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

of letters and things from Aunt Hilda’s house. Ben thinks somebody should have a good look through them.’

‘How many filing cabinets?’

‘Four.’

He whistled. ‘That’s a lot of papers.’

‘I know.’

‘I have no knowledge of their contents – or even their existence. What I have been party to is a statement from a certain Mrs Harriman, who lives a couple of doors down from Miss Trubshaw’s house in Keswick,’ he said. ‘The closest thing she had to a best friend, it seems. It so happened that I was available at the right moment and had the pleasure of interviewing her.’

‘Never heard of her,’ said Simmy. ‘And I don’t think Christopher has either. Why is she relevant?’

‘You didn’t get this from me, okay? But it seemed to me she might be quite usefully forthcoming if you could manage a little chat with her. I didn’t get very far, but I have a strong suspicion that there’s more she could tell a patient listener.’

‘Oh?’ This was a whole new situation. Previously the detective had done his best to prevent unofficial approaches to potential witnesses. ‘Gosh! Tell me more.’

‘She’s in her sixties and spends all day minding her small grandchildren and one or two others, I suspect. She seemed a bit nervous about that, so she’s probably unregistered as a childminder, but does it anyway in a small way. There’s a big garden, from which she can see into Miss Trubshaw’s. I gather the staff at the auction house had regular weekdays off in lieu of the Saturdays they had to work, and the two women had got into the habit of meeting up and taking the kids out somewhere when Miss Trubshaw was free. Mrs Harriman is extremely upset about the violent killing of her friend, as you’d expect but she can offer no hint as to precisely what might have happened.’

‘I see,’ said Simmy, following all this closely. They were still standing beside her car, which was parked so that anything large trying to get through the village would be impeded. There were very few wide stretches of road in Troutbeck, and even fewer straight ones. Fortunately, nothing had so far required her to move.

‘There could be some backstory,’ Moxon explained. ‘The sort of thing a woman would tell another woman in conversation that just wouldn’t crop up in a police interview. It’s one of the great frustrations of this job, as I might have mentioned before. We start off in complete ignorance of all the undercurrents and background history, and it takes a lot of time and patience to ferret it out. Quite often that never happens at all, of course.’

‘You’re telling me it wasn’t just a burglary that went wrong, then.’

‘Did you ever think it was?’

‘I did hope it might be. That would be so much less malicious, somehow. And if she knew the person who killed her, that must be a dreadful final thought. The betrayal, the bewilderment. It breaks my heart to think of it.’ She cocked her head again. ‘But what about the Armitages? Fabian and Richmond and Aunt Hilda and the cousins? They all knew Josephine, and they’re all involved somehow. But Ben and I couldn’t find a concrete connection that might account for her being murdered. Just a few random theories is all we could manage.’

‘That sounds very much like undercurrents to me.’

Then a large van approached, and Simmy heaved a sigh. At the same time, she saw Robin jerk himself awake. ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘What’s this woman’s address?’

Quickly Moxon fished out a notebook and after a moment consulting a page, he copied down the details and gave Simmy the sheet he’d written on. ‘Just turn up with your little one, and I’m sure everything will fall into place quite naturally,’ he said blithely.

‘I’m not making any promises,’ she warned him. ‘This really isn’t the sort of thing I do. You’d probably glean just as much from Ben. He’s made an in-depth study of Aunt Hilda, for a start. She was quite famous at one point.’

The van tooted, and Moxon waved at it to be patient. He gave Simmy one of his kindly, probing looks, and said, ‘Well – that’s it for now. We’ll speak again in a day or two.’

‘Right. It was lovely to see you – I’m going now.’ And she got into the car, throwing a soothing word at Robin, and drove off.

Hilda had a secret – this idea revolved in her head. Or perhaps it would be truer to say she had been forced to swallow a secret that she was keen to reveal. She had done her best to make it public, all those years ago, and the forces of respectability or political discretion or whatever had pushed it out of sight again. There was no DNA testing in those days. As Ben had observed, proving paternity had until recently been a very inexact science.

Weren’t secrets often at the root of violent deaths? Ben had apparently unearthed something shameful – although Hilda herself didn’t sound as if she’d been ashamed. The claim against the putative father had been made, the fact of a child exposed to public gaze and then seemingly forgotten, with no apparent harm done. So was there something else, more recent? Something entirely unconnected to the mysterious child who would now be over seventy years old? Even perhaps dead.

The drive, as always, required concentration. Again, the grey stone walls tormented her, twisting ahead, bordering a road that belonged in a fairy tale. In the distance she could see Brothers Water glistening, marking a return to more reasonable driving conditions. Before she could reach it, she had to crawl past two vans and a Range Rover, all of them forcing her to cringe into the grass, millimetres away from the wall. There was an obvious beauty to the landscape on all sides, anyone would agree, but for the practical exercise of getting from one point to another, it was completely unfit.

But the seven miles from Troutbeck to