The Ullswater Undertaking by Rebecca Tope (read dune .TXT) 📕

‘Let’s see, then.’ He tapped the keyboard of a laptop sitting in front of him. ‘I’ve got the auction house website. Here she is – Josephine Trubshaw. Miss or Mrs?’

‘I always assumed she was Miss.’

‘Trubshaw’s a good name – echoes of Concorde and all that.’

Simmy waved this away, knowing better than to ask for her ignorance to be rectified. It was all too easy for Ben – or Bonnie, in recent times – to become badly sidetracked by irrelevancies. ‘There’s a whole lot more you need to know about, that seems to be connected, but might not be,’ she said, thinking of her baby upstairs and the realisation that she had never yet been so far removed from him. What if Helen dropped him? What if a meteor fell onto the roof and crushed everyone on the upper floor?

‘Shoot,’ Ben invited.

She tried to keep her account brief and lucid, but nothing about Fabian Crick lent itself to brevity. She outlined the story about Aunt Hilda and Uncle Richmond, before pausing to think. ‘Fabian’s very strange. Unsettling. Untrustworthy. And quite pathetic at the same time. He uses a mobility scooter to get around because he’s not allowed to drive. Imagine that on the roads up there! We can’t really believe that he killed her – it wouldn’t be physically possible to get there, and he wouldn’t be very difficult to resist. Even Bonnie could probably push him over.’

‘Hm,’ said Ben, paying gratifyingly close attention. ‘Not very likely that he’d lie about the car. Too easy to disprove. How old is he?’

‘Around sixty, we think. Maybe a bit less.’

‘How old was Josephine?’

Simmy flinched slightly at the ‘was’. ‘Mid fifties, I suppose. He said he knew her ages ago, when they were at school together. Must be forty years nearly. And they kept in touch ever since.’

‘That works age-wise, then, more or less.’

‘Right.’

‘People do keep up with old friends, now more than ever,’ Ben said. ‘It’s so easy these days.’

‘Hm. I wouldn’t think either of them were natural Facebookers. They sent postcards, apparently.’

Ben laughed. ‘I gather that’s a thing again. Good business for the post office. Have you heard of an outfit called Postcrossing?’

‘No. Is it relevant?’

‘Nope. But it’s a very interesting phenomenon. Zoe’s got well into it.’ Zoe was one of Ben’s three younger sisters, and the one Simmy had almost never met.

‘Anyway, Josephine told Fabian where he could find Christopher, and he phoned on Saturday then showed up the next day. Apparently Christopher made him a promise ten years ago and he’d come to make good in some way. There’s something horribly sneaky about him. He’s scared of the police, as well. And it doesn’t sound as if he’s got any money.’

Ben was jotting down notes on a big writing pad. ‘So Aunt Hilda died, leaving a big house. Haven’t we been here before – in Grasmere?’

‘Sort of. There’s a lot of it about, according to Christopher. But the crucial thing is – she left it to Josephine!’ She sat back in triumph, watching his face.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘So I wonder who gets it now she’s dead as well.’

Simmy had not thought to ask herself this question, despite it now seeming glaringly obvious. ‘She’ll have a relative somewhere,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Hasn’t everybody?’

‘You’re saying you have no idea. Didn’t that strike you right away as the inescapable motive for killing her?’

‘Sadly no,’ she confessed. ‘I hadn’t got as far as wondering about a motive.’

‘The thing is …’ he tapped his teeth, as he always did when thinking. ‘Unless she made a will leaving it to this Fabian man and his family, they can’t possibly expect to inherit it, can they? And if she did make a will, they’d be such obvious suspects that they’d never dare murder her. We’re assuming it’s a highly desirable house, are we?’

‘Presumably. Can you find it online? She was called Hilda Armitage. I assume they’re all called Armitage except Fabian. He wrote some of it down for us when he was giving us some clues about Uncle Richmond.’

‘Leave that for a minute. When did Hilda die?’

‘Um … I think it must have been about six weeks ago, from what he said. The whole thing feels very recent. Ongoing, in fact. Josephine can hardly have had time to get used to the idea that the house was hers. She never said anything at work – Christopher had no idea.’

‘Josephine was probably intending to sell it, then. Make enough to feather a very nice nest in her old age. Did Fabian seem angry about her getting it?’

‘Sort of, yes. He blames Christopher, actually. They both believe that if Chris had done as he promised ten years ago, relations between Fabian and his aunt would be so good that she’d have left the house to him. I have my doubts about that. It feels very flimsy – like nearly everything he told us, in fact. It was amazing how little actual hard information he gave us. It was nearly all waffle and self-pity. He stayed for ages, but we still didn’t really know what he wanted by the end. Just find Uncle Richmond and see if he could be helpful in bringing them all back together. There’s got to be more to it than that – Uncle Richmond isn’t lost, just detached. Out on a limb, not having anything to do with the family, even his own sons. Didn’t sound very unusual or mysterious to me – although I think Fabian hoped it would. He’d heard about you, of course. I guess that’s really the heart of it, even if I can’t work out how.’

‘Ten years is a long time. Did Chris remember him?’

‘It’s not really so long,’ Simmy corrected him. ‘I can remember my thirtieth birthday as if it was just a few months ago.’ She chuckled. ‘That’s funny – I must ask Christopher what he was doing for his. We were born on the same day, you know.’

‘I know. You’ve told