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

they’d get it when Hilda died. But instead she gave it to Josephine, which meant she had to be bumped off, so they could nab it.’

Simmy took a deep breath. ‘That’s a theory, yes, but I can’t see one single shred of evidence to lead you to think it might be right. And quite a few details that make it extremely unlikely. This isn’t like you, is it? Starting from the wrong end, you used to call it. What changed?’

He gave a rueful grin. ‘Can’t get anything past you, can I? The thing is, since I decided to abandon the forensic studies, I’ve been trying a whole new approach. Not just to things like this, but everything. Bonnie says I get too bogged down in the minutiae, picking people up on tiny mistakes, agonising over small problems, and forgetting the big picture. So this time I thought I would try to see it from the other end, so to speak. Start with motives and relationships and personalities and see if it works that way.’

‘And does it?’

‘Too soon to say. We still have to have some hard facts, and they seem pretty scarce so far. The other thing I never gave enough attention to is context. What else was going on in people’s lives – what their priorities were, what they wanted. I’m trying to think more like a historian, see?’

‘I do see,’ she agreed. ‘And I suppose now you put it like that, you’ve been drifting in that direction for a while now. Ever since last summer when you were with your relatives in the Cotswolds.’

‘Right. I learnt a whole lot about families and their complicated histories when I was down there. And this looks as if it might be more of the same.’

Simmy leant back. Complicated families were well outside her experience. The Straws had all been boringly lower-middle-class, working in offices or factories for generations. On her mother’s side, Angie stood out as a stark aberration. Everyone else was as dull and dutiful as the Straws. Not a whiff of adultery or secret love children, no embezzlements or bankruptcies. But Ben had a very different experience – he had come to realise that the family his mother came from was far from immune to lurking secrets and tangled motives. And as for Bonnie Lawson, the very mention of families made her flinch.

And then Helen was coming downstairs with Robin, who was bleating anxiously, and Simmy rushed to collect him. She watched apprehensively as Ben’s mother took the steps with agonising care. ‘Don’t want to fall,’ she laughed. Simmy could see that she was finding it difficult, startled to observe how much worse the arthritis had become since their last encounter. She went up a few steps and took the baby.

‘Stairs are the worst thing,’ panted Helen. ‘It’s my knees. They won’t bend, and they hurt. It doesn’t seem fair, when for years it’s just been my hips. Hips are a lot easier to deal with.’

‘Are you booked for replacements yet?’

Helen blew out her cheeks in exasperation. ‘They don’t know where to start, now I’m in such a state. This last winter was ghastly. Every day’s worse than the last. And I’m not even sixty yet! I’ll be in a wheelchair for twenty years at this rate.’

‘We keep telling her to go private,’ said Ben from the dining-room doorway. ‘Start with the knees this year, and when they’re working nicely, go back for the hips. Probably less than a year from start to finish, and she’d be a new woman.’

Simmy winced away from the prospect of four major operations for poor Helen, however quickly or slowly they might be performed. Like caesarean births, or heart bypasses, the mere fact that they were common did not reduce the deep physical trauma of any surgery. There was a kind of conspiracy to pretend that the whole thing was routine and nothing to get excited about. Simmy herself found even a minor thing like removing an appendix dreadful to contemplate. But I’m just a wimp, she reminded herself.

‘I’ll give him a quick feed, if that’s all right, and then get out of your way,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Ben.’

‘For what?’

‘Oh – reassuring me that my brains haven’t melted, I suppose. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to function now I’ve got a baby. I wouldn’t say I was altogether back to normal, but at least I can follow a logical thread.’

‘I had five,’ said Helen mildly. ‘And still managed to do a decent day’s work after the first few months were behind me. That’s all nonsense about motherhood rotting your brains. The opposite happens, if anything. You get more focused, more observant – and you’re always having to keep one step ahead. I pity the poor things who never even have one.’

Simmy smiled and said nothing. She and Christopher had already decided to let nature have her own way when it came to contraception. If another baby came along quickly, that would suit them very nicely, they agreed. Privately, Simmy envisaged them as a proper family of four by the end of the next year. Which reminded her – ‘Oh, by the way – we’re getting married in June. Only small, but you two are invited, of course.’

‘Great,’ said Ben carelessly.

‘That’ll be nice,’ said Helen, with little more enthusiasm that her son. ‘Make everything official.’

Some people disliked weddings, Simmy remembered. She wasn’t madly keen on them herself, as it happened. And she’d done it all before, with Tony. ‘That’s the thing,’ she said. ‘It still works better in a lot of ways. We really should all have the same surname.’

‘Of course,’ said Helen. ‘Let us know when it’s all fixed.’

After that, there was nothing to do but give Robin a swift snack and head back to Windermere, which was less than five minutes’ drive away.

Chapter Seven

Bonnie was busy when Simmy got back to the shop, with a small impatient queue of customers. There was an air of suppressed panic, emanating chiefly