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

‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘Well, don’t let it upset you. You’ve probably been unduly influenced by your parents, who can be very … contrary about this sort of thing. Hasn’t your mother deliberately scattered giant hogweed seeds at the end of their garden?’

‘And good luck to her,’ said Simmy fiercely.

‘In any case, I’m pretty sure this little thing will die. One of its legs looks funny – did you notice? It’s probably been deliberately rejected by its parents as a misfit.’

Simmy inspected the leg. The lower part of the limb was undoubtedly set at an odd angle. ‘No, I didn’t see that,’ she admitted in a small voice. ‘I expect I’ve interfered with nature, then.’ And she turned a mournful face on her fiancé. ‘That just compounds the moral dilemma.’

‘You’re talking with your hormones,’ he concluded. ‘I’ve heard about this sort of thing. Moral dilemmas and the cruelty of the world. It’s all down to bringing a new life into being and worrying about the responsibility of it all.’

‘Don’t you feel it as well, then? You brought the life into existence as well as me.’

‘I do a bit,’ he laughed. ‘But in my case, it seems to be focused more on worrying about why a perfectly harmless middle-aged woman should be slaughtered in her own home.’

Simmy’s laugh was breathless with relief. ‘Well, then – we’re both as bad as each other, and that makes everything all right.’

‘Good,’ he said and gave her a warm hug.

‘Why are you back so early?’ she asked him, a little while later. ‘It’s not even four o’clock yet.’

‘They didn’t need me. Now Fiona and Pattie are jostling for Josephine’s job they’re both straining every nerve to show how competent they are. It’s quite funny, actually. They’re grabbing new deliveries the minute they come in, ordering poor Jack about and arguing about whether the old system could be improved. Imagine that! Pattie did have quite a good idea, that I’ll have to run past Oliver and think more about. And we need another pair of hands, at least …’ He tailed off, aware that Simmy’s attention was wandering.

When he fell silent, she gave herself a little shake. ‘I’ve got two things to tell you. At least.’

‘Can we have some tea first? I know you’re the one who’s always meant to be thirsty, but I’m parched.’

‘I bought a few things in Troutbeck. Custard creams, for one.’

‘Goody.’ He busied himself with kettle and mugs, and cut two large slices of Corinne’s very stodgy cake, which was all the tastier for its maturity. ‘Can we have this instead of your biscuits?’ he asked.

‘Of course we can. Hasn’t it always been a rule to eat things in rotation – I mean, according to their age? It’s wasteful otherwise.’

They sat at the table, with Robin on his father’s lap, waving his hands in front of his face and following their movements with absorption. ‘Fire away, then,’ he invited.

‘First – Ben thinks he’s found something momentous about Aunt Hilda’s past.’ And she repeated the tale of the mysterious baby born over seventy years ago and somehow lost. ‘That is, Ben can’t find any trace. We don’t even know if it was a he or a she. It was a brief scandal that somehow never really went anywhere. Something else must have been in the news at the time that people thought more interesting.’

‘Not exactly a secret, then, if it was in the papers.’

‘There could have been much more to it. Something about the child that had to be hushed up. Not just its father.’ She eyed her orphan squirrel thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it had a wonky leg, like little Nutkin here.’

‘Nutkin?’

‘From Beatrix Potter. You remember.’

‘I remember the cover of the book, and I could swear that was a squirrel of a different colour.’

‘So perhaps that was the real scandal about Hilda’s baby then – it came out the wrong colour. People were horribly prejudiced in those days.’

‘Not if its father was a prominent politician. I don’t think there were any black ones in those days. Though there might have been a few Asians. Possibly in the Midlands.’

‘I was joking.’

‘Oh. Right. Well, the Churchill theory does sound very persuasive. That would have made real headlines. But why didn’t she just name him? What sense was there in telling only half the story?’

‘She must have been blackmailing him. Demanding money for her silence. Isn’t that the obvious explanation?’

‘Guesswork. As Ben probably already said, where’s the evidence?’

‘He would say that,’ she agreed. ‘But I bet you I’m right,’ she insisted. ‘I wonder if we’ll ever know.’

‘She hasn’t been dead very long. Sooner or later secrets float to the surface, once a person dies. Probably something incriminating in one of those filing cabinets that have found their way to Josephine’s house – which I think is really a bit weird. Not that it matters much what’s inside them now. So what was the other thing you had to tell me?’

‘What? Oh – yes. I met Moxon just now in Troutbeck. Outside the shop. He’s not directly part of the Keswick investigation – but like last time, he gets to see the notes and do some of the peripheral stuff. They got him to do an interview, I suppose on Tuesday when it was all very busy.’

‘And that’s you, is it? Peripheral stuff?’

‘Potentially,’ she said, with a sniff. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? And he was very nice about Robin, and very upset about Ben going off university. He feels quite paternal towards him, you know. I realised that during that awful thing in Hawkshead.’

‘Who does he think killed Josie, then?’

‘Come on – you know better than to ask me that. He wants me to go and talk to a woman who lived in the same street, informally. See if I can ferret out any clues that she wouldn’t tell the police.’

‘You’re joking! Didn’t he notice you’d got a new baby?’

‘He probably thinks the baby would make a good introduction. A talking point. The woman looks after