The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Babies don’t just die,’ Christopher assured her. ‘They’re incredibly tough. And anyone who can make a noise like that obviously hasn’t got much wrong. I could hear him from the road.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. And look at those spots!’

  ‘Didn’t we read something about milk rashes? I expect that’s all it is.’

  ‘Oh.’ She heaved a sigh and wiped her face. ‘This must be a reality check or whatever they call it. It’s all been so smooth up to now. I thought I understood him – what he wanted and how to give it to him. And then he just started screaming at me.’

  ‘Well, he’s all right now. He was picking up on your panic, presumably, and you got into a vicious circle between you, winding each other up. You’ve been doing the opposite until now – relaxing each other. Sort of,’ he finished humbly. Simmy could see he didn’t want to sound as if he knew better.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You saved our lives.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ He smiled. ‘You know what? I was planning on digging over that potato patch before it’s too late. It won’t be dark for a while yet. I’ve always wanted to grow potatoes.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for weeks. Get on with it if you’ve got the energy.’ She spoke affectionately, even playfully, challenging him as she had done thirty years earlier. ‘But you won’t leave supper too much longer, will you? And I am desperate to know what you’ve been doing with Fabian this afternoon.’

  He yawned. ‘You know what? I’m too knackered for digging. It’s been quite a day. Quite a week, come to that.’

  ‘And it’s not half done yet.’

  ‘Indeed. So now I’m going to do a big pan of scrambled eggs, with bacon and black pudding and sautéed potatoes. It’ll take precisely twenty-five minutes. You go off somewhere cosy and feed the young master, and then we’ll eat. All sorted.’

  She looked at him in a sort of wonder. Here was the Christopher she had almost forgotten. She was transported to an evening on a beach in North Wales, bathed in westering sunshine, Christopher was cooking sausages on an open fire he’d made himself. He must have been barely seventeen. His father was sceptical – the sausages would taste of smoke and be raw inside, he insisted. The younger Hendersons were running in and out of the waves, squealing and pushing each other. The three Straws were passively observing the much larger family. It was perhaps the last day of the annual seaside holiday that they’d all shared every summer for years. And it was, as it turned out, the last of such holidays. Christopher and Simmy had discovered each other as sexual beings, instead of semi-siblings, and the parents were alarmed.

  The sausages turned out beautifully. So did the baked beans that he had gently warmed at the edge of the fire. For good measure he had toasted slices of white bread as well. ‘Enough for everyone,’ he announced proudly – which was in itself a miracle. Ten people ate the little barbecue meal with relish, and muted astonishment at this sudden show of competence by the eldest Henderson son.

  ‘You’re a marvel,’ she told him now. ‘An absolute marvel.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said again. ‘Now go away while I cook – and then I’ll tell you all about my very weird afternoon with Fabian Crick. And after that I’ll fill you in on everything the police asked me this morning.’

  It all happened more or less as he’d planned, apart from Simmy having to eat with one hand because Robin was slumped over her shoulder. He had accepted the feed with reasonably good grace, burped gratifyingly and then remained wakeful. She could feel him turning his head, just under her ear. ‘He’s listening to what I say,’ she laughed.

  ‘Of course he is. But he’s going to find what I say a lot more interesting.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ she invited.

  Christopher plunged into a lengthy account of his afternoon. ‘Fabian began by explaining in much more detail about the family situation ten years ago. It’s rather more than he said on Sunday, which makes it even more embarrassing for me. Apparently at that time Aunt Hilda had recently had an operation for cancer, and everyone was worried about her. Fabian had been very attentive, and they’d got very close. He did talk about her quite a lot on the trip, which is how we worked out the Cumbria connection. Then when he was delirious and dying, he made a massive production of how he’d never said goodbye to her when he left for Africa. They’d had a bit of a tiff, apparently. Honestly – it was all so melodramatic, I think I simply dismissed it as the ravings of a disordered mind, or whatever they say. But now he insists it ruined his chances of inheriting the house, because she never got the message I was meant to deliver. By the time he’d recovered from his sleeping sickness, she’d found a new friend in the shape of Josephine.’

  ‘And she survived her cancer.’

  ‘Right. And then this cousin decided he was going to write her biography, and they immersed themselves in old diaries and so forth, before she finally died this year. She was very keen on the whole project, according to Fabian. And he was totally sidelined.’

  ‘Sounds to me as if he’s got an awfully good reason to be furious with Josephine.’

  ‘I know. And now the whole family’s under police scrutiny, which isn’t going down at all well with any of them.’ He sighed. ‘It is rather a mess. He’s living in a dark little room at the back of one of those ugly little houses behind the grassy bit in Glenridding. The bit where nobody ever goes. And he’s got no money. Just state benefits. You’ve got to feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Oh dear. I don’t think I can manage that. He’s just too creepy.’

  ‘He’s not so bad as that. He came all down here again today on that scooter, you know. It takes some nerve, on that road.’

  ‘And back again, presumably. Why did you go there anyway?’

  ‘In the end I managed to ram it into the car, with all the seats folded down and the boot flap hanging open. It weighs a ton. Lucky I didn’t damage my back. Getting it out again was just as bad.’

  ‘You idiot. Answer the question. Why go there at all?’

  ‘Mainly I think he wanted me to see how wretched he is – to make me feel even worse about letting him down. But he’s got a stack of old photo albums – and some not so old. I remember he was mad keen on taking pictures on the trip. But then, everyone was. It took him years to get them all printed out and put into albums. Being Fabian, he had no intention of storing them all on a computer. Anyway, he’s got pictures going back to the late sixties – all the family were there. Aunt Hilda was a striking woman, all right. In fact, she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Everyone else is there, except Uncle Richmond. Apparently he never lets anybody take his photo.’

  ‘Hang on a minute. Can we try and think through what would have been different if you had delivered the message? She would have assumed Fabian was dead – right? So she’d have changed her will then, if he’d been her main beneficiary.’

  ‘Well, no, because she’d have made enquiries, and discovered that he hadn’t died after all. We’re talking about ten years ago, not a hundred. She could have contacted people in Botswana and been told there was no record of his death.’

  ‘Okay. And then she’d have wondered why he didn’t get in touch and tell her he was alive and still loved her.’

  ‘Not necessarily, because I would already have told her that. I’d have said he was terribly ill, probably dying, and his last thoughts had all been of her. So she’d have rested on that for quite a while.’

  ‘How long? Surely she’d have expected him to surface eventually and make up the lost time?’

  ‘He says he did send a few postcards but didn’t say much. It was three years at least before his brain got working again. It sounds as if he more or less forgot about her. And without my assurances, the cards must have seemed very cold and distant.’

  ‘So – because you never visited her, she didn’t know about the illness and just thought he was swanning around the world ignoring her completely, apart from a few rubbish postcards.’

  ‘Exactly.’r />
  ‘I see,’ she said, just as Ben had said to her a little while earlier.

  The early evening became bedtime, with further sporadic discussions about the Armitage family, interspersed with domestic and parental matters which they shared amicably. Simmy found herself treading carefully, aware that her fiancé’s feelings were fragile. The shock of Josephine’s death had come on top of the remorse over letting Fabian down, and then been compounded by the stress of his police interview. And, she reminded herself, being a new parent was every bit as destabilising for the father as it was for the mother. There was a risk that Robin would lose his place at the centre of all their attention by the ill-timed murder. She tried to voice this worry.

  ‘We mustn’t let it swamp everything else,’ she said. ‘Robin’s got to come first.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. He knows exactly how to make sure he gets his rightful due. Look at him!’ The baby was lying on the sofa, propped against a cushion, alertly watching the world that consisted entirely of two people. Both those people were squatting a few feet away, like slaves before a pharaoh.

  Then he slowly sank into a deep sleep and the parents were left to talk about other things. ‘I forgot to say that Ben’s found Uncle Richmond. It took him about two minutes, by the sound of it. He’s got the address of his farm in Workington.’

  Christopher groaned. ‘I should really hate that boy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he makes me look old and slow and brainless.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. You haven’t had time for finding disaffected uncles, and he has. Besides, you’ve been unearthing plenty of stuff yourself, as well as heaving Fabian’s blasted scooter in and out of the car.’ That, she found, was quite a sore point.

  ‘But now the whole Richmond thing is fairly pointless anyway. The police will want to talk to him, presumably.’

  ‘Will they, though? We don’t know that he ever had anything to do with Josephine or Aunt Hilda’s house, or any of it.’

  ‘True. In fact, I get the impression he’s never been included in family stuff. Although his sons are. One of them is writing the biography. So he’s got to be at least vaguely relevant. Otherwise, why would Fabian bring him up in the first place?’

  ‘Probably because he’s a nasty little man who thinks he can make you do what he wants. He’s a leech. He’ll be after you for money next.’

  ‘I won’t give him any, I promise. And he is upset about Josephine. And he definitely can’t have killed her. Pity, in a way,’ he snorted. ‘He’d be better off in prison.’

  Simmy laughed. ‘Maybe he ought to make a confession, then. When they find out it’s all lies, they might lock him up for wasting police time.’

  Robin stayed wide awake through the final stages of supper, and then found himself being put to bed at the new time of eight o’clock. ‘We’ll have to try and keep him awake more in the afternoons, so he gets tired earlier,’ said Simmy. ‘We won’t have any evenings to ourselves if he goes on like this.’

  ‘I expect it’ll settle down,’ said Christopher unhelpfully.

  They were still talking about Fabian when they went to bed. ‘I liked the sound of Uncle Ambrose,’ said Christopher. ‘Did I mention him?’

  Simmy was losing interest. ‘I don’t think so. What about him?’

  ‘He’s an archivist. Probably knows Oliver, actually. Or did. He’s a bit doolally now, apparently. Had a head injury a while ago.’

  ‘Did somebody bash him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said he had a head injury.’

  ‘Oh – no – he fell off a motorbike that he’d just bought. Something much too big and powerful for a man in his sixties. A typical story. It took Fabian a good twenty minutes to tell that part.’

  ‘Ambrose is a wonderful name,’ Simmy said ruefully. She found herself wondering if that would have been a better choice for her baby.

  ‘That’s what I thought. It must be due for a revival any day now.’ He had obviously read her mind. ‘But we don’t want our child to be that sort of pioneer, do we? Names can damage a person’s whole life.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she argued. ‘Speaking as somebody called Persimmon. It makes you memorable and it probably builds character.’

  Christopher just laughed, and went on, ‘Anyway, Ambrose spends all his time reading old books and collecting Edwardian postcards. Fabian hasn’t much time for him. The cousins both live in Keswick, so they must have known Josephine as well.’

  Simmy yawned. ‘This is all going round in my head until I’ve got confused. Can we talk about something else? Or just go to sleep. I think Fabian’s just a silly little man who’s made a complete mess of his life, hoping to blackmail a good-natured acquaintance into sorting things out for him.’

  ‘Meaning me? Good-natured, am I?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Not always. Right now, I want to call his bluff and text him Richmond’s address, phone number and email – if Ben managed to find all that. Then I don’t want to see him ever again. It was stupid of me to waste time today listening to him, when I should be thinking about Josephine and how in the world we’ll ever manage without her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simmy. ‘I feel exactly the same. Now let’s drop it.’ She patted her pillow and pulled the duvet over her shoulder. Then she said, ‘Did you say happy birthday to Robin today? He’s three weeks old now, you know.’

  ‘Happy birthday, Robin,’ said Christopher obediently. ‘And please don’t keep us up all night.’

  Chapter Nine

  Wednesday morning started at four-fifteen, courtesy of baby Robin. ‘Are we back to the old routine, then?’ Simmy asked him in a whisper. Christopher hadn’t woken as she slipped out of bed, gathered the baby and went to her favourite spot beside the window. It was going to be a bright day, she noted from the clear sky. There were moon shadows on the fells, everything utterly still. Before long the birds would anticipate the sunrise with their reassuring chorus.

  The peaceful rhythm of the suckling baby sent Simmy’s thoughts wandering freely. She felt almost culpably contented, largely, she realised, thanks to Christopher. They were going to get quietly married and try for a second baby. He was taking on the disaster of Josephine’s death with a much better attitude than on previous occasions. She was almost tempted to use the word ‘maturity’ about him, except that it felt patronising to do so. The willingness to talk at such length about all the theories and details and implications was different from earlier responses, and very much to be welcomed. Where once her ‘team’ had comprised herself, Ben and Bonnie, now she felt as if she and Christopher were the pivotal pair, working in a harmony that exceeded all her hopes.

  All the same, he was definitely shouldering a degree of responsibility towards Fabian, which Simmy found unnerving. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, it was fatherhood that had changed him. Didn’t men generally feel an obligation to set a good example to their sons? Did Christopher feel he should do the right thing because anything else would make him vulnerable to critical judgement from Robin, as he grew up? If seemed fanciful, looking at the helpless, trusting infant at her breast, but the idea persisted for all that.

  Which inevitably took her to consideration of the murder itself. There was still no indication that it was linked to Fabian Crick and his family, and yet it seemed impossible that it was not. The central connecting figure was Christopher Henderson, employer of the victim. On one of Ben Harkness’s flowcharts, all the lines would radiate out from Christopher. Logic, she adjured herself. Where was the logic? It could quite easily be a coincidence, with no earthly sense in casting suspicion on Fabian or his relations. Josephine had probably been killed by someone after her antiques. The little Limoges boxes could have a value, after all. The old chestnut of ‘A burglary gone wrong’ could well apply here. On the other hand, Josephine just might have discovered that Aunt Hilda had a terrible secret and suffered the ultimate fate as a direct result at t
he hands of one of her relatives.

  She crept back to bed at five, to the sound of soaring birdsong just outside. The sun was risen, and another day had begun, but she hoped she could postpone it for another hour or so. Robin had obligingly gone back to sleep, and within moments his mother did the same.

  She woke again at seven, to find Christopher standing by the bed with a welcome mug of tea. ‘Gosh, thanks,’ she smiled. It was still a novelty to be waited on. Her first husband had never acquired any such habit, always the last to get out of bed. Even when Simmy had been annihilated by the death of their baby, Tony had been equally useless, so that neither of them made tea or did anything to show care or concern for the other. ‘I had a dream about Josephine and Aunt Hilda,’ he said. ‘They were both shouting at me – really angry they were.’

  ‘Oh dear. Guilty conscience,’ said Simmy thoughtlessly.

  ‘Maybe,’ he acknowledged with a wince. ‘But I thought I’d got past that. And shouldn’t it be Fabian shouting at me? How did I annoy Josephine?’

  ‘Dreams aren’t always logical. Don’t let it worry you.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’ He leant down to kiss her. ‘Not long till we make it official,’ he said.

  For a moment she couldn’t think what he meant. ‘Oh – getting married, you mean. Right. Is that how it seems to you – official?’

  ‘Sounds horribly conventional, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of Robin, mainly. It’s supposed to be better for a kid if its parents are married, apparently.’

  She had no answer to that; certainly she didn’t want to argue. But it left a small niggling question in her mind about the real meaning of marriage in modern times. Commitment was the aspect she most favoured, ‘forsaking all others’ was the part of the wording she valued, like any jealous female since the dawn of time. She had heard enough women of all ages voice the unhappy truth that men were not naturally faithful. You had to make them promise and threaten them with an array of painful penalties if they defaulted. Even good-natured men like Christopher.