The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘After we’ve looked at Christopher’s computer, yes. And after I’ve taken you to collect your bike.’

  ‘So what about the baby clinic?’ he asked.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘I forgot all about it,’ she said, with an embarrassed giggle. ‘Never gave it a thought. What time is it now?’

  ‘Twenty past twelve. You’d have had a rush anyway, without having to rescue Bonnie. I was just going to mention it when the phone went.’

  ‘I’ll go next week instead. I can send a text or something. There’s no way I’m leaving Bonnie to struggle on her own. And the deliveries have to be made, come what may. I’ll lose business if I let three lots of people down. It’s unthinkable.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ he said, with a concerned glance at Robin. Again, there was that annoying male assumption that without some official medical surveillance the child might be at risk.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. They only want to interfere anyway and upset us both. I never thought I’d feel like this, but I’m very happy indeed to find I’m more than merely a mother. It won’t hurt him to come down to the shop. I might even pop into Beck View while I’m there.’

  ‘You’ll have to leave him somewhere, if you’re using the van,’ Ben pointed out. ‘I don’t imagine there’s a baby seat in it.’

  ‘Never mind all that. Let’s go to the saleroom. Finish that pasta thing and we can get going. I’ll tell you the rest of the Richmond story in the car. I’ll just take Robin into the ladies’ and give him a new nappy.’

  She managed to convey everything she could recall of the conversation with Richmond the previous evening, in the five minutes it took to reach the auction house. ‘That’s it,’ she concluded. ‘He was nice. And I’m assuming that the lack of an arm would make stabbing a fit and healthy woman quite difficult.’

  ‘It definitely was a stabbing, you know,’ Ben said. ‘It was in the latest news report last night.’

  ‘Oh. I’d been assuming it was, ever since Oliver said there was a lot of blood. Not that I really want to know that sort of detail.’

  ‘It would be very difficult for Richmond to have done it, I agree,’ Ben said. ‘But the backstory could be crucial, all the same. There’s obviously something murky.’ He went quiet, before bursting out, ‘What if he’s the mystery baby that Hilda said she’d had? Isn’t that what he was trying to tell you? That Hilda was his mother, not his sister?’

  Simmy forced herself to stay focused on the road, despite the buzzing in her head that this idea caused. ‘What? Good Lord, Ben – isn’t that a pretty big leap? If it’s true, why didn’t he just say it directly? I actually asked him who his parents were and he dodged the question.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a leap at all. I think it’s crystal clear. The main question is why – if she’d dumped him on a foster mother at birth – did she then make the whole thing public umpteen years later?’

  ‘Circumstances change. I can think of all sorts of reasons.’ Despite herself, she was fitting the known facts into Ben’s hypothesis and finding it was not entirely ludicrous after all. ‘But where did that idea even come from?’

  ‘Where any ideas come from, I suppose,’ he shrugged. ‘Of course, the other massive question then is, how does it link up with Josephine?’

  ‘Remind me why we need to find out what that auction lot in the garage was. It was just a box, after all.’

  ‘Two boxes,’ he corrected her. ‘But I do admit there’s only the slightest cause to think they’re important. The honest truth is that I thought it would be an excuse to see how the auction database works, and how much information they keep about every item sold. If we could persuade Christopher to let us rummage around in it, we might come up with all kinds of useful stuff.’

  ‘Us,’ Simmy sighed. ‘It’s all hugely confidential, I expect. And it would take hours to have a proper look through the whole thing.’

  ‘Days,’ he said happily. ‘I wonder how hackable it is.’

  ‘Don’t you dare! Christopher would never speak to you again. Oliver would probably give him the sack. You won’t, will you?’

  ‘Don’t panic. Even if I did, nobody would ever know.’

  ‘We’re here now. Just behave yourself,’ she ordered, still hankering for the schoolboy he had been half an hour ago.

  Christopher met them at the entrance to the reception area, looking tired and worried. Simmy initially took his concern to be about her and the baby, but she was soon disabused. ‘We’re having a rather fractious meeting,’ he said. ‘I saw you out of the window and came to head you off. Why are you here?’

  ‘Ben had an idea and wants to look something up on your database. A sale two years ago. Is that allowed?’

  ‘I guess that depends on what he plans to do with the information.’ He rubbed his face. ‘Honestly, Sim, it’s not a very good time. Aren’t you supposed to be at the baby clinic?’

  ‘I’m putting it off till next week. This is more interesting.’

  He gave a sceptical laugh. ‘How can anything be more interesting than our baby?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Is everybody at your meeting? Isn’t there a girl somewhere who’d like to do a bit of dandling?’

  Christopher looked at Robin, who was already in his buggy. ‘We won’t be much longer. Have a look round while you wait. There’s some really nice Moorcroft just in. Even you can recognise Moorcroft, can’t you? Just don’t break it.’ He looked at his son again. ‘You won’t turn up with him like this when he’s three, will you? He’ll be in full vandalism mode by then.’

  He then hurried back to the meeting and Simmy turned to Ben. ‘Looks as if we’ve got to wait,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I heard. Let’s check out that Moorcroft, then. You know it’s the single most consistently sought-after china there is, don’t you? People never seem to get tired of it.’

  ‘I expect some real antique snobs look down on it, for that very reason.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Ben dubiously.

  They went into the big saleroom and started to look around. ‘That must be the Moorcroft over there.’ Ben pointed to a shelf.

  They found a group of three slender vases, all the same shape but with very different decoration. ‘They’re so elegant,’ breathed Simmy. ‘Nothing bulbous or fiddly. The more you look at them, the more gorgeous they are.’

  ‘A triumph of form,’ nodded Ben. He then looked around at the large area that was the main saleroom. ‘Where do they put the memorabilia?’

  ‘It hasn’t been sorted yet. There aren’t any lot numbers on anything. These stickers are the vendor numbers.’

  ‘Hey – get you!’ he said. ‘You’re picking it all up, aren’t you?’

  ‘Only the basics,’ she admitted. ‘I’ll never work out the system they use for deciding on the lot numbers. Apparently it used to be alphabetical by vendor, but there were complaints because the same people always came last, when most buyers had gone home.’

  They wandered aimlessly around the disorganised-looking tables, the buggy barely squeezing between the rows in some places. Large items of furniture were lined up against the back wall, with rolled-up carpets and rugs leaning against some of them. ‘It’s all rather magical,’ said Ben. ‘I can see how people could get addicted.’

  Then a woman approached them, and their wait was over. ‘Fiona,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m sorry if we’re a bother.’ Suddenly their intrusion felt embarrassing and foolish. She and Ben would have to be careful not to say too much. Any mention of the Armitage family would be ill-advised, for a start. ‘Do you think we could check out a sale you had here two years ago on your computer? We’ve already asked Christopher about it.’

  Fiona looked very pale and droopy. Simmy remembered that there was potential rivalry between her and Pattie for Josephine’s job. Perhaps the meeting had decided in favour of Pattie, leaving Fiona to sulk. Except this looked more like grief than resentment. ‘Are you all right?’ Simmy asked.

&n
bsp; ‘More or less. Everything’s changing, and we’re all in a muddle.’ She waved a hand at the piles of objects. ‘We’re at least a day behind with all this, and then Oliver calls a meeting that puts things back even further.’

  ‘Oliver’s here, is he?’

  Fiona nodded. ‘We don’t seem to be able to manage without him.’

  Before any more could be said, Christopher appeared, followed by Pattie, Oliver and a woman Simmy didn’t recognise. ‘Come on then,’ Christopher said to Ben impatiently. ‘Let’s get it over with. Everyone’s going for lunch now, so we’ve got a bit of time.’ The whole group seemed jaded and discordant. Only Pattie acknowledged the presence of baby Robin, and she was nowhere near as enthusiastic as she’d been two days before. ‘He’s looking very contented,’ was all she said.

  Christopher led them into the small office, where the buggy was very much in the way. He sat Ben at the computer and, leaning over him, tapped a few keys. ‘What date was it?’ he asked.

  Ben extracted his phone and showed his picture of the auction house label. Christopher copied the date and lot number and then stepped back. ‘There it is,’ he said, without giving the result a proper look.

  ‘“Two boxes of papers and letters from the 1940s”,’ read Ben. ‘Hammer price six pounds. Right. Seems like a bargain.’

  ‘Does that leave you any the wiser?’ asked Christopher.

  ‘Can we see who sold them and who bought them?’

  ‘It’s all there. Scroll down a bit.’

  With a surprised glance from Simmy to Christopher and back, Ben did as advised. ‘Vendor was somebody called W. J. Bolt, and buyer was a person called H. M. Armitage. Right. As we expected, really. Any idea who the Bolt character is?’

  ‘Um … wait a minute. That date. Just over two years ago. I think that was my very first time as auctioneer. The date is engraved on my heart. I made a right mess of the whole thing. I was so slow we didn’t finish until gone seven o’clock. It was pouring with rain and there was a big football match on, so there were very few buyers, either here or online.’

  ‘Do you remember this lot, by any chance?’

  Christopher read the description for himself. ‘Oh God,’ he said, turning a nasty shade of grey. ‘I do. It got me into trouble with Oliver. That and a few other bloopers. Gosh – it’s all coming back to me now. That wretched old woman – she came up to me later, when she was collecting the boxes at the end. Full of herself, she was, smiling from ear to ear. “You don’t know what you’ve just let go for peanuts,” she gloated. I tried not to take any notice, but a few days later, Oliver gave me a bollocking because the vendor had complained that we didn’t list it properly. I was only doing it because he’d been off sick and there wasn’t anyone else. Everyone could see I wasn’t ready to be dropped in the deep end like that.’ He stared at Ben. ‘Why, out of all the thousands of lots I’ve sold since then, did you have to choose this one?’

  ‘That woman was Aunt Hilda,’ said Simmy slowly. ‘The very one you promised Fabian you’d go and see. We found boxes with this lot number on them in her garage.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Christopher. ‘Then I can only assume it must be karma, chasing me up because I didn’t do what I promised Fabian.’

  ‘That’ll be it,’ said Ben. ‘Who’s the Bolt person?’

  ‘The name rings a bell, but I don’t think I ever met him. He’s in London, deals in memorabilia.’

  ‘So what was in the boxes that was worth more than six pounds?’

  ‘I have no idea. I never even looked properly. The woman held up a bundle of letters and waved them in my face. They didn’t look like anything special to me – not even in envelopes with stamps on. Sometimes that’s the only reason people buy that sort of stuff. She must have had a good look at them at the viewing the previous day, and spotted something. But there was no reserve, so there was nothing to stop her buying them for a few quid. Actually, I think if she’d waited, I’d have dropped down even lower.’

  ‘Nobody else bidded for them?’

  Christopher shook his head.

  ‘Well, it’s a fascinating insight into how it all works,’ said Ben happily. ‘Even though it might not be relevant to anything. The 1940s was a long time ago.’

  Simmy was only half listening to the conversation, as she bent over Robin and tried to interest him in a plastic toy attached to the buggy. His jerky, swiping motions persuaded her that he was trying to grab for it, and that made her proud of his obvious intelligence. ‘If the vendor knew he was selling something valuable, he’d have made a point of it, wouldn’t he? I mean, you wouldn’t just bung an original letter from Hitler or someone in a job lot without a reserve, would you?’ said Ben.

  ‘Exactly what I said to Oliver,’ Christopher agreed. ‘I assumed he was just disappointed in a general sort of way. He apologised eventually and said there was no real harm done. Turned out the buyer was a better friend than the vendor. So at least she was happy with us.’

  ‘Did Oliver see the letters?’ asked Simmy. ‘Isn’t he interested in that sort of thing?’

  Christopher groaned helplessly. ‘I really don’t know. And I’d much prefer it if you didn’t ask him. It took him quite a while to get over being cross with me for being so sloppy. Josephine tried to defend me, I remember. Told him that none of it was my fault.’

  ‘And she would have known who the woman was, because of her friendship with that family,’ Simmy noted.

  ‘It does all connect,’ said Ben, obviously thinking hard. ‘Papers, letters, history. And that nephew trying to write Hilda’s life story. She was probably co-operating with him and feeding him information, with hard evidence to back it all up. You know something? We might yet find some real evidence concerning her baby. The date’s about right, after all.’

  Christopher had transferred much of his attention to his son. The word ‘baby’ could only refer to Robin – but that was puzzling. He frowned. ‘What baby?’

  ‘Hilda claimed she had a baby out of wedlock somewhere late in the 1940s. I’m sure I told you. It was in the papers,’ said Simmy. ‘Not at the time, but years later, when she tried to sue the father, or something.’

  ‘Old history,’ Christopher said. ‘Why does it matter now?’

  ‘It might well matter if the father was somebody important, as seems very likely. And now we’re wondering whether that baby might possibly have been Richmond – abandoned because of his missing arm. People didn’t like defects in those days.’

  ‘And Hilda really didn’t like them. Fabian told us that,’ Christopher added thoughtfully. ‘Do the dates fit?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Which somehow seems to bring us back to Hitler,’ said Christopher, with another frown, this time a more playful one. ‘Please don’t tell me that Richmond Armitage is Hitler’s lost love child.’

  ‘No – because Hitler died three years before the child was born,’ said Simmy irritably.

  Ben was still scrolling up and down the auction house database. Suddenly he took out a notebook and pencil and jotted something down. ‘What’s that?’ demanded Christopher.

  ‘Just the basics. Simmy’s going to want to go in a minute and I don’t want to keep her waiting. Bonnie needs her at the shop.’

  ‘Annoyingly, this young man has just filled his nappy,’ said Simmy. ‘It was only on for five minutes, too. I’ll do it in the loo, if you like. Lucky I put two spares in the bag.’

  Christopher groaned again and rubbed the top of his head. ‘Do it anywhere you want. I’m really not enjoying today,’ he complained. ‘Nobody’s telling me anything. Even Oliver’s gone all tight-lipped. He’s upset the girls, and as for Jack – I think he’s weeping in a corner somewhere. He was very attached to Josephine, apparently, although I can’t say I ever noticed.’

  ‘It’s all here,’ said Ben obscurely. ‘It just needs to be figured out.’

  ‘You need to do an algorithm,’ teased Simmy over her shoulder, as she headed for the toilet.
r />   ‘I do,’ he agreed with perfect seriousness.

  ‘We forgot to tell him about Chrissie Harriman,’ said Simmy in the car. ‘I keep forgetting to tell people things. I should phone Moxon and update him, I suppose.’

  ‘You’ll get at least two Brownie points.’

  ‘What did you write in the notebook?’

  ‘Just the Bolt person’s email address,’ he said airily. ‘That can’t hurt anything, can it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s probably breaking data protection laws – as you jolly well ought to know.’

  ‘That’s why I didn’t tell Christopher what I was doing. Nobody’s ever going to know. It’s a good database, though. Beautifully organised.’

  ‘Josephine must have been very capable.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she could take much credit for it. The software comes already packaged – you just have to put the information in.’

  ‘Even so,’ Simmy argued, ‘I imagine plenty of people make a mess of doing that.’

  ‘It must be a nice one to work with – I mean, there’s something very straightforward about it all, and yet there’s so much variety in the things they sell. I never wondered about the descriptions, until now. Everything hinges on that, when you think about it.’

  The conversation was disjointed, as Simmy drove southwards to Windermere. They passed the outskirts of Grasmere and Banerigg where Simmy had been handed a small baby, just at the very start of her pregnancy. Superstitiously, she credited that infant with the successful implantation of the fertilised egg that became Robin. A surge of hormones just at the right moment seemed to her a perfectly rational assumption. Then they were into Ambleside, which had numerous associations with murder and malice. Having Ben as a passenger heightened and focused the memories. There had also been Hawkshead and Coniston and Staveley, all of them bringing her and Ben together in the contemplation of violent crime.

  ‘Bonnie must be feeling a bit left out,’ Simmy said. ‘Stuck there in the shop all the time with only Verity to talk to.’