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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Lake District Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
'Rebecca Tope does what she does best: she gathers a cast of lively characters and a few red herrings (or not, as the case may be), and weaves them all into a nicely tangled plot against the glorious background of the Lakes' Mystery People Following a personal tragedy, florist Persimmon 'Simmy' Brown has moved to the beautiful Lake District to be nearer her parents. Things are going well and Simmy is content to lose herself in her work until she finds herself at the heart of a murder investigation... Includes the first three instalments in the Lake District Mysteries: The Windermere Witness, The Ambleside Alibi, The Coniston Case.
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The Lake District MysteriesBooks 1, 2, 3
THE WINDERMERE WITNESS THE AMBLESIDE ALIBI THE CONISTON CASE
REBECCA TOPE
Contents
1
The Windermere Witness
REBECCA TOPE4
5
For Vronny – hoping we’re still friends after two weeks in a car together.6
Author’s Note
Most of the places mentioned in this story are real – the hotels and monuments and some shops. The private houses, however, are products of my imagination. I have taken liberties with the buildings of Troutbeck in particular.
I am grateful to Michael Jecks and Tony Geraghty for information concerning guns.352
Chapter One
What a day for a wedding! Sheets of rain sluiced across the windscreen, giving the wipers a harder task than they were equal to. The road ran with water, so it resembled the lake that lay a few yards to the right. The turning into the hotel was ahead, somewhere, on a pimple of land jutting into the lake. On a bright day, it would be a stunning venue for a wedding; the photos spectacular. Today it would be madness for a bride to venture outside in silk and lace and expensively wrought hair. The many thousands of pounds that must have been spent on the event would do nothing to mitigate the disappointment, if Simmy was any judge. There would be huge umbrellas on standby, of course, and other tricks with which to defy the weather, but rain on this scale would defeat every attempt to save the day.
Behind her, the back of the van was filled with scent and colour, conveying all the layers of meaning that went along with flowers. She was confident that her work would 8meet all expectations. She had laboured over it for a week, selecting and matching for colour, shape and size. The scheme was a rosy peach (‘Definitely not peachy rose,’ said the bride with a grin, when she and her mother had come to talk it over) with scatterings of rust and tangerine to echo the autumnal colours outside. Colours that were muted to grey by the rain, as it had turned out.
The hotel’s facade was a pale yellowy-cream on a good day. There was a confident elegance to it, despite the lack of symmetry. The older part boasted a columned entrance that Simmy suspected might be a loggia, officially. She had been profoundly impressed by the whole edifice, on a previous visit two months before. The chief element in its reputation, however, lay in the setting. The lake itself was the real star, and the various architects who had created the Hall had had the good sense to realise that. All the ostentation lay indoors, where no expense had been spared in grand ornamentation.
She parked the van as close as she could get to the humbler entrance where deliveries were customarily made. A team of hotel staff was on hand to assist, and within the hour, the centrepieces, swags and two monumental arrangements had been set into position. During that hour, Simmy lost herself in the creative process, immersed in colour and form that were intended to enhance the romantic significance of the event. She gave brisk instructions to the people detailed to work with her, their tasks restricted to pinning and tying, fetching and carrying. The florist herself attended to everything else. Everything fell perfectly into place, exactly as she had envisaged. Clusters of red berries to suggest fruitfulness; luscious blooms for sensuality; 9some dried seed heads for permanence – she loved the understated implications that few, if any, wedding guests would consciously grasp, and yet subliminally they might appreciate.
‘Just the bouquets and buttonholes now,’ she told her helpers. ‘Where do they want them?’
The bride’s mother was telephoned, and Simmy was asked to take the flowers to the suite upstairs. In the lift she balanced the large box on one hand and thought briefly about weddings. Just as births and funerals conjured a kaleidoscope of personal memories and associations, a wedding always called up comparisons with others one had experienced. In her case, it was her own, nine years earlier.
She was on the third floor before she could get far in her rueful reminiscences. Room 301 was awaiting her, the door already open. Inside was a flurry of female activity, half-naked girls with hair in rollers, a heavy atmosphere of near hysteria. ‘Flowers,’ she said, superfluously, looking for a familiar face. She saw herself reflected in a gold-bordered full-length mirror – a misfitting figure amongst all the froth of silk and lace, dressed in a blue sweatshirt and jeans. Her hair was untidy, her hands not entirely clean. She had given no thought to her own appearance, which made her a complete alien in this room where appearance was everything.
‘Oh! Let’s see!’ And there was Miss Bridget Baxter, soon to be Mrs Bridget Harrison-West, fumbling at the lid of the box in her eagerness.
Simmy carefully set it down on a marble table beneath the window and lifted the lid. ‘I hope they’re what you wanted,’ she said.
10The bride met her eyes with a direct blue gaze that would instantly endear her to the greatest misanthrope alive. ‘They’re fabulous!’ she said. ‘Look, everybody! Aren’t these gorgeous!’
‘Keep them cool, if you can,’ Simmy advised. ‘Probably the bathroom would be best.’
The enormous room swirled with bridesmaids and long dresses hanging on a wheeled rail. There were two big sofas, on one of which sat a young girl, intently fiddling with her fingers and apparently muttering to herself. It could only be the smallest bridesmaid, traditionally referred to as the ‘flower girl’, and as such, Simmy felt herself justified in making an approach. She sat down on the edge of the chintzy sofa.
‘There’s a special bouquet for you to carry,’ she said. ‘Do you want to see it?’
The child shrugged, but flashed a quick smile that seemed friendly enough. ‘If you like,’ she said.
‘This is all a bit … daunting, isn’t it?’ Simmy sympathised, with a glance around the room.
‘“Daunting”?’ the little girl repeated with a puzzled frown.
‘Overwhelming. Stressful.’
‘It’s a wedding. This is what they’re like. I went to one before.’
‘Did you? Were you a bridesmaid then, as well?’
‘No. They were all grown-ups that time. Thank you for the flowers.’
Simmy felt subtly dismissed, by a child who was probably accustomed to being attended to by people paid to do it. She smiled briefly, understanding that there was no further role for her.
11There was a smell of lavender soap and warm ironing. Ms Eleanor Baxter, mother of the bride, was nowhere to be seen. Simmy was not sorry to miss her. When choosing the flowers, she had been a disconcerting mixture of autocratic boredom and penetrating exigency. The flowers had to be right, because this was a wedding, but weddings were actually a tedious necessity that she very much wished she didn’t have to bother with: that had been the general message that Simmy picked up.
‘Look at that rain!’ cried one of the girls, standing by the window. ‘The lake will overflow if it goes on like this, and we’ll all be washed away.’
‘It’s a disaster,’ said Bridget cheerfully. ‘I knew this would happen.’
‘But last weekend was so lovely!’ moaned the girl. ‘Warm and sunny, and lovely. How can it change so quickly?’
‘That’s England for you,’ said Bridget. ‘It’s all Peter’s fault, of course. He wouldn’t miss his sailing, even to get married.’ Everyone within earshot laughed, causing Simmy to suspect that the reality was something rather different.
She made her departure, with a murmured good-luck wish. Not that it was needed. Miss Baxter, spinster of the parish of Windermere, was so comprehensively blessed that a rainy wedding day would hardly dent her faith in her husband, or in the world. Although the florist had been given no special confidences, she did happen to be acquainted with the bride’s hairdresser, who had. ‘She loves him, Sim. They’ve known each other for years, and he always said he’d marry her the moment she was old enough.’
‘Don’t you find it the weeniest bit creepy?’
12‘Why? Because he’s twenty-five years old than her? No, not at all. It’s lovely that he’s waited all this time for her. It’s like a fairy tale.’ Julie was a romantic creature, and Sim saw no cause to undermine her illusions. Besides, from the glimpses she had gained of Bridget, it seemed she would wholeheartedly agree with her hairdresser.
The wedding was scheduled for eleven, which left an hour and a half for Julie to work her magic. ‘She wants the whole works, with tendrils and pearls,’ she’d gloated. ‘I can’t tell you how much she’s paying me. It’s embarrassing.’
Simmy had felt no envy. The proceeds from the wedding flowers would keep her in business for some time, and do her reputation no harm at all. There was every chance that the hotel would recommend her more often, now she had been selected for the Wedding of the Year. The pictures in the gossip columns would cement her position, with any luck.
Outside, the van was about to be joined by others. Two vehicles were making a stately approach down the lesser driveway, and Simmy realised they would want her out of the way. She would do best to leave by the main entrance. As she drew level with the loggia, she saw that a knot of men had gathered, under huge umbrellas. Somebody amongst them was smoking. They looked like a clump of bullrushes growing beside the lake, their seed heads exploding in black arcs, silhouetted against the water behind them. They were laughing together as if the weather meant nothing to them. Too soon for wedding guests, surely? Family and close friends would be staying at the hotel; others would arrive in relays – some for the ceremony, some for the wedding breakfast, and another batch for the obligatory evening 13disco. Getting married at eleven meant a marathon fifteen hours or more, these days, albeit with lengthy interludes during which nothing happened. Simmy remembered it well.
The jocular group eyed her van as she drove slowly past them. One individual detached himself and flapped a hand to stop her. She opened the window on the passenger side and heard one of the others call out in puzzlement – ‘Hey, Markie, what’re you doing?’
‘You’re the florist,’ he said, with a glance at the stencilled logo on the side of the van before peering in through the window. ‘You live in my house, in Troutbeck.’
She stared uncomprehendingly at him. ‘Pardon?’
‘I was born there. We moved away three years ago. The new man didn’t stay long, then.’
‘Mr Huggins? He lost his job, apparently, and had to go to Newcastle to find another one.’
The boy shrugged. ‘It’s a nice house. I hope you’re happy there?’
‘It’s lovely,’ she said.
He smiled, and changed the subject. ‘Did you bring the buttonholes?’
‘I did,’ she nodded. ‘Why?’
He was very young, perhaps not even eighteen. Simmy suspected she was more than twice his age – not that this detail seemed to deter him from flirting with her. ‘I hope mine’s the nicest one,’ he grinned.
‘You’re not the best man, are you? It’s my guess you’ll be one of the ushers.’
‘The most important usher,’ he corrected her. ‘I’m the bride’s brother.’
14Aha! thought Simmy, remembering the gossip she’d heard about the family. The coincidence of the Troutbeck house gave her a sense of fellowship with him, and she tilted her head teasingly.
‘Well, I’m sorry to tell you the buttonholes are all the same. Won’t you get wet, standing about out here?’
‘We’re waiting for my pa. He’ll need an escort to give him the courage to go in. We can’t just let him turn up without a welcoming committee. He’s due at any minute.’
‘I see.’ Pa, she concluded, was father of the bride, the very much divorced one-time husband of Eleanor, Bridget’s mother. George Baxter had been married twice since leaving Eleanor, and was assumed to be not finished yet. And that made the effervescent Markie, even if he was brother of the bride, deserving of no special treatment where buttonholes were concerned. ‘Is that the groom?’ She peered through the rain at a moderately handsome figure with broad shoulders and full lips.
‘Peter – yes. He’s a good bloke. Known him all my life.’
‘So I gather,’ she said recklessly.
‘Talk of the town, right?’
‘Wedding of the year,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve heard the whole story.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ he corrected her, with a sudden change of expression. ‘You haven’t heard a word that’s true, I can promise you.’ The word dread flashed through Simmy’s mind, only to be dismissed as far too dramatic. Even so, the boy plainly wasn’t looking forward to the arrival of his pa.
‘Stressful business, weddings,’ she offered.
‘Too right,’ he agreed. ‘I’m never going to forgive Briddy for this.’
15‘Well …’ she put both hands on the steering wheel, ‘I should get out of the way. My part is finished.’
He seemed reluctant to let her go, glancing back at the cluster of men. Only one of them was watching him – a tall man in his early forties, with brutally short hair and a green waterproof jacket. His egg-shaped head looked all wrong without a decent covering of hair. ‘That’s Glenn,’ whispered Markie. ‘Peter’s best friend.’
‘The best man,’ Simmy nodded. ‘Is he worrying about his speech?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice. He was drinking till four this morning, apparently, but you’d never guess. I was legless by midnight. The other chap is Pablo. He’s Spanish.’
‘And under the loggia?’ She had only just noticed another man, sitting in a wheelchair out of the rain. Once glimpsed, she could not take her eyes off him. He was also watching Mark with lowered brows.
‘Oh, that’s Felix. Peter’s cousin.’
‘Really? I don’t think he was in the stories I heard about you all.’
‘He ought to have been. Broke his back falling off Castle Crag, a year ago. Dreadful business. But he’s being totally heroic about it. They all say so. Peter wanted him for the best man, obviously, but he flatly refused. He’s getting married in the summer himself.’
Simmy dragged her attention away from the damaged man and smiled a vague acknowledgement of Markie’s innate politeness in keeping her abreast of the personnel. ‘Shame about the rain,’ she said. ‘It’s not slacking off at all, is it?’
‘It’ll stop at eleven-fifteen, that’s official. Nothing to worry about.’
16‘Really?’
‘Yup. Glenn’s got a hotline to the Met Office, or something.’
She revved the engine. ‘Have fun, then,’ she said and drove away.
The two-mile drive to her shop involved negotiating crowds of disconsolate visitors in Bowness. Despite Saturday being ‘changeover day’ for self-catering as well as most of the guest houses, there were plenty of exceptions to this rule. They came in caravans; they stayed in hotels costing anything between £50 and £250 per night; they thronged the B&Bs, such as the one her mother ran in a quiet backstreet in Windermere. The lake cruisers still plied up and down from Lakeside to Ambleside, doing even better business than usual, in the rain. Stuck in a traffic hold-up close to the jetty, Simmy watched a large ship approach. Even after nine months, she still found them incongruous on a freshwater lake, albeit ten miles long. Like an overlarge toy in a bath, it struck her as wasted when it should be taking people across the open waters of the Adriatic. But there was seldom any difficulty in filling the hundreds of places aboard, and nobody else appeared to share her slight sense of absurdity.
‘Persimmon Petals’ was in the main street of Windermere. While Simmy was at the hotel, her teenaged assistant Melanie was holding the fort. Melanie lived on the eastern edge of Bowness and attended college at Troutbeck Bridge, taking Advanced Level Management for a year, aspiring eventually to become a hotel manager. The timetable contained enough gaps for students to find paid 17employment around the town, and Melanie worked at the flower shop for fifteen hours a week. She talked a lot about ‘the hospitality industry’ and its innumerable ramifications. Simmy could often not understand her.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked, having located Melanie in the back of the shop. Her large figure was generally easy to spot. As tall as Simmy, she had a generous covering on her bones, and a big round head. She also had no sight in one eye, thanks to a fight with her brother when she was four.
‘Fine. How’s the bride doing?’
‘She’s disgustingly relaxed and cheerful. Doesn’t care about the weather. Loves the bouquets. Julie’s going to be in her element. I was a bit surprised that she hadn’t got there yet, but nobody seemed worried.’
‘You haven’t heard, then?’
‘What?’
‘Julie won’t be doing it. She’s broken two fingers.’
‘What? But none of the wedding people seemed to have heard – they’d have been in far more of a flap if they had. How do you know? What happened to her? I only saw her on Thursday.’
It was a daft question. Everybody knew everything in Windermere. Behind the throngs of tourists, there was a small core of residents, both dreading and yearning for the few quiet weeks after Christmas when they could breathe more easily and compare notes as to how the year’s business had been.
‘Graham Forrest came in for some roses, five minutes after you left. He’s lodging with Doreen Mills now, in case you didn’t know. And she’s Julie’s aunt. It happened yesterday. She trapped her hand in a hairdryer, somehow. It 18“jackknifed backwards”, that’s what Graham said. Lucky it wasn’t a customer. She’d have been sued. You’d think—’
‘Yes,’ said Simmy hurriedly, hoping to avert a short lecture on health and safety. ‘Right. So who’s going to do the hair? Will they still pay her? My God! This is going to wipe the smile off young Bridget’s face.’
‘Yeah,’ said Melanie, her expression mirroring Simmy’s own mixture of concern and thrill at this unexpected setback in the life of the local golden girl. Except, even this might not seriously upset her. She could get married with her hair in a simple chignon, and the sky would not fall. ‘They’ve sorted out somebody else, I suppose. The hotel will have a list. They always have a contingency plan.’ She spoke proudly of her chosen profession. To Melanie, floristry was a poor lightweight line of work. She made no secret of the fact that she was only there because there’d been no other choice with the right number of hours.
‘But it won’t be the same. And the photos,’ Simmy said. ‘She’s got to have proper hair for the photos.’
‘They’re sure to find somebody else,’ Melanie insisted. ‘Julie’s not the only hairdresser in town.’
A fussy customer occupied the next ten minutes, but Simmy’s mind was not on the job. Poor Julie – she must be feeling wretched, not only because of the wedding, but because fingers were painful when broken, and extremely necessary for any sort of work. ‘Which hand was it?’ she asked.
‘Oh, the right. First two fingers on the right. She won’t be able to do anything for weeks.’
Outside it was still raining. The deep grey-brown of the local stone had turned black from the soaking. The 19big building at the top of the street looked like a looming battleship. ‘Shirley C’s got a great big puddle outside,’ she observed. The biggest shop in town was another incongruity that Simmy still had to wrestle with. It sold lingerie, with the long street window full of plastic torsos modelling knickers and corsets for every passing visitor to admire. How it managed to survive, nobody knew. Thriving mail order business, some know-all suggested. The sheer brazen take-it-or-leave-it attitude was what struck Simmy most powerfully, seeming typical of the whole approach to life in the region. Nothing was done for ostentatious show – the stone walls were simply there to keep the sheep in; the houses were made of the same material as a matter of course, but if someone wished to add stucco nobody objected. It all worked out quite peaceably, because the fells and the lakes were of so much greater interest and significance than any human activity.
The wedding remained at the front of her mind for the rest of the morning. At eleven-fifteen, she gave up all attempts to concentrate on the work in front of her, and went back to the street door to examine the sky. Markie Baxter’s predictions came back to her – that it would stop raining at exactly this time, which would be more or less exactly the moment when Bridget and Peter became man and wife. Assuming everybody presented themselves punctually, of course. That, in Simmy’s experience, seldom happened.
The puddles and rivulets in the street were deterring most would-be shoppers. The beck alongside her mother’s house would be frothing and scrambling in full spate after so many hours of downpour. The lake would be lapping 20at the jetties and piers along its shores, and creeping closer to the hotel that had been built so hazardously close to the water. Had it ever flooded, she wondered? It was hard to see how it could have avoided it, in the two centuries since it had been built, and yet she had heard no local stories of inundation.
As she watched the little town centre, she realised that there were faint shadows being thrown by the few shoppers as they walked along the shining wet pavements. Umbrellas were being closed, and chins released from enveloping collars. ‘Mel – it’s stopped!’ she called back into the shop. It was like a tap being turned off, and she marvelled at it.
‘What did you expect?’ came Mel’s voice behind her. ‘The Baxters and the Harrison-Wests between them are more than a match for the weather gods. Nobody would dare rain on their special day.’
‘The boy, Mark, said it would stop at eleven-fifteen. It’s like magic.’ Simmy still couldn’t credit it.
‘What boy would that be?’
‘Mark. Markie – whatever they call him. Her brother, isn’t he? He stopped me for a chat as I was leaving.’
‘Half-brother, Sim. He’s her half-brother. Don’t you know the story?’
It was a question she must have heard a hundred times since relocating from Worcestershire. Everywhere there was a story, a piece of local history that she was expected to have absorbed within weeks of arriving. ‘Different mothers?’ she ventured. ‘But they can’t be more than a year or two different in age.’
‘Less than a year, actually,’ grinned Melanie. ‘There was 21never any secret about it. Poor old Eleanor just had to put up with it.’
‘But I thought she divorced him?’
‘Not until the children – that’s Markie as well as Bridget – were old enough to cope with it.’
‘Why would it affect Markie? What difference did it make to him?’
‘I’m not sure, exactly, but everyone says there were major changes to both their lives. Once George had gone, both Eleanor and Markie’s mother would have been on the same footing. The balance of power would shift.’
Simmy did her best to imagine how it would have been. ‘So how old were they, then?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know exactly, but they weren’t babies. And then it was George who divorced Eleanor. He’d fallen for the Plumpton woman by then, and wanted to marry her.’
‘Lordy, Mel – it’s like something out of Noel Coward.’ Except it wasn’t really, she acknowledged. It was all quite commonplace in the present day. Mixed-up families, with no two children sharing the same two parents, and everybody more or less amicable about it. It was she, Persimmon Brown, who was out of step. She was the one who could not find it in herself to forgive or forget or cease to wish every sort of hell onto her one-time husband, Tony.
Chapter Two
‘P’simmon!’ warbled her mother. ‘What are you doing here? I’m knee-deep in sheets, look.’
Her mother was the only person who used her full name, and even she omitted a couple of letters, pronouncing it in her own unique way that made it sound oddly Irish. When asked repeatedly to give a rational account of her choice of such an outlandish name for her baby, she always said, ‘You were bright orange when you were born. You looked just like a persimmon. How could I resist?’ But nobody in England knew what a persimmon looked like, Simmy argued feebly. The name was ridiculous. ‘So change it,’ challenged her mother. ‘Maybe you’d have preferred to be Apricot?’
Simmy would have preferred Liz or Jane or Emily, when she was eleven, but gradually she came to appreciate some aspects of her name’s uniqueness.
Teachers had been crass about it, baulking at this 23unknown name when Kezias and Chloes and Zaras went unremarked. Persimmon, they would cry, making it sound awkward and unbalanced. Even Persimmon was clunky. Nobody ever got the hang of P’simmon.
‘I did the wedding flowers at Storrs Hall,’ she said. ‘Julie’s broken her fingers. She can’t do the hair. It stopped raining at exactly eleven-fifteen, like magic. Did you have a lot in last week?’
‘Full to bursting. Daddy had to go foraging for eggs at ten last night and I had him waiting table this morning. You know how he hates that.’
Simmy knew better. Her father made a complex private game out of serving breakfast to their guests. He had a mental list of a dozen or more snippets of local information, which he issued on a strict rota basis. He would subtly steer any conversation around until he could deftly slip in the fact that Mountford John Byrde Baddeley would be for ever turning in his grave at the memorial they’d built for him. Or that Lake Road had once been the main highway through Windermere, choked with traffic for centuries. Now it was silent and still and very much improved.
‘He doesn’t mind, really,’ she argued mildly.
‘He likes the money.’
The house had five guestrooms. When it was full, earnings reached three hundred pounds a night. In the summer peak, they might all be full every night for weeks on end. By any standards, the money was significant. The fact that Angie Straw was an unreconstructed hippy who found the normal rules of B&B-hood completely impossible to adhere to, seemed to matter little. She had a dog and two cats which might all appear without warning 24anywhere in the house. She allowed guests to bring their own dogs, and kept a constant stack of patchwork cotton bedspreads for them to lie on. ‘People always say it’ll sleep on the floor, but of course that never happens,’ she laughed. The useless extra cushions that so many landladies heaped onto the beds were absent from her establishment. She gave people real milk in little jugs that she collected from small potteries across the country. There were no televisions in the rooms. Instead she had erected a substantial bookcase on the landing and invited people to help themselves. She let people smoke in two of the rooms, and smoked unashamedly herself. This last got her into the most serious trouble, but her website made a feature of it, and earned her a steady stream of relieved customers as a result.
‘You wouldn’t believe how many people like their dogs and fags so much they never go away unless they can take them along,’ she said. ‘They think I’m wonderful.’
The legal implications of allowing people to smoke simmered ominously in the background. Simmy was fairly sure that it would only take one complaint to bring the authorities down onto her mother’s head in an avalanche of litigation. But she had no hesitation in supporting the right to allow anything in your own home. The smoking ban had gone ludicrously beyond what was reasonable and the sight of sad little groups of smokers standing outdoors in all weathers always gave her a pang.
‘Bridget Baxter’s married by now, then,’ said Angie. ‘Peculiar business. Who’s Julie?’
‘The hairdresser. I suppose they knew about it when I was there, but nobody said anything. All the girls had rollers in and Bridget seemed amazingly relaxed.’
25‘Probably stuffed to the eyeballs with Valium. Nobody uses rollers any more, do they?’
‘I think she’s going for a retro look. All bouffant.’
‘Dangerous in the rain.’
‘The rain stopped. Markie said it would, and it did.’ Simmy was still wondering how that had happened so predictably. ‘Amazing.’
‘Markie?’
‘Bridget’s half-brother,’ Simmy told her, with her newfound knowledge. ‘Only a year younger than her. All rather scandalous.’
Angie tossed her head impatiently. ‘Not interested,’ she asserted. ‘Not my kind of people.’
It was true that Simmy’s mother tended to focus on higher matters than the local gentry. She read literary biographies and watched old French films and never gave up trying to persuade everyone else to do the same. Unusually for a B&B she provided a sitting room for the guests containing a TV and DVD player, with a stack of discs that only the most dedicated film buffs could be expected to watch. There were also games and jigsaws and about five hundred more books, additional to those on the landing. The surprise was that these eccentricities were received with acclaim. ‘Beck View’ was suspected to be the most popular and successful establishment in the whole of Lake Road.
‘Can I have lunch?’ Simmy asked. ‘Is Daddy going to be in?’
‘He is. We’re having sausage bake with spaghetti,’ her mother informed her. ‘I’ve got a new lot of people due at three, the pests. It clearly says on the website that we don’t 26want anybody before four, but they always think I’ll make a special exception for them.’
‘They’re right. Couldn’t you say you’d be out? Can’t they find something else to do for an hour?’
Angie shrugged. ‘We’ve been recommended by some friends of theirs, apparently. I didn’t recognise the name of the friends, but they sound all right.’
‘Not really pests, then?’
‘It depends. You can never be sure. They’ll go out for an evening meal, anyway.’
‘No wonder you can’t remember their friends. There must be hundreds who’ve stayed here over the years.’
‘Thousands, actually. And I do usually remember them if I see them again. Although there are some who make no impression whatever.’
At thirty-seven, Simmy conducted her own life well out of sight of her parents. She had bought a small stone house halfway between Windermere and Ambleside and made sure she didn’t visit Beck View more than once a week – often less than that. Catching up with news was generally done over lunch, as it would be today.
Except that the comfortable family meal never took place. Five minutes before the three of them were due to sit down together someone rang the doorbell. Angie asked Simmy to get it, and she found Melanie on the step. ‘Something’s happened down at Storrs,’ she gasped. ‘Somebody died.’
Simmy visualised an overindulging uncle succumbing to a coronary and knocking trays of champagne flying. Melanie’s excitement, always quick to flare, struck her as excessive. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘And that warrants leaving the shop, does it? Couldn’t you have phoned me?’
27‘It’s the boy – Mark. He drowned in the lake.’
‘No!’ Simmy’s insides cramped with a sudden involuntary horror. ‘Was he boating? Surely not. He was an usher …’
‘I think we ought to go down there and see,’ Melanie insisted. ‘You spoke to him today. They’ll want to know what he said to you. They want you to be a witness.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Of course they don’t. Why me, when there must be hundreds of people who’ve seen more of him than I did?’
Melanie’s dimples appeared as she manifested extreme exasperation and her sightless eye stared insistently. ‘Sim, listen,’ she urged. ‘There’s more to it. Joe called me just now. It’s terribly serious. The Baxter man has gone berserk, accusing everybody in sight of killing his boy. Joe says Markie never showed up for the wedding at all. He must have been in the lake all morning. So when I said you’d seen him, Joe said you had to go and make a statement. He said I should fetch you and take you down to the Hall.’
‘Joe,’ Simmy repeated, dazedly. ‘The policeman, you mean?’
‘Yes. He’s my boyfriend, in case you’ve forgotten.’
‘He shouldn’t have told you about it, should he? Is he allowed to do that?’
‘He knew we did the flowers. We’re involved, Sim. This is a huge thing to happen. The Baxters and the Harrison-Wests, for God’s sake.’
Simmy began to imagine the headlines and the gossip, and felt icy rivulets flowing through her body. But still she was far from grasping the central import of Melanie’s news. Standing there on her mother’s doorstep, her jaw working erratically as she attempted to speak coherently, 28she wanted nothing more than to close the door in her assistant’s innocent face.
But she could not do that. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and tell my mother. Give me half a minute.’
‘Bring a coat,’ said Melanie, with a maternal touch that would never have occurred to Angie. ‘It’s turning colder.’
The van was still parked behind the shop, so they walked briskly back to collect it. ‘Why didn’t you drive here?’ Simmy grumbled. ‘If there’s such a great hurry?’
‘I told you, I haven’t got the motor today. I came on the bike. And you won’t let me drive the van, remember?’ This was a sore point with Melanie, who was unmoved by arguments involving the price of insurance.
The convolutions of Melanie’s transport arrangements had never properly registered with Simmy. She shared an elderly Fiesta with an older brother, a liability in Simmy’s view, which regularly refused to start. For backup, Melanie used an expensive bicycle that she resisted as much as possible. Melanie was not really built for cycling. ‘Did you?’ Simmy puffed. ‘In all that rain?’
‘I did. It was horrible.’
‘Must have been. Gosh, you never realise how steep this hill is until you try to walk up it quickly, do you?’
‘Nearly there,’ Melanie panted.
The van, with its cheery floral logo, seemed an incongruous vehicle in which to arrive at a police investigation, but there was no choice. They were through Bowness and on the final stretch down to Storrs within a few minutes. The whole scene was completely transformed from that of a few hours earlier. None of the festive 29merriment of a wedding was to be seen. The lapping waters of the lake struck Simmy as almost voracious, gobbling up poor young Markie for no reason at all. What in the world could have happened to him, she wondered, when he had been so happy and relaxed, apparently moments before meeting his death? Except, she corrected herself, he hadn’t been all that relaxed. He’d been worried about meeting his father, impatiently waiting out in the rain.
The last of the rain clouds had slipped away to the east, leaving a pale-blue haze overhead. Simmy glanced at her watch, in an attempt to calculate how much time had elapsed since she was last there. It was a quarter to two – four and a bit hours, in which the lives of a dozen people or more must have been permanently changed. The memory of the little bridesmaid twiddling her fingers on the sofa came unbidden to her mind. Was she a cousin, perhaps, or somebody’s stepdaughter? Had she known and loved the charismatic Markie? Would anyone manage to explain to her that she was never going to see him again?
They had to park on the roadside and walk down the hotel’s drive, having explained themselves to a policeman at the main gate. There were people everywhere, some with obvious TV cameras, and vehicles almost blocking the road that continued down to Newby Bridge. The hotel’s lawn was suffering badly from the heavy traffic across it, so soon after the rain.
Inside the hotel, the staff were plainly pulling out all the stops to maintain a calm front, while cooperating fully with the police. The magnificence of the rooms made their task a lot easier. The building seemed to be saying it had seen every sort of upset before, many a time, and 30this latest episode was not going to change anything. People might shout and bustle and throw accusations, but the Hall would drift serenely on, its gaze on the forested slopes across the lake, and keep the whole business in perspective. Simmy took a moment, as she was escorted towards a room somewhere to the left of the main entrance hall, to appreciate the fabulous rotunda with the gallery running around it, like a replica of St Paul’s Cathedral. Would whispers run around it, like its more famous forebear, and reveal the secrets behind the death of Mark Baxter?
Her strongest feeling was one of being an interloper, an unjustified intruder, there under false pretences. She was, after all, a humble florist, with no claims at all to special insight of any description. At some point, outside the Hall, she had been parted from Melanie, who had said, ‘See you later,’ before melting away. Simmy could not help feeling that Melanie would make a far better witness; that she had a firmer grasp of what had been going on.
She was shown into a room which contained seven or eight people sitting at tables. As she focused more carefully, she saw they were in twos, and that notes were being taken. The room was more than large enough for the pairs to speak privately without being overheard. A man with a long head and small eyes behind spectacles appeared to be waiting for her. Her escort was a young constable, who said, ‘Mrs Brown, sir. The florist.’
‘Ah! Yes. Thank you very much for coming, Mrs Brown. It’s a big help for us if people can come and see us quickly, while everything’s fresh in their minds, as it were.’
She raised an eyebrow at him, and waited to be invited 31to sit. ‘Sorry,’ he realised. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Moxon. Do sit down.’
She glanced around the room, wondering whether all the other interviewers were of such senior rank as hers. It seemed highly unlikely. She recognised none of the interviewees.
‘I still don’t know what happened,’ she complained.
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. But first I need to make a note of your full name and address, and phone number, if that’s all right.’
She gave them automatically, trying to quell any temptation to make difficulties. In the back of her mind, her rebellious mother muttered about databases and unwarranted storage of personal material.
‘Thank you,’ he nodded. ‘Now, I expect you’ll understand that we need all the help we can get. We’ve asked you for interview, because I have it on the authority of a Constable Joe Wheeler that you were here this morning, with the wedding flowers, and that you spoke to the young man, Mark Baxter, as you were leaving. Is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time would that have been?’
‘When I spoke to him? Something like twenty past nine, I suppose. I got here just after eight, and spent an hour arranging the flowers in the room they were using for the ceremony, and the banqueting room. Then I went up to the bridal suite and delivered the buttonholes and bouquets. I was back in Windermere at about a quarter to ten.’
‘A five-minute drive?’ he frowned gently.
‘I got stuck in Bowness. There was a coach and quite a few caravans coming and going. It might have been 32twenty-five past nine, perhaps, when I saw Mark. We only chatted for a couple of minutes.’
‘Had you ever met him before?’
‘No.’
‘What did you chat about?’
‘The wedding. He seemed excited to be an usher. He wanted the best buttonhole and I told him they were all the same.’
‘Did he say why he was outside?’
‘Waiting for his father, he said. There were three or four other men waiting with him.’
The inspector’s little eyes brightened. ‘Indeed? And did you know any of them?’
‘No, but Mark told me their names. One was the best man, Glenn, I think. Plus the groom and a Spanish man called Pablo. And Felix, of course. He’s the groom’s cousin – in a wheelchair. You’ll easily confirm that. They were all quite a lot older than Mark. I think one or two of them were smoking. They had big umbrellas. It was raining hard.’
‘So there were four of them?’
She paused to think. ‘Five with Mark.’
‘Did it seem strange that he should speak to you? Didn’t you get wet?’
‘I was in the van. He waved me down as I was leaving. It was a bit funny, I suppose. One of the other men shouted after him, asking what he was doing.’
‘Did he get wet?’
‘He must have done. He didn’t have a brolly of his own. He put his head in through the passenger window. He was very young. I imagine he was just a bit bored with all the waiting about, and wanted someone to talk to.’
33‘But … forgive me, but you are quite a lot older than him as well. Why couldn’t he have talked to his male friends?’
‘I have no idea. I can only make wild guesses, which I don’t expect would be very helpful.’
‘Impressions, however, might be useful,’ he argued. ‘You have to understand how little we know. We build up a picture out of a lot of small details, from various sources, in the hope of reaching a solid conclusion.’
She said nothing, still absorbing the fact of the boy’s death, and failing to attach much significance to anything other than that. Nobody had uttered the word murder as yet, although she remembered Melanie telling her that Mark’s father had been hurling accusations.
‘So?’ coaxed the inspector.
‘Um …? What was the question?’
‘How did he seem to you, really? Excited, bored, on the edge of the group he was with – that’s what I’ve got so far. He was waiting for his father. Did he seem eager to see him?’
The fleeting expression she had observed on Mark Baxter’s face came back to her with a sudden jolt. ‘No, I don’t think so. He seemed a bit scared, actually. Or jittery, maybe. Wanting to get it over with. I don’t think he knew the others very well, being so much younger. But people are often like that before a wedding, aren’t they? Especially a great big one like this.’ A thought struck her. ‘They did get married, didn’t they? All this didn’t make them cancel at the last minute?’ An unworthy anxiety that cancellation might jeopardise the payment of her bill crossed her mind. No, she told herself, they’d have to pay me, whatever happened.
34‘They got married,’ he told her with a tight smile. ‘Minus one usher. It didn’t seem enough of an omission to warrant any delay.’
She grimaced. ‘They must feel terrible about that now.’
‘I imagine so,’ he said, with an invisible shrug to indicate that this lay beyond his sphere of interest.
‘And what an awful business for the hotel,’ she went on, as more and more repercussions flooded her mind. ‘You’ve already made a frightful mess of their lawn.’
‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ he said suddenly.
‘What? No, I’m not. I moved here earlier this year.’
‘From where?’
‘Worcestershire. But I was born near Manchester. We’ve moved about a bit. My parents run a B&B in Windermere now. I came to be near them when my marriage broke up.’
‘Do you have children?’
Normally the question was brushed aside with a quick ‘No’ and a change of subject. But this was a police detective, and answers had to be given more carefully. She met his eye and shook her head. ‘We had a little girl who was stillborn,’ she elaborated. ‘Three years ago now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with something that looked like real emotion. ‘That must have been hard.’
‘As you’d expect, more or less. We’re not a very prolific family. There are compensations.’ She held his gaze steadily. ‘I mean it – there really are.’
‘Good,’ he nodded. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Have we finished?’
‘I think so, yes. I should have told you sooner that this is a murder enquiry. First indications are that Mr Baxter was killed by a blow to the head and his body deposited in 35the lake. Two people found him during a search after the wedding ceremony had been completed.’
‘What time was that?’
He gave her a look that said All right, I’ll let you ask me one question, and only one. ‘About eleven-forty-five.’
She glanced around the room, and then at her watch. ‘You moved quickly,’ she said. ‘Setting all this up, and getting me down here. I’m amazed.’
‘Constable Wheeler can be thanked for the last part. He knew you’d done the flowers and were here this morning. He called your assistant who said you’d spoken to Mark. He suggested she bring you down for interview right away.’
‘Yes,’ she said, still half dazed. ‘I know. But even so …’
The detective smiled. ‘Were you always a florist?’ he asked, in something that felt like an attempt to send her away in a lighter frame of mind.
She hesitated. ‘Market gardener, originally. It’s a long story.’
A man across the room was half turned on his chair, watching Moxon closely, plainly waiting for a chance to interrupt. ‘You’re wanted,’ said Simmy.
‘Ah!’ he nodded a quick thanks for the alert. ‘Thank you again. I might want another chat with you at some stage.’
‘Right,’ she said, and got up from her seat. She wanted to protest loudly to somebody, somewhere, that the boy should not be dead, that she should not have spoken to him, and that bad things should definitely not happen to innocent young souls.
Chapter Three
She wandered out of the hotel, hoping to see Melanie waiting for her. The shambles of the wedding was increasingly evident, with groups of finely dressed guests hovering uncertainly on the lakeside. There should be a major banquet underway by this time, with champagne and speeches and gaiety. Whatever might have happened to Markie, people had to eat, and the planned schedule presumably somehow had to be adhered to. The additional staff employed by the hotel would be in the kitchen and its adjoining rooms, wondering what to do. The main players would be required to speak to the police, the parents of the dead boy too flattened to play their wedding roles. Except, his mother was unlikely to be present. George Baxter was unlikely to countenance the presence of both her and his first wife, Eleanor. Where was she, then? Did she know what had happened?
The ambivalence of all weddings was a familiar theme 37for Simmy. Serious and silly, portentous and frivolous – the excesses inherent in the celebratory aspect overshadowing the profundity of the emotions and the public commitment. Hapless registrars did their best to conjure the more solemn implications in the midst of froth and flowers. As a florist, Simmy understood that she was assumed to be on the side of the froth. She was expected to focus on matching shades of peachy pink, and the exact drop of a swag of autumn leaves – and she diligently fulfilled such expectations. It was a job, a profession, for which she had studied and passed exams. Few people grasped that a florist had to listen to stories of sudden deaths and inconvenient births. They had to take enormous care over wording on cards and timing of deliveries. The wrong flowers could cause decades of offence. They were invisible but crucial bystanders at the major life events that overtook every family in the land. Where a wedding demanded far more labour than any other occasion, Simmy was fully aware that the really important work lay with a funeral.
And young Markie Baxter was going to have a very big and very public funeral one of these days.
There was no sign of Melanie. The massive hotel gave plenty of scope for getting lost, with the so-called service wing as large as a substantial mansion in its own right. Mel knew many of the staff, having been at school or college with them. Her best friend was married to the deputy manager and her cousin was in charge of the team of chambermaids – most of them from Eastern Europe. The world of a major four-star hotel struck Melanie as intensely glamorous, and fuelled her eventual goal to work in one. She regularly reminded Simmy that her participation as a 38part-time assistant in a florist’s shop was purely temporary and expedient. Simmy received these reminders with mixed feelings. She liked and trusted Melanie, but she knew there were plenty more where she came from, and the prospect of a succession of assistants was actually more appealing than otherwise.
An odd pair of people caught her eye, sitting on a damp rustic seat under a tree at the edge of the lawn, holding hands. It was Eleanor Baxter and the little flower girl from the bridal suite, their heads bowed in a strikingly similar attitude. Automatically, Simmy went towards them, drawn by the stillness and sadness coming off them like steam. Were they grandmother and grandchild, she wondered confusedly? Surely not – Eleanor was barely fifty, a slim and glamorous mother of the bride, taking up the role with an aggressive zest that Simmy had found difficult. She was unlikely to be this child’s grandmother.
Wishing she had paid more attention to the gossip about the family, she met the little girl’s eye and smiled tentatively. ‘Hello,’ she said.
Woman and child stared at her with barely veiled hostility. She couldn’t blame them, when she thought about it. What was she doing? Whatever did she plan to say to them? ‘I’m so sorry,’ she floundered. ‘What a terrible thing to happen. I mean …’
The older woman scowled blackly. ‘Please be quiet,’ she snapped. ‘We were hoping to be left alone for a while. Lucy and I have no part to play at present.’
Belatedly, Simmy realised that there was every chance that the child – who appeared to be about six – had not been told anything specific about what had happened. What did 39you tell a child, who thought she was at a wedding and turned out to be embroiled in a murder?
Lucy huddled against her companion and swung one foot agitatedly. The peach-pink outfit made her look like a doll. An expensive doll with a china face. It was difficult to believe she was a real individual with swirling emotions. As youngest bridesmaid she had been a sort of mascot, a point of endearing innocence in the wedding pictures. Now she was a vulnerable embarrassment, who ought to be taken home by somebody.
‘I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do to help?’ Her sincere intentions must have come through in her voice, despite being totally unable to think of any assistance she might usefully supply.
Eleanor Baxter looked up at her thoughtfully. ‘Do you live locally?’
‘Well … yes. A couple of miles the other side of Windermere. Why?’
‘Would you take Lucy for me? They won’t let anybody else leave until they’ve asked all their questions. And we are supposed to be having a wedding breakfast. God knows whether that’s going to happen now. It seems impossible, either way.’
Simmy gulped. Modern protestations rose to her lips, the most daft of which was But I haven’t had my CRB check. Didn’t the child have a mother somewhere, or a nanny? How was it possible that she could be handed so readily to a total stranger?
‘Where’s her mother?’ she blurted. ‘That is – who is she?’
Again the two pairs of eyes stared at her. ‘I’m her mother, you fool. This is Bridget’s little sister. I thought everybody knew that.’
40‘Oh! I’m so sorry. How stupid of me. But …she doesn’t know me. You can’t just …’
Lucy remained passively on the seat and awaited her fate.
‘Of course, it was an outrageous request,’ said Eleanor stiffly. ‘But things are rather desperate, as I expect you can see. The fact is, Lucy has never been very interested in the wedding, have you, darling?’ She nudged the child, who shook her head. ‘She’s not really the bridesmaid type, but of course Bridget wouldn’t listen to anything like that. She thinks everyone’s as mad about weddings as she is. There are hardly any other children here – just a pair of teenaged boys. It would be doing her a great kindness. You might take her for a walk in the woods, something like that.’
‘In that dress?’
‘Ah. The dress is a difficulty, of course. Do you have children? Might you not find some clothes for her?’
‘Surely she has some of her own, in a room here somewhere?’ Lucy had been wearing something casual earlier in the day, Simmy remembered. ‘Where are the things she had on this morning, when I brought the flowers?’
Eleanor sighed. ‘I suppose I could go and fetch them. We’re on the top floor.’ She looked hopefully at Simmy, who stood her ground. No way was she going to start running errands inside the hotel for a woman who had full use of her own legs, murder or not.
‘Don’t worry. My mother has a collection of children’s clothes. We can go there.’
‘Oh?’
‘She runs a B&B in Windermere. She’s discovered that it’s easier to supply emergency clothes than let people try 41and do some washing.’ This summary concealed a great slough of painful experience associated with dirty clothes and American insistence on total cleanliness at all times.
Eleanor smiled tightly, as if it pained her to hear such disclosures. The dead boy, Simmy reminded herself, was the son of Eleanor’s one-time husband, by another woman. There was no term for it – ‘stepson’ assumed the father had married the mother, which George Baxter had not done, if Melanie could be believed. There was no reason to think Eleanor had felt warm towards Markie – but neither could it be assumed that she had resented or hated him. Nothing could be taken for granted. ‘Perhaps you should give me your name and a telephone number,’ Eleanor said.
Simmy extracted a card from her shoulder bag. It introduced her as ‘Persimmon Petals’ with address and phone number, and a tiny line that added ‘Proprietor: P.A. Brown.’ She rummaged for a pen and added her mobile number. ‘My name is Simmy Brown,’ she said.
‘Simmy?’ Eleanor rolled her eyes with no attempt at subtlety. ‘Are you telling me your Christian name is Persimmon?’
‘I’m afraid so. But I go by Simmy.’
‘I’m not sure I should let Lucy meet your mother in that case.’
It was a joke, of a sort, and Simmy took full advantage of it. ‘She is a bit overwhelming,’ she admitted. ‘But very good with children. She’s got a room full of games. Lucy might like to spend the afternoon there. I haven’t got anything for her to do at my house.’
‘No children, then,’ nodded Eleanor. ‘That’s a shame.’
Twice within the hour she had been reminded of her 42failure, her lack. It was almost too much. ‘I’ll have to find my assistant. We came in a van. There’s no child seat. She’ll have to sit on Melanie’s lap. It’s probably illegal.’
‘Probably,’ Eleanor agreed carelessly.
Lucy had slowly perked up in the course of this exchange. Simmy detected a spark of interest that suggested a lurking spirit ready to be rekindled. She began to suspect that what she had seen thus far was in no way representative of the true nature of this small girl.
‘All right, then,’ she decided. ‘You can find us at Beck View in Lake Road. It’s a big house, with a sign outside. On the right as you approach from this direction. We’ll wait for you, shall we?’
‘Thank you. I’ll be sure to come for her by six. At least – somebody will.’ She sighed again. ‘It might be her father, if they won’t let me escape from here by then.’
‘Dad?’ chirped Lucy, speaking for the first time. ‘But he’s in Ireland.’
‘Is he?’ Eleanor blinked her confusion. ‘Are you sure?’
The child nodded emphatically.
‘Oh, yes, I remember now. We’re supposed to stay the night here, aren’t we? God, this is such a bloody mess, Luce. I knew it would be awful, but this is ridiculous. That wretched boy …’ She stopped herself with an effort.
‘Simmy?’ came a new voice. ‘What’s going on?’ Melanie came into view, around the dripping autumnal branches of the tree. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
‘This is Lucy,’ Simmy introduced. ‘We’re looking after her for the rest of the day. I thought I’d take her to my mother’s. Are you coming back now in the van? It would be helpful if you did.’
43To her credit, Melanie made no objections and asked no questions. ‘Okay,’ she said. Even when they were packed into the van, she was still just as restrained. Perhaps, thought Simmy, as one of a large family, it seemed quite normal to her to take charge of a strange child when the need arose. As for Simmy herself, the situation became increasingly alarming with every passing second.
Angie took one look at the frothy silk dress and shook her head at the crazy ways of the world. ‘You poor thing,’ she sympathised. ‘That looks horribly uncomfortable. I’ve got a very nice brown tracksuit in my treasure chest, just your size. Come and see.’
