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

‘That’s great! You sound quite fired up. How’s the baby?’

‘He’s behaving beautifully, even though Ben seems to think he has too many feeds.’ His remark was still rankling, she discovered, to her own shame.

‘What does Ben know?’ said Bonnie supportively. ‘He’s only a man.’

‘Anyway, give us a couple of hours at most. Ben’s bike is in Troutbeck, which will mean a bit of a detour. There’ll be awful traffic, as well. Where are the deliveries to go to? Did Verity put fuel in the van this week?’

Bonnie filled her in on the details, and Simmy ended the call on a surprising high. It was deeply satisfying to be needed by her assistant, to be reassured that the shop was still hers, and there were times when only she could deal with its needs. Her identity as a businesswoman and a florist was still intact, just beneath the new role as mother. She bounced Robin on her arm, as if encouraging him to share her foolish elation.

Ben had gleaned almost everything, including the reference to his tactless comment about the feeding of babies. ‘We’re going back to Windermere, then?’ he said.

‘After we’ve looked at Christopher’s computer, yes. And after I’ve taken you to collect your bike.’

‘So what about the baby clinic?’ he asked.

Chapter Seventeen

‘I forgot all about it,’ she said, with an embarrassed giggle. ‘Never gave it a thought. What time is it now?’

‘Twenty past twelve. You’d have had a rush anyway, without having to rescue Bonnie. I was just going to mention it when the phone went.’

‘I’ll go next week instead. I can send a text or something. There’s no way I’m leaving Bonnie to struggle on her own. And the deliveries have to be made, come what may. I’ll lose business if I let three lots of people down. It’s unthinkable.’

‘If you’re sure,’ he said, with a concerned glance at Robin. Again, there was that annoying male assumption that without some official medical surveillance the child might be at risk.

‘Of course I’m sure. They only want to interfere anyway and upset us both. I never thought I’d feel like this, but I’m very happy indeed to find I’m more than merely a mother. It won’t hurt him to come down to the shop. I might even pop into Beck View while I’m there.’

‘You’ll have to leave him somewhere, if you’re using the van,’ Ben pointed out. ‘I don’t imagine there’s a baby seat in it.’

‘Never mind all that. Let’s go to the saleroom. Finish that pasta thing and we can get going. I’ll tell you the rest of the Richmond story in the car. I’ll just take Robin into the ladies’ and give him a new nappy.’

She managed to convey everything she could recall of the conversation with Richmond the previous evening, in the five minutes it took to reach the auction house. ‘That’s it,’ she concluded. ‘He was nice. And I’m assuming that the lack of an arm would make stabbing a fit and healthy woman quite difficult.’

‘It definitely was a stabbing, you know,’ Ben said. ‘It was in the latest news report last night.’

‘Oh. I’d been assuming it was, ever since Oliver said there was a lot of blood. Not that I really want to know that sort of detail.’

‘It would be very difficult for Richmond to have done it, I agree,’ Ben said. ‘But the backstory could be crucial, all the same. There’s obviously something murky.’ He went quiet, before bursting out, ‘What if he’s the mystery baby that Hilda said she’d had? Isn’t that what he was trying to tell you? That Hilda was his mother, not his sister?’

Simmy forced herself to stay focused on the road, despite the buzzing in her head that this idea caused. ‘What? Good Lord, Ben – isn’t that a pretty big leap? If it’s true, why didn’t he just say it directly? I actually asked him who his parents were and he dodged the question.’

‘I don’t think it’s a leap at all. I think it’s crystal clear. The main question is why – if she’d dumped him on a foster mother at birth – did she then make the whole thing public umpteen years later?’

‘Circumstances change. I can think of all sorts of reasons.’ Despite herself, she was fitting the known facts into Ben’s hypothesis and finding it was not entirely ludicrous after all. ‘But where did that idea even come from?’

‘Where any ideas come from, I suppose,’ he shrugged. ‘Of course, the other massive question then is, how does it link up with Josephine?’

‘Remind me why we need to find out what that auction lot in the garage was. It was just a box, after all.’

‘Two boxes,’ he corrected her. ‘But I do admit there’s only the slightest cause to think they’re important. The honest truth is that I thought it would be an excuse to see how the auction database works, and how much information they keep about every item sold. If we could persuade Christopher to let us rummage around in it, we might come up with all kinds of useful stuff.’

‘Us,’ Simmy sighed. ‘It’s all hugely confidential, I expect. And it would take hours to have a proper look through the whole thing.’

‘Days,’ he said happily. ‘I wonder how hackable it is.’

‘Don’t you dare! Christopher would never speak to you again. Oliver would probably give him the sack. You won’t, will you?’

‘Don’t panic. Even if I did, nobody would ever know.’

‘We’re here now. Just behave yourself,’ she ordered, still hankering for the schoolboy he had been half an hour ago.

Christopher met them at the entrance to the reception area, looking tired and worried. Simmy initially took his concern to be about her and the baby, but she was soon disabused. ‘We’re having a rather fractious meeting,’ he said. ‘I saw you out of the window and came to head you off. Why are you here?’

‘Ben had an idea and wants to look something up on your database. A sale two years ago. Is