The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘No,’ said Richmond Armitage tiredly. ‘I wanted to tell you the exact opposite of that.’

  Robin was remarkably docile throughout the hour-long session with Richmond. Beer was consumed, along with a bar meal when they realised how late it was getting. Questions were raised and answered, details filled in and affection established. This was a nice man, Simmy concluded, in spite of his somewhat sinister appearance. But she still regarded the rest of the family as being at best self-serving and argumentative. ‘I really don’t feel very warm towards any of them,’ said Richmond.

  ‘Even your sons? Even poor old Ambrose?’ Simmy asked.

  ‘Ambrose doesn’t really count. He opted out decades ago.’

  ‘And yet he came to see us yesterday,’ said Christopher. ‘And he seemed to know pretty well what was what.’

  ‘You surprise me. I suppose Fabian felt there would be strength in numbers.’

  ‘Is it a fight, then?’ Simmy wondered.

  ‘In a subtle sort of way, I imagine it is. Fabian’s panicked about poor Josie, and my sons are squabbling over Hilda’s life history.’

  ‘It all comes down to her, doesn’t it?’ said Simmy. ‘That’s why Fabian’s dragged Christopher into it.’

  Richmond was clearly puzzled by this. ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, you might not know that he made a promise ten years ago, when he thought Fabian was dying. He was supposed to go to Hilda and give her a message – tell her how she was in Fabian’s thoughts to the end. But he never did, so now he feels bad and Fabian’s latched onto that.’ She patted her fiancé’s leg reassuringly. ‘He just forgot about it by the time he was back in England.’

  ‘You’ve lost me. I should tell you that Fabian and I have no truck with each other, never have. My boys have kept up with him, on and off, since they were all living close to each other, but I never had any time for him. Sneaky little beast he was, always causing trouble. Made my life a lot harder than it might have been.’

  ‘Aren’t your boys much younger than Fabian? Why would they have been so close?’

  ‘Fabian’s fifty-six. Petrock’s forty-eight. Keith’s forty-six. They worshipped him when they were small. My wife went off with them, back to Keswick, when Keith was barely three. Fabian’s dad was good to them all. They were thrown together.’ He shrugged. ‘I was the one left out in the cold.’

  ‘Fabian asked me to find you,’ Christopher reminded him.

  ‘Yes – you said. And you’re right, it was all a game, to keep you dancing to his tune. That promise you made, whatever it was, he must be rubbing his hands to think he can tweak your conscience any time he likes.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I mean – nobody keeps a promise to a dead man, do they? If you thought he was dead, why go to the trouble?’

  ‘I did mean to,’ said Christopher feebly. ‘At the time. We were in Africa and he had sleeping sickness. Everyone was sure he was dying.’

  ‘Take a lot to kill the little rat. My wife used to say he was just like his mother, when she first knew him.’

  Simmy sat up straighter. Here was a gap she’d hoped would be filled. ‘Did she?’ she said.

  Richmond sighed. ‘Her and Fabian’s mum were cousins, funnily enough. Very alike in their characters. And they died within six months of each other. There’s a genetic thing they’d both inherited. Don’t ask me for details. Seems none of the boys have got it, luckily.’

  ‘And you’ve known Josephine a long time,’ Simmy pressed on, making the inevitable connection.

  The man nodded miserably. ‘The best woman in the world, bar none. How some evil swine could kill her I shall never know. There’s nothing she could ever have done to deserve that.’

  ‘Nobody deserves to be murdered,’ said Simmy, with a determined glance at her little son. How he came into it she could not have explained, but he did.

  ‘We’ve been thinking a lot about that,’ said Christopher. ‘We’ve got this young friend, you see, who’s a bit of an amateur detective. He and Simmy have been quite closely involved in a number of murders over the past couple of years, and this boy—’

  ‘Ben Harkness, right,’ nodded Richmond carelessly. ‘We all know about him.’

  ‘He found your address,’ said Simmy defensively. ‘Took him two minutes. And he unearthed Hilda’s secret. There’s nothing he can’t ferret out on the Internet. It’s like magic.’

  ‘Hilda’s secret? What’s that then?’ The man seemed determined not to appear interested. ‘You don’t want to believe everything on the Internet, you know.’

  Something about his tone gave Simmy pause, and with another warning pat on Christopher’s leg, she just shrugged. ‘Well, it’s probably not what Fabian was talking about anyway. What do you think of Petrock writing her life story? Is it going to be a bestseller? She does seem to have done a lot of remarkable things through the years.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I never even met the woman.’ Again, he spoke with a studied nonchalance that was not convincing.

  ‘What? How is that even possible when she was your big sister? And you must have lived in Keswick if your boys went to school there. Just a few miles away.’ She frowned. ‘What happened?’ she asked simply.

  ‘Long story.’ He brandished his stumpy arm. ‘Has to do with this. And don’t you get that Harkness kid onto investigating it, because he won’t find anything.’

  Embarrassment silenced both Simmy and Christopher for half a minute, before Simmy’s curiosity broke through. ‘You don’t wear a prosthesis, then? No bionic hand or anything?’

  ‘Tried it for a bit when I was younger. Never got on with it. People stared at that even more than they did at the stump, and asked the same questions a million times. You can go off people very quickly, you know.’ He smiled tightly, and tucked the arm back where it had been before.

  ‘At the risk of asking one of those annoying questions – were you born with it like that?’ asked Christopher.

  Simmy did a rapid calculation, thinking Richmond must be too old to have been a thalidomide baby. Could you be born with a truncated limb like that? She doubted it.

  ‘Hospital error. I was a C-section delivery, as they call it now, big emergency, and the surgeon’s knife slipped. Severed blood vessels and tendons and they couldn’t save the arm. So, yes, in a manner of speaking, I was born with it.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’ Simmy declared, thinking of how her mother would react to such a tale. It took very little to enrage Angie Straw against the health service, for her usual perverse reasons. It was certainly true that when they did make mistakes, they made them on a grand scale.

  ‘I don’t want to go into it. It’s not relevant to anything, except to say that it meant I never grew up as part of the family. I had a good foster mother from the start, and never realised she wasn’t my real mum until I was about ten. I had the Armitage surname, and she was called Forrest and eventually I asked her why that was.’

  ‘Did she have a husband?’

  ‘Actually, yes. Angus. He worked away a lot and never seemed to take much notice of me. I called him Dad and he did take me fishing now and then, and rowing on Derwentwater once or twice. A harmless sort of chap.’

  ‘So – do you know who your biological parents were?’ asked Simmy directly.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he nodded with a stony expression. ‘I got most of the story when I was twelve. That’s when it was in the papers. But we’re not going to get into that now. It has nothing to do with you.’

  Simmy found herself unable to agree with this. ‘It seems to me that it might have quite a lot of relevance,’ she said, without quite knowing her reasons. She could feel Ben at her shoulder, urging her to stick to the subject. ‘You’re not Hilda’s brother, then? Or Ambrose’s?’

  ‘Leave it,’ said Richmond tightly, and Christopher muttered something similar.

  ‘Yes, but—’ Simmy persisted. ‘I’m sorry, but it leaves so much unexplained. And where does Josephine fit into it?’

  ‘Yes, t
hat’s the nub, isn’t it? That’s what we’re doing here. Which of the accursed Armitages stabbed her to death in her own home – and why? You’ll be thinking it was me, due to being rejected by her, as I’m sure you’ll have discovered by now. And I’m thinking that weaselly Fabian’s capable of anything. And Petrock’s all excited because he thinks it’ll make his book sell better if there’s a nice murder all tied up with his old auntie.’

  ‘And Keith?’ prompted Christopher, with a smile of pure enjoyment on his face. Simmy could see that he felt justified in relishing the situation, given Richmond’s straight talking.

  ‘Who knows what Keith is thinking?’ said his father. ‘Never was any good at explaining himself. But there’s no way he’d kill anyone. He hasn’t got the spirit for it.’

  ‘It’s often the quiet ones,’ said Christopher.

  ‘My son is no killer,’ Richmond repeated firmly. ‘Not either of my sons, in fact. Petrock’s a selfish swine at times, but he wouldn’t take the risk. He knows he’d never get away with it. Besides, neither of them would have the slightest reason to do such a thing.’

  Simmy glanced anxiously at Robin, who should be having his bath and bedtime feed by now, but he appeared to be sleeping soundly. Forget the routine, she silently adjured herself. This is too interesting to stop now. Christopher evidently felt the same. ‘It would make more sense to kill Aunt Hilda,’ he said. ‘Except she died anyway.’

  ‘And left the house to Josephine, which was a surprise, I admit – but a nice one. Showed the rest of them up. Sloppy of them to let that happen. Funny, when you think about it. Nice house, so they tell me.’

  Christopher stared. ‘It’s barely half a mile from here. You can’t seriously tell us you’ve never seen it.’

  ‘I live in Workington, nearly an hour’s drive away. Until today I hadn’t left the farm for six weeks. The Land Rover’s not even taxed, so I have to hope I don’t get stopped going home.’

  Simmy giggled, suddenly thinking that her mother would share her liking for this unusual man. She savoured various images of him working on his farm, throwing hay bales around or even driving a tractor, with only one arm.

  ‘You’re not dairy, then,’ said Christopher. ‘Otherwise you’d be doing the milking now.’

  ‘It’s not that sort of farm,’ said Richmond stiffly. ‘More a matter of polytunnels and packing sheds. Tomatoes, peppers and so forth and a few acres of soft fruit. Blackcurrants mostly.’

  ‘I see,’ Christopher nodded, with the subtlest suggestion of scorn. ‘A sort of market garden, then.’

  ‘Do you grow flowers?’ Simmy asked, mindful of her role as a florist. Richmond shook his head. From one moment to the next it had become clear to them all that the conversation was over. Even Robin – who was learning quickly – picked up the atmosphere and began to whimper.

  ‘Better get this young man home to bed,’ said Christopher, squaring his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure what we’ve accomplished, but it was good to meet you.’

  ‘And you,’ said Richmond with a straight look. ‘I mean that. It’s not often you meet a decent little family like you. I know I don’t cut much of a figure, and you had no reason to trust me or listen to me, but you’ve been good enough to hear me out, and I’m grateful. We’re in a pickle, between us, and you ought never to have been dragged into it, but there it is. It’s good to talk to someone who knew Josie and will miss her as much as I do – or very nearly.’ The little speech seemed to embarrass the speaker more than the listeners. His eyes grew shiny.

  Simmy was increasingly sleepy; the task of maintaining a hold on any logical thread was proving difficult by that point. She had tried listing headings that she could report to Ben, but everything seemed to fly around in disconnected shreds, with nothing remotely resembling a clue to Josephine’s murder to be glimpsed. And yet, there had to be something. Every instinct insisted this was so.

  The next hour was devoted to Robin’s needs, and then Simmy fell asleep over his feed. Christopher found them on the bed in a heap together and heartlessly woke them up. ‘Put him down, and come and talk to me for a bit,’ he ordered.

  But Robin had other ideas. His day had been spent almost entirely asleep and now he wanted to be sociable. ‘You can play with him while I have another nap,’ said Simmy. ‘Come back in half an hour.’

  Grumbling about the loss of an evening and the whole idea of a routine going out of the window, he did as he was ordered. It was nearly nine when he came back with a docile baby and dragged Simmy downstairs. ‘We’ll have to talk it through now,’ he insisted. ‘There won’t be another chance until this time tomorrow.’

  With a muzzy head and a guilty sense that Christopher was right about the routine, she followed him into the kitchen where he gave her a mug of coffee and yet more cake – this time small pieces of the one Angie had donated. ‘This is the last of it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be biscuits from here on.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Simmy.

  ‘So – what do we make of Richmond?’ he asked in a determined tone.

  ‘He’s nicer than his relations. But I didn’t follow a lot of his story. What happened after he was born? Who was his mother? Why is he so against Hilda? There’s a great big gap somewhere. I’m sure we’ve been told everything we need to fill it, but I’m too tired to figure it out.’

  ‘I expect Ben can fill the gap for us. I admit my attention wandered during some of that family stuff. My mind doesn’t work like Ben’s. I can never put myself into people’s heads like he seems to. That man doesn’t like Fabian much, does he?’

  Simmy shrugged as if to say Who does? ‘Ben has a special knack. I hope I remember everything I need to tell him. Poor Richmond – what a terrible start in life. Caesareans were pretty unusual back then, so something must have gone wrong to need one. A massive emergency, in fact, which is why they sliced his arm off by mistake. Think how ghastly that must have been! And if he was an afterthought, following three or four others, they might not have wanted him anyway.’ She was obsessing over the details, imagining the cold, bright room, the blood and the horror. It inevitably took her back to her own first experience of childbirth and the way everything could go so terribly wrong.

  ‘Don’t dwell,’ said Christopher briskly, seeing the way her thoughts were going.

  ‘No – I won’t. We really do need Ben, though. All the facts will be recorded somewhere and he’s the man to find it.’

  ‘You make it sound pathetically simple.’

  ‘It probably isn’t. Why do I feel so busy all of a sudden, when it’s practically bedtime, and there’ll probably be two night feeds, and it’s the clinic tomorrow.’ She sighed heavily.

  ‘Not to mention an adopted baby squirrel,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Aaghh. I had forgotten all about that. What shall I feed it? Nuts? Worms?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. All I can think of is wholemeal bread, which seems to be good for most creatures.’

  ‘There must be a website about it. At least it seems to be old enough to need solids. I might have to breastfeed it otherwise.’ She hauled herself over to her laptop and searched for information. ‘Kale and fruit,’ she summarised. ‘I guess cabbage and apple will do, then. I’ve got both those. And it should have milk, apparently. Well, maybe water with just a bit of milk mixed in will do.’

  ‘This is very silly, you know. You should have left it where it was. It says here,’ he pointed over her shoulder, ‘that the mother is usually close by.’

  ‘Too late now.’ She found a quarter of white cabbage and a bright red apple, and cut them up. The squirrel was curled in the nest she’d made for it and showed no interest.

  ‘It’ll be dead by morning, I expect,’ Christopher predicted.

  Privately, Simmy thought he was probably right. Nevertheless, she wanted to do her best for the little thing. When she’d finished she collapsed exhaustedly back onto the sofa and directed her thoughts to the following day. ‘I’m actually scared of the clinic, would y
ou believe? It makes me all fluttery to think about it.’

  ‘Do you want me to come as well? What time is it? They won’t give him any injections, will they?’

  ‘It’s two o’clock in Ambleside. They do the injections terribly young now, but I think it’s six weeks, not three. I’m going to be in a seriously awful state for that. You don’t really need to come tomorrow. I don’t think they encourage fathers. Your work was done once he’d been delivered, as far as the medical people are concerned.’

  ‘I’ll definitely come for the injections. You hear such awful stories.’

  ‘Stop it! You sound like my father. And mother, come to that.’

  ‘Sorry. But you should hear Hannah and Lynne on the subject. They both went to some monstrous place in Penrith, where the woman was a certifiable sadist. Like something from the Spanish Inquisition, apparently.’

  ‘That was years ago. Didn’t one of them complain?’

  ‘Hannah did, yes. No wonder there’s such a persistent movement against vaccination, the way some people administer them. Torturing innocent babies for fun.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s better now,’ said Simmy firmly.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They were in bed by ten. Robin demanded sustenance at eleven-thirty and four-thirty, which was reasonable enough from his point of view, but resulted in sleep deprivation for both parents. In Simmy’s case it was made worse by swirling thoughts of murder and medical accidents and a driving sense of urgency that she could not properly account for. She slept fitfully and was bleary with Christopher when he brought tea at eight next morning.

  ‘Friday today,’ he said, and then gave his customary report, having gained an advantage over her by being downstairs already. ‘Your squirrel is still alive, and it’s eaten some apple. I didn’t interfere with it at all. I’m leaving it all down to you. I’ve had some toast and I’m off in five minutes’ time. There shouldn’t be much doing at work. I don’t suppose there’ll be any news about Josephine’s funeral.’ He paused and scratched his head. ‘Who’ll be arranging that, I wonder? She’s even shorter on family than you are.’