complain about her man going off or the frustration arising from having to consider the baby before making any sort of move.

  ‘Plenty,’ he said excitedly. ‘I found Uncle Richmond quite easily. He’s got two sons, an ex-wife and lives on a farm near Workington. The wife might be dead – she hasn’t lived with him for about twenty years, as far as I can see from the voting register.’

  ‘Wow!’ Simmy applauded. Then, ‘Well done.’

  ‘It’s perfectly simple when you know how to go about it. But lots of people give up when they realise they don’t even supply proper phonebooks any more.’

  ‘Have you found out anything else about him?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, what does he do? I mean, is it a proper big working farm?’

  ‘Have a heart,’ he protested. ‘It’s not dairy, but I haven’t traced the exact nature and number of his livestock. Although he did achieve a brief week or two of fame four years ago when he dug up a piece of Roman treasure in a field. That’s quite an interesting story, but not pertinent, as far as I can see.’

  ‘Was he metal detecting?’

  ‘No, funnily enough. He was just digging for some reason and there it was.’

  ‘Couldn’t that be why Fabian’s looking for him? He probably thinks there’s money sloshing about.’

  ‘There isn’t. It wasn’t a treasure trove and he just got a modest finder’s fee.’

  ‘It’s a nice bit of background, even so.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve got any sort of feeling for the actual man. I couldn’t find a picture of him. You only get random snippets from searching newspapers, but it’s a start.’

  ‘So it would be easy enough just to go and find him,’ she said slowly. ‘If we wanted to.’

  ‘Assuming you’d be up for a drive to Workington. Which might be a bit of a hassle with the baby. And why would you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was trying to straighten her thoughts. ‘But you know what – Christopher’s told the police all about the Armitages and their connection to Josephine. So they’ll be tracking Richmond down, the same as you’ve just done.’ She felt herself shiver. ‘That feels a bit treacherous, actually. They’re not going to like it, are they?’

  ‘Nobody likes the intrusions that go on when there’s a murder investigation. And the chances are pretty good that one of the family did it – or knows who did. Did Chris say any more about how she was killed, by the way?’

  ‘No. They won’t have told him that, will they?’

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘A woman from the auction house called Fiona. I suppose she’ll know if it was a knife or a gun or—’

  ‘A garotte,’ said Ben with slightly too much relish.

  With a jolt, Simmy remembered that her fiancé had gone off with a man who was at best unreliable. But before she could convey this worrying development to Ben, the boy read her mind.

  ‘That’s where we need Christopher,’ he said urgently. ‘He can surely find out a whole lot more about the entire family just by asking Fabian Crick, and I bet he’s gleaned quite a bit today as well. If this promise he made to Fabian means anything, then he’s working blind unless he gets more actual facts. Although that might turn out to be totally irrelevant now Josephine’s dead.’

  Simmy spluttered. ‘I’m not sure I followed that last part, but let’s hope he’s doing exactly that as we speak. Finding out about the family, I mean.’ She quickly described the note and the anxiety it caused her. ‘I’m quite scared,’ she admitted. ‘Everything’s completely different now from how it was on Sunday. There’s a murderer out there.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about Chris. It doesn’t sound as if the Crick chap’s very tough.’

  ‘He might have hidden skills, like judo or something. He might have a knife.’

  ‘Don’t get in a state. If he’s only in Glenridding, you can go and see for yourself, can’t you? Has he gone in the car? If so, you’ll easily find it, won’t you? It’s a small place.’

  ‘Not that small. There are quite a few houses. And what about the baby,’ she wailed. ‘I can’t strap him into his blasted seat again and take him with me, if there’s a chance there’ll be trouble.’

  ‘Calm down,’ said the youth, who was half her age. ‘Take some breaths. Nothing’s going to happen to any of you. Why would it? We already decided there’s virtually no chance that the Crick man killed Josephine. He’s probably a lot more scared than you are, thinking the police might be after him.’

  ‘If they are, it’ll be thanks to Christopher, and that might make him mad.’

  ‘It sounds to me as if Christopher went perfectly willingly. It might even have been his idea – trying to get more information. Anyway, we found Uncle Richmond. That’s a step forward. Next step ought to be to go and talk to him, don’t you think?’

  ‘In theory,’ she agreed cautiously, trying to keep pace with Ben’s thought processes. ‘But really it’s got to be Christopher, not us. All we can do is tell him the address. He’ll probably think phoning is the best he can do – if he does anything at all. It’s probably much more sensible to stay out of it.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Ben. ‘We might have had a nice day out.’

  She snorted, but then admitted, ‘I’ve never been to Workington. It always sounds like somewhere dark and industrial. Even my father barely knows it.’

  ‘Steel furnaces, yes. But plenty of Roman history and some pretty bits. Blighted by a huge number of wind turbines, in some people’s view. They are terribly dominant, it must be said. Seabirds slaughtered in their thousands, apparently. Interesting place to live, I should imagine.’

  ‘Well, I can’t just drop everything and drive forty miles,’ she repeated. ‘And it wouldn’t make any sense to do that anyway.’

  ‘Not until we get a bit more information,’ he conceded.

  ‘And anyway, we just said we should leave it to Christopher.’

  ‘I know we did. We don’t wanna do that, do we? Because we’re hooked now, and there’s been a murder, and it’s a very weird story, which we’d really like to get to the bottom of.’

  She giggled. ‘Stop it, will you. I’m not supposed to be getting into any more madcap amateur detecting. I’ve got a baby.’

  ‘Too late to worry about that. Christopher’s already up to his neck in it, and you’re not going to want to leave it all up to him, now, are you?’

  ‘I might. Except he’s already said he wants you to lend a hand. Doing what you do best. Which you’ve already done, I suppose.’

  ‘Thanks to you coming here and explaining the whole thing to me. Which you did not have to do.’

  ‘I wanted to,’ she realised with a sigh. ‘I really want to know who murdered Josephine.’

  ‘Hey!’ He sounded bewildered. ‘What’s come over you? The Simmy I know would be delighted to have an excuse to back off and forget the whole thing. Surely having a baby doesn’t change a person as much as that? And if it did, I’d have expected you to get more risk-averse, not less.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the baby. It’s Fabian, and the hold he’s got over Christopher. I want it all settled properly, so we can just get on with … well, raising the baby, I suppose.’ She was grabbing passing thoughts as they happened. ‘And there’s something about justice and truth and making the world a better place for Robin, if that doesn’t sound too pious.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ben.

  They left it undecided, dependent on what Christopher had to say when he came home. Which he did fif
teen minutes later. Simmy had lost track of the time, thanks to Robin’s confusing behaviour. He had slept almost the entire day, feeding with less gusto than previously and developing a number of spots on his face. When she picked him up for closer examination, he was suddenly wracked with sobs. ‘Hey!’ she told him. ‘There’s no need for that.’

  But the baby clearly thought otherwise. For the first time since he’d been born so reassuringly alive, Simmy experienced a stabbing terror that he was going to die, just as Edith had done, after all. Here in her arms, he would expire from one moment to the next. He was, after all, only three weeks old. What was that in a lifetime? If he died now, it would hardly be different from being stillborn. A flickering little spark of life stubbed out after a mere handful of days. She rocked him and then held him tightly against her cheek, crooning wordlessly, utterly incapable of soothing him or guessing what the matter was. She walked around the house, vaguely wishing that the builders hadn’t gone. Humphrey might have some suggestions as to what to do. She hadn’t realised till then what a comforting presence he had been in the past weeks. He and his little crew of assistants had become such familiar fixtures that she was never entirely sure of their movements. In and out, back and forth, on their own mysterious schedules, they worked diligently and made impressive progress when they were in the house, and more than that she left unexamined. But they weren’t here now and now it was incredibly nearly six and she needed help. She must have spent over an hour doing just about nothing but try to settle her infant – with very poor results.

  Robin screamed more loudly, and Simmy clutched him more tightly. They were bound together in an agony of distress. It was terrible, and before long mother and baby were both in tears.

  ‘Good Lord, what’s all this?’ came a voice that contained an outrageous hint of amusement. ‘You’re squeezing the poor kid half to death.’ The new father prised the squalling bundle from her arms and balanced him on his own forearm, peering into the furious little face. The howls stopped as if a switch had been flipped.

  Simmy sank exhaustedly onto a chair. ‘That was awful,’ she moaned. ‘I couldn’t think what was wrong. It’s been going on for ages. I thought he was going to die.’