The Ullswater Undertaking

by Rebecca Tope

‘Yeah, she does. Don’t forget my bike,’ he warned, as they approached the first of three possible turnings up to Troutbeck. ‘This is the quickest way.’

  More reminiscences gripped Simmy as she did as directed. She had lived in Troutbeck since moving up to the Lakes, and selling her cottage there had been a wrench. It had not been given enough time to fully adopt her personality, the garden still a long way from perfect, and she felt an occasional foolish shame for abandoning it as she did. Christopher and Robin had diverted her expected trajectory, to the point where she had almost forgotten the Troutbeck interlude. The sudden appearance of Moxon the day before had swamped similar feelings of nostalgia.

  The road was steep and well filled with tourist traffic. ‘What are you going to do next?’ she asked.

  ‘Go home and start that algorithm. I’ll need to ask you more questions, I expect. The Petrock chap, for example. Quite a lot keeps coming back to him. I’ll do a bit more googling, see if I can unearth any more about Hilda and her family. Today’s moving too fast – we’re dropping things that we should be thinking about. There’s a whole armful of clues, if we just slow down and really look at it intelligently.’

  ‘Right,’ said Simmy, hoping she was being sufficiently intelligent for his purposes. ‘So I guess you’re on your own for the rest of the afternoon. I’ll be out delivering flowers until half past three or so, and then I expect I’ll go to Beck View and give my poor baby some attention. Thank goodness we’re not trying to stick to any sort of schedule. All that seems to have gone out of the window.’

  ‘My mother always says they thrive on neglect.’

  ‘She’s probably right, but maybe it’s just slightly too soon to experiment. If he has even the mildest mental health issues in later life, I’m going to blame myself for neglecting him when he was tiny.’

  ‘Phooey to that,’ said Ben.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bonnie was being stoical in the face of adversity when Simmy finally reached the shop, having weaved the baby buggy in and out of groups of tourists who were looking for something to do in Windermere. Just go down to Bowness, why don’t you? she silently shouted at them. For many of them, this was the last day of their holiday, and they were probably checking out Windermere just in case they’d missed something.

  There were three customers waiting for Bonnie’s attention, presumably wanting flowers for the weekend. Simmy experienced a strong sense of déjà vu. ‘Haven’t you got any irises?’ the one at the head of the queue was demanding. ‘What about freesias?’

  ‘Irises no, freesias yes,’ said Bonnie patiently. ‘And scented roses that came in this morning.’

  ‘You can’t put roses with freesias,’ said the woman, as if this was one of the Ten Commandments.

  Simmy pushed forward, and addressed the second person in the line. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I just wanted this,’ said the meek, middle-aged woman, who had the air of spending most of her life waiting in a queue. She proffered a large fern in a pot. ‘I’ve been looking for one like it for a long time now.’

  ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it. Where will you put it?’

  ‘In the bathroom. They like moist air, don’t they?’

  ‘They do,’ Simmy confirmed. She then had to wait for Bonnie to finish at the till before she could take the customer’s money. She sometimes wondered why it was that people buying flowers so often paid with cash, rather than a card. Were they embarrassed at having the purchase show up on their statements – or what?

  The third person waiting was suddenly receiving double attention, as the way cleared. Simmy automatically waved him forward, before catching herself and looking at Bonnie. ‘All yours,’ she said.

  The man was straightforward, wanting a nice colourful bunch for his wife and paying shamelessly with a card. Simmy and Bonnie both knew him as a regular. ‘Sorry you had to wait,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘No problem. I’m earlier than usual. We’ve got a new thing at work, where we can knock off at three on a Friday. It’s meant to help us get ahead of the rush, but if anything it’s worse.’

  ‘You’ve got all the school people as well,’ smiled Bonnie.

  ‘Right.’ The man was in his late fifties and had probably forgotten all about school schedules.

  At last the shop was empty. ‘Phew!’ gasped Bonnie. ‘It’s no fun trying to do this on your own. Am I minding Robin while you do the deliveries?’ She looked worried.

  ‘Well … that was the idea. But he’s going to get hungry soon. It’s been a very weird day, from his point of view. Lots of driving, which he didn’t seem to mind, luckily. But rather snatched feeds at random times. And now he’s fast asleep, look.’

  ‘Go now,’ Bonnie urged. ‘You’ll only be forty minutes or so – unless the traffic gets really bad. There’s Newby Bridge, then Blackwell, then someone just round the corner from Ben’s house. I’ve got all the postcodes for you – shall I put them in the phone?’

  ‘All the way to Newby Bridge?’ Simmy sighed.

  ‘’Fraid so. It sounds quite easy – you’ve been there before, I think. The flowers are all done, anyway. I’ll go and put them in the van.’

  Despite her earlier relief at still being needed at the shop, it caused her a certain degree of distress to abandon Robin and return to her old routine of flower delivery. ‘It’s not even a month yet,’ she whined to herself. ‘And here I am back at work, just as I vowed not to be. I’m a mess of contradictions, let’s face it.’ She could hear, in her mind’s ear, the baby’s howls of hunger and abandonment. How could she – and not even leave him a dummy for comfort? Angie had threatened to disown her if she ever used a dummy.

  The traffic was mercifully co-operative, until the final few minutes, when trying to get back onto the main road after the last delivery proved almost impossible. In the end, she simply pushed out in front of an elderly woman driving an elderly car, waving a thanks that would have gone unseen through the solid sides of the van. She threaded it through the narrow alley that led to the back of the shop and rushed to her baby’s rescue, terrified of the implications of what she’d done.

  ‘He hasn’t moved a muscle,’ said Bonnie complacently. ‘I parked him in the back room and forgot all about him.’

  Simmy’s next horrified thought was that he must therefore be dead. She almost shook him in her efforts to check for a breath. ‘Calm down,’ said Bonnie. ‘He’s absolutely fine.’

  Which he was. ‘I’d better get off to Beck View, then,’ said Simmy. ‘I can feed him there, if he ever wakes up.’

  Bonnie’s forlorn expression gave her pause. ‘Oh Lord, you poor thing,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m really sorry you got landed with it all. When’s Verity likely to be back?’

  ‘She didn’t say. It’ll be all right for a few days now, anyway. If Tanya comes in tomorrow, and if Monday’s as quiet as it usually is, we needn’t worry till Tuesday. Maybe you could call her and make her say what she’s doing.’

  ‘Ben and I need to talk to you about things. It’s been a very productive day. He’s gone home to do an algorithm and work out who’s the chief suspect. We had to go to Keswick.’

  ‘Yes, I know. He’s been texting me about it.’

  ‘Has he? That’s good.’

  ‘I don’t really understand it, though. There’s no way he can tell me everything until I see him. I’m going down there this evening, to see if I can catch up.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be phoning Moxon. He asked me to talk to a neighbour of Josephine’s and we met her in the street. Christopher knows her. What she told us was interesting. In fact, the whole day has been extremely interesting, one way and another. I think we sort of know the whole thing, if we can just put it all together.’

  ‘It’s half past four, Sim. You’d better get going. Maybe we can get together on Sunday, like last week, and sort it all out then.’

  Sunday still felt quite a long way off to Simmy, as she walked her somnolent infant back to Beck View, where she had left her car.
Her main concern was a sudden raging thirst, due to having nothing to drink since the pub lunch. She began to walk faster, which had the useful effect of lulling Robin into yet more sleep.

  Her parents were in receptive mode, settling her on the sofa, bringing a large mug of tea and inviting her to talk to them. ‘We heard about the woman at Christopher’s workplace,’ said Angie. ‘You never told us.’

  ‘Didn’t I? I can tell you now, if you like. Dad met her last year – the woman in the office, sitting at the computer.’

  ‘Don’t remember,’ said Russell.

  ‘Ben and I have been doing detective work all day. It’s been fun, mostly. Robin was incredibly co-operative. He doesn’t mind the car any more. Christopher’s in a tizzy, obviously. Not just because they’ve lost Josephine so horribly, but because there’s this man called Fabian Crick, who knew Josephine and has a whole lot of relations called Armitage.’

  Russell’s eyes went wide and his head jerked forward. ‘Is one of them called Petrock?’ he asked.

  ‘Actually, yes. He’s a cousin. The person at the centre of it all is their Aunt Hilda. She died not long ago, and Petrock’s writing her biography. She did a lot of remarkable things, apparently.’

  Russell laughed. ‘He’s been saying he’d write it for years. I doubt if he ever will. Though it’ll help that she’s dead. You can’t libel the dead.’

  ‘You know him?’ It was his wife who spoke. ‘How?’

  ‘He was in that little writing group I used to go to in Ambleside. When I was trying to collect local anecdotes for a booklet – remember? We were all decades older than him, and I suspect we patronised him rather. He didn’t stay very long. I remember him mainly for his wonderful name. We all thought he was rather a fantasist, I’m afraid, dreaming of revealing some shocking incident from his aunt’s early life. We warned him about libel and so forth, I remember, but he said it would all be true and he was determined to prove it. Some documents he said would confirm the whole thing.’

  ‘He’s written most of it,’ Simmy said. ‘I saw the manuscript. He even read some of it to me and Christopher. And Ben found some newspaper reports about Hilda in the 1960s. It looks as if things have moved on since you knew him.’

  ‘Made more progress than you did with your booklet, then,’ said Angie rather unkindly.

  Simmy briefly told them the main points concerning Ben’s discovery of a mysterious baby and the apparent links to Josephine, which were tantalisingly difficult to pin down in any detail. ‘We still think one of them must have killed her. When we tell Ben that you knew Petrock, he’ll be thrilled. I have a feeling he thinks that he’s the most likely suspect.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Russell firmly. ‘That man could never kill anyone. He’s much too dithery for that.’

  ‘He’s young and strong and didn’t seem a bit dithery to me. His brother’s more so. And as for Uncle Ambrose …’ she giggled. ‘He’s the very epitome of ditheriness. He’s an archivist and spends all his time with musty old books.’

  Russell gave her a severe look. ‘That’s a very inaccurate stereotype, if I may say so. Archivists are the sharpest people of all. They never miss a detail or fail to spot a connection. They can read handwriting from the sixteenth century that’s totally illegible to anybody else. I often wish I’d been one,’ he finished wistfully.

  ‘I stand corrected,’ smiled Simmy. ‘He should be working for Oliver, by the sound of it. I never realised that his speciality is authenticating old bits of ivory and documents – and Josephine seems to have been doing something interesting with old documents as well. Her neighbour told us today that she used to sit up half the night poring over papers or letters or suchlike. She collected that sort of stuff, apparently.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  Simmy didn’t answer for a moment, as she shifted Robin to the other side, and asked her mother if there was any more tea on offer. ‘There’s some sort of thread running through all this,’ she said slowly, more to herself than to Russell. ‘Something about letters from the 1940s. It’s all gradually coming clearer. I wish I could go to Ben’s now and talk it through with him.’

  ‘But you’ve got responsibilities,’ said Russell, eyeing the baby.

  By a quirk of mental association Simmy suddenly remembered another dependent creature. ‘The squirrel!’ she yelped. ‘I forgot all about the squirrel! It will have died of hunger by now. I’ve been out all day.’

  ‘Have you changed that baby’s nappy lately?’ Angie asked, coming back with the second mug of tea. ‘There’s a bit of a whiff.’

  ‘I haven’t got any left. I put the last one on when we were in Keswick. He seems to be a right little poo machine today. I didn’t think I’d be out this long when I left home this morning. Have you got any here?’ She did not expect an affirmative answer, but Angie Straw was nothing if not resourceful. As the owner of a busy B&B, it was, Simmy supposed, hardly surprising that such emergency items should be kept available for feckless guests.

  ‘Of course I have,’ she said. ‘But mostly in larger sizes than you need.’ She went off to rummage in the appropriate drawer.

  ‘Squirrel?’ Russell prompted. Simmy explained. ‘A grey squirrel?’ He was delighted, to the point of gently clapping his hands. ‘You devil. Although, did I tell you I heard on QI this week that the reds are in fact more recently introduced than the greys? Can you believe that? It’s a bit of a semantic game, but all the reds were totally wiped out centuries ago – presumably by human beings – and quite a while later they imported replacements from Scandinavia, much more recently than the greys got here from America. And now they’re exterminating them. Doesn’t that create some sort of moral quagmire, don’t you think?’

  ‘I thought so already,’ said Simmy, feeling idiotically distressed about her neglected little pet. ‘Will it have died, do you think?’

  ‘Not from hunger. Did it have water?’

  ‘A bit. I’ll have to go. Christopher’s going to be there before me as it is. What a bad wife I’m going to make.’ She paused. ‘And that’s another thing. The wedding. I can’t imagine how we’re going to get everything ready in time. Even keeping it simple, there’s a horribly long list of things to do. I haven’t thought about it at all today.’

  ‘Wedding schmedding,’ said Russell, apparently thinking he was being hilarious.

  Driving home, Simmy felt painfully torn in a number of directions. Only hours ago she had been congratulating herself on managing to be a fully functioning person, engaged in another unofficial murder investigation with Ben, while at the same time being a more than adequate mother to Robin. It struck her now that Christopher had not featured at all in this self-congratulatory thinking. How was it that she so often found herself secondary to someone else’s needs, stressing about who came first and what she might best do for them? It had to be, she supposed, that this was how she liked it. If pressed, she could not have identified any other course than this. There was nothing she actively wanted to do differently. She loved the shop and the autonomy it brought her. There at least she was only answerable to herself. But she was loving the new house and the new baby just as much.

  And, to her horror, she realised she very much loved the intellectual games with Ben, solving the mysteries of the criminal mind, plunging into the labyrinth of brutal murder with Ben and Bonnie and earning the approval of DI Moxon. She wanted it all, she concluded – and that probably made her a very greedy person.

  She had texted Christopher with an update, apologising for failing to be at home to greet him and asking him if he would please feed the squirrel. ‘I just got carried away,’ she said at the end.

  Kirkstone Pass was cluttered with tourist traffic, some of it evidently eager to watch the sunset from such a good vantage point. Mindful of the baby in the back, Simmy slowed down and kept a careful watch for any careless drivers or panicked sheep that could require a sudden application of the brakes.

  She got back at five forty-five, to find Christ
opher frying sausages while the deep fat fryer sizzled with chips. ‘Ooh, calories!’ she rejoiced. ‘Wonderful!’

  Robin sat in his little chair while they ate. ‘He’s been in that thing all day,’ Simmy worried. ‘Do you think it’ll damage his posture?’

  ‘Probably not. I fed the squirrel for you. It was very grateful. We won’t have any muesli left at this rate. Apparently it doesn’t like carrots, though.’

  ‘Thanks. Maybe it’ll be ready to go back into the wild in a few days.’

  ‘The sooner the better. We haven’t space in our lives for another baby just at the moment.’

  ‘I thought we were getting a puppy this summer.’

  He looked up in surprise. ‘Oh? I thought you were still vetoing that idea.’

  ‘I thought perhaps a golden retriever …’ she said shyly. ‘It’d be nice for Robin. It could be my wedding present to you.’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ he cried. Then he said, ‘I’ve earned it, actually. After you’d gone today I had a look at the database, checking to see what else Hilda Armitage had bought, before and after those papers. She wasn’t anything like a regular at the auctions, but she did get hold of another couple of collections, like the one you found. I asked Jack if he remembered her. He’s very sharp, you know, in spite of seeming so inconspicuous. He knows everybody, and remembers most of what they buy – and sell. He had a think and said he’d seen Oliver and Hilda in a huddle over old papers and stuff, quite a few times. And he told me that Oliver went to Hilda’s funeral, but Josephine didn’t, which seems a bit odd, given that she left Josie the house.’

  ‘It’s new information. Were all three of them working on some sort of historical project, do you think? Maybe Petrock as well. So – could they have fallen out somehow and divided into two camps?’ She shook her head. ‘That doesn’t seem to work, does it? Or if it does, we need a lot more to go on.’

  Christopher plucked the baby from his bondage and lifted him high in the air. Robin blinked. Simmy bit back the urge to tell Chris to be careful. ‘I still can’t quite believe he’s real,’ the new father marvelled. ‘And now I can have a dog as well. It’s a miracle.’