The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

  Simmy laughed. The buckle device on the contraption was indeed mind-boggling. Small plastic shapes had to be fitted together in exact formation before the catch would click into place. With a floppy, sleepy baby, or a rigid screaming one, it was a major exercise to get him into it. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Christopher’s only just got the hang of it.’

  ‘Does he need a feed?’ asked Russell. ‘Shall I try to wake him up?’

  ‘Don’t you dare. He should last till about two – I’m going to see if I can get home in time. I appear to just be in the way here today.’

  ‘Well …’ said Angie, never one to tell a needless lie. ‘As you can see, it is a bit fraught.’

  ‘You could leave him with us while you pop to the shops or something,’ said Russell hopefully. ‘I’ll amuse him if he wakes up.’

  Simmy hesitated. She would like to see Bonnie, but there was no pressing reason to do so. It was a five-minute walk from Beck View, but it involved crossing one busy road and other smaller streets, and the possibility of being knocked down and rendered incapable of returning to her dependent offspring was suddenly terrifying. ‘Better not,’ she said. ‘I do need a bit of shopping but nothing I can get round here. I thought I’d call in on the one in Troutbeck, on the way home. I can park right outside and do it in no time. There’ll be enough fruit and veg and biscuits to keep us going for a bit. We’ve still got one or two bits of meat in the freezer.’

  ‘Take some mushrooms. We’ve got far too many,’ panted Angie. She had turned back to her large pile of bedsheets, preparing to carry them downstairs.

  ‘Thanks, I will. Do be careful on the stairs,’ she added. ‘Why don’t you just throw the whole lot down? That’s what you used to do.’

  ‘I was going to.’ And she plonked the bundle on the top stair and gave it a hearty kick. It stopped halfway down, and she followed it, kicking it again. ‘This is fun,’ she said. ‘I can pretend it’s that awful man’s head.’

  Simmy and Russell both laughed. Simmy experienced a surge of optimism for a future containing these two in their role as Robin’s only surviving grandparents. They would make life fun for him, with their cavalier approach to the world and its restrictions. They would show him how to be brave and independent and argumentative. Something that Simmy felt that she herself really was not.

  She stayed for half an hour, and then bundled Robin, still fast asleep, back yet again into the despised seat. The familiarity of the road up to Troutbeck made her feel sentimental and nostalgic. So much had changed in the past year, shifting her out of the comfortable single life and detaching her from the almost incredible scenery that had been right outside her door. Such drama was missing from Hartsop and Patterdale, despite the proximity of Ullswater. And the roads up there were even worse. However many times she drove over the Kirkstone Pass, she was intimidated yet again by the sheer insanity of the endless kinks in the road that went on for three miles or so, forcing a total concentration and making any decent speed unthinkable. The walls felt as if they were alive and far from benign. There had been moments when she could swear they shifted in the night, making sharper bends than ever.

  Robin obligingly remained asleep while she dashed around the village shop in Troutbeck. It was also a tea room, much valued by walkers, with the grocery side of things intended purely as a stopgap for essentials. Self-catering visitors bought their bread and milk there but were sadly thwarted if they wanted fresh fruit and vegetables, or even any meat. Simmy grabbed necessities for that evening and next day’s breakfast and resolved to send Christopher out to a bigger shop at the first opportunity. His promise to go out to a supermarket on Tuesday had been thwarted by Fabian’s appearance, as he eventually admitted.

  As she opened the passenger door of her car to sling her purchases onto the seat, a man cleared his throat behind her. Without looking, she said, ‘I’ll be gone in a minute. Am I in your way?’

  ‘Mrs Brown, it’s me.’

  She turned, already half aware of his identity. ‘DI Moxon!’ she greeted him with a beaming smile of genuine pleasure. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’

  ‘It’s pure coincidence that you see me now – although I was thinking we would probably have to have a little talk one day soon.’

  ‘About the murder in Keswick,’ she nodded. ‘Out of your area, again, I assume?’ The occurrence in Grasmere the previous year had also technically not involved the detective from Windermere, but in the event, he had been drawn into it as it neared its conclusion.

  ‘And I wanted to see your little one.’ As Pattie had done the day before, Moxon peered into the shadows of the rear seat. ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Boy. Robin. All very straightforward, when it came to the crunch. He’s three weeks and two days old.’ DI Moxon knew most of the story of little stillborn Edith and Simmy’s subsequent divorce. He had shown a finely balanced sympathy and understanding, and endeared himself to her accordingly. His exasperation with the persistent involvement of young Ben and Bonnie in murder investigations had mellowed into a grudging admiration, and a rare acceptance of a participation that most police detectives in his position would regard as blatant and outrageous interference.

  ‘And here you are, out and about just as always.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s how it is these days. I didn’t actually go anywhere for the first week, but since then … well, as you see. What’re you doing in Troutbeck?’

  ‘Bit of trouble at the tourist village. Car had its tyres slashed, would you believe. Not very nice, I must say.’

  ‘Appalling,’ she agreed. ‘So, you’ve made the connection between me and the Keswick murder.’

  ‘It wasn’t very difficult,’ he said with a twinkle. ‘Very bad luck for your … partner.’

  ‘Fiancé,’ she corrected. ‘We’re getting married in a little while. It’s all decided.’ She wondered whether he would expect an invitation and was half inclined to issue one there and then. ‘In fact, I was meaning to go and talk to them at the pub this afternoon. I’d forgotten until now. We might have the party there. What my granny would have called the wedding breakfast, I suppose.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said as if he meant it. He threw another look at Robin, which clearly said, A child’s parents really ought to be married, even though he knew better than to say it aloud.

  ‘Ben Harkness is on the case of the murder, needless to say,’ she told the detective. ‘He’ll be delighted that I’ve seen you.’

  ‘You mean, so that I can disclose confidential details about the investigation, I suppose.’

  ‘Something like that. He needs an excuse not to go back to Newcastle, I suspect. He’s changing his course and there are ructions. The truth is, he really doesn’t like it there, which is a real shame.’

  ‘Changing his course? Whatever for? I don’t think I’ve ever met such a dedicated student of his subject. What happened? Why would he do that?’ The man was clearly shaken.

  ‘I know. I was shocked as well. But I suppose after two terms, he’s given it time enough. I don’t think anything happened, exactly – he’s just not suited to it, somehow. He says the syllabus is too narrow and ignores too much of the bigger picture. Something like that. He wants to do history instead. I get the impression it’s turning out to be less simple than he thought.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Moxon helplessly. ‘I’m gobsmacked.’

  Simmy giggled. ‘Anyway, we’ve just been going over bits of the Armitage family history, to see if we can find any meaningful links to Josephine.’

  ‘Oh?’ He blinked two or three times. ‘Explain.’ When she gave him an old-fashioned look, cocking her head teasingly, he went on, ‘You’re right that I’m not directly involved in the investigation. You are quite likely to know more than I do – which you’re free to disclose to me here and now. I can then pass it to the proper quarters. Anything I can contribute will be gratefully received, I promise you. Or has Christopher already told them everything they should know?’


  ‘They interviewed him on Tuesday, and we went to Keswick yesterday and met up with some of the people who worked with Josephine. I don’t know any of them very well. We’ve mostly been talking to the Armitages. Hilda Armitage left Josephine her house. She’s known them all for decades. One of them wanted to marry her. Did you hear about the filing cabinets?’

  Moxon made slowing-down motions with his hands. ‘All this and a new baby too,’ he said, sounding oddly reproachful.

  ‘Who sleeps a lot of the time. Although I will admit he doesn’t much like it in the car.’

  ‘Looks contented enough now.’

  Robin was still asleep, but his posture yet again caused Simmy some concern. The seat held his body more or less straight, but his head flopped down on his chest at an angle that would give anybody neck ache. ‘It’s not good for him,’ she said. ‘All screwed up like that.’

  ‘Filing cabinets,’ he said.

  ‘She was killed beside them, apparently. They’re full of letters and things from Aunt Hilda’s house. Ben thinks somebody should have a good look through them.’

  ‘How many filing cabinets?’

  ‘Four.’

  He whistled. ‘That’s a lot of papers.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I have no knowledge of their contents – or even their existence. What I have been party to is a statement from a certain Mrs Harriman, who lives a couple of doors down from Miss Trubshaw’s house in Keswick,’ he said. ‘The closest thing she had to a best friend, it seems. It so happened that I was available at the right moment and had the pleasure of interviewing her.’

  ‘Never heard of her,’ said Simmy. ‘And I don’t think Christopher has either. Why is she relevant?’

  ‘You didn’t get this from me, okay? But it seemed to me she might be quite usefully forthcoming if you could manage a little chat with her. I didn’t get very far, but I have a strong suspicion that there’s more she could tell a patient listener.’

  ‘Oh?’ This was a whole new situation. Previously the detective had done his best to prevent unofficial approaches to potential witnesses. ‘Gosh! Tell me more.’

  ‘She’s in her sixties and spends all day minding her small grandchildren and one or two others, I suspect. She seemed a bit nervous about that, so she’s probably unregistered as a childminder, but does it anyway in a small way. There’s a big garden, from which she can see into Miss Trubshaw’s. I gather the staff at the auction house had regular weekdays off in lieu of the Saturdays they had to work, and the two women had got into the habit of meeting up and taking the kids out somewhere when Miss Trubshaw was free. Mrs Harriman is extremely upset about the violent killing of her friend, as you’d expect but she can offer no hint as to precisely what might have happened.’

  ‘I see,’ said Simmy, following all this closely. They were still standing beside her car, which was parked so that anything large trying to get through the village would be impeded. There were very few wide stretches of road in Troutbeck, and even fewer straight ones. Fortunately, nothing had so far required her to move.

  ‘There could be some backstory,’ Moxon explained. ‘The sort of thing a woman would tell another woman in conversation that just wouldn’t crop up in a police interview. It’s one of the great frustrations of this job, as I might have mentioned before. We start off in complete ignorance of all the undercurrents and background history, and it takes a lot of time and patience to ferret it out. Quite often that never happens at all, of course.’

  ‘You’re telling me it wasn’t just a burglary that went wrong, then.’

  ‘Did you ever think it was?’

  ‘I did hope it might be. That would be so much less malicious, somehow. And if she knew the person who killed her, that must be a dreadful final thought. The betrayal, the bewilderment. It breaks my heart to think of it.’ She cocked her head again. ‘But what about the Armitages? Fabian and Richmond and Aunt Hilda and the cousins? They all knew Josephine, and they’re all involved somehow. But Ben and I couldn’t find a concrete connection that might account for her being murdered. Just a few random theories is all we could manage.’

  ‘That sounds very much like undercurrents to me.’

  Then a large van approached, and Simmy heaved a sigh. At the same time, she saw Robin jerk himself awake. ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘What’s this woman’s address?’

  Quickly Moxon fished out a notebook and after a moment consulting a page, he copied down the details and gave Simmy the sheet he’d written on. ‘Just turn up with your little one, and I’m sure everything will fall into place quite naturally,’ he said blithely.

  ‘I’m not making any promises,’ she warned him. ‘This really isn’t the sort of thing I do. You’d probably glean just as much from Ben. He’s made an in-depth study of Aunt Hilda, for a start. She was quite famous at one point.’

  The van tooted, and Moxon waved at it to be patient. He gave Simmy one of his kindly, probing looks, and said, ‘Well – that’s it for now. We’ll speak again in a day or two.’

  ‘Right. It was lovely to see you – I’m going now.’ And she got into the car, throwing a soothing word at Robin, and drove off.

  Hilda had a secret – this idea revolved in her head. Or perhaps it would be truer to say she had been forced to swallow a secret that she was keen to reveal. She had done her best to make it public, all those years ago, and the forces of respectability or political discretion or whatever had pushed it out of sight again. There was no DNA testing in those days. As Ben had observed, proving paternity had until recently been a very inexact science.

  Weren’t secrets often at the root of violent deaths? Ben had apparently unearthed something shameful – although Hilda herself didn’t sound as if she’d been ashamed. The claim against the putative father had been made, the fact of a child exposed to public gaze and then seemingly forgotten, with no apparent harm done. So was there something else, more recent? Something entirely unconnected to the mysterious child who would now be over seventy years old? Even perhaps dead.

  The drive, as always, required concentration. Again, the grey stone walls tormented her, twisting ahead, bordering a road that belonged in a fairy tale. In the distance she could see Brothers Water glistening, marking a return to more reasonable driving conditions. Before she could reach it, she had to crawl past two vans and a Range Rover, all of them forcing her to cringe into the grass, millimetres away from the wall. There was an obvious beauty to the landscape on all sides, anyone would agree, but for the practical exercise of getting from one point to another, it was completely unfit.

  But the seven miles from Troutbeck to Hartsop still only occupied a scant twenty minutes. In the straighter final section, Simmy entertained a host of swirling ideas about families, and how a woman could be fertile for thirty years or so, but seldom more than that. You could in theory have a full sibling thirty years older than yourself, although she had never encountered an instance and they were likely to become even more rare now that teenagers had stopped having babies. Twenty-five years was a lot easier to credit, although even that must be unusual. Quite why she was following this line of conjecture she could not have explained. It had just begun to flow into thoughts of Bonnie Lawson and how Simmy could very easily be her mother, when she reached her new home. ‘Here we are!’ she sang to her baby, as she parked beside the house that was still not much more than a barn. Humphrey’s van was there and she could hear him whistling at the top of the stairs. It was twenty minutes past two.

  By three o’clock, Robin had been fed, changed and played with. His temper seemed to be set fair and the weather outside likewise. Humphrey and his mate were fully engaged with creating a third bedroom out of a large empty space – a project that would take at least another two weeks. The controversial door had been changed and Humphrey’s spirits were back to their usual buoyant state. ‘Going like clockwork,’ he reported.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Simmy said to her son. ‘We haven’t had any exercise toda
y. We might get as far as Patterdale.’ She tied him onto her front in the complicated contraption that made her feel like something between a Welsh woman and a Native American. At least it left both hands free and the sensation of the warm little body against her chest was delicious. She set out down the small road that led northwards, following the stream that fed into Ullswater. There were gates and stiles and stony outcrops to be navigated, but none of them presented any real difficulties. The exercise was palpably beneficial. She could feel her muscles and bloodstream responding. What very strange cultural attitudes there were to new mothers, she reflected. Although thankfully almost all those which ordained forty days of passivity seemed to be out of fashion.

  She knew she ought to be going up the road to look for Aunt Hilda’s house. But that was much too far to walk, and no way was she bundling poor Robin back into the car. Instead, she would methodically go over again everything she had learnt about Fabian and his family, and try to formulate a coherent narrative out of it. It would be a useful mental workout if nothing else.

  But she was repeatedly distracted by the bustle of nature all around her. Birds were scurrying to and fro with their beaks full of either nesting materials or food for babies, Simmy supposed, unsure of quite where spring had got to in that respect. It sounded fanciful even in her own mind, but she did suspect that she had a deeper understanding and empathy for the busy little homemakers now that she was a mother herself.

  And then, under a tall tree she saw movement. Bending awkwardly, she found a scrap of grey fur that twitched when she nudged it. A baby squirrel, she realised, looking up to see if there was a visible nest. What did a squirrel nest look like anyway? What ought she to do about it? Any small furry mammal would soften a maternal heart, and this one was characteristically cute. Its eyes were open, and it seemed to be unharmed. Inevitably she picked it up for a closer look. And equally inevitably, she decided to adopt it and give it a decent chance of life.